Persepolis and Proust

I just saw the movie Persepolis, which is based on a graphic novel by Marjane Satrapi. It's a coming-of-age story narrated by a character also named Marjane Satrapi, about her childhood in Iran under the Shah, and the subsequent Islamic revolution.

The story itself possibly couldn't be less like Marcel Proust's novel -- though politics do find their way into In search of lost time, amid all the love stories and dinner parties. Still, that was the work that kept coming to mind as I was watching Persepolis. There's the eponymous narrator, of course, and also the movie is in French -- beyond that, both are about young artists trying to live creative lives in an uncooperative world. And both are ultimately success stories, the proof of which is their very existence.

The form of a graphic novel turned into a movie -- which I'd never seen done quite like this -- really propelled the story. The subjective reality of Marji comes out more directly and immediately than it could in live action. In one scene, she has just broken up with her boyfriend after catching him cheating on her. As she re-imagines the history of their relationship, we see the same scenes we just watched, redrawn -- meeting at a party, him driving her home, etc. -- but where before they were idyllic and joyful, they've now been transformed to show all his ugly qualities. It's a brilliant way of dramatizing the reversals of perception and memory, and one of which Proust would have completely approved.

"willing to do almost anything"

In one of Miranda July's short stories, "Mon Plaisir," she writes about trying to become a movie extra:

On the third day of the rest of Carl's life, and the eleventh of mine, I began calling the number. Instantcast.com explained that your willingness to hit redial for hours at a time is the screening process. This is the actual, professional way that one applies for this job, in the manner of a person trying to win tickets off the radio. The directors are looking for people who are willing to do almost anything, but will happily do almost nothing, for hours....

-- Miranda July, for the short story collection No one belongs here more than you, p. 161

If only auditioning for orchestras were just a matter of hitting redial. It might still be a nameless, faceless, de-humanizing experience, but it least you'd have a quick, impersonal decision:

Busy signal. Click.

I spent a lot of time discussing the problems and injustices of the audition process, back before I has hired at an audition, and now I seem to spend a lot of time talking about the same thing. No one is really satisfied with the process, on either side of the screen. But as much as we rail against auditions for being awkward, wasteful, tedious, unfair, evil rituals of despair, it's hard to argue the one point: they produce people who are willing to do almost anything.

Well, except maybe tap-dancing. A bassist colleague of mine had an illuminating dream recently, in which he discovered the limits of his personal tolerance for humiliation. My new favorite tag-line is now: "Motherfucking tapdancing!?"

Rejection and humiliation do seem to be part of our actual, professional career path though -- just like busy signals and cattle calls for movie extras. Some orchestras seem to go out of their way to make things as logistically difficult as possible: strange application questions; relentlessly long, unspecific lists; rounds scheduled weeks or months apart; or the dreaded tape round. I suppose we could tell ourselves they just do it to weed out the less committed, organized, or desperate candidates. And isn't there a certain pride in being that committed, organized, and/or desperate?

Until they hand you the tap-dancing shoes. Then all your dignity is lost.

getting past "eh"

Lately as part of my program of Canadian cultural conditioning, I've been listening to Joni Mitchell albums. Right now I have "Blue" playing in the stereo, and it's fantastic.

Canada seems like kind of an underdog country, at least to this culturally semi-literate American, but the more you look the more amazing artists you find have come from here. I suppose that's the catch - lots of great musicians come from Canada, but many leave it to go somewhere else. And so Americans end up imagining this big, cold, empty country that people are scrambling to escape.

Well, hopefully that will change, and it already has in my mind anyway. I've been reading a lot of Canadian authors, like Alice Munro and Vincent Lam. Lam's debut novel Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures is one of those books that keeps reminding me of people and places I've known. My friends Brad and Denise gave me a little book called "So You Want to Be Canadian?" when I moved up here, but the more I look the more vast this country seems to become. And I still don't even understand a thing about hockey. Oh well.

think globally, record locally

Recently at the CPO we recorded music for a television production of Nutcracker, to be aired at 8 pm on December 23, on CBC I think. My colleague Jeff did a nice job of chronicling our involvement over three entertaining days. I was right there alongside of him, experiencing both the highs ("We got the top of the harp gliss to sync with the tear drop falling!") and the lows ("Let's try those 300 measures of fff tremolo one more time, there was something ticking in the booth.")

