Don Juan is the first of Richard Strauss’s tone poems to be considered one of his masterworks, coming after the promising but not quite great Aus Italien. In Don Juan, Strauss’s inspiration is clear, though it’s a bit convoluted. Strauss derived his work from a stage play based in turn on an unfinished poem from 1844, which was itself based on a Renaissance-era legend about a serial womanizer. This same legend inspired Mozart a hundred years earlier, an inspiration which resulted in the great opera Don Giovanni.
Strauss’s work opens with bustling swashbuckler music that sounds like nothing so much as an anticipation of the kind of music Erich Wolfgang Korngold would later write for Errol Flynn movies, with adventurous derring-do alternating with lush music of our hero’s romantic interludes; but Don Juan gradually becomes more and more profound over the course of its roughly eighteen minutes, and it does not end on a heroic note but rather a sad and introspective one befitting a legend that ends with the hero’s death. It’s as if Strauss is depicting the way that all lives end in the same place, in the same way, regardless of how vigorously one has pursued one’s passions throughout.
“Do you remember America?” the curious person will ask one night, in a darkened tavern as they nurse their second or third drink. “The country tried to codify freedom and democracy? I mean, sure, at first it was only for a few of their citizens, but it was a start, right? They got better at it. And sure, getting better took a whole lot of spilled blood over a couple hundred years, and even when they said ‘Sure, fine, you’re free now,’ they came up with ways to keep you from really being free…but really, do you remember America? That country that tamed an entire wilderness! I mean, sure, they seized that wilderness from people already living there, but still. Do you remember America? The country that made polio a memory? I mean, sure, less than a hundred years later they tried to ignore a new disease, but that was pretty neat, right? And they went to the Moon! I mean, sure, that was so they could feel better about getting there first against a country that doesn’t exist anymore, and they never went again or did much about that, but still. Do you remember America?”
“I remember,” a voice will say, probably from the back of the tavern. A raspy voice, an old voice, unable to speak loudly much at all anymore. A hat drawn down over a haunted face, scarred and weathered by time. “I remember America.” And they will lift their whiskey to their mouth.
“What happened to it?” the curious person will ask.
And the person at the end of the bar will swallow their whiskey and look off into the distance, what little distance there is, and eventually they will shrug. “We did,” they’ll say. “We happened to America.”
And the person will drain their whiskey and leave out the back door. Those remaining who heard this exchange will puzzle over it for a bit, but eventually they’ll return their attention to whatever else is going on–a sporting event on the television, perhaps, or some story about what happened at work that day. You don’t often talk about fallen nations and collapsed empires at the tavern after work, you see.
But maybe the curious person won’t turn all their attention back to the dull conversation going on around them. Maybe some part of their imagination will linger there on the memory of a nation, born in fire and too much blood, a nation that aspired but fell short, a nation that rose higher and fell lower than it should have.
Every couple I’ve ever known, of every combination of people, has a hot one and a cold one.
This isn’t about looks, but about reactions to temperature. Every couple has one person who always thinks it’s on the cool side, while the other always thinks it’s on the warm side. The cold person wants to turn up the thermostat in summer, still sleeps under three blankets in July, wears layers consistently through August. Meanwhile the warm person kicks aside all the blankets except maybe the sheet, aims a fan at themselves while sleeping, and will wear exactly the right amount of clothes to keep from getting arrested for indecent exposure and not one layer more.
Conversely, in winter time, the cool person is in their element! They are comfortable most of the time and always feel fine with a light amount of clothes on, unless maybe it gets really arctic in January. This person might even wear shorts in winter and longs for the cool nights of late September and October, often trying to get their partner to let them leave the bedroom window overnight well into November. Meanwhile, the cold one? They’re unhappy, temperature-wise, from that same late September all the way to April. They will huddle under blankets while watching teevee in the living room, they will wear handwarmers and fingerless gloves while working inside in December, they will plot trips to Florida and warmer climes, and it will seem like soup is on the menu each and every time it’s their turn to make dinner.
One or the other.
Some of these depictions may seem extreme, but I know couples even more extreme than what I’ve outlined here.
