an exhausting violin excursion.

A couple weeks ago I had to drop the kid off at a Dungeons & Dragons game down south, and since it was more or less on the way, I dropped in to visit the (literally) world-famous Gryphon Stringed Instruments. After a delightful hour there, I stopped by to visit a violin maker/repairer nearby, Jerry, before heading home. He was writing a song about his friends in New England he'd visited over the summer, and we chatted about that and my violin interests, and he had me try a violin and bow he  was selling: Chinese, but by a Chinese shop he had advised and trained. He said it had been played for a while by a youth orchestra musician, whose teachers/conductors--ironically, of Chinese background themselves--banned Chinese instruments. That's a pretty big hammer for that problem, because there's no shortage of good-to-amazing instruments coming out of China now, and no shortage of bad-to-middling instruments coming from elsewhere, like Romania and Bulgaria.

I see where they're coming from: as with all things made in China, the secret to high quality is developing relationships with makers who know you will pay for it. A friend of mine who insists on running his own email server once discovered he was getting a lot of spam from Turkey, and realized that he didn't know anyone in or near Turkey and could reasonably expect not to get valid email from Turkey, and just black-holed all of Turkey from his email server. That's a lot more effective than banning Chinese violins, though.

This particular Chinese violin was radically different than my rental (which another luthier had pegged as Romanian, speaking of middling instruments). It was light and subtle; to get a good sound out of it, I had to play better, and it rewarded my better playing. Next to it, my rental felt like the tank it was, built with its freedom to resonate bounded by its ability to withstand being rented out to beginning (and often young) violinists. Jerry said he'd picked out the bow, a $200 carbon-fiber number, to match the violin, and in fact it did sound better with that bow than with my own. The violin felt so much lighter, the bow felt so much heavier.

Except I got out the kitchen scale, and the violins weighed the same, and the bows weighed the same. It was weird. The weight is just distributed around differently. Bows are the obvious cases, there: professionals can spend thousands or tens of thousands of dollars on a bow, and presumably they would be happy to fritter away that money on food and rent if they didn't feel like it helped their music. It's a stick! But it's the right stick, with the weight and the springiness distributed all just so.

This kind of "home trial" is routine with stringed instruments, and as far as I know is almost unique in retail. Anyplace you'd want to buy a violin online from has a 7-day or more return policy, from SHAR or Fiddlershop down to this random guy who's so far out in the sticks of Illinois that's he's outside of St. Louis. You want that assurance even more for expensive instruments, of course--bear in mind that "expensive" in violins starts at like $9,000--at the same time that musicians are increasingly less likely to be able to float the cost on their credit card. So you give them an ID and a deposit or whatever, and you borrow the thing to try it out in your everyday surroundings.

Jerry may or may not have been sober that afternoon, but it was also a $1,200 setup he was offering at the "New England discount" price of $900, so he didn't look at an ID or anything, just had me write my name and address down. He said he didn't think I'd want to bring it back, so obviously that instrument was named the Foster Puppy Violin.

It was not quite the right violin for me, nor a great time to be spending $900, so I did bring it back, but I was struck by the experience and I decided to upgrade to the third and final tier of rental from the place I've been renting from.

Last weekend I went out to do that, but I decided to check out another, perhaps more obviously sober, luthier in the vicinity. He had photos of stunning instruments on his website--which is rad, most people don't bother--and no prices, which is common and doesn't mean much, but still feels ominous. I played a few old-ish violins in the $1200-2000 range, German and Czech, and they were so different. Instruments below $900 or so aren't usually very distinctive, but these were. One was full and rich, one was bright and sharp, one seemed sort of mysterious but wasn't what I wanted. The one I liked was a German violin from 1889 or so, and I suspect if I were ready to spend $1800, I could have taken it home happy. It may still be there when the time comes. There are so, so, so many violins.

In the 1800s, as Europe and North America industrialized, the violin-making centers in France and Germany stepped up production of what are called "trade" violins: imported into the U.S. and sold through stores and catalogs like Lyon & Healy or William Lewis & Son. (I don't know why Italy lost out on this trend.) They came at all levels of finish and quality and wood, but in particular many of them were built with the fronts and backs too thick, because it was cheaper to mass-produce them that way.

