07Oct / 2011

In your head, in your head, zombie, zombie, zombie

Mr. Cordyceps was reminded by his wife that a parents’ evening was scheduled at their daughter’s school that same day; she had forwarded to him an e-mail from said daughter’s home-room teacher with the pertinent information, which included room number, time, and an invitation to dine afterwards at a nearby Italian restaurant, which invitation Mr. Cordyceps and his wife had gladly accepted. Immediately after reading the pertinent information contained in the forwarded e-mail, Mr. Cordyceps forgot it again, like an opening scene from some alternate universe anti-matter Mission Impossible episode.

Normally, this social event would have been a source of distress for Mr. Cordyceps, suffering as he does from social anxiety and tinitus, as well as debilitating exhaustion after 6pm. However, the previous day at the airport, he had happened across a self-help book at an airport news agent entitled “Fuck It!” (the book was so titled, not the bookshop), which purported to distill millennia of Eastern wisdom down into that sentence. Mr. Cordyceps decided to experiment and apply that phrase to his daily life, beginning with the decision of whether or not to purchase the book.

His wife turned out not to be thrilled by his surprise reception for her at the airport, so he applied the phrase again. It worked, he was refreshed by the resulting lack of frustration over her dismay.

So when the evening of the school visit approached, he leaned on the phrase hard. There were genuine grounds for worry, many things could go wrong. Their daughter was new at the school, and it was a posh place. The oldest school in town, proud of the quality of the families who sent their children there. Most of the other parents had already known each other for at least four years, they would be newcomers, possibly viewed askance, or at least with skepticism. And there was the matter of his table manners. Mr. Cordyceps had recently observed himself dining and realized that he had the table manners of a starving homo erectus.

The Plain People of Ireland: You just said homo erectus.

Mr. Cordyceps and his wife arranged to both park at a park and ride facility and proceed together to the school, but neglected to arrange a meeting time. As a result there was a slightly tense moment at five pm when his wife called from the park and ride to say that she had arrived and where was he, and he was on the verge of sliding into a dither before putting his new phrase to work. Somewhat calmed, he informed her of her options: she could wait 15 minutes for him to drive there and pick her up, or meet him at the school. Had he parked there, he would have needed 30 minutes to get there anyhow, he told her. Later they discussed the matter briefly and agreed that their decision to meet at the school was the best possible choice, since she had arrived so early; if they meet at the park and ride in the future, they will have to do so half an hour after he gets off work so he can walk down.

Despite all that messing around, they were still the first ones at the school. Then the others arrived and the meeting began. Coincidentally they sat at their daughter’s desk, so they were able to rifle through her things prior to the meeting. The desk was covered with graffitti, but so were all the other desks. Mr. Cordyceps considered adding, “I love my dad” but then applied his phrase, because getting in trouble for writing on a desk would not be a good start to his new relationship with the school.

The home room teacher explained various things. Mr. Cordyceps understood about 75% of what she said, and about 50% of what the other parents said. This was due primarily to his tinitus and general deafness, he decided, but he had to wonder how much was due to the scores of 32 and 33 that he had gotten that day on two test-yourself-for-Aspergers tests he had taken that afternoon on the Internet. 30, according to the tests, corresponds to borderline Aspergers, or suspicion of possibly having Aspergers, or thereabouts, but Mr. Cordyceps was well aware of his ability to suss such tests while taking them, which may have resulted in him achieving a score higher than would in truth correspond to his actual position on the spectrum; moreover, he recalled a conversation with a wonderful German friend years ago who had been in a frustrating relationship with someone who really did have Aspergers and who had assured him that he did not have it; therefore, he concluded that at most a small percentage of his not understanding was attributable to his test scores.

Other teachers came in and explained to parents the importance of participation and homework and organization and neatness. In general, it seemed like a good school; both Mr. Cordyceps and his wife were satisfied and reassured, although Mr. Cordyceps had found the Latin teacher a bit scary, a youngish, slender, sexy blonde woman with a prominent jaw and unnerving tendency to stress the fact that the pupils came from good families, which made Mr. Cordyceps dread dining with the other parents later that evening.

