The glamorous life and thoughts of a concert pianist.

Some good friends of mine are heading out today to Laramie, Wyoming to play a concert. I have never played there, which really doesn’t seem quite fair, for obvious reasons:

There once was a pianist named Jeremy
Who flew out to give concerts in Laramie
But as he sat down to play
A rip at his rear made him say
“My buttocks are really quite bare, Ah me!”

Apologies. Real post later. It seems to me the first two lines are pretty much set; if you come up with any better conclusions, please let me know.

There are some cultural events so momentous, dear readers, that I must suspend the daily rotor of events, must pause even mid-Venti, unfolding and plugging in the aluminum square which skeptical future generations, uncomprehending, will have to speculate was some sort of universal God or Icon, and lay fingers velvety over the clicking surfaces, and scrounge around in the inaccessible, ever-disappearing-behind-a-curtain gray matter for some appropriate thunderbolt of expression, some wordnugget to convey their magnitude to you (“Hypocrite lecteur,” cf. Baudelaire, Fleurs du Mal). Such is today’s WB Farewell (link here).

My friend A was first shocked by this news, as she knew what a blow it would be to me. Before she could shield, deflect, and conceal the rush of empathetic emotion, her naked sense of my vulnerability leaked through: “But your fantasy world… will shrink … and dry up … like a raisin …” (I’m paraphrasing a bit here, she was more eloquent and her simile was less nutritious.) It is not every morning that you contemplate pre-coffee the destruction of your extended adolescence. It is true:

–I have spent lamentable hours banging head against wall wondering whether Ben or Noel would be the preferable mate for Felicity;

— I have imbibed numerous margaritas on my nearly astroturf carpet and swallowed back horrendous oily torrents of Chinese food watching unlikely boyfriends get run over by buses and submit to all sorts of preposterous plot twists;

— I have wept in Middlebury on a cloudy cold afternoon (when I should have been practicing) while watching wobbly VHSes of season 5 of Buffy (yes the one where she dies, twice), and have seriously compared the cold onset of early winter, and the running of half-icy streams, to Buffy’s Dostoevskian trials, her angry submission to fate, the teenaged opposite of late Beethovenian peaceful resignation, but with the same result;

— I have laughed at Angel’s supernatural irony, at the postmodern pancake of vampire and teen cliche, and have allowed it to permeate my pores, contaminating my aesthetic judgment permanently;

— I have winced and groaned under the sheer obvious manufactured pathos and lesson-learning of Dawson’s Creek, and I fought the pain of perpetual insults to my intelligence, and still found time to get teary-eyed whenever Joey gets conflicted (often), or when Dawson and Pacey throw their man-child tantrums with elicited unconviction, or when slimy nostalgia vomits all over the script and no one bothers to clean it up, including me;

This and so much more, I have done. I cannot confess it all; the sins I have committed with the WB are beyond number, like strollers in my 93rd Street Starbucks. And now, having defiled me, having taken the virginity of my image-repertoire, the WB plans to just up and leave, to dissolve into some other corporation and leave me adrift, high and dry, in my 30s, with a heap of desiccated psychobabble at my feet in the sands of unplotted time. As A wryly observed, “you might see this as an opportunity,” a time to quote-un-quote, “throw away the short pants.” I pretend to have no idea what this expression means. And yes I deliberately put quotations redundantly around the quote-un-quote, do you have a problem with that?

I’m not sure if this is true, but that of course will not stop me from saying it, in a really exaggerated, declarative manner: I believe the WB represents a climactic, pivotal event in the transformation of the American Pop Culture Narrative, in which all stories, no matter how great or small or implausible or profound, can (nay, must!) be transferred into the theatre of the American campus/schoolyard. In fact, I think there can be only two choices for the writer of a modern script (as Barthes points out, “there is only what I can choose to write, to put forth in this world of mine, and what I choose not to”): high school, or college. Once you have chosen, your casting is pretty much done, then pop whatever timeless narrative you wish into it, superimpose the element of Wanting to Be Popular if necessary, contrive a scene with a swimming pool (to get your money’s worth out of the Young Bodies you have employed), save it to disk, and await royalties. Soon, I am sure, there will be a King Lear set in high school, and the doddering protagonist will be played by an over-the-hill senior, who has been driven senile by too many late nights at the drive-thru, or by some chemicals they put in the tater tots (King Lear meets Erin Brockovich?). He (or she) will pass power down to some nascent popular boys or girls and I think the rest writes itself. I will call it King Larson. Larson/Lear will be played by Chad Michael Murray.

