This morning I woke up early and well-rested, though considerably irritated by the lack of toothpaste and so on. I determined to go to a shopping mall in Queens, and researched the subway route there. The subway stations here have halls where you can buy the tickets (metrocards) from the touch-screened machines, with cash or a VISA or, I think, a debit card. I only had tiny change and a $20 bill (the machine can only give change up to ca. $6.50), so a woman directed me to a booth with two attendants, one of whom gave me back a $10, a $5, and five $1 bills for my twenty. Then I passed one of the turnstiles, swiping my Metrocard along the designated groove, climbed down the stairs, and reached a station that looked pretty much like any other that I saw later. Steel pillars, in an I-shaped cross-section, stand at intervals along the gum-infested platform; movie posters on the faintly green, small-tiled walls; peeling paint on the ceiling. Someone in baseball cap, loose trousers, grey T-shirt, jacket, and sneakers was jogging in place enthusiastically as he listened to music, and at length he intoned aloud, "Isn't the mood electric?" (No.) and so on and so forth.
After changing my mind twice about which platform was the right one (again, no maps, only signs indicating the line's identity and the station's identity), I entered the correct train. It was packed and most people (of all ages and origins) didn't even have to hold on to the poles. At Court Square I went out, and searched in vain for the V train to Forest Hills. Or at least I think it was in vain, because there were three E trains that arrived and went as I was there, but not a single V train, even though the sign seemed to indicate that it was a shared platform. I felt like whimpering, out of exasperation and bewilderment, and did a little bit internally. But then I retraced my steps, got into the right train by luck, and then returned to Brooklyn. Temporarily I've given up on public transit, though.
There is a trio of grocery stores at the subway station, the one with the deli apparently being the least sleazy. But the deli store had everything except for toiletries, so I went into another store which had a large stock of no-name brands. I selected a Head&Shoulders shampoo whose container was dirty and had a dent in one side (they all were and did), a Colgate toothpaste tube that looked all right, and a deodorant. The cashier did not give me the three cents change that I was supposed to have, if I understood the price correctly, and no receipt, and he packed everything into an unmarked black plastic bag, so that this shopping felt very much like an underhanded monetary transaction. I suspect that many of the wares in the store are diluted and refilled into further containers. But being able to brush my teeth again was worth it.
I have $12.42 left, which I am hoarding to ensure that I can pay for transit to a currency exchange booth. No food, no aspirin (it ran out last night), nothing to drink except tap water (which I have resorted to a lot in the past two days). Fortunately, though the jaw is still swollen, my toothache is endurable now.
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Notes on the Hood
I wanted to buy water and the toiletries (deodorant, shampoo, and toothpaste) which I omitted to take along in the flight, but there is a dismal lack of the generous Turkish grocery stores that I know from Berlin. One of my roommates (more about them later) pointed me to "Bravo," which was supposedly at the street corner, but either it is the shop that is closed, or I was looking at the wrong street corner. So I walked down a little, and someone actually asked me for directions! so I must have looked like I belong in the scene! but I couldn't tell him, of course, and he went on his way. In the meantime the cars were honking merrily away, either because the driver was impatient or recognized someone he knew.
I made up my mind to go to a KFC store at the intersection. I had read before that poorer people in the cities have no choice but to buy unhealthy food, because it is what they can afford and because it is what is available. Here is more empirical evidence. The store sold no water, only Pepsi and Diet Pepsi and Cola and Mountain Dew. Out of an impulse for which I (metaphorically speaking) kicked myself later, as I generally refuse to sacrifice taste to calorie-counts, I ordered a diet pepsi. With a small box of popcorn chicken, it cost $3.88. The pepsi was mostly ice cubes and tasted of the plastic container in which it was presumably kept, and the popcorn chicken, in a box that was small indeed, tasted more of chicken grease than of the miserable little snippets of meat that they contained. To guard against hold-ups, the cashiers and cooks were behind a glass wall interrupted only by the two little swivelling boxes in which they deposited the food and change, and received the money. I don't regret going to the store, because I needed substantial food of some sort, and of course gathered information, but I do think that the large proportion of ice, which I presume to be company policy as the cashier herself was friendly and competent, is only one instance of egregious exploitation by a major corporation. There are charts that list the number of calories (multitudinous! I think mine contained 800!) in each dish, but they are not going to solve much of anything.
My hostel is incidentally guarded against break-ins, too. There is a keypad on the door, and one has to type in a code to enter. There is also a doorbell, but I'm not going to use it anymore because not knowing who is at the door when they have to answer it probably does make the hostel staff nervous. As for my roommates, they are all girls (I chose an all-female dorm as I do not like the charged dynamic that the mixed rooms tend to have). There is one girl, T***, who was strenuously trying to sleep, from behind a makeshift curtain of towels, when I arrived yesterday evening. She has an army of hair care products, a clothes-iron, clothing, a bathrobe, food (crackers, water, Coke), a big and much scuffed orange backpack, huddled in a range around her bunkbed (both of whose levels she has taken as her own) and on top of the mantel of the apparently defunct fireplace. On many of them she has scrawled her name in bold letters, which is why I know it. Then there is W***, an abrupt and irritable but not bad-hearted student(?) who is shortish, wears glasses, and has her blackish hair in a bob; she has a single bed in a niche to herself. So far I have only asked her whether everyone could use the coat-hangers on the rack (we can), and she has asked me whether I'm Nellie (I'm not). Thirdly, there is a girl who woke me up last night by saying "Who is that?" (repeatedly) in the direction of my semi-slumbering form, and then inquired, upon seeing that I was awake, if I was too cold without a blanket. She may be the one who has a book by some entity named Osho lying on the grey carpet and a hair-curler reposing at its ease on a low table, and who altogether scatters about her belongings more than W*** or me but not nearly so much as T***. What I suspect is that at least one of these girls is a student, staying at the hostel in the long term as a cost-cutting measure.
I made up my mind to go to a KFC store at the intersection. I had read before that poorer people in the cities have no choice but to buy unhealthy food, because it is what they can afford and because it is what is available. Here is more empirical evidence. The store sold no water, only Pepsi and Diet Pepsi and Cola and Mountain Dew. Out of an impulse for which I (metaphorically speaking) kicked myself later, as I generally refuse to sacrifice taste to calorie-counts, I ordered a diet pepsi. With a small box of popcorn chicken, it cost $3.88. The pepsi was mostly ice cubes and tasted of the plastic container in which it was presumably kept, and the popcorn chicken, in a box that was small indeed, tasted more of chicken grease than of the miserable little snippets of meat that they contained. To guard against hold-ups, the cashiers and cooks were behind a glass wall interrupted only by the two little swivelling boxes in which they deposited the food and change, and received the money. I don't regret going to the store, because I needed substantial food of some sort, and of course gathered information, but I do think that the large proportion of ice, which I presume to be company policy as the cashier herself was friendly and competent, is only one instance of egregious exploitation by a major corporation. There are charts that list the number of calories (multitudinous! I think mine contained 800!) in each dish, but they are not going to solve much of anything.
My hostel is incidentally guarded against break-ins, too. There is a keypad on the door, and one has to type in a code to enter. There is also a doorbell, but I'm not going to use it anymore because not knowing who is at the door when they have to answer it probably does make the hostel staff nervous. As for my roommates, they are all girls (I chose an all-female dorm as I do not like the charged dynamic that the mixed rooms tend to have). There is one girl, T***, who was strenuously trying to sleep, from behind a makeshift curtain of towels, when I arrived yesterday evening. She has an army of hair care products, a clothes-iron, clothing, a bathrobe, food (crackers, water, Coke), a big and much scuffed orange backpack, huddled in a range around her bunkbed (both of whose levels she has taken as her own) and on top of the mantel of the apparently defunct fireplace. On many of them she has scrawled her name in bold letters, which is why I know it. Then there is W***, an abrupt and irritable but not bad-hearted student(?) who is shortish, wears glasses, and has her blackish hair in a bob; she has a single bed in a niche to herself. So far I have only asked her whether everyone could use the coat-hangers on the rack (we can), and she has asked me whether I'm Nellie (I'm not). Thirdly, there is a girl who woke me up last night by saying "Who is that?" (repeatedly) in the direction of my semi-slumbering form, and then inquired, upon seeing that I was awake, if I was too cold without a blanket. She may be the one who has a book by some entity named Osho lying on the grey carpet and a hair-curler reposing at its ease on a low table, and who altogether scatters about her belongings more than W*** or me but not nearly so much as T***. What I suspect is that at least one of these girls is a student, staying at the hostel in the long term as a cost-cutting measure.
A Tourist Strays in Brooklyn
After I wrote my last post, I researched bus and subway routes, and even if one only looks at Brooklyn they are terribly confusing (one-way streets, etc.), a Gordian knot that cannot be cut except by the medium of the car, and even then the car routes are probably likewise labyrinthine. There are little curling bus routes, but they are localized and do not run in one long, satisfactory stretch. Or maybe the stretches are long but look short given the vast proportions of the map.
At any rate, after a moment of despair I figured that this would be a perfect opportunity to learn not to be a wimp where public transit is concerned. So I found one simple bus route down to the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens and took it (a fare for two hours, is $2.00 unless one is a student or something). The buses here are not accordion-like but broad; the doors can only be swung open outward with a great deal of effort. I rode along a street full of old brick apartment buildings, classicist or very restrainedly Baroque in their flourishes, spare and simple but tinted in glass green or pale senna or the customary brick red. The fire escapes were a delicate filigree. Some of the buildings were really ramshackle, others were in fine trim. So I felt that I had seen a quite satisfactory wedge of the real New York. But of course it is a poor region. There are mostly African-Americans of all ages along the sidewalks, in runners and hoodies and so on, a bustling community in one way, but not very lively because bored and impoverished. No one was rapping away or breakdancing on the sidewalks, and I don't remember even seeing anyone swaggering about decked out festively in bling. The small shops (a notice on one of them said that food stamps were accepted there) are interspersed with little latter-20th-century religious edifices like the "Church of God" (isn't that redundant?). As for the cars, there is an immense variety, but the majority are shiny new and not matte older models, and many are also SUVs or minivans.
I stepped out at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, where admittance is free during weekdays in winter. There was a security booth at the front entrance, and a bored soul tenanted it, but the door was wide open. At first there was a children's garden which did not impress me much, as it struck me as an amalgamation of all the cutesy gardens (gnomes, grinning suns, etc.) that I have ever seen, rendered unsettling in the contrast of its artificial cheer and the weeping dead grasses, leafless trees, etc. But shortly there came the first trees, catawbas and the biggest gingko biloba I have ever seen, oaks (an avenue of them was planted to commemorate Sept. 11th, which is evidently still quite present, as are American flags at schools, buses, and the train I took yesterday), and swathes of green lawn. The plants are marked with touching accuracy, in the form of little black signs. Then there were monuments of a Victorian sensibility, a sparse neoclassical building that housed the visitor's centre and gift shop, great sea-green domes of glass in which the tropical plants flourish, a rose garden (rose-less at present, of course), and a "cherry esplanade."
After gazing at the Brooklyn Museum, a vast edifice that rivals London's National Gallery in pomp, I made my way to Prospect Park, where joggers and people walking their dogs passed me, and children shrieked at the zoo, and everyone shrieked in the ice rink at the lake. The lake itself, the biggest one in the park, is hauntingly impressive if you ignore the modern buildings, or any buildings, and just watch the grey squirrels, hear the birds twitter, and look out on the swampy expanse with the islands of barren willow and other trees, the cattails, etc., imagining that this is the way the area might have looked when the first European explorers arrived. I also enjoyed the busts of Irving (, Washington?), Beethoven and Mozart, which were proudly perched on top of pillars above the ice rink. But I often heard police car sirens in the background, which did not make me less queasy about the city. Also, whenever the bank of the lake was accessible from the path, there was a red ladder ready to rescue anyone who ventures out onto thin ice, and warning signs to prevent someone from doing that in the first place. At one point a cyclist was passing me when I looked up, and he said, surprisingly in a way that did not sound corny (though, as I type it, it is of course kitschy) or creepy at all, "Hi, you are very beautiful, for Christmas and forever." -- and he cycled on. Very random.
As I walked, then, getting lost and worried (but not too worried), I then philosophized about my trip. The idea of living in a neighborhood where rents are cheaper, regardless of how unsafe it is, has been knocked out of my head once and for all. I don't believe in fearing and shunning everyone, just because there are a couple hoodlums about, and I've concluded that there are bad, good, and indifferent people to be found everywhere -- only in the city there are more of them. But it is not respectful to parade into a neighborhood that is governed by a code that I do not understand, and not fair to myself or anyone else to parade about like a sitting duck with a target painted on its back. Going out alone is very ill-advised; I should either have friends here first or live together with somebody. Still, being too attractive doesn't worry me in the least, as I doubt that I approach the common North American standards of beauty, and I have no intention to wear the make-up, shinier hair, or tighter clothes that would be required. But it is too easy to get lost; even staying in the bus does not work if I have to change buses, and then wait for fifteen minutes, on my own, at a half or wholly empty station in the middle of nowhere. There are no maps in the bus shelters, only diagrams of the route of the specific bus line, it is hard to tell which bus stop is coming up, and altogether it is impossible to get anywhere without a map (whether on paper or in one's head). Even if I am capable of learning the rules, I am helpless until I do. My sense is that most New Yorkers, even, tend to move in small radii within their city, especially if they are poorer.
Maybe I will still move here, and procure work as a translator for German into English, for instance, but before renting an apartment I would find out all I can about the surroundings first. It's not a hoity-toity desire to be removed from the hoi polloi, but common sense. I also do not want to be around people who are prone to hoodwinking others; not because of its inconvenience to me so much as that I find the unkindness and the unworthy victimization of the weak saddening. If I had known what awaited me here, I might not have come now. But, as it is, this is immensely interesting, and challenging, and I like that pretty much everyone here is genuine. If I must conduct fencing-matches with others, it is so much more straightforward if they are straightforward (if one can read character well). Besides, it is proving to me that, as I suspected, I do have much force of character now, and that is what is crucial.
At any rate, the length of my post bears an inverse ratio to the breadth of my experience here, so I guess I'd better desist. What does bother me is that I haven't eaten or drunk anything since yesterday evening, though a chocolate bar from the plane is still waiting to be consumed. Also that I have very little American cash. Gallivanting off to JFK again is something I don't want to do after the experience of yesterday, so hopefully there will be a location in Manhattan where I can change money. More snow, by the way!
At any rate, after a moment of despair I figured that this would be a perfect opportunity to learn not to be a wimp where public transit is concerned. So I found one simple bus route down to the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens and took it (a fare for two hours, is $2.00 unless one is a student or something). The buses here are not accordion-like but broad; the doors can only be swung open outward with a great deal of effort. I rode along a street full of old brick apartment buildings, classicist or very restrainedly Baroque in their flourishes, spare and simple but tinted in glass green or pale senna or the customary brick red. The fire escapes were a delicate filigree. Some of the buildings were really ramshackle, others were in fine trim. So I felt that I had seen a quite satisfactory wedge of the real New York. But of course it is a poor region. There are mostly African-Americans of all ages along the sidewalks, in runners and hoodies and so on, a bustling community in one way, but not very lively because bored and impoverished. No one was rapping away or breakdancing on the sidewalks, and I don't remember even seeing anyone swaggering about decked out festively in bling. The small shops (a notice on one of them said that food stamps were accepted there) are interspersed with little latter-20th-century religious edifices like the "Church of God" (isn't that redundant?). As for the cars, there is an immense variety, but the majority are shiny new and not matte older models, and many are also SUVs or minivans.
I stepped out at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, where admittance is free during weekdays in winter. There was a security booth at the front entrance, and a bored soul tenanted it, but the door was wide open. At first there was a children's garden which did not impress me much, as it struck me as an amalgamation of all the cutesy gardens (gnomes, grinning suns, etc.) that I have ever seen, rendered unsettling in the contrast of its artificial cheer and the weeping dead grasses, leafless trees, etc. But shortly there came the first trees, catawbas and the biggest gingko biloba I have ever seen, oaks (an avenue of them was planted to commemorate Sept. 11th, which is evidently still quite present, as are American flags at schools, buses, and the train I took yesterday), and swathes of green lawn. The plants are marked with touching accuracy, in the form of little black signs. Then there were monuments of a Victorian sensibility, a sparse neoclassical building that housed the visitor's centre and gift shop, great sea-green domes of glass in which the tropical plants flourish, a rose garden (rose-less at present, of course), and a "cherry esplanade."
After gazing at the Brooklyn Museum, a vast edifice that rivals London's National Gallery in pomp, I made my way to Prospect Park, where joggers and people walking their dogs passed me, and children shrieked at the zoo, and everyone shrieked in the ice rink at the lake. The lake itself, the biggest one in the park, is hauntingly impressive if you ignore the modern buildings, or any buildings, and just watch the grey squirrels, hear the birds twitter, and look out on the swampy expanse with the islands of barren willow and other trees, the cattails, etc., imagining that this is the way the area might have looked when the first European explorers arrived. I also enjoyed the busts of Irving (, Washington?), Beethoven and Mozart, which were proudly perched on top of pillars above the ice rink. But I often heard police car sirens in the background, which did not make me less queasy about the city. Also, whenever the bank of the lake was accessible from the path, there was a red ladder ready to rescue anyone who ventures out onto thin ice, and warning signs to prevent someone from doing that in the first place. At one point a cyclist was passing me when I looked up, and he said, surprisingly in a way that did not sound corny (though, as I type it, it is of course kitschy) or creepy at all, "Hi, you are very beautiful, for Christmas and forever." -- and he cycled on. Very random.