Nevertheless, dine they did. First they walked to Mr. Cordyceps’ car to put in a fresh parking pass because you are only allowed to park for up to two hours on the street in that district of town, and only with a parking pass filled out in the window, after which you have to leave or put in a fresh pass (that is what Mr. Cordyceps believed, and in fact when he met a husky, uniformed woman later that night checking parking passes and writing tickets and asked her how long one was allowed to park, she confirmed this, saying “one is allowed to park for two hours, but we tolerate three,” which he found charmingly Viennese). They had to walk clear around the block to do so, about which his wife complained. She knew a shortcut, so the walk back to the restaurant was shorter.

In the restaurant it was very crowded and noisy. The acoustics were terrible, and all noise (kitchen and conversation) was focused at the corner in which they sat. Mr. Cordyceps was on his best behavior. He observed the others and did what they did. He found it difficult to arrive at a comfortable sitting posture, and tried out several. Luckily his wife’s hearing is fine and she is a good talker; he smiled and nodded. When the waiter came, he ordered Merlot, so did his wife and another woman sitting across from him. From this he concluded that the Merlot had been a socially-acceptable choice, while entertaining the possibility that the others had themselves been unsure what to order and opted on the I’ll-have-what-he’s-having choice, which he found slightly humorous given his profound lack of wine knowedge.

The Merlot was okay. Mr. Cordyceps was sitting next to the only other man in the group, but he did not talk to him because he would not have been able to understand what the other man said, and besides the other man was apparently engrossed in a woman with maroon hair and deep in conversation with her. Mr. Cordyceps studied the menu, looking for an entree that matched the color of his tie (off-white, stupidly, given that they were eating in an Italian restaurant) and would be easy for a hungry homo erectus to eat politely.

Plain People of Ireland: Fuck it.

Mr. Cordyceps decided on pizza. No, not pizza, because that involves a lot of fork and knife action, which allows far too many opportunities for mishaps, such as when one has a knife that is insufficiently sharp and pushes the pizza from the plate, or when one does not slice 100% all the way through the crust of the pizza and instead of raising just one bite to one’s mouth lifts the entire pizza. Risotto would be a good decision, and his wife did recommend the shrimp risotto, which she had eaten on a previous occasion, but Mr. Cordyceps was not hungry for risotto. Pasta, which he loved, was out, due primarily to the tomato sauce, which did not match his tie, but also to the twirling it onto your fork process involved, which also bore excessive slapstick potential.

Mr. Cordyceps applied his new phrase and decided on spaghetti aglio, olio e pepperoncino. Pepperoncini? The woman across from him ordered that as well, so he felt more comfortable. In a worst-case scenario, he would copy her methods of eating it. And, in fact, he did just that. When the food was served, the spaghetti came with a spoon, which Mr. Cordyceps knew was to be used as a base for twirling the noodles onto your fork. He had also heard that this was not an authentically Italian way to eat one’s spaghetti, and endeavored at first to eat his spaghetti fork-only.

All this time, it was impossibly noisy. It was a wall of sound. It was an Einstürzende Neubauten wall of posh restaurant conversation and tinitus. Mr. Cordyceps focused on his spaghetti with a laser-sharp concentration. At home, he basically got the whole plateload of spaghetti twirled around his fork all at once and sort of gnawed it off in as few bites as possible, but he knew that would not be well-received here. Everyone else was using their spoons, so he did as well. He noticed that they did not try to minimize the number of forkloads they ate. On the contrary, they were eating relatively small bites, so he also did. Despite this, he was the first to finish, as he was eating only and not eating and talking. There was a lot of oil at the bottom of his plate, and there were a lot of garlic slices. He avoided the oil, which guaranteed nothing but grief, tie-wise, and concentrated on the garlic.

