Music of the Tigers

Over the past few days I’ve seen three live performances.  I want to use this post to ponder the complexities of how we react to live performance.  I want to say at the start that no one wants to give a bad, a boring, an inadequate performance.  I’ve done a bit of amateur theater, and even  more amateur music.  It’s always true that when I’m on stage, I’m trying my hardest to make it special for the audience.  Sometimes, I just don’t have the professional skills that it might take to “achieve lift-off”, in a friend’s phrase.

And sometimes, as an audience member, I’m just sitting there holding on to my lead balloon and not willing to be transported.  Maybe that’s what was going on at the recital by Bryn Terfel that I heard on Thursday night.  He has an amazing voice that he can control from the loudest roar to the softest whisper.   He also has an engaging manner on stage–not too chatty, but genuine.  He opened with a comment that if we noticed a certain jocularity of manner and bumptiousness of walk from him, that he had just been singing Falstaff.  It was some of the best singing that I’ve ever heard in a recital.  At one point, he stopped in the middle of a group of songs to complement the audience on being quiet and said “You can breathe, you know.”  But the magic didn’t happen for me.  It seems that it did for the reviewer from the San Francisco Chronicle [here’s the review], and he’s not known for being easy to please.  What’s particularly puzzling to me is that our reactions to the details of the recital were quite similar.

Then yesterday, a friend and I went up to Sonoma State University for a  double bill.  There was a matinee of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, and a performance of West Side Story in the evening.  Let’s just say that the Shakespeare was really beyond the current abilities of the cast.  In general, the delivery of the iambic pentameter was bound by the meter and the line breaks of the text [dadum-dadum-dadum-dadum-daDUM/ dadum-dadum-dadum-dadum-daDUM].  And the actors are, well, students.  I spent much of the afternoon somewhere between bored and cranky.  The real surprise for me is that I ended up the performance with tears running down my cheeks.  Now how did that happen?  Did I suddenly find the performance much better?  Did the language trigger memories of the other performances of the play that I’ve seen in the past?  Maybe the only way to “understand” it is to quote Henslowe’s line from Shakespeare in Love about what happens in the theatre: “It’s  a miracle.”

The evening production of West Side Story was full of energy, good singing and music, and an interesting use of the space.  Before the show, I hadn’t thought of the complications of casting a show whose primary plot element is the conflict between two gangs where membership is based on race/ethnicity, but the cast isn’t being chosen based on race.  The director addressed this directly in the program, saying that at heart, the conflict of the piece isn’t about race but about the more fundamental question: “Who is Us? and who is Them?”.  At some level, I think that’s one of the most important questions for the 21st century.  I did mist up a bit for “There’s a place for us”, but I wasn’t crying at the end.  My friend, sitting next to me, was.

Perhaps that’s the real reason that I continue to seek out live performance.  There is a special kind of energy that happens when the audience and the performers are both in the same room–with the energy between them creating today’s unique version.  It’s an energy that I often find missing from CDs and DVDs, where the production sometimes polishes out all the “errors” and, at the same time, removes all the personalities of the performers. 

   I think it’s time for another bit from this book.  There are a number of pages labeled “Women Wisdom”.  They represent various things that women have learned that they can and do teach the faggots.

 The strong women told the faggots that there are two important things to remember about the coming revolutions.  The first is that we will get our asses kicked.  The second is that we will win.

The faggots knew the first.  Faggot ass-kicking is a time-honored sport of the men.  But the faggots did not know about the second.  They had never thought about winning before.  They did not even know what winning meant.  So they asked the strong women and the strong women said winning was like surviving, only better.  As the strong women explained winning, the faggots were surprised and then excited.  The faggots knew about surviving for they always had and this was going to be just plain better.  That made ass-kicking different.  Getting your ass kicked and then winning elevated the entire enterprise of making revolution. [p. 21]

The page that I’ve quoted here has always been one of the most significant pages in the whole book for me.  Partly, it honors the women who came before, and who pioneered a vision of society that had room for people whose sexuality was expressed differently.

More important, it emphasized both that there is trouble ahead.  And looking back from here, there has been plenty of trouble for us queers in the intervening years.  But that, in the long run, truth, justice and [dare I say it] the American way will triumph.  I’m afraid that it’s too easy for me to imagine that trouble ahead means that there is no long-term possibility of success.

I’m greatly cheered by looking at the way that people of different ages respond to the “issue” of same-sex marriage.  People over fifty [except those of us who know better] purse their lips and make “tsk tsk” noises.  People in their forties and thirties dither and say “well, I’m not sure….on one hand…on the other hand…”  And people in their twenties say “what’s the big deal”….   I know I’m grossly generalizing–but the point of stereotypes is that they do have an element of truth.