Now, 120 years later, they're still too thick, but now they're made of 150-year old high-quality European wood, so there's a long-running side business in taking these violins, which originally sound kind of muted and boring, taking them apart (which violins are meant for), and "re-graduating" or "re-voicing" them, carving and sanding away the overly thick plates so they can resonate. This is a specialized form of wood-carving, and you have to know what you're doing, but if you have the skills and motivation, you can buy an old German violin for a few hundred dollars, re-graduate it, and maybe sell it for a few thousand. The 19th-century charmer I played is one of these, discounted because of a particularly tricky repair that automatically devalues the instrument by 40-60%. (The luthier said some people seek them out for that reason.)

Someday.

twists and turns.

Ten years ago or so, I did a 3-week residential program at San Francisco Zen Center. There was a guy there, James, who lived there full-time, and was close to his full monk/priest ordination. He was strikingly young, under 22, I think: even in American Zen's boom years of the 70s and 80s, it was rare for anyone that young to decide to be a professional cleric. But there he was.

The folks at City Center were an insular bunch, often not very interested in connecting with the transients like me. I did have one conversation with James, and it stuck with me. One night he was stationed at the front door desk, working on the copious sewing of the several items required for monk ordination--the sewing takes a few years, as a rule--and I talked to him about his background. It emerged that he had never really lived out in the world: he went from his family of origin directly into two or three consecutive religious communities. He didn't seem to know about the world that was out there, and professed not to be interested in it; his path to adulthood was the same as the path of his calling.

I was skeptical.

He did finish the ordination, and eventually moved out to a Zen center in middle America that needed a priest. He had a blog, updated erratically (as one does). Six-ish months later, his blog mentioned he was stepping away from the priesthood for a bit, to live alone and independently. I think of him often, and not just because I was right, as amusing as that can be: his experience is thought-provoking. City Center wasn't wrong to ordain him, I don't think, but most of the teachers there are pretty sharp, and I don't imagine they were surprised.

I look him up sometimes, and usually don't find anything, except for this most recent time. He's a public defender, with a couple of little kids.

In my hometown. Which I don't think of as a place people move to, as a rule, although I'm sure housing is cheap.

never a dull moment.

There are finally people working on the house! Underneath the terrifying loose pseudo-insulation and rat biowaste--the cleaning company disinfected it after vacuuming--we actually have a considerable attic up there. Snazzy steps pulling down into the hallway replace the previous 3'x3' "access" that required carefully placing a stepladder underneath it and levering yourself up and through.

The attic guys had put proper insulation down, but luckily they didn't glue it or anything, because there turned out to be a lot more knob-and-tube wiring than expected, so what was thought to be some re-wiring along with replacing our terrifying ceiling fans turned out to be quite a lot of re-wiring along with replacing our terrifying ceiling fans. The new ceiling fans, while not artistic, do look nicer, and more importantly do not shake alarmingly. No household appliance should be a memento mori.

The guys have been laying plywood on top of the ceiling beams, so we can store stuff up there; specifically, we will need to empty the garage so it can be destroyed and replaced. This was going well enough until one of them put his foot through the kitchen ceiling (he's fine), and that itself wasn't so bad until in their work to fix that they didn't put up enough plastic sheeting, giving the entire kitchen, and much of the flooring elsewhere, a layer of sheetrock dust. Anna did a deep cleaning, and then had stern words for the contractor: putting a foot through the ceiling is an understandable accident, but trashing the kitchen is not. Anna's stern words are quite stern; I would feel sorry for them, except that they fucked up.

We did a couple days of having Leela confined to the office and backyard, but it was endless barking, so we've been bringing her to the kennel for the day. They call it "All-Day Play," which I'm sure it is for some dogs, but Leela is complicated and mostly hangs out alone or with the humans. She hates going, though not as much as she hates the groomer (she unreservedly loves going to the vet). Something in her little doggy brain re-lives her actual abandonments every time we drop her somewhere, even as she grows more secure and confident with passing years. This has reached its apotheosis this month, as she is routinely "removed" from the general population into a different room, not for behavior problems as would be usual, but because she figured out that each time other dogs are being brought in or taken out is an opportunity for her to escape. (This is a beagle specialty.)

There's a double gate with a sort of airlock-like area in between, which they call the "bubble," just for this purpose; they can't really stop her, so they just stick her in solitary at the rush hours. I happened to see it firsthand on Friday, as I was taking a break from a conference to handle parenting stuff by telephone and decided to look at the video stream for the Small Dogs room. I spotted her meandering in from outside, and then a dog was getting taken out, and I watched her work her way into the press of dogs pushing up against the door, and then...go under them. Her Jack Russell heritage gives her a deep chest, but also a fantastic flexibility, presumably for those times when the rats won't come out of their burrows and you have to dive in after them. She can flatten herself a bit more than your less specialized dog, but what she can really do is flatten herself and then move, in a sort of commando-crawl. She's shorter than any full Jack Russell variant would be, so she goes over to the crowd of dogs, drops herself 3-4 inches, and slinks out under them.

