Icon + Incognito =

















Design is like cooking, if you start with great ingredients, (image, concept and words in design), and keep it simple, you get a great result. I made this faux album cover for Patti Smith using the famous Mapplethorpe photo. Took me a couple minutes and I am very technically illiterate.

I Wish I Were an Architect!












David Ayache, an Italian luthier, took this wonderful interior photo of a violin. I love the shot and wish I were an architect. Then I would design a lobby for a symphony hall that looked exactly like this with the soundpost, curves, materials, basebar and f holes. (Imagine this 22' tall!)

Wouldn't it be fun to sip wine here during intermission?

How to Succeed With an F Average








How I envy those who can captivate with a story. I mean in a conversation, like last night when we had dinner with a close friend. She obviously has different genetic material than I do regarding the ability to make interesting words come out of one's mouth.

This is very different from being able to write an interesting story.

As I sit here at the computer, remembering our cellist friend tell her stories last night, it's like remembering scenes from a movie, or like the stories happened to me, not her.

I, on the other hand, feel shy and clumsy in company. It's as though I'm playing the wrong instrument, say a cellist blowing into an oboe. I think of Gary Larson's cartoon of an elephant onstage at the piano realizing in panic that he's not a pianist, he's a flutist.

When I do say something, it's often a clumsy imitation of what I wanted to say. And I can't go back and edit, revise, like I can as I am typing to you here.

That is why I like typing out my stories and essays. It feels like I am playing the "write" instrument.

Writer Lorrie Moore answered well when she was asked "What in your childhood contributed to your becoming a writer?"

"... a shyness that caused me - and others - to notice that I could express myself better by writing than by speaking. This is typical of many writers, I think. What is a drawback in childhood is an asset in literary life. Not being fluent on one's feet sends one to the page, and a habit is born."

Ineptness in conversation can be a useful failing if you're interested in writing. Just as dead, decomposing plants in your garden become the humus, the soil, which allow other plants to thrive.

In her article on how to become a writer, Ms. Moore speaks of a different failure which is helpful to writers...

"First, try to be something, anything, else. A movie star/astronaut. A movie star/missionary. A movie star/kindergarten teacher. President of the World. Fail miserably. It is best if you fail at an early age -- say, fourteen. Early, critical disillusionment is necessary so that at fifteen you can write long haiku sequences about thwarted desire."

I just finished a book of poetry that took a few years. Yea! and Confetti! And I can truly say that my finesse at the small failures in life has greatly contributed. (Except for my failure at being a descent speller. That's been a bit of a drawback.)

Here is a small appetizer from the collection. . .

An Extra Closet

The corners of my home
have become
filled with filling.
I wish I could put
some of the piles
into my writings
and hide them away.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Actually though, gathering any experience will give you some grist for the mill, having something to write about is what matters. Not just the failures, a writer's successes in life and those mixed results can be useful too. Getting out of bed and trying is the thing.

Playing Hookey











I was going to write something else today but I got distracted by the faint and constant snowing. In a few hours we'll go skating at Bryant Park. It's very beautiful to skate there as the snow falls. Then we'll go to a restaurant I love nearby there that reminds me of being in Japan. I'll order tanuki (a tanuki is an animal like a raccoon, but that's just the name, there's no tanuki meat in this). Tanuki has pieces of tankatsu batter, the batter used in making tempura, in a soba or udon, warm, noodle broth. I love it.

They also have kitsune (fox) of soba or udon broth and tofu skins, which is funny because this again stirs my memory, of the simple, traditional song my son and every Japanese child hears and sings about - kobuto, kitsune, tanuki, neko. However there is no (kobuto) piglet or neko (cat) soba or udon.

How to Walk onto the Stage of Carnegie Hall Without Stage Fright










Nine and and a half years ago, in July of 2002, I cut out a couple paragraphs from a New Yorker article and taped it up on our kitchen cupboard. In it is the simple secret of how to instill confidence in your child or in a pianist who will debut at Carnegie Hall.

Never praise abilities, praise efforts.

Never tell your child, self, wife or student that she is talented, smart, or naturally gifted. Tell her, she is such a hard worker.

Never say to a pianist that he is so good at sight reading, tell him that he worked hard at sight reading and it paid off. Don't these sound similar? But no, no and no - they are polar opposites, like northern polar bears and southern penguins, we feel they are from the same region, but they live on opposite ends of the earth.

Do not tell a violinist that she has real talent, tell her that her hard work on her vibrato really paid off. This is a dangerously important distinction.

And secondly, it is better to praise small achievements than broad accomplishments. You really worked hard on this trill in the second movement; you're getting good at filling the cat bowl; I noticed how quietly you have been closing doors lately, you've been trying hard not to slam them; you're relaxing your shoulders now when you play the piano, you've put a lot into it.

If you want to walk on the stage of Carnegie Hall without stage fright, you need to start encouraging yourself way before that night. You need to make it a habit to tell yourself that you are a hard worker. Not in a magic phrase way. But find little things you worked at, notice them and encourage yourself. Surround yourself with friends who will do the same for you. "I love the way you worked on phrasing in the beginning of the slow movement, it sounds beautiful."

Here is the article snippet from my cupboard. . .

Carol Dweck, a psychologist at Columbia University, has found that people generally hold one of two fairly firm beliefs about their intelligence: they consider it either a fixed trait or something that is malleable and be developed over time. Five years ago, Dweck did a study at the University of Hong Kong, where all classes are conducted in English. She and her colleagues approached a large group of social-science students, told them their English-proficiency scores, and asked them if they wanted to take a course to improve their language skills.

One would expect all those who scored poorly to sign up for the remedial course. The University of Hong Kong is a demanding institution, and it is hard to do well in the social sciences without strong English skills.

Curiously, however, only the ones who believed in malleable intelligence expressed interest in the class. The students who believe that intelligence was a fixed trait were so concerned about appearing to be deficient that they preferred to stay at home. "Students who hold a fixed view of their intelligence care so much about looking smart that they act dumb," Dweck writes, "for what could be dumber than giving up a chance to learn something that is essential for your own success."

In a similar experiment, Dweck gave a class of preadolescent students a test filled with challenging problems. After they were finished, one group was praised for its effort and another group for its intelligence. Those praised for their intelligence were reluctant to tackle difficult tasks, and their performance on subsequent tests soon began to suffer.

Then Dweck asked the children to write a letter to students at another school, describing their experience in the study. She discovered something remarkable; forty per cent of those students who were praised for their intelligence lied about how they had scored on the test, adjusting their grade upward.

They weren't naturally deceptive people, and they weren't any less intelligent or self-confident than anyone else. They simply did what people do when they are immersed in an environment that celebrates them solely for their innate "talent." They began to define themselves by their description, and when times get tough and that self-image is threatened they have difficulty with the consequences. They will not take the remedial course. . . They'd sooner die.
-
Yes, every musician in or out of music school knows you have to practice like a little, red-tailed demon, talent alone gets you nowhere. But it is the self-encouragement of noticing our little victories, and how we talk with each other that make a difference. Are we saying, "Oh, you're so talented! You're going to go far." or "Wow! you really worked on your dynamics in that piece."?

You made it to the end of this article, you really showed determination. Keep up your good work!

What To Choose as Your One Genie Wish













This is what your parents should have chosen for you, and what you should for your son or daughter. . .

Confidence.

Occasionally, when I am in the middle of badgering my son, trying to change, inform, control, mold, teach him - I stop and ask what I am actually teaching him. Yes, I can defend every little thing I say as being important for him to learn, but. . .

What am I really teaching him?

What should I be teaching him? Well, I want him to grow into a confident person, a disciplined-on-his-own, compassionate, considerate (rather than bullying), thankful, happy, intuitive person who accomplishes great things.

If I stop and ask regarding any of these - am I teaching him these? Much of the traditional molding of a child is teaching him exactly the opposite, (you find it in both the classroom or home).

So, if I find a bottle washed up on the beach with a genie trapped inside, I would use my wish to give my son confidence.

And I can, just by putting less effort into molding him and letting him make his mistakes, work through his own challenges. Watch my son do his project exactly wrong and say nothing, or let him rebel a bit and say nothing.

There was an interview of a Japanese comedian we watched one summer in Tokyo. He was asked how he became such a success. The comedian said that when he was young, he was a very poor student. But if he would come home with a test with no answers right, his mother would exclaim, "Wow, anyone can get a 5 or 10, you got a perfect 0%. That's something." If he got one question right, she would say, "That's great, you got a 5%, let's put it on the refrigerator." No matter how poorly he did, his mother would praise his results.

The comedian says his mother gave him so much confidence that now when he gets up in front of a huge audience of people or performs on TV, he knows he will be funny and people will laugh.

I want that for my son. Don't you want that too? For yourself, your child?

There is a wonderful Jewish saying, "If you tell you child to study, he will grow up to be a person who tells his child to study. If he sees you studying, he will grow up loving to study."

We teach other lessons than what we think we teach.