His eyes will not be gouged, but his sunglasses will be seriously damaged. Thank you, thank you, send bids for the script to my friend A … as revenge for her too-penetrating analysis of my emotional situation. Anyway, back to my serious point, which is that, in the world of American Narrative, (ridiculous generalization follows of course, but that is only my revenge on the generalizing nature of Narrative, generally), beyond the college years yawns an endless abyss where only pockmarked policemen and disillusioned spouses dwell in a purgatory of nondefinitive endings. Jack McCoy lurks as aging icon of sexless justice (world of the mind!). Need I mention NYPD Blue? There is no easy “venue” for these “late-life” dramas; they are always gritty, or tormented. I eagerly await a prime-time drama about graduate students doing their dissertations (let’s call it “ABD”, and of course it would have to be on ABC). If you want to explore this existence beyond the 21 mark, you must then do a story about elusive disintegrations, loss, memory, or put in a compensatory amount of violence; something must either trivialize or literarize the story. I loved You Can Count on Me, but case in point: it is tinged with sadness, regret, loss, and it is no longer really a STORY. It is just kind of a moment between further disintegrations. The Narrative, these days, is so dependent upon the geographical limitations of the campus; like a nervous child dropped at school, it gets frightened when it has to wander off; writers behave as if the geographical boundary also creates and implies some welcome emotional limitations: as long as they stay on campus they are safe and a story can be told.

The WB, by planting not just naive, sexually precocious youngsters (paradox?), but also vampires and demons, on campus, and by framing their shows, despite all contradicting transcendencies of time and space, to begin and end with matriculations and graduations (“behold this is the world”), created and glorified this campuscosmos and invited us to live in it, if only in the mind. And I today, between 5 and 10 Eastern time (4/9 Central) must bid farewell to the landscaped, hour-parcelled world they seduced me into; I must lose, finally, even the benefits of my Faustian bargain. If I arrange to videotape today’s episodes, and watch them again and again, will that still constitute some sort of mature moving on, or must I just let it go, watch and weep and let them vanish into ether and memory? What would Buffy tell me to do, I wonder …

I advise readers of this blog to hear Gabriel Kahane’s masterful setting of a CraigsList posting (“Neurotic and Lonely”), immediately. Go to his MySpace page, and click on CraigslistNeurotic…

“Yes, I confess, to my eternal chagrin I am indeed a chip man.” I couldn’t really believe this sentence fell out of my mouth. If you haven’t traveled on Amtrak recently, you are in for a surprise; pursuant to some distant policy, the Acela workers are now aggressively pushing product. I came up, ordered a hot dog and a soda, and in those pregnant, magical moments while the dog steamed in a mysteriously recessed industrial microwave, the man behind the counter proposed a bag of chips. “Nothing could be better than a cold soda,” he said, his eyes seeming to mist, “a hot dog, and some chips.” I was swept up (as so often) in his faux emotion; I paused, teetered, acquiesced. He smiled toothily. “Yeah, I thought you were a chip man, just from the look of you,” he said, and I had to admit the obvious. And that’s when I said the ridiculous sentence. I got a laugh from the woman next in line, and went back to my car and smeared Grey Poupon on my sweaty dog with an undeserved smile on my face of comic accomplishment.

