classical music for dummies

“Classical music isn't a secret society unless we allow it to be.”

—Brigid Delaney, The Guardian, Oct. 16, 2015

CLASSICAL MUSIC FOR DUMMIES

Attending a classical concert or an opera can be an intimidating prospect for newer patrons, but not to worry--on any given night there is a wealth of knowledge and guidance to be gleaned from the more experienced audience members surrounding you. The following are tips and tricks gathered at symphony halls and opera houses across the country.

Don't let something as simple as a cold deter you from attending a performance. You paid for your ticket and are entitled to attend in any state of medical indisposition. Coughing is encouraged, and you will soon note that many others in the audience will join you in solidarity. Nobody minds! However, if you do prefer to use cough drops for the sake of your own comfort, please follow proper etiquette and bring lozenges wrapped individually in crisp plastic. Store them at the bottom of a purse or satchel with a large Velcro closure. Reseal the Velcro firmly every time you retrieve a lozenge, so that when you need another one later on it will be sure still to be there.

Going to the opera or symphony may sound fancy, but really it is no different from watching DVDs on your couch in the living room. Bring a bag of crunchy snacks and a bottle of sparkling water or soda, if you'd like! Just be sure to open these items as slowly as possible, as you will find this helps to mute any noises produced. If someone rudely asks you to be quiet, tradition dictates that you may intentionally chew more dramatically and rustle your snack bag more vigorously. If you bring a metal canteen with water, don't neglect to add ice cubes.

There is plenty of legroom in the rows of seats in most concert and opera houses, so do not be afraid to bring along a large tote bag or backpack. It can sit at your feet and won't bother anyone. It's also a convenient way to transport your snacks!

It is unnecessary for you to have to miss any incoming phone calls or text messages. Under no circumstances should you feel obligated to turn off your phone or mute its ringtone. Your personal communications are more important than any musical performance, and the artists recognize and appreciate that. You are also encouraged to take photos (a flash is advisable), and naturally you may check your email during longer works of ten minutes or more.  

If you are enjoying the music, some "air conducting" and humming along would not be amiss. You may also bob your head or use your entire leg to keep time. It is important that nearby patrons understand how much you appreciate the music, and this is a great way of showing them.

It is likewise important to impress on your neighbors your command of grammatical gender and number in Italian. Shout “bravo,” “brava,” “bravi,” or “brave,” depending on need. Shout these words confidently and smugly, with exaggerated articulation, so that your linguistic prowess may be fully recognized. There is no need to wait for the end of a piece; a slight pause in the music suffices. Musicians have famously large egos, and they especially enjoy shouts of “bravo” and its variants while they are still in the middle of their work.

At the opera, overtures and other purely instrumental sections are considered unimportant; feel free to use these intervals as a chance to chat with your neighbor.

Don't bother to read the synopsis if you are attending an opera with someone who knows the story, since your friend can easily keep you apprised throughout. Request that he or she communicate using a stage whisper, so that the sound will travel quietly yet effectively. This type of opera aficionado can also be a terrific source of valuable ongoing color commentary, such as "That was a long scene," "It's about love and betrayal," or "This singer is from Poland.” 

If you don't have a knowledgable friend to take with you to the opera, you may want to consider using the flashlight feature on your cell phone to assist in reading the synopsis during the performance. The same naturally goes for program notes at the symphony. There is no need to waste your time reading anything before the performance or at intermission.

Your opinion matters! For example, you can and should shout “AWFUL!” at the conclusion of any piece written after 1935. At the opera, onstage abominations such as modern dress or projected images should be met immediately with muttered derision. It is well known that understanding an opera is difficult enough without having to watch it being performed by people who are not wearing hoop skirts.

Napping is expected and encouraged.

keeping austin weird

I am in Texas for the Fourth of July weekend, mainly because I love 100+ degree temperatures, large bugs, and copious and unabashed pro-U.S.A. "these colors don't run" style sentiment. Also, I am a devout Christian and favor big hair.