She is also quite gifted at staying in human blind spots, so much so that I'm rarely surprised any more when we're walking off-leash and I look back to find her, only to discover that when I turned to look backward, she went around my other side.

Luckily she's quite charming, and the kennel folks seem to find her a fun change of pace.

up on yonder mountain

Driven by a restless, consuming curiosity, and a desperate need to grow up, I've accumulated a lot of good stories. Some of them belong inside other stories, like the saga of the aloe plants an unstoppably enthusiastic Mexican woman in Baja gave us, even though we were living on a sailboat. This one came up at work recently.

My parents were kind enough to send me to Europe a few times, including twice with my high school choir. Both trips were to the Bavaria/Bohemia/Austria area, where it's always worthwhile to visit a palace or two of the unfortunate King Ludwig II of Bavaria (1845-1886). Schloss Linderhof is lovely, even in winter, but clearly arose from a "I wish I had my own Versailles" kind of impulse. Much more interesting...



...is Schloss Neuschwanstein. It looks like a fairy-tale castle because it's meant to, and because it's the pattern for Disney's various Magic Castles and logos.

It may or may not be fair to call Ludwig "mad," but he certainly wasn't well-adjusted or mentally well. Bavaria is not a big place, and he spent a lot of money building these things, which didn't get much use before his extremely mysterious death at age 40. He was a huge fan of the problematic composer Richard "There's A Reason The Nazis Loved Him" Wagner, and up several flights of stairs, at the top of the building, is the Hall of the Singers:



It's unclear to me if any of Wagner's work was ever performed here, but that was the intention.

One of the magic things about traveling with a talented group of a cappella singers is the ability to just make music whenever you get the urge: during a long layover at JFK, for example. People appreciate two dozen high school students singing beautiful songs, in a way that they may not appreciate my violin playing. We walk into an acoustically interesting room and start snapping, to test the sound. We want just the right amount of reverb, for a room to be "live" by not deadening the sound. If there's an actual echo, the sound will be muddy and vague, and we won't be able to hear each other.

The Hall of the Singers is a good room.

I don't know who had the idea. We sang all the time, rehearsing and performing. It was just what we did. While some other kids made sure we had all the voice parts, I asked our guide if it would be okay. Clearly no one had ever asked this before--and probably has not since--but if I interpreted her thought process correctly, she wasn't entirely sure what I meant, but couldn't think of a rule against it, and said it was probably fine. She was prepared for the worst, but she had no way to know.

We were really good. Like, it wouldn't be outlandish to buy tickets to see us, kinds of good. We had a tyrannical but brutally effective director, forged in the merciless fires of Midwestern chorale culture. Our standard was not that of New England prep schools, but of competitive college choirs.

I'm not sure which song we sang. It was either "Hark, I Hear The Harps Eternal" (there's the St. Olaf Choir, a solid approximation of how we sounded and how our director conducted) or "Sing To The Lord," both being famous-ish (the legendary Robert Shaw) arrangements of a particularly resonant kind of American a cappella folk song.

(It's called "shape-note" music, after its notation devised to include more diverse levels of musical literacy. To be honest, I find recordings of it intolerable to listen to: except in extraordinary cases, it sounds like people barking in unison.)

We picked a plausible starting note, and we sang. Some of us had been performing that song for 3 years, and not infrequently, either: we did standalone concerts of our own, but also did short sets for any number of trustee and alumni and parent and faculty events. The men performed in tuxedos, which were rented for us--for the whole school year. We were pros.

We sang with all our power, in that bizarre performance hall, built by a somewhat unhinged prince for a racist composer genius. It was gorgeous. The building is like a Bose Wave stereo built out of stone. They could hear us down in the kitchens. People inched up the stone stairways to find the sound.

It's a weird thing, a cappella music. You carry it with you, always. Your singing voice is like if God handed you a violin or a guitar or a drum, and told you what kind of instrument it was, but not what it was made of, or how to use it well. My first guitar, with its laminated rather than solid wood soundboard, was constrained by its ingredients: no matter what techniques I learned or how much I practiced, it would never make great music. At best, if I learned on better instruments, I could go back and sound like a great musician playing a crappy guitar (though probably not having a lot of fun with it). But you've only got the one voice, and the best singer you can be is the best you can be with the voice you got. For each of us individually, that may be much or it may be little; but together, we change our sound. We can create a voice bigger than just our singing together. That's the voice we gave to whoever was there to listen.