The woman across the table mentioned a town. Mr. Cordyceps understood his wife to say, I don’t think I’ve ever been there. He decided he had misunderstood her, since she went there a lot to go shopping with the girls. Then she looked at him. Apparently she had thrown him a conversational bone and he was expected to pick it up and manipulate it somehow. Oh, I’ve been there, he said. I even played a concert there. He explained that he had composed a piece for voice and theremin and performed it in a concert location there. The other parents they were talking to were all musicians of one stripe or another. Mr. Cordyceps’ wife mentioned that he played the cello. He added, badly. His wife accused him of tiefstapeln. Everyone smiled. Mr. Cordyceps considered adding, And the singing saw, but ultimately did not.

Trapped there in his snow globe of noise, the look on the other woman’s face told him that he had just scored a status point somehow. He wasn’t sure what for, thanks to his scores of 32 and 33, but he thanked his wife internally. He resolved to thank her externally as soon as he got a chance, but he forgot.

Then they paid their bill and went home. There was a small problem getting his wife back to her car, as it was impossible to get there from where they were, by car. The closest he could get her was the station, from which she had to walk a few meters. Nothing remarkable; afterwards it occurred to him that he should have walked to her car and let her drive his, but that would have entailed the problem of him finding where she had parked her car, and she did ultimately make it home safely so in the end all was well. He applied his phrase again.

Then he went to sleep, and slept until the rain woke him in the morning, after which he lay in bed a few minutes listening to it. It was the most beautiful sound.

_______________________________

PS The Irish Times is celebrating the 100th birthday of Brian O’Nolan by reprinting some of his columns, bless their hearts.

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11Aug / 2011

Behold the sturgeon

The sturgeon decides enough is enough and decides to finish turning that cluttered room in the cellar into a studio/workshop/whatever. He marches downstairs, opens the door, steps inside and stands there gobsmacked by the horribility of the mess.

He is standing there while his youngest daughter enters. “Dude, I would totally put a sofa right there,” she says. “Or a big mafia boss chair, at least.”

He throws out some stuff, then goes to bed and sleeps.

The next day he goes back down there and throws away some more stuff. Other stuff he arranges in boxes and puts away in an orderly manner. Slowly it begins to look better than before.

He stands at the work table going through papers he has, for whatever reason, saved. Post-Its with scribbles on them, for instance. You never know when you will need one of those. Instruction manuals for computers he no longer has.

A piece of paper reading, “I love you” in the handwriting of one of his daughters. Tapes that to the wall.

Later he finds a Valentine’s card his oldest daughter gave him when she was four or five.

This is time travel, it dawns on him. This is two tin cans connected by a string, stretched between him, now, and that little girl sixteen, seventeen years ago.

He holds the can up close to his ear.

He can hear her voice, as he reads the card.

“I want you to be happy,” she says.

“I love you,” she says.

“I am giving you a castle with lots of roses.”

The world is full of these tin can telephones, crossing decades, he thinks.

This is why he can’t throw anything away. You never know.

Everything comes to a stop for a minute, down there in the cellar.

“I am giving you a castle with lots of roses, just for you and me.”

That’s all they want from him, he realizes. That is the only thing – for him to be happy.

Everyone who loves me wants only for me to be happy, he thinks.

So he decides to be happy.

Just like that.

And he is.

His oldest daughter, she of the time traveling tin can phone, writes of her trip through India and he is happy, amazed at her talent for writing, her eye for detail, her heart for the world.

His youngest daughter informs him that he has to drive her into Vienna before work tomorrow for a dance lesson. He asks her what sort of dance and she says, pole dancing, and he is happy.

He plays cello with his teacher at a lesson and at one point the beauty of Vivaldi moves him to the verge of tears, and he is happy.

He tapes the Valentine’s card to the wall of his shop. Then he throws away some more junk.

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22Jun / 2011

Cello recital

The cello category here looked lonesome.

I had my cello recital recently. I thought I sucked, although less than last year (yay!). But according to my wife and my cello teacher, I didn’t. So isn’t that nice, I didn’t suck at my cello recital this year. I played some Vivaldi, and boy do I love Vivaldi.