As I walked, then, getting lost and worried (but not too worried), I then philosophized about my trip. The idea of living in a neighborhood where rents are cheaper, regardless of how unsafe it is, has been knocked out of my head once and for all. I don't believe in fearing and shunning everyone, just because there are a couple hoodlums about, and I've concluded that there are bad, good, and indifferent people to be found everywhere -- only in the city there are more of them. But it is not respectful to parade into a neighborhood that is governed by a code that I do not understand, and not fair to myself or anyone else to parade about like a sitting duck with a target painted on its back. Going out alone is very ill-advised; I should either have friends here first or live together with somebody. Still, being too attractive doesn't worry me in the least, as I doubt that I approach the common North American standards of beauty, and I have no intention to wear the make-up, shinier hair, or tighter clothes that would be required. But it is too easy to get lost; even staying in the bus does not work if I have to change buses, and then wait for fifteen minutes, on my own, at a half or wholly empty station in the middle of nowhere. There are no maps in the bus shelters, only diagrams of the route of the specific bus line, it is hard to tell which bus stop is coming up, and altogether it is impossible to get anywhere without a map (whether on paper or in one's head). Even if I am capable of learning the rules, I am helpless until I do. My sense is that most New Yorkers, even, tend to move in small radii within their city, especially if they are poorer.
Maybe I will still move here, and procure work as a translator for German into English, for instance, but before renting an apartment I would find out all I can about the surroundings first. It's not a hoity-toity desire to be removed from the hoi polloi, but common sense. I also do not want to be around people who are prone to hoodwinking others; not because of its inconvenience to me so much as that I find the unkindness and the unworthy victimization of the weak saddening. If I had known what awaited me here, I might not have come now. But, as it is, this is immensely interesting, and challenging, and I like that pretty much everyone here is genuine. If I must conduct fencing-matches with others, it is so much more straightforward if they are straightforward (if one can read character well). Besides, it is proving to me that, as I suspected, I do have much force of character now, and that is what is crucial.
At any rate, the length of my post bears an inverse ratio to the breadth of my experience here, so I guess I'd better desist. What does bother me is that I haven't eaten or drunk anything since yesterday evening, though a chocolate bar from the plane is still waiting to be consumed. Also that I have very little American cash. Gallivanting off to JFK again is something I don't want to do after the experience of yesterday, so hopefully there will be a location in Manhattan where I can change money. More snow, by the way!
A Comedy of Errors
(Written in haste; please pardon any errors.)
I'm in New York, and I don't know whether to laugh or to cry about it. The flights yesterday, from Tegel to London-Heathrow and London-Heathrow to JFK airport took a long time, and this time was rendered much longer by the raging toothache which caused a walnut-sized bump to form to the right of my chin. I had aspirin, fortunately, and on the transatlantic flight I received some other medication from the stewardesses, after "signing my life away," i.e. indicating that I was doing so at my own risk, as one of them wryly said. But I liked the flight in all other aspects, except for the soggy sandwiches that were served for breakfast. Beside me there was a friendly woman from New Jersey, and we chatted away for a while; across the aisle there was a rather unfriendly man from one of the Carolinas who spoke in a southern drawl, told the steward "Don't lecture me" when the latter was pointing out that he could not come to serve people during takeoff (the man had pressed the button), and chatted with another presumably southern girl who followed up sentences with a "sir" that was supposed to be respectful but came off as affected. The flight took longer due to strong headwinds and the collapse of some equipment behind us when we were still in the berth.
At JFK, customs took forever, in a stifling, low-ceilinged room where even the three large fans did not help much. There was still a pained throng of foreigners when all the American citizens had passed through and were helping themselves to their baggage. I also felt insulted that we had to get digital prints of all of our fingers, then have a digital photo taken. The customs agent was an interesting dour type, though, possibly a prison warden, and yet quite polite.
Then came the bother of trying to find the trolley that I presumed would take me to Jamaica Station. It turns out that the "air trains" at the airport take you there. The air trains run along glass hallways that only look like glass hallways, not like platforms, when you walk along them at night (as I did). The darned terminal where I was at did not indicate which train went where; it was only after much to-ing and fro-ing, and thanks to inquiry, that I found another terminal where a sign did tell you that this was the Howard Beach(?)/Jamaica line, and then I had to be careful to step in the Jamaica and not the Howard Beach(?) train.
At Jamaica Station I had to buy tickets at one of a whole row of machines, where an attendant helped me, and then go through the turnstiles, where I managed, I believe, to open the turnstile to my left instead of the one in front of me as intended, and got exasperated until another attendant helped me there. It was rather humiliating, though amusing. It was still awfully hot, by the way. Finding the train that stops at Nostrand Avenue was a pain, too, but I was directed to the Flatbush Ave. line (the right one), by a grey-goateed New Yorker who came up to me as I was helplessly looking at the brochures and asked me, in broad accent, "Are you lawst?" My intentions of not being visibly touristy are evidently fated not to be realized.
After a long while a tremendously long metal train arrived, and we had to go far, far down the platform to the front of it. When I got out at Nostrand Ave., I realized that going to New York on my own is quite possibly one of the stupidest things I have ever done. It was merely a long platform, no information, no anything, on a dark street in a poor neighbourhood of shabby little chicken take-out places and old brick houses and bleak newer housing. I didn't know how to get to the bus station that would take me further. I stopped under a light to take out the notebook where I had scrawled the very insufficient directions, when a black man in his late twenties or so stopped and told me for my own good that I shouldn't take out money on that street (which I wasn't doing anyway, but point taken). He made a determined effort to instill trust in me and to prevent me from being afraid -- which was unnecessary as no matter what he intended specifically he was essentially nice and I was not afraid -- by showing a card with his name on it, asking me to look directly into his eyes, etc. Which sounds very dubious, but was all right in the event. Then he hailed one of the blank white taxis that were cruising through the neighbourhood, but I was dubious about them, especially after having forked over a good deal of money to a driver who had no idea where the intersection where I had to go to was. After stating my determination to get out at the next bus station to wait for a bus and ask the driver for directions, the man who was helping me hastily stepped out, after asking for money as compensation for being "taken out of his environment"; I take this to mean that this neighbourhood was not safe for him.
After waiting for the bus, very glad that the cab driver had let me out of the car, as I was rather worried he wouldn't, in the rain, for many minutes, with the white taxis beeping as they passed to offer their services, I finally went to a cigarette store and asked the two men there if they could call a taxi for me. It turns out that this was probably like asking a plumbing union, on strike, if they know any plumbers who could fix my sink. At any rate, then one of them hailed another inofficial taxi for me, after a charade intended to convince me of its trustworthiness (the shop person asked the cabbie for his number in case he has to take a cab eventually, too). The driver took me to the intersection where the hostel is. I handed over the 8 dollars the driver had asked for; perhaps the price was excessive, but I was so happy at reaching the right place that I let him keep 10 dollars. The driver had the same smirk as one of the cigarette store owners, implying that I was hopelessly dumb, but at that point I simply didn't care; I was not slow to pick up on deception, but unable to tell how to counteract it, and willing to give people the benefit of the doubt. If I was exploited, at least there are three people who are not especially wealthy walking around a little the richer for it. Tant mieux.
The hostel is a modest old building, which appeared in the dark to have no sign indicating its nature at all. It is quite friendly, though not the cleanest. The owner showed me up to bed right away, and I gave up on the idea of showering, changed into my pyjamas, and prepared to sleep. Unfortunately the blanket, though freshly washed like the sheets, had feces or some similar substance on it, but by that point I didn't care at all. I pushed the blanket to the foot of my bed and huddled under my coat instead. It was cold at times, it was hard to go to sleep, and the toothache was worrying away at me as much as ever. As I tossed and turned in the middle of the night, I was wondering if I should give up this trip, find the earliest flight, and return to New York. But I must stay at the hostel at least two nights, an earlier flight would probably cost more, and I still think that returning to Berlin now would mean giving up finding what to do once and for all.
Anyway, it's snowing, and it's daylight, and I feel more cheerful about everything now after e-mailing home and writing this. Besides, some past travelling experiences may not have been more awful but they felt much more awful. It's still an adventure, there are nicer parts of the city to visit, and I want to prove to myself that I can be brave.
I'm in New York, and I don't know whether to laugh or to cry about it. The flights yesterday, from Tegel to London-Heathrow and London-Heathrow to JFK airport took a long time, and this time was rendered much longer by the raging toothache which caused a walnut-sized bump to form to the right of my chin. I had aspirin, fortunately, and on the transatlantic flight I received some other medication from the stewardesses, after "signing my life away," i.e. indicating that I was doing so at my own risk, as one of them wryly said. But I liked the flight in all other aspects, except for the soggy sandwiches that were served for breakfast. Beside me there was a friendly woman from New Jersey, and we chatted away for a while; across the aisle there was a rather unfriendly man from one of the Carolinas who spoke in a southern drawl, told the steward "Don't lecture me" when the latter was pointing out that he could not come to serve people during takeoff (the man had pressed the button), and chatted with another presumably southern girl who followed up sentences with a "sir" that was supposed to be respectful but came off as affected. The flight took longer due to strong headwinds and the collapse of some equipment behind us when we were still in the berth.
At JFK, customs took forever, in a stifling, low-ceilinged room where even the three large fans did not help much. There was still a pained throng of foreigners when all the American citizens had passed through and were helping themselves to their baggage. I also felt insulted that we had to get digital prints of all of our fingers, then have a digital photo taken. The customs agent was an interesting dour type, though, possibly a prison warden, and yet quite polite.
Then came the bother of trying to find the trolley that I presumed would take me to Jamaica Station. It turns out that the "air trains" at the airport take you there. The air trains run along glass hallways that only look like glass hallways, not like platforms, when you walk along them at night (as I did). The darned terminal where I was at did not indicate which train went where; it was only after much to-ing and fro-ing, and thanks to inquiry, that I found another terminal where a sign did tell you that this was the Howard Beach(?)/Jamaica line, and then I had to be careful to step in the Jamaica and not the Howard Beach(?) train.
At Jamaica Station I had to buy tickets at one of a whole row of machines, where an attendant helped me, and then go through the turnstiles, where I managed, I believe, to open the turnstile to my left instead of the one in front of me as intended, and got exasperated until another attendant helped me there. It was rather humiliating, though amusing. It was still awfully hot, by the way. Finding the train that stops at Nostrand Avenue was a pain, too, but I was directed to the Flatbush Ave. line (the right one), by a grey-goateed New Yorker who came up to me as I was helplessly looking at the brochures and asked me, in broad accent, "Are you lawst?" My intentions of not being visibly touristy are evidently fated not to be realized.
After a long while a tremendously long metal train arrived, and we had to go far, far down the platform to the front of it. When I got out at Nostrand Ave., I realized that going to New York on my own is quite possibly one of the stupidest things I have ever done. It was merely a long platform, no information, no anything, on a dark street in a poor neighbourhood of shabby little chicken take-out places and old brick houses and bleak newer housing. I didn't know how to get to the bus station that would take me further. I stopped under a light to take out the notebook where I had scrawled the very insufficient directions, when a black man in his late twenties or so stopped and told me for my own good that I shouldn't take out money on that street (which I wasn't doing anyway, but point taken). He made a determined effort to instill trust in me and to prevent me from being afraid -- which was unnecessary as no matter what he intended specifically he was essentially nice and I was not afraid -- by showing a card with his name on it, asking me to look directly into his eyes, etc. Which sounds very dubious, but was all right in the event. Then he hailed one of the blank white taxis that were cruising through the neighbourhood, but I was dubious about them, especially after having forked over a good deal of money to a driver who had no idea where the intersection where I had to go to was. After stating my determination to get out at the next bus station to wait for a bus and ask the driver for directions, the man who was helping me hastily stepped out, after asking for money as compensation for being "taken out of his environment"; I take this to mean that this neighbourhood was not safe for him.
After waiting for the bus, very glad that the cab driver had let me out of the car, as I was rather worried he wouldn't, in the rain, for many minutes, with the white taxis beeping as they passed to offer their services, I finally went to a cigarette store and asked the two men there if they could call a taxi for me. It turns out that this was probably like asking a plumbing union, on strike, if they know any plumbers who could fix my sink. At any rate, then one of them hailed another inofficial taxi for me, after a charade intended to convince me of its trustworthiness (the shop person asked the cabbie for his number in case he has to take a cab eventually, too). The driver took me to the intersection where the hostel is. I handed over the 8 dollars the driver had asked for; perhaps the price was excessive, but I was so happy at reaching the right place that I let him keep 10 dollars. The driver had the same smirk as one of the cigarette store owners, implying that I was hopelessly dumb, but at that point I simply didn't care; I was not slow to pick up on deception, but unable to tell how to counteract it, and willing to give people the benefit of the doubt. If I was exploited, at least there are three people who are not especially wealthy walking around a little the richer for it. Tant mieux.
The hostel is a modest old building, which appeared in the dark to have no sign indicating its nature at all. It is quite friendly, though not the cleanest. The owner showed me up to bed right away, and I gave up on the idea of showering, changed into my pyjamas, and prepared to sleep. Unfortunately the blanket, though freshly washed like the sheets, had feces or some similar substance on it, but by that point I didn't care at all. I pushed the blanket to the foot of my bed and huddled under my coat instead. It was cold at times, it was hard to go to sleep, and the toothache was worrying away at me as much as ever. As I tossed and turned in the middle of the night, I was wondering if I should give up this trip, find the earliest flight, and return to New York. But I must stay at the hostel at least two nights, an earlier flight would probably cost more, and I still think that returning to Berlin now would mean giving up finding what to do once and for all.
Anyway, it's snowing, and it's daylight, and I feel more cheerful about everything now after e-mailing home and writing this. Besides, some past travelling experiences may not have been more awful but they felt much more awful. It's still an adventure, there are nicer parts of the city to visit, and I want to prove to myself that I can be brave.
Tuesday, December 09, 2008
A Second Castle in Spain
Unfortunately the bad mood of yesterday is not all gone, but it is much better. I've become something of an expert at deploying tricks to regain a serene state of mind; these tricks are not more complicated than applying moderate doses of activities that are at once cheering and sedating, like reading and music. In the evening I researched and drafted a preliminary outline of the places I'll see in New York, and now that most of that is over (I should still research bus routes, train routes, and bakeries), it's quite a relief.
On the piano I practiced the E flat major and minor scales (the whole caboodle: ordinary scales, four-note chords, arpeggios, chromatic scales, and diminished and dominant sevenths; legato and staccato and detached). I also endeavoured to memorize another half page of Beethoven's Sonata appassionata and to become more familiar with Rachmaninoff's Prelude in g minor (Op.23 No.5). Then I played these pieces:
J.S. Bach: Concerto in d minor, Mvt. 1
Well-Tempered Clavier, Preludio IX (E major)
Schumann: Kinderszenen (No. 1-4 and 6)
Albumblätter, "Impromptu"
Schubert: Sonata in B flat major (D960), Mvt. 1
C.P.E. Bach: Solfeggio in c minor
Beethoven: Deutsche Tänze, 1-7
Bagatelles (Op. 119), No. 1
Sonata in c# minor ("Moonlight"), Op. 27 No. 2
Bedrich Smetana: Song, Op. 2 No. 2
John Field: Nocturne No. 5 in B flat major
Astor Piazzolla: Milonga del ángel
Claude Debussy: Page d'album
Perhaps a week ago I realized that I could devote myself to playing music for much of my life and be content with that. At moments my playing still is or seems horrid, but it has been much more horrid, and the chances seem better now that I can play an entire piece without distracting errors and with good technique, expression, and intuition. Secondly, learning music theory and history, and practicing scales, no longer hold the terrors for me they once did; I've long felt that the true test of my devotion to a field is my willingness to plough (for lack of a more exalted metaphor) staunchly onward even through its stony and arid patches. Thirdly, I've grown into the music much more and become much less self-conscious. I only wish that I knew if I was middling, good, or, in some respects, great.
So the whim has seized me to send an audition CD to Juilliard for early admissions in February. I am probably atrociously overrating my abilities, and might convert this plan into a more modest one. But at least a miracle has occurred in the shape of me playing scales and finger exercises without hating every minute of it, and purposely memorizing pieces for the first time in at least two years. It also provides me with an agreeable aim. The repertoire that I am learning for the CD or some other purpose is the D major preludium-and-fugue pair from the Well-Tempered Clavier (Bk. II), Sonata appassionata, Kinderszenen, and Rachmaninoff's prelude. I think it's a good programme: varied yet not wholly dissimilar, not boring, sound as a "narrative arc" (to employ a most pretentious phrase), and put together from some of my favourite music.
