Sunday, March 24, 2013

The Pursuit of Trivia








On Oct. 1, 2011, I wrote in a post about Fernando Sor, "Until I came upon Fernando Sor's grave in Cimetiere Montmartre in Paris I don't think I'd ever heard the name."  I subsequently learned that he was a Barcelona-born classical guitarist and composer.  A Belgian musicologist/critic of the period called Sor "le Beethoven de la guitare"

I came across Sor's name recently in Oscar Hijuelos's excellent memoir Thoughts Without Cigarettes. He mentions that when, as a teenager, he was studying guitar, he learned of a neighbor who also "played the guitar, but in the classical style, with sheet music for studies by Tarrega, Fernando Sol, and others lying in stacks on a table by a stand in his living room."

(Hijuelos won the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for his novel The Mambo King Plays Songs of Love.)

I loved knowing who Fernando Sol was when I came across that line.  Not that I think a Jeopardy answer will ever be "Who was Fernando Sol?"  And, nor, do I ever think I'll be a contestant on Jeopardy.

I tried once.  It was the late eighties.  A call went out in Vermont: Come to such and such ballroom in Burlington to try out for Jeopardy.  About three hundred of us showed up.  At the time there was a large monitor on which Alex Trebek asked questions and we had some amount of time to write the answer on the paper with lines numbered one through fifty provided to us.  As it turned out, I knew the answers to 48 of the 50 questions but on question #12 (the answer to which was, if I remember, the name of one of the famous National Parks out west). I couldn't think of the right answer, but thought it would come to me later, but instead of leaving line #12 blank, I wrote the answer to #13 on line #12, and so on, right on through to #27, the answer to which was "who were Hugh Cronyn and Jessica Tandy" but which I also couldn't think of at the time, though I knew it.  I did remember to leave that line blank, and then realized my earlier error, but there wasn't enough time to go back and erase and re-write all the correct answers I'd written on incorrect lines.  And, anyhow, as I progressed through the test I wasn't positive that it was at line 12 I'd need to start correcting ... was it maybe 13?


I'm not sure that 48 correct answers out of 50 would have gotten me into the next round anyhow.  At the end, after our entries were checked, five people were called to another room for a second round of testing.  Out of some 300 people, if I could get 48 out of 50, I supposed that 5 out of 300 could get 50 out of 50.

Oh, well.  Maybe in the far distant future we'll get to live our lives over again, but with improvements.  And maybe there will be a TV show called Jeopardy and I'll get on it and win and win and win and then I'll be in the Tournament of Champions and for Final Jeopardy they'll ask us to name an 18-19th century guitarist who was called by a critic "le Beethoven de la guitare".
 
"Who was Fernando Sol?" I'll answer, and Alex will ask me what I'm going to do with all my money.
 
Or maybe in that other life I'll be a quick-as-a-flash and flashy point guard on Florida Gulf Coast University's basketball team and I'll be feeling like a million bucks on a day like today ... a member of the first 15th seeded team to get to the Sweet Sixteen!



Monday, March 11, 2013

Touches of the Orient in the Capital

I spent the first two nights with Liz and her family. She was
to go to one of the Inauguration Balls so had to be spiffed. We
started off at a nail salon in Silver Spring; then to the hairdresser,
then to a dozen different shops trying to find an exact color of
nail polish.


I indulged in a pedicure.  Once, back in the sixties, someone
told me I had beautiful ankles!  That odd remark has become a
running joke amongst my friends, so this is for you, Rodney,
and for you, Jim.  (I also have beautiful arches.)

The next two nights I spent at my friends Bill and Bill's place, and I
was going to die if I didn't get to see the exhibit of the work of the
Chinese artist Ai Wei Wei (pronounced, I'm told, I-Way-Way) at the Hirshhorn
Art Museum, so Bill and I (Billy had to work) spent post-InauguralDay museuming.  One
installation was of seven of 81 identical chests Weiwei made using rare quince wood. Four
holes, two on each side, are placed at eye-level and above. "Nevertheless," according to 
the exhibition catalog, "the upper and lower openings always align so that they 
create the effect of showing every phase of the moon ...." That's Bill standing,
at my request, amidst the 4th or 5th chest.  He got scolded by a guard.
I and my camera got off scot-free.

