Classical Music Lives On

Interesting article from today's New York Times about the rumors of classical music's demise being greatly exaggerated. Here's the conclusion:

"Woody Allen's 'Annie Hall' observation about relationships and sharks — that both must either move forward or die — also works for culture. In classical music, lots of people really just want the dead shark. They pine for the days when Bernstein, Reiner, Szell and Toscanini stood on the podium, with Heifetz fiddling, Horowitz at the piano and Callas and Tebaldi locked in a perpetual diva war. Most of all they want their repertory dials set between 1785 and 1920.

You can send those people your condolences.

For the rest of us, the shark is still moving. We're getting our revivals of Machaut and Rameau along with vigorous reconsiderations of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Mahler and a varied gallery of contemporary composers. We may be hearing much of this in small, high-tech halls instead of cavernous temples of the arts or finding it online instead of in shops or on the radio. But it's all there, constantly renewing itself. You just have to grab onto the dorsal fin."

Amen--in jazz, we have the same problem with those listeners and their rigid "repertory dials." I wonder how the audience numbers stack up compared to classical music.

Tonight at Anna's, Sunday in Sonoma

As with life, the show must go on. My dad had some surgery done and is in the hospital and the family's a bit freaked out (that's probably all he'd like me to say--if that).

Not that it compares in gravity, but yesterday morning our good truck, the dirty 93 Nissan we just bought from my dad for $800 (with power steering and working radio and rock-hard jump seats so all four of us can ride, albeit painfully) was stolen from in front of our house. Nice police officer told me property crime is up in our neighborhood, and in Oakland in general--in 14 years he said he's never seen the kids so active. He said they used to arrest old guys, crack heads, for burglary, but a few days ago he'd arrested several teenagers who'd committed a string of crimes. The good thing is, he said despite some anomalous incidents, violent crime is not increasing. We also discussed the upcoming city elections and the fact that our police force is understaffed by at least 500 officers--though he says they make a lot of money doing so much overtime. Apparently the police academies can't spit out enough officers to replace those who are retiring. He also said he's against legalizing sideshows, something our city council member had proposed. When he finished taking the report he said they had an 85% recovery rate for stolen vehicles, so I might get a call in a few days when the perpetrators had finished using my truck to commit other crimes.

Sure enough, at midnight the dispatcher called and said our truck was around the corner! Radio was removed, and the tool boxes were jimmied open--but thankfully my husband had removed his tools, which he doesn't always do. So now I have a car to get to our gig tonight...

...Yes, tonight, please come see us at Anna's Jazz Island at 8 pm-11:30 pm. Anna's is in downtown Berkeley at 2120 Allston Way (just east of Shattuck Avenue & downtown Berkeley BART).

We'll also be at the Sonoma Jazz+Wine Festival on Sunday, May 28 from 2-5 pm, just a drop in the bucket in a weekend packed with top acts (Herbie Hancock, Dianne Reeves, John Santos, Rickie Lee Jones, Natalie Cole) and toasted fans.

Did I mention I just had a baby 6-7 weeks ago?

Fugging Finland

My favorite horribly mean-spirited celebrity fashion blooper blog, Go Fug Yourself, has a very funny take on the Eurovision music broadcast and especially Lordi, the atrociously campy Finnish death metal makeup band. Check it out here! (And curse you, Tami, for introducing me to Fugland--it's an addiction now!)

Da Vinci Code: Finding the Feminine

I read too many magazines and too few books. The other day, as I was beginning to OD on the glossies, I remembered that a friend had recommended The Da Vinci Code as a fun diversion, filled with strange puzzles and historical fictions that made you ponder what really happened. I picked up a paperback of it and found it to be a perfect summer pot boiler. But beyond that, I was impressed with Dan Brown's thesis, that the "sacred feminine" has been lost in modern, macho society. I knew a lot of the history of how Christianity sought to eliminate or coopt competing religions through violence or syncretism, but I haven't read any detailed discussions of goddess worship. I know some societies in Europe and Mexico did have strong matriarchal religions, but I'm thrilled that a best-selling author is championing them! Check out this passage:

"The Catholic Inquisition published the book that arguably could be called the most blood-soaked publication in human history. Malleus Maleficarum--or The Witches' Hammer--indoctrinated the world to 'the dangers of free thinking women' and instructed the clergy how to locate, torture and destroy them. Those deemed 'witches' by the Church included all female scholars, priestesses, gypsies, mystics, nature lovers, herb gatherers, and any women 'suspiciously attuned to the natural world.' Midwives also were killed for their heretical practice of using medical knowledge to ease the pain of childbirth--a suffering, the Church claimed, that was God's rightful punishment for Eve's partaking of the Apple of knowledge, thus giving birth to the idea of Original Sin. During three hundred years of witch hunts, the Church burned at the stake an astounding five million women.

