Warhol morning

I am stuck behind a Ford Focus that is stuck behind someone else that is stuck behind someone else ...

The Focus is splattered with bumper stickers that are too small to read without risking a wreck, but the vanity plate intrigues ...

Warhol.

I presume the intention is to honor Warhol, Andy. The artist.

That someone would go to the expense and time-consumption of acquiring a plate to celebrate Andy, sets my thoughts a-spinning. I try to glimpse the driver, a man probably a few years older than me. Probably would be very interesting to sit down and chat with in a coffee house.

We are between cities and I wonder if he is traveling to mine. But my natural impatience eventually overcomes my curiosity and I shift lanes and leave him behind.

"Whammer Jammer" by J. Geils Band is playing on the radio. Great start-of-a-summer road trip kind of song. I thrash around appropriately in my car. But sadly, I am going to work, not play.

I think about that old country song, something to the effect that every day, a man pulls up to a certain stoplight in town and must make a decision: right means home to the Wife, kids, mortgage; left leads to the open road.

In the corner of my eye I glimpse a bearded guy sitting on a box by the side of the freeway, playing a guitar. Surreal. But since I am now going 81 mph in the left lane, I have deprived myself of the chance for a closer look, I am half a mile beyond him before my brain clicks into gear. Oh well. Surely in my life I will again see a bearded guy sitting on a box by the side of a freeway playing guitar and next time I will be going slow enough to pull to a stop and have a chat.

Billy Idol is screaming "White Wedding" on the radio. Against my will and the mood of the music, I slow down. Don't care to give a traffic cop a score for the morning.

I pull into the dismal parking lot of my place of employment just as Pink Floyd begins "Us and Them." I consider sitting there and grooving to the whole song and being rather late. I shut off the music and begin another day.

I will make the right turn at the stoplight tonight.

The pen is back ...

I celebrated the completion of a huge work project -- the labors of nearly a month -- by eating lunch out. Chez Taco Bell.

Sometimes when I pull up to the drive-thru of such a place, I think of a column I once read by some delightful old curmudgeon. Never, says the man, does he ever go through the drive through. He stops his car, he goes inside, he talks to people, not a speaker-box and he eats his meal around other people, not in his car.

So today, I did likewise.

My order was about $6. Just for kicks, I calculated the percentage that I paid in taxes. Nearly ten percent. That would be, in Biblical reckoning, a tithing. Tithing belongs to God, not the guv'mint. The implications were disturbing.

How many times a day do we calmly hand over nickels and dimes, nickels and dimes, more nickels and more dimes, to the government,without any thought at all?

"I'm sorry, my son picked up your order by accident," said a Woman approaching the table where I was waiting for my food. "He just put napkins on the tray, he didn't unwrap anything."

I assured Her that I wasn't the least bit bothered. Then I pondered for a while on the society in which I live, where every stranger has now become a disgusting bag of germs in our eyes, where they actually wrap plastic forks in a coating of plastic in a restaurant such as I was in, lest the filthy fingers of strangers brush across them or their breath blow out a blast of baleful bacteria.

It wasn't so long ago that people ate out of communal bowls, shared the same Communion cup at church, even slept double in beds with strangers at roadside inns. Then again, people died young back then.

It is Schumann's 200th birthday today. Great composer. I listened to the melody of his composition for string orchestra and wondered about the precise moment when it entered his head. Was he munching schnitzel in some inn, on a rainy, cold night? Walking the street in spring? Or just sitting quietly in his study contemplating life?

Taco Bell is not celebrating Schumann's birthday. Their PA system is playing Stereo Mc's "Connected."

"If you make sure you're connected
The writing's on the wall
But if your mind's neglected, stumble you might fall
Stumble you might fall, stumble you might fall."

Perhaps Stereo Mc will be remembered in 200 years. Perhaps not.

Random thoughts

Need to visit Molly, Chase and my other neglected blog friends -- and take off the blogrolls others from whom I've drifted away.

Need to start blogging daily again -- SO MUCH to write about, all the time, that it just seems overwhelming. And I hate the way Facebook forces me to limit my thoughts to one or two measly paragraphs, wrtng lke a txtng teenagr.

Listened to Vivaldi on the way in to work -- I simply love Baroque music. If it wasn't a time of such filth and cruelty, I might have liked to live back then. How did such gorgeous music arise in such a dungheap of a society?

