Category: Personal

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How One’s Reading Habits Decay

Trinity College Library, Dublin

We are all creatures of habit, and sometimes a habit can become the unconscious focus of our daily lives. In other words, we relinquish personal control to a formula of behavior. Brushing your teeth regularly is a good idea. Reading the news every morning is not.

More than ever, it’s become a dispiriting activity that, if you take it seriously, can poison your mind for the rest of the day. Smart people know this, yet we persist. This morning we read about the train wreck in India where nearly 300 people died; Biden crows about the debt ceiling agreement; the Supremes continue to defy ethical standards.

Politics now highlights every human frailty and failing. Worse still, for me, Trump and DeSantis have displaced Barthelme, Mallarmé and the literary life I once pursued. Martin Amis is dead. So is most poetry, and I don’t read much scholarly stuff anymore—or good fiction either.

I know I’m not alone. Many of you fix on your daily dose of the Washington Post and the New York Times. I do too while castigating them for all the junk stories they pursue. I also look regularly at Politico, the New Yorker, Vox, Bloomberg, the Guardian, New York Magazine, and sometimes Axios. Most of the liberal pubs like The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, Harper’s, etc. I’ve given up on—too pro forma.

As world problems have become more convoluted and controversial, creative writing seems to have become less innovative and more conventional. A few sites still fight the good fight. But I don’t want to read about the gender trials that young people are undergoing or their kinky love affairs or food preferences. Digital content brings us everything we don’t need to know.

The recourse used to be bedtime. You absorbed a good read until sleep took over and dreams displaced the world of the book. That worked for me for a long time, but I read more slowly now and it’s hard to focus on Kindle after a while. Or the book falls to the floor, and the memories of what it contained don’t last until morning.

Among all the positive benefits of reading proposed by one site, we’re told that reading “helps prevent age-related cognitive decline.” Well, friends, I would suggest that this notion clearly depends on what you read. And, finally, nobody but you cares what you read.

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My Memorial Day

I’m going to rest up like my friend here. I’m going to eat well and play some music. And I’m going to remember our military dead—which is what the holiday used to be about. For many it’s become just another day off from work, an excuse to shop the many sales, a big weekend for travel, as a record 2.7 million will do by air this year.

Memorial Day shouldn’t be just about barbecues and beaches. It used to be called Decoration Day (which is what my mother called it), a day to adorn the graves of the now millions who served the USA and died for it. As the country has secularized, so have its holidays, Christmas being the notable example. Patriotism, for many, is long out of fashion.

People don’t much care now about the meaning of holidays—or even those current events which can dramatically affect their lives. How many have been truly involved in the outcome of the debt ceiling deal, for instance? Or understanding climate change, the world’s biggest challenge? I grew up in a different time and surely a different cultural milieu.

When I was 21, I was planning my first trip to Europe. This was 10 years after the defeat of Nazi Germany. My aunt Edna had lost her son Bobby in the war. He had flown bombers for the Air Force and was downed over Germany, the land of his forebears. Edna asked me to visit his grave in Cambridge, England, which I did and which I can’t forget.

Why is it only those with personal ties who feel the impact of such a mountain of death? What does it mean to die for your country?

Part of my respect for commemorating the dead came from Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy who taught for many years at Dartmouth College. I took several courses from this extraordinary man who spoke about religion, theology, language and philosophy in an inimitable way. He had fought in World War I as a German soldier.

He also had much to say about the importance of holidays, their celebration and meaning. One example: “To reconquer his holidays, to establish a new and better time schedule for life, has been the great endeavor of man ever since the days of Noah.” Some of us would occasionally meet at his house in Norwich, VT, for evening talk.

The celebration of holidays was one subject that brought together the disparate elements of Rosenstock’s thinking. With all the things now clamoring for our serious attention, maybe we can’t revise the meaning of a holiday like Memorial Day. Maybe we can’t recapture the past, but we can remember what it was about.

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Aging and Ego: Please, Martha, Enough

Martha Stewart at age 81 poses in scrupulous déshabillé for Sports Illustrated’s Swimsuit Edition, and her legions of fans applaud.