Which one are you?
Here at Casa Jaquandor, I used to be Hot One while The Wife always used to be the Cold One. She’d be hankering the close the windows in October, while I’d be the one who spent the entirety of July in heat-related misery. She’d be the cold one in February, never venturing outside unless it was under the protection of a giant coat, where I’d usually just put on a t-shirt and thick sweater under my trusty overalls and call it a day.
And now, recently, we’ve switched places.
I’m not entirely sure when this started, but it’s been going on roughly a year now. I haven’t shifted quite as strongly as she has, but there are often times now when I’ll be feeling slightly chilly and she announces it’s too warm inside. She puts up a lot less argument about me running the fan at night or having the central air going in the hotter days of summer; we’ve even had a few days so far this year where we have the windows open and the air is turned off and she comes into the room I’m in and asks, “Wow, are you really not turning the air on? I figured you’d be miserable!”
Strange, huh?
And it’s not just her! Time was when I’d go from, say, Memorial Day to Labor Day and only wear overalls a handful of times. Now? Well, as I write this it’s in the upper 70s and I’m wearing a long-sleeve t-shirt under blue denim overalls. And earlier I walked the dogs! So far this summer I’ve barely worn shorts. This blows my mind. It’s not just that my tolerance for heat has improved; I’ve found that long sleeves versus short sleeves doesn’t really make a difference in my degree of misery from the heat, and I’m kind of finding that long pants versus short pants isn’t much of a factor either. Plus, overalls aren’t belted so there’s more internal air flow, I guess is a nice way to phrase it. Now, I’m not going crazy here: I won’t be wearing flannel or any of my denim shirts any time soon, and the summer is young and climate change is going to have its way with us. July is just beginning, and in my heat-hating days, July was always my least favorite month of the year. We’re due to attend the Sterling Renaissance Festival in three weeks; I’d love to be able to wear overalls with one of my poofy Renfest shirts (which are made of really light fabric) to the Faire, which is located on the side of a forested hill. We’ve only gone there once when it was well-and-truly sweltering, so…we’ll see. Fingers crossed! (And also for rocking overalls at the County Fair in August.)
Meanwhile, as I write this, The Wife is upstairs in bed, under the blankets, watching something on Netflix. (Oh, she’s recovering from a minor surgical procedure on her foot from a week ago. Nothing horrible, just tendonitis that wasn’t going to heal without surgery.) Earlier I indicated that it might get warm enough later in the afternoon to warrant turning on the A/C; she responded, “We’re not there now?!”
How about you all? Is there a Hot One and a Cold One in your relationship? And have you ever flipped the poles, as it were?
No subject is more eternally disappointing to see discussed in America than race, because a great many of us simply don’t have any inclination to engage in anything remotely resembling an honest discussion of race at all.
This is not the least bit new. All that’s changed, in recent months, is the wording. White people have been finding ways to dodge discussions of racism probably since the beginning of time, but the most prominent version in my personal experience has been simple dismissal of the subject as soon as it is brought up: some version of “There they go again, playing the Race Card,” usually accompanied by a rolling of the eyes.
What is signaled by saying “Playing the Race Card” is itself a rhetorical strategy that has several goals: it’s a granting of permission to oneself to ignore anything the other person is saying, as well as a signal to that person that their words are falling on ears that have been rendered deaf before the fact. It’s a neutering of conversation, and saying it is a metaphorical hanging of the “CLOSED” sign on the mind.
The racism-denialist side has become a bit more sophisticated of late, which you can see in the way they have cynically elevated something called “Critical Race Theory” to the status of Bogeyman Supreme in this country. For a good summation of this, I strongly recommend the summation John Oliver did on this season’s opening episode of Last Week Tonight:
Of special interest is the fact that not one of the people shrieking most loudly about “Critical Race Theory” can tell you the first factual thing about “Critical Race Theory”, and that the American right-wing has become so divorced from any factual basis for its constant drum-beating about nonexistent grievances that now their entire debate can be shaped by dishonest actors like Christopher Rufo, who will publicly and openly admit the dishonest nature of their rhetorical framing as they watch their preferred framing of the debate happen anyway. These people are deeply sophisticated in their knowledge of how American media will follow a bouncing ball to the end of the Earth, so long as the ball is set bouncing by the right wing.
