It's Not How Well the Dog Dances

Everything’s Bigger in America

24 December, 2015

Today I’m writing from a coffee shop in the Santana Row “village” (see below for rant) in San Jose, California. It’s Christmas Eve, 2015. I’ve been in the Czech Republic now with only brief interruptions since June 2015, so I’ve had a fair bit of time to acclimate to the European lifestyle. Coming back for the holiday brings a bunch of thoughts, including how weird it is that everyone understands English, but one stands out:

Holy crap everything is just enormous!

Like, seriously huge. Cars, houses, roads, plates of food, stores, things in stores… I feel like Gulliver or something. Only the people are roughly the same size. Well, they’re roughly the same height, anyway. Nonetheless, it apparently takes one of these to transport a family of four to dinner:

It’s not like big cars are a new thing in the U.S. After all, my father drove us around in one of these when I was a kid:

(Wow I really wish he had kept that car…)

What I do think has changed since the Johnson administration is the size of everything else. I’m not sure, but I wonder sometimes if the American obesity crisis is simply an attempt to expand to fill all the space we’ve made for ourselves. (Really I think it’s because we’re being poisoned, but that’s a subject for another blog.)

The contrast with Brno, where the average monthly salary would not quite buy the gas for the truck above, is quite impressive. You can make arguments for both lifestyles, I guess, but I know which I would prefer.

Oh, and about Santana Row… blearrgh. Why do we tear down real towns with character and interest, so we can build fake ones instead? Not enough room for luxury retail? Bad land-use laws (this is probably it, really)? I think I feel another blog coming on on the importance of decent legislation…

My God, What Have I Done

23 December, 2015

So my crazy nephew Elliot Brock has decided it is imperative that he host his own 4chan server RIGHT NOW.

4chan? Seriously? But, I’m supposed to be his hip nerdy uncle, so I’m all, sure, I have a spare Linode that isn’t doing much, you can use it if you want. The catch is you have to learn enough emacs that you can sysadmin the thing yourself, because there is no way I’m waking up late at night to fix it when it breaks.

Yes, I am making a young person learn emacs. Call me evil, if you want…

Anyway, got a web root set up for him, he’s taking to emacs quite well for a 14-year-old with a post-millenial attention span, so far so good. (Is it possible to have a negative attention span, actually?) The point of the exercise is of course for him to actually learn something about networking, linux system administration, etc. And to create another emacs user because otherwise vim will get him, and that will be the end of that. Groan.

Happy Birthday to Me

20 February, 2015

Today on my 47th birthday I am going to say thanks to Mom and Dad for raising me right (to the extent anyone could have, anyway).

Things I got from Mom:

* My determination to believe, sometimes in the face of the evidence, that people are basically good and that we are all made of the same stuff — put another way, that it is wrong to blame people for their bad circumstances when external forces are almost certainly to blame

* My “What, me worry?” optimism

* My love of animals

* My belief that I can do more or less anything if I put my mind to it

Things I got from Dad:

* My love of music and my musical ability (although I think Mom may actually have a better ear). Some kids get praised for throwing a ball — I didn’t even have a ball, I got praised for singing on pitch. (n.b. if you want your kid to know how to throw a ball, you should get him one and throw it with him.)

* My inclination, tamed by two years of beatings in graduate school but still present, to use five syllables when one would do. Put another way, my love for words and playing with words and everything wonderful about language.

* My intolerance for bad music and bad taste in general. This of course flies in the face of Mom’s proletarianism, which makes for an interesting internal tension.

* My belief that I can do more or less anything if I put my mind to it Mom and Dad fought through some rough years bringing us up, but no matter what they put looking after us first, perhaps to a fault (my memory on this is fuzzy, but I’m fairly certain that Dad, after a long string of defeats, finally lost his partnership at the large lawfirm he was at because he took two weeks off to direct the music for my junior-high-school production of The Mikado, starring me.) I’m only now beginning to really appreciate how difficult that business of putting your kids first can be, as I watch parents around me go through the same traumas Mom and Dad did.

Anyway: Thanks, Mom and Dad. I am a lucky, lucky boy.

No Upgrades Available…

18 February, 2015

… on my flight to Tel Aviv this weekend. I thought about pleading with US Airways that it will be my birthday and I really, really *need* a lie-flat seat and complimentary alcoholic beverages for that 11-hour trip, but I don’t think it would have worked.

The nice thing about US Airways is that it is often possible, for $300 and 30,000 miles, to float yourself into that privileged area up front. I mean look there is no way it’s actually worth $300, but on the other hand I almost always try, so that must mean it actually is worth it by some definition.

The fact that my Quaker grandparents would consider all this insanely self-indulgent is not lost on me. I try not to think about it when I glide serenely past the masses waiting to board coach.

Stop Equating Music and Sports

17 February, 2015

On a plane home from Europe the other day I watched a movie called Whiplash, about a jazz drummer at a fictional music school in New York and his battle with this asshole band director who just about kills him by… well, being an asshole.

It wasn’t a bad movie for a jazz lover like me. There were a lot of good tunes, albeit mostly big band stuff which isn’t necessarily my thing, but still good tunes. I started off as a drummer myself before I switched to keyboard percussion, so I could relate pretty well to the specific physical issues the kid was wrestling with as he tried to push his fastest swing tempo ever faster. And certainly any musician who has been to music school has seen or heard about abusive teachers or directors, people who genuinely believe that they are doing their students a great service by humiliating them in public. The portrayal of this particular band director was exaggerated to drive the plot of the movie, but sure, there was a grain of truth there.

There was something that bothered me about the movie though and I didn’t really put my finger on it until a couple days later: Despite having a lot of music in it, the movie wasn’t really about music. It was much more about equating achievement with physical struggle and pain — lots of shots of the bandaids on the kid’s hands, blood on the cymbals, sweat everywhere, etc. In other words, the plot could have been lifted from any sports movie. Talented young kid thinks he’s all that, runs headlong into abusive coach who sees potential but insists on “breaking him down,” followed by humiliation, struggle, and eventually some level of victory.

Now, there is nothing wrong with the idea that achievement requires hard work and discipline, and achievement in music is certainly no different. But in focusing on all the physical suffering this kid goes through to achieve, the movie entirely misses an essential thing about music, and jazz music in particular: great music is an art, not a sport, and it requires above all else listening. A great musician listens intently to herself, to the other players in her ensemble, to the room she is playing in. This is particularly true in jazz, and I would argue even more true of jazz drumming. The drummer’s entire role is to support the other musicians in the band, to feed off what they’re doing in a solo in real time and make it into something greater. In-the-moment creativity and art is what separates great music from merely good music, not just in jazz but in chamber and orchestral music as well.

So in the end I found myself dissatisfied with Whiplash (although kudos to the filmmaker for making any kind of jazz movie at all, and doing a credible job with a lot of details). I wanted it to be about the musician’s never-ending search for art in the moment, and instead I got Top Gun.