“Crafting, gardening, cooking, modeling, restaurant owner.…What can’t Martha do? Unstoppable,” one fan wrote on Instagram. “An icon,” another said.”

Yes, her ego is unstoppable and really tiresome. For years now she has set herself to rule over American middle-class lifestyle choices—in fashion, furnishing, gardening, cookware, accessories, recipes and gourmet food. She sells not just items but her taste as an arbiter of style for the good life.

After a slight interruption to serve a short jail term (for securities fraud and insider trading), Martha took on business ventures (see below) and a social media presence. Now she takes off her clothes to prove, I guess, that you’re as young as you feel. She took posing as a challenge, she says, which she met and found it “kind of fun . . . a testament to good living.” It seems, rather, to be a testament to making more money.

Sure, she looks good for an 81-year-old. I look pretty good too for my age yet would never display myself as some kind of physical paragon triumphing over the trials of aging. And how many older women would do that? On aging she says, “I think all of us should think about good living, successfully living, and not aging. The whole aging thing is so boring. You know what I mean?”

For me, entering the world of aging was like entering a new life. For her, it must be an unwelcome continuation of the old, fighting off the degeneration of body and mind. She wants to show how she can beat the devil.

The best story on Martha happened in her new Paris-in-Las Vegas restaurant, as reported here. She is involved in a licensing partnership with Caesars Entertainment “where Ms. Stewart helms the restaurant’s concept from design and décor to food and beverage recipes.” In this Martha-themed restaurant called Bedford, a roast chicken served lukewarm costs $89.95 and lukewarm baked potatoes cost $15.95 each.

“If you order a baked potato, one will be presented by a server, raised high in the air and brought down with a resounding thud on the surface of a tableside potato cart.” So the food is presented with phony showmanship at an exorbitant price. The writer wonders whether Martha serves potatoes this way at her house.

The Bedford seems like another attempt to sell good taste to the yahoos, and yet it turns out to be a venture in kitsch. Her media company at one point was worth over $1 billion but the Bedford cooks “work, not for her, but for Caesars Entertainment.” That arrangement puts a rather big dent in Martha’s reputation for competence.

And she’s never going to compete with the sexy young women who used to populate the Swimsuit Edition.

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Ominous Prophecies and Shirley Horn

You didn’t have to be psychic to know what was coming from CNN’s Trump Town Hall event. Still, it was worse than I could have imagined. One forgets how vile and lunatic the former president is.

I found myself in a deep depression on Thursday, realizing what a chokehold he has on a large number of those living in what I used to call home. Trump shows nothing but anger, defiance, and the will to inflict his madness on everybody.

I wanted to write about all this and scoured the internet for some thoughts that might be a little different from what other struggling scribblers came up with. A futile search so I fell back on music to get rid of the blues, a process I’ve written about before.

A good friend had just broken up her CD collection and given me several discs, among which were three albums of Shirley Horn’s music. I’ve been a fan of hers for many years. Before she left us in 2005 she was a unique vocalist-cum-pianist who had a following of many jazz musicians and a growing public.

I got to know about Shirley through Rusty Hassan, a DJ and jazz fanatic whom I hung out with in Washington, DC. (Rusty wrote a fine essay on Shirley, his DC friend and neighbor, plus her involvement in the local music scene. It’s in a booklet that accompanies Shirley Horn: Live at the 4 Queens, a 1988 set that captures the way she sounded in a typical club date.)

She was a regular at One Step Down, that great small Washington club no longer there. One evening my wife Jane and I went to see her on a New Year’s Eve in the ’90s. We were given seats at the piano bar right in front of Shirley for two sets. Celebrated by many, including Miles Davis, this diminutive person in white gloves sang and played piano like no one else, accompanied as she was for many years by bassist Charles Ables and drummer Steve Williams. Here’s what she sounded like:

Her music gets under your skin because Shirley is such an impeccable performer. No one has ever sung these songs with such quiet authority and good taste. Most of her tunes also represent a perfect marriage of music and lyrics. Here she is with Buck Hill (tenor sax) performing one of the more upbeat standards that she liked:

Shirley was a singer with a perfect palate and execution, a master of space and silences. She was finally honored in 2004 with a Jazz Master award from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Her artistry got me out a bad funk on Thursday, and she’ll do that again, I trust.