I personally do not know much at all about Critical Race Theory, but I am at least aware that my willingness to admit this puts me in an unfortunate minority among white people. Weird irony, that.
What catches me so much about the rhetoric around the thing that right-wingers have crafted in their increasingly fever-minded, fact-deprived heads about “Critical Race Theory” is one objection I hear over and over and over again. You’ll hear it in the Oliver segment above, and I also saw it this past week in comments on a post to my local Nextdoor forum.
(Yes, I’m on Nextdoor, mainly because it’s useful for stuff like “Hey, anybody know what all those sirens were last night” and “Anybody know a good roofer?” But the site is very obnoxious in a lot of other ways, and I’ve imposed a personal rule of never posting at all on it. One good example is the thread from a few weeks ago–and I am not making this up–of a person breathlessly posting about the suspicious-looking ‘colored’ person in the pickup truck who was obviously casing local houses…until someone else on that same street said, “Yeah, that’s Bob. He’s a meter-reader for the power company.” If I had commented on that, I probably would have been banned.)
(UPDATE: Since I wrote this, I closed out my NextDoor account. It just got to be too much idiotic racism.)
A person posted about “Critical Race Theory” being taught! in the local elementary schools!!! Now, this is BS, obviously, and to their credit, a few folks did point out that this is total BS. But equally obviously, “Critical Race Theory” is just a catch-phrase for these people that has come to refer to any mention of race at all, in any context. (Which is what Rufo et al. intended the entire time–again, see Mr. Oliver.) And that framing leads to this specific talking point:
“I do not want my children being taught to feel bad about their country!”
Or:
“I do not want my child being made to feel BAD about their history!”
Or:
“I don’t want my kid being made to feel like they have to answer for things they didn’t do!”
And you know what? Maybe that’s a bit tempting. I never owned any slaves! Why do I have to feel bad about it? Why do I have to atone for that? It was 150 years ago! Leave me alone! Lemme be! Get over it!
When you really start digging into this, you realize quickly that these people don’t want history taught as a factual discipline from which we can learn valuable lessons for the future and in which we come to see the flaws as well as the strengths in the generations that preceded us. No, these people want a feel-good story, a hegemonic tale whose purpose is to shape young minds so they get obediently tearful in the presence of a flag (and, maybe just maybe, the creepy politician literally hugging it). They want the Hero’s Epic version of history, with an honesty-obsessed George Washington admitting chopping down the tree years before he stood proud and tall in that boat as he crossed the Delaware. They want a tale of lantern-jawed heroes, always driven forward by God and goodness, with their women at their backs (always, always that) as they hew their destinies from the land itself.
These people want all the feel-good stuff from history, and that’s it. They want heroic inspiration from the brilliance of Thomas Jefferson’s diplomacy and writings, and none of the frankly horrific caution of Thomas Jefferson’s forced relations with his own slaves. It’s this feel-good cherrypicking approach to history that gives me particular pause, because it’s borne of the same lack of curiosity and honesty that leads these same people to embrace nonsense across the board, including rejecting vaccines in favor of some random medication pushed by some random doctor Joe Rogan had on the podcast this week.
“I don’t want my kid to feel bad about their history!”
Look, here’s the thing, for all those people who complain that they don’t want their children being made to feel bad about their history, or to feel like they are being blamed for awful things their ancestors did:
If you’re not going to let the evils in our past make you feel bad, then you don’t get to turn about and let the triumphs in that same past make you feel good.
If you don’t want to feel bad about slavery, or Jim Crow, or red-lining, or the KKK, or resistance to Civil Rights, then you also don’t get to feel good about defeating fascism in World War II, or triumphing over the East in the Cold War, or landing on the Moon. History is not a buffet where you can choose what things you like and which you don’t.
And this isn’t about “feeling bad” in the proper context to “feel good” about the good stuff, either. History isn’t about feeling bad or feeling good. History is about learning what we’ve done, the good and the bad, so we can make better decisions later.