This was sort of our group's theme song, which I think is an objectively stunning piece of music.

light dawns on Marblehead.

I've been watching Agatha Christie's Poirot from the beginning, since Netflix only had series 9-13, and a while ago, and I flamed out trying to watch the final episode, which is very sad and bitter. It's amazing how thoroughly Arthur Conan Doyle defined the modern detective genre: at least in English, any venture into detective fiction is either avoiding or nodding to Sherlock Holmes. So it is with Hercule Poirot: finicky, unpredictable, brilliant, prideful. But Poirot was a policeman, and respects policemen, where Holmes more often than not can scarcely cloak his contempt in politeness. Poirot freely loves and cares about people, with some spiritual foundation, alluded to as Catholicism; Holmes cares, but is never able to articulate why, and his conduct in personal relationships rivals the most awkward teenage boy trying to talk to girls at a dance.

(No that wasn't me SHUT UP)

Series 3 begins with a flashback double episode, "The Mysterious Affair at Styles," which takes place during World War 1, and shows Poirot leading a group of fellow Belgian refugees around town.

...I didn't know there were Belgian refugees in World War 1. As I thought about it, I realized I had no idea what Belgium's experience of World War 1 was, why it should have been that way, or in fact much detail about World War 1 at all. (I mean, I read at least some of "In Flanders Fields" in school, so I knew there was at least one battle in Flanders, but we don't call it "World War 1" because it was highly localized.)

This odd-looking gap in my knowledge arises from having studied history in a thematic sort of way. I can tell you about the technological, economic, artistic, and geopolitical consequences of the war, and a decent amount of what went into it, but by definition, that airbrushes the details so you can see the broad strokes of color. I'm not great at memorizing pages and pages of raw information--ask me how much fun I had the final time I was an actor, or why I stopped after a single semester of Chinese--so I took advantage of a liberal arts education's offer to focus on concepts and patterns rather than memorizing.

The problem is that human events sometimes just don't quite make sense without some missing keystone fact. Part of the Middle East gestalt remained out of focus until I happened to hear author Stephen Kinzer on NPR, talking about how the CIA ousted the democratically-elected prime minister of Iran in 1953.

I didn't know Iran had a democracy! Suddenly it made sense why the Shah was hated enough that his overthrow could rebound so hard and consistently derive so much energy from anti-American sentiment. Not that they didn't have problems at the time, but they were working on solving them their way, and we broke their country because British Petroleum wanted us to.

Returning to Belgium, I went searching and found Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August, which covers a manageable lead-up to and first 30 days of the war. Her writing is spectacular! And...wow. What a mess. I've barely started and already found a keystone fact I'd been missing: the outcome of the Franco-Prussian War--I didn't remember anything about it except that it had happened--was France:

• being baited into declaring war on the confederation steadily becoming Germany;
• losing; and
• forced to surrender under thoroughly humiliating terms,
• designed to cripple for generations their ability to make war,
• adjusting their borders so they could only be on defense,
• signed at...Versailles!

Oh, damn. Dear readers, Shit Has Gotten Real, because after the 1871 Armistice of Versailles, France paid off its indemnity early, and immediately re-set itself to only think of offense. All this time, I'd thought the 1919 Treaty of Versailles had been ordinary human vengeance, and it certainly was, but not (or not only) for the Great War.

What a fucking mess.

lots of surprises.

I'm not sure how many people pick up the violin because of Swedish folk music. Outside of Sweden, and possibly Minnesota, probably not many. I'm actually not sure there's many inside of Sweden, either: tons of people (possibly most) spending their time performing folk fiddling traditions have music degrees and/or started playing as children, and after mastering the classical tradition, either returned again to the music of their childhoods, or learned it for the first time and found it more satisfying.

Don't get me wrong: I like Irish and Scottish fiddling, and Cape Breton, and bluegrass, and old-time. And Quèbecois, although I think you have to be able to dance while playing, so it will probably remain beyond me: the percussion in this track is the fiddler chair-clogging.

I don't really care for Cajun or zydeco fiddling, except in moderation, but I won't claim there's any logic to that, because it all sounds repetitive and similar to me, which is equally well said of most fiddle music I do like, to say nothing of lots of other music I enjoy.