On the piano I practiced the E flat major and minor scales (the whole caboodle: ordinary scales, four-note chords, arpeggios, chromatic scales, and diminished and dominant sevenths; legato and staccato and detached). I also endeavoured to memorize another half page of Beethoven's Sonata appassionata and to become more familiar with Rachmaninoff's Prelude in g minor (Op.23 No.5). Then I played these pieces:
J.S. Bach: Concerto in d minor, Mvt. 1
Well-Tempered Clavier, Preludio IX (E major)
Schumann: Kinderszenen (No. 1-4 and 6)
Albumblätter, "Impromptu"
Schubert: Sonata in B flat major (D960), Mvt. 1
C.P.E. Bach: Solfeggio in c minor
Beethoven: Deutsche Tänze, 1-7
Bagatelles (Op. 119), No. 1
Sonata in c# minor ("Moonlight"), Op. 27 No. 2
Bedrich Smetana: Song, Op. 2 No. 2
John Field: Nocturne No. 5 in B flat major
Astor Piazzolla: Milonga del ángel
Claude Debussy: Page d'album
Perhaps a week ago I realized that I could devote myself to playing music for much of my life and be content with that. At moments my playing still is or seems horrid, but it has been much more horrid, and the chances seem better now that I can play an entire piece without distracting errors and with good technique, expression, and intuition. Secondly, learning music theory and history, and practicing scales, no longer hold the terrors for me they once did; I've long felt that the true test of my devotion to a field is my willingness to plough (for lack of a more exalted metaphor) staunchly onward even through its stony and arid patches. Thirdly, I've grown into the music much more and become much less self-conscious. I only wish that I knew if I was middling, good, or, in some respects, great.
So the whim has seized me to send an audition CD to Juilliard for early admissions in February. I am probably atrociously overrating my abilities, and might convert this plan into a more modest one. But at least a miracle has occurred in the shape of me playing scales and finger exercises without hating every minute of it, and purposely memorizing pieces for the first time in at least two years. It also provides me with an agreeable aim. The repertoire that I am learning for the CD or some other purpose is the D major preludium-and-fugue pair from the Well-Tempered Clavier (Bk. II), Sonata appassionata, Kinderszenen, and Rachmaninoff's prelude. I think it's a good programme: varied yet not wholly dissimilar, not boring, sound as a "narrative arc" (to employ a most pretentious phrase), and put together from some of my favourite music.
Monday, December 08, 2008
To Be or Not to Be (Discussed at Exorbitant Length)
I'll be in New York from December 15th to 24th; the airline tickets ($594.79 US in total) are booked, and the hostel rooms ($155.00 US) reserved. Though I am certain that, despite the stresses of travel, the journey will be enjoyable once it's underway, my feelings presently are in a state of turmoil that is not happy. Even though it is only a little trip to determine whether I would like to live in New York or whether I've formed a wrong idea of it, it feels like the throw of the dice that will decide my entire future. I have tried to think soberly what to do if I decide not to move there after all, or don't find work there, but on the whole I think I'd be very depressed if that were the case. It is the one thing I have really looked forward to, aside from my friend's visit and our travels this summer, in years. So it is exciting but also terrifying.
What bothers me, too, is the worry that my parents and relatives (will) disapprove. Of course I say that I need to live in a way that contents me, but the other side is that I've always been afraid of disapproval and it drains my self-confidence. My plans are mostly quixotic, but often enough I am only formulating them and building them out in my mind to cheer me up and give me some hope for the future instead of the customary dread; besides, if they are practicable and worthwhile, only very difficult to carry out, I think it's unkind to discourage me from pursuing them.
Anyway, I want to be completely honest now, and I am writing what follows partly so that I don't have to think it within myself the whole time, and partly because it's probably interesting as a psychological case study. For a long time I haven't understood why I still exist, or existed in the first place. Up until Grade 11 I felt that life was going somewhere, and now it only feels like an endless and empty coda. It is childish of me to still harp on the subject, but in a way I feel as if my school years after Grade 7 stole my future. I don't know what I am good at or what I want to do, and whatever talents I have are totally underdeveloped; then, not only did my bad grades undermine my belief in myself and conversely make me stop caring about grades because the criteria by which they were given were too absurd and arbitrary, but they also deprived me of any chance of entering any of the "best" universities, which I wanted to enter not for the sake of the degree or subsequent job but because I thought that they would teach me the most. I still don't know whether I am stupid or intelligent, a good writer or a bad one (my spelling and grammar are good, and my vocabulary is extensive, but that isn't everything), and a good musician or a bad one. Of course much blame can be put on me, too, but the system was utterly unsuited. Then there are, in addition, the years of being at the bottom of the social hierarchy among my classmates, so that I'm still hermity and absolutely afraid of people my own age five years later.
It also seems as if, whenever there has been an opportunity for something to move forward, it hasn't happened, except for UBC (after the gap year), which then petered out after the second year when it was clear that I hadn't the motivation to continue, and the move to Germany. I have done hours of job-searching, and applied to some five jobs for which I thought I was really suited, and nothing has happened. I research travelling to places, buying an apartment, etc., on the internet, and it isn't carried out. On the surface of it, it looks as if I were doing nothing, but it would have looked as if I were doing a lot if anyone had decided to employ me. On the other hand, it is quite evident that, firstly, it was wrong to expect that in the future things just happen to one, because they don't; and, secondly, one does have to do astronomical quantities of job-searching and send out huge numbers of applications if one does actually want to get work (except through connections, which I don't want to use and only could if I really made an effort, as I don't think that being on speaking terms with the influential Mr. or Mrs. So-and-so, or having the same third cousin as one's boss, is a valid job qualification, etc.). My dabbling won't cut it, and I wish it had been clearer to me from the outset that, under the circumstances, it may truly not be my fault if the job-search is unproductive.
Then I have the sense that I am completely unimportant to anyone. If I were to move to New York, I would leave a gap in the family, because I've been around for twenty-three years and have on the whole been a pleasant element. But the last time I was an actually agreeable influence on the lives of more than ten people was probably when I was still publishing the family newsletter, which managed to amuse a goodly circle of relatives and friends. Besides, I am not truly close to anyone. I've never been able to share my problems well with other people, either because I can't analyze the problems succinctly, or they are boring and too abstract, or I doubt that anyone would understand, or I don't want to burden anyone. Though I can talk to my parents about most things, and can confide the harmless portions of my experience to my siblings, I don't even do that often.
At any rate, the worst problem is the previously mentioned fear of not doing anything in life except being befallen by one unhappy event or despairing mood after another, wherefore I wish that I could cut the whole miserable thing short. In July I did get terribly close to suicide, and I planned things out as far as is possible with an impulse like that. But I have come to the conclusion that it is not an option. Though, at the age of sixteen, I was certain that no one would be very sad when I died because I wasn't at all loveable, I figure now that tears would be shed, if only out of pity for life cut prematurely short, etc., and that I'd cast a gloom over everyone who likes me and possibly provoke a lot of emotional turmoil. I don't want to inflict that. Secondly, though people will have to feel bad when I die sooner or later, I figure that it's nicer to go out in God's own good time, with dignity, and that God's own good time and dignity do not involve a gory and violent scene of slit wrists. Thirdly, I like comfort and find self-injurious impulses instinctively repellent. Lastly, while I'm given the opportunity to live I might as well do something worthwhile with it. So, as I've said, suicide is not an option. Only from time to time I think of it when I feel powerless again, and more often I do think I'd like to be in heaven (its boringness as depicted in popular culture no longer being much of an objection).
In the end, once I've taken as my premise that dying is not an option, it's clear that I might as well face things bravely and make the best of them. (Which might not be precisely what I was doing in this post; but I don't want to complain, only explain how things are.) I also know that lots of people are suicidal; it's a part of life and one can get past it. Also, such feelings, though they are awful at the time, aren't the worst I've known; it is far easier being unhappy but feeling that there is a way out, than being unhappy but feeling that there is no way out. So, with the exception of my second year at UBC, I haven't been this contented since Grade 7; it's only that inaction and hopelessness encourage this sort of thought more than active stress does.
Long story short, I can deal with all sorts of things, and have done it for a long time, and will continue to do so, on my own. If I do something stupid, honestly I don't feel that anyone else is responsible, or should feel so. What I'd only like is to be trusted and respected as an adult, and treated as a reasonable and independent being, and not to be judged all the time. And if I can at least try to follow my whims and dreams in peace, I'll be eternally grateful.
What bothers me, too, is the worry that my parents and relatives (will) disapprove. Of course I say that I need to live in a way that contents me, but the other side is that I've always been afraid of disapproval and it drains my self-confidence. My plans are mostly quixotic, but often enough I am only formulating them and building them out in my mind to cheer me up and give me some hope for the future instead of the customary dread; besides, if they are practicable and worthwhile, only very difficult to carry out, I think it's unkind to discourage me from pursuing them.
Anyway, I want to be completely honest now, and I am writing what follows partly so that I don't have to think it within myself the whole time, and partly because it's probably interesting as a psychological case study. For a long time I haven't understood why I still exist, or existed in the first place. Up until Grade 11 I felt that life was going somewhere, and now it only feels like an endless and empty coda. It is childish of me to still harp on the subject, but in a way I feel as if my school years after Grade 7 stole my future. I don't know what I am good at or what I want to do, and whatever talents I have are totally underdeveloped; then, not only did my bad grades undermine my belief in myself and conversely make me stop caring about grades because the criteria by which they were given were too absurd and arbitrary, but they also deprived me of any chance of entering any of the "best" universities, which I wanted to enter not for the sake of the degree or subsequent job but because I thought that they would teach me the most. I still don't know whether I am stupid or intelligent, a good writer or a bad one (my spelling and grammar are good, and my vocabulary is extensive, but that isn't everything), and a good musician or a bad one. Of course much blame can be put on me, too, but the system was utterly unsuited. Then there are, in addition, the years of being at the bottom of the social hierarchy among my classmates, so that I'm still hermity and absolutely afraid of people my own age five years later.
It also seems as if, whenever there has been an opportunity for something to move forward, it hasn't happened, except for UBC (after the gap year), which then petered out after the second year when it was clear that I hadn't the motivation to continue, and the move to Germany. I have done hours of job-searching, and applied to some five jobs for which I thought I was really suited, and nothing has happened. I research travelling to places, buying an apartment, etc., on the internet, and it isn't carried out. On the surface of it, it looks as if I were doing nothing, but it would have looked as if I were doing a lot if anyone had decided to employ me. On the other hand, it is quite evident that, firstly, it was wrong to expect that in the future things just happen to one, because they don't; and, secondly, one does have to do astronomical quantities of job-searching and send out huge numbers of applications if one does actually want to get work (except through connections, which I don't want to use and only could if I really made an effort, as I don't think that being on speaking terms with the influential Mr. or Mrs. So-and-so, or having the same third cousin as one's boss, is a valid job qualification, etc.). My dabbling won't cut it, and I wish it had been clearer to me from the outset that, under the circumstances, it may truly not be my fault if the job-search is unproductive.
Then I have the sense that I am completely unimportant to anyone. If I were to move to New York, I would leave a gap in the family, because I've been around for twenty-three years and have on the whole been a pleasant element. But the last time I was an actually agreeable influence on the lives of more than ten people was probably when I was still publishing the family newsletter, which managed to amuse a goodly circle of relatives and friends. Besides, I am not truly close to anyone. I've never been able to share my problems well with other people, either because I can't analyze the problems succinctly, or they are boring and too abstract, or I doubt that anyone would understand, or I don't want to burden anyone. Though I can talk to my parents about most things, and can confide the harmless portions of my experience to my siblings, I don't even do that often.
At any rate, the worst problem is the previously mentioned fear of not doing anything in life except being befallen by one unhappy event or despairing mood after another, wherefore I wish that I could cut the whole miserable thing short. In July I did get terribly close to suicide, and I planned things out as far as is possible with an impulse like that. But I have come to the conclusion that it is not an option. Though, at the age of sixteen, I was certain that no one would be very sad when I died because I wasn't at all loveable, I figure now that tears would be shed, if only out of pity for life cut prematurely short, etc., and that I'd cast a gloom over everyone who likes me and possibly provoke a lot of emotional turmoil. I don't want to inflict that. Secondly, though people will have to feel bad when I die sooner or later, I figure that it's nicer to go out in God's own good time, with dignity, and that God's own good time and dignity do not involve a gory and violent scene of slit wrists. Thirdly, I like comfort and find self-injurious impulses instinctively repellent. Lastly, while I'm given the opportunity to live I might as well do something worthwhile with it. So, as I've said, suicide is not an option. Only from time to time I think of it when I feel powerless again, and more often I do think I'd like to be in heaven (its boringness as depicted in popular culture no longer being much of an objection).
In the end, once I've taken as my premise that dying is not an option, it's clear that I might as well face things bravely and make the best of them. (Which might not be precisely what I was doing in this post; but I don't want to complain, only explain how things are.) I also know that lots of people are suicidal; it's a part of life and one can get past it. Also, such feelings, though they are awful at the time, aren't the worst I've known; it is far easier being unhappy but feeling that there is a way out, than being unhappy but feeling that there is no way out. So, with the exception of my second year at UBC, I haven't been this contented since Grade 7; it's only that inaction and hopelessness encourage this sort of thought more than active stress does.
Long story short, I can deal with all sorts of things, and have done it for a long time, and will continue to do so, on my own. If I do something stupid, honestly I don't feel that anyone else is responsible, or should feel so. What I'd only like is to be trusted and respected as an adult, and treated as a reasonable and independent being, and not to be judged all the time. And if I can at least try to follow my whims and dreams in peace, I'll be eternally grateful.
Friday, November 21, 2008
The Bear and the Rooster
There may be lots of inaccuracies in this, but it's after 2 a.m. and I want to go to sleep. So I'll post it as is, with my apologies.
* * *
This evening T., Ge., J. and I betook ourselves to the Philharmonic, braving the chills of this snowy day, passing across the rimy grass at the Kulturforum, and wandering briefly under the sky where the ghostly white clouds strayed across the blackness. Inside it was perfectly warm, and we wended our way through the great, bright foyer and the flocks of quietly cheerful or quietly hostile concertgoers, decidedly belonging to the quietly cheerful camp. Our seats were perched above stage level out in front, and we had a good view of all musicians, save the basses at the rightmost nook of the stage. There was an impressive array of chairs, for a veritable army of violinists, violists, cellists, bassists, flautists, oboists, bassoonists, trombonists, percussionists, and trumpeters. There was a celesta, two cymbals, a gong, big crimson drum, tambourine, two timpani, a triangle and xylophone, etc. The golden parquet, the blond wood chairs, the dark brown of the basses, and the copper glare of the timpani formed a most pleasing tableau as we waited for their occupants to enter.
The light on the stage became more glaring, the musicians filed in, the tardier portion of the audience straggled in, and the conductor, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, strode onto the stage in evidently excellent spirits. Then the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin began to play Tchaikovsky's Francesca da Rimini. Before the concert I had read up on the tale that inspired it. It comes from a passage in Dante's Inferno, where the wandering protagonist interrupts his journey through the eponymous nether regions in order to parley with old acquaintances whom he finds in the region allotted to lusty sinners. Francesca had married some person who apparently wasn't too agreeable, when she and her brother-in-law Paolo decided to read Arthurian romances together. They came as far as the episode with Queen Guinevere and Sir Lancelot, and never went further, for they were unwisely inspired to a spot of kissing; at which point the husband (who is going to hell too, only later, as Dante helpfully informs us) stopped by, flew into a jealous rage, and stabbed them both to death. As for the music, it was the Ride of the Valkyries without the horn theme, just the strings wuthering up and down the scale, like demons flitting and swooping, hither and thither, through the atmosphere of hell. Then there was a peaceful episode where one of the woodwinds, possibly a cor anglais, had a lyrical solo, followed by pastorally amorous string passages and a fleeting answer by the flute (the man was evidently the more talkative entity in this relationship). Then the Ride was back, as were the fortissimo passages that had a hectic effect on my blood pressure, hammering in the point that the couple were pretty darn damned. Then the music came to an end with four or so thunderous whacks of the timpani, which I surmised were the stabs of the angry husband.
After a break for applause, it was on to Prokofiev's Violin Concerto No. 2, with the soloist Lisa Batiashvili, who was born in Tbilisi and presently lives in Munich. Her opening phrase was very beautiful, and she brought out the individuality of her violin's tone excellently. Altogether the touch was lyrical but not self-indulgently so, and the technique was inconspicuously irreproachable, as is ideal. The overall physical approach was a very athletic one, with much bending and so on, but it wasn't painful to watch even for one as humourless about theatrics as I. The violinist was absorbed in the conductor's direction and turned often to face and consult him, with a disregard for the audience that was rather likeable and an even more likeable lack of the knowing smirks that often characterize these consultations. She is decidedly not a lady-violinist, and there was a refreshing absence of revealing gowns, lavish make-up, and of the showily "graceful" movements that are often employed to emphasize a violiniste's femininity for the sake of CD and ticket sales.
