Chancelucky

The Collapse of the High Road (first of 2 parts)

2007-04-30T16:06:00.000-07:00

I watched the Warriors game last night between updates on the collapse of a freeway interchange on the Oakland side of the Bay Bridge. A few days before that one of my favorite if not my favorite non-fiction writer, David Halberstam, died in a car crash in Menlo Park. There was another mass shooting in Kansas City, this time at a shopping mall. Astronomers found a new planet that might have water some twenty light years away from earth. The Alberto Gonzales matter continues to unfold alongside Dennis Kuckinich’s recent attempt to file articles of impeachment against George and Dick. In the meantime, there’s been the usual daily mass killing in Iraq. I know that smarter bloggers would break all these events into separate posts. In fact, I was in the midst of doing separate posts about both Gonzales and Halberstam late last week. Sometimes though, things stick together.

The last time the Cypress collapsed, it happened during the World Series in 1989 which just happened to match the San Francisco Giants and the Oakland A’s, the first and only time btw. That was an earthquake with forty five thousand people in the increasingly creaky Candlestick Park (talk about cursed ballparks) and post-rush hour traffic still on the Bay Bridge. This was a fuel truck crashing catching fire at 3:45 in the morning with no one dying.

The more recent incident haunts me more. This was not a terrorist act, but all disasters now make me think of what a purposive act with even relatively low-tech weapons might do. Many of the 9/11 skeptics insist that a steel structure would not have melted just from the fireball from a jetliner’s fuel burning. I don’t know if this was a renovated part of the freeway post 1989, but the fact that a single tanker trunk caused a freeway overpass to collapse makes me, as a non-scientist engineer, a bit less skeptical of the capacity of everyday items to manage what even the most potent bombs from the beginning of the twentieth century couldn’t.

Last Wednesday, Retired General Robert Scates’s testimony before Congress flew well under the news on behalf of an idea called the “Language Corps.” Scates’s notion is simple. Modern wars are won across multiple dimensions. While the United States has a huge advantage technologically, its resources for fighting a cultural and diplomatic war are much more meager. At some point, you can’t just kill everyone who stands in your way. In the meantime, weapons of medium destruction like fertilizer bombs, chlorine trucks, etc. remain both easily accessible and potentially almost as dangerous as the most sophisticated nuclear and chemical weapons.

Think about it, post-9/11 we can’t exactly ban all airline traffic nor can we seriously consider doing things like eliminating fuel trucks. Both are assumed into any modern city. We can check all the passengers and trucks we want, but that doesn’t address the culture bomb. The danger only gets worse as long as the number of people who might have motives for doing these things continues to increase. It’s not perfect, but the ability to share a language and to understand what matters to someone else does help persuade people to work things out rather than to use planes as missiles and fertilizer trucks as bombs.

As I watched the Warrior game, they kept flashing pictures of screaming fans in the stands. As much as any place in America, I believe the Bay Area can claim that American culture is a suitable vehicle for cultural interchange and inclusion. People whose ancestors came from every part of the world were in there screaming in unison when Baron davis hit a 49 foot shot to end the half, stole the ball and drove for a layup to end the third quarter, and then hit Andres Biedrins , the Warriors Ukrainian big man, with a perfect pass for a layup to clinch the game. It’s possible that the Warriors will lose even this series, but this team reminds me of the 1981 49ers whom no one expected to go deep into the playoffs. There were two signature moments in that season as well. During the season, the 49ers beat the Cowboys big behind Fred Dean, acquired mid-season from the Chargers. They got to the Super Bowl against the Cowboys when Dwight Clark made “The Catch” the single greatest moment in Candlestick history in the corner of the end zone.

On Super Bowl Sunday in 1981, the Chicago Symphony performed at Davies Hall, still relatively new at the time. Before the performance, cars up and down Van Ness honked their horns continuously in celebration of the 49ers first championship. You could hear it inside Davies. In tribute, Solti changed the program slightly to play Wagner’s Die Meistersinger Overture. Wagner was very self-consciously building a German cultural identity, Germany the political entity was still relatively new, through Opera. It struck me that all those honking automobile horns were a kind of American symphony celebrating our own cultural identity that afternoon more than a quarter century ago.

At that time, another incident, the first time I ever heard of David Halberstam, was still fresh in my mind. My parents sent me off to a private school in New England for high school. Although my grandfather was wealthy, my parents were decidedly middle class. They were part of the first generation of Chinese to raise their children in the suburbs. For whatever reason, the Kennedys resonated especially strongly with my father. Joe Kennedy had been a bootlegger and my Grandfather owned a gambling house. Both had taken an interest in politics for their children as a means to completing the arc of success in America. To get his children ready, Joseph Kennedy, the scion of the Irish Catholic family, sent his sons to decidedly English-protestant Prep Schools in New England. I went to one of the schools that had been attended by several prominent JFK advisors.

When Halberstam’s portrait of how JFK/LBJ’s advisor had drifted into Vietnam came out, my Dad went straight to Tower Books because it contained some long sections about my high school. I don’t think it occurred to my Dad that Halberstam’s description wasn’t necessarily flattering though it wasn’t damning either. My Dad simply liked pointing to sections in a real book and saying “That’s where my son goes to school.”

Actually the man who had taught the presidential advisor the lessson of Munich and appeasement that got overgeneralized to Ho Chi Minh, was still teaching at my school. In any case, a few months later Nat Hentoff, the Village Voice columnist, was a guest speaker at the school and he chose the occasion to riff off Halberstam’s book and announced that “JFK’s chief advisors were war criminals.” Both the history teacher and three of the man’s sons were in the audience.

A long emotional encounter mediated by both the teacher and the headmaster ensued. Honestly, I didn’t really understand the very strong emotions of my three fellow students, none of whom I ever got to know all that well. I even sort of sympathized with Hentoff who kept saying that he’d had no idea that they were in the audience, but that he still believed that the best schools would teach people to honor the “human” impact of the decisions they made. It was a strange moment for me as well in understanding the place of this school in my life and my place in it. My parents desperately wanted me to do well there as an “open door” to a future. I was looking around at all these dope-smoking school mates, many of whom were also very bright, diligent, and committed to improving the world and thinking there was something wrong. The problem was that I never could articulate it nor could I choose between pleasing my parents and setting my own course, a fairly common adolescent issue just in an odd setting.

It struck me though that Halberstam recognized the mixed legacy of Brahmin institutions and the odd role they had played in getting us to Vietnam. I became a fan of his writing and followed him through his explorations of the fall of the U.S. Car Industry, the Fifties, the Trailblazers, the newspaper business, the Cardinals, Dimaggio’s hitting streak and Williams’s .400 season, etc. One time I gave my father a copy of Halbertsam’s Robert Kennedy book, An Unfinished Odyssey, and that remains one of my best memories of my dad. We both read the book in a single setting and my Dad kept reading passages from it aloud. It didn’t occur to me that my Dad was different in some ways. He wanted me to go to the best schools to some day make money, but money wasn’t what mattered to him. It was what one might do with money to make the world a better place that mattered.

Halberstam wrote about a huge variety of subjects starting with his early indictment of the Vietnam War. In another sense though, he always wrote the same book. Invariably, his theme was the pursuit of the kind of transcendent excellence in the world that somehow touches the soul. As I watched Bill Walton broadcast a Warriors game over the weekend, the reason why Halberstam’s writing resonated with me so much finally came home to me. He was writing about my parents’ own take on the American Dream which they wanted to live through me. (Yes, I know that one has other implications as well)

End Part I continue to Part II if you care to.

chancelucky

Walmart and John Grisham's Ford County

2009-11-05T15:12:00.000-08:00

Call it due diligence...Okay, my work is close to a Walmart so I went there on my lunch hour. I got into the mood by getting a quarter pounder from the in store McDonald's, read a copy of US Magazine to find out why the Bachelor dumped Melissa Rycroft, then went to find Ford County, John Grisham's short story collection 16.99. The store was pretty busy, but I was the only person in the book section there.

It was in a shelf marked best sellers which was dominated by a huge quantity of copies of Twilight and its sequels (there were so many I thought the display itself was painted black and I suppose this supports my theories that Walmart really is a big box take on Vampirism). I did not, however find a collection of short stories by Stephanie Meyer. In terms of number of copies stocked, the Grisham was second to Twilight.

Ford County was directly in between a book by Danielle Steel and one by Nicholas Sparks. On the far right of the display, they had a book by Glenn Beck. On the far left, they had a book by Rush Limbaugh (just kidding about the Rush, there was no book from anyone left of Glenn Beck there). I live in the middle of Northern California btw where teabagging remains something you mix either with hot water or with another consenting adult so it was surprising to see the Beck book there as the lone political tome on the shelf.

Ford County was on the only book of short stories on the bestseller display. I did later find a copy of Olive Kitteredge on a distant bottom shelf sitting next to a single copy of Angela's Ashes. There were also multiple copies of Tuesdays with Mori and Mitch Ablom's complete opus of inspirational writing on a high shelf. Interestingly, no Harry Potter. My last visit to the book section of Wal Mart was all Harry Potter. btw I'm a big Harry Potter fan,even to the point that I would probably buy and read a JK Rowling literary novel.

No, I didn't read the whole book or even all of a story (that would be wrong). I did read the first pages of most of the seven stories, skimmed a bit, and checked the endings of the 7 stories. The stories are all really long, actually too long to be posted here even on novellas. While this isn't completely fair, I'm told that standard slushpile practice is to read the first page then make a quick decision.

I'd forgotten that Grisham is a wonderfully clear writer. You know where you are, what he's talking about, and you don't trip over any sentences, all with a minimum of effort. I think that serves him well in his thrillers. My one venture into a regular Grisham book, it struck me that he wasn't necessarily great at setting mood, evoking place, or finding imaginative ways to describe things (he's no Michael Chabon that way). Not a lot of metaphor, imagery, symbolism, etc. Anyway, this virtue also is something of a handicap to me because it leads to a sort of flatness of tone and the impression the insights aren't all that deep either. That may just be me, I notice that writers who see detail, make the language sing, and know how to cast shadows with their description and bring out ambiguities also often have deeper insights.

He tosses in some Southern Grotesque, on page one he tells us that someone's mom is 400 pounds (that one may be American normal or at least fast food normal these days vs. Flannery O'connor grotesque though) and there are similar details about the good old boy protagonists who wind up at a strip club instead of donating blood for their friend.

I don't think it was length alone that kept these stories out of the New Yorker. They may, however, be perfectly enjoyable stories. I'd have to read them all the way through to know that. There's definitely more to a story than style and voice and those things might be in those stories. Still, when I think Ford and short stories, I'll probably think of Richard rather than Ford County.

That said, I'd love to get my own book into Walmart someday. My guess is they sell a lot of books.

chancelucky

The Second Chancelucky in Line

2009-11-03T11:31:00.000-08:00

I’ve been reading a lot of Haruki Murakami lately and enjoying it. I’m also worried that it’s starting to affect my regular life. As I’ve mentioned, I write fiction some times when I’m not blogging. Judging from the last few months, I must have been writing a lot of fiction :}. I certainly haven’t been blogging.

Anyway, a couple months ago I was looking to see what the deadline for the University of Iowa’s Short Story Collection competition happened to be this year. I’d entered the year before, but I knew that I didn’t have much of a chance. I used the competition more as an opportunity to put together something that looked like a collection than a serious run at winning it. I opened the web page and much to my shock the winner was Kathryn Ma, someone I actually knew. As it happens, Kathryn went to both the same college and graduate school that I did. We weren’t good friends, but we certainly knew one another. She’s a terrific writer and very deserving. One of the shocks was that I had no idea that she wrote at all. I later learned that she didn’t start until she was 40.

Had someone told me that the winner of the Iowa contest would be a Chinese-American writer who set stories in Northern California and the same writer had gone to school x and school y at such and such a time, I would have started celebrating. Certainly, that could only have been me. Slightly less odd, the judge for the contest was Curtis Sittenfeld (American Wife) who went to the same high school I did and attended the same college that Kathryn and I went to though ten years later. After the publication (part of the prize) of All That Work and Still No Boys (Kathryn’s collection), I sent her an e-mail through Facebook and decided to go to one of her readings in Berkeley. I’ve been to any number of readings by authors, but I don’t know that I’d ever seen anyone who had prepared quite as well as Kathryn. She thanked the owners of Mrs. Dalloway’s , the bookstore/garden supply store hosting the reading, delivered a brief-engaging talk about her history as a fiction writer, read a selection from the book that she timed out at exactly 8 minutes (I assume that’s an ideal length somehow), and answered questions with poise and charm for the 30 or so people there.

I bought a copy of her book then got in line to have her sign it. After a minute of standing in line, a younger Asian man inadvertently stepped in front of me. Eventually, he turned around and I think it dawned on me that he’d cut in front of me and he offered to switch places. I told him not to worry about it. We waited our turn, then he came up to Kathryn and she said, “Who do I make this out to?”

The guy says “Sign it to Chants Lucky.”

My eyes-widened and I imagined the books flying off the shelves and rearranging in odd patterns.

Kathryn says, “Oh, you’re Chants Lucky. Thanks for your e-mail.”

“The guy finishes his visit and turns to leave, but I get to say, “Is your name really Chance Lucky?”

He nods then takes off.

My turn comes up and I tell Kathryn, “You’re not going to believe this, but I’m Chancelucky. You know we went to X and Y together.”

Kathryn smiles and acts like this happens a lot. We catch up a bit in the way that 2 people who barely remember one another might. She signs my book and says, “Ah yes, Chance Lucky with two C’s right?”

I compliment her on her memory (it does make me feel a bit better, end the visit since there are several people behind me in line several of whom may also have names Chants Lucky, Ciance Lucky, Chans Lucky, Chentz Lucky.

As my friend and I left the bookstore, it occurred to me that I should have stopped Chants Lucky to get his story. I would then have learned a bit more about alternate universes etc. and maybe gotten published in some journal of theoretical physics for Star Trek fans who also read Murakami. I didn’t. Maybe,I was afraid of the possible anti-matter matter explosion from a Chance encounter of this kind.

Instead, maybe I'm fated to stay the second Chance Lucky waiting in line to talk to Kathryn Ma. It may be all that's holding the cosmos as we know it in place.
chancelucky

Thought I'd mention it

2009-10-21T17:23:00.000-07:00

My story Tears for the River God was nominated by Grey Sparrow Journal for a Pushcart prize. I'd like to thank both Diane Smith (the founder of the journal) and Sue Haigh the fiction editor for that edition.

Cave Painting (fiction)

2009-10-15T14:44:00.000-07:00

Medici chapel,

Story appears in the current issue of Lacuna Journal.