At one point a producer came out to say hello, thank us for our fine work - and then he explained why the music hadn't been licensed from pre-existing recordings, or outsourced to some orchestra in Slovenia. I hadn't realized this, but that is where a lot of film and television scores get recorded, because Eastern European orchestras will work for lower wages. They don't advertise that fact - no movie poster ever boasts "Score recorded in Bucharest!" - but it's a way of cutting some of the costs.

This was the rare case in which a production team really does take pride in using local performers. The dancers, choreographer, and other artistic staff were all based in Alberta; they had insisted that the music should come from Calgary as well. And while most of the music was Tchaikovsky - numbers from Nutcracker as well as bits from the 5th and 6th Symphonies - quite a bit of transitional music was by a local composer, John Estacio, who was on stage with us for the entire session.

Last month I read Barbara Kingsolver's latest book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, which was where I first heard of this term 'locavore'. It's a person who tries to consume only what is grown locally. So things like avocados, bananas, and olive oil, which are so common in our stores we might think they're local, are off the table. I'm not going to be that strict, but it's definitely altered my approach to shopping and eating. I won't bother looking at asparagus, since it's long out of season here, and a couple weeks ago I canned a huge box of tomatoes, thinking I'll save them for the winter when fresh tomatoes are a distant memory.

I wonder though, if any locavores will ever get as particular about their music as they are with their food. There certainly is a huge difference between live and recorded music - probably as big as the difference between fresh and canned spinach. And it seems important (to me anyway) to support a community of local artists and musicians, as well as farmers and food artisans. Ideally this would include local composers, conductors, instrument makers...

Of course, as this producer talked about these great local ideals, I began to feel a bit like that Ecuadoran banana in the supermarket. I've only lived here in Calgary a few weeks; and I've never played in this particular Nutcracker production; and I'd be hard pressed to name a single Albertan composer (besides John Estacio!). There's a case to be made for the occasional importthough, I think - no chocolate or coffee grows in Calgary, after all. And you can't have a Nutcracker without a few imported nuts.

Juliet winced

When she read the letter, Juliet winced, as anybody does on discovering the preserved and disconcerting voice of some past fabricated self. She wondered at the sprightly cover-up, contrasting with the pain of her memories. Then she thought that some shift must have taken place, at that time, which she had not remembered. Some shift concerning where home was...

Because it's what happens at home that you try to protect, as best you can, for as long as you can.

- Alice Munro, from the short story "Soon", collected in Runaway, p. 125

I've been reading the Canadian author Alice Munro lately - all these incredibly nuanced stories of closely held secrets and privately lived lives. She makes you see the ultimate absurdity of how we conceal so much within ourselves, just to go on living in our ordinary, tolerable way. And when things become intolerable, how quickly our secrets can collapse in on us!

I don't want to overdramatize my own little secrets - probably I have nothing quite worthy of an Alice Munro story, so far. But since several people made such thoughtful and understanding comments to my post the other day, I wanted to write a little about why I enjoy this sometimes silly hobby, and what I see as this blog's mission, just supposing it were worthy of anything so grand-sounding as a "mission".

The most astonishing thing about blogging is the people who read me - I'm continually amazed at the depth and care put into responses on this blog. While I don't always directly answer each comment, they always seem to make me laugh, wonder, or think again about what I wrote. How often I've just written something on a whim, on any sort of obscure subject matter I might imagine, and then quickly found an answer from some passionate authority on that very subject - Martinu's chamber music, or Schoenberg's personal relationships, or bowings in the Bach cello suites - and realized there's no subject too obscure, too bizarre (or even too personal) - that it won't strike a chord in someone.