And this is perhaps as good a place as I’m likely to get to thank all the hard-working feminists who came before, and whose work allowed me to see the way that gender works to reinforce the status quo.  There have been plenty of things that I have disagreed with, sometimes intensely, but I don’t think that gay people, and the notion of gay liberation, could possibly be where we are today without the pioneers from the women’s movement.

We’ve all heard the saying “Practice makes perfect”.  Some years ago, the director of the chorus that I sing with rephrased that saying in a way that stopped me in my tracks.  She said “Practice makes permanent”.  Her point was that practice is leading to perfection only to the extent that what we practice is closer to our ideal than our current state.  The other side of this is that what we practice incorrectly gets etched deeper and deeper into our being.

Her rule was that it is necessary to practice correctly three times for each incorrect practice.  When I’ve found myself doing this with music, that’s about right.  But there have also been musical errors that get so thoroughly ingrained into my voice that I can’t ever get rid of them.

It seems to me that this lesson applies much more broadly.  When, once again, I let my concern for “what will the neighbors think” stop me in my tracks, I am making it more likely that the same pattern will repeat again and again.

When I put up with disrespect, I set myself up to be disrespected more.

Maybe this is one of the ways that karma acts in the world.

But if I have to stand up for myself three times for every time I’ve let myself be put upon, I better have a couple of reincarnations in store, ’cause I don’t think that I’ll have time to get through them all in this lifetime.

[Warning: this is a post from Nerd World.]

 [The columnist John Carroll from the San Francisco Chronicle always warns his readers of impending columns about cats–some people love them, some people hate them.  I’m borrowing the trick for my posts from Nerd World.]

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve found the language of science, and particularly chemistry and physics, to be a great tool for understanding the universe around me.  I have an almost mysical relationship with the biochemistry of energy production.  Just contemplating the citric acid cycle makes my heart beat faster.

So, some years ago I found the ideal book [for me] about food and cooking.  It’s called On Food and Cooking: the science and lore of the kitchen.  The second edition came out in 2004; it’s about three times larger than the first edition.   It’s an encyclopedia of food.  Ingredients are described in terms of biology, chemistry and physics.

One of the things that makes cooking so interesting to the practical chemist is that the raw materials are so much more complicated than the usual laboratory experiment.  On top of that, the basic solvent for all [or almost all] food is water–but there are significant admixtures of oils, proteins, starches, and other solids that make our lives more interesting.

Let me take a moment to illustrate all this with an example from On Food and Cooking.  The author, Harold McGee [also author of a column The Curious Cook], clarifies that a foam is a mixture of a gas–in most cases air–in a liquid matrix.  The properties of the foam are determined by how small the bubbles are and by how easily the liquid phase regroups into a puddle.  If you try to whip water, nothing much happens because water has a very high surface tension, so it comes back together readily and because the water molecues [H20] are so small that they slide over each other readily.

Here’s a mental image that might help.  Imagine a packing carton with a layer of BBs on the bottom that’s about 4” [10 cm] deep.  We’re pretending that we can see the water molecules [BBs] in our  mixing bowl [the carton].  Now, take your hand and agitate the BBs furiously.  When you stop, it looks pretty much the same, because the BBs have slide one over another, and come to rest pretty much where they started.  –We’ll come back to this example shortly.

In order to whip something, the surface tension, the viscosity [how easily the liquid flows] and the size of the molecures need to be adjusted.  A spectacularly good example of a whippable liquid is egg white.   Egg white is a mixture of some fairly good sized proteins, particularly albumin, in water.  The protein molecules are large, “gooey” and “stringy”, so egg white has it’s familiar texture.

Now let’s go back to our carton.  Instead of BBs, fill it with shoelaces–or lengths of clothesline or even fettuccini alfredo.  Now, as we stir them around, they begin to get tangled together.  Before we know it, the whole contents of the box is moving around as one big lump–and if we want to get it untangled, we’re in for a long job.

Now we can translate our mental picture back to egg whites.  The albumin molecules, in addition to being long and “gooey”, have the useful property that they unfold and start to tangle just by being agitated at room temperature.  [The proteins in egg yolk don’t–so the technique is different: check out zabaglione.]  As we continue to whip the egg whites, first we get a froth of large bubbles.  But the egg white is sufficiently gooey that the bubbles don’t burst right away.  Soon the froth is becoming a foam–the bubbles are much smaller, and the resulting mass starts to stick to the bowl when we turn it.  At the same time, the albumin molecules are getting more and more tangled, and keeping those tiny bubbles from rejoining into big bubbles.  We’ve reached the soft peak stage.