What I missed in this concerto was the Russian character which, I think, could have been found and and should have been brought forth, even though the piece is in my view principally an attempt to mimick the French modernists. Mostly this concerto was not my cup of tea, though it could be worse, being an experimental jumble of disparate and insignificant motifs, which can be rendered palatable through a glowing tone and a whimsical imaginativeness of interpretation, but which is not particularly worthwhile. (I doubt that the previous sentence could have been snobbier, but oh, well.) In any case, there were many curtain calls and an encore. There the soloist played a Georgian folksong, to the accompaniment of four or so of the string players in the orchestra, which everyone visibly enjoyed.
*Intermission* (Where we stay in our seats and chatter cheerfully.)
After the break came Debussy's Jeux, which was essentially a stream of effects: strings evoking the sweeping of leaves here, cascading of the harps there, and that sort of thing. But it was agreeable while it lasted — not going anywhere really, but not boring. Theoretically I have much more use for Tchaikovsky than I have for Debussy, but these Jeux were much more distinctively and originally Debussy than Francesca da Rimini was distinctively and originally Tchaikovsky. Oddly enough, I even liked Ravel, for whom I don't have much use apart from some famous orchestral piece whose name I've presently forgotten.
The Ravel was, specifically, a rendering of Daphnis and Chloe, an old Greek tale of a sheep-herding foster brother and sister to whom it is revealed that they adore each other after much bucolic bliss. This is yet another species of romantic tale that I don't find at all romantic, as there is no surer way of leading a stifling and claustrophobic existence than marrying a person who has an identical upbringing and life experience. Anyway, as Ravel interpreted the tale, there was a very morning-ish (or, to employ a term from one of my online novels, matutinal) opening, burgeoning with clichés like trilling flutes for birds and scales on the harps and strings for the rising of the sun or who knows what. Then there was, fittingly, a great deal of the aforementioned bucolic bliss, woodland oboes and hunting horns and the like. It was hilariously over-the-top, very sweeping, and every musical instrument had its moment. I was much more excited than I should be at my mature years by all the interesting instruments, and squealed internally when, for instance, the triangle or the piccolo flute made its appearance, or when the harps had a phrase or so. Altogether the music was familiar; it resembles the score to every black-and-white film ever made. Apparently Wagner and Ravel were the alpha and omega of Hollywood composers.
Altogether my impression, not being used to comparing orchestras or knowing what is good or bad, was that the orchestra was very good and that its tone was especially remarkable. It may be balderdash, but I once read that different orchestras choose different approaches to the bowing, so that in the Israeli Philharmonic the players are permitted to find their own bowing, which apparently leads to an interesting, if a trifle anarchic, multiplicity of sound; in this case the bows of the strings rose and fell in an incredibly unisono movement. The unwieldy contingent of musicians was capable of astounding lightness and versatility as well as swelling sound, the dialogue that ran from the strings to the woodwinds and from the violins through the cellos to the basses and so on ran fluidly, and above all I thought that the tone was quite lovely. The music did not have an overly rehearsed effect at all; it was alive. What I thought was missing was the edge that would have counteracted the intermittent tendency to be nearly lush.
At the end we reemerged into the cold, cold air, running across the Kulturforum to the bus station to grow warmer, and then waiting in a literal huddle for the bus to arrive. Yet we were in a good mood. I'm glad that I'm beginning to enjoy my outings wholeheartedly — instead of going somewhere on my own initiative and on my own, out of a sense of duty, only to feel depressed by how little I get out of it — and also that I'm bothering to read up on things before I go. In the process of doing the latter, I have, for instance, discovered a very nice biography (over several webpages) of Prokofiev.
P.S.: The subject line is probably highly incongruous, but the rationale behind it is that, since bears are sort of Russian and the rooster is an emblem of France, these animals represent the nationalities of the composers.
* * *
This evening T., Ge., J. and I betook ourselves to the Philharmonic, braving the chills of this snowy day, passing across the rimy grass at the Kulturforum, and wandering briefly under the sky where the ghostly white clouds strayed across the blackness. Inside it was perfectly warm, and we wended our way through the great, bright foyer and the flocks of quietly cheerful or quietly hostile concertgoers, decidedly belonging to the quietly cheerful camp. Our seats were perched above stage level out in front, and we had a good view of all musicians, save the basses at the rightmost nook of the stage. There was an impressive array of chairs, for a veritable army of violinists, violists, cellists, bassists, flautists, oboists, bassoonists, trombonists, percussionists, and trumpeters. There was a celesta, two cymbals, a gong, big crimson drum, tambourine, two timpani, a triangle and xylophone, etc. The golden parquet, the blond wood chairs, the dark brown of the basses, and the copper glare of the timpani formed a most pleasing tableau as we waited for their occupants to enter.
The light on the stage became more glaring, the musicians filed in, the tardier portion of the audience straggled in, and the conductor, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, strode onto the stage in evidently excellent spirits. Then the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin began to play Tchaikovsky's Francesca da Rimini. Before the concert I had read up on the tale that inspired it. It comes from a passage in Dante's Inferno, where the wandering protagonist interrupts his journey through the eponymous nether regions in order to parley with old acquaintances whom he finds in the region allotted to lusty sinners. Francesca had married some person who apparently wasn't too agreeable, when she and her brother-in-law Paolo decided to read Arthurian romances together. They came as far as the episode with Queen Guinevere and Sir Lancelot, and never went further, for they were unwisely inspired to a spot of kissing; at which point the husband (who is going to hell too, only later, as Dante helpfully informs us) stopped by, flew into a jealous rage, and stabbed them both to death. As for the music, it was the Ride of the Valkyries without the horn theme, just the strings wuthering up and down the scale, like demons flitting and swooping, hither and thither, through the atmosphere of hell. Then there was a peaceful episode where one of the woodwinds, possibly a cor anglais, had a lyrical solo, followed by pastorally amorous string passages and a fleeting answer by the flute (the man was evidently the more talkative entity in this relationship). Then the Ride was back, as were the fortissimo passages that had a hectic effect on my blood pressure, hammering in the point that the couple were pretty darn damned. Then the music came to an end with four or so thunderous whacks of the timpani, which I surmised were the stabs of the angry husband.
After a break for applause, it was on to Prokofiev's Violin Concerto No. 2, with the soloist Lisa Batiashvili, who was born in Tbilisi and presently lives in Munich. Her opening phrase was very beautiful, and she brought out the individuality of her violin's tone excellently. Altogether the touch was lyrical but not self-indulgently so, and the technique was inconspicuously irreproachable, as is ideal. The overall physical approach was a very athletic one, with much bending and so on, but it wasn't painful to watch even for one as humourless about theatrics as I. The violinist was absorbed in the conductor's direction and turned often to face and consult him, with a disregard for the audience that was rather likeable and an even more likeable lack of the knowing smirks that often characterize these consultations. She is decidedly not a lady-violinist, and there was a refreshing absence of revealing gowns, lavish make-up, and of the showily "graceful" movements that are often employed to emphasize a violiniste's femininity for the sake of CD and ticket sales.
What I missed in this concerto was the Russian character which, I think, could have been found and and should have been brought forth, even though the piece is in my view principally an attempt to mimick the French modernists. Mostly this concerto was not my cup of tea, though it could be worse, being an experimental jumble of disparate and insignificant motifs, which can be rendered palatable through a glowing tone and a whimsical imaginativeness of interpretation, but which is not particularly worthwhile. (I doubt that the previous sentence could have been snobbier, but oh, well.) In any case, there were many curtain calls and an encore. There the soloist played a Georgian folksong, to the accompaniment of four or so of the string players in the orchestra, which everyone visibly enjoyed.
*Intermission* (Where we stay in our seats and chatter cheerfully.)
After the break came Debussy's Jeux, which was essentially a stream of effects: strings evoking the sweeping of leaves here, cascading of the harps there, and that sort of thing. But it was agreeable while it lasted — not going anywhere really, but not boring. Theoretically I have much more use for Tchaikovsky than I have for Debussy, but these Jeux were much more distinctively and originally Debussy than Francesca da Rimini was distinctively and originally Tchaikovsky. Oddly enough, I even liked Ravel, for whom I don't have much use apart from some famous orchestral piece whose name I've presently forgotten.
The Ravel was, specifically, a rendering of Daphnis and Chloe, an old Greek tale of a sheep-herding foster brother and sister to whom it is revealed that they adore each other after much bucolic bliss. This is yet another species of romantic tale that I don't find at all romantic, as there is no surer way of leading a stifling and claustrophobic existence than marrying a person who has an identical upbringing and life experience. Anyway, as Ravel interpreted the tale, there was a very morning-ish (or, to employ a term from one of my online novels, matutinal) opening, burgeoning with clichés like trilling flutes for birds and scales on the harps and strings for the rising of the sun or who knows what. Then there was, fittingly, a great deal of the aforementioned bucolic bliss, woodland oboes and hunting horns and the like. It was hilariously over-the-top, very sweeping, and every musical instrument had its moment. I was much more excited than I should be at my mature years by all the interesting instruments, and squealed internally when, for instance, the triangle or the piccolo flute made its appearance, or when the harps had a phrase or so. Altogether the music was familiar; it resembles the score to every black-and-white film ever made. Apparently Wagner and Ravel were the alpha and omega of Hollywood composers.
Altogether my impression, not being used to comparing orchestras or knowing what is good or bad, was that the orchestra was very good and that its tone was especially remarkable. It may be balderdash, but I once read that different orchestras choose different approaches to the bowing, so that in the Israeli Philharmonic the players are permitted to find their own bowing, which apparently leads to an interesting, if a trifle anarchic, multiplicity of sound; in this case the bows of the strings rose and fell in an incredibly unisono movement. The unwieldy contingent of musicians was capable of astounding lightness and versatility as well as swelling sound, the dialogue that ran from the strings to the woodwinds and from the violins through the cellos to the basses and so on ran fluidly, and above all I thought that the tone was quite lovely. The music did not have an overly rehearsed effect at all; it was alive. What I thought was missing was the edge that would have counteracted the intermittent tendency to be nearly lush.
At the end we reemerged into the cold, cold air, running across the Kulturforum to the bus station to grow warmer, and then waiting in a literal huddle for the bus to arrive. Yet we were in a good mood. I'm glad that I'm beginning to enjoy my outings wholeheartedly — instead of going somewhere on my own initiative and on my own, out of a sense of duty, only to feel depressed by how little I get out of it — and also that I'm bothering to read up on things before I go. In the process of doing the latter, I have, for instance, discovered a very nice biography (over several webpages) of Prokofiev.
P.S.: The subject line is probably highly incongruous, but the rationale behind it is that, since bears are sort of Russian and the rooster is an emblem of France, these animals represent the nationalities of the composers.
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
Tales of the Idler
Mama is in the kitchen preparing what promises to be a most delectable lentil casserole, compounded of bacon, onions, carrots, leek, parsnip, celery root, parsley, green and pale orange lentils, etc. T. is back from university; Gi. and Ge. and J. are back from school; and Papa should return from work shortly. It is already dark outside, and from the whishing of the cars along the road I surmise that it is lightly raining.
I woke up at around 1 p.m., as Papa left for university, having been up after 3:30 a.m., and then lay there trying to shake off the last sleepiness. At last I got up, wrapped one of our green plaid flannel blankets around my shoulders, breakfasted on a slice of raisin bread with butter (simple but delicious), and then peregrinated over to the corner room. There I perched gingerly on the edge of hot stove; let the chocolate that remains from Papa's purchases of yesterday melt in my mouth, square by square; and read more of Jane Eyre. I've reached the point where the heroine has returned to Gateshead Manor to visit her dying aunt, stays there a month, studies the curiously contrasting pair of her cousins Eliza and Georgiana, and then travels back to Thornfield. Besides, I showered, sat at my laptop and glanced at the news. When Ge. was at home again, we watched The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and, later with J., The Colbert Report. The guest on the Daily Show was Sir David Frost, who makes a good impression as an intelligent and witty and well-informed representative of the traditional England that I like, and one who is very good at what he does (though surprisingly indistinct in his speech for a broadcaster) and very interested in it.
Last night I read The Cromptons, by Mary Jane Holmes. It is set at first in rural Florida, and then in some other American state whose identity escapes me, and it is the tale of a colonel who secretly marries beneath him and then abandons his uneducated wife, only to adopt the daughter when the wife dies. The daughter, rendered careless in part by the uncertainty about the identity of her father, runs off to marry her music-teacher. Then the tale skips ahead to the fortunes of a young schoolteacher who is sought by two gentlemen, and it falls into its expected course. Anyway, not great literature, certainly, and the more melodramatic plot points don't so much interest me, but despite the unrealism it is still an interesting window on the America of the author's time, i.e. around the Civil War (though the author rarely touches on it directly), reasonably well and vividly written, and not devoid of humour. What interests me too is that Miss or Mrs. Holmes writes about mentally ill people in a humane and not in a stigmatizing way, and depicts them living in their homes, with family, instead of being shut away in institutions.
Besides, I've been proofreading pages of scanned-in books for Distributed Proofreaders, which supplies gutenberg.org with its texts. I did so at university, too, but it took a long time because I was much more afraid of making errors and my attention span was shorter than it is now. (One of the great benefits of the past two years is that I am regaining the ability to focus on things properly, which I lost during teenagerhood and which was not much improved even at UBC.) I mostly look at books that have been in the queue for a very long time: French and Spanish histories and novels, musicological works, etc. It's excellent for freshening up and expanding my knowledge of both languages, and there are very absorbing books among them to which I would not otherwise be exposed, due to my predilection for fiction. For instance, the French historian Hippolyte Taine, in his great opus on the story of English literature, launches a tirade on the inane questions that St. Thomas Aquinas asked à propos of the Bible (e.g. Was the dove of the Holy Spirit an actual animal?), before opining with apparent regret that he was still the greatest theologian of his age — given the exile of Abélard and somebody else. The French writers are also generally remarkable for the fluency and purity of their style.
Otherwise I have been mulling a new story, set during World War I, which will unfortunately remain a tale that I should not like to show anyone else, unless a miracle occurs and I manage to make it more sober, well-rounded, realistic, and intellectual. I don't like writing stories merely for the exercise of developing plot, character, etc., even if they are entertaining, if I can't feel proud of them in the end. Above all, the substance is lacking. Of course I am pleased that I have started or completed more stories this year than I have in all my life before that, but quality is more important than quantity. In principle I would prefer to wait until I am capable of writing a truly worthwhile story, and in the meantime devote myself to blogging, reading, meditating, and furnishing my cranial dome as well as I can. As for attempting to write an unintelligent bestseller, I'd only like to do that if it could be unpretentious, goodhearted, and perfectly written in its modest way, and still possess sincerity and substance at its core. Perhaps that is a paradox.
Winter is setting in, and it is quite evident I won't be in New York in January, but I am bearing it with equanimity, or rather equanimity has descended upon me quite irrespective of my own exertions, and it's best to enjoy it while it lasts. Of course there will be the inevitable depression, but, as serious as they become, I've become used to battling blue devils, and as long as it's only my own moods that I have to fight, not any unfamiliar external problems, I know that they are surmountable. As for my particular blue devils, I think of them as my "maladie imaginaire." It is imaginary because it is emotional stress and desperation caused by worrying about my life, even though I am otherwise quite happy. It's reached the point, however, where I am convinced that worrying about the future, unless this worry produces some positive action, is counterproductive. In retrospect, I've figured out that, for the first year when we lived here in Berlin, I used to intentionally worry in order to punish myself for not earning money for my upkeep, but this is neither healthy nor helpful, which is why I no longer do it. Nor is there much use in worrying about what other people think; first of all, a valid criticism would require a greater understanding of my character and circumstances than anyone except my parents possesses, and, secondly, I am the one who has to live with myself and with the decisions I make. I take the effect of actions on my parents and siblings into account, for as I live with them these actions affect them directly, but otherwise there is no obligation to anyone except Ego.
I woke up at around 1 p.m., as Papa left for university, having been up after 3:30 a.m., and then lay there trying to shake off the last sleepiness. At last I got up, wrapped one of our green plaid flannel blankets around my shoulders, breakfasted on a slice of raisin bread with butter (simple but delicious), and then peregrinated over to the corner room. There I perched gingerly on the edge of hot stove; let the chocolate that remains from Papa's purchases of yesterday melt in my mouth, square by square; and read more of Jane Eyre. I've reached the point where the heroine has returned to Gateshead Manor to visit her dying aunt, stays there a month, studies the curiously contrasting pair of her cousins Eliza and Georgiana, and then travels back to Thornfield. Besides, I showered, sat at my laptop and glanced at the news. When Ge. was at home again, we watched The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and, later with J., The Colbert Report. The guest on the Daily Show was Sir David Frost, who makes a good impression as an intelligent and witty and well-informed representative of the traditional England that I like, and one who is very good at what he does (though surprisingly indistinct in his speech for a broadcaster) and very interested in it.