Of course, as amazing as can be to reach into cyberspace and discover some kindred soul out there in the void, I don't really write this for strangers or fanatics. (Sorry, strangers and fanatics!) Mostly I think about those readers who I already know well, either from real-life acquaintances or from reading and following their own blogs, sometimes both. It's fascinating to develop that kind of multi-level relationship with someone - discovering that a person you really like in person has whole other dimensions in cyberspace.

And I suppose that writing here gives me a chance to explore dimensions I don't readily show in person. Or even quite realize were there. I love that Walt Whitman line -

Do I contradict myself?
Very well, then I contradict myself,
I am large, I contain multitudes.

and I think that blogging is an opportunity to air one's multitudes, try them out on an understanding or indifferent audience.

I suppose that's what makes blogging a bit scary, too. You never know when you might air some aspect of yourself that irritates, displeases, or offends someone. And as much of a pleasure it is to receive a comment, either from an old friend or a complete stranger, as I start to read them I'm always a bit wary that maybe I've rubbed someone the wrong way, or bared a little too much of my soul this time. Thankfully I've very seldom had that experience, but I know many people who have found themselves the target of nasty and personal attacks - and I can understand the chilling effect those voices might have.

I suppose any time we write to express ourselves, it's a more or less fabricated self we express. Even a writer as gifted as Alice Munro can only hint at what goes on inside of us. Still though, I think the writing of which I'm most proud, and wince the least at, is when I've honestly made that effort. It's not easy, and you sometimes have to fight every self-protective instinct to press "publish", but still it can be worth it.

So I think I'll keep writing - maybe I'll have change some names or be coy with some details, but there's no point having an outlet if you can't actually let things out. And if I write enough long, self-conscious posts like this, I might just bore all the critics away! One can hope.

renouncing renunciation

Asceticism, of course, is no solution: it is sensuality with a negative prefix. For a saint this might become useful, as a kind of scaffolding. At the intersection of his various acts of renunciation he beholds that god of opposition, the god of the invisible who has not yet created anything. But anyone who has committed to using his senses in order to grasp appearances as pure and forms as true on earth: how could such an individual even begin to distance himself from anything! And even if such renunciations proved initially helpful and necessary for him, in his case it would be nothing more than a deception, a ruse, a scheme - and ultimately it would take its revenge somewhere in the contours of his finished work by showing up there as an undue hardness, aridity, barrenness, and cowardice.

- Rainer Maria Rilke, from The Poet's Guide to Life: The Wisdom of Rilke, p. 135-136

Even though I draw inspiration from these words, I can't say I've exactly lived up to them. For most of my life, I've been renouncing one thing or another: television, drinking, the beach, relationships, blogging... It sometimes seems like every recreation, every source of pleasure I have discovered in life has had to be weighed against my greatest pleasure and purpose, which is making music. And in most cases I have limited, or even renounced altogether, those non-musical pleasures.

The more I consider this question though, I find myself agreeing with Rilke's perspective. Certainly we need to be discerning and disciplined, in our lives and our art. There are a whole slew of things not worth the brief pleasures they may give us, and we need to avoid these things if we are to respect ourselves and our art. There is an opposite extreme though, and when we limit ourselves too much, avoid everything, it is another sort of disrespect for our art and ourselves. It's as though we don't want to credit ourselves as skillful players, able musicians, and complete human beings. We act as though our technical equipment is so fragile, our musical ideas so feeble, that they need constant maintenance and attention.

I'll always respect my friends who do marathon-practice sessions. Lately though, I'm of the opinion that there are times when it's better not to practice - spend the time with friends, or outdoors in nature, with poetry or literature, or maybe studying the score without your instrument to intervene. Give your imagination the opportunity to develop and keep pace with your technical command of the instrument. After all, speed and agility will never compensate for a lack of imagination. When we let our practice outstrip our lives, and the craft replace art, it only leads to those qualities of aridity, barrenness, hardness, and cowardice.

So lately I'm trying to open myself up to new things, try some courageous acts, and live a fuller life outside the practice room. I'll report on how my humble attempts go, and I hope you'll read those words of Rilke and become inspired as well!

how hopeful...