The real reason I am in Austin is that this is the home of my fun and kooky pseudo-in-laws, as well as the lovely and delightful Vickie Howell, who is one of my MEOW kitties and who has a wee 5-week-old bebeh at the moment.

James's sister and her husband live in a development called Agave, which is all cubist/modernist and eco-friendly, and it is so effing cool that I almost want to move to Austin so I can live in one of these homes. There's also the fact that even the largest, fancy-schmanciest model still does not set you back as much as an 875-ish sq ft Edwardian apartment in San Francisco (ask me how I know). Plus this neighborhood attracts the upscale lefty hipster tree-hugger types, what with being all sustainable and shit, so it would practically be like living in San Francisco anyway. Except for the heat and the giant bugs and all.











Here is my sorta-brother-in-law-in-law in his kung fu outfit. Also, a photo of his horrifying gorilla-foot kung fu shoes.





There are cute cats here. This one tries to act all dignified:



Except when she doesn't:



But she is still awfully cute:

there are some things that should be illegal

...and profusely sweaty, balding, foggy-eyeglassed men at the gym on stationary bikes grasping the Wall Street Journal in one hand and checking their stocks via their iPhone in the other hand are definitely one of those things.

because nothing says "romance" like fullerene-related structures consisting of rolled graphene sheets

I went down to L.A. for the long weekend, technically in part to...wait for it...work on my screenplay, but really mostly just to hang out at James's house and also to attend our friend The Other Karen B's birthday party and get drunk on mojitos and lick chocolate buttercream off of ladyfinger cookies. (Apparently that's what the kids are calling it these days. Who knew?!)

Because James and I are so very, very old, we decided to go to downtown Pasadena on Saturday before the birthday party simply to ensure that we'd stay awake until 9:00 p.m., which was when the party was scheduled to begin. Sadly, I am completely serious.

Fueled by sentimentality more so than a desire for decent potables, we stopped by the restaurant/bar where we went on our very first date back in 2000. We plopped ourselves down, ordered a couple of drinks, and when they arrived James immediately (a) noticed that the two tiny straws in his beverage were of different diameters, (2) inserted one inside the other, and (iii) romantically declared, "I've now got a concentric multi-walled nanotube." He looked vaguely confused as I scrambled to dig a pen out of my purse and reached across him to grab a cocktail napkin. "I need to write this down," I explained, scribbling. "This is COMEDY GOLD."

James: "Why is that funny?"
Karen: "It's funny."
James: "The fact that I don't understand why it's funny is also funny, I bet."
Karen: "Yes."

****

There's nothing like spending a weekend in L.A. being driven around in a purring German sports car and attending parties full of movie industry people to make you truly appreciate the misery that is the route 31 bus up here in San Francisco. Because lo, that is the bus I chose to board for the final leg of my public transportation journey home this evening, and I would be lying if I told you that one of my fellow passengers wasn't a crack-smoking transvestite in a hospital gown and a puffer jacket, sporting a dingy bar towel as a 'do rag, occasionally flashing her naked ass, and manically switching seats and talking about someone who was going to rape her and asking the driver to find her a cop and then bitchily accusing him of not being a Christian. And when I say this person was a crack smoker, I am not jumping to conclusions or falling prey to vicious stereotypes. SHE WAS SMOKING CRACK RIGHT THERE ON THE BUS.

P.S. If any of you out there are planning to take the 31 in the next couple of days, there is at least one coach with several seats you'll want to avoid sitting in. Or touching. Or being alive next to.

travelogue

James and I decided that instead of driving down the I-5 to Los Angeles for Thanksgiving week, we'd take two days for a leisurely drive down California Route 1. We spent the night in San Simeon, which is right next door to Cambria.




