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ZAM! A Review after 40 Years of Heavy Use

Posted on by musickmorley0814

I like Amazon reviews that follow up years later with updates — like, “I bought this vacuum cleaner 40 years ago and as I previously wrote, I thought it was great, but now I’m here to report it broke and so it’s really a cheap piece of shit.” I was sixteen in 1984 when I first read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (ZAM), and I told everyone at the time it was the best book ever written. This is my follow-up review.

I read ZAM about a dozen years after it was published, but it was still basically a bestseller. I think I found it in a used bookstore and read it because I liked the cover. It’s not an exaggeration to say it completely changed my life. I can say this with a straight face since I was just sixteen years old and couldn’t really know better. I can also say it with a straight face because it was likened to Moby Dick by George Steiner in the New Yorker in 1972, perhaps in a senior moment. Oddly it received glowing reviews pretty much everywhere. Even the NYRB, whose sole job is to savage a book like ZAM, is ambivalent. They acknowledge that it was an “important” book despite some shortcomings. But I’m not getting off to a fair start here. The book made me who I am and I’m not all bad.

When I first read ZAM, I absorbed it like a baby cactus — I just sucked up every bit of moisture from it — the voice, the road trip, the values, the pretensions. The book has a serious ambition to answer fundamental ontological questions and at sixteen I was jumpstarted and ready to prick other people’s ideologies. When I finished, I told my parents I was buying a motorcycle.

They proceeded to laugh off this idea, as I didn’t seem like the kind of person who could get it together to buy something as big and expensive as that. Normally it requires a job to buy a motorcycle. What my parents didn’t realize was that I could sell all of my belongings (and some of theirs) for just about as much money as a used bike cost. I also borrowed $200 from my friend Bill. When I came home with the bike, an ’82 Honda CM450c, it was a little late to intervene. I didn’t realize it at the time, but it’s almost the same as the bike Pirsig drove when he supposedly took the trip that is cataloged in the book. That bike is in the Smithsonian now. To be fair, nothing in the book suggests you should sell whatever is at hand to get a motorcycle.

 So, in 1986 I rode my motorcycle to college with ZAM in my backpack and its arguments in my head. I was put on academic leave after my first semester because I thought and acted like the roots of western philosophy and my professors were bullshit and no one, it seemed, appreciated my take. The professor who asked me to leave was a Hegelian. Out of school, I was forced to work blue-collar, minimum wage jobs for a year, which clarified a few things, namely that I should go back to philosophy with a more open mind. I said as much to the Hegelian and he gave me a second chance. This was unusual because Hegelians are not generally known to give second chances, but I guess he felt I was sufficiently aufhebunged.  

By this time I’d been riding a motorcycle for a couple of years, and since I never had any money, I learned a lot of motorcycle maintenance. I bought the 480-page shop manual on the CM450c. It was probably the technical motorcycle parts of ZAM that first clued me in to the book being a little misleading. If he was wrong about something as easy as motorcycle maintenance, perhaps the metaphysics had problems?

ZAM has three main pillars: Philosophy, Motorcycles and Fatherhood. At fifty-four years old, I have now legitimately been tackled by all three of these. First, as I’ve indicated, came the motorcycle which was my only form of transport for 15 years. I still own one today and was riding my youngest son to kindergarten on it not too long ago. Philosophy became a bigger love of mine — I’ve studied it my whole life, first as an undergrad and then in several grad schools. Like the author of ZAM, I’m ABD and always thought I’d teach. But also like the author, I felt that I needed to really understand it all before I could responsibly do so. 

Since Hegel has been my white whale, that’s been somewhat untenable. Pirsig has his own white whale in the book, which he calls the “metaphysics of quality” (MOQ), and hides its utter incoherence inside the story of the main character going insane from such deeply original thoughts. This is of course nonsense, there are no original thoughts in MOQ, but when pressed about Hegel, I might want to hedge like this too. Like the author, my main line of study has been both deep and debilitating. But I’ve at least read western philosophy before mouthing off about it. It’s quite clear Pirsig hasn’t. Calling MOQ a white whale is not to legitimate Steiner likening it to Moby Dick, which is simply mind-boggling.

