Brno

Show And Tell

6 February, 2019

“Check out this umbrella, folks! Isn’t it cool?” By woodleywonderworks – https://www.flickr.com/photos/wwworks/2850669383, CC BY 2.0, Link

I was talking to a European colleague the other day about the differences between Europeans and Americans. He blew my mind with an idea I had never thought of before: It all comes down to show and tell.

I don’t really know why we even have “show-and-tell” in preschool in the US. I should probably ask one of the teachers in the family to explain it to me at some point. At any rate, my colleague holds that show-and-tell is a reason, if not the reason, why Americans tend to be so much louder than Europeans, and why we’re so much more comfortable standing up and talking to a group. Not just comfortable, really — more like compelled.

So what’s so special about show-and-tell? At age three or so, you are required to stand up and talk about a thing you brought with you from home that you think is important. If you do it well, you are praised for it — and you watch other kids being praised for it (or heckled if they do it badly). If you like being in the spotlight, you’re going to find out at an early age, and you’re going to want to keep going back there.

Apparently this kind of thing doesn’t exist in European primary schools, according to my colleague at least. I don’t have any inside knowledge of schooling in western Europe, but all my Czech friends have told me that “standing out” in school is a great way to get singled out for abuse or worse. They say this is yet another anti-pattern from forty years of communism. Anyway, standing up and being noticed is definitely not something Czechs are into, with the required exceptions of course.

Americans’ desire to stand up and talk is not entirely a virtue, of course — to other cultures, we look boorish, self centered, and rude. We’re also impossible to miss. Kim and I used to sit in cafes in Paris and guess the Americans walking down the street — you can just about do it with your eyes closed. Just listen for the loudest people around, and if you want confirmation open your eyes and check if they’re wearing white sneakers.

Something I Will Never Own

23 January, 2019

Sailboat — A very beautiful white sloop anchored off Prickly Pear

I’m not sure how boats became part of my life. I grew up in Atlanta, after all, far from the sea. The most experience I ever had with the water was skiing on man-made lakes (which was fun but not really boat-y). Given I have no family history, then, it’s a little funny that I spend so much time today thinking about being on boats, taking pictures of them, writing about them, and so on.

In the end I have to credit my father-in-law Ron, who has been a major influence in my adult life, with getting me into boats. Somewhere I have photos and videos of Kim and me at ages 25 and 22, respectively, on my first ever sailing trip in the BVI, on the sailboat Priority II — a beautiful Taiwan-built Tayana 55 — that he and his business partner Dean Burtch had just had built for themselves. I had no idea that I was ascending to the pinnacle of sailboating my first time out of the gate.

At the time I never dreamed I might some day myself own such a thing, or even rent one and captain it. But Kim and I have fallen into exactly that, between river boat trips in France and now our first sailboat charter trip in the BVI. Chartering in France is a great vacation and not wildly expensive. It’s quite a bit more expensive in the BVI, but still manageable… and here we are doing it. Strange.

But rambling about boats wasn’t actually the reason for this post. I wanted to write about owning versus renting, about the possessing of things versus the using of them for fun.

For reasons that aren’t clear to me, American culture has long been obsessed with ownership. Maybe it’s the only way to signify social standing in our supposedly classless society, or maybe it’s the role the private property aesthetic and legal structure played in our forbears’ theft of the land from its former occupants… who knows. Anyway it boils down to the “who dies with the most toys wins” wisecrack you hear now and then.

I accepted this principle — that more and better stuff was unquestionably a good thing — without question until we moved to Europe a few years ago and rented an apartment for the first time in a very long time (having left most of our possesions behind in Philadelphia). The apartment was lovely, stocked with the basic stuff we needed to live, and I found myself very happy not to have to worry about repairing it or being responsible for it in any way. I had accidentally discovered for myself the great truth that your stuff owns you just as much as you own it. Every single thing you acquire puts some level of demand on your mental energy, worrying about its welfare or whether it was worth purchasing.

So, back to the beautiful boat above. I’m not likely to have the means to purchase such a lovely thing, but I don’t think I would even if I could. On the whole, I’d rather rent.

And I Suppose You Want To Go Practice?!

17 July, 2016

So, like I don’t have enough to do, I bought one of these:

It is a Yamaha P115 digital piano, with a graduated weighted action that is meant to make it feel like the real thing. I have a real piano back in Philadelphia (a six-foot Weber grand my father bought in White Plains, NY before I was born), but it did not make the trip over here to Brno for obvious reasons. Fortunately the people renting our house there actually play, so at least someone is using it…

Anyway, I digress. Why, a reasonable person might ask, would I go out and buy a piano to practice, when I already have a perfectly good vibraphone sitting right here that would happily absorb any practicing I could throw at it?

Here it is, looking a bit surly like a jilted lover…

Bogus reasons for buying the piano are:

The piano can be practiced with headphones on so as not to wake up my spouse early in the morning. This is actually a real concern since morning is the only time I can get my shit together to practice, but my poor wife would gladly suffer the noise if it meant I was actually practicing the thing. So, not a real reason.
Taking a vibe to jams is a serious pain in the neck, but people are happy to let you sit in on a piano. Also sort of true, but again, if I really wanted to play out on the vibe, I would figure out a way to make it work.
Piano skills are more versatile. Also probably true, but this isn’t the real reason either.

The real reason: The piano and I have unfinished business with each other.

It will come as a shock to those of you who know the disciplined, driven, regimented person I am today, but when I was a child I had no self-discipline whatsoever.

Heh.

No the second part really is true. I liked the piano, I enjoyed playing it, I loved to play it for other people and make them happy. I just would not ever make myself sit down and practice the thing. It’s funny because then, as now, I don’t mind practicing at all. As a kid, though, I simply refused to get around to doing it. There was always something else to get in the way. So, even though I must have had nine years of lessons starting from age 6, I never got very good at piano. Weirdly, I did go to a proper conservatory and major in music performance — but it was in percussion, which I did not take up until I was 16. Hence the vibraphone.

So, years went by. I wound up with my father’s piano because somehow my mother got it in their divorce settlement, and I periodically went through bouts of “Hey let’s learn to play jazz on this thing, why not?” which then inevitably tapered off. Readers will be forgiven for thinking hey isn’t this just another one of those cycles?

Well, I am determined to prove you all wrong. It’s all about this unfinished business, you see. When I was young, and I had all the time in the world to practice, I squandered that time and failed to achieve something that I have really always wanted to achieve, from the first day I saw my father sight-read Scott Joplin rags out of the big book he had. So now, when I have no time at all, but maybe a bit more self awareness, I have decided to give it another serious go. My deal with myself, before I bought the instrument that is staring me as I write this, was that I would only allow myself to have it if I practice it every day. Meaning, every single day — at least every day I am not traveling. (This is a fairly big loophole that I’m not quite sure how to close and will probably have to live with.) Every day is going to mean getting up earlier in the morning and forcing myself to sit down on that bench and really, actually learn how to play. I mean, play well enough that I can hang on the bandstand with a real jazz combo, which is serious business. Every day is going to mean being careful to go to bed earlier so that I’m awake and alert when I get up to practice. But, every day also means that you progress like a rocket compared to how long it used to take me to learn anything practicing for an hour the morning of my lesson (only).

I’ll let you all know how it goes…