Of course, all those fiddle traditions (and more!) are one family, carried from France and Ireland and Scotland over to Canada and Appalachia and Louisiana, mixing with everything they encountered, like Spaniards, enslaved Africans, and each other. Like any instrument unconstrained by the tyrannies of fixed pitch, the violin is tailor-made for musical syncretism. Want to play music with quarter-tones? If you can hear the difference, and remember where you put your fingers, the violin will play it for you.

Owing to Scandinavia's failure to thoroughly colonize the Americas, Scandinavian fiddle music is...something else. And then within Scandinavia, as far as I can tell, Swedish music is weird. The thing that grabbed me about Swedish music is the same thing that makes it hard: everything about it is just unexpected. I have all these decades of listening to classical and Irish music (and Cajun, until admitting I didn't like it), but I listen to Swedish music, and I constantly feel like I had NO IDEA that note was coming. To say nothing of the rhythms: a Swedish polka is the Polish polka we're used to, in 2/4 time, but the Swedes have a polska, which sounds like this:

Notwithstanding that the band is a supergroup of Swedish Folk Revival ninjas, this is a Christmas concert for normal people, and this is the kind of music the audience is expecting. The musician Lena Jonsson (not in that concert) described the polska as "in 3/4, but the second beat comes sooner," which is enough to make most of us ordinary (and non-jazz) musicians cry out to the heavens. "WHAT THE HELL DOES THAT EVEN MEAN, THAT IS NOT WHAT A BEAT IS."

It's more of a pulse, and it's part of why the email from the local Nordic music ensemble told me to use the sheet music as a starting point, but not to invest too much time in it, since the band plays whatever it plays and mostly uses the music to remember how songs start.

I highly recommend watching the whole concert. It's so different, but so damn catchy.

a long morning.

Another court hearing yesterday! Good times, good times.

After June's Crabby Judge Adventure, I was expecting Crabby Judge 2.0, and my own hope was to direct her crabbiness where it belongs, at Angry Biodad (ABD), who keeps pulling fun stunts that dodge her orders. Crabbiness levels were surprisingly low, though, and I think were helped by a couple of attorney appearances: one new associate, who came charging hard at the judge out of the gate, and immediately wished he hadn't, turning red with embarrassment as his aggressive claims fell apart like wet tissue paper. This was followed by a guy who:

• looks like he's in his mid-70s,
• talks like an immigrant from some long-ago part of the Northeast,
• seems like maybe he focuses on jury trials, because he was standing up and gesticulating and emphasizing a lot, and
• wore a bright emerald green blazer, and the biggest cuff links I have ever seen: disks over an inch across.

Hard not for him to be the highlight of everyone's day.

From the sanity-preserving low expectations of this just being a continuous holding action until J turns 18, the outcome of yesterday was A+: the previous interim order continues (J chooses where he lives and who he talks to) and ABD's primary shenanigans for dodging previous orders are kneecapped. He can now see the harbingers of doom on the horizon, which he's worked so hard to avoid:

• The many medical and psychological professionals who have gotten to know J, and, to their misfortune, ABD, will be interviewed and their opinions collated for the judge.
• He has to keep payments current with the court-appointed medical arbitrator who isn't allowed to work unless both parents are paid up (thus letting him continue to veto medical care simply by declining to write a check).

While it's not always a comfort, I am always grateful that he's not intelligent, focused, or wealthy; he's sort of the Ford Pinto of narcissists. His contribution to the world has been purely genetic, and whatever his own original potential, he now lives in that far realm of fantasy where he reads things on the Internet and uses that lofty education to assess the medical expertise of people who teach in multiple departments at Stanford Medical School while running world-class clinics.

The closest he comes to personal growth is learning from an occasional support group that in repairing his relationship with J, spending months telling J he should feel bad for how much he's been hurting ABD's feelings may have been counter-productive. I'm quite sure he doesn't understand why that should be the case. He's a simulacrum, the most shallow imitation of an adult human; a little like Pinocchio, if Pinocchio told the Blue Fairy to fuck off because he was already a real boy, thank you very much, and God, if it isn't just like a fucking fairy to try and tell you who you are.

(You may think I'm exaggerating, but one of the final straws for J was ABD going on a bender of anti-feminist ranting; a standard feature of Men's Rights Activism, which I promise is far worse than you're imagining, and probably gave him the referral to his scumbag lawyer who specializes in representing domestic abusers.)

Onward to the next seven weeks, then. It goes how it goes.