The last parallel between Pirsig and myself, and my supreme qualification to review this book, is that I too have some sons now. Pirsig has more than the one son that he focuses on in the book. He evidently had another son and a daughter and also a wife but you never hear about them. His wife and other kids are so MIA in his book, one feels sorry for them and then Googles them to learn that they were super fucked up and upset after publication. Pirsig also remarried and moved overseas to live on a boat. It makes one wonder a little about the author. I have a wife and three boys. If I focused on my favorite of them, I’d still be at least mentioning the shortcomings of the others. Pirsig doesn’t tell us anything about them. The book is subtitled “an inquiry into values” and there’s definitely some fucked up family values in the book. But still, I’m not being entirely fair. ZAM was without a doubt the most important book of my life.

After doing my BA, and actually reading Kant and Aristotle, I realized that the first pillar of the book was a little rickety, so I stopped carrying it with me everywhere. It was a relief to not always have that book with me. It weighs at least a pound and my copy was so ratty that it required kid gloves and a protective wrapping of imported Japanese rice paper. I used to take it backcountry camping, an enterprise where one is so laden down with supplies that one needs to choose between things like spare socks and food. There was never a time where ZAM came in handy on one of those trips. But to be fair, Hegel isn’t useful there either and his books weigh more.

ZAM seems relevant enough to pack on one of those trips though. It’s full of detailed exegeses of the motorcycle maintenance any sensible person needs to perform on a road trip. The whole story is framed around just such a trip with his troubled twelve-year-old son. But just a year into owning a bike I learned these exegeses were nonsense. In one scene, Pirsig wakes up 45 minutes early one morning to adjust the tappets on his bike. I remember the magic of that word when I first read it. Other readers I’ve interviewed for this review mentioned that word to me too. What on earth are tappets? It turns out this is insane. 

Adjusting the tappets is a job that takes hours and specialized tools. You need to remove the gas tank, the rear brake line and the engine head to do it. I did it once, because my CM450c had tappets and because Pirsig made me feel like tappets might be the inner essence of technology and soul work. So for no real reason I adjusted them. Nobody in the history of motorcycles has done this while on a camping trip. Also, tappets are proleptic shitty engineering and this is why no modern bike has them anymore. Pirsig also changed his tires and chain after what I calculated must have been under 600 miles of driving. The amount of maintenance he performs would have required that he be tailed by a tool and parts truck. But I didn’t fully realize all this at the time. It was only on re-reading it as a fully fledged adult-philosopher-biker-dad. But I’m getting ahead of myself. 

I’d be lying if I said moving on from that book was easy. It was easy for me to leave the Jewish faith — Israeli nationalist Hebrew School made that easy — but I imagine it felt like what someone who loved the Church as a child felt when they realized God was dead. Or like leaving the girlfriend at the time who I loved but just knew was all wrong. To be honest, she left me. I told friends at the time who knew of my obsession with the book about the break up. ‘It was that tappet bit,’ I said… and that the Aristotle and Kant which formed two thirds of the book was wrong, and so I needed to just move on. But I looked back for a long time and the book looked back at me.

Twenty-five years went by in my life without thinking too much of it. Somewhere along the way I even lost the relic. But a few months ago, I rented an Airbnb with a friend who I had known even earlier than ’84, and who probably tolerated my obsession with this book back then. He told me subsequently that he had loved ZAM and read it around the same time as me. But he hadn’t become a philosopher-biker-dad. Why? Why had he become a lawyer? Pirsig doesn’t even like lawyers. I should mention that most of my family was with me in that Airbnb even though they have nothing to do with any of this. 

On the shelf of that Airbnb was the same edition that I had originally read. It was a mint green paperback and on the cover there was that image of a wrench emerging from a lotus — a clever symbol of one of the ideas of the book — that science could be spiritual and that we do ourselves a favor by learning how to get to the meat of things. I agree with this perspective. It’s who I am and anyone who knows me knows I don’t pay people to do most things like building stuff, engine repair, or plumbing, to name only three random things. This quality has enriched me but has also taken a pretty big toll: think the destructive power of a table saw and the fragility of the human hand.

