The glamorous life and thoughts of a concert pianist.

I spent much of the plane ride staring at a mustache in the window seat. (I’m an aisle man, man.) It glinted and bristled. Clutching my dormant cell phone, I fell in and out of strange sleep, only to awaken, again and again, with my eyes magnetically held on that salt-and-peppery, yet deeply unappetizing, cluster of hairs … behind which the vast misty Earth unfolded, 35,000 feet away, blue and gold tendrils of a dawning, atmospheric Monday. Good God, man, I thought, what sort of person wears a mustache like that? It was an unholy visitation, the price of some bad bargain. He did not seem to be evil, otherwise; but his mustache spoke hirsute malice.

The evening before, I had consummated a solemn rite. With passionate resolve, I determined, in a two hour period, to straighten all in my life that was unstraightened, and then to fall into saintly slumber. Best laid plans. The straightening process left a tremendous rubble in its wake. Eventually the arteries of my apartment, always narrow, became harrowing; they required bypass surgeries that they would not get. Climbing my way between Piles of Music Past and Piles of Music Yet to Come, between J Crew catalogs and long-lost paystubs, mired in expired to-do lists, I was attempting to incarnate in my suitcase some sort of condensed, intense microcosm of my next trip’s state of mind, an ur-wardrobe which would land in Detroit without incident and set the stage for .. who knows? I ransacked my worldly possessions for these perfect items. It appeared as though I was burgling my own apartment. After a time, only the suitcase was clean, pristine, contained, zippable; while every other square inch of the space descended into chaos. Somewhere in there, I discovered something that I should have known for a long long time.

I was trying to pack up my phone when I realized it.

My cell phone charger and my laptop charger had slowly, over the last months, become inseparable. They were locked below my kitchen table, I noticed, in a desperate embrace, intertwined black and white ivy, surging with 120 volts. I made a desultory stab at separating them. But they were whorled, gnarled, a spectacular, Escher-esque accumulation of spirals receding into what passes for infinity in the Greystone Hotel. Due to the hazards of living in my proximity, they were both sprinkled liberally with coffee grounds, and the caffeinated residue seemed only to bring them closer, to unite them in squalor. A hushed conference over my kitchen table ensued: me, my chargers. How could I break asunder what God had brought together? In chaos I had found love. I decided to do the right thing. We had a Commitment Ceremony. Some Bach was played. I read them some short passages from Emerson about Love and Friendship, and some bleak poems of Montale (for perspective, realism, pragmatism) and then, after a moment of silence, they were united in perpetuity. I cried a few bitter tears. Chargers grow up, they’re around for a while, but eventually, if you love them, you have to let them go…

Even the man at the security line the next day seemed to acknowledge the ineffable power of love. He pulled out my computer charger to run through the machine again. He only wanted the one, but the other clung desperately, following its mate out of the bag and onto the belt. He tugged briefly, looked at them, looked at me, he held the seeming mass of spaghetti out at arm’s length. I am sure, at that point, he saw the pain on my face, and, sighing, he ran them through the machine together. Even in X-ray vision their passion was magnificent, full-blooded, corporeal.

While all this emotional stuff was taking place, I was often on the phone with friend L. Other desperate situations had presented themselves. For instance, another friend had texted the following:

Con lovin’d knuc gluawt

What could it possibly mean? L and I debated at length. Its author was unavailable for comment. “Lovin” was clearly the only comprehensible segment, but perhaps it was a red herring? Anyway the apostrophe-d somewhat confused the grammatical sense. (Meanwhile: love was in the air, my newlyweds were happily consummating in the privacy of my bag what they had been too shy to express out in the open.) What was “gluawt”? I felt this was the key. But our various theories failed to pan out…

This text seemed the final, devastating enigma of the last two months, which I had spent more or less at home, in an attempt to have a “routine.” Many peculiar things had happened—odd changes and unexpected events—but there were frequent visits from the unwanted familiar. What did I discover in this routine but a self-limiting circle? I had spent a spectacular amount of time with my piano, and now we eyed each other warily. We too had our commitment ceremony, each day. Most importantly: yet another significant period of my life had elapsed in which the list of things I had intended to do bore little resemblance to the things actually done. My relationship with the organized agenda was still contentious, seemed fraught, perhaps, with “glauwt.” I asked L in desperation, throwing socks and receipts into scattered piles, “What’s to become of us, what are we to do with our lives?”