And yet, and yet: how hopeful each individual person is every time again, how real, how well intentioned, how rich. When one then looks at the confused and dreary crowd, it is impossible to grasp that the individual loses himself there in this way as if without a trace.

- Rainer Maria Rilke, The Poet's Guide to Life: The Wisdom of Rilke

Lots of my New World Symphony colleagues have been heading off for auditions in recent weeks, flying off to all corners of the country and beyond. Just as in that Rilke quote, they all leave hopeful, real, well intentioned - maybe not rich in net worth, but definitely with a wealth of musical ideas! An audition can be a confused and dreary crowd, though, and you hate to see people return back diminished. So many of my friends have gotten very close, and made great strides - still, there's a sense of disappointment when they don't get that final yes!

I've been thinking a lot about Danny Matsukawa's idea of a "musical mission" as I pack and get ready to take my own audition - in Calgary this weekend. I have a lot of hopes and expectations for myself, but I'm trying to not let too many of them hinge on the final outcome, which I can't control. I want to play with a real sense of confidence, of phrasing and line and beautiful sound, and really show how I can play. I want to present the kind of audition that makes people stop checking notes, allows them to sit back and relax and enjoy a real performance. Even writing these hopes down seems a like an act of courage - I know it's a lot to ask of myself. But I know the music, I've prepared it well, and that faith can help guide me, I hope!

I won't have Dan Wakin to report on this audition, and my computer won't be coming along either - but when I get back next week, I'll try and write more about it. I've been a little negligent of the blog, these last couple weeks, but I'm grateful that so many people have kept checking in and reading the few scraps I've written!

Here's one more Rilke quote, which helps remind me of a larger purpose in all this self-absorbed navel-gazing:

Before a human being thinks of others he must have been unapologetically himself; he must have taken the measure of his nature in order to master it and employ it for the benefit of others like himself.

Rilke on life and music

Lately I've been reading a book with the rather unwieldy title The Poet's Guide to Life: The Wisdom of Rilke, edited and translated by Ulrich Baer. It's a collection of passages from Rilke's letters, which apparently comprise many more than just those few to the young poet. In fact, there are an estimated 11,000 extant letters, of which 7,000 are uncopyrighted and available to the public. Ulrich Baer notes in the introduction, "In his last will, Rilke declared every single one of his letters to be as much a part of his work as each of his many poems, and he authorized publication of the entire correspondence."

I've just begun the book, but already I've found some wonders - here are a couple of my favorites, which seem to relate to the experiences of both living and making music:

If we wish to be let in on the secrets of life, we must be mindful of two things: first, there is the great melody to which things and scents, feelings and past lives, dawns and dreams contribute in equal measure, and then there are the individual voices that complete and perfect this full chorus. And to establish the basis for a work of art, that is, for an image of life lived more deeply, lived more than life as it is lived today, and as the possibility that it remains throughout the ages, we have to adjust and set into their proper relation these two voices: the one belonging to a specific moment and the other to the group of people living in it.

Each experience has its own velocity according to which it wants to be lived if it is to be new, profound, and fruitful. To have wisdom means to discover this velocity in each individual case.

The following realization rivals in its significance a religion: that once the background melody has been discovered one is no longer baffled in one's speech and obscure in one's decisions. There is a carefree security in the simple conviction that one is part of a melody, which means that one legitimately occupies a specific space and has a specific duty toward a vast work where the least counts as much as the greatest. Not to be extraneous is the first condition for an individual to consciously and quietly come into his own.

very locals

....He also watched people walk on Lincoln Road, past the cafe. He could distinguish the Europeans from the South Americans and the Americans. The French traveled in pairs, usually couples, burnt from too much sun. The English came in small groups of pale and rowdy young men. The South Americans spoke softly and examined the menu carefully. The locals were easy to spot too. They left the best tips. Then there were what he called the very locals, the beautiful young people who lived on South Beach. They were tanned and fit and wore few clothes. They always had their cell phones out, talking into them or thumbing messages. There were others too--performers, pamphleteers, a man who sang the 1958 hit "Volare" in different keys, a juggler, and a one-armed crazy....