Last night I read The Cromptons, by Mary Jane Holmes. It is set at first in rural Florida, and then in some other American state whose identity escapes me, and it is the tale of a colonel who secretly marries beneath him and then abandons his uneducated wife, only to adopt the daughter when the wife dies. The daughter, rendered careless in part by the uncertainty about the identity of her father, runs off to marry her music-teacher. Then the tale skips ahead to the fortunes of a young schoolteacher who is sought by two gentlemen, and it falls into its expected course. Anyway, not great literature, certainly, and the more melodramatic plot points don't so much interest me, but despite the unrealism it is still an interesting window on the America of the author's time, i.e. around the Civil War (though the author rarely touches on it directly), reasonably well and vividly written, and not devoid of humour. What interests me too is that Miss or Mrs. Holmes writes about mentally ill people in a humane and not in a stigmatizing way, and depicts them living in their homes, with family, instead of being shut away in institutions.
Besides, I've been proofreading pages of scanned-in books for Distributed Proofreaders, which supplies gutenberg.org with its texts. I did so at university, too, but it took a long time because I was much more afraid of making errors and my attention span was shorter than it is now. (One of the great benefits of the past two years is that I am regaining the ability to focus on things properly, which I lost during teenagerhood and which was not much improved even at UBC.) I mostly look at books that have been in the queue for a very long time: French and Spanish histories and novels, musicological works, etc. It's excellent for freshening up and expanding my knowledge of both languages, and there are very absorbing books among them to which I would not otherwise be exposed, due to my predilection for fiction. For instance, the French historian Hippolyte Taine, in his great opus on the story of English literature, launches a tirade on the inane questions that St. Thomas Aquinas asked à propos of the Bible (e.g. Was the dove of the Holy Spirit an actual animal?), before opining with apparent regret that he was still the greatest theologian of his age — given the exile of Abélard and somebody else. The French writers are also generally remarkable for the fluency and purity of their style.
Otherwise I have been mulling a new story, set during World War I, which will unfortunately remain a tale that I should not like to show anyone else, unless a miracle occurs and I manage to make it more sober, well-rounded, realistic, and intellectual. I don't like writing stories merely for the exercise of developing plot, character, etc., even if they are entertaining, if I can't feel proud of them in the end. Above all, the substance is lacking. Of course I am pleased that I have started or completed more stories this year than I have in all my life before that, but quality is more important than quantity. In principle I would prefer to wait until I am capable of writing a truly worthwhile story, and in the meantime devote myself to blogging, reading, meditating, and furnishing my cranial dome as well as I can. As for attempting to write an unintelligent bestseller, I'd only like to do that if it could be unpretentious, goodhearted, and perfectly written in its modest way, and still possess sincerity and substance at its core. Perhaps that is a paradox.
Winter is setting in, and it is quite evident I won't be in New York in January, but I am bearing it with equanimity, or rather equanimity has descended upon me quite irrespective of my own exertions, and it's best to enjoy it while it lasts. Of course there will be the inevitable depression, but, as serious as they become, I've become used to battling blue devils, and as long as it's only my own moods that I have to fight, not any unfamiliar external problems, I know that they are surmountable. As for my particular blue devils, I think of them as my "maladie imaginaire." It is imaginary because it is emotional stress and desperation caused by worrying about my life, even though I am otherwise quite happy. It's reached the point, however, where I am convinced that worrying about the future, unless this worry produces some positive action, is counterproductive. In retrospect, I've figured out that, for the first year when we lived here in Berlin, I used to intentionally worry in order to punish myself for not earning money for my upkeep, but this is neither healthy nor helpful, which is why I no longer do it. Nor is there much use in worrying about what other people think; first of all, a valid criticism would require a greater understanding of my character and circumstances than anyone except my parents possesses, and, secondly, I am the one who has to live with myself and with the decisions I make. I take the effect of actions on my parents and siblings into account, for as I live with them these actions affect them directly, but otherwise there is no obligation to anyone except Ego.
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
The Well-Tempered Concertgoer
It already happened two days ago, but T. and Ge. and J. and I went to a concert at the Berlin Philharmonic, and here is an account of it. I very much dislike the practice of making dogmatic statements that may be totally untrue, without admitting in manner or speech that this is the case, but it is also bothersome to write "I think" or "it seems that" all the time, so I'll just state at the beginning that these are merely my thoughts. If the style is pompous, I would also like to remind the reader that this is, after all, a music review. If I can dispense with stream-of-consciousness references to impressionism and the like, that's already a considerable achievement. (c:
The pianist was Hélène Grimaud and the programme was Bach and Beethoven. She began by playing the Prelude and Fugue in c minor, the 2nd set in the 1st volume of the Well-Tempered Clavier. The prelude is a rhythmic flurry of notes, which she executed with a romantic flow, in a way that may not be quintessentially Bach-ian but that fit in well to the overarching concept of her concert; the fugue is a lightly troubled series of questions and answers, which she executed with a likewise luminous tone.
She moved on to the Prelude and Fugue in c# minor (4th set, 1st volume), which are very slow and sombre, and, in my experience, somehow awkward to play because the many sharps have a thickening effect on the tone. (I sometimes think, though it may be complete nonsense, that Bach and Händel "engineered" this thickening on purpose in their music, so that the thin sounds of the harpsichord would be richer.) There she brought out the sacral element well – the prelude brings to mind the strains of an organ in an empty church, and if the Philharmonic were a cathedral and the concert were being filmed, a camera would have been panning the soaring stained glass windows – and the tone was beautifully fit to bring out the melody to its full advantage. But the fugues are at times an unforgiving tangle of thoughts, and this one, through no fault of the performer, felt interminable.
The third Prelude and Fugue, in d minor (6th set, 2nd volume), are less my cup of tea than the others. They are a desultory wandering that, to be a bit mean, is fine background music, for instance at that point in a concert where everyone is inclined to snooze and even the performer has been hypnotized out of his self-consciousness, but not in itself so meaningful. As often happens in Bach pieces, the first bars pose a problem whose solution neither promises to be particularly interesting nor, most likely, even exists. In concrete terms, I suppose what I mean is that you always expect the minor key to be resolved into a major key, or the theme to progress into another theme (not a weird intellectual one, but one that is hummable), but nothing of the sort happens, which feels unsatisfactory. It is like the rambling Gregorian chants; they are quite beautiful as a process, but a dreadful bore if you have to sit down for an hour or so and listen to them as a performance. What is rather interesting is how Bach's preludes often have the effect of starting in medias res, which is to say, in the midst of the action.
Then Hélène Grimaud launched on Ferruccio Busoni's rewriting of Bach's chaconne (familiar as part of the violin repertoire), BWV 1004. Here her skills were most apparent. While her earlier rendering of Bach was too fluent and frictionless, and she was playing it with so resplendent a polish that it sounded as if she was playing it in an empty room for a recording (Papa told me later that her concert programme was, in fact, taken from her new CD), the conviction that Bach was not so much for her was dispelled as she gradually got into the mood. But what made her rendering of this work especially good was that, like a fine ballet dancer, she contrived to make the effort seem effortless. She did not assume virtuoso airs because of the piece's difficulty, and instead she played the octave scales, chromatic scales, etc., with an elegant sensitivity that made music out of something that otherwise bears a tiresomely close resemblance to finger exercises.
When this piece was over – with brio of course – there was a brief pause for applause, and then she started again with a Prelude and Fugue in a minor (20th set, 2nd volume), which were the epitome of desultory wandering, and very much an anticlimax. I thought that they, and the following work (i.e. Liszt's reworking of another a minor Prelude and Fugue, BWV 543), could profitably have been left out of the programme. To employ a geographical metaphor, in between the massive continental plates of the first and second halves of the programme, they were like an insignificant and superfluous fragment of oceanic crust. For a while I considered how the programme might have been constructed differently; probably it would have worked to play a more energetic and interesting pair of pieces, capable of standing on their own, instead.
*Intermission*
After the intermission, the programme moved on to Beethoven's Sonata in E major, Op. 109, one of the composer's last. (Frankly, I dislike the beginning so much that, in my peregrinations through the later sonatas, it has consistently been skipped; so it was mostly terra incognita to me.) As Hélène Grimaud played it, it was very satisfactory and recognizable as Beethoven, in his pleasant classical phase. It has much of the clarity and loveliness that is more characteristic of Mozart. The theme of the andante movement is remarkable for its rather lovely gravitas, too, and she did due justice to it. Sadly, the variations on the theme were not so great, I thought. Beethoven's variations for cello and piano are diverse and imaginative to the point of genius (the only rivals I can think of are Bach's Goldberg Variations), but his variations for piano solo are at times terribly uninspired. Maybe he tended to find it more important to finish a work, imperfect or not, than to perfect it and beautify it during the writing of it.
The concert ended with Bach's Prelude and Fugue in E major (9th set, 2nd volume) and a Prelude in E major (BWV 1006) that was reworked by Sergei Rachmaninoff. For some reason I can't remember this last prelude, but the prelude and fugue I like, and the pianist played them well. They evoke the ringing of church bells, engaging in a quid pro quo and a mutual echoing: the prelude is higher-pitched and livelier, bringing to mind little bells like those in a carillon, whereas the fugue is lower-pitched and more ponderous, bringing to mind the truly weighty bells.
After these pieces, the vigorous clapping went on for minutes and minutes. There were ca. seven call-backs, an adorable incident where a young lad came to the stage with a bouquet and handed it up to Hélène Grimaud, who then shook his hand, and two encores. The first encore was, I thought, something by Scriabin or Ravel; the second encore sounded very much like a Rachmaninoff prelude reft of the melody and the sense (fault of composer, not of performer).
In fine, to use an old expression, there are four questions that help me determine what I think of a performance in its entirety. Firstly, would I want to hear the performance again? Secondly, do I remember the music (not the opus number but the music itself) that was played? Thirdly, do I love the music that was played? Lastly, do I want to go home and play the music myself? – In the course of the past two days I've thought about them, and the answer to all of them is an enthusiastic yes. (There were, of course, exceptions that I mentioned above, but there always are.) This is, after all, the first time when I've gone out of a concert cheerfully, though perhaps annoyingly, humming part of the programme.
***
In other news, yesterday the family celebrated St. Martin's with an aunt, uncle, cousin, and two friends. Mama put up lanterns, cooked gulash, and deep-fried the incredibly rich Pöfferkes; besides, there were mandarin oranges, nuts, gingerbread, Printen (a dentist's nightmare, being an exceedingly tough variant of gingerbread, mined with large sugar crystals), Spekulatius, and Pfeffernüsse. Though I was tired by 11:30 and went to bed early (my sleeping hours are now orthodox but peculiarly short; even though I could sleep in, I somehow don't), it was most enjoyable. The conversation was extremely entertaining, as usual. After dissections of American politics and politicians, the talk turned to children's literature (old friends like The Little Princess, The Hobbit, and the Narnia series), abbreviated parodies of German poems, Sviatoslav Richter, films like Quantum of Solace, etc. Which reminds me that I would like to take the opportunity to say that I find The Hobbit much better than Lord of the Rings, because it is more healthy and less kitschy, and that I like the Ring films, though I infinitely prefer them when I can skip the tedious scenes (the Aragorn and Arwen nonsense, for instance). As far as German children's literature goes, what was discussed especially is a new film based on Otfried Preußler's book Krabat; I read it some seven years ago and found it too dark and oppressive, as opposed to the author's delightful lighthearted fare like Die Kleine Hexe, Hörbe, Wanja, etc., which I've enjoyed long after I was too old for them. Anyway, I might have said a lot yesterday evening where I didn't contribute a peep of conversation, but the preference for listening over talking is still firmly engrained in me, especially as I have little practice in formulating ideas on the spur of the moment (which is admittedly something I should work on), and moreover always was and always will be a trifle slow on the uptake.
***
The pianist was Hélène Grimaud and the programme was Bach and Beethoven. She began by playing the Prelude and Fugue in c minor, the 2nd set in the 1st volume of the Well-Tempered Clavier. The prelude is a rhythmic flurry of notes, which she executed with a romantic flow, in a way that may not be quintessentially Bach-ian but that fit in well to the overarching concept of her concert; the fugue is a lightly troubled series of questions and answers, which she executed with a likewise luminous tone.
She moved on to the Prelude and Fugue in c# minor (4th set, 1st volume), which are very slow and sombre, and, in my experience, somehow awkward to play because the many sharps have a thickening effect on the tone. (I sometimes think, though it may be complete nonsense, that Bach and Händel "engineered" this thickening on purpose in their music, so that the thin sounds of the harpsichord would be richer.) There she brought out the sacral element well – the prelude brings to mind the strains of an organ in an empty church, and if the Philharmonic were a cathedral and the concert were being filmed, a camera would have been panning the soaring stained glass windows – and the tone was beautifully fit to bring out the melody to its full advantage. But the fugues are at times an unforgiving tangle of thoughts, and this one, through no fault of the performer, felt interminable.
The third Prelude and Fugue, in d minor (6th set, 2nd volume), are less my cup of tea than the others. They are a desultory wandering that, to be a bit mean, is fine background music, for instance at that point in a concert where everyone is inclined to snooze and even the performer has been hypnotized out of his self-consciousness, but not in itself so meaningful. As often happens in Bach pieces, the first bars pose a problem whose solution neither promises to be particularly interesting nor, most likely, even exists. In concrete terms, I suppose what I mean is that you always expect the minor key to be resolved into a major key, or the theme to progress into another theme (not a weird intellectual one, but one that is hummable), but nothing of the sort happens, which feels unsatisfactory. It is like the rambling Gregorian chants; they are quite beautiful as a process, but a dreadful bore if you have to sit down for an hour or so and listen to them as a performance. What is rather interesting is how Bach's preludes often have the effect of starting in medias res, which is to say, in the midst of the action.
Then Hélène Grimaud launched on Ferruccio Busoni's rewriting of Bach's chaconne (familiar as part of the violin repertoire), BWV 1004. Here her skills were most apparent. While her earlier rendering of Bach was too fluent and frictionless, and she was playing it with so resplendent a polish that it sounded as if she was playing it in an empty room for a recording (Papa told me later that her concert programme was, in fact, taken from her new CD), the conviction that Bach was not so much for her was dispelled as she gradually got into the mood. But what made her rendering of this work especially good was that, like a fine ballet dancer, she contrived to make the effort seem effortless. She did not assume virtuoso airs because of the piece's difficulty, and instead she played the octave scales, chromatic scales, etc., with an elegant sensitivity that made music out of something that otherwise bears a tiresomely close resemblance to finger exercises.
When this piece was over – with brio of course – there was a brief pause for applause, and then she started again with a Prelude and Fugue in a minor (20th set, 2nd volume), which were the epitome of desultory wandering, and very much an anticlimax. I thought that they, and the following work (i.e. Liszt's reworking of another a minor Prelude and Fugue, BWV 543), could profitably have been left out of the programme. To employ a geographical metaphor, in between the massive continental plates of the first and second halves of the programme, they were like an insignificant and superfluous fragment of oceanic crust. For a while I considered how the programme might have been constructed differently; probably it would have worked to play a more energetic and interesting pair of pieces, capable of standing on their own, instead.
*Intermission*
After the intermission, the programme moved on to Beethoven's Sonata in E major, Op. 109, one of the composer's last. (Frankly, I dislike the beginning so much that, in my peregrinations through the later sonatas, it has consistently been skipped; so it was mostly terra incognita to me.) As Hélène Grimaud played it, it was very satisfactory and recognizable as Beethoven, in his pleasant classical phase. It has much of the clarity and loveliness that is more characteristic of Mozart. The theme of the andante movement is remarkable for its rather lovely gravitas, too, and she did due justice to it. Sadly, the variations on the theme were not so great, I thought. Beethoven's variations for cello and piano are diverse and imaginative to the point of genius (the only rivals I can think of are Bach's Goldberg Variations), but his variations for piano solo are at times terribly uninspired. Maybe he tended to find it more important to finish a work, imperfect or not, than to perfect it and beautify it during the writing of it.
The concert ended with Bach's Prelude and Fugue in E major (9th set, 2nd volume) and a Prelude in E major (BWV 1006) that was reworked by Sergei Rachmaninoff. For some reason I can't remember this last prelude, but the prelude and fugue I like, and the pianist played them well. They evoke the ringing of church bells, engaging in a quid pro quo and a mutual echoing: the prelude is higher-pitched and livelier, bringing to mind little bells like those in a carillon, whereas the fugue is lower-pitched and more ponderous, bringing to mind the truly weighty bells.
After these pieces, the vigorous clapping went on for minutes and minutes. There were ca. seven call-backs, an adorable incident where a young lad came to the stage with a bouquet and handed it up to Hélène Grimaud, who then shook his hand, and two encores. The first encore was, I thought, something by Scriabin or Ravel; the second encore sounded very much like a Rachmaninoff prelude reft of the melody and the sense (fault of composer, not of performer).
In fine, to use an old expression, there are four questions that help me determine what I think of a performance in its entirety. Firstly, would I want to hear the performance again? Secondly, do I remember the music (not the opus number but the music itself) that was played? Thirdly, do I love the music that was played? Lastly, do I want to go home and play the music myself? – In the course of the past two days I've thought about them, and the answer to all of them is an enthusiastic yes. (There were, of course, exceptions that I mentioned above, but there always are.) This is, after all, the first time when I've gone out of a concert cheerfully, though perhaps annoyingly, humming part of the programme.
