Our #10 is one-year-old today. We (and by that, I mean I) bought him a tractor. On the steering wheel, there’s a button in the middle that you can push to play a very mild-mannered Old MacDonald, and another one to simulate the start-up noise of a tractor. Our little one enjoyed the music but wasn’t as moved by it as he was when he actually belts out a tune on the piano. Maybe I’m over-thinking here, but maybe it’s because he really prefers action. When he does use the piano that we have at our house, I make sure that I move and shake to show that hey! You can move to music! It’s to the point now when he’ll play and look up at me to make sure that I am.
Boy, are kids smart.
Here’s a good example of that.
I got here via TWKIWDBI, but I’m showing the one on Youtube. You can turn on the English captions on the bottom. They’re not timed particularly well, but I think you’ll get the message, even without the translation.
Surprise! This email actually did arrive on Friday, but after I had shut my computer/phone down for Shabbat.
Dear Mysending, (YES! They got my name right on this one!)
Congratulations! The repair of your item is now complete. Our service depot has shipped it back to you with tracking number: 1Z21A…………………
Please be sure to test out all of your item’s functionality as soon as you get it and if there still are any issues please immediately contact the service depot at the number they provide. If you have any questions or concerns regarding your claim, please feel free to give us a call at 1-877-555-1111.
It’s unfortunate your item failed, but this is precisely the reason a warranty was the right choice. When buying electronics or appliances from any retailer, don’t forget the SquareTrade warranty!
Sincerely,
The SquareTrade Team
Please Note: The bulk of SquareTrade communications are done through email. To ensure you receive important emails, make sure you add this email to your address book.
Now here’s the biggest surprise–guess what arrived today! And guess what has a new unbroken case!
But they didn’t send the really nice cloth that had protected the keyboard.
Smitty: That’s very cool. The title track, “He Had A Hat,” for those that may not know, talk a little bit about what that means. It’s kinda funny in a way, but just talk a little bit about why you decided to go with “He Had A Hat.”
JL: Well, it’s just really a joke. It’s the punch line to an old Borscht Belt joke, actually.
Smitty: Yeah.
JL: And we were just having so much fun in the studio, we were telling jokes and stuff, and it just kinda symbolizes the joy that we had of creating music and sharing music and just having fun in the studio, just hanging out, but anyway, the joke is about a grandmother that takes her grandson to the beach and a big wave comes and sweeps her grandson off the beach, and she’s distraught and she looks up and calls out into the sky like “God, please bring Mikey back. I’ll do anything, I’ll do good works, I’ll devote myself to feeding the poor, and just anything. Just please bring Mikey back.” And all of a sudden a big wave comes and puts the kid right on the beach, and she looks up in the sky and says “He had a hat!”
Smitty: (Laughs.)
JL: So it’s just a funny old joke, but it actually has another meaning too, which is….I wear a lot of different hats because sometimes I’m an engineer, I’m a piano player, I’m an arranger, songwriter, I mean, that’s kinda the way it is in this music business these days. You need to wear a lotta hats in order to survive because it’s kind of a tough competitive environment these days, but we just wanted to put out that vibe of fun and good humor that we had when we were making the record. That was pretty much it.
I’m going to show you a few of the photos I took before and after the performance last week at Tanglewood. Of course, you are asked not to take photos during, and I obliged. But I am happy to be able to show you some that most program attendees do not see.
I’ll start with the grounds.
Then we went into Koussevitzky Music Shed (Thank you, Google dictionary.)
Now back outside to catch the starting pink of the sky.
And now over to our destination, Ozawa Hall.
Here’s the Carriage House, where the students/musicians practice.
Yes, we were early. That’s a good thing. And yes, this is where we were sitting!
And now, we got to go into the Carriage House. Our host knew someone. She was very happy to show us around on our own little tour.
I did say it was the Carriage House. Here’s some proof.
This is a small part of a panorama shot from one of the earliest years. I think that the older man dressed in white in the center of the second row is somebody famous. They probably all are. But I do think that he was pointed out as being Koussevitzky himself, which would make sense why I would take this portion.
One of these two sweatered men was also pointed out to us as being someone. I just liked their sweaters.
So maybe you shouldn’t necessarily be smiling, but at least not miserable!
We went to the Gateways Inn in Lenox last Wednesday night for their piano bar. This was following our night at Tanglewood, which will come up in this post as well. Here’s a photo from that night, to get you in the mood.
The room is very comfortable, not too large; intimate setting, I think is the apt description. We were there from the beginning of the evening, along with the wife/girlfriend of the bass player. In walk a few couples, quiet, not really into the music, but not complaining.
The bass player asks his compatriots what should they play of Marian’s? What? Yes, Marian McPartland died that day. Rest in Peace. How about playing Someday My Prince will Come?, I said. ISHI said why not that song from that CD we have in the car and he started singing it. I said it was called For All We Know and he googled it and said I was right. They didn’t know that, so they played Someday, even though I don’t really think it was her song. And she didn’t wait for her prince; she just did what she wanted herself.