- from "Nothing" by Gonzalo Barr, The Last Flight of Jose Luis Balboa, p. 95

Gonzalo Barr writes stories that make the familiar seem strange, and the strange familiar. I read them this weekend in a state of astonished discovery, recognizing so many people I've watched or walked past on Lincoln Road. Like the bar manager in the story "Nothing", trying to please his customers, keep the orders coming, and fend off the crazies. I'd never thought much about who he was, what his life might be like - I would just walk past, cringing at those expensive drink prices. Reading Barr makes me regret how lazy my imagination has been, how little I bothered to wonder about all these people and their stories.

I think that like that bar manager, I tend to classify people quickly - tourist, local, sunburnt French couple - and then promptly forget about them. Partly it's a function of the volume of people around to see, and their willingness to be categorized. I'm not sure if I'm a proper South Beach local - I'm certainly not one of those 'very locals' with their cell phones and few clothes! Reading about this bar manager, Roig, certainly might lead me to tip him better, if only in sympathy for all he has to put up with. So local or not, Barr's stories brought me into the inner lives of people in Miami, which in composite could represent the inner life of the place itself.

In a NY Times review of another book I read recently, Dave Eggers' "What is the What", Francine Prose writes,

The liberties and devices of fiction (dialogue, voice, characterization and so forth) enable the writer to take us into the mind and heart of a person not unlike ourselves who talks to us from a distant period and place, and so becomes our guide to its sights and sounds, its sorrows and satisfactions.

I think it's a very good observation, and an explanation for the paradoxical way that fiction can be truer than memoir or non-fiction. Prose's description is just as relevant for a book set in one's own city and time, though - it seems to me that the great boundaries between people today are often not time or place but indifference and failure of imagination. When we can't fully understand or sympathize with our own neighbors, it's difficult to do so for Palestinian or Sudanese people. Still, I think great stories like Barr's can be a cure for indifference, and a way of entering into others' lives without harrassing or annoying them.

Gonzalo Barr appears today on WLRN's "Topical Currents".

everything is weirder here

The saying goes that everything is bigger in Texas, and if we have an equivalent I would say that everything is weirder in Florida. That weirdness might start with our climate and natural surroundings, but it definitely applies to the people, the politics, and the literature here as well.

One of the Florida authors my friend Kevin of hidden city raves about is Carl Hiaasen. His most recent novel, Nature Girl, is about a woman who lures a hapless telemarketer to her home in the Everglades, not only to punish him for his annoying vocation but to give him a fuller appreciation of the natural world. I heard a radio interview with the author on WBUR's On Point, a public radio show in syndication nationwide which unfortunately doesn't broadcast in Miami. I heard it online though.

It was strange hearing all the live callers, most of them Miami natives, who phoned in from New Mexico, South Carolina, Kentucky, everywhere but Miami. The host Tom Ashbrook at one point wondered aloud why all these people had left, whether it was the very weirdness and scuzziness of the place Carl Hiaasen depicts that had driven them all away. It's probably more because we can't hear On Point live, but it is remarkable how many former Floridians are still in love with the stories, the colors, and the overall weirdness of this place. Hiaasen pointed out that he sees Florida as a place of incredible wonders which people are quickly and senselessly destroying - in this sense his novels aren't so much satire, he said, but documentary.

Another native Miami author I've recently discovered is Karen Russell, whose debut collection is St. Lucy's Home For Girls Raised by Wolves. Russell's stories also feature the glorious strangeness of Florida. Her stories are filled with human attempts to tame and control nature, which somehow only manage to turn everything weirder. We're placed in bizarre theme parks (Swamplandia!), school field trips gone tragically wrong, a program pairing young ex-cons with retirees living in boats, and a reformatory school for feral girls. Just like Hiaasen, her stories are hilarious and reveal human nature at its twisted extremes.

Maybe things wouldn't be half as weird around here if we didn't have so many people trying to straighten Florida up and turn it into a big Disney amusement park. The real amusement of Florida comes from watching all those plans go askew, seeing nature take its revenge, and our authentic, native weirdness winning out in the end.