“Whatever it is,” she said wryly, “we’re already doing it.”

The woman down the hall is angry. She believes I have allowed someone else into my apartment: someone incompetent at best, perhaps a child or a murderer. “No,” I say, “it’s Anton Webern, the composer of the Second Viennese School,” but she does not relish the information.

I was in the N train, on my way to Astoria. A man with a guitar got on at the last Manhattan stop. Doors closed; the train hit the tunnel, accelerated. The noise grew, the train clattered and shook; I and a few scattered hipsters flew under the East River. For some reason, my brain chooses these moments to ask itself: where am I? I scanned the lit train and glared at my pale reflection in the window and at the dark movement of tremendous speed behind that.

Just at that moment—when, in the claustrophobic roar, it was impossible to hear anything—the guitarist began to play. He strummed gently, making no effort to project; and he apparently sang. Since he was standing quite close to me, I thought I could make out occasional glimpses of his voice—an operatic wail, some lonely Spanish vowel, or downward sprechstimme slide of pitch—fragments which I mainly had to construct out of my imagination.  And then after that strange, mostly mute, implied minute we emerged, climbing onto the elevated tracks. I no longer saw my own reflection, but in its place the sky, which was a wonderful dark dark blue, the last stop before black. Yes, there was a world consisting of buildings and people.

As if recognizing that, the train calmed, its tunnel noise subsided. And that, of course, was his cue: as soon as he could be heard, he stopped playing. He was suddenly aimless, like an actor without a motivation.  But as we pulled up to the first Queens stop (to my amazement) he began to offer CDs for sale. I was sorely tempted.

[PARENTAL WARNING: this post is extremely unreadable until paragraph 5 or so. It may be occasionally unreadable after that. You can’t say I didn’t warn you.]

So, Newt Gingrich has written a novel:

James nodded his thanks, opened the wax paper and looked a bit suspiciously at the offering, it looked to be a day or two old and suddenly he had a real longing for the faculty dining room on campus, always a good selection of Western and Asian food to choose from, darn good conversations to be found, and here he now sat with a disheveled captain who, with the added realization, due to the direction of the wind, was in serious need of a good shower.

—Gingrich/Forstchen, Pearl Harbor: A Novel of December 8

Bravissimo. As I struggled to swallow this sentence, which felt suspiciously like a day-old dish, swerving through clausular inanities towards my unshowered cortex, I realized, due to the direction of the piano bench, oblique, while pointing my disheveled eyes at my bookshelves, with the added realization, but darn good piles of cookbooks to be found, squeezed next to Ulysses in company with Kafka, it was not too far a stretch to leap from Newt’s sentence to this one:

Then as she is on her behaviorite job of quainance bandy, fruting for firstlings and taking her tithe, we may take our review of the two mounds to see nothing of the himples here as at elsewhere, by sixes and sevens, like so many heegills and collines, sitton aroont, scentbreeched and somepotreek, in their swishawish satins and their taffetaffe tights, playing Wharton’s Folly, at a treepurty on the planko in the purk.

Wow! I rejoyced to see the simil-Eire-ities.

But I think Finnegans Wake still makes more sense. Which should be exciting for Newt; he is more avant-garde, more pomo, more staggeringly innovative than he ever imagined.

Moving on. I had some family in Houston for my concerts, and relative X apparently asked after the concert, “Why is everything so long?” Oh, lovable family. Broadsided by the question, sprayed like Diesel jeans in the acid wash of the real, of the ungeeky, coming to grips with my irrelevance, I lay awake, fingering Pringles and other morsels from the minibar at 2 am in the humid darkness, asking myself, indeed, why IS Sibelius 2nd Symphony so long? C-SPAN was no comfort; even HBO, solace of so many hotel hours, left me high and dry.

The so-called silly query hung in the air, cheekily profound. One after the other, the plain Pringles crunched into their new forms of existence, seeking reincarnation as a stomach ache in the morning. The piece is as long as it is, I thought. Would you ask why Spiderman 3 is so long? Yes, actually, you might. In fact, the length of movies (the true genre of our times, along with the pop song, the advertisement, the billboard, the reality TV show, the Starbucks paper cup) is always up for debate, and the editing room is much valued, even fetishized. But no! … in the classical world, things are as long as they are, dammit, and that’s just that. Sit back and take it.