There’s a song on Blood on the Tracks, I think it’s Tangled Up in Blue, maybe not, where he croons about Verlaine’s words burning off every page as if it was written in his soul. Somewhat sheepishly I report this experience, though it wasn’t Verlaine that did it to me. I hadn’t picked up ZAM in 30 years, but I felt my mouth forming every word I read. I had this book literally memorized and so I continued, trance-like, to recite this book to itself. My bad memory is legendary in my family. Only my oldest son has a worse memory. I forget if he’s the oldest. But I really did remember every word of ZAM.

And as I read, I relived my life, as it was and as it continued to be in the present. As is my penchant, I mostly saw the mistakes, the three pillars kicked out after only 50 pages in. But there was still some fine writing and a touching but troubling relationship with his son and the core values of the book were still mine, well maybe not the fathering and husbanding or the epistemology, but the do-it-yourself values, the descriptions of red wing blackbirds and a certain amount of bullshit. I feel like I’m still not being totally fair.

Here’s the thing to say about this book, if it isn’t already clear. It completely changed my life’s trajectory without my sending even a dollar to someone like Tony Robbins. This book made me sell everything I had to buy a motorcycle, which then led me down the backcountry trails of Montana where I saw bears who were disappointed I had this stupid book instead of food. It found me love because I had a motorcycle and a fluency with Kant. It led me to Hegel who then wasted decades of my life. Lastly, despite Pirsig’s bad relationship with his son, it didn’t scare me off from having kids though it did give me the wisdom to prevent them from reading this book.

As I was recently waxing nostalgic for ZAM, the story of realizations and lessons learned, etc., my middle son (I think he’s my middle son) bemoaned that I had told him not to read it. Why, he asked, would I have denied him this book that had so transformed my life, the father that he loved so much. He was 16 at the time I scared him off — the same age as me when I had first picked up this book. He could have had a similar experience to mine. Well, I said, get your own fucking book. You like Wittgenstein, so go build a cabin in the middle of Finland or something, like he did. This is my story and it’s a three-legged stool with no remaining attached legs — so why would you want it for yourself anyway? It’s no Moby Dick no matter what stupid George Steiner said. And then my youngest son chimed in and said he was gonna get a motorcycle when he’s older and I said, no fucking way. I might preemptively sell all his shit.

And so, dear reader of this Amazon review — 40 years on, I say, “This vacuum cleaner changed my life, made me what I am, but it’s really a piece of shit, has tappets and you should buy some other book. This one is mine.”

Launeddas Music

Posted on by musickmorley0814

The launeddas is an ancient Sardinian instrument, similar to the bagpipe, consisting of three separate cane flutes played simultaneously. With a circular breathing technique, players use the largest flute (su tumbu) to produce a single droning note, and the two smaller flutes (sa mankosa nanna) for the melody. Each finger hole is called a krai, or key, and the reeds are often altered with wax.

Though flutes come in many different sizes, only certain flutes are paired together, and each pairing has a name and scale associated with it. Some of these are: the thorn, the bagpipe, the median, the median as a little girl, the monk and the nun, the widow, and the marriageable widow. Dialogues take place between the flutes in certain songs: the monk talks to the nun, a lover talks to her beloved. The marriageable widow is an upbeat variation on the widow. 

In the past, players made flutes from cane stalks cut on nights of the full moon and hid the best patches from their rivals. The instrument conferred an enviable degree of prestige which allowed the most gifted players to rise above social stations inherited at birth. Though Maestro Efisio Melis’ parents had the “despised occupation of selling wine and nougat at village festivals,” he was able to join elite Fascist circles in Cagliari on account of his gift for “discovering ways of amusing himself and others.” 

Melis spoke with the author of the definitive treatise on the launeddas, Dutch anthropologist Andreas Bentzon, who traveled Sardinia on motorbike, transporting his sources’ hay and pecorino in return for the opportunity to record their music. After learning that the anthropologist was to visit his rival Antonio Lara (76 at the time,) Melis lied to Bentzon, saying that Lara had suffered a fit of apoplexy and would not be able to talk. But the trick was only payback for an earlier incident, when Lara had told everyone that Melis was dead, forcing Melis to travel around Campidano Cagliari to prove that he was still alive, and available to play Sunday dances.