***
In other news, yesterday the family celebrated St. Martin's with an aunt, uncle, cousin, and two friends. Mama put up lanterns, cooked gulash, and deep-fried the incredibly rich Pöfferkes; besides, there were mandarin oranges, nuts, gingerbread, Printen (a dentist's nightmare, being an exceedingly tough variant of gingerbread, mined with large sugar crystals), Spekulatius, and Pfeffernüsse. Though I was tired by 11:30 and went to bed early (my sleeping hours are now orthodox but peculiarly short; even though I could sleep in, I somehow don't), it was most enjoyable. The conversation was extremely entertaining, as usual. After dissections of American politics and politicians, the talk turned to children's literature (old friends like The Little Princess, The Hobbit, and the Narnia series), abbreviated parodies of German poems, Sviatoslav Richter, films like Quantum of Solace, etc. Which reminds me that I would like to take the opportunity to say that I find The Hobbit much better than Lord of the Rings, because it is more healthy and less kitschy, and that I like the Ring films, though I infinitely prefer them when I can skip the tedious scenes (the Aragorn and Arwen nonsense, for instance). As far as German children's literature goes, what was discussed especially is a new film based on Otfried Preußler's book Krabat; I read it some seven years ago and found it too dark and oppressive, as opposed to the author's delightful lighthearted fare like Die Kleine Hexe, Hörbe, Wanja, etc., which I've enjoyed long after I was too old for them. Anyway, I might have said a lot yesterday evening where I didn't contribute a peep of conversation, but the preference for listening over talking is still firmly engrained in me, especially as I have little practice in formulating ideas on the spur of the moment (which is admittedly something I should work on), and moreover always was and always will be a trifle slow on the uptake.
Wednesday, November 05, 2008
The Day After
Last night I woke up at around midnight (my schedule is still screwy) and began to follow the election results as well as I could. The AP has a map that helpfully refreshed itself, and was the best thing of its kind that I came across in my press roamings. Then I stayed with the live webstream of CBS's coverage, with Katie Couric and Jeff Greenfield and Bob Schieffer (whom I officially like considerably now). The anchors were in an enjoyably good mood. Whenever there was not much happening I read a book.
At first the AP map was disturbing, as there were unexpectedly high results for McCain in several states, but these clearly represented very right-leaning districts. I was thoroughly worried until, in the course of the early morning, I heard that Obama had won Ohio. Then the results trickled in, and in, and then Virginia was called in his favour. I went back to my CBS video (this was at ca. 5 a.m.), hoping that they would mention it, and then Katie Couric unexpectedly said that Barack Obama had won the election, and that the local stations would return to their regular programming. Still skeptical, I went for confirmation to other sources, and CNN and ABC and the AP map had called the election, too. Shortly thereafter John McCain gave his speech in Phoenix, which speech was indeed very conciliatory, I thought, and procured him a graceful exit. I think he was relieved not to be elected president.
Going to the CBS coverage again, an African-American guest showed a photo that he keeps on his desk, of black garbage workers striking for their dignity, and then mentioned that he wanted to telephone his mother, his standard American slipping more and more into a Southern dialect in the emotion of the moment. It was very moving, and I began to cry, a trifle hysterically, trying to be as quiet as possible because everyone else was sleeping. T. woke up, and asked what was up and whether I was happy or sad, and then I calmed down. Then I saw the footage of the Rev. Jesse Jackson standing in a crowd with tears streaming down his face.
Altogether what I love about this election night (and post-election day) is the cheerfulness of the news anchors (the BBC World News anchor was thoroughly chipper this afternoon, and I thought that the economist and Nobel laureate who spoke at one point about the future of the American economy was choking up a little with joy), the gracious comments by McCain voters that I've seen on the internet, and the elation that comes with the feeling that most people are decent. What is still more incredible is that George W. Bush actually seemed at ease and even cheerful when he congratulated Obama. Also, in the eight years that I have "known" Condoleezza Rice, she has never seemed sympathetic until the moment today where, soft-eyed and trembling on the verge of alternate tears and smiles, she made her own personal statement on the election results at a State Department press conference.
What I missed was the jubilation here in Berlin. I personally felt that honking cars, cheers, balloons, and who knows what else would have been in order. Instead it was an extraordinarily quiet day, grey and twilightish. Even when I went for a walk to Potsdamer Platz and the Brandenburg Gate, the only symptoms of the election were the unenthusiastic conversations of two or three passersby, and a small Obama campaign sign, in the window of an Ebony hair salon, that said "Change we can believe in." Also, I felt the most benignant I am ever likely to feel again at the sight of the massive and soulless architectural bore that is our American Embassy.
On the whole I have been much more thoughtful and even sad today, than jubilant. A portion of it is that California has voted to ban gay marriage, and Arizona and Florida have voted to define marriage as a union between a man and a woman, which is hard for me to understand. (At least it's a good day for marijuana, medical in Michigan, and in general in Massachusetts.) A portion of it may also be a "spiritual hangover" from the past eight years of Bush and the past two years of unbearably protracted campaigning. But, above all, there are so many problems that Obama will have to confront. Dmitri Medvedev's speech (which I thought rather abhorrent) was not a good start. I have been, and perhaps most of us have been, conditioned into being very uncertain that events that promise to be good will fulfill that promise. So I fervently hope that those who transcended their traditional party affiliation and prejudices to vote for Obama will not be disappointed, and, even more fervently, I hope that his capable mind and his upright character will translate into a presidency that will truly benefit the people of America, Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.
But I believe that we must do what we can (in my case, as a foreigner, not much) and have faith. As long as we try to do the right thing, hour by hour and day by day, in small matters as well as in great ones, it will turn out all right.
And, to end on that hopeful note, here are passages from a speech given in Washington, D.C., forty-five years ago, by a southern preacher:
At first the AP map was disturbing, as there were unexpectedly high results for McCain in several states, but these clearly represented very right-leaning districts. I was thoroughly worried until, in the course of the early morning, I heard that Obama had won Ohio. Then the results trickled in, and in, and then Virginia was called in his favour. I went back to my CBS video (this was at ca. 5 a.m.), hoping that they would mention it, and then Katie Couric unexpectedly said that Barack Obama had won the election, and that the local stations would return to their regular programming. Still skeptical, I went for confirmation to other sources, and CNN and ABC and the AP map had called the election, too. Shortly thereafter John McCain gave his speech in Phoenix, which speech was indeed very conciliatory, I thought, and procured him a graceful exit. I think he was relieved not to be elected president.
Going to the CBS coverage again, an African-American guest showed a photo that he keeps on his desk, of black garbage workers striking for their dignity, and then mentioned that he wanted to telephone his mother, his standard American slipping more and more into a Southern dialect in the emotion of the moment. It was very moving, and I began to cry, a trifle hysterically, trying to be as quiet as possible because everyone else was sleeping. T. woke up, and asked what was up and whether I was happy or sad, and then I calmed down. Then I saw the footage of the Rev. Jesse Jackson standing in a crowd with tears streaming down his face.
Altogether what I love about this election night (and post-election day) is the cheerfulness of the news anchors (the BBC World News anchor was thoroughly chipper this afternoon, and I thought that the economist and Nobel laureate who spoke at one point about the future of the American economy was choking up a little with joy), the gracious comments by McCain voters that I've seen on the internet, and the elation that comes with the feeling that most people are decent. What is still more incredible is that George W. Bush actually seemed at ease and even cheerful when he congratulated Obama. Also, in the eight years that I have "known" Condoleezza Rice, she has never seemed sympathetic until the moment today where, soft-eyed and trembling on the verge of alternate tears and smiles, she made her own personal statement on the election results at a State Department press conference.
What I missed was the jubilation here in Berlin. I personally felt that honking cars, cheers, balloons, and who knows what else would have been in order. Instead it was an extraordinarily quiet day, grey and twilightish. Even when I went for a walk to Potsdamer Platz and the Brandenburg Gate, the only symptoms of the election were the unenthusiastic conversations of two or three passersby, and a small Obama campaign sign, in the window of an Ebony hair salon, that said "Change we can believe in." Also, I felt the most benignant I am ever likely to feel again at the sight of the massive and soulless architectural bore that is our American Embassy.
On the whole I have been much more thoughtful and even sad today, than jubilant. A portion of it is that California has voted to ban gay marriage, and Arizona and Florida have voted to define marriage as a union between a man and a woman, which is hard for me to understand. (At least it's a good day for marijuana, medical in Michigan, and in general in Massachusetts.) A portion of it may also be a "spiritual hangover" from the past eight years of Bush and the past two years of unbearably protracted campaigning. But, above all, there are so many problems that Obama will have to confront. Dmitri Medvedev's speech (which I thought rather abhorrent) was not a good start. I have been, and perhaps most of us have been, conditioned into being very uncertain that events that promise to be good will fulfill that promise. So I fervently hope that those who transcended their traditional party affiliation and prejudices to vote for Obama will not be disappointed, and, even more fervently, I hope that his capable mind and his upright character will translate into a presidency that will truly benefit the people of America, Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.
But I believe that we must do what we can (in my case, as a foreigner, not much) and have faith. As long as we try to do the right thing, hour by hour and day by day, in small matters as well as in great ones, it will turn out all right.
And, to end on that hopeful note, here are passages from a speech given in Washington, D.C., forty-five years ago, by a southern preacher:
[. . .] even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."
I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.
I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
I have a dream today!
[. . .]
This is our hope, and this is the faith that I go back to the South with.
With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith, we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.
[. . .]
And when this happens, when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual:
Free at last! Free at last!
Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!
Tuesday, November 04, 2008
November the Fourth
P.S.: Photoshopped scan of real four-leafed clover, picked in 2006. It brought me luck, so I thought I'd "share the wealth."
Friday, October 31, 2008
Coals and Cauldrons
It has been a quiet but agreeable Halloween. Papa is still in Glasgow and Gi. is still at Uncle Pu's and K.'s house, and T. was not particularly lively because she had spent the night (very much to my admiration, by the way) finishing her homework for university, hence the quietness. At around noon the coal for our stoves arrived and Mama eventually lit a fire in the corner room. I am huddling in one of our impressively good sleeping bags anyway, but for the first time in many months I have been able to assume my favourite perch on top of the oven, without it being cold as a tomb.
We watched television together — news of the American elections and of the Congo, glimpses of an apparently terrible docudrama on Martin Luther (the wedding scene with Katherine Bora, or I presume it was that, looked like a made-for-TV romance, except that the groom wore a monastic garb and coiffure) that aired in honour of Reformation Day, and the Halloween special of The Simpsons (which we have not watched in ages). Normally I am ambiguous about Halloween, because I don't like the garishness and mindless-consumption aspects of it, and I don't like horror films or stories. But I do like candy and pumpkins, and at times I like costumes — which, I suppose, makes me sound like a four-year-old, but what do I care. (c: As far as the Simpsons Halloween specials go, my favourites are the tale of the time-travel toaster oven and the riff on Edgar Allan Poe's "Raven." Once I did undergo a sinister Raven- (or Birds-)like scenario; it was on a chilly dawn after I had stayed up all night, and I was passing innocently along the kitchen counter when I heard a thumping, so I looked up, and there was a crow standing on the skylight and pecking at the glass, its beady expressionless eyes fixed in my direction. I was quite glad to get out of its line of sight.
Anyway, so J. went shopping for candy, and then we whiled away the hours at our computers as evening fell. In the course of said evening, two trick-or-treating groups came to the door, and Mama offered them chocolate bars. All of the sugar candy had been dumped into bowls, one for us and one for Papa and Gi., and we nibbled away at it in the meantime. Fortunately there was plenty of chocolate left for us, too. It is a pity that we hadn't any pumpkins, because in Victoria it was fun to carve them and to roast the seeds that were in the interior, and oddly I liked the musky scent that rises from the pumpkin flesh as the tealight heats and bakes the inside of the lid. (Then, less enjoyably, there was the fruit's inevitable disintegration into pale pulp, much accelerated by the onset of frost. But at least it was a fresh supply of nitrogen for the soil!) A last reason why I like Halloween is, by the way, that it is one of the dates that I psychologically clung to during my school years as the forerunners of Advent and Christmas.
After we had eaten our fill, Ge. and J. dressed up as a 19th-century gentleman and as a woodcutter, respectively. The first costume consisted of dark jeans (I think), a shirt, and a woolly grey vest; the second consisted of jeans, an orange flannel-like plaid shirt, a cap, and an ax. As for their faces, they had held a saucer over a candle so that it was coated in soot, then they dabbed the soot onto their visages to create heavy black eyebrows, a mustache, and, in Ge.'s case, impressive mutton chops. I was considering dressing up as someone from the 60s, but I haven't the least notion how to do a beehive hairdo, etc., so this year I was "person who couldn't be bothered to change out of her pyjamas." Which was a trifle awkward, because I dislike being seen in my pyjamas (it makes me feel guilty about not being ladylike and proper), and so when the people to deliver the coal came, I ducked into our tiny pantry and contemplated the courtyard for something like a quarter of an hour.
We watched television together — news of the American elections and of the Congo, glimpses of an apparently terrible docudrama on Martin Luther (the wedding scene with Katherine Bora, or I presume it was that, looked like a made-for-TV romance, except that the groom wore a monastic garb and coiffure) that aired in honour of Reformation Day, and the Halloween special of The Simpsons (which we have not watched in ages). Normally I am ambiguous about Halloween, because I don't like the garishness and mindless-consumption aspects of it, and I don't like horror films or stories. But I do like candy and pumpkins, and at times I like costumes — which, I suppose, makes me sound like a four-year-old, but what do I care. (c: As far as the Simpsons Halloween specials go, my favourites are the tale of the time-travel toaster oven and the riff on Edgar Allan Poe's "Raven." Once I did undergo a sinister Raven- (or Birds-)like scenario; it was on a chilly dawn after I had stayed up all night, and I was passing innocently along the kitchen counter when I heard a thumping, so I looked up, and there was a crow standing on the skylight and pecking at the glass, its beady expressionless eyes fixed in my direction. I was quite glad to get out of its line of sight.
Anyway, so J. went shopping for candy, and then we whiled away the hours at our computers as evening fell. In the course of said evening, two trick-or-treating groups came to the door, and Mama offered them chocolate bars. All of the sugar candy had been dumped into bowls, one for us and one for Papa and Gi., and we nibbled away at it in the meantime. Fortunately there was plenty of chocolate left for us, too. It is a pity that we hadn't any pumpkins, because in Victoria it was fun to carve them and to roast the seeds that were in the interior, and oddly I liked the musky scent that rises from the pumpkin flesh as the tealight heats and bakes the inside of the lid. (Then, less enjoyably, there was the fruit's inevitable disintegration into pale pulp, much accelerated by the onset of frost. But at least it was a fresh supply of nitrogen for the soil!) A last reason why I like Halloween is, by the way, that it is one of the dates that I psychologically clung to during my school years as the forerunners of Advent and Christmas.
After we had eaten our fill, Ge. and J. dressed up as a 19th-century gentleman and as a woodcutter, respectively. The first costume consisted of dark jeans (I think), a shirt, and a woolly grey vest; the second consisted of jeans, an orange flannel-like plaid shirt, a cap, and an ax. As for their faces, they had held a saucer over a candle so that it was coated in soot, then they dabbed the soot onto their visages to create heavy black eyebrows, a mustache, and, in Ge.'s case, impressive mutton chops. I was considering dressing up as someone from the 60s, but I haven't the least notion how to do a beehive hairdo, etc., so this year I was "person who couldn't be bothered to change out of her pyjamas." Which was a trifle awkward, because I dislike being seen in my pyjamas (it makes me feel guilty about not being ladylike and proper), and so when the people to deliver the coal came, I ducked into our tiny pantry and contemplated the courtyard for something like a quarter of an hour.
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
A Musical Interlude
Lately I've started investigating a spate of new pieces on the piano. One of them is the piano part of Felix Mendelssohn's Trio in d minor, which I listen to frequently, and which is among my favourite music. (Altogether I like Mendelssohn's compositions very much, as may already be evident from all the songs without words I've recorded. I think they are imaginative, sensitive, sincere, simple but not stupid, and quite healthy.) So far I've been playing the second movement, which is sentimental in a very satisfactory, wiping-tear-from-corner-
of-eye-and-sighing way, as long as one doesn't cross the fine line to kitsch. Here it is, as performed by the trio of Gregor Piatigorsky, Jascha Heifetz, and Artur Rubinstein, in a 1953(?) film:
of-eye-and-sighing way, as long as one doesn't cross the fine line to kitsch. Here it is, as performed by the trio of Gregor Piatigorsky, Jascha Heifetz, and Artur Rubinstein, in a 1953(?) film:
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
A Transatlantic Coup de Main
When Boris Johnson was elected Mayor of London, I was of course disappointed that Ken Livingstone had not won, but his successor did not make so bad of an impression. I thought that his "buffoonery" was more of a façade than an indication of fundamental incompetence. This impression was justified when, through Hendrik Hertzberg's blog, I came across his endorsement of Barack Obama in the Daily Telegraph. (Even if, on a purely pedantic writerly level, I think that his use of the term "double whammy" is too undignified.) Of course I don't think it's ethical for a politician to declare support for an electoral candidate in a foreign country (except if, let's say, the candidate's opponent is a dictator); still, it appears to be a common practice. In any case, what I liked was not even so much the fact that Johnson is for Obama, but how he explains his reasons for the endorsement. It does not come across as an opportunistic leap to the winning team, but as the cumulation of long-term thought. I also like the surprisingly nuanced tone. In any case, my favourite sentence is possibly this one:
If Obama wins, then the United States will have at last come a huge and maybe decisive step closer to achieving the dream of Martin Luther King, of a land where people are judged not on the colour of their skin but by the content of their character.