Theoretically, the classical music “demographic,” being somewhat elderly, has less time on its hands, and yet is drawn mysteriously to the long-breathed, time-sucking works of our great canon. While youths in full flower, with the decades of their lives spread out before them like Cheez Product on Movie Nachos, or like Hijinks in a Sitcom SubPlot, mainly confine themselves to the 4 minute musical experience: they will not waste their bounty.

Relative X rephrased her question, something like, “why do they play for a long time, and then just everybody sits quietly for a little bit, and then they play again?”

Again, the questions, the obvious questions. I adopted a reasonable tone of voice, sipped heavily on my martini, began to explain: “well the parts of the piece are called movements, and they’re sort of like chapters of a book, you see …” and as I found myself giving this tedious little lecture, a little mocking voice in my head said bowel movements, bowel movements and I was unable to continue … I looked around the table uneasily; I had slipped and fallen on a ellipsis, as so often on Think Denk (how self-referential!); where was the entree?; why was everyone staring at me? It seemed to me the very words I had to use to describe classical music were against me. A mountain of jargon loomed in a booth across the bar, laughing.

Well, I’ve had it with this state of affairs. I’m done mourning over chips and other snack foods.

Some mornings, I have to tell you, I wake up and I really don’t even like the word “Sonata,” it looks at me across the piano keys like a stranger. Why on earth, I ask myself, am I playing a “Sonata”? Don’t get me wrong, I love the sonatas themselves, just not the titles. (I also can become very uncharitable towards the sort of hip names that composers these days give their pieces, like “Fractalization Doping,” or “Nascar Deconstruction,” etc. etc.) But here, why not replace so many of the words we normally use with other words, start fresh with an uncorrupted, unknown vocabulary … ?

I have, just for a starting experiment, taken a passage from Charles Rosen’s The Classical Style, replacing fuddyduddy terms with fresh, deck chatter. See if you don’t feel it is improved:

This snarky E is, of course, the pre of the pre: its very nature implies the traditional first dressingroom almost by definition. Accordingly in cop 18, E is established as the deck of a crossfire using (a); and then in cop 23, after decorated forms of (a), it is established as the coaster. It is interesting to note the ‘is-enough trannies, and to see at how many levels the E is made prominent. The zing now has such force that it no longer demands rubdown, but can itself be used to rub. To bring out this force, an F-natural is set up against it with a shoutout repeated four times under (a) in cops 26-29, an F-natural that also serves to prepare the splendid surprise chipper on an F-jor rowr postjaws at cop 38. This F is now earlgreyin for six cops (cops 39-44) with all the penguins’ power Haydn’s Imhotep can manage, using the opening meme (a): cops 38 to 47 are essentially an inner expansion—a withholding of the chipper at cop 37. A new whatev’, square and decisive, is finally introduced in cop 48 to renovate the real estate. To appreciate the full mastery of this pose, we must rock it with the trackback. When the opening meme returns it has an entirely different sense: it is now a dressingroom from the pre back to the post.

Whoever can reconstruct the original (without recourse, of course, to the Rosen text) gets some sort of dubious award. The sentence in bold translates as “To appreciate the full mastery of the exposition, we must play the repeat.”

By the way, yes, I’m (trying to) read Finnegans Wake. Sigh. How could you tell? Yes, that’s pretentious. But is it, I ask you, as pretentious as invoking hipster terminology to vanquish the haunting Pringles of my lost adolescence?

Here at Think Denk, we try to keep abreast and astride and athwart of all the most meaningful, semiotically capacious internet trends. Woe betide the blogger who heeds not the flittering flutter of the zeitgeist! I have had my attention drawn, lately, to a certain captioning, captivating phenomenon: it goes by the mysterious name of “LOL cats.” It fuses the concision of Webern and the haiku with the immediacy of the image and relies heavily upon the magnificent erosion of usage that is the lifeblood of language.

You can read about it here at Slate, or else go directly to the source.

Which led (of course, regrettably, inevitably) to:

and perhaps I can include the contribution of a fellow admirer of LOLcats,

Clearly these are humble beginnings. I await, tenterhooked, the contributions of the wider classical blogosphere.