Lara recalled his own teacher hiring sentries to prevent him from hearing and then stealing his themes (called noddas in Sardu). Refusing to obey, Lara hid himself behind a stack of kindling in the courtyard of a marriage ceremony, where he heard and then stole his teacher’s noddas.

It was normal for masters to refuse to teach their students—they would say they were “too tired” and “had other things to do.” Sometimes retiring masters taught students only in order to sic the younger player on their rivals. Palmeriu Figgus was stabbed with a knife after winning a launeddas competition, and concerts sometimes evolved into feats of strength, with flutists blowing until one or the other bled from the mouth. Efisio Melis once insulted a rival player with these words: “You are no launeddas player and cannot be one, because you are not from Villaputzu, but from a small village where they do not know what cane is.”

People and generations differed in their sense of how regimented the playing ought to be, how much it should encourage the emotions, how it should induce one or another kind of dancing. Nietzsche’s critique of Wagner—“Gradually one loses one’s footing and one ultimately abandons oneself to the mercy or fury of the elements: one has to swim…”—his advocacy of “old music—where one had to dance,” which act required “control of certain balanced degrees of time and energy, and forced the soul of the listener to continual sobriety of thought”—finds echoes in the preferences of the conservative village of Cabras for Giovanni Pireddu, whose playing “was so firm no one could miss a step”; their dislike of the “undanceable,” excessively fast Efisio Melis; and their exhortation of a serio style of play. Songs were criticized if they “mancano d’argomenti” (lacked a topic); good playing was “piu giustu e piu morale” (more correct and more moral).

Sardinia’s global integration and modernization, and the accompanying influx of other kinds of instruments and music, resulted in the marginization of the launeddas. Today it lives on in religious processions, concerts and folklore festivals observed by tourists. It is sometimes mixed, in my view unsuccessfully, with jazz.

A 2015 documentary with 522 views on YouTube profiles five young launeddas players in Sardinia. “Figli di crisi” (sons of the crisis), the boys have been afforded the time to perfect the difficult cane flutes by periods of prolonged unemployment. Some of them attended the underfunded technical school where I teach, where the internet is always out, and where the maps of the world in every room are crazy tapestries of cocks, hearts, the names of lovers, the names of rappers, and the English word “gay”… And here some students have graffitied the names Sestu, Settimo, and Sinnai over Fijian islands– a joke about how far these provincial towns are from Sardinia’s capital of Cagliari. 

Graziano Montisci, one of the young players profiled in the film, teaches circular breathing to aspiring players by having them blow into cups of water with plastic straws. The practice recreates a game played by the sons of shepherds with blades of grass and clay bowls which was also preparation for the launeddas. A Skype student from Sacramento quits his lessons before mastering the requisite skill, a fact which causes Montisci some anger—and the effort to speak optimistically about his own future creates slight, pained modifications in the young man’s voice.

“For someone who plays the launeddas, the right job is crucial,” he says. “If you knead concrete all day your hands will feel it … At home my parents tease me, ‘Oh you’ll ruin your hands! Oh, callus!’ But they don’t know what it means to spend many hours practicing an acciaccatura.” Montisci drives the No. 8 bus to keep his hands soft. 

It passes the same train station and churches every day, ascending the hill into Castello, where for a few minutes one sees the city laid out like sets of pots and boxes: the Brotzu hospital, Buon Aria church, and the monumental cemetery; the tennis courts by the communal gardens, the one-and-a-half-story Ferris wheel known as the City Eye, Piazza Yenne full of youth in Emporio Armani. Then, far off, the mountains in Pula, Capoterra, and Sarroch. 

Montisci and a young accordion player meet in a Conad grocery store parking lot one night, pour red wine into plastic cups and play a song together. The light from the store signage shines onto their van, while their friends smoke cigarettes and chain dance in the shopping cart depository. Later, they perform at a procession for Saint Efisio, walking ahead of two brown bulls.