(And by the way, in case some Genie is reading this essay, I hope I would get another wish or two for selfish, little me.)

A Perfectly Broken Performance









My son is learning the piano and bassoon, and last week we went to a dinner at a friends' Brooklyn home with about 15 people. Sage, at 14, is getting quite good and there was a piano in the dinning room, so he volunteered to play after the meal.

Sage sat down and began with the new Clementi piece his teacher gave him. He played with a handful of stutterings, restarting phrases he tripped on, as he tried to play this piece which he just began memorizing. But he didn't care. And it actually turned out well enough, then a nice applause followed.

My wife and I were in shock that he played the Clementi he hadn't quite mastered yet. And that he was totally unfazed by his rough playing, not unnerved or embarrassed at all.

I was even in more amazed when I realized my son had actually listened to me.

I had been explaining to Sage over and again that it's not the mistakes in a performance that matter but the quality of playing. And I had been telling him that when he performs to just enjoy it and not try to impress people with how talented he is or how perfect he has been been practicing. The performer is there to share his love of a piece with the audience, to move them with wonderful music.

He could have chosen to impress the room with his Debussy, but this Clementi Sonatina was what he was excited about, in the middle of learning. This was the music of his current heart.

I hope he carries this attitude all his life and in all his performances.

The Exotic Fish, My Flashlight
and Monkey Waiters










I remember my son, Sage, getting upset only three times when he was very young. And each of these times he was quite inconsolable.

Once, we were given tropical fish and a tank. I thought the tank needed one more so I took Sage to a pet store and he picked out a fish. We brought it back in the small plastic bag you get, but when I put our new pet in the tank with the other fish, Sage cried.

He wanted to eat it. My wife took him to Citarella's to get another fish that was for eating, but Sage remained insistent on the one he and I had picked out. Not even a beautiful pink snapper could entice him.

When I first saw the movie Tampopo, I thought it was funny but too exaggerated - no one obsesses about food like they show in the movie. Then I married a Japanese girl and slowly began to realize as I frequented Japan, the movie was an understatement. The Japanese have a different relationship to food than all others and while my son was half Japanese, his tongue genes were inherited entirely from his mother.

Another time, Sage cried was when we showed him a flashlight for the first time. We sat on the bed and he put the the flashlight to my ear and looked in the other one. He was upset because he couldn't see the light through my empty head. What do you say to someone who is disappointed about such a thing?

The third time was entirely my wife's fault. We were headed to Chinatown in Yokohama. She was trying to get him excited about going to a restaurant there called something like "Monkichi." Somehow he got it in his head that it was a monkey restaurant and imagined monkeys serving us Chinese food. With such expectations, how could anyone not be disappointed? Sage cried until he fell asleep at the restaurant and missed the meal.

Never underestimate the Japanese, however. Last year we saw in the newspaper that a restaurant in Tokyo has monkeys which bring you your food.

The Composer as Performer












"I am disturbed that Gosfield doesn't place the acquisition of musical (esp. instrumental) technique at the top of her list. Ever since it became acceptable to be a "accredited" composer and not a performing musician (thanks to universities which began issuing degrees in "composition"), "composers" have given us music which is not worth the paper it is written on.

Young composers should spend more time being performing musicians and less time hatching half-brained works which the public is invariably going to hate. I liken the contempory composer to a chef who conjures up recipes without ever having set foot in a kitchen.

Having listened to "Lightning Slingers and Dead Ringers" (2008) is it clear that Gosfield has a good command of the piano: young composers should aspire to the same level of proficiency. If your instrument is the computer, then please don't compose for acoustic instruments."
- Desabata. Hamburg, Germany

I deeply agree with the above idea that we composers need to aspire to master instruments.

Our greatest influence is the voice, from which in the tongue which we speak, we find our most subtle musical phrases. The next is the rhythm with which we move through life, our dance. After that are the instruments we play and lastly the ambient sounds of railroad trains, steam kettles and catbirds which inhabit our personal worlds. Somewhere in the mix, of course, are all the other compositions that have beautifully or obnoxiously invaded our ears. (My order here is quite arbitrary and may be skewed.)

The instruments we play and to the degree we master them, are frustrated by their limits, alter them, imagine them just beyond what they can do, and push and struggle against them for perfection, become our internal tools of composition. "Break your instrument," Casals.

Whether adjusting the pitch for cello notes higher or lower within a piece's harmonic and step considerations or getting a piano sound like other various instruments as did Horowitz, or altering the emphasis of notes as did Rachmaninoff for others' piano works, we learn.

Modern composers are generally strong in getting feedback from musicians as to how to stretch their instruments in new ways. If there is not first however, the deep, subtle connection to wonderful music playing of these or another instrument by the composer herself, the adjustment is only a parlor trick, an "Ah, ouuh, look at my cleverness," not something deeper.

The greatest composers were among the greatest performers. And I imagine, this will continue to be.

Advice to Young Composers











"The composers you admire didn’t get where they are by imitating others. Inspiration and influence are a far cry from imitation, so listen, observe, and then dig deeper to find your own music."
- Annie Gosfield

"I am not in any way a specialist in any kind of music. I am what might be called an ordinary, general listener. In that very limited capacity I would give one piece of advice to young musicians. Try to understand the kind of music which has given people, and still gives people real pleasure, true joy in listening. Understand then that in order to truly give something in music it might be necessary to speak in a vocabulary which most of mankind is capable of understanding and enjoying. Touch the heart and soul of human beings, and avoid empty technical achievements which even computers will not hum along with."
- Shalom Freedman, in response to an article by Annie Gosfield

In my way of thinking, the way to approach composing is to write beautiful music that touches the soul and uplifts it, encourages people to live a little higher up the chakra tree than before, be more caring and giving and thoughtful.

But composers want to make something new. They believe that this is a measure of having achieved a great stature. It is.

However, one should not aim at being original. That comes naturally from the process of being great at doing what has been done before. Doing it over and over and honing your talent until one day your work actually becomes something new without that being the goal.

I don't mind being old fashioned, Bach was considered old fashioned during the years he was writing. I would rather follow him.

Composers write at the level they are at in their personal lives, they relate to that level. The music of the rapper, for example is one of aggression and survival at any cost, down at the lowest chakra level called survival. That is where many people are comfortable and rap music affirms their feelings. Other musics fit people at other levels. Much of popular music is about the ego, getting things, especially getting (or wanting or the sadness of loosing, etc.) a romantic relationship, which is on a bit higher plane than "survival." The music of Bach is from a composer who, and for an audience which, are less comfortable living on that level and more comfortable with a more advanced spiritual level.

Experimental composers mostly relate to the world which is now sadly discordant, polluted, overpopulated and at war. Of course, this shows in their music. How to make them cringe? Tell them their work is sweet and warms you.

But it is more than the world situation which creates a "modern composer."

Their writing is often a reaction to too much exposure to mediocre and saccharine sweet classical performances, often the composer's own. When a composer who is middling at best on her instrument spends hours and hours, years and years, playing his guitar or cello and it doesn't hit the quality of beauty of say, Segovia or Casals (and in fact is boring), the composer turns to something else to erase the experience of that bland music which deadens the soul.

Having to sit through some very uninspired piano music last week sent me straight to my own piano to improvise extreme discord with some resolution. If the composer has sat at her piano for years of her own tedious practice and dull piano lessons, she needs to react to that.

If the composer tries to write the exercises at music school and finds that her work is flat and dead compared to what Faure or Schubert did in their school work when they wrote their Ave Marias, what is she going to do but try something else? If the composer, realizes somewhere in her heart of hearts that in writing traditional music, she will become at best, a workaday, mediocre composer, she will turn to the avant garde. That way it feels creative and exciting and the quality of her music can't be measured against Beethoven and Haydn.

Nadia Boulanger, the most influencial music teacher of the past century taught just about everyone: Quincy Jones, Gian Carlos Menotti, Ned Rorem, Walter Piston, Astor Piazzolla, Aaron Copeland, Burt Bacharach, Leondard Bernstein, Daniel Barenboim, John Adams, and two I would like to now contrast, George Gershwin and Philip Glass.

George Gershwin went to Ms. Boulanger to hone his compositional skills. She told him that while he might not understand all of technical aspects, she did not want to teach them to him because he had a quality that she did not want to ruin. She knew he would produce wonderful music.

Philip Glass also went to Ms. Boulanger in Paris to improve as a composer after studying first at Julliard. He said he wasn't very good at traditional composing so he turned to minimalism.

"Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it".
- C. S. Lewis

One Small Step Can Change Your Life



In Robert Maurer's book by the above title, he mentions how bestowing small rewards produces the best results.

He tells us, Japanese companies give tiny rewards for suggestions, maybe a pen for the best year's idea, as opposed to a common American practice of giving large cash rewards in proportion to the money their idea saves. Because of this, the ideas suggested are different and 90% in Japanese ideas are implemented while less 38% in American Companies. But these figures are misleading by themselves. It gets worse. You have to take into account how few employees in our country's companies offer suggestions while Japanese workers offer their companies a lot.