But we don’t want that…or too few of us want that. We don’t want to talk or even hear about race. If we do, we want to pretend that ending officially-sanctioned slavery and quoting a single sentence from a single speech by Martin Luther King is all the discussion race ever needed. I don’t know how we get White America to even come to the table to have the discussion much less honestly engage it in the first place, but I do know that if something in history makes you feel bad, you shouldn’t avoid that topic but interrogate it even harder, because if something your ancestors did a few dozen or a few hundred years ago makes you feel bad, maybe it’s relevant to something going on now.
Sorry for the lack of posting the last few days. June was a rather difficult month–not bad, mostly (except for matters of national import, of which I must honestly admit that our last good month as a nation is in the rear-view mirror), but difficult. June was full of daily-life stuff that occupied a lot of my brain cycles, and as the month drew to a close, that level of activity increased to the point that I just had to shut down my writing brain just to get through.
We’re all caught up now, though! Again, none of this was bad, but it was all at once and it all absorbed a lot of mental energy, and I’m finding that mental energy isn’t as easy to come by as it used to be. I can prop it up for a while by upping my caffeine and sugar intake, but that only works for a little while and I always feel like crap for 36 hours after doing that–and I have every suspicion that the 36-hour recovery for that behavior will become 48 before too long, and then even longer.
Anyway, I’m on a three-day weekend now, getting some R&R in, and there will be more of that in the future. Onward and upward! Zap! Pow!
And now, here’s one of our cats, touching Carla’s butt.
I’m pretty sure this is Remy, because Rosa generally won’t get this close to Carla. Hard to tell, though, because they look the same and they have the same mutant paws.
Here is everything I know about Zoltan Kodaly: He was a Hungarian composer who lived from 1882 to 1967, and the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind cites Kodaly as the inventor of the hand-signal method used in the film to accompany the musical tones with which humans begin communicating with the aliens.
That’s it.
I even did a search on this blog, because I’ve been known to feature an obscure (or lesser well-known) composer once, completely forget about them for years, and then feature them again with a “I’ve never heard of this person!” blurb. I can find zero mentions of Zoltan Kodaly in all of my blogging. I’m pretty sure that I used to conflate Kodaly with Khachaturian, because it’s not as if I have any expertise on Eastern European composers who start with K. (That could probably be a Jeopardy! category for the Tournament of Champions, eh? “This Russian composer of two symphonies might have been a big name if he hadn’t died of tuberculosis at 34.” “Who is Kalinnikov?” “Correct! Pick again!”)
So, what about Kodaly?
In a way he seems to have been a kindred spirit of Ralph Vaughan Williams and Percy Grainger, in the fact that he toured the rural outlying areas of his homeland to record (on actual wax cylinders) folk songs and melodies, which he would later use as inspiration for his own compositions. Bela Bartok was another contemporary of his, and apparently the two men were friends who shared a passion for the folk music of that region.
Kodaly was also deeply invested in music education, and he left behind a significant body of work that, taken together, has come to be known as “the Kodaly method”. It is in this method that we find the use of hand signals to stand in for musical tones, with the specific hand signals having been taken from earlier work by an English musician and teacher named John Curwen.
I feel like I’m writing a research paper here: “Take a composer’s name out of the hat and write five pages on them by Tuesday.” But Kodaly is a pretty important name in twentieth century classical music, and yet I know so very little about him! This is always interesting to me: the gaps that exist in my knowledge, and why.
Anyhow, this piece is a collection of what Kodaly called “Gypsy dances”. I assume the Gypsies were Romani people (the word “gypsy” had not been exposed as a slur back then), and the work is a presentation of a number of their themes. In this way the work is most reminiscent of one of my favorite works of all time, Enescu’s Romanian Rhapsody No. 1. For all my admiration of the various musical forms at play in classical music–sonata-allegro, rondo, chaconne, passacaglia–there really is something to be said for the good old collection of tunes.