As we continue to whip the egg whites, we come to a time where the albumin molecules are about as tangled as they can get, and still allow the water molecules to be mixed in.  This is the hard peak stage.  But if we keep whipping, the albumin molecules will start to group so tightly that the water molecules are squeezed out, and the egg white mass will start to weep, and to collapse.

If we just leave our bowl of whipped egg whites on the counter, after a while it will collapse again.  So we need to stabilize the foam.  How?  The two basic answers are: heat and cold.

We can take our egg white foam–suitably seasoned with sugar–and bake it into meringues.  In this process, two important things happen.  First, the sugar absorbs some of the water, so there is less an issue with weeping.  Second, the baking changes the chemical properties of the albumin, so it’s no longer able to rearrange itself.  Further, the whole structure is dried out–it becomes much harder.

I just mentioned that the sugar absorbs some of the water.  That’s the reason that the sugar isn’t added to the egg whites until the soft peak stage.  If the sugar is added at the beginning, the resulting mixture is so thick and sticky that it’s very difficult to get the foaming to start.

A particularly impressive use of our meringue relies on the excellent insulating properties of foams.  That would be baked Alaska–where we seal ice cream inside a shell of meringue that can then be baked without melting the ice cream.  Anyone who lives in a house with foam insulation can attest to the efficiency of foam as insulation–it’s the fact that the little bubbles don’t connect to each other that keeps the heat from flowing easily.

Alternatively, we can fold a flavoring into our eggwhite foam and then chill it into mousse.  Charateristically, the flavoring includes lots of fat–think chocolate–that hardens as it cools.  This hardening allows the egg white foam to retain it’s lightness, to the point that our mousse almost dissolves on the tongue.

This is perhaps a bit on the long side, but I thought it would give a bit of the flavor of On Food and Cooking.  If you want even more detail, check out pp. 100-113 of the second edition. 

One last trick that I can’t resist sharing.  In my experience, the best way to separate eggs is to crack them into my hand and let the egg white slip through my fingers into another bowl while I hold the egg yolk in my palm.  I was amazed at how much control over the process I had, and how tough the membrane around the yolk is. 

     I have been an amateur birdwatcher since my days in Borneo in the Peace Corps.  Characteristically, a morning of bird-watching consists of getting up early, then going out and standing someplace and letting the birds come by.  There may be a bit of walking involved.

   I had originally thought of suggesting that bird-watching is a kind of walking meditation, but it really isn’t.  It’s more a kind of waiting meditation.  I wander about until I find a place where there are indications of bird life–calls, rustles in the undergrowth, or even, a quick glimpse.  Then I stop, and do my best imitation of a tree.  There have been times when I have stood in one place for 20 minutes, hardly daring to breathe, in order to spot a shy bird.

And the point isn’t that it’s necessarily a rare bird, or one that I could add to my “life list” [the list of bird species that I’ve ever seen in the wild].  For example, after brunch today, I went to the arboretum in Golden Gate park.  It’s a beautiful spot, and one that I have visited many times.  In addition, on the first Sunday of the month, the local Audobon Society organizes a birdwatching walk.  The trick is that they get to go in 2 hours before the arboretum opens, so the place is deserted. 

Today, there were people everywhere.  I was a bit disappointed.  I had been hoping to be able to wander about, and, perhaps, see something unusual.  But no.  Apparently, all the birds were sufficiently terrified by the people that they were keeping to themselves.  And really, birds tend to take a midday siesta, as should all sensible persons [excepting us “mad dogs and Englishmen”]. 

I continued to wander around the park, getting grumpier and grumpier. 

Then, I found a spot where, for the moment, there was no one else.  Imagine my surprise when two California quail scurried out of the brush.  They ran forward a bit, and tussled with each other for a moment, then ran back the other way.  During this whole episode, someone could have come up to me and tapped me on the shoulder, and I wouldn’t have seen it coming.  I was so rapt by the sight that I was outside the usual universe.

I believe that most birders have these moments–and not all in the process of looking for rarest birds. [See Sam Keen “Sightings: Unusual Encounters with Common Birds”.]

It is these moments of just being, not doing, that provide a certain balance to my life.

    I just heard a commentary on NPR in the segment “This I believe” by a woman from New Jersey.  She pointed out that her feelings about the war in Iraq were made less urgent by the fact that she has no personal stake in the policy of our government.  Her solution was to re-instate the draft as a universal requirement.  Then we would all have to care.

   I was in college during the Vietnam war.  I remember listening to the draft lottery the year that I turned 20.  At this point, I don’t remember the exact number–38, 43, or something like that–low enough that I was sure to be drafted if the war continued.  Fortunately for me, the war in Vietnam ended before my college days were over.