Last night my wife came home a bit shocked. She had some little-kid stickers. You know, "Good Job!," "Doin' Great," Super Work," that kind. Chie teaches at NYC's premier public high school, Stuyvesant. The students pride themselves on being sophisticated. She didn't expect them to gush over the stickers so much when she stuck them on their completed work sheets. These are the students who will be going into pre-med or pre-law in two years. One boy asked for it to be put on his folder instead of his paper so he could see it everyday and get inspired.

Chie ordered a slew of Pokemon stickers for the students last night.

If you think you smile to the cashier girl or a tiny tip to the young man who made your coffee this morning is unimportant, think again.

Part of why you appreciate a smaller award may be that you sense you actually deserve it. Another part may be that when the gift is small, you focus on the fact that the other person noticed you, cared.

On a similar note, I've seen that homeless beggars here in Manhattan are often more thankful for the fact that someone cared than the coins put in their paper cups.

Why Does Intuition Want to Spoil My Wonderfully Logical Plans?











Let's say you want to be a rich and famous novelist.

You have it all planned out:

1. get a writing job at the local newspaper;
2. come up with a brilliant story idea;
3. write novel;
4. find an agent who gets your book published;
5. tour the country for signings;
6. have novel made into blockbuster movie;
7. win Nobel Prize for literature;
8. retire to the South of France.

You get step one and two checked off. Great!

Then one balmy Tuesday in October comes along. Your "Intuition?" tells you to call in sick and enjoy some golf. You call your friend Alfie and meet him at the North Fork Country Club. Your boss runs into you at the 19th hole and you get fired from your terrific job at the Suffolk Times.

Back to step zero.

Now, the only lousy work you can find is scraping barnacles off boat bottoms at the Greenport Yacht and Shipbuilding Company. You get depressed as the weeks drag by.

Then you start noticing that the strange characters who work with you each have their interesting quirks and histories. Your novel starts to percolate. You can't wait to get home each night and type away. And Danny, the old man who's been painting the names on yachts, his daughter is a top literary agent. You meet her at her Danny's retirement party and she takes interest in your writing.

Your logical mind says, "Well, why didn't you tell me that we were supposed to write about the characters in the shipyard? And that you were planning to meet an agent through one of them?"

"Why?"

Well, your intuition isn't interested in wasting time talking to your logical mind. It speaks a different language. I haven't figured out if its Medieval French or Pre-Cyrillic Russian, but I know it's something I can't translate just yet.

Besides, your intuition only deals with the next step. It only will tell you the next thing to do.

This is important, this is why I actually wrote this entry. Your intuition only deals with the next step. It will only tell you the very next thing to do and will sometimes wait years until you do it.

It won't not nag and hound you like your mother did when you were 14, to clean up your room. It will just whisper. Sometimes just once and if you don't listen, you miss out, you file the thought away, you forget about it. Or if you keep pestering your inner feelings instead of taking the next small step, you might get to hear the wrong answer you wanted to hear all along.

If you want to hear your intuition, you need to blindly take the step it is telling you. Afterwards, you may stumble into what to do after that, or your intuition may speak to you again.

I like to think of life as a maze. Your logical mind tells you that you want to go a certain way. It knows the cheese you want is to the north. But you will sometimes will have to go east or southwest as you follow the maze path. You have to if you want to eventually get to your goal, your cheese at the end of the maze.

It can be frustrating, your mind is shouting "the cheese is thataway" and your gut is yelling, "I don't care, this is the next step in the maze." They can sound be like two brothers, 8 and 9, fighting over that last jelly doughnut.

And it takes courage - what if your gut feeling is wrong?

At one point in my life, I studied from Stuart Wilde. He said that, "Your logical thinking isn't right all the time, so don't expect you intuition to be either." You will make some mistakes. When you follow you intuition, do your taxes, or paint the name on a boat, you will make mastakes.

It will take practice and mistakes to know when it really is your intuition speaking.

I don't like writing articles like this for one reason. Too much theory, too much thinking. All the words in 180 books can matter less than one bumbling, tiny attempt to do something. My gentle reader, just make some small, clumsy attempt to do what your gut is saying and I will feel today's writing was worth it.

(Oh, man! I was going to have oatmeal for breakfast. Now that I wrote about jelly doughnuts, It ain't gonna happen.)

A Chinese Yom Kippur?



Well, there is a Chinese New Year and a Jewish New Year. This year I had a Chinese Yom Kippur.

Sort of. . .

There is an old Chinese New Year custom is to go out to the street and break one of your dinner plates. Any bad luck which was slated for coming year is transferred to this loss of a plate.

Now, when the Jewish new year starts, G-d pencils in what will be allotted you for that year - marriage, how much money you will make, a broken foot, a trip to The Great Wall of China.

But He gives you a second chance. If you get nervous and feel that things might not go too well in the next 12 months, you can be comforted in knowing this. . . He watches to see if you made changes in yourself during the few days after the new year. If you did, He gets out his eraser and then pens in your new destiny on the 10th day, Yom Kippur. You get a new this year's karma.

The day before Yom Kippur, my desk computer died. I was upset and then realized, well it is the new year and I probably deserved worse in this coming year so this is a kindness, a softening of my karma sentence.

Years ago, a rabbi told me that when you repent, G-d may lessen the serious consequences of your wrong actions. He said, "Maybe instead, a cup of coffee you buy will be cold" or maybe your computer will break like a dropped dish.

My Cello













My meditation teacher of years ago told us that when you meditate with a question the answer may not come to you then, but rather the next day. You might be walking down the street and what's written on the side of the truck that almost ran you down might tell you the answer. Or you might be just sitting having coffee and the answer comes. You'll know. The answer is usually so simple and obvious, you might want to laugh at yourself for missing it before.

For some months I had a real problem regarding my cello. The other day I briefly thought on it before meditating and expected no solution and found none then. I forgot about it until the next day when the solution just slipped into my mind. It was so simple and obvious. Duh!

And when I actually followed through on this, the solution was severely better than I thought it would be. My wife was a bit shocked with the results and my son impressed also, (though until now I didn't mention the meditation to anyone).

Rocky III, Err... I Mean The Three Rockys



I watched Rocky III for the first time some nights ago. The music running through the film was "Eye of the Tiger" by the rock group, Survivor, a great choice.

The "Eye of the Tiger" is an interesting concept in martial arts. It is when a fighter goes to the next level of perception while in the ring. His view shifts from the view of fighting someone across from him to a birds-eye view. The fighter looks down at both himself and his opponent. It is as if you were playing a video game and your view point changed to over your head.

But the movie didn't deal with the actual point-of-view shift. I first read of the phenomenon when the New York Times covered a scientific study of it over a decade ago.

What the study didn't say was how it comes about.

Enter Charlie Campanelli, the boxer. He was, when I met him, in his 90's and had been for many years both retired and a consultant to all the big name boxers. He was what your would call "A real character" and he looked exactly like Rocky's trainer, played by Burgess Meredith, maybe just older and somehow harder, rock like.

He would preach to Muhammed Ali, or some other boxer, not to look at the opponent's hands. Look at his feet. You can't throw a decent left punch unless your left foot starts to the rear. Of course, same with the right.

I realized that when you do this, you start to shift your viewpoint to overhead.

Everyone listened to Mr. Campanelli except for one boxer, Rocky Marciano. He didn't have to. He was so enormously strong that he would just punch the opponents arms until that opponent couldn't hold them up any more to defend himself. Then came the knockout.

How strong was Marciano? Well, to illustrate. It takes a lot of energy out of you to throw punches and it will tire you out. Ali defeated the hard punching Foreman by his rope-a-dope method of leaning on the ropes and letting Foreman punch at his body for four bells. Then Ali knocked out the tired Foreman in the fifth.

Marciano must have been strong. Charlie Campanelli said he was. Campanelli also said some other interesting things when my friend Howie asked him at two different times, "Who's the greatest fighter in the world?"

The first time he said that the greatest fighter was someone who never stepped into the ring. Yoda said the flip of the coin with "Great Warrior... Wars don't make one great." (I just quoted Yoda?)

The second time he chided Howie, "You can't tell how strong someone is by looking at him. He could be the world's greatest fighter."

Well, I didn't think so. He was pointing at this skinny guy, me. But Campanelli was right, you can't tell.

If you were counting, what happened to the third Rocky in my title? Someone once sent me a postcard of Rocky and Bullwinkle. It was funny, Stallone and Bullwinkle. I'll leave you with that.

What I Write



Three times in these past few days, I was asked what I wrote. And I didn't have an good answer.

Now, If someone button-holes me and wants to know, I will say "Potatoes."

I guess you could say I write about potatoes as much as anything.

I write to make magical rings and dragons as real as unwashed potatoes.

I write to make wooden chairs and a sack of potatoes as interesting as what the last ice dragon is hiding in her broken hand.