Good old Vivaldi.

What a world, huh?

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21Jan / 2011

I totally forgot to tell you about this!

Last Saturday I took a breather from studying for Gamma’s (ultimately catastrophic) math test and went to an exhibition of new old instruments (mostly new instruments built by luthiers in the style of old instruments) with my cello teacher and several other cello students at Vienna’s Konzerthaus.

It was full of instruments, and of people, many who appeared to be your old-instrument geek type, which is one of my favorite types. They were all trying out the instruments, which include a lot of recorders, various string instruments (baroque cellos, violins, violas, various gambes, lutes, harps, and i think i saw a theorbe, among others) wooden flutes, guitars, and so on. There is no word to describe the aural experience, especially if you have tinnitus.

Well, except maybe for cacaphony. Or din.

Or racket. Or jarring dissonance.

I wasn’t even going to touch an instrument, not even get close, in the higher rent (I assumed) area near the entrance. Cool-looking stuff, though. I just have a phobia of messing up a priceless instrument.

We went downstairs, where the acoustics were even worse and looked at more stuff and my teacher explained the baroque cello. We even tried one out at a stand. Basic differences to a modern cello: no spike, less tension on the gut strings so it has a different sound. Softer, I assume – and more open, if the other baroque celli i have heard are typical. Unfortunately, there was a guy selling bagpipes at the next stand so we couldn’t actually hear any of the sounds we made on this cello, we just sat there and ran the bow over the strings.

Afterwards, I found out that the cello was originally made in the 1700s, then later converted to a modern style cello ( as many were) and then restored to its original condition by this particular luthier. I was glad I hadn’t known the cello’s age when I was playing it or I would have been all uptight.

After that our little group broke up and we went our seperate ways. I wandered over to the gambe stand and talked to the luthier, a big Hungarian guy from Budapest. I asked him about gambes (he also makes celli) and he let me try one out, which I have for years wanted to do. It was a neat experience but I’ll stick to cello. First of all, you’d think gambes are easier to play because they have frets, but in fact they’re 50% harder to play because they have 6 strings instead of 4, plus extra difficulty from having less of an arc in the bridge, meaning when you press down one string it gets pressed down even with, or even below, the strings next to it so you’re playing chords all the time instead of single notes.

But, man, beautiful instruments. All of them were – so nice to wander around.

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21Sep / 2010

Tiefstapeln

Tiefstapeln is currently my favorite German word, besides maybe Zniachtl, which is a dialect expression meaning shrimpy person. A literal translation would be, to pile lowly. Hochstapeln, which might seem like an opposite, translating literally as to pile highly, means to con someone. A Hochstapler is a con man, or one sort of con man. Tiefstapeln means, I gather, to portray something or oneself modestly, except that there is an element of dishonesty or disingenuity involved, so I guess it’s another kind of con.

I was recently accused of Tiefstapeln and have been wondering about that. I have been wondering about several things lately, in fact, including what will come of all this wondering. Write a blog called metamorphosism for ten years, or more, and then act all surprised when something actually changes.

It’s partly the cello. This morning at breakfast, I told my wife I played cello with abandon last night, for the first time.

She said, well, you’re getting a lot better. I said my new teacher, A, was making a big difference. She said my visit to Ruth had made a big difference as well.

We were speaking German. Unterschied means difference. Der Unterschied.

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13Sep / 2010

Things I learned this weekend

In no particular order. Or, rather, in the order that they occur to me as I type frantically.

Everyone needs a cello lesson from Ruth. ¹
Julian Merrow-Smith cooks as well as he paints.²
Provence is still beautiful.
Ants in Provence live underground which they access through little holes surrounded by perfect circles of sand.³
Some cats are friendly but don’t like to be picked up so much.
A GPS navigation thing totally gets you where you’re going, but YOU NEVER KNOW WHERE YOU ARE.⁴
Eating dinner with Dean Allen and Gail Armstrong gives you a lobotomy.⁵
One can sleep okay on a train in a sleeper car, but don’t do it alone.⁶
Americans always photograph their food and overtip.
Germans will not hesitate to drive a BMW right up your ass on the Autobahn.
On the other hand: no speed limit – whee.⁷
My wife is exceptional.⁸
There’s no place like home.