Standing in front of three giant photos of Ai Weiwei dropping an
urn dating from the Han Dynasty, "thus destroying," according to
the exhibit's catalog, "2000 years of cultural tradition and legacy
[and expressing] the notion that new ideas and values are
produced through iconoclasm."
Bill standing before an installation of steel rebars "recovered
from the rubble of collapsed schoolhouses in Sichuan following
the 2008 earthquake."
In one of Weiwei's photos, a large bird is being flipped at The White
House (there's a similar photo with the Chinese equivalent of The
White House).  Despite having gotten him scolded twice already by
the art-guards, I got Bill to flip the bird at the flipped bird. I dared
not use my flash, thus the crappy lack of detail in the photo ... well,
I promised Bill I wouldn't use the flash ... plus my camera's kind
of cheap, plus, sadly, I'm not much of a photographer.

So, though I am way way in love with Ai Weiwei, we moved on
to the Asian Art Museum, also part of the Smithsonian. The only photo
I took was of this beautiful Buddhist memorial stone.


We had lunch at Pret a Manger.  (I didn't understand exactly
what Bill was saying when he suggested this place so I didn't realize
until later that we had eaten at what is the very latest in chic!) "Now,"
said Bill, "I'll take you to the very best coffee place in the city. It's in
Chinatown." "You don't drink coffee, so how would you know where the
best coffee is?" I asked.  "Billy drinks coffee and, believe me, he knows
what is the best place for coffee.  Trust me ... Billy knows."  We passed
the above exotic edifice on our way to the city's best coffee.
There it was, around a corner, with a distinctively hung sign.

The barista was handsome and said it was
okay to take his picture.  Too bad it came out fuzzy.
He created this amazing frothed design on my latte.  
After coffee, my legs rested, we headed for the National Portrait
Gallery to see the exhibit called "Poetic Likeness - Modern American Poets" --
 something which, if I didn't also get to see, I was going to die twice in one day.
Here, standing before a photograph of Sylvia Plath, I'm trying to
express the puzzlement, even to myself, of having spent so much
of my life obsessed with her life and her poems.

And then I stood in homage before the portrait of Stanley Kunitz,
my new favorite poet, whom I admire and enjoy without obsessment,  And then
we got on the Metro, met Billy, and had dinner at a great Asian-Fusion
restaurant called Pauline's.  Then Bill & Billy drove me to Washington National
Airport. I got on the plane at 10PM, landed in Providence at 11PM, found
my pickup in Long Term Parking, scraped the ice off its windows, and
headed for Cape Cod.  I got home at 130AM.  I went to bed at 230AM,
got up at 630AM and went to work.  I'd had life in the fast lane for four days.
It was great.

Tuesday, March 5, 2013

RIP: Hugo Chavez - July 28, 1954 - March 5, 2013

Photo credit: Steve Pike in The New Yorker
Born into a poor family, he becomes an altar boy and he looks around.  He hates imperialism.  It must sting to notice that an outsider named Rockefeller owns three of the largest ranches in Venezuela.  He becomes a  revolutionary and eventually a leader.  He despised many of the foreign policies of my country.  His heart was in the right place even if he wasn't entirely successful at reaching good goals.  He loved the poor.  Perhaps he was better at ideas than the implementation of them -- not so great at governing.  Sometimes he opened his mouth before he engaged his brain; still I, for one, was tickled when at the podium of the United Nations in 2006, Hugo Chavez, referring to the fact that George W. Bush had stood in the same spot the day before, remarked, "The devil came right here ... and it still smells of sulfur today."

I don't know about the odor of sulfur but he was right about the evil impersonated in the unintelligent "is out children educated?" man who took the advice of really evil men and got my country into a mess which I don't feel confident we'll ever get out of. Decline and fall, and all of that.

(That United Nations incident gave me a thrill close to that I got when, in 1992, Sinead O'Connor tore up a picture of the pope on Saturday Night Live.  That incident, for its symbolism, made me jubilant!)

Here in Massachusetts there is a non-profit organization which provides heating oil to the needy at below-market prices.  This group asked all the major oil companies to help; the only one willing to participate was Citgo, a company nationalized by Chavez, and so owned by the people of Venezuela.

I have a soft spot in my heart for anyone who reaches out to help those who've been trodden down.  I'm glad, when my tank is close to empty, if there's a Citgo gas station ahead that I can pull into.