I write to show how the smallest acts (like sweeping the floor and peeling some potatoes for a poor, old neighbor) can change the history of nations.

I grew up surrounded by potato farms and beaches. It's good for a writer to have a deep sense of the common, muddy world before he goes and tries to make his own paper world or tries to explain the complexities of the one we live in.

There is a certain writer I admire because she wanted to describe what a certain poison tasted like, so. . . she tasted a bit. As a writer you need to know this, or what rotting potatoes smell like, or what the hundred different night noises in Harlem mean.

The easiest beast to draw is a fantastical one, like a dragon, rather than, say a horse. We have a Da Vinci drawing of a dragon, and it is terrific study because his idea was to patch together different real animal parts to make a new whole, a dragon. The imagined, if done well, is not something new, but a delicious variation of the mundane.

You have to first know your common russets and yellow finns, whether you write of them for a cookbook or you tell a tale of gnomes sneaking off with enchanted tubers. You have to know how your common goat and lion are sinewed together to create a dragon real as that bowl of steaming, buttered potatoes with dill sitting on the table before you.

Well, I don't actually write much about potatoes. But I write about potatoes, if you get my drift.

Missing One House Cat



Last month, we would occassionaly see this small creature run across the floor. And for weeks, when I woke up, I would have to light a candle, open doors and windows and wait for the little fellow's smell to disapate.

We were afraid. Would he (she?) bite? Would the smell get worse, what of diseases? Would he invite his in-laws and cousins to move in?

I finally had to get rid of the rat. I went to the hardware store on Broadway and bought some sticky traps and a snap traps. I was reluctant because I really didn't want to hurt it. If I bought a humane trap, the animal control people would kill it anyway.

A house cat could have helped, but my wife has a strong allergy.

In the store, when I was standing in the aisle trying to decide between sticky traps and snap traps a young woman stopped by me and looked at me. I said that we have a rat and have to get rid of it. She said, "Do you have to kill it?"

I said the kitchen stunk from it and it could bring disease.

"Well," she replied, "It is just one rat and there are millions of them."

"No," I replied, "It's a creature and it has a life and feelings. I wish I didn't have to kill it."

When I went home and set the traps, I was still reluctant so I said to the rat, (though I was guessing it wasn't nearby), "Mr. rat, I don't want to kill you. Look, I am setting some traps, please go live somewhere else."

I checked the traps the next morning and they were untouched. But there was no smell either. I figured he would return the next morning. But no, It has been six weeks and he is gone.

Afterwards, I was reminded of a story I read decades ago from the Babylonian Talmud about a rabbi and nest of mice.

Rabbi Yehuda HaNassi was a perfect tzaddik, yet he suffered great pain. How did it begin? Through a deed of his. He was walking through the marketplace when a calf being led to the slaughter ran to him and hid under his cloak. He told the calf, "Go. For this you were created."

That is when his troubles began. An angel who witnessed the incident argued that since Rabbi Yehuda HaNassi had no compassion for an innocent animal's suffering, why shouldn't he have some suffering too.

And it ended through another deed. The rabbi's maid was sweeping the floor and found a nest of mice beneath the boards. She began to sweep them away, when he stopped her. "It is written," he said, "that His compassion is upon all of His works." That is when his suffering ceased.

My "plague of rodent" ended when I felt sorry for him. I wish all our problems could be solved so easily.

Yesterday, I had another dilema with an animal. Outside Barnes and Noble, some animal shelter had puppies and kittens up for adoption and I fell for a felix domesticus. I asked my wife if there was no way we could get it. My wife found him cute too, but unfortunately... her allergy. The answer was no.

I stayed out until dinner and when I returned, I found a large cat lying against our door and mewing plaintively.

I didn't want to disturb the cat and went to knock on the door of a new neighbor to see if it was their pet. Then I heard people calling and found out the cat belonged to apartment directly above us and wanted to get back home but couldn't figure out the right floor.

But her timing was impeccible.

The Worth of a Writer



We writers can make this mistake - valuing our writing in how many pages we finish. Beat this...

"Barn burnt down, now I can see the moon."
- Masahide

Or this tiny story from a conversation with the Japanese lady who sat next to me at Lynn Harrell's concert on Saturday (he is a great cellist and my teacher's teacher)...

"My one daugher played the violin and the other played the cello, the best was my son on the violin. But my son became too busy for the violin when he went into medical engineering. He told me that he felt his identity was gone. He had time to build a Model T Ford from scratch, but the violin takes a different kind of effort."

Harrell talked about Shubert before his last encore that night...

"When he was one of the pallbearers at Beethoven's funeral, little did Shubert know that he would only have a year to reign over classical music. He died the next year at only 31. In that year, he wrote great music, but if he only wrote this one little piece, it would have been enough..."

Don't number words, my friend.

The Owners of the Two Half Chickens



I have just one small story from when my family was in the old country. And while one small story does not make much of anything (anymore than one chicken bone in water makes a soup), it means a lot to me because it is something that is mine, the oldest thing that I know that is part of what made me, me.

• The old country is Poland. I had only one grandmother. One grandmother and one Bachi. My father's mother who lived with us in my early years was Bachi to me (and even her children called her that). When my cousin Barbara couldn't pronounce Babchi, meaning grandma in Polish, our Babchi's middle b was dropped and she came to be called Bachi, which now to me is also kiss in Italian. It just meant my dad's mom then. I miss my Bachi, but after maybe thirty years, I can still stop and let myself remember her specific kisses, the touch, her smell. It's funny the things that are chosen for us to remember. And I think I could still pick her hands and thin arms out of a lineup. This is her story I now tell, Connie's. To her friends, she was Connie.

Connie and her neighbor in the village pooled their few kopecks together and bought a chicken. I don't know what kind or if they gave it a name. They would take turns with the egg their chicken would lay most mornings. The neighbor would get it one day, Connie the next.

Once, for almost two weeks, the were no eggs and the neighbor kept accusing Connie of sneaking all the eggs for herself. Connie protested her innocence. Then chicken started laying again but the bitterness of the owners of the two half chickens didn't abate.

Soon after the hen was seen with a clutch of little chicks trailing her. The mystery was solved and the neighbor bought a dozen eggs for Connie as an apology.

I apologise that I have no more stories from the old country. Maybe that's why I read so hungrily the Issac Baschevis Singer stories of Poland. My wife and I have especially loved for many years his stories of the inhabitants of Chelm, who, in all his humorous stories of them, were schelmiels, wonderful fools.

A couple weeks ago my wife found out that two of her favorite students had ancestors who hailed from Chem. We had thought it was a mythical place. Now we are delighted that somewhere in Poland, our favorite old world village actually existed and maybe still does.

I have heard of immigrants who kept keys to their old country homes or something else, candlesticks maybe, and then they passed them down to their children. I am not jealous of them, I have this. A good story is one of the best things to have.

Hiroshima

Two weeks ago my thirteen year old son visited Hiroshima for the first time. The same day he arrived there by Shinkansen train from Tokyo, I saw a beautiful hardcover book on a street vendor's table for only four dollars. It was John Hershey's Hiroshima, which was one of the first serious books, the first I remember, that I read. I borrowed it from the local Cutchogue library. I have looked over many used books in stores and on the street over the years and would have noticed this volume before. But not until that day did I see it.

I am quite skeptical when it comes to coincidences and intuition, but these things seem to occur at an interesting frequency. I saw another book last week about how we overestimate the importance of coincidences with our minds. I believe we do. Yet there must be something going on even though I was trained by my Christian upbringing to believe in these things in the abstract but not live among them.

After years of schooling where I was told to not speak when I wanted; not eat when I felt like it; wait when I felt the need to relieve myself in the rest room; not to play or socialize when I felt like it; to concentrate when I wanted to rest; to do math when I felt like doing art; to read science when I wanted to study math; to be with dull, bitter teachers I wanted to get away from. . . I, like most Americans, learned to shut up what I felt inside.

Tell me, if you refuse to go the bathroom when your insides scream 'I have to go now,' how are you going to hear a more subtle, quiet message of intuition? I was trained to be counterintuitive for years and years.

Now, I don't know why I found Hershey's book when I did. I don't have to know but I can enjoy the event.

Why intuition you say, I thought you were talking about coincidence. Because intuition is to me, when you listen to your inner self, and some coincidence follows. Though you don't always have to sit down for 45 minutes and ask hmmmm. . . what are you saying, Miss Inner Self? Though sometimes that is what you might want to do.

I recently found out that John Hershey wrote another interesting small book called A Single Pebble, a story of an American engineer who travels the Yangtze to find places to put dams. Now, 50 years later, it is even more poignant with the the damming they are doing to that river. But while this is a touching, tender story, there is another story about Hiroshima and a single pebble that I would like to share, a true story.

A boy and his friends, perhaps it was his sister, were walking in Hiroshima near the end of the war and the boy stopped to pick up a small stone that caught his eye. There was a brilliant flash of light which burnt his friends, but the boy was shielded by a low cement wall as he bent down for his stone; and he lived.

