Call this an exercise in self-brainwashing. Self-hypnosis?
Oh, speaking of hypnosis, anyone catch the broadcast yesterday on the radio, the Metropolitan Opera's production of Philip Glass' Satyagraha? Non opera-fans may skip down, but I caught about 20 minutes of it. Glass wrote this opera about 30 years ago when he was in his "minimalist" period. For those of you who were unaware that anyone's music had had a "minimalist" period, or indeed of what a "minimalist" period might involve, Glass in the 1970s was trying to keep it simple, big time. In a typical Philip Glass piece of that period, he'll glom on to a melodic and harmonic figure, repeat it for 15 minutes, then switch to another figure, repeat it for 15 minutes, and so on. This will give you some idea of what Satyagraha sounded like. (It's an opera about Gandhi, by the way.) Listening to it in the car, it occurred to me that Glass could have assembled the original score at Kinko's -- write out a figure, run off 500 copies, write out another figure, run off 500 copies, etc., then Scotch-tape 'em all together.
But what do I know? I'm not a composer. The only reason I bring the subject up is because during every break, the announcers kept telling us how "hypnotic" the effect of all this was.
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I submit to you that "hypnotic" is a polite way of saying "boring." I have trouble staying awake through the first act of Tristan and Isolde, (I suspect because Tristan, like so much of Wagner, is usually performed in the dark.) If I'd been at the Met yesterday, the guy behind me would have had some serious problems with the guy in front of him, the one with his head tilted back, snoring just like he snored through most of the movie Titanic, whose music was similarly "hypnotic."
But enough of that kind of talk. Enough of that negative, sneery, grumpy-old-man stuff that bloggers are always dishing out. It's not nice. (As a former boss of mine once said about insulting people, "It's FUN, but it's not nice.")
I recently undertook a new project, editing a weekly newspaper here in the Washington, D.C. area. I had a short "editorial conference" the other day with my boss, Abraham. Abraham is an entrepreneur, not a journalist, but he knows what kind of product he wants to put out. He's tired of picking up newspapers and seeing nothing but flood, fire, famine, crime, war, earthquakes, disease, poverty and Hillary and Obama getting into mashed-potato fights. While he granted that bad news sells, and we certainly can't ignore the bad stuff going on all the time, he wants me, in my capacity as editor, to accentuate the positive. Look around for stories in the metro area that highlight people doing good stuff rather than what they usually do. Just kidding, Abraham!
Seriously, I, and whatever freelance writers I end up working with, will be on the lookout for stories about people doing upbeat, positive things; creative things, helping-your-community things, artistic things, empowering things and funny things. It's not that we're going to ignore drive-by shootings, it's just that we're in general going to be more interested in the guy who won the wheelchair marathon because he spent the previous nine months pumping iron to the point where his arms got to look like Wile E. Coyote's legs in that Road Runner cartoon where he's popping "muscle pills" to make himself run faster.
On that note, I will now embark upon my version of one of St. Ignatius Loyola's Spiritual Exercises. Let's call this Thinking About Good Stuff 101A.
With a tip of the hat to Julie Andrews singing "My Favorite Things" in The Sound Of Music, here is a short list of stuff that makes me happy, or happier, anyway:
1. I love the smell of bacon and eggs in the morning. You smartasses are substituting "napalm" for "bacon and eggs," aren't you? Ha! I thought of it first! (Note to myself: bad dog.)
2. Ditto the smell of freshly-ground coffee before it's brewed.
3. A flawless, not-too-hot summer afternoon at the ballpark, with my team winning.
4. The sound of doves very early in the morning.
5. Bicycles. I am goofy for bicycles. If I were as rich as Bill Gates I'd have a dozen of them. I'd probably look at them more than I'd ride them, but hey, a fetish is a fetish.
6. Radios. And radio. There are three radios in the room where I'm sitting. I could easily become a radio collector, but in general I think hobbies of that sort are kind of silly. And I'd rather listen to the radio than watch TV any day.
7. Cigars. You prissy, self-righteous non-smokers out there can go stuff tofu up your noses. There's nothing quite as delightful as a good Havana with a cup of strong, black coffee.
8. Since he just passed through town last Thursday, I will say that I'm rather impressed with Pope Benedict XVI. Everyone thought he was going to play Larry Holmes to John Paul II's Muhammad Ali, you know, the guy who came afterward whose name nobody can remember. But he's made a good impression on the world in general. I've read a couple of his little books and he's not a bad writer either.
9. Any movie that has Ava Gardner in it.
10. My wife Valerie's dimpled smile.
11. My own meatloaf.
12. All of my pets. Tick 'em off: Dogs: Alexandra, Fulbright and Stanley. (all three miniature schnauzers.) Cats: Humboldt, Cyrano and Rageuneau. My family.
13. Books. Do I love books! And all of this Amazon Kindle nonsense aside, I snap my fingers at the digital doofuses joyfully predicting that the age of paper-and-ink is over and that soon we'll all just be lugging around our Sony Readers. The compact disc revolution, which was more about convenience than anything else, nevertheless took something away from the experience of listening to recorded music. I miss the days when I would take a shiny black vinyl disc out of its beautiful cardboard sleeve, put it on a turntable and place the needle on it, then watch it spin as the music played. It was a more tactile, more participatory, in general a more aesthetic experience than clicking the button that says "download." By the same token, holding a hunk of plastic and batteries in your hand is not going to measure up to the experience of settling down with a beautifully-bound example of the publishers'-and-printers' art. And here's my trump card that the digital doofuses can't trump. No matter how convenient they make their book-download-doodads, they are always and forever going to need juice. Books don't require juice. If I'm flying from New York to Paris, reading The Brothers Karamazov on my Amazon Kindle, and the battery dies all of a sudden, I'm stuck for the rest of the flight reading the hotel and fragrance ads in the airline's in-house magazine. But if I have a paperback copy of Dostoevski in my pocket, I'm good to go, batteries be damned.
14. Rioja wine from Spain. I developed a taste for Spanish wine during a visit to the Costa Brava in 1995. There is nothing better with a steak.
15. Listening to Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony on a rainy autumn night.
16. Chess. Without any false modesty, I am the world's worst chess player. If you can't beat me in eight moves, you're having an off day. But I love the game, don't ask me why. Maybe I was better at it in a previous life.
17. The poetry of Dylan Thomas, read out loud.
18. Baseball. Baseball. Baseball.
19. Certain of Hemingway's short stories. By and large his novels don't impress me that much, but he was one of the greatest short-story writers of all time.
20. Anything and everything written by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
21. Something I don't do anymore: sit on the Novi Arbat in Moscow and watch the Russian women go by. To this old globe-trotter Russian women are the most beautiful women on earth, and by the way I don't know what they see in Vladimir Putin. He looks like he was weaned on a dill pickle and he has all the charisma of a parking meter.
22. The quiet of the early morning, when I manage to be up for it.
23. The good memories I have of my late sister Lynn, my one-and-only, honest-and-for-truly, now-and-forever bestest friend in the whole wide world.
24. Scotch.
25. That moment in the movie Mister Roberts when Capt. James Cagney has sounded general quarters because Lt. Henry Fonda just threw his palm tree overboard. In the ensuing chaos, Chief Ward Bond catches two sailors hoisting a rubber life raft over the railing. "Put that raft back!" he shouts. "He didn't say 'Abandon ship!'"
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