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Foul Language Ascendant

According to several reports, Tucker Carlson got fired for using the “c-word” in reference to one of his bosses. And the Fox newsroom apparently was awash in unwholesome epithets, often sexual in nature. Such is the state of far-right conservatism. But heavy-duty expletives, once stigmatized by politicians and the media, now prevail everywhere.

You surely have noticed this. Films and pop music seem to glory in their ever more funky language. The staid New York Times now grudgingly accepts profanity. So does NBC News and many major media outlets. It seems to be coin of the realm to spice up stories with otherwise little merit.

Readers of this blog know that I’m not a prude about language. I counted eight stories with the word “bullshit” in them, but I like to avoid the stronger stuff unless it’s in a quote. Hot words lose their punch quickly, particularly with overuse. And the purpose is not blasphemy anymore; it’s putting on an act of being streetwise and hip.

When I was much younger I used foul language a lot. Sometimes it was just a lazy way to make a point or impress a listener, and sometimes that was worth doing. You have to develop a kind of good taste in when and how you swear. That’s lacking in so much of what we hear and see in the media today.

Though this linguistic indulgence began before him, Trump is largely responsible for how such language (and behavior) has flourished. His language is key to how his followers respond to him. Does it help the rest of us understand him? I don’t know. If I called him a coarse motherfucking pussy-grabber, does that clarify anything?

Bless E. Jean Carroll for pursuing her case and telling her story. The Post’s Ruth Marcus says that we need to hear these repellent stories over and again “to remind ourselves of how far Trump has dragged us down into the gutter with him, reduced to his level of tawdry entitlement.”

“Tawdry entitlement.” That really says it all, doesn’t it? Language, as someone said, is the window to the soul.

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Ahmad: Dying into Life

When great jazz musicians die, those of us who loved their music mourn their loss by remembering their sound. We don’t rehearse and recast their lives; that’s for the obit writers to do. When I wrote about Wayne Shorter’s passing a couple of months ago, I complained that jazz’s “great practitioners often get more notice when they die than when they lived.”

That is certainly true with the recent death of Ahmad Jamal whom the unwashed would accuse of playing cocktail music and tinkle-tinkle piano. Now at least some writers have recognized that he created a wholly new sound for jazz—not only with his rhythmic displacements (which Miles Davis often acknowledged) but with his left-hand vamping approach.

That, as pianist Benny Green noted, “laid the template for the essential approach that’s been universally applied by influential pioneers such as Red Garland, Wynton Kelly, Bill Evans, McCoy Tyner, Herbie Hancock, and Chick Corea.” Add to that roster Keith Jarrett.

Ahmad also made marvelous resurrections of old sentimental yet rich pop and show tunes, a practice Bill Evans and others took up. His 1958 hit, “Poinciana,” made him popular and well-off. About that time I was studying graduate English at the University of Chicago, and friends and I would venture to the Pershing Hotel frequently to meet the man and hear his novel music.

The Pershing was just west of Hyde Park and the University, at 64th and Cottage Grove Avenue, a solid black middle-class neighborhood. The hotel’s lounge hosted many jazz greats. Ahmad was young, approachable, and played piano like no one else. I have a number of his albums from those days when he played with the great Israel Crosby (bass) and Vernel Fournier (drums).

Another 1958 success was his version and subsequent album “But Not for Me.”

After his “Poinciana” triumph Jamal went on to greater acceptance though recently, I think, was somewhat passed over as a member of the jazz pantheon. His music changed but was always strong and involving. Here’s what he did some years ago (1970) with Herbie Hancock’s “Dolphin Dance.”

Ahmad left us at age 92. For me there seems something magical and strange about dying at that age. My two good jazz friends, Sue Mingus and Sy Johnson, both died last year, also at 92. I keep wondering how and if I’ll catch up with them—and now with Ahmad Jamal.

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Headlines We’d Like to See

In the spirit of fake news, we offer the following. The photo above, however, came from an actual story, French Drink Wine as Protests Rage. Here are a few more headlines I’ve wished for.