Fred Plotkin's Amazon page. He knows way more about this stuff than I do.

chancelucky

National Defense University on the Iraq War

Grand Slam

2009-09-01T11:07:00.001-07:00

Two weeks ago, a work friend gave me two tickets for the Giants-Rockies game. It turned out to be an important late season game, the first in many years in San Francisco. After blowing a three run lead in the fourteenth inning last Monday to fall four games behind in the wild card race to the Rockies, the Giants had gotten within a game by going 4-1 at home. I invited a friend who got me to my last major league game three years ago to see the A’s and we were all set to watch Matt Cain, arguably the best pitcher in the league this year, put away the Rockies.

We got to our seats in the deep right field bleachers midway through the Star Spangled Banner and I found myself next to a seven or eight year old boy, his older sister, and their dad who was keeping score with an old-fashioned scorebook. Virtually everyone around us had some sort of Stanford paraphernalia on. The current Giants management is very good at family promotions. They have little kids announce the hitters. They let little kids ride in the golf cart with a mascot who circles the stadium and throws t-shirts into the crowd. They show little kids cheering on the Jumbotron. They have a t-ball park near the Coke bottle that’s a replica of ATT park, so really little kids can pretend to play baseball. It’s a simple idea, get the kids addicted. On the other hand, it’s about forty bucks a ticket or more. If you go with the family to a Giants game, you’re looking at a three hundred dollar outing.

For many years, I’ve mostly noticed how any children near me at baseball games are mostly interested in the vendors and hardly look at the game. About ten years ago, we went with a friend and his son who made it through maybe six innings, whined every time someone was selling soda or ice cream, and who may or may not have known the score of the game at any given point. I’m just not that on sitting next to kids at baseball games. I did take my daughter once a few years ago, but she’s my kid so there really wasn’t anything she could have done wrong and unlike me she didn’t turn into a baseball fan.

Anyway, this kid had the garlic fries, the licorice, etc. and I was all set to be annoyed particularly since the game started badly. Cain went 0-2 on the first hitter then walked him. The guy stole second base, went to third on a ground ball, then Tulowitzki doubled off the centerfield fence. In turn, the Giants spent the next three innings popping up the first pitch. I think the Rockies starter went 3 scoreless innings on 22 pitches. Cain steadied some and the Giants got a sacrifice fly from Schierholz to tie the game in the fourth. The kid next to me stands up and cheers the fly ball. In the meantime, his dad is quietly marking things in the scorebook and his older sister, who looks like Lyndsay Lohan when Lyndsay Lohan was a cute kid, is explaining things to him like how hit and runs work and why you’d intentionally walk a number 8 hitter. More impressive, the boy is listening the whole time and hasn’t gotten up to go to the bathroom repeatedly.

It occurs to me that I was his age when I saw my first baseball game at Candlestick Park in 1963, the day after Marichal and Spahn went 16 innings in a 1-0 night game there won on a Willie Mays home run. My dad used to tell me that the moment I saw the big green field, my face lit up and that he knew right then that I’d always be a baseball fan. Of course, I stayed up the entire night before to listen to the Marichal-Spahn duel at age 7, so it was already sort of a no-brainer. We didn’t have video games then or the internet, so listening to baseball on the radio was one of the few kid friendly media of the time. Btw, my wife and I love Mad Men, but how is it that none of those people are baseball fans? I get that Don Draper wouldn’t care, but no one in that office even makes Mets jokes.

I look at the boy next to me and realize that he’s just like me only he wasn’t nerdy enough to bring a baseball glove to the park just in case he got found by a really-really long home run. Also forty plus years ago, I don’t know that he’d have had an older sister explaining the nuances of the game to him though my mother did sometimes take me to Giants games without my dad. One time I had a 102 temperature and she took me to a night game at Candlestick just because Sandy Koufax (my favorite player- I know that’s treason) was pitching. Koufax was left-handed like me and he was Jewish which back then was as close as any star athletes got to being Chinese until Masanori Murakami got signed by the Giants the next year. Anyway, when Koufax pitched against the Giants, I’d secretly root for the Dodgers, something that ended a couple years later when Koufax and Marichal faced off and Marichal hit Roseboro with the bat. My parents and I were far up the left field line that day. Dad and I went to the stadium the night before to get tickets.

So the Giants tied the game 1-1 in the fourth and I’m happy that the kids around me are actually into the game. Cain then comes out for the fifth and gives up 800 feet worth of back to back homers to Helton and Tulowitzki, 3-1 Rockies. A couple innings later it’s 5-2 Rockies. Giants get men on second and third with no outs and somehow don’t score a run. They’re best pitcher didn’t have it and everyone knows this year’s Giants can’t hit.

Somehow, the Giants get a double, a walk, and a hit by pitch to load the bases, but then somehow make two outs. Somewhat disappointing free agent, Edgar Renteria, comes up and I turn to my friend and say “He’s actually one of the best hitters with men on base in the majors.” It’s just one of those weird things that stuck in my head a few months ago.
Edgar Renteria actually has been one of the better hitting shortstops in baseball for many years, but he’s not exactly a household name. Besides, once you sign with the Giants you lose thirty points off your batting average. In this case he came here as a .288 hitter and has been at .259.

The guy takes a pitch from Rafael Betancort, there’s that sound of wood on ball, and the whole park is standing and screaming except the fat guy in the Tulowitzki jersey a couple rows away from us. Renteria’s ball climbs into the lower part of the left field bleachers just inside the foul line. A disappointing game suddenly turns into the most exciting sports event I’ve seen in years. Franklin Morales went from being the reliever who got two strikeouts with two on in the last inning to the bum who loaded the bases and set up the grand slam. Renteria went from sort of disappointing free agent to indelible Giants memory a la Rob Pruitt ( Iwas there) and Brian Johnson and the Giants suddenly became serious playoff contenders going into September. I figure if this can happen this suddenly at ATT park, maybe the same thing can happen with the economy and universal affordable health care.

An inning later, the Giants load the bases but still have just a one run lead and a bunch of their own relievers not looking terribly effective. The manager sends Ryan Rollinger, a shortstop who has never had a hit in the majors, to pinch hit. He doubles and the crowd goes almost as wild as they did for Renteria. The little boy next to me is jumping around and screaming his head off.

The week started with the Giants losing to the Rockies on a grand slam in the 14th. It ends with the Giants winning on a grand slam in the 7th. I got to go to a baseball game with an old friend. You know those people you don’t see for three years and you do and you just start talking again like no time has passed. I see this little boy who makes me remember how I became a baseball fan, his very cool sister, and the dad with the pen and the paper scorebook. Even bigger, I got to see hope pulse through forty thousand people all at the same moment. It’s a trivial thing, but it’s not. Hope’s been in short supply lately and baseball was one of those things that held America together the last time things were this scary.

Funny thing to suddenly remember what it’s like to be a fan.

chancelucky

Hlly t-90 (cheap class D amp with actual power)

2009-08-16T23:37:00.000-07:00

Ever since I first fell for the Sonic Impact t-amp, I've been intrigued about the prospects of a higher-powered Class D amp. As most people who follow these things know, Tripath went under a couple years ago, but they made higher-power chips. Sonic-Impact was promising one a couple years ago as was Mark Schifter's av-123, X-electronics. It's just that both turned out to be vaporware. PopPulse has also marketed an amplifier based on the Tripath 2022, a higher-powered chip, but I still haven't found a serious review.

Hlly electronics is a Chinese company that has offered a handful of Tripath-based amplifiers via E-bay and a North American distributor p-mac audio. They aren't the only Chinese company that has tried to capitalize on the success of the Sonic Impact and the Trends Audio, a more audiophile t-2024-based amp that was reviewed very positively. In many ways, they typify the joys and frustrations of doing business with Chinese audio companies.

My first experience with Hlly was with their T-2020 based amp, similar to the Trends but slightly more powerful (nothing significant). It sounded good initially, but it suddenly fried on me. They were glad to either refund me or replace, but wanted me to pay shipping to China. Unfortunately, the amp was 68 dollars and the shipping was 22. I give Hlly credit though, we worked something out and I wound up having them ship me a T-90, Hlly's own t-2022-based amp which boasted a promising 90 watts into 4 ohms. In other words, it promised to deliver tripath sound to speakers that aren't either horn-loaded, single driver, or meant to play from two feet away.

Unfortunately Hlly's original release of the t-90 was premature. It made a noise at idle and the muting circuit may or may not have been overly finicky. A few weeks earlier, the company had announced the implementation of new board for the t-90 and apparently dealt with the persistent hiss/noise issue.I was in one of those what the hell moods, so I took the chance. Hlly was very good about returning e-mails and was very straight in their dealings with me though there was a bit of a language barrier.

Before I review the t-90, I also want to mention that Hlly has landed their new amp in a peculiar market spot. The Virtue Audio One, 30 watts/channel (the Hlly is 60 into 8 ohms btw), but numerous rave reviews, is $250.00 which is more than the Hlly $180, delivered from China. I haven't heard the Virtue, but my guess is that a lot of people might prefer the “known quantity” aspect of the Virtue for what's not that big a price difference. Incidentally, the Virtue recently sold out all of its stock, either a clever marketing ploy or a sign of terrific marketing success in a tough market for audiophile toys.They rather ingeniously sold their products as a budget amp or a second audiophile-level amp for your computer.

When my Hlly-t90 arrived I was surprised by the size and weight of the package. The t-20 was well-built, but resembled a headphone amp in size. The t-90 was hefty and quite deep, maybe a little too deep to stick on a desktop next to your computer. Instead of including a switch mode power supply that plugged into the body, the t-90 has a toroidal transformer in the case, a surprisngly heavy transformer. Like the t-90, it has a solid metal case with a thick-milled aluminum front. The power switch is on the front and it includes a volume pot for possible use as an integrated amp.

I started the t-90 on my office system through a run of the mill laptop soundcard and a pair of Radio Shack Lx-5 speakers (late version). I loved the sound, but was surprised to find that the Hlly didn't sound a lot “louder” than the Sonic-Impact. My laptop soundcard doesn't have a lot of gain and I had noticed that the Sonic Impact had surprisingly good sensitivity. My initial impression was that the Hlly t-90 sounded very different. Where the SI T-amp is beguilingly light and airy, notably so, the Hlly is darker and more solid sounding. It may be that it restores the bottom octaves while the little t-amp had a filter below 100 hz. I was favorably impressed with the Hlly though, just wasn't sure that it's a good match for low end low output sound cards or medium-sized desks. Cards like the m-audios and even middling fare like the sound blaster audigies would probably do fine btw.

I took the Hlly home to try it in a higher-end system. For me, that's a relative term. I haven't bought big money equipment in years, but have had two great but very different amps in the past (both died). I had an early Richard Marsh-Bill Westerfield amp Mosfet AB huge power, incredibly fast, terrific authority (though not in the bottom bottom octave a mosfet thing), and unbelievable clarity. I also had a 300B with Western Electrics (NOS) push-pull from Canary Audio that one day stopped working (still have the tubes, though there are some brown spots on top of the glass) 18 watts but as harmonically beguiling as anything I've ever heard, wondrous midrange, pretty but slightly rounded bass, and clear-sweet highs. I've also built speakers for years and had design help with my Scanspeak monitors from Brian Smith.

I first tried the Hlly with a tubed preamp, the Scanspeaks (6.5 inch Kevlar 2 ways with a Revelator tweeters), and my older Sony ES CD player. Even with a pre-amp, the Hlly did better with the volume pot well past 12 O'clock, but it has plenty of subjective power. I noticed the following.

There's something about this amp and the human voice. Voices as different as Louis Armstrong, Rickie Lee Jones, Joni Mitchell, Johnny Hartman, and James Taylor sounded both distinct from one another and natural. For instance, I noticed that I understood lyrics and heard phrasing much more readily than I usually do. Where some, amps reproduce voices with tonal purity, the Hlly has that sonic quality that leads you to believe that you can see the shapes the singer makes with his or her mouth. Even more impressive, you can pick up the number of voices in a chorus and overdub effects to prevent older singers voices from sounding thin on the higher notes. With one singer I won't name, they were doubling her voice with just a touch of echo.

The second real glory of the amp is that it reproduces classical woodwinds with the same level of articulation. It's very good with timbres and you can identify things like bassoons, oboes, and clarinets quite easily while also picking up differences between the real thing and sythesized versions of these sounds dropped into the mix. This is often a sign of very good control of intermodulation distortion, something it shares with the lower-powered Tripath amps and my old 300 B-based amp.

Utterly unlike lower-powered amps though, the Hlly90 has real bass. Electric bass in particular has authority and bloom as does the bowed string bass. If there's one place I'd fault it here though, it's that the attack isn't as good with percussion as I've heard with the best AB and Class A transistor amps, though the Hlly is much less rubbery than low-powered tubes or the Tripath 2024.You feel like the amp really does control the woofer, I just wouldn't say that it has the slam of a really well-designed AB amp or maybe even my gainclone amps (3886-based powered speakers).

Conventional wisdom is that tubes are great on the back-end (overtone) end of the sonic envelope and that transistors are much better with the attack or the front-end. A lot of people note that the Tripaths and other digital amps split the difference. There's a bloom and airy quality to the sound of tubes at which even relatively inexpensive tubed amps excel. Transistor amps have traditionally done things like drums with authority, but you often have to pay serious money to get a transistor amp that breathes well, either that or you have to go to low-power Class A. The Hlly actually does both well, though not world class well (what do you expect for $180?)

One sign of a good amp is that it doesn't get confused with complex musical passages. There are points in say Prokofiev where the different sections of orchestra do very different things. A really good amp lets you hear the pluck of massed strings and the metal in unison brass sections. The Hlly not only lets you hear the sections of the orchestra as distinct and tonally different, but it lets you hear the different timbres and overtones within that section. It does equally well with rock music. It's quite good with detail, but intriguingly doesn't sound “detailed”. A lot of times, I was just really surprised to listen in and pick things up like which drum the drummer was hitting and with what or whether the pianist was using the sustain pedal. While it's not an overtly fast amp, I really did like it with rock and roll and with full orchestra at least partly because the Hlly tends to sound more open and fuller as you turn up the volume. The image is big and wide, but it's not super deep. For instance, the brass in an orchestra should sound several feet behind the soloist and it doesn't quite reproduce the depth and the height, though that could be a function of my source equipment.