This piece, called Dances of Galanta, is just that: a collection of dancelike tunes, each one with touching rustic lyricism and rhythm. (Galanta is a small town, population around 15000, in Slovakia.) Like many such works, the entire orchestra is featured throughout, but the clarinet gets special focus, apparently standing in for an ethnic reed instrument that you wouldn’t find in the standard complement of a modern symphony orchestra. Dances of Galanta is an interesting piece from a voice I may well have never actually heard before. Kodaly sounds like an interesting voice, though.
By now I’m sure we’ve all had the weirdly unsettling experience that goes something like this:
I was talking to a friend about how to best slice tomatoes, and nobody else was in the room, and then the next day my Facebook feed kept showing me ads for mandolin slicers and tomato-slicing gadgets and kitchen cutlery! It’s SCARY, man!
I’ve kind of gotten used to this, to be honest. I find advertising an irritant and nothing more; I generally pay no attention to it. What’s a little frustrating is how often I’ll see a whole bunch of ads for a thing or a category of things–after I’ve already bought the one example of such a thing that I needed! Buy a new vacuum cleaner? Why then, here are a bunch of ads for vacuum cleaners! But…I don’t need another one, so why am I seeing all these ads?
But then these algorithms can get a bit too granular in their serving up content to satisfy very particular tastes. My mother has been out of town, so I’ve been hanging out at night with my father, and I’ve already noted that there’s been a lot of prime-time The Price is Right on lately, so I’ve seen more TPIR in the last couple weeks than I had probably in the last ten years.
Yesterday I visited YouTube just to kill time by checking out some videos, and YouTube suggested several TPIR clips, probably because I searched for a couple on the post from a few days ago. Leading the pack was this clip, likely from the early 80s, in which a young woman who looks a lot like actress Elisabeth Shue from The Karate Kid (if you were a straight dude in the 80s you crushed on her in that movie, it’s just a thing you did, like playing Pac-Man) plays for a car. And she’s wearing purple overalls.
Yeah, sometimes these algorithms get it right to an eerie degree.
I wonder if Konnie is still out there somewhere…she’d probably be in her early 60s by now, if I’ve timed this right.
(BTW, I noted that I spent a bit of Friday morning taking The Wife to a local hospital for an in-and-out procedure. When I picked her up I had to wait in the surgical waiting room for fifteen minutes or so. I walked in and plunked myself down in the nearest seat that wasn’t clustered by other people, and then I noticed that everyone else was looking in my direction. Weird…until I realized that they weren’t looking at me at all, they were watching the teevee that was hanging above my head. And on the teevee at that point? You guessed it. The Price is Right.)
Until yesterday, I had never walked through Delaware Park.
In Buffalo, this is almost a kind of heresy. Delaware Park is Buffalo’s equivalent to New York City’s Central Park: it is the biggest of Buffalo’s public parks, the one with the most variety in terms of things to do and see, all of it tucked into an energized urban environment. I’ve driven through or around Delaware Park many times (among other things, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery is on the park’s western edge), but somehow, in all my years of living in The 716, I’ve never actually stopped to spend a bit of quality time in Delaware Park.
Until yesterday.
What was more is that The Dee-oh-gee and I were there shortly after sunrise.
I am not a morning person–at least, I am not a sunrise person. We were all up that early because we had to whisk The Wife to a local medical facility for a scheduled procedure (she’s fine, just tendonitis in a foot that wasn’t responding to physical therapy), and of course we had Cane ride along with us; after depositing The Wife at the hospital where the thing was being done, I decided to take Cane someplace for a walk before heading home. I thought to go to Buffalo’s Outer Harbor, but I was in the vicinity of Delaware Park, and as I drove through it, I thought, Hey, why not walk right here?
Living in Buffalo’s Southtowns, Delaware Park is far enough off my normal beaten path that it simply has never been a destination of its own. That should probably change, and soon. For now, though, I’m happy to have been there on an early morning in June. It had been a cool night but was warming up, which made the waters misty in the golden light.
In light like that, even a distant cloud of gnats or whatever insects these were can be beautiful, as they catch the sun:
Geese:
And many magnificent trees:
The best thing I saw yesterday was a great egret. We kept interrupting this bird as we walked along the path. There it would be, fifty feet or so ahead of us, and then it would fly farther down the lake as we approached. This happened several times until finally it took wing and flew all the way back down the length of the lake; we didn’t see it again after that. But what an impressive bird this is!