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
A Debate on Long Island
Once again I stayed up all night to watch an American presidential debate, this time the third and last. The intended topic was domestic policy, but the answers did roam a little, as John McCain unwisely stuck to his shtick of attacking Barack Obama's record with the kind of "gotcha" mentality that he has criticized in the press, making much of minor mistakes rather than of major failings. On the whole he was a vigorous opponent, and he and Obama appeared to be even, as the latter was unable, due to time constraints, to offer rebuttals to the spates of accusations.
What disturbed me in the first presidential debate and in the only vice-presidential debate was that I had the feeling that the Democratic candidate did not emerge as clearly the victor as I would have liked. The reason, as I just realized, is that, if the confrontations had been fistfights, McCain and Palin would have won, or at least been equally matched, because they were more emotionally invested and therefore more aggressive. But the confrontations were debates, and in both cases, upon reading the transcript later, the flaws of the Republican candidates were clear. Joe Biden, in terms of experience and seriousness and intellect, was in every true sense the victor in his debate, as Obama is in his debates by the force of superior reason and civility. What is particularly impressive about Obama is that, as his demeanour indicates, he can take verbal blows without interpreting them as personal affronts or even letting them permeate his defenses (though this time he did not seem as unmoved).
Anyway, a central topic was health care. Obama intends to offer all American citizens who are not satisfied with their present health insurance, or who have no health insurance, the same insurance that federal employees are currently receiving. He also wants to prevent companies from denying people health insurance on the grounds of pre-existing medical conditions (in other words, the people who are actually sick and who really need the insurance presently have a high chance of not obtaining it). The disadvantage of this plan is that it is, firstly, difficult to finance, and, secondly, difficult to pass through Congress unless it is dominated by the Democrats, though Obama's refusal to mandate health insurance is likely to make it more acceptable for the Republicans. McCain wants to give a $2500 tax credit per person or $5000 tax credit per family to buy health insurance, and suggests that people shop across state lines to find the best plans. The problem with that is that this money is not nearly enough for many individuals and families, and also that this leaves the problem of no health insurance for people with pre-existing medical conditions unsolved.
Then there was the issue of the budget and taxes. McCain reiterated that Obama would raise taxes, and Obama reiterated that those who earn $250,000 or less per annum would actually not have to pay any more taxes than they do now, or even pay less taxes. (At therally event where he first encountered Joe the Plumber, a citizen who asked him a question about taxes for businesses and who was adopted as a symbol of the ordinary American by McCain for the purposes of this debate*, he has said that for those earning more, the taxes would rise from 36% to 39%, and that this was the level of taxation during the Clinton administration.) McCain then suggested that taxes not be raised if no one wants to pay them. (What about the eleven trillion dollar debt, or the fact that, in life, everyone must do a few things that he doesn't want to do?) Then he assured the American citizenry that he was certain that he could balance the budget, and mentioned that the last person to raise taxes during a recession was Herbert Hoover (a Republican, as the Daily Show pointed out), and look where that got us! He also hacked around on the one billion dollars of earmarks that Obama supported, and on the three million dollar overhead projector in a planetarium in Chicago(?), which McCain has mentioned before. This is the sort of petty artillery that is no more significant than the arrows of the Lilliputians against the bulk of Gulliver, especially if one considers the heavy artillery that might be levelled against the Republican administration on account of the Iraq War expenses, the Treasury's decision to let the Lehman Brothers go under, etc.
Where Obama really shone, however, was when he defended himself against the insinuations that he was a terrorist sympathizer for associating with William Ayers, and that ACORN, the voter registration organization where workers filled in forms in the name of Mickey Mouse and other fictitious individuals (in the vein of the Simpsons episode where the people and pet cemeteries of Springfield apparently temporarily relinquish their dead to vote for the Republican candidate), is part of a big Democratic conspiracy to commit electoral fraud. In any case, there are so many things wrong with the ACORN scandal, not least of which is the tendency of less reasonable Republicans (including McCain, in this debate) to warn with horror about the possible subversion of democracy and terrible injustice in this election, blithely ignoring the GOP's filthy machinations in 2000. He was also straightforward and firm on Roe vs. Wade, and he countered McCain's attacks on his abortion voting record (while he was a senator in Illinois) with admirable precision.
As for McCain, he made odd slip-ups. He said that Sarah Palin "understands" special needs, specifically autism. But Palin's baby does not have autism; he has Down's Syndrome. He also said that Obama voted against the appointment of Supreme Court justice Stephen Breyer, whereas Breyer has been on the Court since 1994, a good decade before Obama was in the Senate. Then he said that Obama opposes offshore drilling, when in fact Obama already said in the last debate that he was not. (Then he said that Obama's phrasing that he will "have a look" at offshore drilling was telling, apparently oblivious to the possibility that one might research an issue before taking an absolute stand on it. Not to mention that the oil extracted through offshore drilling will only cover a fraction of the US's consumption, and that until the oil actually begins to flow, a decade, I think I've read, will have passed.)
One hint that McCain may not be as distant from Bush as he argues is that he fervently argued for cutting taxes to improve the economy. Bush has tried it – it has, in fact, been a cornerstone of his economic policy – and it hasn't worked, as the rising unemployment, budget deficits, etc., prove. It is also becoming evident that the "trickle-down effect" is not only theoretical, but also imaginary. (This effect is the tendency of money, when given to big companies, to trickle down through the economic hierarchy, gradually enriching the middle and working classes; for, so the argument goes if one couches it in Shakespearean terms, the quality of money is not strain'd, but it droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath.)
But McCain's least finest hour came when Bob Schieffer – who was an excellent moderator of the type who asks probing questions and demands proper answers and keeps the debaters within the time limits (unlike Tom Brokaw, who only forcibly grumbled about it) – asked both candidates about the negative campaigning and the ugly tone of the election campaign lately. First McCain blamed the uncivil tone on the lack of town hall meetings, which he had wanted and Obama had turned down. Then he spoke as if he was the principal victim of negativity, because John Lewis (member of Congress for Georgia and a leader of the civil rights movement) recently responded to the McCain and Palin rallies where people shouted out "Kill him!" and "Terrorist!" about Obama, by saying that politicians who tacitly permit or even encourage a climate of violent antagonism can end up being responsible for a great deal of damage, as Alabama's governor George Wallace was during the 60s.** McCain interpreted this to mean that he and Palin are segregationists. But I think that there is an enormous difference between such unflattering parallels that, if unjustified, can be ignored easily, and an incitement to violence (and, if inspired by Obama's national origins and perceived Muslim background, hate speech) that is especially disturbing because of the recent history of the United States. So I was seriously displeased by McCain's very selective moral outrage, which hints that his sense of right and wrong is much skewed by a post-Vietnam tendency to rate his own moral comfort, however propped up by half-truths and self-deception, as the highest good. Of course that would be no concern of mine, if he were not running for president.
What I also dislike is the tendency of politicians, even Obama at times, to say what citizens want to hear even if it's not truthful. McCain said, for example,
* I am inclined to agree with the conspiracy theory that Joe attended the rally at the behest of McCain's campaign, as a gimmick,because it is weird for one political candidate to address the questions raised by those who attended the rallies of his opponent. (Actually, he was outside playing football with his son, in a quintessential American touch, when Obama came down the street while visiting his Ohio hometown, and he decided to ask a question. Still possible that it was pre-orchestrated, but I guess that there are graver matters to worry about, and this is not an allegation that should be made seriously without proper proof.)
** Admittedly the comparison to George Wallace is a forceful one, and one which Obama's campaign did quickly criticize, because Wallace was a very outspoken proponent of segregation.
P.S.: Sarah Palin is not a "role model to women," or at least not to me.
What disturbed me in the first presidential debate and in the only vice-presidential debate was that I had the feeling that the Democratic candidate did not emerge as clearly the victor as I would have liked. The reason, as I just realized, is that, if the confrontations had been fistfights, McCain and Palin would have won, or at least been equally matched, because they were more emotionally invested and therefore more aggressive. But the confrontations were debates, and in both cases, upon reading the transcript later, the flaws of the Republican candidates were clear. Joe Biden, in terms of experience and seriousness and intellect, was in every true sense the victor in his debate, as Obama is in his debates by the force of superior reason and civility. What is particularly impressive about Obama is that, as his demeanour indicates, he can take verbal blows without interpreting them as personal affronts or even letting them permeate his defenses (though this time he did not seem as unmoved).
Anyway, a central topic was health care. Obama intends to offer all American citizens who are not satisfied with their present health insurance, or who have no health insurance, the same insurance that federal employees are currently receiving. He also wants to prevent companies from denying people health insurance on the grounds of pre-existing medical conditions (in other words, the people who are actually sick and who really need the insurance presently have a high chance of not obtaining it). The disadvantage of this plan is that it is, firstly, difficult to finance, and, secondly, difficult to pass through Congress unless it is dominated by the Democrats, though Obama's refusal to mandate health insurance is likely to make it more acceptable for the Republicans. McCain wants to give a $2500 tax credit per person or $5000 tax credit per family to buy health insurance, and suggests that people shop across state lines to find the best plans. The problem with that is that this money is not nearly enough for many individuals and families, and also that this leaves the problem of no health insurance for people with pre-existing medical conditions unsolved.
Then there was the issue of the budget and taxes. McCain reiterated that Obama would raise taxes, and Obama reiterated that those who earn $250,000 or less per annum would actually not have to pay any more taxes than they do now, or even pay less taxes. (At the
Where Obama really shone, however, was when he defended himself against the insinuations that he was a terrorist sympathizer for associating with William Ayers, and that ACORN, the voter registration organization where workers filled in forms in the name of Mickey Mouse and other fictitious individuals (in the vein of the Simpsons episode where the people and pet cemeteries of Springfield apparently temporarily relinquish their dead to vote for the Republican candidate), is part of a big Democratic conspiracy to commit electoral fraud. In any case, there are so many things wrong with the ACORN scandal, not least of which is the tendency of less reasonable Republicans (including McCain, in this debate) to warn with horror about the possible subversion of democracy and terrible injustice in this election, blithely ignoring the GOP's filthy machinations in 2000. He was also straightforward and firm on Roe vs. Wade, and he countered McCain's attacks on his abortion voting record (while he was a senator in Illinois) with admirable precision.
As for McCain, he made odd slip-ups. He said that Sarah Palin "understands" special needs, specifically autism. But Palin's baby does not have autism; he has Down's Syndrome. He also said that Obama voted against the appointment of Supreme Court justice Stephen Breyer, whereas Breyer has been on the Court since 1994, a good decade before Obama was in the Senate. Then he said that Obama opposes offshore drilling, when in fact Obama already said in the last debate that he was not. (Then he said that Obama's phrasing that he will "have a look" at offshore drilling was telling, apparently oblivious to the possibility that one might research an issue before taking an absolute stand on it. Not to mention that the oil extracted through offshore drilling will only cover a fraction of the US's consumption, and that until the oil actually begins to flow, a decade, I think I've read, will have passed.)
One hint that McCain may not be as distant from Bush as he argues is that he fervently argued for cutting taxes to improve the economy. Bush has tried it – it has, in fact, been a cornerstone of his economic policy – and it hasn't worked, as the rising unemployment, budget deficits, etc., prove. It is also becoming evident that the "trickle-down effect" is not only theoretical, but also imaginary. (This effect is the tendency of money, when given to big companies, to trickle down through the economic hierarchy, gradually enriching the middle and working classes; for, so the argument goes if one couches it in Shakespearean terms, the quality of money is not strain'd, but it droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath.)
But McCain's least finest hour came when Bob Schieffer – who was an excellent moderator of the type who asks probing questions and demands proper answers and keeps the debaters within the time limits (unlike Tom Brokaw, who only forcibly grumbled about it) – asked both candidates about the negative campaigning and the ugly tone of the election campaign lately. First McCain blamed the uncivil tone on the lack of town hall meetings, which he had wanted and Obama had turned down. Then he spoke as if he was the principal victim of negativity, because John Lewis (member of Congress for Georgia and a leader of the civil rights movement) recently responded to the McCain and Palin rallies where people shouted out "Kill him!" and "Terrorist!" about Obama, by saying that politicians who tacitly permit or even encourage a climate of violent antagonism can end up being responsible for a great deal of damage, as Alabama's governor George Wallace was during the 60s.** McCain interpreted this to mean that he and Palin are segregationists. But I think that there is an enormous difference between such unflattering parallels that, if unjustified, can be ignored easily, and an incitement to violence (and, if inspired by Obama's national origins and perceived Muslim background, hate speech) that is especially disturbing because of the recent history of the United States. So I was seriously displeased by McCain's very selective moral outrage, which hints that his sense of right and wrong is much skewed by a post-Vietnam tendency to rate his own moral comfort, however propped up by half-truths and self-deception, as the highest good. Of course that would be no concern of mine, if he were not running for president.
What I also dislike is the tendency of politicians, even Obama at times, to say what citizens want to hear even if it's not truthful. McCain said, for example,
This is like me saying that Democrats are all compassionate, open-minded, intelligent people. Of course they're not! Saying otherwise is a blatant lie. And that is what I came away with from this debate: it is not only Sarah Palin (who falsely insists that she has been "exonerated" from misconduct in the firing of her former brother-in-law), but also John McCain, who tells outright lies and repeats them.I'm not going to stand for people saying that the people that come to my rallies are anything but the most dedicated, patriotic men and women that are in this nation and they're great citizens.
* I am inclined to agree with the conspiracy theory that Joe attended the rally at the behest of McCain's campaign, as a gimmick,
** Admittedly the comparison to George Wallace is a forceful one, and one which Obama's campaign did quickly criticize, because Wallace was a very outspoken proponent of segregation.
P.S.: Sarah Palin is not a "role model to women," or at least not to me.
Sunday, October 12, 2008
The Lions of London and a Ferris Wheel
Lately there has been little to write about. One exception is that Papa brought out a videocamera for me to record songs on the piano without the poor sound quality that comes with the digital camera, so he worked out how to operate it for me, and I recorded Schumann's Kinderszenen and the beginning of Album für die Jugend, Mozart's variations on the march from Les mariages samnites, and the first movement of Schubert's Sonata in B flat major. All of these recordings were all right, but not exactly stunning, as far as the way I played goes. One reason is that I haven't played the Kinderszenen in a long while. Anyway, one major benefit of this session was to revive my ambition to improve and to find new pieces. Today, for instance, I played the piano part of the third movement of Beethoven's Archduke Trio again. It is lovely to play it when the piece is still fresh, because I consciously "live through" (to exaggerate a little) the progression of the music, and it isn't so familiar and mechanical yet. Besides, I am playing without the pedal except where indicated, because I tend to overdo the pedal, and because it encourages sloppiness in the way I play individual notes.
Then I am writing more of my England-in-the-time-of-Bloody-Mary story; it really isn't that great, but it is helping me to practice writing dialogue, plot, characterization, etc. It has also revived my interest in Shakespeare, since his phrases continually come to mind and I continually wish I could work them into the story as quotations, so I quickly dipped into The Tempest and The Merry Wives of Windsor and Measure for Measure yesterday. It is fortunate that, the older I get, the more alive the plays of Shakespeare become and the better I can understand them. But he is one of the authors whose work I admire more than I like. A large part of it is probably because theatre is demonstrative and deals in more or less primal emotions, and because I am all for being undemonstrative and level-headed.
Aside from that, I watched television, starting with the (what I felt to be) very vague statements of Jean-Claude Trichet, José Manuel Barroso, Nicolas Sarkozy, and Jean-Claude Juncker, at the live press conference about a unified plan to help Europe's banks in the present economic crisis. On the documentary channel there was an exciting film about the Ice Age, which featured visually convincing but conceptually absurd CG scenes to explain the topography of that Age in reference to present-day landmarks. We (J. was in the room, too, to do his Spanish homework) were treated to the sight of a row of curly-roofed Amsterdam houses, the Finchley Road Tube station sign, and Berlin's Sony Centre, embedded in the massive snowy face of a glacier. Then the subject turned to the balmier African climate that graced England in past times, so a living lion ambled past his stone brethren and ascended the Fourth Plinth(!) in the glare of the winking sun, hippopotami basked in the basin of a fountain, and vultures encircled Nelson's Victory Column, in Trafalgar Square.
Despite the fascinating nature of this documentary, I returned to another channel to see the end of Passenger 57, an action thriller with Wesley Snipes. It was amusingly old-fashioned in some ways, and middling in most ways. Executive Decision and other films have covered the ground as well, and mostly better. But the chase scene in the fairground, though not nearly as well-thought-out as it would have been in a Jackie Chan movie, was still pretty good, what with the head of a merry-go-round horse being exploded with bullets and so on. The part that I saw was also refreshingly free of bloody splurge and luridly inventive demises.