(Atomic bombs can be configured to do different types of damage, only killing people and having the radiation dissipate quickly or giving off little radiation but doing much physical, heat damage or producing radiation that will stay a long time like in Chernobyl. So that is why this is possible.)

I collect stories of stones. One of the important hidden motifs of the Hebrew Scriptures is that of the Even Shetiah, the moving stone. If you have any stone stories, please share them with me.

And the lantern boats in the picture are sailed on the Hiroshima water each summer to not forget the tragedy and perhaps, help deal with it.

I don't think my son was there for the lantern boats but maybe one day he and I will go see them together. For me it will be complicated, my father was a navigator on an airplane which bombed Japan, though he was not on the Enola Gay, the one that bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki; my wife's parents were in Tokyo at the time, being bombed by planes with conventional bombs.

If I do make it, I will look for a stone to carry in my pocket.

The Perfect Sunday Morning Service

As a musician, I love playing both carefully composed works and my improvisations; I love playing squirreled away within my own apartment or out in the wide world.

In central park there are three large lawns : the Sheep Meadow where, years ago, sheep actually kept the grass short; the Great Lawn where Simon and Garfunkle, the N.Y. Philharmonic and many other famous groups perform; and the North Field at whose edge I sat and played recorder this Sunday morning, watching the first stray players trickle onto the baseball fields.

I moved to the handball courts when my hill was taken over by a cacophony of dog owners, the courts just a few strides away. Stepping on the courts, I remembered practicing tennis here on another morning last year with two young raccoons shyly peering out of the near garbage can as my audience.

At the court, I played again but stopped when I thought I heard church bells. It took me a moment to realize what was happening. In the middle court there is a high chain link fence dividing two lines of courts and when I played my recorder there, the fence resonated. The actual sound was like the fuzzy after-peal of church bells sans the percussive knock or a loud glass harmonica.

If I have to attend a Sunday morning worship service, this is how I like it: Bach's music and improvised tunes, soft pealing sounds in the background, gorgeous woodsy setting, no preaching, no husband or kids dragged there when they'd rather be still under the covers or getting ready for the beach.

I have to report that 100% of the congregants (me, the only one) were thrilled to be attending.

I mentioned "Bach's music and improvised tunes." Of interesting musical note, I read a book on Bach's Art of the Fugue yesterday. It mentioned that while Bach improvised freely, when he then took those improvisations to paper, he would then adjust them to musically flawless, technically correct works.

This goes along with my thinking that music writing is a two part process, the first part being a freely created tune, often inspired by half remembered melodies now with new twists; infused the remembered rhythmic feel of a dance, a heartbeat; animated by birdsong (which that morning I heard and played with); laughter, which I personally believe (though I never heard anyone else say this), was the persistent basis of Mozart's melodies; or in one case (Harold Arlen, "Over the Rainbow"), kindled by the whistling for his dog.

The second part being the sometimes wonderful developments, patterns and clever teasings reworked into the piece.

In a review last week in the NY Times, Bernard Holland explained...

Countries with powerful popular cultures don’t produce many fugues. Abstraction and formal design have a hard time competing with musical impulses that seem to grow out of the ground, especially when the country is Spain and the melding of European and North African music remains so strong.

Folk cultures and popular music genres have no time for fugues, their musicians are busy playing melodies. Makes sense.

Bach, spent more of his energy on development, borrowing (stealing away for us?) tunes he found, including one song from Martin Luther (for which arrangement, two days ago, my son just finished studying the four recorder parts, SATB). "Serious" composers develop songs they find. Aaron Copeland's famously took the Shaker's It's a Joy to Be Simple and did hardly anything to it.

Of course, composers do love to make their own tunes. When improvising, I find myself focusing on a melody and its variations, while at the same time focusing on its development, progression and its interweaving with other melodies. It's like having two parts of your brain converse with each other, each speaking at the same time and it's you in each case being the speaker and listener.

When I do this, I see that multitasking the brain is deliciously addicting and must reluctantly admit I can't criticize my son for playing two demanding video games (and typing away like a demon to talk to other online gameplayers) at once, while watching a movie on the screen and listening to music, and researching stuff on the internet in between. I'd like to criticize but I can't.

But no matter how complicated the composition gets, its the tune, that short story of what happens to notes and harmonies, that matters.

People want to hear pretty, unforced melodies which feel like they grew out of the ground, whether played by popular musicians or reworked in classical style; whether they were created centuries ago like Greensleeves or improvised on the spot; in a concert hall or in a chance encounter in a park.

A pretty tune is like an cute girl. You want to spend time with her.

Pineapple triplets

Dear reader, I hope this story of my childlike attempts will encourage you even if you are not studying the cello as I am.

I want to tell you about Pineapple Triplets. First off, musical triplets are fitting in three notes where you would normally count two notes.

The easiest way to do triplets was suggested in Arnold Steinhardt's book, Violin Dreams...

When playing a whole note, play it to the word... Pear.
When playing a half note, play it to the word... Ap ple.
When playing a quarter note, say to yourself... Wa ter mel on.
And what is the word for triplets?... Pine ap ple.

Each syllable so easily directs one to play one of the notes. It's like having a little conductor in the brain, (Hormunculous' cousin?).

I was having trouble reading through some Scriabin (And as I am meeting with his great-grandson, the pianist, Elisha Abas, felt I should be playing a bit of the composer's music).

The music piece has dotted triplets (wouldn't it be neater if it was spelled trippplets?). And dotted triplets are more complicated than triplets; making one of normal length; one, half-length; and one triplet of one and a half-length.

Yesterday, I had asked my teacher to play the Scriabin through and then forgot what it sounded like this evening. She additionally told me how to approach the dotted triplets, explaining the process of learning to play them accurately: get the regular triplets down first, then adjust them.

But when I sat down to practice, I remembered Pear, apple, pineapple, watermelon.

I found I could easily lengthen and shorten the appropriate syllables in Pineapple once I got Pine ap ple into my head, I could adjust as my teacher said. But I didn't even have to play them or think them through as regular triplets first, they just easily came out perfect.

It was so easy and struggle-less. It was like playing the simplest tune.

Now I know why I was trying to convince my wife to buy a pineapple earlier in the day, when we went shopping, a purchase I have made three or four times in my entire life...

My inner self was trying to get me to remember about and use pineapple triplets.

And that pineapple tastes great, ask my son.

photo links:
willtooke
RaeA
jwlphotography

A Quality of Laughter

I am thinking of taking a yoga class. And yoga is not my cup of tea; if I find out it will take too much time to get there or it's at an inconvenient time, forget it.

What is attracting me to this yoga class is that it's laughing yoga; and besides being the best medicine, it sounds like fun. Doesn't it?

Years ago, I worked at the farm in eastern Long Island. It was just behind our house; I could just roll out of bed and be there. At the farm's fruit stand this one summer, worked a girl who was quite cute. She had a short haircut, dark eyes and an unbelievably warm, inviting laugh.

When I told her how much I liked her laugh, she told me that I should hear her sister.

The summer passed, the fruit season ended and when the other "summer people" left, she moved to Vermont to live with her laughing sister.

Well, the story could have ended here but I decided to take a car trip to see her, my longest then except for the one to Buffalo and Niagara Falls to see my brother in college.

I felt like the racing car hero in A Man and a Woman who drove across France to spend a short night with his love. It was winter, there was snow, I drove on highways voted the most scenic in America. The trip was a joy.

Beside having a great time in Vermont, I met the sister and heard her laugh. It was shear beauty. One of her college professors had told her she laughed chromatically. Yes, it hit half notes up and down with gentle timbre. I wish you could hear it, just once. Clean as a child laughing on a lazy afternoon, it was.

In a couple days my laugh had changed too. It was like picking up an accent. But I returned home and after a while, like a borrowed Southern drawl on Brooklyn streets, my quality of laughter melted away.

Now, if the laughing sister were teaching this yoga class, or even in it, I would so sign up, even if it were way up in Vermont. I want to laugh like that again. click these photos to visit their home sites.

(The photo of the pretty, young woman is not the girl I knew but a stunt double).

A Joyful, Noisy Thursday

Yesterday, there were two new entries to my son's calendar.

He had heard a car alarm repeating "Thursday, Thursday." (Yes, it was Thursday.)

Windshield wipers, washing mashines, and old refrigerators seem to whisper in our language and dialect, occasionally, deliciously. This was Sage's first encounter with"speaking machines" and it had made me wonder at the time, why he remained blankly on the top step of his cello teacher's brownstone instead of following me in.

Later inside, it happened to be the first time he played a double stop on the cello (a chord, two notes at once). Usually I don't pen-in these such small, delicate events, rather days like when he learned to ride a bike or when he first arrived in Tokyo and met his grandmother there.