I also brought the Hlly into the living room to test with my 8” 3 way floor standers (accuton mid and tweeter with cabasse woofer, about 88 db) . I didn't use a pre-amp here and matched it with a very inexpensive vhs-dvd player from Toshiba (89 dollars from Best Buy) with a variety of CD sources and a bunch of movies. This is simply a great amp for video. I also find that movies make for a very good test of audio equipment, at least in part because you become much less aware of “listening”. Men's speech didn't have hissing sibilants, dialogue was very understandable, and sound effects held both their position and level of loudness. Interestingly, my cheapo DVD player had plenty of output for the Hlly to sing without a pre-amp though I still recommend a pre-amp (micro-dynamics are better).

A lot of amp lovers like to brag that their amp is completely neutral sounding. That's not the case with the Hlly. It has a basic character of being dark, creamy, and a little bit more solid-sounding than airy (you actually want both the body and the air). Musicians and instruments are definitely there, it's not notes reverberating in air (my sense of the Sonic -Impact). It's vaguely euphonic, but unlike a lot of euphonic amps it's capable of surprising detail and pace. Contributing to the creaminess, it's arguably just a bit smoother or rounded sounding with rhythmic transients than would seem completely natural, but I'm talking about a hundred and eighty dollar amplifier. I've never had anything this inexpensive that sounded this good with real world speakers at performance-level volumes.

That said, I've had one issue with the amp and it's a bit troubling. It's got a very persnickety mute circuit. Hlly insists that it's an over-voltage issue. I probably don't have the cleanest 110 volt lines in my house, but nothing else here turns off spontaneously. On several occasions, I've had to do a bit of a dance getting it to play music again once it mutes. I did discover that it does better when I turn the Hlly volume way down when I turn it back on. I've also considered the possibility that the Tripath overvoltage circuit is actually protecting the amp in a good way. The tolerance is supposed to be 5 percent which in the US wold be 116 volts. I have measured the AC in my lines here and it wasn't 110 always, but it was never quite that high, but who knows. It does continue to raise the specter that Hlly maybe should test its products a bit more thoroughly before taking them to market, the feedback on the earlier verison of the t-90 had to hurt the model and brand some.

Assuming the over-voltage issue doesn't come back to haunt me, I have to give the Hlly t-90 a very strong recommendation at any price. For $180, it's an outstanding bargain though I'd still recommend checking out the Virtue One as well with its better pedigree and reasonably competitive price with the Hlly. In the meantime, Hlly has announced a full digital amp soon and I look forward to finding out more about it.

I've mentioned in the past that the best listening test of any equipment comes with time as in just what do you find yourself listening to with an amp and what do you start avoiding. With my 300B's small ensemble jazz and movies sounded incredible. With my Parasound 1200, I started listening to rock and roll a lot. With my Super T and Sonic T, I got into chamber music and acoustic small group stuff and avoided full orchestra and driving rock. With the Hlly t-90, it's orchestras, rock and roll, any kind of vocals, solo piano, chamber music, and movies. If I'm not leaving out much, there's a reason. It's simply a great real-world amp at a very affordable price. My other guess is that it has much more potential for tweaking than do the Virtue Audio designs.

chancelucky

A Cross Thief?

2009-08-18T12:23:00.000-07:00

Last Sunday, Belle, our four year old Sheltie, was hit by our new neighbor’s truck late at night. The dog was walking across the street and apparently the neighbor didn’t see her. My wife was very attached to Belle at least partly because our youngest left for college back East about a year ago. To note the passing of our dog, she put up a white wooden cross in a flower pot near the front of our driveway. It’s not a large cross. She made it from strips of leftover floor molding from our garage and painted it herself.

Two days later, she came out to the front yard early in the morning to discover that the cross was missing. Nothing else in our yard was disturbed. Shortly after that, my wife made a second cross, stuck it in the same flower pot, attached a pair of notes explaining that they were for our dog near the new white cross and you guessed it some time last night (3 days later), the cross was stolen again. My wife thinks its someone who hates Christian symbols. I think it’s our crazy rageaholic neighbor who kidnapped our other dog once and demanded two thousand dollars in ransom. One of my colleagues thinks it’s the neighbor who happened to run the dog over. I haven’t eliminated the possibility that something supernatural is going on as well. One of the oddities is that we haven’t found any signs of the stolen crosses nearby.

I’d assume that it is someone who lives near us. It also seems to be happening very early in the morning or very late at night. A few people have suggested installing a video security camera. Mostly though, it just seems to be one of these thoughtlessly mean acts that’s compounded our sadness about losing our dog. I try to think the best of most everyone, but this is just one of those “Why would anyone be this cruel?”

In the meantime, my wife’s been getting cards, calls, and even flowers from other neighbors, friends, and relatives about Belle. It reminds me that there’s still a lot of kindness out there.
chancelucky

A Weekend from Hell

2009-08-10T13:56:00.000-07:00

I talked to my mother on my way home from work on Friday night and my stepdad and she were doing well. At 8:00 pm, she left a message saying that he’d had a stroke and that she was on the way to the hospital. We called my stepsisters, etc. They made it to the hospital okay and he did indeed have a stroke. They had caught it early, partly because he was able to tell my mother that he felt one coming on. 911 was right on time and the emergency room gave him an anti-coagulant to break up the blood clot very quickly. When we saw him the next day, my stepdad was in the emergency room. His speech was affected, but it wasn’t a strain to understand him. A couple times, he tried to scratch the right side of his face with his right hand. He’d bring his arm up, get within a couple inches, then switch over to his left hand.

For an 85 year old man, a stroke is a very serious matter, but this was pretty good as these things go. I have to say though that you don’t really know how it’s going to go for a while. They have gotten him to stand and he’s going home very soon.

The scarier thing is that my mother is 79. She came back to the hospital at seven in the morning. The nurse in the emergency room accidentally sent my mother to the wrong room where a man with my stepfather’s first name happened to be. He had a breathing mask on, but other than race looked completely different from my stepfather. My mother spent four hours tending to, comforting, and talking to the man in the mask. She was laughing about it as was my stepfather, but it’s scary. When we left that evening, I think we were at least as nervous about my mother as we are about my stepfather. Making matters worse, my mother couldn’t find her car in the parking garage that night. She wound up flagging down a group of three strangers who offered to take her keys to look for her car then call the third stranger who stayed with my mom to let her know they located the vehicle. Fortunately, they were honest folk.

I was very impressed with the level of medical care available for my stepfather. Some of the other stuff, I’m not so sure about like taking 10 hours to find him a room (they left him on a gurney the whole time). I’m also not sure about my mom being taken to the wrong room. Still, these episodes always make me think about how much is involved in providing any individual with health care. I can’t imagine having to make any of these decisions without it. It strikes me as barbaric that so many people in this country don’t have coverage.

Earlier in the day, I had played basketball just before we left for the hospital. I rarely shoot much in my games, but on a whim I took a shot from just inside half court on game point. It’s pretty much the opposite of smart basketball, but the ball went straight through the basket. I had thought that might be a sign of a good weekend. Instead, late yesterday after we’d had dinner with two of our friends, my wife decided to take Belle our Sheltie out for a walk after dark. Just before she could get the leash on the dog, Belle saw a couple kids across the street and ran towards them. A truck came up the street and hit Belle, apparently never saw her.

We put her in the back of our station wagon and tried to get her to the vet, but we both knew there probably was nothing that could be done. There’d been too much blood. After first leaving her with the vet for cremation, my wife decided that she wanted to bury the dog in our backyard, one of the dog’s favorite places. I wound up spending the first part of the morning digging a big hole in the yard until my wife returned with a cardboard coffin. I got a blister from the digging and as I sit here that blister feels strangely reassuring and I don't want it to go away for a while. One of the saddest moments of the morning came when Chance (8 years older than Belle) came up to the porch to eat. She kept looking towards Belle’s bowl wondering where her companion had gone. Lucky, Chance’s original companion, died two years ago.

It’s an understatement to say that my wife was attached to Belle. I used to tease her constantly and tell her that none of the rest of us liked Belle. She was a mischievous but very sweet dog. She stole a lamb gyros off the table from me once a couple years ago when I left the kitchen. She also used to run around in tight circles when she got excited. Of course, she also ate our daughter’s Ipod, several pairs of shoes, and a bunch of underwear (ickk). She also used to sneak onto the living room couch and sleep upside down, then when we’d caught her she’d pretend like nothing had happened. She was one of those dogs that always wanted to be near us physically, assuming she wasn’t trying to steal cat food. For some reason, she had an obsession with the cat food. I insisted it was because she wasn’t quite as bright as our cat who had learned to open both the front door and the cat food storage container and she had thought that it would make her smarter to eat like a cat.

Now that our kids are all out of the house and on the other coast, I think we saw Belle as the critter who’d keep us company in the meantime. It’s funny what you assume sometimes and how quickly things can change. I’ve seen so many sudden changes and all I know is that the practice doesn’t make you any better at getting through the rough ones.

I hope that Belle has moved on to some place where she is smarter than all the cats. They used to wrestle with one another in our living room. My stepdad started physical therapy today and my mom didn’t have any memory lapses when we talked. These are small things, but I’m grateful for them. My wife seems to be holding up well. I broke down crying last night after I came to bed and in the weird way things work, that seemed to make her feel better than anything I did to overtly comfort her. I just hope the next several weekends are better than this last one.
chancelucky

He's Just Not That Into You (2009) movie review

2009-07-07T12:47:00.000-07:00

He’s Just Not That Into You (2009) is one of those movies that you watch and tell yourself “This should have been a lot better.” On the other hand, what should you expect from a romantic comedy based on a self-help book of the same name (Greg Behrendt, Liz Tuccillo). Even less promising, the authors of the eponymous book got the title from a line from Sex in the City. It’s not like I didn’t know better. I just happen to like romantic comedies, partly because my wife will pretty dependably watch them with me (the fact that she didn't because she'd seen this one in the theater with our older daughter probably should have been my clue). To be honest, I also wasn’t going to pass up a movie that included both Jennifer Connelly and Scarlett Johansson.

The formula for romantic comedies is actually pretty simple. The audience has to fall in love with and root for at least one of the stars. If you manage that, the movie-going public will forgive a wide range of shortcomings in the script. It’s one of the reasons that once you score in one of these things, they’ll never stop casting you in them. Meg Ryan, Julia Roberts, Sandra Bullock, and Drew Barrymore (the creative force behind He’s Just Not That Into You) have built careers on exactly this. On the guy side, Hugh Grant and Tom Hanks have done the same, though Hanks actually makes serious movies too. Drew Barrymore got together a monster cast for He’s Just Not That Into You. In addition to Connelly and Johansson, you get Drew Barrymore herself, Jennifer Anniston, and Ben Affleck. The only problem is that none of these stars do the heavy lifting in the movie. The bulk of the screen time actually goes to Jinnifer Goodwin, Justin Long (Dodge Ball, the Hangover), Bradley Cooper (Wedding Crashers), and Kevin Connolly (The Notebook). Unfortunately, you just don’t wind up all that charmed by any of the characters, established or not.

Let’s do the math. Jinnifer Goodwin plays a ditz. Justin Long is a jaded bartender. Bradley Cooper is a cheating husband. Kevin Connolly fakes being gay to sell real estate. Scarlett Johansson seduces a married man. Jennifer Anniston spends most of her onscreen time being annoyed because her longtime boyfriend (Affleck) won’t marry her. Jennifer Connelly is a cigarette nazi. Now, there’s a group that I’m really going to sympathize with. And which one of them do you want to make the emotional heart of your movie? Actually, the bigger question is where was the heart in any form?

To me, it looks like they tried to use Crash (best picture 2006) with its interlinked plots tied together by either a single setting or oblique connections to a single event as the blueprint for a romantic comedy. This, of course, has been the vogue, and it’s done quite effectively in movies like 21 Grams, Babel, and The Air I Breathe where the jigsaw puzzle ultimately serves to underscore the mystical connection of all things in a world spinning into incoherence and alienation. Unfortunately, this one didn’t just copy Crash, it crashed. It’s worth mentioning that the mosaic plot was done well long before Crash. It goes back at least as far as Grand Hotel (1932) and was used very effectively in a romantic comedy in Richard Curtis’s Love Actually (2003). The difference being that I still remember how charming Colin Firth was as an awkward writer who falls for his Portugese housekeeper or how poignant Emma Thompson was when she realizes that her husband bought diamonds for his mistress and a Joni Mitchell album for her for Christmas. And no, it didn't help He's Just Not that In to sprinkle in some of those man on the street interview across the movie a la Reds, Harry Met Sally. Does anyone in Hollywood get that a movie is not made to feel original by copying original touches from other peoples' movies?

Sadly, He’s Just Not, simply lacks those kinds of moments. This was Scarlett Johansson’s 47th turn as a sexually-overripe but essentially lonely woman, but I honestly can’t say she’s as good here as she was either in Match Point or Vicki, Cristina, Barcelona. Whatever happened to the little girl from the Horse Whisperer or the confused but chaste young adult in Lost in Tokyo anyway? She’s plenty sexy, but I’m pretty sure she can play other roles. Drew Barrymore gets about three minutes of screen time as the only straight employee of the Baltimore Blade. Half of Anniston’s scenes look like outtakes from when they cut out the serious parts of Wedding Crashers. I think Jennifer Connelly’s a terrific actress, but it strains credibility that she’d be married to a guy who’d want to cheat on her.

What are we left with? There’s a bit about a pen between Goodwin and Justin Long. Minor mechanical note. Connolly and Long’s characters supposedly know one another from childhood, but somehow they never get a scene together. Instead, the various links between the characters are bookmarked then forgotten. All the women work together, Bradley Cooper and Ben Affleck are pals, but nothing really comes of it. Instead, we just get this message “Hey everyone, these miniatures we stuck together, they’re connected somehow!” The one really romantic scene in the movie with Affleck ultimately fails for the simple reason that we just haven’t seen enough of him in the script to care much.

It may come down to this. While the self-help publishing industry may have only recently caught up with the notion of learning to read the signals of mismatched desire, it’s actually been a romantic comedy theme since pre-Jolson. It’s just that no one ever told the producers of this movie that. At one point, they homage John Hughes ( not my favorite director), but it’s like they had no clue how a John Hughes movie or any good romance actually works.
chancelucky

Henry Louis Gates and the Most Disliked Athletes

2009-08-02T13:46:00.000-07:00

Since we started saying President Obama, there’s been widespread sentiment that “race” as issue in American may be in our cultural rear window. For instance, a number of my progressive friends supported the firemen in the New Haven firefighter’s case, Ricci v. De Stefano simply because they supported the virtually inarguable position that at some point America needs to be a country where decisions are based on merit and not skin color. As a number of folk have pointed out, President Obama has had virtually perfect pitch on racial matters. Not many people folk noticed that his administration backed the fire department in the New Haven case on the little understood basis of an increasingly obscure notion in 14th amendment law, disparate impact.