[...] Women, once celebrated as an essential half of spiritual enlightenment, had been banished from the temples of the world [...] The once hallowed act of Hieros Gamos--the natural sexual union between man and woman through which each became spiritually whole--had been recast as a shameful act. Holy men who had once required sexual union with their female counterparts to commune with God now feared their natural sexual urges as the work of the devil, collaborating with his favorite accomplice... woman."

The best part:

"The days of the goddess were over. The pendulum had swung. Mother Earth had become a man's world, and the gods of destruction and war were taking their toll. The male ego had spent two millennia running unchecked by its female counterpart. The Priory of Sion believed that it was this obliteration of the sacred feminine in modern life that had caused what the Hopi Native Americans called koyanisquatsi--'life out of balance'--an unstable situation marked by testosterone-fueled wars, a plethora of mysoginistic societies, and a growing direspect for Mother Earth."

Here's an essay on the Da Vinci Code "as a parable of American modernity" by U. of Michigan professor and blogger Juan Cole. While I can't read the rest of his blog (can't handle political discussions, all I can do is vote and send money), he makes some good points about how Brown seems to be advocating moderation, not a feminist extremism:

"The other pole in the Brown narrative is the priory around the female descendants of Jesus through Mary Magdalene. This pole is about paganism, feminism, individualism, scientific rationality and sexual freedom. This pole, likewise, can become corrupt and antinomian." I had to look up "antinomian"--it's a cool word, means a belief that "faith alone, not adherence to moral law, is necessary for salvation" (Webster's).

Not that I've fact-checked it (and I am a historical idiot), but the amount of detail and the appearance of accuracy is also reassuring to find in Brown's book, especially for an editor. With all the scandals around fake memoirs and plagiarized chick lit of late, it's nice to see that someone has done a heck of a lot of homework. Sue Grafton is another quick read who always does plenty of research, as is Tony Hillerman.

One point about the whole Catholic patriarchy controversy: My mother became an episcopal priest a few years ago, and in divinity school she discovered the bulk of her peers were women or gays, people who had previously been excluded from the Church. In the end, Brown does not make an indictment of the Church, but rather of its past and of its obsessions gone awry. I'll have to get my mom's opinion of some of the statements about women in Christianity--she's actually done some scholarship on it, unlike me. Brown has certainly not pinned down the only plausible theory about Catholicism's celibacy mandate; there is some interesting Mexican study of that (the film El Crimen del Padre Amaro is a great modern Mexican take on it).

There are no easy answers, but Brown's romp through art and architecture is elevating--better than dissecting celebrity hairstyles!.

Mom and Babe

Finding Bembe and McBurnie

Recently I went back to see Wayne, baby in tow, and we reviewed what we've done thus far in preproduction on my album. We're really quite close to finishing the song list and arranging all the tunes. I remembered that the last time I'd been to his place I'd been 9 months pregnant and spent our session lying on his floor, barely able to move. This time the baby was quite good and I only had to nurse him a few times.

We also looked at the tunes I'll be singing on his next album, for which we'll be in the studio next month! There's just some beautiful stuff for that, including a South African folk song in Bantu (I'll have to find a native speaker to help with my pronunciation, though it seems pretty straightforward).

Wayne also wanted me to learn a canto to Obatala and he said I should buy an album that contains all the cantos, called Bembe, released on 1986 by Milton Cardona. The next day I called up Rasputins and asked if they had it. The man on the other line had a distinctive, languid voice and an accent that sounded semi-Carribean. "I know that voice," I thought, but I couldn't place it. When I got to the store, the man found the album to me. "Are you David McBurnie?" I asked. "Yes--do I know you? You look familiar." "Wow--you had me on your radio show a year or two ago." David has a wonderful show on KPFA FM 94.1 called Music of the World, Tuesdays at 10 am. He'd interviewed me when I released my CD, and it was a pleasurable experience because he's so knowledgeable. I'd put that I was a tree climber on my bio, sort of as a joke (I don't climb many trees these days) but he focused on that among other things and we had a great conversation.

So, we had a chance to catch up there in Rasputins in Berkeley. I was pressed for time so I didn't get to hear all his stories but the man is very entertaining! We briefly covered the state of the music scene in the Bay Area and LA, the failure of his distribution company, the fact that he hates iPods, the fact that CD stores are dying, and which were the most authoritative Cuban recordings of the cantos. He acknowledged that Bembe was the best to get, even though it was out of New York, in that it contained all of them on one disc.

If you're looking for recordings of world music or a wonderful radio show of same, David's your man!