I keep track of new things that pop up in Sage's life and put them in calendar form. A decade from now, when he graduates college (or whatever), I'll present the calendar to him and then each January of his life he can see that the 3rd was his first piano recital and each February, that the 27th was when he met a close friend. I hope this will later make for a life of mini-celebrations and smiles.

kriegs' photostream

Practicing the Cello

My cello teacher tells me over and again that it is most important to notice what we are doing when we play a scale, a movement, an exercise.

She asks me to put into precise words what I was trying to do throughout the playing and what I noticed in my playing. Did I hold down my first and second fingers as I played the top C? Did I prepare and start to lift my hand as I played F and G on the A string as I moved higher in the scale? Were my dotted timings correct, my equal notes steady or was I subconsciously imitating the rubato of Casals whom I heard play the piece many times? Being specific in noticing is very hard for me but it is the way of getting better at the cello. The only way.

In the TV show, Psych, we see flashbacks each week to the protagonist's childhood. His father asks him to close his eyes and recall the very minor details around them. In this way, the son gradually learns to notice. Noticing takes work.

And when we take care to notice in our discipline, be it yoga or cello, knitting or sweeping the floor, we begin to fall into the practice of noticing more in our daily lives.

simone_schot's photostream

My Magical Owl

This afternoon, the sky was waiting for snow. Now I finally hear ice plinks begin as I start to write at 2 this morning. I hear that quiet sound I like, of slow cars moving on the wet road. I am not trying to be poetic, just simply writing of my surroundings as I have woken and found myself here - unchanged by an overnight, Kafaesk, metamorphosis; not mesmerized away by a novel; still here in Manhattan, not having suddenly remembered that, Oh, yeah, I flew in to Tokyo last night; and not still dreaming another landscape. But if I may wax just once, Here I, transported by the magic carpet to nowhere else, am. (Ah, the very definition of meditation - though I am currently bumbling through the apartment in the beta state of workaday thinking.)

This afternoon, (back to the point of this entry), I needed to get out of the house a bit and so headed across Central Park toward the Met Museum. I always (always, near to the point of an Adrian Monk obsession) take a certain route when I get to an edge of the Jackie O. Reservoir. I take the jogging path along side the water going toward the museum and come back home by way of the Great Lawn and the pinetum.

This afternoon, I had a feeling I wanted to leave for the museum the other way, by the Great Lawn. It wasn't a strong feeling, I just wanted to take the road "usually" not taken. It was as simple as when you want a glass of water and then you notice yourself automatically getting one. But there must have been some resistance because I found myself needing to say out loud, I want to go the other way today. And so, I went.

There was a man with a large telescope in the pinetum. It was pointing to the sky, and I guessed he was bird watching but the angle looked just too high for the top of the fir trees in the fore. I wondered if he was looking at something in the sky? I had to ask, he said he was looking at an owl. We got to talking about whether there were actually 60 million birdwatchers in the country as I had read just yesterday and he took me a few steps to the other side of the copse where his wife was photographing and the man positioned his tripoded telescope for me to see one of the two long-eared owls treed there.

This afternoon was the first time I saw an owl in the wild even though I grew up not in Manhattan, but wandering field and wood, even taking foxes, rabbits, a turtle and a skunk as pets.

Seeing my first feral owl let me know that I had been connecting to the Life Force, to the greater world. Certainly, we all want these acknowledgments that our gut feelings are spot on, we want these magic owls. But even more is the connection we tangibly have when we stop and ask, How do I feel inside.

Please ask now. Reading this was just a prelude. Your feelings don't have to be profound, they might be just quietly hooting to you, Relax or Get moving. Then go out and try to keep connected as you move about you life. If later you happen to want to buy a magazine you never bought before or take a different route on your way home from grocery shopping? Why not?

And let me know what happens, if you will... TheAncientSounds@Gmail.com.

Hoot, hoot.

From my kitchen window, the road now and the car tops are white, and the plinking of icy snow keeps me company as my family sleeps.

photo by Dave Schreier on flickr.

Coincidental Groceries

I went to buy a chicken for dinner and remembered what a teacher had said years ago, When you go to the bank, don't stop off and pick up your laundry or pop in the record store, just go straight there, and your determination will grow stronger (paraphrased).

I listened and was not be distracted (as was my usual wont) along the way, not by the bookstore or other interesting stores. I went straight to buy for dinner. (Mission accomplished!)

Coming back, I stepped right beside a close friend and we were able to talk as we continued on. (This being unusual in that neither of us had a child in tow and so we could leisurely converse.)

Then I went to Gary Null's Whole Foods and right there was my wife, returning from her work, checking out groceries and I was able to help her carry them home, (this, the first time we met unpurposefully in the 15 years we have known each other).

I guess I was just where I should have been. Perfect Timing, ten minutes later and I would have missed the coincidental meetings. But it's the feeling you get, not the coincidences, which let you know things are as the should be. That palpable connection to the life force. And the term was not coined by George Lucas, I've noticed that Rashi used it in the middle ages, though in Old French.

To begin to feel more connected, just ask now, What do you notice within? And remember, gentle reader, it's the attempt, the asking, not what you call results that matters most of all.

Image by © JLP/Deimos/zefa/Corbis

Sonnata for Tenor Blockflote and Steam Radiator

Yesterday, got my son laughing when I played the recorder and incorporated the steam radiator's soft, plaintive D into the song. The quite recorder-like radiator played somewhat regularly every 20 seconds, sometimes with and extra toot or two.

He also drew a map of the moon earlier in the day and after learning how to draw a perfect circle with his thumb as a compass point. There are few things poetic as the name places of our Moon... the Ocean of Storms, the Seas of Tranquility and Serenity, Crater Tycho (I love the story of when Tycho Brahe was walking home one night and realized a new star had formed, he was so intimate with the dark sky), the Sea of Crises, the Ocean of Fecundity, the Lake of Sleep, the Sea of Nectar (never heard of these last two till now) and the Sea of Cold. My favorite is the Sea of Rains. Ah, yes, and the Dark Side. The homeschooling dad in me gives you your first question of the day, where was the Apollo 11 landing?

In the Museum of Natural History nearby, there is a display which shows how scientists believe the moon was wayward planet which bumped into earth (I don't know, it was before I was born) and it shattered then reformed as the moon. In that same little exhibition room is a small rock you could comfortably carry in your pocket. I guess it came from a meteor and you can touch it. It is older than the earth. That is my favorite part of the museum.

I guess homeschooling can be fun, though it is workety-work just to be around your kid and providing quality attention/guidance all the time then staying up all night to write music or whatever. Today we get to go to our favorite cheep-o Japanese restaurant in midtown, Zhia (really wrong spelling, I know), and go skating behind the 42nd street library in gorgeous Bryant Park. Here's the last question of the day, what are the names of the two famous lions outside the front of that library?


Frank Lynch
LeggNet

Playing the Piano Like a Pianist

Certain things were impossible, others I just wish they had been. Then they wouldn't have happened.

I would have said that teaching my son, Sage, to play the piano "wonderfully" within an hour would have been impossible, but it happened and the un-parental part of me wishes it had been impossible. Yes, I am glad o' the resultants, but it was a frozen moment and peppered with beggings for him to consider quitting piano. He wanted to just play the notes not music and sounded as bad as most "talented" young pianists. (He is now a version 12.5 kid and has been at the keyboard now for two years plus a little.)

Sage did not want to adjust his hand/finger/wrist position/movements and play from the solar plexus. While dealing with his ego/crying/sheer anger and deeply analyzing myself as to my pushing him for my own paternal motives (the quote, paraphrased, comes to mind, that "The most important influence of childhood is what our parents did not achieve") and trying to figure out as quick as that instant-satori moment of Zen - what the heck were the exact, intricate changes he must make and how to communicate them? All this from me, who incorporates things musical then erases within, all trace of how they got there and why to do things so. Then afterwards, the playing feels intuitive, instinctive for me. And I knew the window of teaching him this was very small or he would have just closed off. Well, I did it.

It was like that scene in Star Wars, A New Hope where Obi Wan on board the first death star memorizes the mappings of that death star and how to disable its tractor beams at speed-reading speed. My mind raced.

Once I figured out his very specific needs it was sort of easy. I won't go into the details of the motions, positions and concerts of ebows, fingers and wrists - your eyes would just glaze over.

But once shown he played well, completely differently. And the actual physical teaching took only twenty minutes or so. And yes, I also know it will take some gentle reinforcement over time to make all this natural and habitual.

The next day my wife played hooky from school and heard Sage practice from the other room and wondered at the change - very noticeable. Then she came in to see him and later told me that he now looks like a pianist when he plays.

After Sage's two years of piano lessons, this is the second time I actually got involved. My wife said that this help is why, when if you come from a musician's family, it's a big advantage for learning music. but its also the learning from just noticing without knowing they are noticing how the musician parents do subtle things. His teacher is terrific for him (yes, most of the time parents think their child's music teacher is the greatest when the teacher might not be so, true especially for unmusician parents), but he needed a different help here. Yeah, I'm tooting my own English horn, but hey, I am convalescing from the lesson and still trying to deal with the aftershocks yet 36 hours later the quake.