But suppose it hadn’t.  At the time, my father, a WWII veteran, was adamant that I go to Canada rather than serve.  It didn’t surprise me, having heard some of his stories from his service.  And having understood some of how he changed as he grew older.  I certainly knew that I was a “conscientious objector”, but at the time, it was impossible to claim that status without a religious justification–and I wasn’t a Friend, or, indeed, a christian at all.

It was certainly true that, during the Vietnam war, the existence of the draft focused the attention of young people powerfully on what was happening in the world.  Would the same thing happen now?  I’m not so sure.  The government has learned from that experience.  They’re very good at keeping the real cost of the war out of the newpapers or television–we’re not seeing body bags; we’re not hearing of the numbers of casualties.  By and large, the reporters have to travel around with the military, and they produce their reports from that point of view.  And the cost to the Iraqi people, from our government’s perspective, doesn’t seem to matter at all.

Would a requirement for national service for all young people between 18 and 20 be in the national interest?  Would it make society better?  Is it a move “toward a more perfect Union”?  And would those of us who are no longer young take our responsibilities to that generation any more seriously?   I don’t know….

In the 1970’s, some amazing literature for gay men appeared.  One such is “Faggots & Their Friends between Revolutions”, by Larry Mitchell.  The copyright is 1977.  I’m going to be quoting at length, because it is out of print.  I did find some used copies for sale, with prices up to almost $100.  This won’t do.

Part 1   The Way It Is

“Ain’t nobody perfect

‘Cause ain’t nobody free”

     From “Blues for Mama” [p. viii]

Let’s drink to the old faggots who were there and helped make this happen just by being there      [p. ix]

It’s been a long time since the last revolutions and the faggots and their friends are still not free [p. x]

I particularly wanted to post this [p. 2]:

   The faggots and their friends now live in Ramrod.  The leader of Ramrod is Warren-and-his-Fuckpole.  He is the leader of Ramrod because he is the most paranoid and therefore the most vicious man in the land.  Warren wants to know who the leader of the faggots is so he can rationalize with him.  But the faggots have no leader.  They have only dead heroes.

   Ramrod is known to its neighbors for the fierceness of its weapons and the touchiness of its leaders.  To support their violence, the rich men without color who own Ramrod send their tax collectors out to steal the people’s work; they send their shifty-eyed ones out to sell the people machines which do not work and security which is not dependable; they send their thugs and goons out to take peacefulness away from the people.  The more the rich men without color can steal from or take from or sell to the people, the more violence they can buy.

   Ramrod is known to its neighbors for the elaborateness of its violence and its eagerness to use it. 

Over the years, I find that I’m more likely to re-read a book that I have previously enjoyed than I am to find something new.  Weirdly enough, this is particularly true of genres that most people think of as “one-time-only”–like mystery and science fiction.  In trying to understand why I am drawn to re-reading, some of the pleasure is knowing the details of the plot, so that I can relish the ways in which the characters do (or don’t) confuse themselves as the plot goes on.  In other words, I find myself concentrating on the characters rather than what happens.

Of course, the book needs to have characters that I want to spend time with.  It may be embarassing to me to admit, but I have to say that one of my main models for a personal relationship is the relationship of Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane as described by Dorothy Sayers.  Maybe that’s why it took until I was in my 40s to find the right guy.

There is, of course, another variety of re-reading–coming back to a great book after some number of years have passed.  It’s not that the book has changed; it’s that I have.  Right now, I’m on my second voyage through Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu.  The first time was about 25 years ago.  I have to say that I’m a lot more patient with myself, and with the incrediby convoluted sentences that I have to deal with.  But I’ve also lived enough to be able understand somewhat more of what Proust is getting at.

Of course, all this re-reading means that my pile of “to-be-read” grows faster than I can get through it.  This isn’t a complaint, just a fact of life. 

   I’m a gay man who has been living in San Francisco for about 15 years.  I’ve spent a certain amount of time in various countries, including three years in the Peace Corps in Borneo, teaching mathematics.  I have a great love of languages–including the technical languages of science–and of the systems of explaining the way the world works.  It’s been almost 20 years since I’ve owned a television, and I try not to believe everything that I read.

Music is a big part of my life, particularly “classical”.  I’ve been a part of a community chorus for ages, and I find the experience of being inside the music one of the most special times of my life.  I respond viscerally to opera and dance.

I’ve been part of a couple for almost a decade now, and this whole time we’ve lived apart.  Jeremy [my husband] lives in Vancouver, BC–at least it’s the same time zone.  He cherishes the best parts of me, and calls on me to be more myself.

My professional training is as a mathematician, and currently I work as a statistician for the California Department of Public Health.  I have a long history of being a nerd.  I suppose that I still am.

I’ll probably end up writing about all this stuff, and some other stuff as well.  Welcome to my world.