Jacob Pepper: like Harold Bloom, but younger and infinitely more entertaining

Last Saturday I went to my old Barnes & Noble with Jacob Pepper so that he could get himself a copy of Moby-Dick.
When asked "Why Moby-Dick?" Mr. Pepper replied, in a tone slightly exasperated but still cheerful, "Cause I wanna read something totally sweet." Later, when someone spoke of a past attempt at Don Quixote, Jacob pointed out that Don Quixote was inferior, because it's not about a man trying to kill a whale.

Sometimes when I laugh at this sort of thing, put it on my blog, I worry that it seems like I am condescending, that Jacob is a joke I derive amusement from. It's not like that. Yes I laugh, but I also find myself wishing that I had said what Jacob said, that his way with words was mine, that I saw the world with the same intensity, earnestness, and good humor. So often I find myself embarassed by emotion, and Jacob's easy acceptance of his feelings and refusal to apologize for them account in large measure for his charm.

And furthermore, he's right: a story about a man hunting a whale is totally sweet.

The High Price of Sound Judgement

There's a little boy at my daycare with an unusual name, bestowed by obvious former hippies. I can't use the exact name without violating his privacy, and I've spent some time trying to think of a comparable name by which I could call him. Let's go with "Poem."
One day while playing with blocks Poem got into a shouting match with a third grade girl about the war in Iraq.
"THE SOLDIERS ARE DYING FOR OIL!" he yelled, his eyes full of tears.
"NO THEY ARE NOT!" she screamed back, approaching tears herself, "THEY'RE DYING FOR OUR FREEDOM!"
Obviously, Poem listens to what his parents say and takes it to heart. Most kids do.

About a week ago I walked into the library and found a group clustered in a corner, shouting excitedly.
"Poem is telling people there's no such thing as God," a helpful kindergartener told me.
The cluster then came apart to reveal Poem, red in the face, hollering his parents' beliefs in vain at the surrounding children, each of them just as convinced by their own parents. Five or six of them asked me to intervene-- "TELL POEM THERE IS TOO A GOD!" --and intervene I did, but not in the way that they, or I for that matter, wanted:
"Poem, it's okay to believe that, but the other kids get to believe what they want too. It's a very personal subject, and it's better not to talk about it at daycare."
Oh restraint, oh wisdom, you save me a job, but at what cost? What unimaginable joy, now forever lost, would it be to tell these children, with the authority of age, title, and $10 an hour, "No, Poem is right about everything. There is no God. The soldiers are dying for oil. Construction workers are unspeakably cool. Apple churros are the best snack. High School Musical does suck, and you should stop singing it all the time. "

Richmond Symphony, be not proud

The following appears in the April 2006 edition of RVA magazine, on stands now. It is my first time being published, outside of the college literary magazine and a few letters to the school paper, and I am moderately proud. A link to the RVA magazine website may be found to your right.

Back in February the Richmond Symphony performed the Mozart Requiem, and I went to hear them do it. They did a good job, as they almost always do-- the Richmond Symphony is a good orchestra. I wish more Richmonders knew how lucky we are to have them.

Before the performance conductor Mark Russell Smith, always one for the sound of his own voice, made some brief remarks: the expected stuff about it being Mozart’s 250th birthday, and the outstanding chorus directed by James Erb, and how the Requiem was a fitting tribute to some important local personage, recently deceased, of whom I had never heard. Then the soloists walked out, the orchestra tuned, and the Requiem began.

A word about the venue: in 2003 the Symphony was temporarily evicted from the Carpenter Center, and sent to live as refugees in a number of area churches. This particular performance took place at St. Michael’s Catholic Church in Glen Allen, a perfectly nice building that requires, for logistical reasons I am not privy to, that concerts there be played with the house lights up.

House lights up shouldn’t be a big deal, and at first I almost didn’t even notice. But as the bassoons and basset horns began their dark opening lines above the quiet detached notes in the strings, building to that small climax just before the chorus enters for the first time, it struck me exactly what it meant to have the house lights up. It meant I could see the audience, and the audience, typical of a classical music performance, was generally in its mid-to-late eighties.

I’ll admit that at first I felt tremendously put off by this. Hundreds of articles have been written about classical music’s aging audience and its taste for the established, its fear of the new and the dissonant. I have resented this audience for years, not because they’re old and crazy and they talk during the music, but because orchestra programs pander to them, usually at the expense of what I want to hear. I know they aren’t bad people, but we have different tastes: I want something to stimulate and engage, they want something to comfort and soothe-- a friend to hold their hand while they go, so to speak. I want to hear Penderecki and Bartok and Daugherty. They want to hear Beethoven and Brahms and, above all, Mozart.

As the soprano began singing her first solo, all around me I could see eyes glazing over, mouths hanging open, streams of drool beginning to form. Just before the Kyrie, as a woman behind me hacked up some phlegm, it occurred to me that this was actually the perfect way to experience this music. Here, as I listened to one of the great artistic examinations of human mortality, all around me was the disturbing physical representation of same. Music that had been in the past abstract, about the death that awaits everyone, in the distant future, the death we must all come to terms with, eventually, took on a startlingly immediacy. Death was present in the room with us, sitting all around me, coughing and asking his wife if she had seen his program. This performance wasn’t about the general death we all face. These people sitting around me were slowly dying as I listened, and taking the classical music industry with them. I’m not exaggerating when I tell you that I am surprised at least one audience member didn’t pass on in the middle of the concert.

During the Lacrimosa I swear I saw the bald scalp of the man in front of me decay before my eyes. My father, who was sitting next to me, noticed something was wrong and asked if I was alright. I nodded that I was okay, but in the distance, behind the horns and the timpani, I thought I heard ambulance sirens.

The Man is Coming for Your Teeth

From the Washington Post:
"Government lawyers tried to confiscate the gold tooth caps known as "grills" from the mouths of two men facing drug charges, saying the dental work qualified as seizable assets. They had them in a vehicle headed to a dental clinic by the time defense lawyers persuaded a judge to halt the procedure."

The Best Way to Eat a Cupcake

Thursday evening finds me tired and eating a cupcake in bed. I have smeared a small amount of icing on the sheets, and as I wipe at it with a damp paper towel I think that it might be worthwhile to share the following:
If you're going to eat a cupcake you should tear the bottom off and put it on top of the frosting, creating what is known in some circles as the "cupcake sandwich."
Why do this? Because, reader, it better distributes the frosting to parts of the cake that might otherwise be eaten sans glacage.

Tomorrow I plan to work fourteen hours, after which I shall have sex with your mother. It will be unsatisfactory, and afterwards I will tell her it isn't going to work out and ask her not to be awkward when she inevitably runs into me at parties.

Lame, perhaps, but it doesn't involve ESPN

New Yorker music critic Alex Ross on a recent Kronos Quartet Concert that featured an extended interview with Howard Zinn:
'My favorite moment came after Zinn said that free speech was being curtailed in America: a man in the balcony yelled “Amen!” and a woman near him yelled “Quiet!”'
I like Alex Ross very much, and these lines put a smile on my face. You may find a link to his blog, The Rest is Noise, in the space just to your right.