Archives for April 2005

Yes, I’ve noticed that whenever I post a message saying that posting today is going to be light, it tends to be followed by a flood of additional postings. And no, I haven’t figured out what mysterious kink in my psyche is responsible for this phenomenon.

Anyway, I’m probably not going to post very much on Friday, unless I change my mind and decide to post a whole lot of stuff.

Thanks for asking.

This is the first paragraph of the first chapter of Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong. I hope you like it.

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To the northerner New Orleans is another country, seductive and disorienting, a steamy, shabby paradise of spicy cooking, wrought-iron balconies, and streets called Elysian Fields and Desire, a place where the signs advertise such mysterious commodities as po-boys and muffuletta and no one is buried under ground. We’ll take the boat to the land of dreams, the pilgrim hears in his mind’s ear as he prowls the Vieux Carr

“Those who say that their childhood was the happiest period of their lives must, one suspects, have been the victims of perpetual misfortune in later years. For there is no reason to suppose that the period of childhood is inevitably happier than any other. The only thing for which children are to be envied is their exuberant vitality. This is apt to be mistaken for happiness. For true happiness, however, there must be a certain degree of experience. The ordinary pleasures of childhood are similar to those of a dog when it is given its dinner or taken out for a walk, a behaviouristic, tail-wagging business, and, as for childhood being care-free, I know from my own experience, that black care can sit behind us even on our rocking-horses.”

Lord Berners, First Childhood

From the New York Times obituary of Stanley Sadie, editor of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, who died the other day of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis:

Mr. Sadie had spent three weeks at a hospital in London, but was intent on returning home in time for the first concert in a music series that he and his wife run in a church near their home. The concert, on Sunday evening, was an all-Beethoven program performed by the Chilingirian String Quartet. Mr. Sadie was able to stay for the first half, but felt unwell and went home to bed. At the conclusion of the performance, the quartet went to Mr. Sadie’s house, set up quietly in his bedroom, and performed the slow movement of Beethoven’s Quartet No. 16 in F (Op. 135) as he drifted in and out of sleep.

He died at home the next day.

“I have always taken an almost intoxicating delight in ‘perilous laughter,’ that is to say laughter which, either from good manners or fear, has to be controlled at all costs. The kind of laughter which, on solemn occasions or in the presence of the great, sometimes wells up within one with such violence that the human frame is nearly shattered in the course of its suppression.”

Lord Berners, First Childhood

A reader writes:

I just came back from Budapest, and on Wednesday, March 30th, went into
the Museum of Fine Arts (known in Hungarian as
Sz

I spend more time waiting for people in front of theaters, concert halls, and nightclubs than anyone I know. The reason is that I’m always given two press tickets to the shows I see, and I always invite a friend to fill the second seat. (Actually, I didn’t have the nerve to ask anyone to accompany me to All Shook Up, but that was an exception.) Since I’m at shows of one kind or another at least three nights a week…well, you figure it out.

I try not to get my knickers in a twist when little things go wrong, and I think I’ve become fairly good over the years at avoiding needless exasperation. (I used to be awful at it.) On the other hand, I really can’t be late to the shows I see, since I’m there for professional reasons, so I start to get antsy whenever a guest fails to arrive at 7:45. After years of pointless suffering, I finally started giving the same speech to all my escortees: Meet me in front of the theater fifteen minutes before curtain time. If you’re not there five minutes before curtain, I’ll leave your ticket at the box office in your name and meet you inside.

My fifteen-and-five plan made it possible for me to consider the behavior of my friends from a detached, even sociological point of view, and I soon noticed that only one of them, a woman in publishing who makes a fetish of punctuality, can be counted on to show up at 7:45 on the nose. Another is habitually early. (She is, unlikely as it may sound, a jazz singer.) The rest are late to varying degrees. Most show up at some unpredictable point between 7:50 and 7:54, looking mildly anxious as they push their way through the crowd on the sidewalk and catch my waiting eye. A few like to arrive at 7:55:30, usually as I’m scrawling their name on the ticket preparatory to depositing it at the box office.

This leaves five friends who usually come to the theater between 8:03 and 8:05. (No eight o’clock curtain in New York ever rises before 8:05.) They are, in ascending order of delinquency:

• Two writers from the outer boroughs who work at home and come straight from their desks to the theater, thus exposing themselves to the caprices of mass transit.

• A reporter who has a way of getting stuck on the phone just as she’s getting ready to leave the office.

• A civilian who is so notoriously unreliable that at one time I made it a rule never to take her to a show without our dining together first, thus ensuring that I’d know where she was at curtain time.

• An artist (I won’t identify her medium, though she knows who she is) who has never been on time for anything in her life, though she always has interesting, sometimes spectacular excuses for her lateness. I’ll never forget the time she called me on my cell phone from the wrong theater six blocks up the street, then ran all the way to the right one. (Thank God she works out.)

Back in the benighted days before I came up with the fifteen-and-five plan, I used to get irritated at these five delinquents. Then I realized that to do so was pointless, since they clearly weren’t going to change their lifelong habits for me (or, I assume, anyone else). I didn’t want to deprive myself of the pleasures of their company, so I figured out how to manage their chronic lateness in such a way as to make it tolerable. Now it doesn’t bother me, except in the case of the artist, who cuts it closer than anyone I know. More than once she’s run down the aisle and dropped into her seat just as the house lights were dimming. She drives me crazy, if not quite enough for me to stop taking her to shows. Quite. Yet.

Most people don’t have this kind of perspective on their circle of friends, just as most people have never been unlucky enough to edit an anthology containing essays by a dozen of their best friends. (I’m pleased to say that I managed to do so without alienating any of the friends in question, though I did consider murdering two of them.) But I do, and what puzzles me after all these years is this: why is it that only two of my friends meet me on time? Because none of the others do, not ever. As in never. N-E-V-E-R. And you know what? Even though I know they’re going to be a little late, and have an ironclad policy in place ensuring that I’ll be in my seat when the curtain goes up, I still get antsy waiting for them, every damn time.

Might it possibly be that I’m the one who’s in need of an attitude adjustment? Surely not. That would be blaming the victim, right? No?

“Why does it happen so quickly? You throw a stone into the air and it has to overcome gravity, so its rise is slow, and that is why the days of childhood are so long and leisurely. But as the stone falls, it goes faster and faster, with a velocity of thirty-two feet per second, so that your sense of time finally is that of a rush into death. As the Book of Job puts it,