Calm as gods, horns garlanded in flowers, the huge, gorgeous animals tow the saint as an old woman in a shawl and her husband in a tracksuit scatter rose petals on the ground. A long line forms behind them, consisting of priests, farmers, pilgrims, cross-bearers, policemen, children, and tractors who pass from the paved roads of the town to dirt roads surrounded by tallgrass. 

I once heard launeddas music at a protest in Teulada. A few hundred people had come to demand the closure of the nearby NATO base, which regularly tests bombs in the area, leaving radioactive thorium deposits in the ground. The black bloc tried to run around a line of riot guards while the older activists sat by the pickup truck, playing music and making salami sandwiches. An ancient and grizzled looking man put on punk separatist music and then a launeddas song, which led some people to begin to dance. 

Two older women with rich, smoke-damaged voices called to the man and asked him to dance. He smiled and shook his head, but they insisted, taking him by the arm and leading him into the sand. There, with linked arms, the three of them made crosswise steps in and out of a semicircle, throwing their heads back and laughing in joy. The man danced faster and faster and appeared unburdened, as though a bad season had passed. The police loitered by their armored bus and a boy called out from the side of a cliff on the base, where he had placed a smoking orange flare.

In the Sardinian ballu, as in Riverdance, the upper torso is kept rigid while the feet fly—because of which it seems as if the dancer’s spirit is forced up from the fast-moving feet, past the torso and into the head, where it expends itself in involuntary expressions of joy, of freedom born from restraint. A Bronze Age sculpture of a launeddas player captures this unabashedness, with its wide open eyes, its cheeks inflated and full of flutes, and its penis erect.

Launeddas music calls to my mind prelapsarian dreams, with green insects embodied by the drone flute and flocks of sheep embodied by the chanter flutes, all singing encouraging words, telling us to finish our work and then forget it. The songs suggest a harmony in purpose between humans, plants, and animals—a compilation of the shared compositions of rivals Efisio Mellis and Antonio Lara sounds like a field of crickets, whose chaos and order slip into one another with the complicated regularity of ecological cycles.

In their two-part Fiorassiu e puntu e organu, it is as if one were looking at the white and black dots on a static TV screen and suddenly saw rings of dancers and singers emerge, with one or another dot standing alone for a moment to sing out a long note above the honks, drones, and squeaks of the others. Their Fiuda Biugadia is more like a singing, dying motherboard, except that the modular notes (unplaceable on a gradient connecting animal and machine) are interrupted by festive shrieks of laughter and shouts in Sardu. The album is full of wild, violent, and happy songs like these.

So it is not hard to believe that people used to say the launeddas could make you insane, make pregnant women abort, make young girls fall in love, and blow the roofs off of churches. Some also held that there was somewhere a certain charmed instrument with a silver tongue-piece that only chosen players could sound.

Antonio Lara’s memories of the magic player Agostino Vacca seems to recall so much that his account breaks down:

Antonio Lara: They said Agostino Vacca had [a charmed instrument].
Andreas Bentzon: But how did one know?
AL: Oh, but it is something … Oh, until eighteen years old he was a swineherd, then when he was eighteen years old there came somebody who …
AL’s wife: It must have been the hand of God.
AL: But when the launeddas was sounding, it was also as if the earth was trembling … from the energy of the sound. My father tried, and he was a good launeddas player. Gioaniccu Cabras tried. They could not give him so much breath. [AL lifts his little finger.]
AL’s wife: And his instrument …
AL: It was empty, that instrument. They could not give enough breath, they could not breathe in it. It was an empty instrument, they did not succeed. They have thrown it away. But! You could go to jail! And he, he took it … He was only half a man. [AL shows his height.] He played like a … Madonna Santissima!

Top Gun: Two Critical Perspectives

Posted on by musickmorley0814

Gautama Mehta — The best Hollywood movies are made with an appealing amoral grandiosity of purpose. Often they’re about the U.S. military. People who don’t know how to read say these movies are meant to persuade you that the U.S. military is good and its enemies are bad. Among the class of illiterates who tend to think this way are the U.S. military, its enemies, and even the people who make the movies.