Noted that one Fabio Biondi recorded this particular CD of Vivaldi. Looked up his name online. Fascinated by a line in his bio, "driven early on by an inexhaustible cultural curiosity ..." My kind of guy! Not that I care much about guys. But you Ladies might enjoy his baby blues glowing at You from www.europagalante.com/fabio_biondi

Weekend is on the way -- a palette of possibilities!

The Looney Tunes lie

As duly noted to your right and below on this page, I’m an average guy. Which should mean that I care about football, but I don’t. So sue me. Which also should mean that I don’t care about highbrow pastimes such as opera. Which is true. Or was, til very recently.

I have been fooled by the cartoon stereotype of some largish blonde topped by a Viking helmet cracking windows with Her vocals; or some largish guy with a huge moustache and an even huger ego – the sort of character that Bugs Bunny used to torment.

But last week, I was treated to a snippet of music that shattered all those myths. It was as lovely, sweet and plaintive as any ballad – and I do love a good ballad, even if that means I must turn over my Manliness Club Membership Card.

No theatrics. No shattered glass.

I did some internet research based on the title and author of the piece – and that is when I discovered that said piece, “Pangione,” is a part of that once-dreaded genre, an opera.

Specifically, Handel’s “Julius Caesar.”

In the venue that I visited, the lovely soprano Sarah M. sung the role in said opera of Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt, at the moment in history when Cleopatra was told (falsely, of course) that Julius Caesar, Her beloved, had drowned.

I learned much about Handel this morning, much about opera (such as the once fashionable concept of castratos – yeah, it’s exactly what it sounds like, talk about suffering for your art!) and maybe a little about myself.
Can I still be an average guy, though?

Thank you, Mom and Dad

... For teaching me to appreciate classical music when I was a boy.

Because you played the music of the masters in our home, because you loved it, I learned to love it.

That is why I drove thirty miles tonight of my own volition to be swallowed up in the great old architecture of a church, rich with history, gorgeous with stained glass windows, and listen to soprano Sarah M. render Handel, DuParc, Schumann, Strauss and Purcel.

She sang with an angel's voice and it was worth the traffic and worth skipping dinner to get there on time.

Meditations upon Music

I drove to work today in a cocoon of bliss. Twice through on a new CD, I listened to "Meditation from Thais" on violin, by a young performer who lives in my region, and whom I had the exquisite pleasure of seeing in person just two weeks ago.

Can anything, anything in the world possibly be more delightful than a beautiful Woman bringing forth beautiful music on a beautiful instrument?

As the notes rose and fell, I could see again Her dark eyes, Her dark hair; could see again Her pale, slender arms in the afternoon light; Her fingers cradling the bow, now caressing, now teasing, now striking the strings; Her body swaying, leaning into, then pulling back in the passion of the music; could see Her beautiful smile, as innocent and sweet as a child, as She concluded the performance and was enveloped in our applause.

To be so at one with music! To step beyond the point where notes on a page must awkwardly be translated as a, b, c, or g; to reach the plane where they simply are what they are, drawing forth the appropriate musical response! It is as when a learner of a language no longer must convert "leche" to "milk" or "pneuma" to "spirit/breath" in his mind, but simply sees the "new" word for what it is.

Does time hallow all chili dogs?

I used to work at a certain little restaurant, and from those days, before they flattened it to buidl a highway, I remember the finest-tasting chili-cheese dogs I ever put into my mouth.

In all the years since, no chili dog has ever lived up to that standard. Perhaps none ever will.

This morning, I played a little Bach on my way in to work, and lamented to myself the passing of that man and the end of that great age of music.

I like my rock as much as the next Gen X'er, don't get me wrong. I know the lyrics to every Tom Petty song, a little Korn, a little Ozzie, a lot of AC/DC.

But seems to me, my thoughts-a-spinning, that the world is a drearier, lesser place since the great classical composers have departed it, since the Golden Age of Music ended.

Where is today's Bach, today's Mozart or Pachabel?

Am I just salivating for a long-lost chili dog and being unfair to the modern composers of great instrumental music who must surely be out there?

Or has that age truly ended, has it passed beyond all hope of reclamation?

You could assemble all the ingredients of a great ethnic recipe from Baluchistan and follow the instructions exactly to make it, and yet never achieve the same results as some little old bent over granny in a dusty Baluchistani village. You can't replicate the soil in which she grew her vegetables, the atmosphere of her kitchen or the tang of the old pots in which she cooked them.

Every work of art, whether a painting, a melody or a fine bowl of Magyar gulyas soup, is a product of its time and place, and when that time and place has passed, the mold has been broken, so to speak.