Cambria has some nice beaches, where you can view lovely sunsets and all that crap, but the town itself is what we now lovingly refer to as "White Trash Ashland." The shops in Ashland (Oregon), while clearly aimed primarily at tourists, at least have things you might want to purchase--for someone you like, even. In Cambria you are confronted with tacky shoppes [sic] with holiday-themed baby clothes, amateurish seascape paintings, Australian dry goods (apparently to make something Australian you just have to glue some shearling on it somewhere), and cutesy tee shirts. One store prides itself on being rubber ducky headquarters for the entire USA. Do they carry Hanukkah rubber ducks, complete with yarmulkes, you ask? Zikher, I say:



I couldn't even bear to look at, much less photograph, the rubber "celebriducks." These were kind of like centaurs, except with a rubber duck's ass where the horse part should be and an elaborately detailed famous person's head and torso up front (Queen Elizabeth, George Washington, etc.). I am all for animals disguised as other animals, and while technically a historical figure in the form of a duck would fall into that category, I think we can all agree that that is just stupid and disturbing.

Speaking of disturbing animals, this morning we got in the car to go to Whole Foods and James noticed a dog that was off leash and became concerned. "My neighborhood isn't very safe for loose dogs these days," he said, in a way that made me realize he regretted saying it as it was still coming out of his mouth. "Um, what do you mean?" I asked suspiciously. "Does this have something to do with mountain lions?" And indeed it turns out that several dogs recently have been killed by a mountain lion in his neighborhood, in areas further away from the foothills than his own house.

James hadn't mentioned this sooner because he knows I am already a little concerned about the occasional bear that wanders down the street or parks itself in a hot tub, so naturally I had to make fun of him for thinking I was too delicate to handle this latest bit of news. "I CAN'T BELIEVE you didn't tell me that a mountain lion had been eating babies in your neighborhood," I said. (Pause.) "I can't believe you didn't tell me that a mountain lion had killed your next door neighbor Mike...and his wife."

Anyway, the police have killed the mountain lion in the meantime, which kind of sucks in theory but probably seems like a great idea as you watch a giant feline dragging away your Labrador. Personally, though, I am more of a cat person.

see the movie, skip the book

The other day I went to see the new movie Slumdog Millionaire, primarily because the still photo in the New York Times review (and above) clearly indicated that at least part of the movie was shot in the apartment complex where I used to live in Mumbai. The movie was so good (save for a couple of lapses into tired romance/destiny themes and scenes) that I immediately bought the novel it was based on. It was originally entitled Q&A, but has been renamed to match the movie.

I'm about 75 pages into it and I can't put it down...because I have to keep asking myself, "How in the world did someone read this sophomoric, one-dimensional, sloppy, homophobic piece of crap and turn it into the movie I just saw??" It's like they aren't even related. Normally I have no problem with giving up on miserable writing and moving on to the next book in my queue, but I feel obligated to keep giving this one a chance. Seriously, though--it's almost unbelievably awful.

Updated to add--
Here is the larger version of the movie still:



vs. a photo I took from my bedroom window:

koan in the land of calculus

James and I needed to do a long training walk today, so we decided to do the route below twice (19.75 miles total). This is what is called an "LSD" walk, which, depending on your tolerance for flashbacks, you may be pleased or displeased to learn stands for "long slow distance." In race walking terms, "slow" is maybe 4 mph, so it took us about 5 hours.


There's a lot you can talk about in 5 hours, so if you choose to share that time with the biggest geek on the planet I suppose you have no one to blame but yourself. Around mile two, James was in the midst of providing me with a comprehensive overview of the history of computer programming, and, having come to the object-oriented programming portion of the lecture, he happened to say something about shapes that were "broken down into squirrels, triangles, and squares."

Me: Squirrels?
James: Huh?
Me: Squirrels, triangles, and squares?
James: CIRCLES. I said circles.
Me: Oh. (pause) Could you start saying squirrels instead? I would prefer that.
James: Um, sure. So, it breaks down to squirrels, triangles and squares...
Me: Could the other ones be animals too?
James: What?
Me: They should all be animals.
James: Oh, alright. (pause) It breaks down to squirrels, chipmunks, and ravens...
Me: I think I like object-oriented programming.