Not Just Mommies, We're Mortals

Ever since he saw his baby brother being born, my five-year-old occasionally calls me "supermommy." This morning as I fed my month-old baby on one breast and pumped on the other, hunched in a chair for 45 minutes, Sebastian wanted an explanation of the pump. We reviewed the concept of mammals and I told him I'm just like a cow. "No, you're supermommy," he said. Then the phone rang and I asked him to get it. When he came back, having yelled at and then hung up on whoever had called, I decided even more multitasking was in order and asked him to bring me my cellphone. Hunching farther down I could liberate a few fingers and dial the house phone on the cell. "Go answer the phone," I told him, "we're going to practice." It took a few tries to get him to answer the phone after it rang and not before, but with the cell on loudspeaker we reviewed some polite and safe telephonic conversation points.

Later today, for reasons he left unexplained, he started putting on the werewolf costume I made him last Halloween (I'm boasting, but I firmly believe Halloween costumes should be homemade, and look it. This is more important than regular meals or bedtimes, in fact.). "Can you attach the tail?" he asked me. "No honey, can't you see I'm feeding the baby and trying to eat a sandwich?" "But Mommy, you're supermommy--you can do it. You can!" Men. They know learn how to manipulate us at such a young age. "Come here, let me see if I can do it." I put down the sandwich and wedged the tail in his waistband.

Certain things are easier with this baby. I'm not freaked out by new motherhood and I've become a much stronger person than I was before I had my first son. My new mantra is, "If I can get through childbirth I can get through this." Though my brain is still terribly overactive I seem to get more done than I used to. The more you do, the more you can do, it seems--indeed, I read something yesterday that suggested there's an optimal amount of stress required for peak performance. Too much and you start to go nuts, too little and you go limp. Makes sense. As I write this I've fed the baby multiple times this evening and let him cry for awhile while I tidied up in the kitchen. Each time I think he'll sleep he proves me wrong, so now he's in the sling I'm wearing and I'm jiggling my knee to keep him quiet.

In the last week I've started running again and I find I'm writing while I run--but I have so few moments with two hands free to transcribe my thoughts afterwards. I've also had quite a few song ideas suddenly, and I told Sebastian a pretty funny story yesterday that I thought I should save as it might make a good children's book or recording, yet I'm committing the sin of not writing them down anywhere. Anyway, the hands are free now, so I'm taking advantage of it.

Another positive is that I don't have to do the whole corporate mommy BS again. The first time you have a kid and an office job you have to work twice as hard to dispel the myth that you're working half as hard. At least now I know I can do that, telecommuting, pumping at my desk, doing stupid ass conference calls and constantly proving myself as necessary. Then, the irony is, people go the opposite direction and think you work too much, or they try to take you down a notch. We had a very short experience with an expensive bilingual preschool with no waiting list (warning sign: expensive school=meaningless, waiting list=meaningful) where the owner diagnosed my son as violent and neglected. "You travel so much," she scolded after just a few days of knowing us. "Your son is starved for affection." "But all I do is go to Boston once a year," I objected. "You work so much, it must be hard," she said in a syrupy tone. "I work 40 hours a week. Don't you?" Anyway, my son never liked the place so we left after two months.

But on the negative side, I don't get maternity leave, whereas I had the luxury of four months of leave with my first child. One week after this baby was born, I was working two freelance writing jobs, and two weeks after I had to do meetings with clients! Since I was laid off in December, a number of men have commented on how convenient that must be. "You can spend time with your kids," they say. The time is a wonderful thing, I agree. But the financial stress is sure as hell not, nor the discrimination by potential employers ("Come back after you have the baby," they've said to my face!). Not to mention the difficulty of getting insurance--after a decade on group insurance, I had no idea that a healthy family of four was uninsurable these days. Fingers crossed, I've found a solution for my children, but this is the kind of thing that is not in any way convenient for a mother. Women seem to understand that better.

My point is, it's hard being a supermommy. But that's what all mommies are.

P.S. I love you, Mommy!

Baby Wisdom

This is the life: Eat. Sleep. Poop. Preferably, sleep and poop while eating.

Strawberry Rhubarb Jam

Mmm. This is good. Tastes homemade. I just bought it yesterday. It's from Mountain Fruit Co. in that hotbed of fun times, Chico, California.

Pay Attention

His body constantly swelling and squirming, quietly migrating across the bed until he lies next to my back on the sweaty flannel sheets. His rosebud lips in repose, his greedy breaths. His velvety hair, rich as the night. The seams in the fatty parts of his arms and legs, his little furry shoulders. The froggy belly. His eyes wide open and hungry for light and color and glitter. His angry startled cry. The repertoire of hums, the grunts and sighs when he suckles. A single coo. His fleshy tiny hands spidering across my breast. As the hours pass in a neverending circle, we are always together--yet he is completely himself. Pay attention. This is important.