A couple weeks ago, the media heated up over yet another cultural moment, Henry Louis Gates-gate. I’ve looked over the police report and my read was that Professor Gates overreacted. That said, it’s also true that a well-dressed 59 year old man trying to open a door in the middle of the afternoon with a pair of suitcases right next to him probably wouldn’t be enough of an incident to call 911 had the 59 year old man been a white or Asian Harvard professor. A lot of passerbys might have walked up to them and said something like “Is there a problem here?”

In fact, twenty plus years ago I was on the upper east side of Manhattan with my girlfriend one afternoon when we saw a young black man hacksawing a U-lock that held an expensive bicycle frame to a parking meter. Yes, our first reaction was that he might be stealing the bicycle, though it did seem like a peculiar thing to do in the middle of the day on a very busy street. Instead, the two of us decided to stand about eight feet away and watch him or let him know that we were watching before we did anything else.
After a couple minutes, the young man said calmly and politely “Yes, it is my bicycle.”

It was an embarrassing moment for us, because would we have suspected him of anything had he not been black? Well, arguably yeah! Wouldn’t it be reasonable to ask anyone with a hacksaw something like “This is your bicycle right?”

So with Henry Louis Gates, Officer Crowley is thinking if I got a 911 call about a man breaking into a house I’d ask anyone for his ID. Henry Louis Gates is thinking I’m Professor Gates god dammit, I teach at Harvard, this is Cambridge, I should be treated accordingly not like some potential burglar especially when this happens to be my own home. I imagine Officer Crowley could have determined easily enough that Henry Louis Gates lived at the address in question without an ID. Unfortunately, the rest is literally history.

The African-American president with the perfect pitch on race matter decided to stand up for America’s most famous black academic, one who endorsed Hillary Clinton no less. Unfortunately, he did so before he had all the facts. Similarly, Deval Patrick, the African-American governor of Massachussetts also jumped in to defend Professor Gates. Suddenly, it was arguably three of the most powerful African-American men going vs. some white Cambridge police officer who by virtually all accounts was just following procedure.

The moment breaks in the news as yet another example of how the race pendulum has swung too far and once again it takes the form of a well-connected black man vs. either police or firemen. For once, our ultra-cool President didn’t do the “cool thing”, he spoke too soon and it hurt him. While it was smart politics, I don’t know that the beer summit helped that much. The point to many Americans is that this well-connected black man was screaming “racism” when no one hit him, called him names, and bottom line the officer was actually just helping Henry Louis Gates protect his own property. The last time the public remembers the race card getting played like this, it was OJ.

To some, Gates-gate is supposed to be the cultural moment that puts an end to the race card, just like the New Haven firefighters case spells the end of affirmative action. The mantra is “See, we’re so far beyond that now. Black President, black governor, black Harvard professor. All within a lifetime of Emitt Till. Need I point out that all the people accused of bilking money for Emitt Till’s coffin were African-American?”

So, even I’m more or less down with that, but the same day as the White House beer summit, was it dark beer or light? I happen to seem the following seemingly unrelated story, a list of the most disliked athletes in America. Here are the top ten,

1. Michael Vick quarterback and dog abuser
2. Manny Ramirez slugger and performance-enhancing drug abuser
3. Alex Rodriguez slugger and performance-enhancing drug abuser and adulterer
4. Terrell Owens wide receiver and quarterback abuser
5. Kobe Bryant shooting guard and one-time accused rapist
6. Alan Iverson point guard with lots of tattoos who doesn’t come to practice
7. Isaiah Thomas basketball coach, sexual harasser, and really bad GM
8. Stephon Marbury point guard with a bad attitude
9. Nick Saban football coach with a big contract
10. John Mcenroe tennis player with a temper who last mattered about 25 years ago.

What’s the first thing I noticed about the Forbes list? How about the fact that the first eight names are all black and the only two white guys on the list arguably aren’t athletes at this point.
Kobe Bryant was acquitted btw. Does anyone even know that Ben Roethlisberger was recently accused of rape (he may well be innocent, but then so was Kobe). What’s your bet that the Steelers quarterback made the top 50 on that list? How about Roger Clemens who threw his wife under the bus by saying the HGH was hers? How about the hockey player who put a hit on someone? Or the various NASCAR drivers who have either gotten caught cheating (somehow that’s just part of the sport as opposed to steroids) or literally doing speed?

I’m not defending Michael Vick. I’m just wondering why the list of most disliked sports figures is so black in a time when we’ve allegedly gotten so far past race.

Let me mention the reason why President Obama and Governor Patrick might have been so quick to speak up on behalf of Professor Gates. I don’t know a single adult black male who hasn’t been stopped by the police in completely innocent circumstances. No, that’s not what happened to Henry Louis Gates that afternoon, but don’t let that convince you that it doesn’t happen anymore.
chancelucky

My Day at Angel Island

2009-07-15T12:26:00.000-07:00

Because of confusion about times, I missed the ferry to Angel Island from Tiburon that had my mother and stepfather and their group of seniors from Sacramento on it. I left a message on my mother's cell phone, then realized that the Island might not have cell phone coverage. That and my mother is forgetting things like her cell phone from time to time. Angel Island's not very big, a few square miles. I think the majority of people who come there go to hike, bike, or picnic, but for more than thirty years the island was used as an immigration processing center for the west coast. It has a special place in Chinese-American history because this is where the Chinese Exclusion Act played out. Angel Island is currently controlled by the state park service and they’ve turned what remains of the old intake center into an “Immigration Memorial”.

I’m like a native New Yorker who somehow never went to the Statue of Liberty. I’m not sure how it happened, but this was my first time there. It’s also possible that I went once and totally forgot about it. They didn’t start making a big deal of Angel Island until the seventies when they re-discovered poetry carved into the wooden walls of the immigration center. At the time the poetry was written, the government saw it as grafitti and painted over all of it.

I spent my first forty five minutes on the island trying to find my mother and stepfather. I couldn’t find a map and naturally I walked in exactly the wrong direction, stopped for lunch, then walked towards the immigration center on the Eastern side of the island. My cell phone wasn’t working and I figured my best chance of finding them was by heading there. For most of the forty five minutes, I was convinced that I wasn’t going to find them.

I hadn’t exactly come prepared for a long hike, the first part of which was up stairs carved into the hill. I was wearing Crocs and it hadn’t occurred to me to bring a coat. I didn’t exactly feel like an immigrant longing to reunite with his family in America, but I got a vague hit of melancholy along those lines. I found the Immigration Center, took the self-guided tour. It wasn’t much. It’s a big room with facsimile’s of the very tight bunks used in the sleeping quarters, several posters, and then views of the poetry carved on the walls. The problem is that the poetry was painted over several times and it’s in Chinese. I don’t read Chinese. They spent 15 million dollars on the most recent rennovation, while it’s nice I’m not sure it showed.

After a few minutes of acting more interested in the poems than I really was (I know that sounds incredibly crass, but I was totally dependent on the translations which the park service provided via laminated placemats), I went to see if there was anything else to see beyond this early version of “blogging”. In the back area, I found a room used for presentations that I initially thought might be hosting my parents. Instead, there were about sixty Hispanic students sitting reasonably attentively to a presentation by female park ranger. She repeatedly tried to impress on them the parallels between Chinese exclusion and current debates about Hispanic immigration legal and illegal. At one point, one of the kids mentioned that the place looked like a park and maybe wasn’t so bad. The ranger parried with, but you can’t go anywhere or see anyone. Eventually, she mentioned that they would someday grow up to vote and they might have to vote on creating some modern equivalent of Angel Island.

The kids nodded. A teacher asked a question about Native Americans being granted citizenship and when that happened. The ranger didn’t know.

Was the ranger being the Sonia Sotomayor of the park service by sliding into political advocacy? The thought crossed my mind, but it also strikes me that certain historical events speak for themselves. I’m not sure what you’re supposed to say about the slave quarters at Mount Vernon, Tule Lake, the site of the Haymarket Massacre, Wounded Knee. Of course, these were horrible things and we have memorials in these places to remind us that the past was not perfect and that we’re supposed to be beyond such moments. What are you supposed to say as a tour guide at say Dachau? Well this was a Jewish perspective, but to be totally fair here’s the Nazi perspective on this place and why they did these things?

I left slightly before the 60 high school students and started to head back to the trail and maybe the ferry. Just before heading down the covered stairway to the Center, I glanced in a room and spotted my stepfather. Naturally, the “cool” tour of Angel Island isn’t the public self-guided version. This one had a room set up that replicated the women’s barracks. On each of the very narrow bunks, they had suitcases set up to show what the detainees might have brought with them. At that point, my mother broke down a little. Her eldest sister came to California alone at age 8 and spent a few weeks stuck on Angel Island. My grandmother had initially brought over my Uncle with her because he was a boy. My aunt had to wait until there was more money, so she had to stay with relatives for several years. My great grandparents died during that time, so she was left to stay with strangers for some of those years. The strangers didn’t treat her well. Eventually, my grandparents sent for her, but she came over alone by boat and for her stay on Angel Island. It ends well, my Aunt made it to San Francisco, eventually married, and they got quite wealthy. She’s still around at age 91.

I think some of my mother’s sadness was also due to the fact that she hasn’t had much contact with her sister in the last 10 years. In any case, the guide brought us into a small room with a genuinely well preserved example of the poetry carved on the walls written in scholarly Chinese. He talked one of the tour group, mostly older Chinese, into reading it in Cantonese.

Afterwards, we went back to the big room where my mother handed me an extra bag lunch and two books she had gotten for me, one about Cantonese Immigrants in Sacramento (had a photo of my Dad’s family) and one about the rise and fall of the Chinese Supermarket Business, by Alfred Yee. Alfred was the guy who helped to organize the excursion for my mother and her group. Once down the stairs, she made sure that I got to meet Alfred, because I’d e-mailed him once with some questions about Locke. We then walked back to the ferry together (maybe a mile and a half) as he filled me in about various myths of Chinese-American history and the history of Locke.

It’s rather amazing what my mother remembers sometimes. Ever since I tried to get in touch with Alfred, she’s made a point of getting me his e-mail, getting me these books, and making certain that I met him. There are days when she can’t remember her own social security number or if she’s asked me in the last half hour about how my daughter, her only grandchild is doing. I think she knows that my writing project is important to me and this is her way of showing that she cares about it. It’s odd sometimes how older parents demonstrate these things.

It’s also odd to think that my mother is 79, was born in San Francisco, and had never been to Angel Island either. My aunt who was there has a daughter who recently moved to Tiburon, the very wealthy town nearest the island. All these distances of time, place, memory got bridged briefly and in some ways I felt it all the more because I missed the ferry that afternoon and happened to glance inside an open door on what I thought was my way out of the immigration center.
chancelucky

Jhumpa Lahiri- Unaccostumed Earth (book review)

2009-07-12T17:14:00.000-07:00

A few months ago I got into a conversation with a work acquaintance about Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies. The friend’s reaction was “I read it and that was me, that was exactly my family.”

It happens that the friend is Bengali, grew up on the East Coast, and is very well educated. Jhumpa Lahiri has been extraordinarily successful critically and commercially. How many other writers get short story collections on the best seller list? With that success has come a certain amount of blowback. The complaint being that Lahiri doesn’t much venture out of her comfort zone. It goes something like this. “She’s really good at writing about upwardly mobile Bengalis in America, but there are Bengalis who don’t go to Yale or Bryn Mawr and shouldn’t a great writer deal with a broader range of experience?

I counter with the fact that I’m Chinese, male, and live on the west coast, but my first reaction to Lahiri was “That’s my story too.”

Lahiri’s Bengalis aren’t exactly universal, but they’re certainly not the only group where one generation has committed to living in exile from its own children. The formula for most Lahiri stories is pretty basic. A Bengali goes to American schools, gets a professional job, then struggles in unexpected ways to reconcile those changes with their own sense of cultural tradition. In this sense, the cultural value of “career ambition” becomes a kind of paradox. The good Bengali pleases his/her parents by succeeding in school, but that’s exactly what creates a sometimes unbridgeable gap with the very parents and elders he or she is working so hard to please.

Non-writers often get into this mode of why can’t Lahiri (or name some author) write about revolutions in Africa, gay men in Italy, or mall rats in the San Fernando Valley the way she writes about Bengalis in the northeast? I suspect they don’t understand that most fiction writers draw on a set of core materials or experiences. Most of us need to understand a world at a very deep level to be able to identify the rich way the different currents in those waters affect what the rest of us see on the surface. It’s not so much that a great fiction writer needs to write about multiple and wildly different worlds, it’s really more a matter of showing that you can find the depth and range of human experience within your chosen material/culture.

One of the reactions to Lahiri’s third book and second collection of short stories Unaccustomed Earth is that it’s just more of the same. I disagree. Where, Lahiri often explored the price of “success” for Bengalis living in America, Unaccostumed Earth looks at the “failures” in greater depth. More often than not, it’s the men who have fallen short in some way. In Only Goodness, there’s an alcoholic brother as seen through the eyes of a sister who may have inadvertently started him down that path. In a Choice of Accomadations, it’s a thirtyish prep school graduate who gave up Med School and who should probably have been a journalist. In the title story, a female attorney says home to be a mother while she wrestles with her decision to ask her recently widowered father to move in with them. In the meantime, her father encourages her to stay in the loop with her career. The collection ends with a trilogy of stories devoted to Kaushik, a man who never emotionally turns the corner after the death of his mother.

In reality, Lahiri is extending her territory to another generation and set of problems. In many cases, the children from Interpreter of Maladies essentially grow up, marry out (virtually all of the characters wind up with white mates), and face problems of their own. Rather than attempting to cling to traditions, they’ve frequently turned their back on the protections of Bengali customs and find themselves unable to navigate. The sister with the alcoholic brother is uncertain how to cope with the resulting “hole” in the family. A young woman (Nobody's Business) who eschews both graduate school at Harvard and various offers of arranged marriage finds herself adrift in a relationship with a philandering Egyptian scholar and confused about the ambiguity of her friendship with a male housemate. Kaushik gives up the interconnectedness of Bengali life and finds himself grasping for Hema, the one person he knew before his life changed. Inevitably, the stories in this collection are bittersweet or deeply sad and lonely.