Around mile four he says, "There's a koan in the land of calculus that says...." I quickly interrupt:

Me: Whoa, whoa, hold on! Did you just say "in the land of calculus?" Where is this mythical Land of Calculus? Like, can I get a plane ticket to go there?
James: Lambda Calculus. In the Lambda Calculus.
Me: Ohhhh. OK, that makes more sense. I thought it was maybe something like the Land of Chocolate.
James: (silence)
Me: Can you call it that from now on? The Land of Calculus? Please?
James: Fine. Fine, the land of calculus.

Around mile five I ask:

Me: So are there just the two koans?
James: No, there are four.
Me: And they live...where?
James: (sighing) In the Land of Calculus.
Me: Yay!! (clapping in delight)

You'd think a daytime walk in a nice urban commons like Golden Gate Park would be a safe, non-threatening experience, but you never know. We turned a corner and saw a bunch of gaudy tents and flags, and a sense of dread swept over me as I realized we were walking straight into the loathsome bowels of a Renaissance Faire [sic]. I have mentioned before that I am allergic to Science Fiction, but that is a mild reaction compared to the psychological anaphylactic shock I experience at the merest whiff of a jerkin or snood.

And so there I was, my body stiffening in panic while I let out a series of "Aggggghhh, aggggghhhh, aggggghhhh" sounds. A couple of elaborately-bodiced young women passed by and I overheard their amateurish opining on Elizabethan linguistics. "Do you have a paper bag I can breathe into?" I asked James, gripping his arm. He looked into my desperate, pleading eyes, noticed over my shoulder a fully costumed trio headed directly toward us, and said, "I'm afraid it's going to get worse before it gets better."

At one point we saw a little girl in costume who was utterly adorable, and it hit me. A three-year-old in a costume is cute and age-appropriate. A fat, 56-year-old man in a costume is just sad. And disturbing. And I want him to stay out of my park.

I did see one thing at the Renaissance Festival that pleased me: Ye Olde ATM Tente.


How the hell do they get the shillings to dispense through that thin slot?

i got yer spared air right here, pal

I'm going to preface this post by saying that I am very grateful to be fully mobile and physically healthy, and grateful to have a place to live, and I realize that sometimes all it takes is a piece of bad luck or a step into the wrong place at the wrong time for one's situation in life to turn horribly for the worse.

And also, as we've established, I don't judge.

But here is a peeve of mine. I do not like it when I pay for a product or service, only to have that product or service subsequently offered to others for free, at which point I am basically prevented from using the product or service as it is intended and/or in the form that was at least tacitly offered along with its purchase. I am, e.g., still mildly bitter about UC San Diego's policy of granting a 2-week or longer "grace period" on parking at the start of some quarters, during which diligently pre-paying drivers would arrive on campus only to find every single legitimate goddamn parking space from Torrey Pines Road to University Towne Centre [sic] taken up by non-permit-bearing vehicles, so that one would become so desperate to reach Phonetics 210 or Goethe's Influence on Kafka's Reading of Thomas Mann's Mario and the Magician or whateverthefuck other class reasonably close to on time that one would finally just park anywhere, only to then receive a parking ticket that cost half as much as the permit for the entire quarter, and you know they're not gonna let you check out a library book or get your goddamn diploma if you've got fines on your record, and so then you're fucking screwed and that, my friends, is how they get you, and you get so worked up you can't even keep your person and tenses straight when you write about it.

And so we come to "Spare the Air" days here in San Francisco. For you non-Bay Areans, typically during the summer on days when it reaches scorching, lower-80s type temps, San Francisco and surrounding regions will declare a Spare the Air day where all public transportation is free. I can always tell when it's a Spare the Air day because the buses will be a lot more crowded, late, and annoying than usual. Well, you might say, then clearly this initiative works: on days when it is hot and the air quality is poor, more people take public transportation. An ingenious example of green problem solving!

Except it's not. I can guarantee you that no one who is spending $350/month to park their car downtown is leaving that sucker in the garage in Palo Alto and taking Caltrain + MUNI to work in the city just because it's free for the day. If that were the case, then maybe they'd call it Leave Your Tacky Lexus at Home day. No, on Spare the Air days, people who normally wouldn't get on the bus think, hey! it's hot and I want to go somewhere, so I am going to take the bus because what the hell, it's free! It should be called Go Somewhere Random You Wouldn't Normally Pay $1.50 to Go day.

