Living Artifacts

It was a night for Beethoven, Bach, Grieg and Mendelssohn as these pianists, young and old students of Lauren Cony, performed at the Community Music Center on Capp Street, in the heart of the Mission District.

Coincidentally, Capp Street has long been notorious as one center of prostitution in San Francisco. I remember a young prostitute named "Tracy Anarchy," who approached us at the Center for Investigative Reporting years ago about police harassment of sex workers in the neighborhood.

San Francisco since the days of the Gold Rush and, later, the Barbary Coast, famously celebrated its streetwalkers by bestowing their first names upon alley after alley in SOMA, the South of Market area that in our time became the center of Multimedia Gulch, home of the creative edge of Web 1.0.

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Back to the recital. I'm not sure how I got distracted. It should not surprise you, dear reader, that I love music of almost all kinds. It is the most intellectual of music -- modern jazz -- that eludes me, however. Tonight, a closing number -- Debussy -- triggered my usual reaction to modernist compositions: Alienation.

(I believe, technically, that Debussy was one of the important French composers in the Impressionist, or Symbolic mode. Whatever, to my ears, he smacks of jazz.)

It's not that I cannot appreciate abstractly the power of this work, or its obvious relevance to our era. I'm just not comfortable with any numbers of forms -- minimalism, for one that dominated the pre-post-modern discontinuity that has provided nothing positive to the human experience.

Hell, if all of these forms were to be traced to their true godfather, it would be Marx, the documentarian of alienation. I've read lots of Marx's writings, and can say, unequivocally, he was the greatest interpreter of our agrarian roots among any 19th century writer. I simply love his rendition of our history on the land, which resonates all the more through my awareness of my father's life, growing up on that small farm outside of London, Ontario.

I saw the house he was born in once -- in the summer of 1976 -- when we all were in London while my mother was operated on for the brain aneurism that very nearly killed her more than a quarter-century before her actual passing.

As fate would have it, the best surgeon in the region, Charles Drake, practiced his craft in London, so we transferred Mom there from the hospital in Flint, Michigan, where her would-be surgeon estimated her mortality/morbidity outcome in far more pessimistic ranges than did Dr. Drake.

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Dylan tells me he loves playing piano and intends to keep doing so way into the future. Tonight I told him something he didn't know about his birth father (who would be me), and that is that I, too, loved playing piano as a child, and like Dylan, I suspect I was rather good.

Like with most subjects, I have my theory about this. Are you ready? (Certainly, someone will shoot this one down.) The reason so many of the greatest classical composers were German, in my view, lies in the relationship between mathematics, classical music forms, and language.

Old English (German) is the most structured of languages. It appears to have evolved from people who took their numbers and their music quite seriously.

This, at least, is my utterly unlearned contribution to the literature of classic criticism. If this does not fully qualify me as a certified crank on Wikipedia, or whatever replaces the Encyclopedia Britannica, then I don't know what I can do to achieve that lifelong goal.

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It's an awful thing to say, but I love this post. It's not that we have traversed the worlds of music, language, math, performance art, sex, my city, my neighborhood, my dear children, or something that have not yet mentioned but ought to -- the Giants came from behind to win tonight! -- it's that this is fun for me.

All I must do is hold myself to two standards -- emotional honesty and intellectual honesty -- as long as a post meets these minimal thresholds I can pretty much weave whatever story knits its way through the sinewy synapses of my electrified brain.

What's not to love about the blogosphere?

Well, there is one thing. Your friends, if they want to, can check in on you and see how you are doing without making any effort to contact you. That, my friend, is a lonely feeling for a writer.

I don't only write for me, but for you. If you like it, it would mean a lot to me to see your smile, rather than only imagining it. I live inside my own head so much these days, the only time in a long life that I have lived alone, that often I imagine that none of this is real -- this blog, this story-telling, this yelp.

My body feels and looks old. I grow tired. For the most part, this is a lonely occupation, perhaps one that will be best appreciated when I can no longer do it. I hope that is not egotistical, but my hope and belief is these 500+ posts, these 300,000+ words and untold hundreds of images will be useful to somebody, somewhere, someday, a long time after I am gone.

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