In Concert

Went with Chris to see The Bad Plus concert at Ithaca's Hanger Theater. We went early so I could pick up my integrated amplifier from the shop. The guys there were unable to get it to misbehave as it had for me. They ran it on the test bench for weeks. Nothing. Decent folks, they didn't charge for all that. I thanked them and hefted the thing out to the car. It's an old amp, so I kind of expect these things. I have my own mysterious maladies, but like the amplifier, most of the time I work just fine.

We drove over near The Commons and stopped into an Irish pub for good beer and not so good for me Irish chips. I should have known better. We walked to the bookstore on The Commons. I was feeling lousy, my throat and stomach burning. We descended to the basement record shop where the guy behind the counter was playing the worst noise music. I've actually heard good noise music. This sounded worse than I felt. And I felt bad.

Flipping through records, I grabbed Face Value by Phil Collins and the Dave Brubeck Quartet's Jazz Impressions Of The U.S.A. I asked Chris, "could I be any whiter?" I passed up albums by the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders and The Brady Bunch . Chris grabbed Duke and the Peter Gabriel album with the melting face. I found a little-known Andy Summers and Robert Fripp album called I Advance Masked. Sweet.

We paid for our records and went up out of the terrible noise music. Chris looked at photography books. I wandered to science fiction and found a rotting copy of Seetee Ship/Seetee Shock by Jack Williamson. Not the edition I had as a kid but the same book and I read the first six pages. I was still burning inside, but the book felt good. It's pretty terrible writing, but things I liked as a kid, much as I might understand their faults now, I still like some because I'm growing more fond of that kid I was.

I joined Chris at the register where he was buying a book. He pointed out tags on the shelves: art on one, photography on the other. The injustice of that dichotomy pisses him right off. I'll bet he writes about it soon.

Back at the pub, we had whiskey which calmed my stomach and throat go figure. We ate corned beef and cabbage with mashed potatoes and carrots. We talked like two people who have known one another fifty years. All discomfort dissipated.

For some reason, patrons, most of them old, kept coming in, ordering pints of beer and then downing them in about one gulp. It was like they were pledging an old folks home. I don't do shots or understand people who do. I sure as hell don't shotgun beer. Other people leave me confused.

We drove from the pub to the show after stopping for coffee. Seven-fifteen on a weeknight and I was ready for a nap.

At the theater, a young woman sat behind a table on which were piled CD and vinyl copies of the new Bad Plus album. I offered my credit card. "Cash only," she said. I thought, this is the twenty-first century, the phone in her hand could have run a Square Reader. Disappointment. Barriers. A problem I couldn't solve then and there.

A local jazz trio opened the show. I gave them a real listen and decided they didn't do anything for me. What, I wondered, makes one band good and another not? Probably the drummer. And the guitarist too. The bassist I liked, but a one-legged tri-pod falls down. It confused me though, what exactly didn't work and whether or not I could possibly know. Who was I to judge these things and wasn't I probably wrong?

Then The Bad Plus came and I knew I wasn't wrong. The difference between the local trio and The Bad Plus was more than just swapping piano for guitar. It was the difference between making sounds and making art. No shelf tags needed. There was genius at work. And grace. It was all about grace and even I can feel that.

A guy in the audience was stumbling drunk. Though mostly subdued, he annoyed me. I thought, "you're missing this," then realized that I was missing it too in thinking about the drunk. How many beers had he taken in one gulp? Why was I drinking him in? I went back to the music, closing my eyes to fall deeper.

At a show I listen to music and watch it being made. When I'm not distracted by a drunk, I'm all the way there. Some fools make the mistake of recording video. Rude. To musician, audience, and self. My phone was powered down. I was glad to be rid of it for the show. I was glad to be immersed in music, in art, in grace.

Now, a day later, I'm typing this while listening to Andy Summers and Robert Fripp play from the turntable through the amp and over the speakers. Mostly I'm writing, letting the music wash over me. Every so often I stop to really listen. I appreciate the amplifier, the record, the richness of signal and noise.

On the drive home last night, Chris talked of someone who posts online drivel about the day without much of a point. Why, he wondered, did that writer have so much of a following? There's nothing there.

All through typing this, I've thought about that person writing drivel. I worry that I'm that person. I always worry that I'm that person. I wonder if I'm the opening act rather than The Bad Plus, fret that I'm making terrible noise instead of music, that my writing will turn out, even to me, years later to have been foolish and impossible to really defend, that the albums I'm picking out aren't cool, that I've affixed the wrong labels to my shelves, and that whatever's wrong with me, despite weeks on the test bench, remains so mysterious that the service people can't diagnose let alone fix it.

I drove fast through the dark, winding road above Tully, under stars I couldn't see, away from a concert where grace washed over me. As we rounded one turn, the carcass of a huge deer lay shattered and splashed just over the white line. The result of that animal's hesitation in the headlights or the terrible timing of its last jump. The deer was long past caring about such things, but I imagined the driver, what he must have been thinking and how much I was sure he looked just like me.

Without Numbers

Second day in a row, I went for a run without my watch. I have no idea if this will be a trend. I kept turning my left hand over to look at my wrist during the run. At the end of today's I almost pushed my right index finger to my left wrist but felt foolish enough to stop. Old habits. The watch keeps track of heart rate too and I've long run in a low heart-rate range. Going without the watch, I don't know what my heart rate was. I just ran by feel and felt good.