On Thursday I did not know yet that it was a free day, and as I was walking to the bus stop after work I saw my bus going by and thought, damn, I just missed it. But then another was right on its heels, and I thought, oh, it's a lucky going-home-timing day after all! Little did I know.

Heading home, I get on at the second or third stop of the route, so I got a seat as I usually do. Within two more stops, though, the vehicle was packed. Then we stopped to let on someone in a wheelchair. Except then neither one of the two potential wheelchair restraints was working. Meanwhile, more and more able-bodied people got on, even though there was less room than usual because a couple of benches were flipped up to expose the wheelchair restraints, and eventually the poor guy in the chair had to get off anyway, because the driver refused to take him if the restraints didn't work. And then a few stops later there was a guy on a scooter chair. And he was pissed already about the full buses, and waving his cell phone around and shouting about how the driver had to let him on, and how he already had people on the phone about it, and then the driver was trying to explain to him that it was a safety issue and the restraints were not working, and finally the driver just gave in to the guy, which also involved maneuvering the bus around a police car that was parked in the bus lane so the bus could get close enough to the curb, and naturally none of this was taking any time whatsoever. But honestly? At that point I still just felt lucky to have a seat and be able to walk when I want to.

And then the very very dirty, smelly guy crammed himself right next to where I was sitting, with his crotch at the level, and within a few inches, of my nose. And the 15 or so further minutes it took for me to get home from there, wedged in next to this guy's crotch and unable to relocate, really almost sent me over the edge. Now, I know in theory that when you pay your $45/month for a bus pass, you are not being guaranteed a seat on any bus at any time, and certainly not a seat next to a freshly laundered person who smells fresh and clean like the meadow outside grandma's house. BUT C'MON, PEOPLE. Spare the air, my ass.

perhaps sometimes violence IS the answer

Now, as you know, I don't judge. But the people who were staying at the bed & breakfast with us in Ashland last weekend were some of the most irritating, pretentious, idiotic, washed-up faux intellectual hippies I have ever encountered.

You know the type. E.g., the woman with long, loose gray hair, all flowing layered skirts and fringe and bracelets and brown velvet. The first morning we heard her and her table mates going on and on and ON about spirituality (a word I condone only if it is in reference to liquor) and new agey barf-inducing pop philosophy, and at some point she said, "Well you knowww, everything in the world is duality--right brain/left brain, yin and yang...." It was at that point James and I locked eyes and, knowing we were in danger of losing our breakfast if we remained to consume even one further morsel of it, went back to our room to roll our eyes and moan softly in intellective pain.

The next morning she arrived a little late, saw that her previous day's table cohort had no free spaces left, and rather than sitting next to a perfectly nice midwestern-y couple nearby she insisted on having a separate place set for her at a vacant table and declared for all to hear, "I think I'd better do some writing this morning." James murmured under his breath, "Wow, there's a frightening thought." And then she proceeded to "write" during breakfast by placing a small pad of paper next to her. Which she did not touch. She did do a lot of meaningful gazing into mid distance, however. I'm sure whatever she was thinking ("Which peasant skirts are back from the dry cleaners? How much turquoise can possibly fit on one necklace? Should I eat this bacon in front of people or pretend I am a compassionate, earth-loving vegetarian?") was exceptionally profound.

(That just reminded me of one of my favorite James mutterings ever. We were at a sushi restaurant next to a large party, and one woman was dominating the conversation in both volume and quantity of discourse--blathering on about her time living in Africa, and repeatedly referring to Johannesburg as "Joburg," and generally and loudly describing various scenarios that demonstrated just how much of a privileged white hosebag she truly was, breaking only for short digressions to discuss her preferred jewelers in Sausalito. At some point she excitedly declared, "Oh! Oh! I have the classic Africa story for you!" At which point James muttered, "Let's hope it ends with her being eaten.")


But where was I? Oh yes, about how I never judge. Really, it makes it easier to sleep at night. Y'all should try it.