Last night I found myself again clutching chips with amusement in a train, some baked KC Masterpiece Lays chips. Perhaps some distant delicious barbecued pork might, if perfectly cooked and served, be declared, after a beer or five, a “masterpiece,” with genuine slavering emotion, and yet, and yet! … after the translation of the barbecue to the sauce and of the sauce to the sauce powder and the powder into the baked, processed potato chip: in that process somewhere the “masterpiece” may have been lost. After eating several chips I ran my hands through my hair and realized now the reddish powder was part of my “do,” and thus decorated (a soldier of Sodium Benzoate) I braved the fluorescent return to the city. I held my head high as I strode through Grand Central Station, a man who is willing to enter the metropolis becrumbed. I must admit, to return, like some composers, to a recurring unimportant theme: I am truly a chip man; I perpetually feel a tension between the finite nature of life and the seemingly infinite nature of chips to be consumed. Many evenings have I succumbed to late night chip-and-salsa cravings only to wake at 3 am with a sour post-vision of chile and garlic and the oily remnants of fried corn tortillas weighing down my pores. And despite all this punishment and regret beyond measure the chip still stands, still calls… like a Siren …

I have been peripatetic of late and obviously the to-and-fro has tolled upon my brain horrendously. When you travel you often practice in strange places and of course, like any migrating species, you have to explore your new terrain, get a feel for predators, food supply, etc. I was sitting in a beautiful studio in NEC (thanks so much Ms. Byun!) and when you are in teachers’ studios and you find yourself unable to concentrate you wander and peep. There were several xeroxes on a counter and this one caught my eye:

But precisely the most important and best thing, namely, that unnoticeable variability of the tempo, of the timbres, simply does not happen in a mechanical way and through rehearsal…
The greatest technical correctness and control one can achieve does not replace the lack of inspiration; but it does have the most fateful consequences for music making as a whole. Excessive technical control, that is, the evenly executed technical perfection of all details, which as such take on a completely different character than intended by their creators, who in their conception always proceeded from the whole. The naturally productive route by which the details are viewed and interpreted by way of the whole, is turned around. The improvisational element is essentially lost, indeed it loses its very concept–this improvisational quality, which does not represent some mere accident, something one can do with or without, but rather is, quite simply, the ultimate source of all great, creative, necessary music-making.
–Furtwangler

Wow. I was really enjoying that quote, from very near the outset, with that enticing phrase the “unnoticeable variability of the tempo, of the timbres.” It’s so very true, that the smallest shifts in tempo feeling are what often make the difference for me between redemptive and annoying performances; or as my late teacher used to say, motion is not as important as mobility. It was late in the evening; Boston lights twinkled; and I was gradually giving in (not very reluctantly) to the notion that no more practicing could be done and thinking emotionally about the softness of my bed at the delightful Bertram Inn, when I realized I was listening, without knowing it, to some student practicing the Chopin G minor Ballade. Mystery Student X assayed a plain version of the coda, which all persons affiliated with the piano must view as one of those inescapable obstacles of music education; as one of those perennial iconic misfortunes which the great genius of Chopin visited upon the planet, in order that endless multitudes of students and faculty learn to suffer and endure; a passage of brilliance, originality and virtuosity so endowed with attraction that it must paradoxically be destroyed under the steamroller of endless repetition. I’m talking about:

And after one run-through of that, X was obviously dissatisfied. Perhaps it was uneven? It all sounded clean to me, through the wall, a notoriously unreliable filter, but perhaps (and I know it well) there was some lingering fear of possible future missed notes, even in the absence of present ones. And so X began practicing “in rhythms”:

AAAAAAAHHHHHH! I stared at the Furtwangler quote, propped on the piano, and he seemed to be speaking, screaming, begging for the Chopin to stop, begging for the Details to be forgotten and the Whole once more to be glimpsed and attempted; and I envisioned the forces of Evenness and the forces of Variability locked in mortal combat, grappling for the soul of the modern Conservatory. The student could never have known how ironic his/her practicing was to me at the moment. It was all too much, I snapped up my Chausson and my quote and my bag and left NEC behind in my dust, via the agency of an insane Boston cabbie (is there any other kind?), who wanted to take lessons from me (me! the madman who fled the Conservatory at 10 pm!) and back at the Inn half-dressed I watched doctors slowly and methodically remove a 200-pound tumor from a woman, and wondered how it got to be 200 pounds, and fell into a deep but unnoticeably variable sleep.