In the Namesake, after all of his emotional wanderings Gogol comes home to the realization that his father’s values were less Indian than he imagined. In Unaccostumed Earth, characters of the same generation frequently lack that comfort and become more fully-exiled from their ancestral culture. They occupy an emotionally more dangerous world than say the young academic in Interpreter of Maladies who takes a room in the home of a hundred year old woman or the Bengali family that befriends a Bangladeshi man just before war breaks out over independence. While there are divorces and various breakdowns in Lahiri’s earlier collection, the characters stay connected to their identity as Bengalis. This greater sense of emotional risk in Unaccostumed Earth also seems to result in a pulling in of plot and the situations themselves. In Interpreter, at least two of the stories are set in India, with one not being about the diaspora at all. In one story, the theme isn’t Indian at all except for the fact that the wife and husband begin cooking dinner together during a regular power outage. In Unaccostumed Earth, the settings and family situations are arguably more familiar and more self-consciously Bengali to heighten the sense of loss and inevitability.

The writing remains beautiful. Lahiri has a remarkably sharp eye for household objects, clothing, and food. Two weeks after reading the book, I found myself jumping up one day and proclaiming to my wife that I wanted to make Bengali fried eggplant (I very rarely cook). I realized later it was just the way Lahiri’s descriptions often linger with me. You don’t just smell and taste the food, she describes so lovingly. You have to taste it for real. While there are some differences between the Cantonese diaspora and the Indian, both cultures have had their greatest success in maintaining a sense of identity through the persistence of food. You live apart from your extended family, you marry people outside your ethnicity, you stop going back to the native country (or never do), but you still define yourself through food.

More significant, Lahiri’s characters maintain their own way of speaking and establish distinct identities quickly. Still, I’m not sure that Unaccostumed is quite as successful artistically as Interpreter, though I think both work better than the Namesake (the movie was actually better than the book in some ways). For one, the trilogy of stories at the end felt vaguely unsatisfying at least partly because Hema never became a full partner in the unfolding of the story and thus lacked the subtle and beautiful plotting of the best of Interpreter of Maladies. In the brother/sister story, I found myself wondering if she’d chosen the less interesting point of view of the two and the references, as beautifully done as they are, to a Van Eyck painting felt forced. My take though may be affected by two things. First, my favorite story was Unaccostumed Earth itself, about the globetrotting father and the homebound daughter, which builds beautifully around the symbol of a miplace postcard. In any case, as fine as the stories that followed were, I felt inevitably let down. Second, Lahiri this time wasn’t new to me. It’s hard to match the joy of “discovering” a writer about whom you can say “that’s me” “that’s my life”.

But none of that has anything do to do with Lahiri failing to venture outwards. In fact, I see this as a very gentle spreading of the wings of her fictional world. She remains very much a writer I love and one whose next flight I’ll track closely.
chancelucky

Visiting Harry Kim

2009-07-18T10:04:00.000-07:00

We went to San Diego for a memorial service for my wife’s older brother this week. He had served in the Coast Guard in the early seventies so my wife and her sisters arranged to have his ashes placed at a military cemetery that overlooks the harbor. I never got many chances to talk to my brother in law. He just wasn’t much of a talker, so I knew very little about his world which consisted of selling military surplus items and working swap meets. Other than that, he was a very good uncle who always showed up at all family gatherings and who always seemed to be available to help with his nieces and nephews who lived in Southern California.

We had a short memorial service, the military give you a little less than half an hour for a ceremony that included two full dress coast guardsmen who unroll a flag, fold it, present it to a family member and someone playing taps on a trumpet. Apparently, they do ten to fifteen services a day there so it’s actually someone’s job to move the services along so the next set of bereaved ones get their memorial service on time.

During the service, my sister in law told the story of Harry Kim. Harry Kim was an army specialist who died at the age of 20 in Vietnam in 1968. My brother-in-law never knew Harry Kim. He had only heard about him through one of his friends, someone who had served with him in Vietnam. Apparently, Harry Kim had gone out on a mission in place of the friend and that was Harry Kim’s last mission. The friend couldn’t bear to visit the grave. Since he was local, my brother in law took on the job of visiting Harry Kim’s gravesite regularly for the friend. Whenever he would visit, my brother in law would gather pine cones from a pine tree that shaded Harry Kim’s cemetery plot and send them to the friend who lived up in Northern California just to show him that someone had visited Harry’s grave and to give him something to literally hold onto.

At the end of the service, we went to visit Harry Kim’s gravesite to carry out the ritual one more time, though perhaps fittingly there were no pine cones to be found on the ground. I’m not sure we would have known who to send them to. Forty one years later, people 3 times removed were seeking out Harry Kim, a very young man who died thousands of miles from home.

A few years ago, my brother in law asked his sister to hold onto his high school leather jacket, an orange thing with leather sleeves and metal snap buttons. The sisters took turns wearing it and on it there was the year of his graduation. When Harry Kim died, my brother in law was still in high school.

It’s such an odd combination of small and big gestures that tie moments like this together. It’s a bit that I never knew about my brother in law, yet it’s something that will help me to remember him as the guy who always tried to be there in some small way for family and others.
chancelucky

Water Ghosts- Shawna Yang Ryan (review)

2009-07-01T12:57:00.000-07:00

If you’ve ever been to Locke, California (sometimes known as the last self-contained Chinatown in America), it’s an easy place to miss from the roadside partly because the town’s buildings are so unremarkable. More than anything, you remember the combined sensation of heat, fog, and the persistent presence of mildew from being so close to the Sacramento River. One result is that the place has an ethereal quality that photographers and painters often pick up. Thousands of Chinese passed through this refuge, yet they remain just a bit out of our reach. Locke is more felt than seen.

First and foremost Shawna Yang Ryan’s novel Water Ghosts (formerly Locke 1928) gets this right. Her vision of Locke stands outside of time. She describes buildings, plants, a church service, a celebration in a gambling hall, but they feel less than permanent. Ryan achieves this by focusing her energies on literally writing from inside her characters’ skins. She describes in great detail what they hear, see, how they bleed, cough to the point where the novel frequently feels claustrophobic. You don’t just see and hear what they hear, you are seeing and feeling what they see and hear intensely. It wasn’t until the middle of the novel that I noticed how little conventional narration there is to provide “perspective” about time, place, or events within the town in the broader sense. Not many writers can manage this and even fewer can sustain the “unsettled” mood that soaks the pages of Water Ghosts.

The second interesting choice Ryan made was to take the fact that Locke the town was a place where men generally outnumbered women 20 to 1 and to look at it though the lens of the 1. Richard Fong, the manager of the Lucky Fortune, one of the town’s gambling halls, who either escaped to California or stays to support his Chinese family, serves as the nominal “hub” of the plot. Despite that, Ryan’s real focus is on the various women who see Richard (Fong Man Gum) as Locke’s alpha male. These include - Chloe, a white prostitute who is a favorite of Richard’s and whose family is just a few miles away in Sacramento - Poppy, the Chinese madame of the local brothel who worked for her position after being the victim of a disastrous arranged marriage– the minister’s wife and daughter – and Ming Wai, Richard’s Chinese wife who suddenly appears in Locke on a raft with two other mysterious women. Ryan explores the capacity of these women to endure and survive in a town where few intact families existed, but birth and death go on.

Water Ghosts is beautifully and hauntingly written. At the same time, it’s not a breezy read nor was it meant to be one. It seems intent on getting the feel of Locke right. Ryan stayed there for some thirty days to absorb the place. I suspect it was time well spent and was critical to her ability to catch Locke. It never was a simple place. Instead Locke was the sort of American town where dreams, ghosts, and forgotten promises coexisted on equal footing with what most of us think of as day to day life. Water Ghosts makes certain that we get the town’s essence.

I look forward to Ryan’s next book which I understand focuses on Taiwan in 1927.
chancelucky

Don't Cry for Me South Carolina (Mark Sanford)

2009-06-27T15:14:00.000-07:00

Here I thought all these sex scandals were going to end with Monica Lewinsky. I don't know what to make of Mark Sanford, Governor of South Carolina, or any of the many politicians who have gotten caught up in these things. I'd say only a fool would claim that it's a Republican or a Democratic or a liberal vs. conservative thing to get caught in a sex scandal. The only difference is that when the Democrats get caught, they either get impeached, resign, or otherwise lose their jobs. For some odd reason, the Republicans do a better job of staying in office after they confess. Even Larry Craig managed to stay in office until he termed out.

One of the odd things to me isn't partisan at all. It's how we consider it a major scandal when politicians get caught in affairs, but when other celebrities whether it's entertainers or athletes get caught up in these things it's just part of the deal. I don't now Jennifer Aniston, but she seemed nice enough. Her husband Brad Pitt gets involved with Angelina Jolie and a few years it's all just something to be expected. Aniston made a hit movie with a dog. Jolie and Pitt both got nominated for Oscars. They're flourishing We don't exactly forget the “affair” thing, but we see the making of movies or celebrity as somehow independent of adultery at least enough so that we don't stop watching Angelina Jolie movies because she maybe stole Brad. Several months ago, it came out that Roger Clemens had an affair with singer Mindy Macready, likely when she was underage. A few years before that Barry Bonds's mistress wrote a tell all book. What lingered? It was the whole steroids thing. You can cheat on your wife if you're an athlete, you just can't cheat in the sport.

Politics is the opposite. Did anyone know who Senator Ensign was.? Even though it wasn't that long ago and it got a fair amount of publicity, does anyone remember that Mark Sanford was the governor who tried to refuse stimulus money? Let's put this another way. Did it matter that Elliot Spitzer was the prosecutor who took on fraud on Wall Street even a little before it became so fashionable. Not that it mattered. We couldn't have a governor who would pay for hookers. What's happened in America that we now seem to care more about who our leaders screw at night than whether or not they're screwing us or helping us in their day jobs?

Sure, sometimes the sex stuff slips over into your actual job like when you give your girlfriend and her husband jobs and contracts or in one case your boyfriend. At the same time, that pales in comparison to Dick Cheney getting out of office and saying “Sure, we never though Iraq had anything to do with 9/11” or learning that the administration was torturing people even though they were getting memos about torture not exactly producing reliable information anyway. Shouldn't we notice that sort of thing instead? It's certainly interesting to find out that Mark Sanford was doing bad things in Argentina, but why is that the bigger news story? I mean which one gets you to the front of the line to hell faster? I started a war for the hell of it and ruined my country's economy in the process or I cheated on my wife in Argentina for a couple weeks? Here's an idea. Why not end all official business in South Carolina completely while they impeach the guy? That certainly would be the patriotic thing to do.

It just strikes me that we have a much more mature view of movie stars. Sure, we're titillated by their private lives and their personal foibles, but we understand that what really matters is that they still look hot enough so that we'll pay 9 dollars to go see one of their movies. We don't especially care if they adopt children from all around the world, save us from global warming, keep us from abusing animals, or serve as president of the NRA. On the other end, we don't care if they spend their offscreen time ingesting black tar heroin, neglecting their children, or beating on hotel clerks for unexplained reasons. We understand that the real job of movie stars is to make us want to watch them in movies. That's the real job. The other stuff might want to make us watch them either more or less, but you can only be dead on screen a certain number of times. Sports has a similar thing. You want our attention, you have to win games at some point. You want to keep our attention, you have to win some more games unless you're Anna Kournikova. Golf, for instance, understands that Tiger Woods is way more interesting than John Daly even if Daly made much better tabloid fodder.

If only we took our politicians that seriously, we might even have universal health care. Personally, if you asked me the public would pay more attention to the issue if instead of talking about insurance premiums they started talking about boob jobs for all adult women and viagra for all males. Then we could pretend that we live like movie stars and athletes and people would treat the policy stuff as if it mattered.

chancelucky

The Greatest Pianist in the World (fiction) Vladimir Horowitz-Art Tatum, etc.