The whole experience reminds me of the man who designed the giant, giant turbines for a dam (was it the Hoover?) and they stopped moving. He was called in to consult in the great emergency. He walked around and looked at the situation, picked up a sledge hammer and went to one of the turbines. THWACK. It groaned and fidgeted and then then hummed full force, starting the others with it. They thanked him but two weeks later had to call him up angrily at the $10,000 bill, which in today's money is probably like above 10 million dollars. Where did he get the nerve to charge $10,000 for just hitting the turbine with a sledge hammer? He capitulated by saying he would send them another bill. A week later they received the second bill, this time itemized... Hitting the turbine with a sledge, $10; knowing where to hit it, $9,990.

Sometimes it takes just a small adjustment but you have to be very precise and knowledgeable.

Please remember, this was for Sage's specific habitual technique adjustments and for his specific hands, everyone's hands are unique (though there are some very basic principles here). Maybe I feel a little better after my rant. It is 2.40 AM here in New York time, no wait, now that the pictures are in, 3.15.

photo links:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jamie_marie/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/arteunporro/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/residae/

Which Craft?

Several months ago, I was wondering where to focus my work and asked The Divine (no, not Bette M., the other One), what I should be doing now (other than raising my son and working on myself), you know, what I should be doing in the world, workwise. My music, my writing, seemed impractical, (how many actually mint decent gold coins at these)?

I didn't expect a clear answer but I did get two. Later that day in a bookstore, a bit anxious, I primed the pump and drew out one card from The Kabbalah Deck. That's just not something I do, cards or tea leaves (too hokus-pokus for me), but, hey, I just plucked out a card. Samech. I remembered the story of how Samech asked Ha Shem to be the first letter in Torah but was told it needed to keep doing the job it had been doing, supporting the poor. No, another, less busy letter would be chosen.

Unbeliever, I, looked up my letter-card in the booklet which came with the deck. Here's the part that spoke to me...

In this context, the early Hasidim prized the worth of stories - sipurim (whose Hebrew word begins with 'Samech') - to nourish the soul and give us a greater appreciation for the holiness existing around us. Such leaders as Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav cherished storytelling as a valuable way to arouse people from their inner slumber.

I didn't think the booklet would actually encourage something like story writing.

The next day, I found myself walking with my son and telling him embellished funny stories. He turned to me, Dad, you should be a writer.

I'm writing this story down here because when I write about things like being answered by The Divine, I'm focusing on them. Then maybe I'll start to notice them a little better when they are happening around me the next time.

To me there is a fine line between being closed minded and reading too much into events and coincidences, being an unbeliever and looking too much for signs and messages. I guess what I am striving for is the same as in my cello playing - rather a focused practice than a vague overdoing. Everything we get better at is by ever more refined focus, by ever more quality attention than we thought even existed a while ago.

A few minutes of cello practice that is very attentive to specific aspects, like correctly varying the bowing lengths in a Bach phrase or carefully adjusting the bow closer to the bridge as a scale rises, will help me get better. An hour of dull practicing will actually make my playing worse.


When a violin maker, a luthier, makes an instrument, there is first the lumberjack who hacks down the tree with a crude ax. Then it is sliced at the less crude mill into straight planks. The best pieces are cut into possible violin slabs and aged. The luthier then roughly cuts the ones he chooses to fit a pattern. Then he carves them into roughly the correct thicknesses. Then with more refined tools, he shaves them into the shape of violin pieces. Then the tools get smaller and smaller, to nearly doll house sized. Finally, and there have been complicated testings and noticings at each step, a days work becomes when he sands a few grains exactly here and not there. Eventually he varnishes the wood become violin.

That is what I attempt in my communicating with The Divine, in my following intuition... a process that must be worked at with increasing attention and ever more refined noticing, but never overworked.

I quote The Violin Maker by John Marchese who in turn quotes ...the great sociologist, C. Wright Mills ...The craftsman's way of livelihood determines and infuses his entire mode of living, there is no split of work and play.

To develop a craftsman's mindset, it helps to actually practice a craft. Which craft does not matter, it could be cleaning one's house or cooking breakfasts just as well as making a violin. It's not the craft, but the way you do it that matters.

What is your craft?

I have to acknowledge again John Marchese, for it was from The Violin Maker that I paraphrased the process of making a violin.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/stedanby/Ste D's photostream

http://www.flickr.com/photos/vphill/

diskcover

OK, sometimes the Life Force, our intuition, needs to tell us over and over again because we ignore it with such obstinance, (even to the point of putting our fingers in our ears, loudly humming a tune to drown it out).

Last night it was trying to give me a message in a dream. Finally it kept saying (while I held an empty CD disk case), "Disk cover, disk cover." I woke and realized... oh, DISCOVER. In other words it was like Yoda saying, You idiot, just listen, discover what I am saying. Just listen.

One of my old teachers wrote that the inner self, intuition, speaks in images and puns. In other words, that part of our brain likes rebuses, it's our inner language, very direct.

OK, I better start listening to the dream message. If only I could taste a potion which would let me notice my intuitions rather than working at it, however easy. Patience, grasshopper.

I just now remembered that I picked up a white button with one word, Patience, on it. That was yesterday at the main NYC public library. Yeah, I guess I was on a roll yesterday...

When I went out yesterday I put my now favorite book and a small duck head umbrella in a backpack. I got on the subway and went for the book. I noticed the missing umbrella that my family liked a lot. Oh, well, I said, and opened the book to page 104, the first line said, How many times do I have to tell you not to lose your things? It went on to tell parents (and we to ourselves, I transposed) not to criticize at all, that there is no constructive criticism. Instead, tell the little ones they are wonderful and responsible because of showing concern for their mistakes.

The book gives nice examples. People need only positive talk and then they do change. But many times what we really care about is getting out our frustrations, not in helping others to change.

When we criticize, we are telling our loved ones (or ourselves)... this is how you are, (in this case someone who tends to loose things). Thank you, this gives me a chance to vent on you about your imperfections. I was already frustrated at having to trudge through life today, now I can yell at you and feel in control and macho. Stay just the way you are, just do it more often (loose umbrellas, don't clean up your room).

Encourage instead. Yeah, maybe I should have a button made that says that too, encourage instead.

Better yet, they should make an encourage instead potion. I wouldn't even have to pay for it, my son would pay for me, believe me. Believe me on this one.

www.flickr.com:photos:frozen-in-time:.weblocfile
ifnoif

The Perfect Meeting

Somehow I missed yesterday's meeting for NY Indie Publishers. I went to the McNally-R. bookstore where it was to be held but was told there wasn't a meeting.

Every rare once in a while (hope it gets more frequent) I get a strong feeling about something beforehand. Before this meeting I knew two things (no idea how I did), I was supposed to go and I wasn't supposed to go. So I was curious, I went.

This is what I found there... it doesn't matter to where you get (the most beautiful private beach or a grimy subway platform). It doesn't matter if there is or not a payoff for being there, just having followed your intuition makes it a wonderful place to be. This is Frost's Road Less Traveled, to me.

I sat down and listened to a couple of poets at the poetry reading which took place when my meeting was supposed to happen, then walked around the bookstore. Nice enough place.

Perhaps there was a payoff though. Found a book that I might not have found in Barnes and Noble. Framed by my mindset, it took more significance. In a future post, I may talk of the book. For now let me say this, it feels good to be intuitively connected to the greater world and that matters most. Yet, sometimes the book you find at the end of the process is more than just a book.

Perhaps we need to count the importance of things differently (it can be the smallest shift). Then we might recognize the path that is laid out especially for us, notice the giant's beanstalk we were overlooking, climb our own personal Jacob's ladder. (OK, lol, am I just kind of blabbing this last, unedited-out paragraph most only because I want an excuse to include this wonderful picture?)

And dear reader, trying to notice you intuitive feelings just once today is worth more than studying 100 books on it.

Right now, what do you notice within? Listen. What you notice is often less important than that you took notice.

Credits - photo of natural ladder from sitting rock on flickr (he interestingly calls it Guide); Mendocino beach photo from Rita Crane on flickr; selecting a book photo from Roberdan on Flickr.

My Son's Last Tooth-Fairy Letter

Hello My Dear Sage,

I see through the window when you are not looking, when you are sleeping, when you are practicing music, when you are looking at the tv or computer.


And sometimes I pretend to be a bug or a window-ledge bird so I can take a longer look. (Oh, don’t worry, if the me-bug gets squashed, I don’t get hurt – it doesn’t work that way)...

When I look, I see a happy boy whose father is trying to make into a hard working person. Well, try to be both.

I have retired but you also are retiring childhood and this is the last time I will be leaving you with a letter and a gift and yet, I will think of you from time to time and visit you unawares between the stuff I do that retired people and tooth fairies do.