There is something about enjoying music that is performed so regally. We had the pleasure of hearing and seeing Menahem Pressler the night before at Tanglewood performing the Mozart Piano Quartet in E-flat, K. 493. Here’s something about this 90 year-old man who smiled almost the entire time while he was performing.
Menahem, his parents and his brother and sister arrived in Haifa just a day before war broke out in Europe. Not so fortunate were his grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins, all of whom perished in concentration camps.
“We were fortunate to find refuge in Israel, but I was a psychological wreck when I arrived,” he says. “I couldn’t eat. My father accused me of behaving badly, but I simply couldn’t, and I just got thinner and weaker.” He was sent to a recuperation home, where the medicine that “slowly, slowly” healed him was music.
“During a piano lesson, I fainted playing Beethoven’s penultimate sonata (Op 110). I’m sure it was my emotional reaction to this magnificent work which summed up what I felt, everything that had happened. It has idealism, it has hedonism, it has regret, it has something that builds like a fugue. And at the very end, something that is very rare in Beethoven’s last Sonatas – it is triumphant, it says, ‘Yes, my life is worth living,’ and that’s what I feel.”
But back to the dessert.
We weren’t eating; we were imbibing, me a 9 year-old Knob Creek. Quite happy and not really missing out on the food, which was actually “kosher-style”, but not for us. Now, in walk a set of 3 couples; 2 middle-aged and one young; the 2 being as white bread as they come; the other; Asian. I was having a good time trying to figure out what their relationship was; it didn’t look like they really had any relationship at all; they were not very comfortable with each other; it didn’t look like they worked together; and it remained a nice mystery. They ordered dessert and coffee after a while and proceeded to eat. And thus the title of this blentry.
Not a smile amongst them. Not even any hint of enjoyment, not even of the dessert. Oh what a waste! My story was that one of the young people was the adopted son of one of the white bread couples, and the young woman was the girlfriend of the young man. Or maybe that both were adopted and then they became a couple and now they were meeting for the first time! In any case, it wasn’t going well.
Then something changed. The bass player called out to one of the fellows if he would like to play. OH! Musicians? I never would have pegged them as that. They had actually come to hear them play!
People can surprise you.
And then, something else. The young man picked some lint or some such thing off the lapel of the man he was sitting next to. Hm. I think I was right, or at least the first part. And then, little by little, they did indeed begin to smile. And laugh just a bit. By the time they left, they actually seemed to care about each other.
I’ve recently discovered that the song “Is That All There Is?” (written by Stoller & Leiber) is actually taken from a story called “Disillusionment” by Thomas Mann (written when he was twenty). The following summary, taken from Colin Wilson’s book The Craft of the Novel, makes this absolutely unmistakable.
The narrator is sitting in St Mark’s Square in Venice when he falls into a conversation with a fellow countryman. The man asks, “Do you know what disillusionment is? Not a miscarriage in small unimportant matters, but the great and general disappointment which everything, all of life, has in store?” He tells how, as a small boy, the house caught fire; yet as they watched it burn down he was thinking, “So this is a house on fire? Is that all?” And ever since then, life has been a series of disappointments; all the great experiences have left him with the feeling: “Is that all?” Only when he saw the sea for the first time, he says, did he feel a sudden tremendous craving for freedom, for a sea without a horizon… And one day, death will come, and he expects it to be the last great disappointment. “Is this all?”
The song sung by Peggy Lee leaves out the part about the sea, but ends, just as Thomas Mann’s story does, with the idea that death will be just one more disappointment.
The verse to this song is actually spoken rather than sung. The refrain, the only part which is sung, goes
Is that all there is?
Is that all there is?
If that’s all there is, my friend,
Then let’s keep dancing,
If that’s all
there
is.
Yesterday, when I was driving to the store to pick out new tiles for our bathroom, I heard this song. I found the version I like the most on YouTube and it’s here below.
It made me think about how much I usually love folk music. I can find fault in much (as I did in my last post) for its oversimplicity that masquerades as lack of effort and value for the listener. But sometimes, actually often, the words drive the music so deeply. I know that different things affect people differently, but how can you hold yourself back from being moved by this?
Or why would you?
I already wrote two years ago here about how our kids made fun of us for our love of folk music. Now, of course, it’s becoming more popular. Good thing. I had saved this entry from delanceyplace.com from March about folk music’s entry into the American musical scene in the 1950’s, which led to the popularity of Bob Dylan (about whom the book was written).
“Those that followed or considered themselves part of the folk revival placed great importance on an elusive quality in music that might be described as authenticity. To be respected in the folk community, musicians had to perform traditional songs in a manner true to the original, while also making the songs distinctively their own. The starting point was to find and learn from the earliest and purest forms of the songs.
Authentic is so often just the opposite. It’s so refreshing to hear something that makes the human connections that are really at the source of all communication. Or is it the other way around?
There’s a extraordinarily insipid Hebrew song that was popular back in the 60’s, at the time when “Jewish” music was just breaking into a new form; pop, meaning popular. In the style of the times. But what it was really was just a 2-part easy-to-sing-around-the-campfire kind of song that could make people feeeeeel something.