A guy this week ran a marathon in under two hours. First time that's been done, so far as we know. It's nice to know we have almost limitless potential. I just hope he didn't do better running through chemicals. That sort of thing happens when we get too caught up with numbers.

I'm listening to a record on the turntable. I don't know how many times I've played it and lack any way to tell mathematically, algorithmically which record, song, or artist I've heard most. Instead, I scan the spines and see what strikes my fancy. Right now it's Steely Dan's Greatest Hits and "Here At The Western World." How did that song not make it onto a regular album? I mean, really.

This month I've stayed off the scale. I know about what I weigh. No matter the number, I'm heavier than is healthy. The daily weigh in became, as it often does, a drag, so I stopped. Sitting here, I feel my belly over my belt. That's all the data I need at the moment.

This week I started a new writing notebook. It lacks page numbers and I haven't written any in. I begin notebooks wondering how long I'll take to finish them. Maybe there's a better way of thinking.

Our older daughter is home from college this weekend. I could count hours and minutes until I take her back (and we resume missing her daily presence), but I'll skip that.

Numbers are my habit and often my friend. Sometimes they get in the way and every relationship needs a break at least for a little while. I would tell you how long this break will last, but I've decided not to count.

From a Columbia Records Sleeve circa 1961

This was inside the Dave Brubeck Quartet's Brandenburg Gate Revisited album:
 

HERE'S HOW RECORDS GIVE YOU MORE OF WHAT YOU WANT:

1. THEY'RE YOUR BEST ENTERTAINMENT BUY. Records give you top quality for less money than any other recorded form. Every album is a show in itself. And once you've paid the price of admission, you can hear it over and over.

2. THEY ALLOW SELECTIVITY OF SONGS AND TRACKS. With records it's easy to pick out the songs you want to play, or to play again a particular song or side. All you have to do is lift the tone arm and place it where you want it. You can't do this as easily with anything but a phonograph record.

3. THEY'RE CONVENIENT AND EASY TO HANDLE. With the long-playing record you get what you want to hear, when you want to hear it. Everybody's familiar with records, too. And you can go anywhere with them because they're light and don't take up space.

4. THEY'RE ATTRACTIVE, INFORMATIVE AND EASY TO STORE. Record albums are never out of place. Because of the aesthetic appeal of the jacket design, they're beautifully at home in any living room or library. They've also got important information on the backs—about the artists, about the performances or about the program. And because they're flat and not bulky, you can store hundreds in a minimum of space and still see every title.

5. THEY'LL GIVE YOU HOURS OF CONTINUOUS AND UNINTERRUPTED LISTENING PLEASURE. Just stack them up on your automatic changer and relax.

6. THEY'RE THE PROVEN MEDIUM. Long-playing phonograph records look the same now as when they were introduced in 1948, but there's a world of difference. Countless refinements and developments have been made to perfect the long-playing record's technical excellence and insure the best in sound reproduction and quality.

7. IF IT'S IN RECORDED FORM, YOU KNOW IT'LL BE AVAILABLE ON RECORDS. Everything's on long-playing records these days…your favorite artists, shows, comedy, movie sound tracks, concerts, drama, documented history, educational material…you name it. This is not so with any other kind of recording.

8. THEY MAKE A GREAT GIFT because everybody you know loves music. And everyone owns a phonograph because it's the musical instrument everyone knows how to play. Records are a gift that says a lot to the person you're giving them to. And they keep on remembering.

AND REMEMBER…IT ALWAYS HAPPENS FIRST ON RECORDS.

Sustainable Listening

I take the album from its paper sleeve which I had pulled from the cardboard sleeve in which it rested. The vinyl is forty-seven years old. I set it on the platter, switch the turntable on, and brush it. The amp hums. I swing the tonearm over the record and lower the lever. (My fingers were never steady enough to lower the needle on their own and now I'm even less steady.) Crackles pop in the speakers, then Neil Young sings about packing it in, buying a pick-up, and taking it down to L.A.

Across the room I sit at an HP laptop reading work emails going back and forth between a couple of the directors. I signed onto the job thinking I'd just write grants, but it has turned into something more interesting because I want it that way and the people who hired me encourage such things. It's a sweet thing. About as sweet as Neil's voice out on the weekend.

My daughter is teaching me about sustainability. Because of her I've committed to never drinking out of a single-use water bottle again. Small steps.

Records are sustainable. I can feel it. The paper sleeve. The brushing. The crackles and pops. Sure, vinyl is pretty nasty petroleum stuff, but it's forty-seven years old and I'll keep it the rest of my days (having learned the mistake of ditching the albums from my childhood).

The job feels sustainable too. My old one was like sitting in a running car in a closed garage. I wrote a note this morning to an old colleagues. I keep wanting to break a window, open the door, something before he suffocates. That's how it was with me. And the effects of that linger. That place was poison to me. I'm only now just beginning to recover.

Over coffee I read Neil Young's Lonely Quest To Save Music and his idea that the compressed digital music is doing something bad to our brains, kind of like the mind-suck of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and whatever else feels necessary but disconnects us. That ain't sustainable either.

The record's almost over. Even that can't go on and on. But there's the other side and there's another record and another after that. Just the feel of the record, the act of putting it on, and the restorative sound flowing across the room, yeah, it's enough to sustain me. It all feels so good.