I have never shown a picture of myself to anyone but as I am leaving, I will give you the only one. (I took it myself, so, sorry I aimed a little low. Well, perhaps that is best anyway)...

I have seen quite a lot of things in my journeys, but you have been my very favorite client, child, friend-though-we-have-never-met.

There were these identical twins in Idaho (or was it Wisconsin?) whose mother could finally tell apart when they lost different teeth, this one spelled “L,” look closely...


(P.S. and her name is actually Lauren which, you know, begins with “L.”)

One nice and rather strange boy wanted to grow up to be a tooth fairy and asked to be apprencticed...














I saved this letter that I especially liked...

One girl’s mom made this for me. Her dad had died earlier in the year. I found it under her pillow with a letter the little girl wrote. In the letter she asked if I would marry her mom to make her mom happy...


Another girl asked for two gifts when her goat lost a tooth the same week as she did...

I got the idea for this photo-letter when I saw your dad late at nite working with photos. I guess we learn to be funny when we are around funny people, nice when we are around nice people?

I know your dad wasn’t going to reserve your Halo 3 on time so I did for you as a farewell. Remember me sometimes. The receipt is below this screen, I paid for it under your dad’s name at the 83rd Street Gamestop.

Enjoy it (but don’t forget to eat and sleep) lol!

You are quite a sage already, little one,
Dusky

Credits: photo of boy in blue cap from starfire on flickr, many credits to yet be given.

1000 Pictures, 1000 Cranes

My wife's name in English is 1000 pictures because her mother, Saddako, liked to draw and paint watercolors.

1000 means a great amount and we love round numbers, Arod's 500th homerun and Matsui's 100th occurred last month with fanfares (both are Yankees). And in Japanese tradition, if someone (or some friends) make 1000 paper cranes, it will bring luck, healing, good results for a cause.

YOU GET TO SEE THIS POSTING IN PROGRESS, LOOK INSIDE MY BRain...

Cold Brewed Green Tea?

I read an article on cold brewed coffee and as we alike Joe Torre prefer green tea (my wife is Japanese), I thought I would give cold brewed green tea a try. We loved the cold green tea we bought from Jas Mart in Manhattan but it was a tad expensive because my wife, my son and I go through it like water.

I put six tea bags into a gallon of water and placed it in the refrigerator. (You need to let it steep in or out of the refrigerator for a couple of hours, and... you don't even have to take out the tea bags! The tanic acid which comes out by over-steeping in hot water isn't found here and you can drink the concoction for days.) The result was terrific. It had a lighter, cleaner taste, more refreshing like cold water. The refined aspects of the tea were not destroyed by the brewing process. We love it!

I love when we use four jasmine tea bags and two regular green tea bags but my wife's tongue has a Japanese sensibility and it is too perfume-y for her.

The photo is of hot matcha green tea but I couldn't resist the beauty.

Here is the article on cold-brewed iced coffee, if that's your cup of tea...

June 27, 2007
The New York Times
Iced Coffee? No Sweat
By CINDY PRICE

BEFORE I go telling everybody that the secret to great iced coffee is already in the kitchen, my friend Keller wants me to confess: I didn’t know from iced coffee until he showed me the light.

It’s important to cop to this now, because not a summer goes by that he does not painstakingly remind me, a rabid iced-coffee drinker, that he’s the one who introduced me to the wonders of cold-brewed iced coffee. The funny thing is, when the subject came up we were holed up in a summer rental with three friends off the coast of Puerto Rico, on a tiny island not exactly swimming in upmarket coffee houses.

Our first morning there I brewed a blend from the local grocery in the coffeepot, laced it with a little half-and-half and sugar, then let it cool. Classy, I thought, carrying the pitcher to the table. “I’ll just take it hot,” he mumbled, while I blinked in disbelief.

Clearly, this boy didn’t know any better. A drink has a time and place. Surely he didn’t subscribe to drinking hot coffee in summer?

“No, I only drink iced coffee if it’s cold-brewed,” he said.

For five days we watched him sullenly sip his hot coffee on a broiling Caribbean island in the dead of summer. We chided him for his pretensions, ridiculed him, tried valiantly to break him, but he patiently waited us out. Once we tried it we would understand, he explained. Like friends disputing a baseball stat in a bar with no access to Google, we had no way to settle the argument.

Two weeks later, back in Brooklyn, I saw a sign: “Cold-Brewed Iced Coffee Served Here.” Fine, then. I threw down two bucks and took a sip. Though it pains me to admit, the difference was considerable. Without the bitterness produced by hot water, the cold-brewed coffee had hints of chocolate, even caramel. I dropped my sugar packet — no need for it. The best brews hardly need cream. It really is the kind of thing a gentleman might spend five days in hot-coffee solitary confinement for.

Most days I’m too lazy to hunt down the elusive cold-brewed cup. But recently I discovered an interesting little fact. Cold-brewed coffee is actually dirt simple to make at home. Online, you’ll find a wealth of forums arguing for this bean or that, bottled water over tap, the 24-hour versus the 12-hour soak. You can even buy the Toddy cold-brew coffee system for about $30.
But you can also bang it out with a Mason jar and a sieve. You just add water to coffee, stir, cover it and leave it out on the counter overnight. A quick two-step filtering the next day (strain the grounds through a sieve, and use a coffee filter to pick up silt), a dilution of the brew one-to-one with water, and you’re done. Except for the time it sits on the kitchen counter, the whole process takes about five minutes.

I was curious to see how it would taste without all the trappings. The answer is, Fantastic. My friend Carter, something of a cold-brewing savant, turned me onto another homegrown trick: freeze some of the concentrate into cubes. Matched with regular ice cubes, they melt into the same ratio as the final blend.

Very fancy. Can’t wait to tell Keller.

Credits -
Photo of matcha supplied by michenv's flickr photostream.
Photo of iced coffee supplied by disneymike's flickr photostream.

The New School Year Blimp

On the first day of this year's not-school (my son of 12 stays home with me and also learns from music teachers, an art/cooking teacher, and a swimming instructor), we were watching Kiki's Delivery Service which features a blimp prominently. We looked up and saw the Goodyear blimp circling around and around our window! We took it as an omen that this would be a good school year. (We measure our unschool year from when my wife goes to teach high school.)

credits -
Photo by Langston McEachen from LSUS Archives which was supplied by mikerosebery's flickr photostream. The photo was taken in Shreveport, Louisiana in 1948.

Study Plans - Turn on Your Long Term Memory

Here is a small article from Time Magazine by Catharine Rankin, enjoy...
Do you try to learn things by blocking off a large chunk of time and going over and over the material until you've got it? Or do you study for short periods of time with breaks in between? Experiments with a variety of animals, including humans, have shown that spaced training - short blocks of learning repeating the same material and separated by rest periods as long as thirty to ninety minutes - works better than does training without breaks. Genetic studies with fruit flies, mice and sea slugs have demonstrated that spaced training triggers the development of long term memory by turning on a gene called CREB. When this powerful learning-and-memory gene is experimentally turned off or blocked, memory fails to form; if enough extra copies of the CREB gene are added, long-term memory is triggered after a single short term session.
I have had this up on the inside door of our cupboard for years.

Photo Link - http://www.flickr.com/photos/jayswww/

Learning is a Two Step Process

I hear that practice at music schools is changing a bit. I hope so. At places like Julliard you would try to grab one of the limited number of practice rooms. Ok, you mananged to get one, so you camped out and practiced for hours so you wouldn't lose having a place to play that day.
Now, I hear, they take more breaks.
When we learn, it is a two step process. (1) Take in information. (2) Incorperate the new information into what we already know and believe.
If you study math for 2 hours then read history for a while, you won't find you retained the math as well as someone who took a break and shot hoops or napped afterward. Yeah, that's why people do well when they memorize right before bed. Learning is a two part process.
It is interesting that even exercise is a two step process. First you run, swim or lift weights. This makes small tears in your muscles. Then you rest at night or over a few days. During your resting, the small tears are repaired as new muscle tissue grows to connect them. It is the complete process of exercise (tearing down) and rest (repair) that is important.
Look at my post on Study Plans which quotes a Time Magazine research article showing how you learn as much studying in little bits as those who plod on unceasingly. Then you might want to get off the computer and take a walk or make a dagwood sandwich so you'll actually remember what you read...

Credits -
Photo from aaroscape on flickr.

Why Ancient Sounds?

Ancient Sounds is the title of a Paul Klee masterpiece. The name also reflects my interest in music. When you choose a career, you should look at the small clues. Do you like the smell of wood shavings and sawdust, then think perhaps of being a builder. As a child, I loved the sound of one even one piano key struck. And I have found that this deep down resonance has stayed with me. Klee had to choose between being a violinist or visual artist. I hope he choose what gave him the truest small pleasures, I think so. But not even creating great works such as his could ever make up for giving up what you were meant to love doing. Choose wisely.

Credits -
Photo taken from WebMuseum, Paris.

Please click on this Klee photo to see texture.