2006-01-16T20:54:00.000-08:00

1:Prelude and Verse
For forty years, before a Vladimir Horowitz concert tour, a crane appeared outside Horowitz's Fifth Avenue apartment. Workmen would load the thousand pound black Steinway Concert D onto the crane to float from the maestro's sixth story practice studio to sidewalk. Horowitz was notorious for canceling concerts unless his personal instrument was available and tuned to his specification. He often happily played another piano in the actual concert.
He even had a personal tuner who traveled with him to set the octave intervals just a little wide and forgiving with the A above middle C tuned slightly flat at 436 cycles per second for solo recitals. When playing with orchestra, Horowitz insisted on 444 to make the piano sound brighter and faster than the string section's usual 440, which made the string section sound less competent than the soloist. This was unless he was playing for Fritz Reiner who would personally take a tuning fork to the piano five minutes before concert time. As a gesture of respect, Horowitz also consented to let his father in law Toscanini articulate the piano's tuning settings with the rest of the orchestra. Of course, Horowitz only played with Toscanini before he became enough of a star to demand billing above the conductor.
When the crane appeared, a crowd would gather to watch the eleven foot long box of stressed mahogany and steel wire strings journey to street level. "Horowitz's piano" they whispered to one another.
Once the instrument touched sidewalk, the onlookers observed an unspoken fifteen foot perimeter from the instrument as if mortals, even New York mortals, had no right to interfere with the master's microphone to heaven.
It was expected that a virtuoso as great as Horowitz would possess an artist's temperament. Horowitz's practice studio always bore the faintest smell of the freshest filet of sole to be found in Manhattan. Wanda Horowitz made certain that her husband got his favorite lunch within seven minutes of twelve thirty either on the balcony adjacent to the practice studio. If she didn't, the pianist brooded for days.
I remember two other items from Horowitz's practice studio. The first was a dark velvet cloth that the maestro used to wipe his keyboard before playing. No other hands could touch his keys unless the ivories were cleaned thoroughly in between. I saw the maestro forget his own fetish twice.
The second was an Ampex reel to reel tape recorder. Horowitz listened to his own concerts and practice sessions repeatedly. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that he never learned to operate the machine. He was the same man who took his first big check from an American tour producer in 1936 and used it to buy a brand new Studebaker sedan for five thousand dollars, despite the fact that he didn't know how to drive and never learned. Wanda hired a chauffeur so that they could get some use from their purchase. For many years, Columbia records supplied an intern who took on the job of cueing and replacing the reels four times a week. In the absence of the intern, Mrs. Horowitz would inveigle the chauffeur, butler, or in an emergency even the superintendent. The couple never had luck keeping servants.
For close to two years, the task of tending to the maestro's tape recorder fell to me. Before it was added to my duties, I had the opportunity to watch Wanda make her tape recorder requests to others. As she walked them through cueing, changing reels, setting levels, and even splicing damaged tape on the 32 inch per second Ampex, it became clear that Wanda knew perfectly well how to operate the machine. She simply hid it from a husband who never noticed. Little in their marriage was as it appeared.
Why am I telling this now? For the first twenty five years, the reason to keep quiet was simple enough. I signed a non-disclosure agreement under the eye of a deaf-Brooklyn attorney hired because he literally had no connection to music. In 1951 when I took the job, six hundred dollars a month was a lot of money for part-time work that didn't interfere with my piano studies at Juilliard. I speak now, because I am old. My music bio consists of one ASCAP credit, a piece called “Blues for Sonya” that was recorded then disappeared. Six years ago, arthritis took away my capacity to play. I failed to make it in any significant way as a musician. This may be the only thing I contribute to the music world .
I was first tempted to break the secret in 1979. Horowitz was celebrating the 60th year of his career as a soloist and was slated to return to play in Moscow for the first time since 1919. A popular TV news magazine did a segment on the Horowitzes. At this point, Horowitz's detractors had disappeared and the word "legendary" appeared in all his liner notes. His concerts now sold out weeks before the announcement appeared in the paper. The show's anchor played straight man to a comic Wanda as she walked them her regimen of supporting her husband-diva. As the zoomed in on the fresh squeezed orange juice served at 9:45 AM, the anchor delivered the setup line, "What if he gets a few seeds in the juice?"
The tiny Wanda gave a practiced theatrical stare and deadpanned. "If he complains, I throw it at him."
"So who's the real boss of this marriage then?"
"I am the managing partner. He just plays piano a few hours a day. A good life, you think?"
The camera cut to Horowitz practicing then a montage of the couple walking in their garden at their Connecticut home, Wanda dressing him for a concert, and the two sitting and laughing as they traded barbs and charm with the anchorman.
One would never guess the real nature of the marriage. In their contract with the network owned by the same corporation as Horowitz’s record company, the couple insisted on conditions. The forbidden topics began with Horowitz's homosexuality, their daughter Sonya's suicide in 1974, and went on for two pages.
The show, which then had a reputation for investigative journalism, did ask one probing question. "Maestro. They say you never left this apartment for twelve years from 1954 to 1966. Tell us about that."
Horowitz's, Wanda coached answer, "It's a really beautiful apartment. Why would anyone want to leave such a place?"
I didn't think the world needs to know that the maestro went into treatment in 1951 to have his homosexuality eliminated or that he underwent electroshock treatments for depression in the early sixties. People don't need to know that Wanda rarely spoke to her husband for seventeen years even as she prepared his lunches, dealt with tailors, managed their social schedule, and coached him on how to present himself to his public. Still, the world deserves to know what happened to make the world's greatest pianist quit performing for so long.
I wanted to come forward, but even as late as 1979 I still imagined that the Horowitzes might help me get a teaching position at Juilliard or a job running rehearsals at Columbia records. I was still deluded about my real prospects in music. After that, I gave little thought to the secret for some twenty five years.
A few weeks ago, my niece came to my assisted living facility and brought me a DVD of that 1979-news-magazine segment. "It's Horowitz, Uncle, the greatest pianist in the world…You said you knew him."
The show kept calling the maestro, "Russian" and the concert in Moscow a return home. One of the oddities of Horowitz's life is that he was Ukrainian. It just happened that his career coincided almost exactly with the Soviet Union. He gave his first concert at 17 in 1919 (the official year of his birth was 1904 because his parents had lied to keep him from being conscripted). The Ukraine was a separate country from 1917-1922 when it was taken by the USSR. It regained sovereignty in 1991. Horowitz died the year the Berlin wall came down, 1989. Horowitz was from Kiev. He had lived outside the Soviet Union after 1929 for a simple reason. For a Ukrainian Jew in the Soviet Union, pogrom and purge were much bigger P's than pianist.
Watching the DVD though reminded me that I was the last holder of Horowitz's secret. Here’s the simple version. From 1951 to 1953, it was my job to keep the fact that the world's greatest pianist was taking piano lessons a secret from the world. If you know classical music, you would know that it is not unusual for well-established musicians to continue lessons with a mentor or coach. There wasn't any shame in taking lessons even for Horowitz. What made them different was that he was taught by a man whose only formal studies took place at the Ohio School for the Blind. Horowitz’s teacher had performed only once in his life in a public concert hall recital and that opportunity had only been the result of Wanda calling in a favor. The rest of the time, he had made the bulk of his living by playing in bars on mistuned pianos. In 1951, jazz musicians knew who Art Tatum was but hardly anyone walking down 5th Avenue would have recognized that the black man walking into the Horowitzes’ apartment house was anything but a delivery boy.
Part 2 Choruses
Some biographers have documented that there was something of a respectful friendship between the world's greatest classical and jazz pianists. One famous story claims that Horowitz, so impressed with one of Tatum's versions of the song “Tea for Two”, transcribed it and played it for the jazz master during to show that he too could play what Tatum had played. Legend has it that Tatum responded by sitting down and improvising yet another even more dazzling version of “Tea for Two” then announcing, "You can copy it, but it doesn't matter until you understand it."
In another story, Horowitz and Stokowski both visited Jimmy's Chicken Shack, where Tatum had a regular gig in Harlem, and Stokowski allegedly told Horowitz in front of witnesses "That man is the greatest pianist in the world."
I had ties to both men. Horowitz had once visited my performance class at Juilliard in 1946. I was in my early twenties, straight from Gaudalcanal and the GI Bill, eager to resume my efforts towards a performance career. I was also good looking. When Horowitz showed an interest in my playing that day, my musician's ego was blind to other motives. Obviously, he wouldn't pretend with a complete clunker of a pianist, but I was naïve enough to tell myself that his interest was musical.
He came to my recital once. He took me to lunch on two occasions. One time while I executed a chromatic run in Beethoven's Diabelli variations, he began showing me how not to arch my hand by stroking it ever so lightly. Nothing was said, I simply didn't respond. I may have tightened ever so perceptibly. I'm pretty sure Horowitz had ferreted out the fact that I was also gay in the way that those of us who are detect and send clues. This may have made my rejection of him even worse. His invitations and interest in my performing stopped.
In 1947, I took a part-time bartending job at Jimmy's Chicken Shack. At this point, I had figured out that my future as a classical soloist had limited prospects. I was fascinated by jazz, especially the controversial-emerging form called Bop. A few years earlier, Charlie Parker washed dishes here and had listened to Tatum play two nights a week. Jimmy's thought that having a white bartender gave the place respectability. As the bartender, especially as a bartender who didn't mind pouring the better stuff for the help, I got to know Art Tatum or Art got to know me quickly.
It was easy to unerstand why Tatum drank so much. He was a mostly blind black man who happened to be a genius on the most classical of instruments, the piano. He played with a speed and technique that matched any classical soloist. In order to play, he had to live on the road where he fought with club managers who tried to cut his share of the house, endured bad hotels, and suffered nasty patrons. His one joy was playing after hours well into morning and drinking as he played. In general it was two fifths a night interspersed with an occasional stein of beer and a cocktail or two. The drinking never seemed to affect Tatum's playing, just his health. Even in 1947, the uremia was beginning to affect him. Although still working, Tatum couldn't tour and because of the ASCAP strike he couldn't record. He didn't record in a studio from 1945 until 1953. Essentially, the world's greatest jazz piano player was supporting himself as a cocktail pianist.
Even musically, Tatum was being left behind. He was a two-handed jazz pianist who played solo at a time when all the talk was about Bird and the new thing. He might have inspired Bird, but most hipsters would tell you that Tatum was too old school, a swing guy who just happened to play faster and more adventurously harmonically than anyone else. Even in 1947, the one-handed style with the bass and drums taking over the rhythm while the piano player played fleet single-note-horn-like lines like a horn was taking hold, because no one could follow Tatum anyway.
One night after one AM, Horowitz and Wanda walked into Jimmy’s Chicken Shack. The two must have come from a society party uptown. He wore a tux, mirror black shoes, and a top hat. Wanda was in an evening gown. They couldn't have looked more conspicuous. Nonetheless, the couple took a table in the back and ordered two glasses of champagne.
Art was playing Ellington's “Caravan”, a fast piece that relies on a middle eastern riff and a rhythm that openly imitates a beating drum. In the second chorus, Art had turned it into a sly rhumba, quoted from three or four other songs, then dropped straight back into the groove by switching from minor to major while interpolating the “Beer Barrel Polka.” With anyone else, it might have seemed gimmicky once you got past the sheer amazement. With Tatum it was sublime and seemingly endless. By chorus five, the customers were hooting, "Go Art…" "Whoo…" "Swing it man."
They had barely noticed Horowitz in their midst. Just as Tatum hit the tonic and dropped his Caravan just short of some Parisian Thoroughfare, a guy, clearly drunk, yelled from the back, "Hey Art, how about the Stars and Stripes Forever?"
I looked closely at the Horowitzes. Art could not have seen the formally-dressed couple in the back and no one from the club had had a chance to let Art know. Art was surprisingly good about requests. I heard him play “Melancholy Baby” three times and had heard him play Andrews Sisters' songs on at least half a dozen occasions particularly when there was a tip involved. I think he drew the line at Jimmy Durante, but I couldn't swear to it.
This is the deal. In 1944, Horowitz had played at Carnegie to celebrate his American citizenship. Ever the showman, after two hours of Chopin, Rachmaninoff, and Schumann, the maestro came out and did an encore of variations on the “Stars and Stripes Forever.” With the war still on, the reaction was thunderous. A 78 of Horowitz's version even made the charts.
Art started straight with Sousa's melody and a firmly established march tempo in the left hand. In fact, it sounded like he purposely wasn't going to show off at all. When Art was on there would generally be silence, I started to hear the clink of glasses and murmured conversation as Art hit the bridge a third time. I hadn't noticed, but Art's rendition subtly shifted from march to blues and suddenly the Stars and Stripes, the ultimate martial music, had transformed into a spiritual, but the fastest spiritual ever. I had always been amazed by Tatum's playing, but this was composition. It was deep, stunningly beautiful, a meditation on being black, patriotic, suffering, and proud all at once. The audience went silent. Horowitz sat there his head down. I saw him wipe away a tear with his napkin. At the end, the house didn't even have the presence to applaud. They just sat in mute worship.
The Horowitzes came back three times in two weeks and each time Vladimir and Wanda invited Art to join them for drinks. I had kept a careful distance from the Horowitzes. I paid respects. He would greet me by name, but we did not speak beyond that. It seemed that this was going to be the way we would deal with mutual awkwardness.
It was Wanda Horowitz who asked me to meet her for lunch at Tavern on the Green. "I have a job for you," she announced after the preliminaries but before the clam chowder.
I would have five basic responsibilities. I had to get Tatum from his room in Harlem three times a month to Fifth Avenue. I had to make sure that Art never told anyone else. I would get the thousand dollars a lesson to Art. I had to keep anyone from ever noticing our regular visits. During the lessons, I was to see that Art always had a full bottle of scotch available. In addition, Art was going to get a concert in a music auditorium with a program. It seemed that Wanda also said something about helping my career.
For thirty seven visits, Art Tatum and I dressed up as piano tuners. On a couple occasions, Wanda even arranged for us to tune the Baldwins and Steinways of residents in the building. Art could tell you just which keys were off by playing a couple scales.
Part 3 Scherzo and Cadenza
Art and Vladimir concentrated on a single song, “Tea for Two.” Horowitz would usually play first. Most would wonder why the loudest-fastest-classical pianist in the world would even consider the possibility of lessons. Horowitz’s “Tea for Two” was filled with arpeggios, quadruple speed sections, counter melodies, and dazzle. Art always sat next to the piano, poured himself a glass, and would shake his head,"That's nice, but it still doesn't swing."
The first few times, Horowitz had this puzzled look. "I am not a jazz player. Why must it swing? I am improvising, yes?"
"All music that's worth listening to has to swing."
Art would motion for Vladimir to move aside and Art would play sixteen bars of “Tea for Two” or was it “Tea for Two Hundred and Twenty Two?”
One time when Art was playing, he caught Horowitz tapping his foot.
"What you doing there man?"
"Doing vere?"
"I might be blind, but I hear you tapping."
Art had this huge laugh when he was genuinely in a good mood. He had enormous hands that he used to gesture when he talked. "So you do know what swing is, then?"
"Yah, I guess."
Horowitz couldn't hide his smile.
"Okay, then. You show me."
Horowitz might have known what it was, but he couldn't quite do it. I did, however, notice one other thing. Horowitz forgot to wipe down the keys after Art played.
Sometimes, the two talked through the lesson. Once between choruses, Horowitz, never especially tactful particularly without Wanda, said, "You have no idea how difficult it is to be a Jew in Europe. You Americans don't understand the suffering."
Art wasn't an arguer. He slipped over to the piano bench and played two quick choruses of the blues. I'm not sure that Horowitz caught the joke. Like Art, his hands sometimes seemed bigger than his body. Instead of saying anything, he raised them as if to play fortissimo then went back to Tea for Two, one of his better versions, but it still didn’t swing.

Horowitz would show Art antique desks, give him tastes of vintage cognacs, and let him feel the material of his perfectly-tailored suits. One day, Horowitz was showing off a diamond ring bought from a single royalty check and Art joked, "Maybe you should be the one giving me piano lessons."
Horowitz’s answer with a riff from one of his radio interviews, "America has been so good to me just for being able to play the piano. I came as a refugee and this is the kindest nation in the world."
I only wish that Art Tatum had responded by playing the blues that day. Some moments are subtle but portend huge changes. Not long after Horowitz said that, the saddest thing in the world happened.
Tatum hadn't recorded in 6 years at that point. Even though Wanda had gotten him a concert in what she called a "proper hall", little had come of it. The Times and the Herald chose not to review. To be honest, Art's music always sounded better when there was a bottle on top of the piano. I was still bartending at Jimmy's and Art was still playing there. I don't know if anyone else noticed, but Art's playing in public began to change.
He was still fast, the harmonies were still dizzymaking, yet something about Art was gone. It was getting just a little bit predictable, as if he were playing from arrangements instead of improvising or creating at the keyboard. He was playing more like Horowitz.
By contrast, Horowitz's playing took on a looser quality. He sounded fresher in concert than ever before. Various critics attributed it to health regimens, a new seriousness about musicianship over showmanship, competition with Rubenstein. One critic wrote,
"Horowitz has always been the great soloist in the romantic tradition. He plays to the hall, sometimes takes liberties from the score in the tradition of Liszt and Hoffman. Some now insist that the musician's job is to interpret the composer's intentions. The romantic understands the composer's intention.
Last week, the Russian unleashed a fresh phase of his career in a program that included Scriabin, Liszt, and Horowitz's own spectacularly inventive transcription of Bizet's Carmen. Where Horowitz once seemed mechanical and merely showy, he has now become a serious interpreter…"
As Horowitz's public playing flourished, Art's began to falter. It was as if the Eastern European were a musical vampire. Even odder, Horowitz never quite learned to swing “Tea for Two.”
Art remained the gentle teacher and when he played during the lessons, his little asides were as feeling and inventive as ever. The biographers say that Art's uremia got even worse around this time. His fingers were stiffening. Every now and then I could see the signs that he would shorten runs or hit a double note that he couldn't instantly resolve harmonically.