Footnotes:

1. Really. I drove to France to have one and it was worth it. Meeting Ruth changed my life. Her understanding of how the instrument is played and what people go through learning and playing it, and what they need to unlearn, her rapport and knowledge and sympathy will change the way you approach the instrument.

2. And he’s a seriously good painter. This weekend I got the feeling that I had been going about this eating thing all wrong all my life, until now.

3. Also, sometimes Buddhists accidentally step on them and then feel awful, sort of, although, on the other hand, hey, that’s life.

4. When I called to say I would be late due to road construction, near the end of my journey, and Ruth asked me where I was, it dawned on me that I had no idea where I was. All I knew was, I had just crossed a rindabite, second exit, and would soon take another right turn in 400 meters. A journey of 1400 kilometers is reduced to a series of left and right turns. On the other hand, it totally gets you there and I love it. Mine only tried to send me through a pedestrian zone once (and that was a temporary thing set up for a market, not a permanent one) and I only made a single wrong turn (after which the machine talked to me as if I were thick, speaking slowly and clearly and instructing me what to do). Another thing I learned in this connection was to turn the thing off if you put it in your pocket when you go into the service station for a pee, because otherwise you will be standing there going and a mechanical voice in your pocket will suddenly say, “in 50 meters, turn right” and a guy in one of the stalls will snicker. I got out of there before it could say, “If you shake it more than three times it’s a sin” or remind me to wash my hands.

5. At least it did me. They’re friends of my hosts and came to dinner and I sat there like the kid who plays the banjo in Deliverance, grinning and squinting all night and always a little late and a dollar short with the banter, which fuck they’re funny. The first place I heard about blogging was a newspaper article about the two of them, a long time ago.

6. Because if you don’t have a friend or partner or etc with you, the Fat German Guy who smells like six weeks of ass and talks too loud and tries to strike up a conversation while you’re reading and sticks his fat ass in your face while he makes his bunk and his ass smells like, oh now I understand why he smells like six weeks of ass, and he snores will share your compartment with you.

7. Lower-case whee, sans exclamation point, if you drive a compact (Mazda 2) as I do.

8. Saturday was the 30th anniversary of our first kiss, but she let me go to France alone anyway. And when I got back, she gave me a scrapbook of our first 30 years she had been working on over recent months. I haven’t read it yet, but she said she only put in the good parts. Thirty years, man. We were so young once.

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29Apr / 2010

Reading music

Girl: “Dad are you just lying there on the sofa reading music?”

Man: “Mm-hm.”

Girl: [Shakes head]

The kind person who helped me shop for cello music had to sing the music to me to give me an impression of what it sounded like, because I had been convinced it was impossible for me to, you know, just look at it and know what it sounded like. But then, as she sang it, I tried to sing along (very quietly) and it actually worked, somewhat.

And I remembered how Beta would 1.)sit down and read a new piece of music and then 2.) play it on the harp, more or less just like that. I had been impressed by how she could read a piece of music the way you might read a story.

So there I was with a bunch of new music, so I decided to try that myself. I curled up on the sofa with Gabrielli‘s Ricercari. I read the accompanying foreword and I hummed along with the music the way a child sounds out the words as he or she learns to read. It was a start. I guess a phobia of one kind or another had prevented me from trying that before. Or a failure to imagine that it might be possible.

Gabrielli’s Ricercari (I haven’t tried to play them yet) are interesting because they are among the first tunes composed for solo cello. According to the second article linked above, these compositions were also influenced by the recent (at that time – late 1600s) invention of wire-wrapped strings which made them more responsive and enabled cellists to play faster, more or less.

I can’t wait to try it. But right now I’m working on “Impromptu” by Alexander Arutunian. It has sort of this Armenian folky feel to it which is kind of neat. So far so good.