Drone Strike Destroys Mar-a-Lago

Biden Backs Off Artic Oil Project

VP Harris Resigns

AMLO Resigns

Sinema and Santos win Medal of Freedom

CNN Finally Fires Anderson Cooper

 Republicans Nominate Kim Jong-un

If you come up with any more, please leave them in a comment.

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Aging and Eating

Poem written for a friend on his seventy-fifth birthday.

Staying alive past seventy-five
Requires some thought to avoid the blood clot.
Here’s my advice to avert your last rites.

Eat lots of red meat and pickled pigs feet.
Fried food is OK; don’t get carried away.
Drink wine, always dry and never sweet.

Coffee and booze you should never refuse.
Ditto with salt, or beer high in malt.
There’s no substance abuse in a chocolate mousse.

Exercise is splendid though too much recommended.
Walking is dumb; you could fall on your bum.
Watching TV beats climbing a tree.

Music is best for those who are stressed.
It’s the only panacea for bad diarrhea.
And whatever ails you—when all else fails you.

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Wayne Shorter, Alive Still

A funny thing about jazz, at least lately, is that its great practitioners often get more notice when they die than when they lived. That’s certainly true about Charles Mingus who passed in 1979 and whose 100th birthday was celebrated last year to much acclaim.

Wayne Shorter, another jazz great, died last Thursday at age 89. His large recorded output survives him, of course, and now the critics (like me) grab the opportunity to speak out about his greatness, uniqueness, and transformative powers.

Shorter was one of jazz’s strong composers besides being a reed player who could shape the conventional forms of the music into something truly new. So I don’t want to hear encomiums about him; I want to know how he did this. The praise will soon fade; the music won’t.

The typical obits gave the facts, as they should. But some writers went beyond that. As jazz critics will do, they offered up spiritual, even flamboyant versions of what they heard in Shorter’s music. Richard Brody of The New Yorker knows his jazz but spoke a different language in trying to express what for him was the essence of Wayne’s music:

Unlike such spiritual seekers of the avant-garde as Coltrane and Albert Ayler, Shorter, even during his most vehement solos, wasn’t heaven-storming but heaven-gazing and heaven-longing, looking rapturously upward—again, in effect, in two places at once.

Jazz people don’t talk like this. Neither should their critics. The people who really understood how to write about Shorter were other musicians, like Ethan Iverson who wrote five years ago about Shorter’s seminal recordings in the 1960s:

The compositions on “Speak No Evil” occupy a rarified plane. They aren’t quite hard bop, they aren’t quite modal. Elements of everything are just there, hanging out in a new and inspired way. The musicians at large loved it, then and now. Every song on “Speak No Evil” has been learned by each new generation of jazz students. Every solo by Shorter, Hubbard, and Hancock has been transcribed and assimilated.

Jazz lovers want to understand how the music they love was created, appreciated (or not), and produced. Let the jazz audience, not the critics, be the spiritual and rhetorical interpreters of what they are hearing. My feelings about a piece of music may or may not be yours.

And, one hopes, the critic can positively influence the public reception and understanding of a music—and do this in a timely way. My book, Mingus Speaks, finally got published almost 40 years after I had finished the interviews with Charles. The unconscionable delay was owing to some troubling and difficult times for me. You know, “life happens when you’re making other plans.”

Anyhow, the last time I saw Mingus was after a set at the Village Vanguard in 1973, I think. He fixed me with the Mingus glare and said, “I guess you’ll finally do the book after I’m dead.” And that’s what happened.

Wayne said it best: “I never make the same mistake twice. I make it five or six times, just to be sure.”

The folks who make their living off jazz and love it and write about it should speak up when it counts. What you have to say about the music can make all the difference to the people who play it. Wayne Shorter’s music was just too singular and important to be treated with fawning praise.

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Old Man Biden

The worst sort of ageism has been stalking Joe Biden. The biggest count against him is that if he runs he’ll be 86 at the end of his term in 2024, and polls show his negatives are mostly about his age. As someone who has eight years on him (he is 80, I’m 88), I rise to his defense.

Getting to this age involves some familiar tradeoffs with your body. I’ve been lucky on that score, and for the most part Joe has too. I’ve seen so many recent hip fractures and replacements among friends, digestive disorders, deaths, disablements and debilitations. One survives by having good genes, following (mostly) the dictates of good health, and being lucky.