IV Finale
In 1953, Art got a call from Norman Granz to come to Los Angeles to record. Granz, a Jewish attorney from Brooklyn, had a special talent for promoting jazz musicians. He was the first impresario to get jazz musicians big money to play in concert hall venues. Granz encouraged his stars to play to the crowd, encouraging them to play faster,louder after playing written melody at least once. He packed his concerts with sax players like Illinois Jacquet who hit the high squealy notes and Oscar Peterson, a Canadian who idolized Art and who played uncommonly fast and complex even if it was neither particularly original nor surprising. Art took the first traing to Los Angeles and Granz recorded him for forty two hours. Art never saw Horowitz again nor did I.
On his way to California, Art stopped in Toledo to visit his son and first wife. He was never especially close to Art Junior, but he bought him a piano and set aside five thousand dollars for him to go to school or buy a house. No one was knew how Art happened to be so flush.
The resulting recordings with Granz, though still wonderful, aren't the real Tatum. Some insist that the drinking had caught up with him. Others insist that he'd just lost it at age 45. Tatum was dead by 1956 from kidney complications. It remains the only extended set of studio recordings of Tatum’s playing after 1945. In the mid-70's someone tracked down an air check of Tatum playing after hours in the early forties. The critics dubbed "God is in the House" a revelation, “the lost evidence of the greatest jazz pianist to ever flat a fifth or empty one.” If you have a really good ear and listen to the Granz recordings, you'll hear that Tatum is playing on a piano with the octaves voiced just a little low and the A above middle C set to 436.
After Art left New York, Horowitz practiced at manic levels as he prepared for a sixteen city international tour. Then one morning, he stopped. Three days befor the tour, he was committed to a psychiatric hospital. Some say he spent thirty-five days in a row staring out the window telling the doctors that he would never perform again until he could play on his swing. Others claim that he would lament that he was not truly the world's greatest pianist, that he was an impostor, and that he dared not face the public again.
In 1954, with no income from concerts, Wanda Horowitz sold the paintings by Raphael and Titian passed to her by her father. Horowitz did not play in public for twelve years and during that period barely spoke to his daughter Sonya. He did record on three occasions in Columbia's Long Island recording facility. After his return in 1966, there were many stories of Horowitz experimenting at the piano with an extraordinary set of variations on “Tea for Two.” The producers, sensing a hit similar to the Stars and Stripes Forever and Carmen, tried to convince Horowitz to put it on record. He adamantly refused. His 1989 will included a provision that no record company ever release any version of his playing “Tea for Two.” No one ever found the tape anyway.
In a chest in dry dark closet in my niece's home in Walnut Creek, inside three layers of plastic bags, there is a 9 inch reel of tape which I now pack with the tape I record now for you. I remember the afternoon I made the recording all too well. Art and Vladimir were joking around, as they sometimes did. He was most of the way through his second bottle of bourbon and Vladimir had yet again not quite gotten Art to tap his foot when he took on “Tea for Two.” It was 1953 and I don't know if either man was aware at the time that this would be the last lesson.
"It's close though?"
"Yeah, it's close."
"Maybe I can't swing?"
"Nah, everyone swings, we just haven't found it yet. It's there somewhere, it always is. Maybe if you had to play an instrument with bad hammers and three unvoiced octaves in bars full of drunks for a few years…."
Horowitz shook his head. I remember the place still smelled like fish. Sonya slipped into the practice studio and tried to get her father’s attention. I smiled at her, but he pushed her away.
“Pappa’s busy, go find your mother.”
I offered to keep Sonya amused as I sometimes did during the lessons, but Horowitz shook his head. His mind was on other things and he wanted me in the room for some reason. He turned to Art with a challenge that he must have considered for some time.
"Maybe I can't swing, but can you play like me?"
Art took a seat at the piano and I taped every second of Chopin’s Scherzo in B flat minor and sat for a moment. I could swear he was staring at the keyboard before he set his hands in place. The notes danced from the piano, stately, graceful, and soft. It was music so pure that even when I listened to it I wondered if there’d ever been an instrument or a pianist involved.

chancelucky

link to some Tatum bio materials

Other fiction on this site

At this level, I'm not sorry about Michael Jackson

2009-06-25T21:42:00.000-07:00

I should probably wait a bit, but I won't. I liked much of Michael Jackson's music and thought that he was a terrific performer in his prime. I'm sorry for the loss of those things and I do find his death sad in that sense. I am, however, not going to mourn the guy. In fact, I'm glad he's dead.

Despite the not guilty verdict, I still believe that Michael Jackson was a child molester. No, he probably didn't lock his victims in a basement and rape them, but he was still a child molester who persuaded young boys to do things with him that they weren't old enough to consent to. In some ways, these are the worst because it's harder for the victim to make the separation between the seeming acts of “kindness/seduction” and the bits of the relationship that constitute molestation. The seduction just lengthens the pain and guilt for the victim. Maybe the King of Pop was some sort of boy at heart, maybe he was abused himself in some way that made his actions more compulsive than chosen, but he never openly repented and there was nothing to ever suggest that he ever stopped trying to do these things or sought treatment.

The fact that Michael Jackson was musically-talented makes no difference to me. In fact, it only made it possible for him to molest more boys than otherwise might have. He also may have done any number of other humanitarian acts, even ones that benefited children. Those were certainly good deeds and I won't question his motives for doing them. I also suppose that there's some possibility that his acts were misunderstood in some way and he wasn't actually molesting boys. If that's the case, I'll take this back.

That said, as a non-celebrity, I'll say on behalf of his likely dozens of victims and the families of those victims what the celebrities and media won't say. I'm glad he's dead. I hope it was painful. I won't mourn him and I'm glad he's not around to molest any more boys. I'm also not going to euphemize it by saying the guy was eccentric. If no one else is going to say or write it today, I will.
chancelucky

Dirty Dansu

2009-06-24T16:17:00.000-07:00

After more than forty years of going to a variety of barbers and hairstylists who never learned my name, I started “going steady” with a hairstylist ten years ago. It was my wife’s idea. She’s not Asian, but was convinced that hardly anyone at those ten dollar haircut places had any idea how to cut Asian hair. Most of the people who cut my hair has this knack for doing it in such a way that I looked like Ed Grimley within a couple weeks. One day, my wife and I were shopping when she said I needed a haircut. It happened that the lady cutting my hair was Cambodian and Mrs. Chancelucky declared that from now on this would be the person who cut my hair.

I’ve now gotten used to knowing the name of the person cutting my hair and her knowing mine. For a few years, we mostly talked about places to go to dinner. I had learned a number of random but interesting items about her, the most significant being that my hair cutter and her husband had managed to buy seven houses. We stopped talking about places to go to dinner because during the banking crisis, they lost six of the houses. She also bought her own shop and sold it, something that I found out today when I came for my appointment and the whole salon had been remodeled. To be accurate, it was mostly remodeled. The ceiling still hadn’t been recovered and only half of the new lighting system was in place. Without all the wattage, the place seemed more like a bar than a hair salon.

Anyway, my hair cutting lady asked me about father’s day then told me about how she had gone to a party with her husband over the weekend at which he began dirty dancing with other women including an old girlfriend of his. I suspect that they have a number of Asian friends in the area, but my hair stylist doesn’t know many middle-aged Asian men who aren’t friends or relatives. She was puzzling over why she got as mad at her husband as she did.

I’d heard other stories from her in the past. Once she told me that she’d never learned to swim because she’d almost drowned while crossing a river when her family was leaving Cambodia. This was different, though. Her husband had ultimately apologized and insisted that he wasn’t doing the dirty dancing as much as it was Hennessey. I don’t know them, but that might have been true. I then asked her if she’d been rubbing up on her husband while they were dancing earlier in the evening and she said “Yes.” I figured that eliminated the possibility of his dancing that way with others but not with her.

I then accidentally told her what appeared to be the perfect thing, “Maybe you got him too excited when he was dancing with you.”

This made her smile and we agreed that she needed to go have a normal night of dancing with her husband some time soon so they could get past all this. I felt like Chris Harrison, the host of the Bachelor who always says just the right thing in the Bachelor’s moment of stress.

I’m not sure why I suddenly crossed this line into the inner life of my hair cut lady. I now understand why some people develop such complex relationships with the people who cut their hair and do their nails. It seems like a very American thing, though I did see an Audrey Tatou movie about a French beauty parlor that amounted to the same thing with beauticians as combination confessors, groomers, and friends. Did I need to have an Asian hair stylist before I could form such a relationship?

After that I picked up lunch at Port of Subs where all the people behind the counter were East Indian. Other than Jared? Do people form friendships with the people who make their sandwiches?

In the meantime, it came out during my hairstyling thing that the only females I’ve danced with in the last fifteen years were my wife and my daughter. With my wife we never go out on the dance floor and make like were in a Patrick Swayze-Jennifer Grey movie or even one with Julia Styles. It’s generally more like Shall We Dansu, only we don’t do ballroom. Maybe once every two years, we wind up at a wedding that happens to have a live band.

Anyway, it seems like every couple develops its own customs about when , how, and who they dance with in public. Some dance with everyone. In fact Bill Clinton’s mom supposedly told him it was bad manners not to dance with every single girl at a party, something that has fascinating psychological ramifications given the rest of Bill Clinton’s life. Some couples dance with others, but only slow dance together. I have no idea what the rules are on dirty dancing, we’re too old for that sort of thing though we did go to a wedding a few months ago where a bunch of the women were making like pole dancers. I didn’t comment on it to Mrs. Chancelucky. At the same time, it’s not like any couple ever sits down and says “These are the rules for when we go out dancing.”

None that has anything to do with being Asian, having a regular hair stylist, or whatever else started this story, yet somehow in some way I can’t explain that has everything to do with how all this came about.
chancelucky

Back

2009-06-23T11:17:00.000-07:00

Well, I finished my short story collection, at least for now. Next step, I need to write the perfect query letter, come up with a 30 page sample, and find an agent. My wife tells me that the whole process sent me into an emotional tailspin. After I had a draft that I “liked”, I found myself more frustrated than satisfied. While those of us who write never say such things, I think many of us dream that people will see it and immediately tell you how wonderful it is. It does happen once in a while, but the overwhelming tendency of friends, relatives, etc. is, if they happen to read any of it, to tell you every single thing they think is wrong with whatever you’ve written. I’m not sure why that is, but it’s often like there’s some unwritten obligation to not say anything positive.

There were also folk who were nice enough to read the whole thing who simply weren’t all that positive. Often, they had criticisms that made sense at the level of “Why didn’t I think of or see that?” Honestly, that just makes it worse. Bottom line, I spent many years working on something an about five people were willing to read the whole thing. Two actually liked it and everyone else essentially dismissed it as unpublishable or not interesting. I think the thing that was harder yet, was how indifferent so many people were as in "What have you been up to lately?" "I just finished my short story collection that I've been working on for years." No response whatsoever. No "hey good luck" No "Gee I'd like to read it some time". No "what's it about?" Instead, it was lots of "Oh someone just knocked on the door, I'll have to talk to you later." My take is that if people who know and like you aren't interested...

Given that, does it really make sense to go look for an agent? Even harder, it felt like the overwhelming message was that I had wasted my time. Instead of being exhilarated about finishing a huge project, I was exhausted and disappointed instead. For the last month, I haven’t even been able to look at my own book. I figured if other people were reading five pages and concluding that it wasn’t worth reading, maybe I’ve been working on something that only I can appreciate.

In the meantime, I slipped away from this blog. Much of that was the short story collection. I also simply hit the fourth wall with reality television. Every time I tried to write about American Idol, I found myself going off about how “tired” the show had gotten. The Bachelor became less of a “reality” show than a soap opera with non-professional actors playing out a not very well-written script. Yes, Mrs. Chancelucky and I have been watching Jillian and guys, but we’re having a hard time deciding if Wes is more annoying than Shane Llamas. As I look at the reality landscape, there seem to be more and more instances of the shows featuring the mentally unstable. With Jon and Kate Gosselin, I keep asking what kind of country lets two people like this have eight kids? I know somehow that the whole business with Susan Boyle could have been avoided. She could easily have had her “moment” without the meltdown. What happened to reality television where the participants got to do something inspiring then disappear back to regular life?

I did like having an audience, a very appreciative one at that, for my reality tv writing. I’d love to find some way to continue that relationship, but I can’t promote shows that I feel have slipped into something that’s essentially unhealthy. Whatever relationship American Idol had to actual “music” and the joys that come with it slipped away in the last three seasons. Any tie the Bachelor had to “romance” gave way to something far more cynical somewhere after Andy and Tessa’s season. More important, my repeating this in post after post would be both stupid and boring.

So what do I post about? Well, I might go back to political commentary. I’d wanted to give President Obama at least a six month honeymoon and he’s had that. There’s also movie and book reviews and the various odd details of Mr. and Mrs. Chancelucky’s lives. Three’s never been much of an audience for those things here, just as there’s likely little to no audience for my fiction, but I like doing it and more important I do miss blogging regularly.

Anyway, I’m back. I wish I could tell you that there are now dozens of agents trying to take me to lunch so that I’ll let them represent “Inventing China”. I probably need to face the fact that it’ll never happen and I have unintentionally created 280 plus pages of random boredom. In the meantime, I like blogging and I like the fact that sometimes people read stuff I’ve written and find it either funny or interesting.
chancelucky

Tears for the River God (fiction redrafted)

2007-04-24T14:39:00.000-07:00

note:

This story has been published by Grey Sparrow Journal in their June 2009 issue

chancelucky

A Night of Great Disco Ballads (Idol 8 round of 6+1)

2009-04-24T16:33:00.000-07:00

Carrie Prejean was recently spotted out with Ryan Seacrest

I’m still trying to figure out why Adam Lambert dressed up as K.D. Lang the other night. While Randy Jackson kept assuring America how great this year’s singers are because they hit all those notes, I kept wondering why they had a Disco night and the only person dancing seemed to be Paula Abdul and her inner-goddess. Just a reminder, in pop music it’s not the notes, it’s the beat especially in Disco. Let me translate, “This is our most talented group ever” really means “America’s not talking about you guys at all and they consider about five of you interchangeable.”