(I know. I’m a sentimental old fool.)
The song was “Kol HaOlam Kulo Gesher Tzar M’od”. The 2 lines translate as:
The whole world is a very narrow bridge.
And the main thing is not to fear at all.
It was based on the words of Rebbe Nachman, who was also becoming mainstream in those days. Ironically, much of the music that he himself wrote is much more sophisticated and worth knowing, past your school or camp experiences.
But it’s actually not what he wrote.
I’m attaching the original Hebrew, but you can see it here, brought to us by the Breslov organization, in Likutei Moharan II, 48.
It says, right in the middle:
…And all of it comes together and gathers and connects and comes to help you in a time of trouble, which is, G-d forbid, some pressure or trouble, G-d forbid. And know that a person needs to cross over a very very narrow bridge, and the rule and the principle is that he should not יתפחד
Okay here’s where it gets even more interesting. The word he uses is in the reflexive future tense. I saw one person translate it as “not give into fear.”
“Don’t get caught up in fear.”
Now we see that they changed the words to get a simple tune.
But this is not simple, is it?
After all, there is much to be afraid of. There was when Rebbe Nachman wrote it and there was when they changed it to fit the tune. And we have not changed now. Newtown. Boston. Syria. Lots of narrowness.
But
the other day, after our hike, I thought about this some more.
It’s not that there aren’t troubles; it’s that we gather our strength to go step-by-step, with G-d’s help. We don’t walk sideways; we walk ahead. We are creatures who move that way, not like crabs.
We can walk backwards, when we realize we’ve made a mistake or when we want or need to re-visit somewhere.
So we can admit to being afraid; we can admit to the reality of the world. But we can also muster up the help around us to move forward.
This post is in response to A Word in Your Ear’s challenge to write about music. Since I had these photos from Australia, all taken on my Droid, I figured I could do that! Click on them to really open them up!
At the Suzuki Night Market at Queen Victoria Market on January 23rd, we saw and enjoyed Tek Tek Ensemble. So did the kiddies. They played a klezmer-like number that perhaps we enjoyed more than others, but it all was delightful.
And then we experienced the Maori group Te Hononga Nga O Iwi. Definitely a seeing event. A Performance.
Aren’t we wonderful for wanting to see them? Yes, a dig at myself and my own heartstrings-pulling background. But if I can get over that, I know that they’re really entertaining and fascinating, yes.
Te Hononga O Nga Iwi : meaning the coming together of the tribes, are a Maori Cultural Performing Arts Group, based in the South Eastern suburbs of Melbourne, Australia.
Te Hononga O Nga Iwi originated in a lounge room in Endeavour Hills in 2007 and over time with the dedication of volunteers and members has evolved into a group of 30 – 50 performers ranging from the ages of 12 years to our more senior aged members and a supporter base consisting of our families and friends.
Te Hononga O Nga Iwi is dedicated to keeping our customs and traditions alive by sharing, teaching, learning and performing traditional and contemporary maori song and dance to people of all ages and diverse backgrounds.
At present we are learning and performing traditional and contemporary items from various New Zealand tribes, that include Haka (Ha, means to breathe, Ka, means fire in essence to breathe fire), Poi ( a ball on a string- in times gone by traditionally used by men to practice their weaponry skills then eventually taken over by women), Waiata(Song/s) and many original compositions.
It is not only our hope and dreams to unite all iwi (tribes) here in Melbourne, but to also strengthen ourselves and our culture here in this new home of ours, Australia, by keeping our customs and traditions alive which have been handed down through the ages by our tipuna (Ancestors).
Maybe, being Jewish, I do relate to this in a very significant way.
And then, to celebrate our anniversary, we went to hear a group at the “best jazz club in the world”, according to LonelyPlanet.
Must be very lonely indeed.
We were wandering without internet and it was really hard to find this Bennett’s Club. Maybe that should have also been a sign.
Would you have thought that, if you saw this front? Really, we should have gone with our instincts that night. Book cover, be judged!
On the other hand, I did really enjoy the beer that we had that night. White Rabbit, it’s called. It was another very hot day, and the place was under-airconditioned. So the beer was about the best thing that we enjoyed. Should I say that we also enjoyed watching the young couple next to us also trying to figure out when and how to get out of there?
But Melbourne redeemed itself the next morning, when we went back to the Vic Market to go souvenir shopping and experienced this man.
And then we went and found good coffee. A good way to remember our time in Australia.
Two words you probably never thought I’d use, and probably Disney is at the top.
On the way to dropping off two bags of old clothes at the thrift shop, I heard the song “Bare Necessities” on our local jazz station. I never would have thought that it was jazz, to begin with, but I really focused more on the words than the music, to be honest.
And don’t spend your time lookin’ around
For something you want that can’t be found
When you find out you can live without it
And go along not thinkin’ about it
I’ll tell you something true
The bare necessities of life will come to you.
Got it now?
Stripping down to the bare necessity of matzah. Getting rid of the excess. Finding out what’s truly important.
But Mostly Hers 