Tom Cruise knows how to read. He is the star of “Top Gun: Maverick” and also its protagonist. He made the movie, he is the movie’s audience, and he is the enemy of the U.S. military.

In “Top Gun: Maverick,” Tom Cruise plays Maverick, the best fighter pilot in the Navy, whom I surmise he also played in “Top Gun.” Before the movie begins Tom Cruise appears onscreen to say the stunts were real and thank you for seeing it in theaters. Before that there was a trailer for another Tom Cruise movie, “Mission: Impossible” Part Seven Part One, which will open in July 2023.

In “Top Gun: Maverick,” fighter pilots have been made obsolete by drones until a group of people named only as “the enemy” does something involving uranium in a place drones can’t reach—a place only fighter pilots can bomb. So Maverick must return to Top Gun, the naval base where fighter pilots are trained, to train a group of younger, lesser fighter pilots to bomb the uranium-connected endeavor.

We never see an enemy soldier’s face. No one discusses the enemy’s motivations or denounces its atrocities. (What kind of propaganda is this, illiterates?) All we ever really learn about the enemy is that it has superior planes to the U.S. military, but it also has an old, obsolete U.S. military plane sitting around—the kind Tom Cruise used to fly—so Tom Cruise steals it and defeats the enemy.

“A feature of the Western ‘war on terror’ that seems to come out of fable rather than reality is an inability to see the enemy. In fact, it is an inability to define the enemy,” writes Rahmane Idrissa in the New Left Review. Idrissa is discussing the French war in the Sahel. But for our purposes, like Tom Cruise’s, the Sahel doesn’t matter.

Tom Cruise understands that efforts to see or define the enemy of the U.S. military are not merely futile: they hinder the plot and cheapen the spectacle. Tom Cruise doesn’t want to battle the U.S. military’s enemy. He wants to rekindle his lost love with Jennifer Connelly, to watch the sun glisten in the magic hour on the backs and torsos of handsome young fighter pilots playing football on the beach, and to see the look of reproach in the eyes of Jennifer Connelly’s teenage daughter when she catches him jumping out of her mother’s bedroom window. War puts Tom Cruise in these situations; an enemy would sully them.

The absence of the enemy of the U.S. military allows Tom Cruise to battle his own enemy—a world in which he feels old and irrelevant—and win. When it’s over, the Navy’s best fighter pilot and Hollywood’s last movie star are victorious in their defense of planes and Hollywood, and none with eyes to see can seriously believe war is anything but a narrative device.

Lenny Wheelman, Transcribed by Guthrie London — People say Hollywood is changing. They say that “Movies” are changing. I wouldn’t know. In fact, I’ve never been a big fan of movies. Movies take my least favorite element of activities — commitment, precipitated by long run times and pricey tickets — and pair it with my least favorite element of life, impermanence. You start them, you watch them, and they end, and you leave the theater with nothing new in your life, with the feeling that a universe has been created and destroyed in the span of two hours. But let’s rewind to the beginning, when I decided to go see “Top Gun: Maverick”.

On the morning of June 2nd, 2022, I made myself four hard-boiled eggs and put them in a bowl. I struggled to get the shells off. Those slippery eggs are always fooling me with their strange outfits. Once I had peeled those disgusting eggs with my hands, and I had their tender insides ready for mastication, I took out a fresh, cold liter of Diet Coke from my refrigerator, ready to pair with my meal. The whole thing made me sick. When my doctor told me I shouldn’t eat eggs, due to my high cholesterol, I misheard him, due to my poor hearing, and I thought that he said I should only eat eggs. Those fucking eggs were making me sick, and when I called him to clarify, he cleared up the mistake. Although I’m not entirely sure that I know what’s going on, as I can barely hear anything anymore. 

I remember, when I was a teenager, the movies used to be so fun. You’d go to the drive-in with a girl, you’d barely watch the movie, and instead you’d make-out, and do hand-stuff. Gone are those days, now people won’t let their teenagers out of the house — and the teenagers don’t even want to go. They want to play with their Tik-Tok and their xbox and do online school. I haven’t done hand-stuff in over 10 years. Things have really changed — so when the trailer for “Top Gun: Maverick” popped up on television, I was excited. These people weren’t on Tik-Tok, they were out doing their jobs. And, boy, look at those planes. And who couldn’t use a hero, played by Tom Cruise. 