We walked along the southern edge of Hoyt Lake and then we turned around and headed back. It was very quiet and serene, with only the sounds of a few joggers breaking the spell of nature and, beyond it, the sounds of traffic and a city waking up. We also saw the stage for Shakespeare In Delaware Park, which we have likewise never attended; I suppose we’ll have to see for ourselves someday if that cockpit can indeed hold the vasty fields of France.
On the way back, I stopped to pluck a single blossom, and after taking in the rising sunlight one last time, Cane and I headed home. We got back just a few minutes before my normal work day, had I worked yesterday, would have begun.
Not a bad way to pass a morning, even if I am still quite sure that I will never be a sunrise person.
“When the fall is all there is, it matters.” (from THE LION IN WINTER)
I am disgusted by the Supreme Court’s ruling. I, like everyone else, knew it was coming, but the awful thing is no less awful for all the foreknowledge in the world.
I support reproductive rights for all persons, period. I reject the notion utterly that protecting a fetus is the most important thing in the world. (In fact, I’m not terribly convinced that protecting a fetus is all that important at all.)
I don’t know where we go from here, but I know it’s to a deeply ugly version of America that I have no desire to see or live in. We all have to act if we don’t want America’s bible-waving minority to force this country back to a time when abortion, birth control, and homosexuality are all illegal. And make no mistake: they’re not stopping at Roe. They’ve got the taste for blood, they think victory is in hand, and they’re coming.
Right now, the fall is all there is. But there’s a lot of future left. So let’s get up.
(I will reject any comments that try to argue in favor of what this Court has done. Not interested.)
Continuing our survey of “Conversation songs”, in which the lyrics give us one side of a conversation, we have “I Don’t Want To Talk About It” by Crazy Horse.
“I Don’t Want To Talk About It” was written by Danny Whitten, a guitarist and songwriter with the band Crazy Horse before he died of an overdose in 1972. The song is a distillation of all the things a lover might want to say to his partner after their breakup, which to judge by the lyrics, was less than friendly. You can really hear the pain here, really feel it–and it’s not at all clear if the old lover is even there to hear any of this.
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Do you remember America?
“Do you remember America?” the curious person will ask one night, in a darkened tavern as they nurse their second or third drink. “The country tried to codify freedom and democracy? I mean, sure, at first it was only for a few of their citizens, but it was a start, right? They got better at it. And sure, getting better took a whole lot of spilled blood over a couple hundred years, and even when they said ‘Sure, fine, you’re free now,’ they came up with ways to keep you from really being free…but really, do you remember America? That country that tamed an entire wilderness! I mean, sure, they seized that wilderness from people already living there, but still. Do you remember America? The country that made polio a memory? I mean, sure, less than a hundred years later they tried to ignore a new disease, but that was pretty neat, right? And they went to the Moon! I mean, sure, that was so they could feel better about getting there first against a country that doesn’t exist anymore, and they never went again or did much about that, but still. Do you remember America?”
“I remember,” a voice will say, probably from the back of the tavern. A raspy voice, an old voice, unable to speak loudly much at all anymore. A hat drawn down over a haunted face, scarred and weathered by time. “I remember America.” And they will lift their whiskey to their mouth.
“What happened to it?” the curious person will ask.
And the person at the end of the bar will swallow their whiskey and look off into the distance, what little distance there is, and eventually they will shrug. “We did,” they’ll say. “We happened to America.”
And the person will drain their whiskey and leave out the back door. Those remaining who heard this exchange will puzzle over it for a bit, but eventually they’ll return their attention to whatever else is going on–a sporting event on the television, perhaps, or some story about what happened at work that day. You don’t often talk about fallen nations and collapsed empires at the tavern after work, you see.
But maybe the curious person won’t turn all their attention back to the dull conversation going on around them. Maybe some part of their imagination will linger there on the memory of a nation, born in fire and too much blood, a nation that aspired but fell short, a nation that rose higher and fell lower than it should have.
And they’ll wonder. Maybe.