Archives for December 2013

Holy shit. Critic Steve Smith of the Times has proclaimed Dennis Johnson’s November, which I reconstructed and Andrew Lee recorded on Irritable Hedgehog, as the number one best classical recording of 2013. Of all of the ventures I’ve taken on in my life, I would not have picked this one to garner as much public resonance as it’s received. I was talking to my good friend, radio personality, and songwriter extraordinaire David Garland about it recently, and pointed out that I had also resurrected Harold Budd’s Children on a Hill, which is incredibly beautiful. “Incredibly beautiful by itself is never enough,” he said. There’s something about Dennis Johnson being an underappreciated underdog, he thought, that made a story that resonates with people. It’s not just that November‘s a wonderful piece, but that it disappeared for fifty years, that it anticipated so many of aspects of minimalism, and that Dennis didn’t get credit for all that. The public (and critics) don’t just want great music, they want a stunning narrative to go with it. If I go down in history as primarily the resurrector of November, I will be very disappointed, but it will make a certain kind of sense.

[I should clarify that while Steve Smith does write for the Times, this particular list appeared in Time Out.]

I took my boxes, paper, empty wine bottles, and what have you to the local recycling place after Christmas. The overweight old guy who runs the plant directed me to put all my trash in the garbage because the huge recycling bins were too full – the amount of recyclables people had brought in were off-the-chart voluminous. Obviously there had been a ton of Christmas presents locally (and it is a fairly upscale neighborhood). I faintly joked, “Well, I guess the economy must not be too bad.”

“Oh yeah,” he replied, “there’s nothing wrong with the economy. People who want to work are going to work, and those who don’t want to work aren’t going to, whatever the economy’s doing.”

I had no ready answer to this, and he pressed me: “Don’t you think that’s the case?”

Wanting to disagree with him without being rude, I finally said, “Well, I don’t want to work, and I’m working.”

He said, “Yeah, I’m working. And I’m going to be 74 next month!”

I have nothing to add to that that you can’t as easily supply yourself. Happy new year.

There are authors of true originality in whom the least boldness offends because they have not first flattered the tastes of the public and have not served it the commonplaces which it is used to; it was in the same way that Swann roused M. Verdurin’s indignation. In Swann’s case as in theirs, it was the novelty of his language that convinced one of the darkness of his intentions.
– Proust, Swann’s Way

The semester never rounds off to an end; it unravels. At some point you realize you’ve lost your students’ attention; their roommates have scheduled their ride home during your final class in which you were going to sum everything up, or else they’re skipping in favor of the graduation barbecue and their summer job; their final paper topics are not what you’d hoped, revealing that they weren’t on the same wavelength as you after all; a couple of kids, sometimes the most eloquent, freak out or overdose and disappear from class; you yourself are too harried by student concerts and conferences to prepare an adequate lecture; hasty requests for incompletes are e-mailed by young scholars whom you will not see again. And so in the penultimate week you quit kidding yourself and start closing up shop, shedding your expectations for even the most formerly gratifying semester as if it were an alcoholic houseguest who was so charming earlier in the evening, but now must just be trundled off out of sight as discreetly and safely as possible, and in the last moments only you and a couple of colleagues are left to stare at each other sardonically as the whole thing fizzles.