Anyway, dawn is breaking and it's time to go to sleep.
Then I am writing more of my England-in-the-time-of-Bloody-Mary story; it really isn't that great, but it is helping me to practice writing dialogue, plot, characterization, etc. It has also revived my interest in Shakespeare, since his phrases continually come to mind and I continually wish I could work them into the story as quotations, so I quickly dipped into The Tempest and The Merry Wives of Windsor and Measure for Measure yesterday. It is fortunate that, the older I get, the more alive the plays of Shakespeare become and the better I can understand them. But he is one of the authors whose work I admire more than I like. A large part of it is probably because theatre is demonstrative and deals in more or less primal emotions, and because I am all for being undemonstrative and level-headed.
Aside from that, I watched television, starting with the (what I felt to be) very vague statements of Jean-Claude Trichet, José Manuel Barroso, Nicolas Sarkozy, and Jean-Claude Juncker, at the live press conference about a unified plan to help Europe's banks in the present economic crisis. On the documentary channel there was an exciting film about the Ice Age, which featured visually convincing but conceptually absurd CG scenes to explain the topography of that Age in reference to present-day landmarks. We (J. was in the room, too, to do his Spanish homework) were treated to the sight of a row of curly-roofed Amsterdam houses, the Finchley Road Tube station sign, and Berlin's Sony Centre, embedded in the massive snowy face of a glacier. Then the subject turned to the balmier African climate that graced England in past times, so a living lion ambled past his stone brethren and ascended the Fourth Plinth(!) in the glare of the winking sun, hippopotami basked in the basin of a fountain, and vultures encircled Nelson's Victory Column, in Trafalgar Square.
Despite the fascinating nature of this documentary, I returned to another channel to see the end of Passenger 57, an action thriller with Wesley Snipes. It was amusingly old-fashioned in some ways, and middling in most ways. Executive Decision and other films have covered the ground as well, and mostly better. But the chase scene in the fairground, though not nearly as well-thought-out as it would have been in a Jackie Chan movie, was still pretty good, what with the head of a merry-go-round horse being exploded with bullets and so on. The part that I saw was also refreshingly free of bloody splurge and luridly inventive demises.
Anyway, dawn is breaking and it's time to go to sleep.
Tuesday, October 07, 2008
A Debate in Nashville
I've just finished watching the second presidential debate, and Barack Obama won!!! Especially on the economy, he was really, really good – sincere, truthful, and reasonable. What he said was far easier to listen to than McCain, because it did bear the marks of individual thought, whereas the honourable opponent was reeling off the usual stump speech fare. The strongest moments that McCain had in the debate were when he was referring to his service in the army, and even that is no direct qualification for office and it had no bearing on the sense of his arguments. As usual, he spoke in hushed, telling-a-bedtime-story-to-children tones, and as far as logic and reality went, he was totally off. The crack at Joe Biden, when McCain referred to hair transplants (which Biden has, and for which he has been laughed at) in the context of health care, was also unworthy. Biden consistently criticizes his record and does not deliver cheap, personal jabs. Then, after the debate had ended and they were beginning to talk to the audience, Obama reached out his hand to him but McCain did not shake it, so that he quickly shook hands with Cindy McCain instead. Earlier on, McCain referred to Obama as "that one." This man is seventy-two years old, not two years old, for heaven's sake. What is wrong with him?
A Pig in a Poke
The following is admittedly only my rambling sense of the worldwide financial crisis, as picked up primarily from Gawker commenters, and put together in my own head. It may be wholly inaccurate, so I guess it is, above all, a story:
At first I did not think it was serious, and that "the only thing to fear is fear itself," i.e. that if the market would not let itself be spooked, stocks would not fall and companies would not have lower earnings and stockholders would not lose their savings. But it is evident that the market is fundamentally unsound. In general I've read that stocks are far overvalued, and that they should realistically be at around 8,000 on the Dow Jones now (though apparently the Standard&Poor is a far better index). In particular, housing prices were overinflated, and so that industry has been quietly losing steam for at least a year now. But real estate is what much of the American economy is invested in, and when this real estate cannot be sold, the companies are unable to transfer the property back into the liquid money that they presently need. At the same time, investors have frequently employed the practice of short-selling, in which an investor sells stocks, expecting that they will depreciate in value (he may even help along this process by propagating unfavourable rumours about the company to whom the stock belongs), after which point he buys them back at a far cheaper price. But, due to greed, this has been done too much, so the Lehmann Brothers actually collapsed because of it.
As one investment bank after the other collapsed in its wake, the confidence of banks in each other has been ruined, so they are unlikely to lend money to each other. In countries like Ireland, Austria, and Germany, the government has promised the security of all bank assets, and is hoping that this will encourage lending again. At the same time, the plunging stock markets are decreasing confidence in the American economy in general, and almost every major company (with the striking exceptions of Campbell's Soups and Tivo) is seeing a drop in its share price. So that is the problem on Wall Street, and of course in stock markets around the world. Iceland was in serious danger of national bankruptcy. Even China, I read in a New York Times article today, will suffer if it can no longer unload its exports on other countries.
The problem on "Main Street" is that firms, from the investment banking firms and Hewlett-Packard to, oddly, Gawker Media, are cutting jobs. On Gawker, it seems that people are only half-joking when they depict their future selves holed up in cardboard boxes, eating crackers and cheese and shooting the occasional squirrel, in the alleys outside their present apartments. Also, the 401(k) retirement plans, where employees invest money in stocks chosen by themselves to finance their pension, are rapidly losing value (in double-digit percentages, even). Of course any stock owner is not going to be happy now. And I'm sure that's just the beginning.
I think that, had the first bailout bill been passed, it would have swung the stocks back on track, because it would have convinced people that the government was certain that it could remedy the crisis, and confidence would have been restored. But, as it was, the government betrayed incompetence and hesitancy, which undermined the stock market to the point that the two or three days that elapsed before the second bailout bill was passed were fatal. The extra $100 billion+ in earmarks (most infamously, a tax break for children's play-arrow shafts, introduced at the behest of the two senators from Oregon) that were added to the bill certainly did nothing for the repute of Washington. Oddly enough, by the way, the press is still referring to this legislation as the "$700 billion dollar bill," when it is really at least the "$800 billion dollar bill." Another valid criticism is that money should, most likely, be injected at the level of the consumer, to remedy the worst damage of the subprime mortgage crisis and to increase consumer spending.
Anyway, to relate this to the election, on thinking of the situation further, I fully understand now why voter support is swinging to Barack Obama in light of it. Imagine that John McCain is elected president. There would be no upswing in optimism, because he has such a long history of supporting deregulation and precisely the state of affairs that got us into this mess, and because he does not seem to have presented a new plan. He did not even manage to get his fellow Republicans to support the first bailout bill as he had said he would. As for Sarah Palin, the economy has clearly never been her specialty; she has only been proficient at cutting taxes, and, given the state of the household, this is not feasible now. Besides, it's what George W. Bush already did, and look where it got us. Nor does she present a serious or informed front. Obama, on the other hand, is both serious and informed, and he has new advisors and (presumably) new ideas, so I would guess that the stocks would rise on his election. It does not look, either, as if he would continue to pump $10 billion per month of American taxpayer money into the Iraq War; as he and Biden stressed during their debates, the Iraqi government does have a $79 billion surplus. (Of course this figure can be taken cum grano salis, but I trust them enough to be sure that it isn't that far off from the truth.) And Biden, while very much a Washington insider, is at least in the subordinate position of vice-presidential candidate.
* * *
I think that John McCain is totally wrong as presidential candidate. He doesn't get along well even with his own party, and he has been well-to-do and embroiled in Washington politics for so long that he has no idea how 90% of Americans live and what is important to them, and the only issues he appears to care about are deregulation and anti-corruption and war. His proposal during the first presidential debate to freeze spending on everything except defence and veterans, and then to slash funding for the useless projects that litter the budget, was in my view a little off the deep end. Even where he is passionate about issues, like the war and torture and the economy, he has consistently betrayed himself in the past two years. He voted against the anti-torture bill that he had introduced; he voted against the GI Bill that would have ensured returning soldiers a good education; and he voted for a bailout bill that went against all his economic principles. Grumbling (or, to borrow from the vernacular, bellyaching) about the bill afterward is absolutely no substitute for action. Most politicians have consciences, and, however diseased these may be, not many of them constantly air their scruples to extort commiseration and praise or to bask in their own thwarted righteousness. That's a wimpy cop-out, not a redeeming trait. He was a maverick, who let himself be branded.
One thing that puzzles me, too, is McCain's visceral personal dislike of Obama. As people have pointed out, he didn't even look at Obama during the first debate. (Which, in turn, is like Palin's performance in the vice-presidential debate, when Sen. Biden had just mentioned being a single father after his first wife and daughter died in a car accident, and she didn't even acknowledge that but cheerfully went on to her next talking points. NYT columnist Frank Rich wrote a really good article about matters like this.)
Generally he prided himself on his "straight talk," and now he condescends to insinuation and smear tactics like everyone else. Yesterday, in a rally, he rhetorically asked, "Who is the real Barack Obama?", and someone shouted out "Terrorist!" He looked disapprovingly pouty at first, but then smiled, as did his wife in the background. He continues, "But, my friends, you ask such questions, and all you get in response is another angry barrage of insults." No correction, nothing. At least his statement is true, if one applies it to himself and his supporters. It's the exact same maddening phenomenon that occurred in the quotation I posted previously, where he says that politicians are expected to leave partisanship at the door, and then he blames Obama for the defeat of the bailout bill. Forget medicine; the cure for low blood pressure is a politician with a penchant for projection. And he was doing no more than following the base lead of Sarah Palin, who irretrievably ruined my opinion of her when she accused Obama of "palling around with terrorists" (i.e. ex-Weatherman Bill Ayers . . . vide dark-skinned people who may be Muslim). His Straight Talk Express has not only taken a detour to Bullsh*t Town, to borrow an expression from Jon Stewart, but it broke down there and is rusting away in the wrecking yard as we speak.
At first I did not think it was serious, and that "the only thing to fear is fear itself," i.e. that if the market would not let itself be spooked, stocks would not fall and companies would not have lower earnings and stockholders would not lose their savings. But it is evident that the market is fundamentally unsound. In general I've read that stocks are far overvalued, and that they should realistically be at around 8,000 on the Dow Jones now (though apparently the Standard&Poor is a far better index). In particular, housing prices were overinflated, and so that industry has been quietly losing steam for at least a year now. But real estate is what much of the American economy is invested in, and when this real estate cannot be sold, the companies are unable to transfer the property back into the liquid money that they presently need. At the same time, investors have frequently employed the practice of short-selling, in which an investor sells stocks, expecting that they will depreciate in value (he may even help along this process by propagating unfavourable rumours about the company to whom the stock belongs), after which point he buys them back at a far cheaper price. But, due to greed, this has been done too much, so the Lehmann Brothers actually collapsed because of it.
As one investment bank after the other collapsed in its wake, the confidence of banks in each other has been ruined, so they are unlikely to lend money to each other. In countries like Ireland, Austria, and Germany, the government has promised the security of all bank assets, and is hoping that this will encourage lending again. At the same time, the plunging stock markets are decreasing confidence in the American economy in general, and almost every major company (with the striking exceptions of Campbell's Soups and Tivo) is seeing a drop in its share price. So that is the problem on Wall Street, and of course in stock markets around the world. Iceland was in serious danger of national bankruptcy. Even China, I read in a New York Times article today, will suffer if it can no longer unload its exports on other countries.
The problem on "Main Street" is that firms, from the investment banking firms and Hewlett-Packard to, oddly, Gawker Media, are cutting jobs. On Gawker, it seems that people are only half-joking when they depict their future selves holed up in cardboard boxes, eating crackers and cheese and shooting the occasional squirrel, in the alleys outside their present apartments. Also, the 401(k) retirement plans, where employees invest money in stocks chosen by themselves to finance their pension, are rapidly losing value (in double-digit percentages, even). Of course any stock owner is not going to be happy now. And I'm sure that's just the beginning.
I think that, had the first bailout bill been passed, it would have swung the stocks back on track, because it would have convinced people that the government was certain that it could remedy the crisis, and confidence would have been restored. But, as it was, the government betrayed incompetence and hesitancy, which undermined the stock market to the point that the two or three days that elapsed before the second bailout bill was passed were fatal. The extra $100 billion+ in earmarks (most infamously, a tax break for children's play-arrow shafts, introduced at the behest of the two senators from Oregon) that were added to the bill certainly did nothing for the repute of Washington. Oddly enough, by the way, the press is still referring to this legislation as the "$700 billion dollar bill," when it is really at least the "$800 billion dollar bill." Another valid criticism is that money should, most likely, be injected at the level of the consumer, to remedy the worst damage of the subprime mortgage crisis and to increase consumer spending.
Anyway, to relate this to the election, on thinking of the situation further, I fully understand now why voter support is swinging to Barack Obama in light of it. Imagine that John McCain is elected president. There would be no upswing in optimism, because he has such a long history of supporting deregulation and precisely the state of affairs that got us into this mess, and because he does not seem to have presented a new plan. He did not even manage to get his fellow Republicans to support the first bailout bill as he had said he would. As for Sarah Palin, the economy has clearly never been her specialty; she has only been proficient at cutting taxes, and, given the state of the household, this is not feasible now. Besides, it's what George W. Bush already did, and look where it got us. Nor does she present a serious or informed front. Obama, on the other hand, is both serious and informed, and he has new advisors and (presumably) new ideas, so I would guess that the stocks would rise on his election. It does not look, either, as if he would continue to pump $10 billion per month of American taxpayer money into the Iraq War; as he and Biden stressed during their debates, the Iraqi government does have a $79 billion surplus. (Of course this figure can be taken cum grano salis, but I trust them enough to be sure that it isn't that far off from the truth.) And Biden, while very much a Washington insider, is at least in the subordinate position of vice-presidential candidate.
* * *
I think that John McCain is totally wrong as presidential candidate. He doesn't get along well even with his own party, and he has been well-to-do and embroiled in Washington politics for so long that he has no idea how 90% of Americans live and what is important to them, and the only issues he appears to care about are deregulation and anti-corruption and war. His proposal during the first presidential debate to freeze spending on everything except defence and veterans, and then to slash funding for the useless projects that litter the budget, was in my view a little off the deep end. Even where he is passionate about issues, like the war and torture and the economy, he has consistently betrayed himself in the past two years. He voted against the anti-torture bill that he had introduced; he voted against the GI Bill that would have ensured returning soldiers a good education; and he voted for a bailout bill that went against all his economic principles. Grumbling (or, to borrow from the vernacular, bellyaching) about the bill afterward is absolutely no substitute for action. Most politicians have consciences, and, however diseased these may be, not many of them constantly air their scruples to extort commiseration and praise or to bask in their own thwarted righteousness. That's a wimpy cop-out, not a redeeming trait. He was a maverick, who let himself be branded.
One thing that puzzles me, too, is McCain's visceral personal dislike of Obama. As people have pointed out, he didn't even look at Obama during the first debate. (Which, in turn, is like Palin's performance in the vice-presidential debate, when Sen. Biden had just mentioned being a single father after his first wife and daughter died in a car accident, and she didn't even acknowledge that but cheerfully went on to her next talking points. NYT columnist Frank Rich wrote a really good article about matters like this.)
Generally he prided himself on his "straight talk," and now he condescends to insinuation and smear tactics like everyone else. Yesterday, in a rally, he rhetorically asked, "Who is the real Barack Obama?", and someone shouted out "Terrorist!" He looked disapprovingly pouty at first, but then smiled, as did his wife in the background. He continues, "But, my friends, you ask such questions, and all you get in response is another angry barrage of insults." No correction, nothing. At least his statement is true, if one applies it to himself and his supporters. It's the exact same maddening phenomenon that occurred in the quotation I posted previously, where he says that politicians are expected to leave partisanship at the door, and then he blames Obama for the defeat of the bailout bill. Forget medicine; the cure for low blood pressure is a politician with a penchant for projection. And he was doing no more than following the base lead of Sarah Palin, who irretrievably ruined my opinion of her when she accused Obama of "palling around with terrorists" (i.e. ex-Weatherman Bill Ayers . . . vide dark-skinned people who may be Muslim). His Straight Talk Express has not only taken a detour to Bullsh*t Town, to borrow an expression from Jon Stewart, but it broke down there and is rusting away in the wrecking yard as we speak.
Monday, October 06, 2008
A Straw in the Wind
I was just watching Hardball with Chris Matthews, the American television show, when he mentioned that hundreds of thousands of new voters have registered in states like North Carolina and Florida. But best of all was these figures:
Pennsylvania:
474,000 New Democrats
38,000 Lost Republicans
This doesn't mean that, though 38,000 Republicans may have left their party, new voters are registering to fill the gap a little; it means that even with the new registered voters the Republican party has a huge loss.
Yoohoo! (c:
Pennsylvania:
474,000 New Democrats
38,000 Lost Republicans
This doesn't mean that, though 38,000 Republicans may have left their party, new voters are registering to fill the gap a little; it means that even with the new registered voters the Republican party has a huge loss.
Yoohoo! (c:
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