Are there really record executives dreaming of the day they find the next Donna Summer? Apparently, a bunch of these Idol finalists think that. How about that Anoop dressed up as a lounge lizard complete with mustache? You know what? The whole night sucked. Think about this, the apparent highlight was Kris Allen doing “Hard for the Money” unplugged. Did he persuade you that there were layers either to the lyric or the melody that benefited from it? Did you pick up any new resonances in the meaning. I have to say, I liked it better when it just seemed to be a song about prostitution, either literal or figurative. Either that or it’s something you play during lunch hour aerobics class. This is what I think, the guy was mostly just trying to get out of having to do disco. According to the judges, Kris is now a contender for the finals. What other story have they got? The whole Allison thing is not happening. If you have more bottom three appearances than actual memorable performances, you’re just not going to win.

That wasn’t the case with Adam Lambert. I’d say when Ryan starts asking, “Say Adam, how are you going to surprise us this week?” It’s time to just throw the fast ball knee high on the outside corner. I know Adam Lambert has both the voice and the stage presence to do that, but now I keep sitting on the curve ball. Let’s see him perform in a clown outfit. Maybe they’ll do Broadway night and he’ll go Freddie Mercury. Maybe he’ll shop in the women’s section like Kris and Paula, but maybe for different reasons. The way the judges have gone lately, Adam’s chances of winning are better than even against the field. This is Secretariat, the Chuck Noll era Steelers, like betting on Clay Aiken coming out some day.

Okay, that one didn’t fit, but the only real drama (not to say the show won’t manufacture some) about the next 4 episodes of American Guydol (Jordin Sparks was the last female finalist and Katharine Mcphee was the last one over 18) has to do with the coming reality show collision between the Miss USA Contest and American Idol 8. If you wonder how they might have made Miss USA more with it, instead of asking Carrie Prejean (this year’s Miss California, well except for parts of San Francisco) about gay marriage they could have said “Do you think American Idol is ready for an openly gay winner?”

If you haven’t been following the news, Carrie Prejean may have lost the Miss USA title because she told the judges she felt gay marriage was wrong and stuck by her answer. Given that half the male audience and a similar percentage of the men working behind the scenes at your average Pageant are gay men, some people didn’t like her answer. It also seemed mildly odd for a woman to parade around in a skimpy bikini, high heels, and makeup then start talking about the Bible being her guide in life. I just didn’t know that Ephesians came with a centerfold. Nonetheless, much of America is giving her credit for not playing the politician and sticking up for what she believes. Would they be saying the same thing if Carrie Prejean had suggested that we burn gay couples at the stake or mentioned that the Jews killed Jesus? Who knows? It’s all a matter of degree I guess.

In the meantime, they’re saying that she went on a date with Michael Phelps. Maybe if they’d asked her about legalizing marijuana, she’d go on a date with Rosie O’donnell? I do think they’re making too big a deal of it. When’s the last time you ever heard of a former beauty pageant winner getting into politics? You betcha, it’s not like Carrie Prejean is going to run for vice-president of the US or something. This is just Miss USA. Can you imagine the other four finalists that night though? How many do you think agreed with Carrie Prejean and America just didn’t get to find out.

Enough with the Adam and Steve business, I assume you want me to talk about Adam and Ryan. Here in California, we recently had Proposition 8 where the Mormon Church spent millions to make sure that we were all clear on the concept of traditional marriage being between a man and one or more women. You wanna talk about Big Love, what bigger love is there in protecting us from the horrors of gay people being in committed relationships. Proposition 8 split California voters right down the middle with slightly more of them siding with Miss USA.

Idol 8 is in this fascinating position of healing the cultural divide. According to most, the likely final is the openly gay guy who really can sing against the widower who works as a church music director. If it weren’t in such bad taste, I’d say it. This isn’t American Idol, it’s like a special episode of Wife Swap. I can see a final where Adam and Danny duet to Ebony and Ivory except with pink keys marking the sharps and flats. For a couple weeks, we may get to watch the finalists engage in all this camaraderie and exchange various tokens of mutual respect.

Adam can sing Bobby Goldsboro's 'Honey' in memory of Danny’s wife. In the middle when gets to 'I long to be with you", the camera cuts to Danny who has to take off his glasses to wipe away tears. The judges tell Adam how he can sing anything and Paula compares Adam to Bob Dylan and Tim Buckley. Danny then sing “It’s Raining Men” and blame it on Jasmine Trias. Just before the final chorus, he points to Adam then Ryan and winks. Paula tells Danny how on key he always is no matter what he sings. Simon thanks Danny for dedicating a song to him. Kara says something about how David Hernandez is probably dancing around right now if he's watching. Carrie Prejean comes out to hug both contenders and to tell America who she loves the sinner and not the sin. Adam gives her an odd look.

American picks a winner based on talent not sexual preference and our country will be whole again, though still 80 trillion dollars in debt. We’re probably not far from a time when instead of a recording contract, the winner of the show just gets a job.

If you ask me, I’d just like to see one season of the show where the winner at the end is pop music itself. Just don’t think that’s going to be this year.
Other Chancelucky Idol Reviews

Sir Linksalot American Idol articles

Buddy TV AMerican Idol Page

chancelucky

Is There Anything to Save? (Idol 8 Round of 7)

2009-04-17T16:52:00.000-07:00

It was nice to see Jennifer Hudson come back for results night on Idol. Her voice still sounds great; whatever issues there were about her wardrobe and look are smoothed out (though I liked the original Jennifer Hudson); She’s more comfortable doing patter. I doubt that her coming back for the round of 7 elimination was an accident. She’s both the only Idol contestant to win an Oscar and the most infamous early exit in the show’s history. As it happens, Jennifer Hudson went out in round 7. As it happens, one of this year’s gimmicks is the judges’ save option: America decides, but we get one chance to correct. Lo and behold, Jennifer Hudson comes to sing on the results show and what do those zany-unpredictable judges just happen to do for the first time? They save Justin Timberfake, I mean Matt Giraud. Imagine that!

If you’re wondering why I’ve cut back on posting about the show this year, that’s it in a nutshell. From Paula pulling out the box of crayons for Simon, to Kara flirting with male contestants, to various oblique references to Danny Gokey’s departed wife, to Scott McCintyre’s disability, everything feels rehearsed. Reality TV thrives on spontaneity. If you’re one of the three people who hasn’t seen the Susan Boyle clip from Britain’s got talent, have a look. Whether anyone really was surprised to hear that voice come out of that person, they sure acted like it and that’s what makes the video viral. Reality shows do best when things happen that just don’t seem to be scripted.

There’ve actually been some pretty memorable vocal performances on Idol in the last two years, but I still wonder if there’s been anything as arresting as Sanjaya Malakar doing Wild Thing. It’s not that the guy was a great talent, it was that there seemed to be something chaotic about his presence on the show. It’s part of why I actually watch this year when Adam Lambert performs. It’s not so much when Paula starts talking about his special sauce, it’s more interesting when he does a Middle Eastern Ring of Fire and Simon hates it. The problem is more with everyone else.

You may or may not remember the American Girls software. American Girls is this history-conscious-politically-correct line of dolls that came packaged with a backstory. Instead of Lingerie Barbie and her pink corvette, American Girls dolls were supposed to provoke little girls to think about what life was like during the revolution, working in a factory, or say a slave girl working in the Master’s plantation manor. Anyway, the dolls were a big hit so since everyone else was doing educational software the company did its own. In it, you could take their characters and stage little plays with them. Nice idea, but in those days most home computers didn’t have the horsepower to do it well.

I think American Idol licensed the software and most of the contestants are just dolls with pre-printed back stories. There’s the Desi-next door who’s kind of like Phil Stacy with a tan. He appears to work hard, has a nice voice, but there’s nothing all that interesting about his music. There’s the 16 year old rocker with the great voice who can’t quite connect with the audience yet (what was she thinking with that song from Armageddon?). There’s the nice-looking married fellow from the sticks who’s doing really well singing ballads. After 8+ performances with this cast, some weeks are good and some not so good, but I’m never all that surprised. A few times, a couple of them have come on to sing I check out the costume, figure out which way they’re going to play it fast-slow, bluesy-sensitive, etc. in about fifteen seconds then I walk out of the living room to put something in the microwave or move clothes from the washer to the dryer. I figure I can just go to the toystore and get an American Idoll next week if I change my mind. With the exception of Allison and Adam, I just don’t see any of these people having any chance to be Jennifer Hudson or Carrie Underwood. As Simon has told a few contestants this year, “I don’t see any way you can win this.” It’s true, but nine zillion people auditioned for this show, what the heck happened?

I know this is horrifying, but I’ve been paying more attention to Dancing with the Stars than Idol. One aspect of DWTS, apart from the fact that even when it’s bad there are always a handful of really attractive people on the show (Mrs. Chancelucky has developed a thing for Gilles Marini and she keeps accusing me of watching the show for Julianne Hough), there are never more than four or five people who can win on that show. For some reason, it’s still fun watching the also rans. That used to be the case on Idol, then something changed and the also rans became oddly forgettable. Does anyone remember Stephanie Edwards, Ramiele Malubay, or Brandon Rogers? Want something even more scary, who are Alexis Grace and Michael Sarver? DWTS more or less keeps the sexy factor in the mix at all costs, this year's AI cast just isn't long on that kind of appeal.

Reality TV is about surprise and a big part of the surprise is rooted in personality. Years ago, Idol had a semifinalist, Melinda Lira, who was so pissed off when she got eliminated that she didn’t go through the motions of even appearing to do her sing off. Not so good for her, but really entertaining tv. One of the joys of watching Jennifer Hudson when she was a contestant was to see both the talent and the rough-edges. It just seems like the contestant show up in the final 12 with their makeovers already done these days. It can be argued that Jordin Sparks grew some on her way to being Idol 6, but I’m hard-pressed to think of other “watch them grow” runs on the show. Taylor Hicks and David Cook pretty much had their acts tv ready. I think the same can be said of Adam Lambert. It’s also one of the reasons Melinda Doolittle didn’t make it past third. We want to see a story unfold. I don’t mean back story, a la my wife died, I mean one where things happen and change over the 20 week season. Think more Elliot Yamin.

So, what can happen to make this season more watchable? Allison Iraheta can acquire a bit more stage presence so it appears less like she’s singing into a microphone and more like she’s connecting to an audience. Lil Rounds can take Jennifer Hudson’s advice and defiantly be herself. I don’t think that’s going to happen though. If I were to list Divas who appeared on the show, well all three from Jennifer Hudson’s season were better perfomers than Lil Rounds. Throw in Carly Smithson, Mandisa, and Lakisha Jones and how can you be like the 8th best singer in your category and seriously expect to win the show? Anoop, Matt, Kris are all reasonably attractive guys with good voices who score somewhere below a 5 on virtually anyone’s originality meter. Generally, this means you finish anywhere from 3rd to 7th. Antony Federov, Chris Richardson, Ace Young, and sorry Beckeye there may even be an Australian or two who fits this category.

With the guys that Paula put in the finals like five weeks ago (like Simon, she might well have been right), I feel like we’re seeing two instances where the show got a do-over. While I think Adam Lambert is in a different talent league from Constantine, they play the same sport. Both clearly love being on stage and see their Idol performances as a “show” rather than a singing opportunity. I also think that Danny Gokey is a new and improved version of Chris Sligh. You have the church ties, the wife being part of the story, even the glasses. This time, though they took away the back talk and the blog. That said, the story with both these contestants is pretty much told. I imagine that Adam Lambert will find yet another way to surprise America, but it’s not going to be breaking news even if he wears Allison’s dress from two weeks ago. Bottom line, I suspect the only lurking story line is Allison making the jump from singer to “performer”. I wasn’t shocked that the judges pimped so hard for her on Tuesday night, whatever sauce Paul was on.

If AI wants to get its mojo back, even if it’s not Born to Be Wild, it needs to get away from being “tamed”. The performers need to take the show back from the producers and
we need to see a couple Susan Boyle moments. If you think about it, that’s more or less what Clay Aiken was so many seasons ago. Though, who knows whether he’d been kissed back then and by whom.
Other Chancelucky Idol Reviews

Sir Linksalot American Idol articles

Buddy TV AMerican Idol Page

chancelucky

An Update

2009-04-09T12:52:00.000-07:00

From the Sacramento Bee

If you’ve been looking for my most recent American Idol posts or (God forbid) looking for any new posts from me on other topics, you’ve probably noticed that I haven’t been around as much.

First, I’ve been very busy with regular life, but I’ve also been working very hard on a short story collection that I’m submitting for publication. Picking the stories is one thing, editing nearly 300 pages of material so that it’s coherent has turned out to be a huge task.

Second, I tivoed AI from Tuesday night, came home, and didn’t even feel that much like watching it. So Simon, it’s me, it’s not you…..Nonetheless, I think I just saw too much of the show. Other than being curious about what Adam Lambert will do next , it’s more or less stopped mattering to me whether or not any of the other contenders do well or badly. The show itself has turned oddly joyless.

I’ll be back to the blogging soon, btw….I may even do a couple more AI writeups assuming that I can watch all the way through. On the other hand, maybe I’ll get an agent, a publisher, and people reading my fiction. Me and the other million or so fiction writers out there :}

In the meantime, I do appreciate everyone who takes a look here and I’ll try to post once a week or so after this.

Binghamton Blues

2009-04-05T08:58:00.000-07:00

The scary thing for me is that 2 of the biggest mass shootings in the US in the last couple years had Asian gunmen. The Virginia Tech shooter was Korean and the Binghamton killer was Vietnamese. So much for the model minority club.

I'm also used to reading shooting stories where hundreds of shots are fired, but surprisingly few people actually get killed. One of the disturbing things about the most recent shootings has been how efficient the killers have been.

One of the NRA's arguments is that if everyone has the right to carry, then people can protect themselves. I don't understand why these things keep happening and the targets never shoot back. In fact, the Unitarian Church shooting in Tennessee, they just tackled the guy and stopped him (that's liberals for you) I would think that if someone really wanted to lobby for the second amendment, he/she'd make sure he was around for one of these mass shootings and shoot the gunman. The NRA could even do something like what the Gideon Society does. All these loose firearms out there and every time some nut walks into a building with dozens of people in it, no one there ever happens to be armed.

Even in Iraq, the Coalition Provisional Authority had the sense to let every family keep one AK47 after they disbanded the army. I'm not sure the combination of mass unemployment and loose assault weapons worked that well there, but it's the principle that counts. We were, after all, building an American style democracy.

I used to see these bumper stickers that said "In a police state, only the police have guns". What's it mean when only crazy people seem to have guns? It's hard for me to register what that implies.

chancelucky