Biden’s brain seems to be working pretty well. He sometimes has a short fuse when responding to dumb questions. And yes, he can ramble on. People are quick to focus on his stumbles boarding a plane, his flubs on delivering a speech, the stuttering, his gait when walking, and so on. Only a few recognize the severe disabilities that Presidents FDR and JFK had to overcome—and their success in doing so. Biden’s problems pale in comparison.

I still don’t quite understand why his approval numbers are so bad. Some 62% say he hasn’t accomplished much, despite a $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill, $369 billion in climate initiatives, and tremendous growth in job numbers. His policy positions should appeal broadly but don’t, though they reflect large-scale approval of their aims. “A third of registered voters have heard ‘nothing at all’ about the climate law, while another 24 percent heard ‘a little’ and 29 percent heard ‘some.’” So says Politico.

Despite a shaky start, his State of the Union speech was strong. It demonstrated that he could quickly and effectively respond to provocations from the Other Side. Who could ask “for a better foil than Marjorie Taylor Greene”? His performance showed that he could effectively think on his feet. The expected catalog of Biden accomplishments was presented so as to be understandable (if not appealing) to everyone. Few presidents have been able to do this as well.

The major problem for Biden seems to be (1) that his administration hasn’t put his achievements in terms to appeal to a mass audience, and (2) made sufficient efforts to get that message out. Young people in particular aren’t tuning in, and “Americans broadly distrust Biden, McCarthy and both parties in Congress.” Some 60% see no progress in job creation even though “Biden has overseen the fastest pace of job growth in U.S. history, with unemployment reaching lows not seen in decades.”

Hurrah, but perhaps the problem is more than messaging. People need to see action and results, some kind of evidence that the Biden policies and legislation are working. The administration has less than two years to show us more tangible progress. Shooting down spy balloons gets a lot of press; opening new chip plants does not.

Joe’s folks need to rebuild their communications efforts. Show us the benefits in real time and tell us stories with real people that we can believe in.

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The Piano

These days, you often can’t give them away, and many fine pianos actually end up in the trash. The market doesn’t care about family or sentimental values or the fact that music may have kept the family together or at least brought home the joy of making music.

In 1931 at the height of the Depression my parents bought a new Steinway grand for their new Chicago apartment. I was born three years later, and the piano (along with 78-rpm records) became my introduction to music—a lifelong passion. My mother played Christmas carols and simple classical pieces on it, dad would hammer out old show tunes, and some notable jazz musicians like Barbara Carroll entertained us at parties.

Other musicians recognized what a great instrument this piano was. When the family moved on from Chicago, so did the piano, to a new home in Highland Park. In 1950 my parents hosted an affair with the Louis Armstrong All-Stars, and Earl Fatha Hines played it and loved it. In the mid-1960s it came to rest in my New York apartment where in 1971 Sir Roland Hanna, the noted jazz musician, came to a party I had and played it. For its later years it took up space at my ex-wife’s house in New Hope, PA.

When Sally and I split up, we had a fight about who would get the piano. At that time she had a house and I was moving around, starting a new life in Rhode Island and doing a lot of itinerant communications work. So she got the piano, and I got the divorce. I think she did play it, a little. But mostly it sat for ten or more years, tuned but unplayed.

When she died the house had to be sold, and I undertook to sell the piano. I wrote to local music schools and got a lot of nice responses and no-thank-yous. I lowered the price and finally got a bite from NYU’s Music Department. They sent two people out from New York to audition the piano. They found it “a very fine instrument” and so we had a deal. Since I used to teach at NYU years ago, I thought it was a perfect home for a pedigreed old Steinway.

Grand pianos are big clunky objects, very heavy. Many people today are perfectly happy with mobile electronic keyboards that offer cheesy programmed accompaniments and sound enhancements. They are light and convenient for band musicians and those content with digital music. As readers of this blog know, I’m never content with digital music even though I do have a Yamaha electric piano to (sometimes) practice on.

Our old family piano in a way held the family together emotionally when we were all younger, analog people. It was more than a fixture; it was a memento of good times and the power of music to create a joyful connection.