But things became more difficult. I forgot where I was going. When I left the house, I had a light bulb in my hand. I don’t know why I picked it up, but maybe I had unscrewed it from a lamp. I figured it must’ve been dead, that’s why I unscrewed it. But I wasn’t sure. When I got to the bus stop, there was no way to know if it was a working light bulb or not, I couldn’t remember. So I began to worry. I was so distracted on the bus, holding the light bulb, and wondering if it was working, that I missed my stop. I went a whole 10 stops too far. When I got off the bus, I was surrounded by ethnics, and I didn’t recognize any of the street signs. I held the light bulb tight, in case someone tried to rob me. 

I met a dog. He was a small dog, and he started following me. I think I was on my way to the other bus, to get back the way I came, but I had been walking a long time and the return bus was right across the street, so it didn’t make sense. The dog must have been a beagle, the way he walked. At first I thought he was trying to get my light bulb, and I shouted at him, but then I realized he was just a puppy, and he didn’t want my light bulb, he was just looking for some food. Ok fine, I thought, I’ll find him something to eat. I went into the convenience store on the corner, to look for some food. I spent half my money getting him some canned pineapple. But when I got outside, I realized I had left my light bulb inside. When I went back in to get it, I couldn’t find it. I went over to the shelf where I had gotten the canned pineapple. The light bulb was there. So I took it, along with the pineapple, back outside. As I walked out, I was afraid the kid at the cash register would think I was stealing the canned pineapple. So I said, “I’m not stealing this,” very loudly. He said something in return, but I couldn’t hear him — I didn’t make eye contact, I just kept walking as fast as I could until I got back outside. When I got outside, I thought I’d find the dog, but he was gone.

I walked back in the direction of the bus stop. I was sure that by that time, I had missed the movie. It didn’t really matter — the movie wasn’t real anyway. You go to all the trouble of getting there and sitting through the whole thing and then it ends. And most of the time, the ending isn’t very good. I found the bus stop and sat down. It was dark now, and people were closing up the last shops. I didn’t know when the next bus would come. I set the light bulb down next to me, but it immediately rolled off the bench and cracked on the ground. I had carried it around all this time for nothing. Now it was broken. I continued to sit next to the broken light bulb, until I finally broke and opened up the canned pineapple. I thought it might be a good snack to have while waiting for the bus. I was eating the pineapple chunks with my fingers when the dog plodded up to me. He wasn’t trying any mischief, so I gave him a chunk of pineapple. When the bus came, I waved goodbye to the dog, and got on.

I wouldn’t recommend “Top Gun: Maverick” to anyone, because I haven’t seen it. Maybe I’ll go next Sunday, but by that time it might have ended.

Nora Brown

Posted on by musickmorley0814

The banjo prodigy Nora Brown is now sixteen and the prefix “Little” has been dropped from her stage name. Raised in Brooklyn, her musical education began at six with the ukulele. Her first teacher was Shlomo Pestcoe, a jovial man with rivers of white hair, one of a long line of Jewish New Yorkers who has done much to preserve and popularize Appalachian music. Amid the clutter of instruments and stacks of CDs in Pestcoe’s apartment Brown learned her first old-time songs. Her acquaintance with the banjo started around the age of ten, and soon she was making trips to the southeast US to study with aging masters like Lee Sexton and George Gibson. A YouTube video shows Brown at age twelve sitting on a sagging couch with a ninety-year old Sexton in overalls as he teaches her “Cumberland Gap” in the beautiful two-finger style. It has been Brown’s dubious honor to be unofficially laureled as old-time’s best hope for survival, granted appearances on the TED channel and NPR’s tastemaking Tiny Desk Concert series. This early prestige has invited listeners to hear Brown’s music as the work of a savant, when it is more simply the work of an accomplished musician. Her first album, released at age thirteen, already bears the trademarks of a distinctive style: gossamer fingerwork, melodic phrases that give way to sudden pauses and silences, frequent use of softer nylon strings instead of the twangier standard steel kind, a special facility with slow tunes; vocally, a recessive quality, her words intoned almost reluctantly. 

This disposition of inwardness sets her apart from the conviviality of many of her forebears. A legend of old-time music like Tommy Jarrell hollered while strumming the banjo, the singer and his instrument sounding like close friends engaged in riotous conversation. The difference may partly reflect changes in recording technology. Many of the canonical recordings of old-time musicians from the last century feature men and women performing on front porches, in living rooms, and in other informal social settings, unaccompanied by microphones, or else projecting loud enough to make amplification unimportant. Loudness also allowed the banjo to be heard over the tromp of dancers’ feet. The evolution of the microphone in the mid-century opened up myriad possibilities for singing and playing. Around this time in Brazil, for example, João Gilberto discovered the sound of bossa nova while singing in his sister’s tiled bathroom. To reproduce this acoustic quality in the studio, he began making albums in which his voice and guitar seemed to emanate a hair’s breadth from the listener’s ears, almost too close. Just a few notches above a whisper, Gilberto’s voice was curiously uninflected by feeling, but in spite, or maybe because of this, it was also supremely intimate. The writer Ben Ratliff describes the transformation that popular samba tunes underwent in Gilberto’s hands: “They were once social songs. Now they’re cloistered, but they still have the samba rhythm inside them: Gilberto could create it alone.”

I think you can hear a similar transformation of cherished old-time songs in Nora Brown’s playing. Garrulous tunes are resurrected as introspective reveries: they’ve left behind the din of the square dance for the privacy of the attic. Familiar lyrics that listeners are accustomed to hearing belted out rise from and subside into silence. Recorded in a cave thirty feet below street-level in Brooklyn, Brown’s new album Sidetrack my Engine does not have the studio-crafted meticulousness of Gilberto’s songs, but it shares in his confidentiality. An interesting example is the song Frankie and Albert. A blues ballad about a woman named Frankie who killed her unfaithful lover Albert in a well-publicized 1899 scandal, the song has passed through innumerable variations, including a marvelously lively rendition by Taj Mahal, who narrates the story’s drama with an old raconteur’s gusto. In Nora Brown’s rendering “Frankie and Albert” comes to us wreathed in the mists and shadows of memory. The dramatic force of the story has been evacuated; in place of narrative immediacy is a serene mood of elegy. “Frankie and Albert” is no longer an item of pressing news relayed through the town market but something else, perhaps the tale of a former friend recollected on an evening many years after the murder. From the banjo, which she plays in the two-finger style, Brown elicits ringing, jewel-like tones, without twang. Sitting near the front during her album release show, it seemed possible to me that the audience had meandered into Brown’s personal quarters and found her sitting there, playing for no one in particular. 

Besides refining one of the singular styles in old-time music today, Sidetrack my Engine offers the pleasure of hearing two creative forces finding each other at the right time: Nora Brown and the talented multi-instrumentalist Jerron “Blind Boy” Paxton. Here Paxton plays the bones, a hand-held percussion instrument associated in the US with blues and minstrel shows in the early 20th century. Like any instrument that has not widely survived beyond a remote patch of time, the bones risk appearing as a quaint anachronism, trotted out to satisfy the curiosity of 78 collectors and the historically-minded. But what Paxton and Brown have created together is thrillingly new. In these duets the traditional timbral roles of stringed instrument and percussive instrument have been exchanged: Brown’s nylon-stringed banjo draws soft, resonantly bassy circles while Paxton’s bones crackle with nasal clarity high above, like Spanish castanets making merry graveyard chatter. Instead of thumping or chugging, the banjo arrives as a quicksilver flutter of notes ascending through the air. The fiddler Bruce Molsky has observed that what sets old-time Appalachian music apart from other forms of folk for him is its special concentration on the language of rhythm; and in their collaborations I hear Brown and Paxton replenishing this tradition’s great stores of rhythm, returning to the joys of nimbleness and fleetness. As Paul Valéry has it, “One must be light like the bird, not like the feather.”