Requiem for a Crash Pad

This post belongs in the Things That Cannot Possibly Be Interesting To Others category, but for my own purposes I feel I should document this little bit of my history as it passes.

***

I was hired in this job on September 6, 2001, five days before the events of 9/11. This working life began with a couple days of orientation followed by six or eight weeks of classroom and simulator training. All new-hires--my class had 16 pilots--are put up in a hotel for our first couple months to give us time to settle in and to help us avoid distraction during the hectic training period. But eventually we needed to figure out our living situation vis-a-vis this new (and hopefully final) job. Airline pilots traditionally commute to work in pretty high proportion, but this is our choice; the company expects you to live in domicile, and if you choose otherwise it becomes your burden to accept. Over half of my class picked up their lives and moved to Louisville. 

This was an enticing option; I had at that point been an airline pilot for almost eight years, and I had commuted to work for all but a year of that. (My one-year exception to the commuting rule had been my first year at Air Wisconsin, when I lived in, and worked out of, Appleton. Having a 15-minute drive home at the end of a flying day was a luxury I could hardly wrap my head around. Alas, it was not to last; they closed the ATW base and moved us all to Chicago within a year of my being hired.) The idea of spending the rest of my flying career operating in and out of my home city was really attractive. But a pilot commute is pretty standard, and Susan was well underway with her own career--which was not, like mine, portable. (It's also a great thing that her family and lifelong friends are all right in ATW. If I'm going to be gone half my life, this is a great setup for her--and, by extension, for me.) 

So as I had done at my other airline jobs, I set up a crash pad apartment for use when in Louisville. Talk to any pilot for a commuter or regional airline and you'll get hours of lurid crash pad stories: grown adults--men, mostly--living in squalor and giving vent to their basest urges (like, say, not decorating or cleaning or washing their sheets, to say nothing of social activities). I'm lucky in that my crash pad experiences have been mostly tame and peaceful (though I did share a one bedroom apartment off the Blue Line Cumberland stop in Chicago for a while with 18 other pilots and flight attendants). When I got based in Escanaba, MI for my first airline job, I found a cute old little house that I shared with a couple other guys, while much of the rest of the domicile stayed at "the mansion" a couple miles out of town on Lake Michigan. I could write a book about the Animal House hijinx of that place. Alas, that's another post.

The rigors of training naturally cause classmates to pair up, and a group of four of us quickly became friends and began driving together between the hotel and the classroom, four late-thirties guys in my hulking 1981 Cadillac Seville. As new-hires, we were all slated to have reserve schedules, which meant we would all need a place to stay in town long-term. When it came to looking for a crash pad, the four of us naturally threw in together.

I still remember the process. Of the four of us, another guy and I came from the regional airlines. The other two guys were corporate and military, respectively. These two guys were not familiar with crash pads, and since we commuter dudes had been down this road many times we were given license to secure something for all. In what now seems a most unlikely bit of serendipity, this other commuter guy and I had almost identical visions of what to look for, and we quickly agreed on a location: the Bardstown Road area of Louisville was the city's nexus of creativity and diversity, a couple-mile stretch of restaurants and coffee shops and movie houses and bookstores and tattoo parlors and art galleries. And the area is adjacent to a huge Frederick Law Olmstead-designed park, Cherokee Park, which was good for daily walking / jogging. My kind of place.

I remember us setting aside a day for the search, and, local paper in hand, we headed out to the Twig and Leaf (still extant) and made phone calls over breakfast. It took two calls. Our second call inquired about a converted "carriage house" in the historic Cherokee Triangle section of town. Two bedrooms, $600 a month plus utilities. We called, she sounded friendly, and we arranged to meet in half an hour. When we met, she expressed skepticism that we fancy airline pilots would be happy with such… modest accommodations. The place was kind of a dump. The previous tenants, last in a long line of itinerant visitors--had been a couple college-age girls. My buddy and I took a quick look and said "It's perfect!" She was doubtful, but we insisted.

That was 12 years ago, late October of 2001. 

Junior pilots at most airlines bid reserve schedules, meaning that for our assigned days (generally week on / week off) we were not assigned specific trips in advance, but had to sit around waiting for the phone to ring with an assignment. On any given day we may fly and we may not. On these days (and for a specified number of hours) we had to be contactable by phone and be no more than 90 minutes from the airport ready to fly. Over the first three or four years we probably few something less than 50% of our assigned days, so we got lots of quality time together sitting around in the crash pad. We assembled a ratty collection of Goodwill furniture, an old TV, and various odds and ends that we collected from our houses to flesh out kitchenware and towels and so on. We bought an X-Box. We spent our free time walking in the park or along Bardstown Road, going to baseball games or tossing a baseball in the backyard, test driving cars, lurking in the nearby bookstores, using the local library's computers, going to movies, grilling out, fixing our old airport cars. And swapping flying stores from past and present days. Those were great times, and even seemed like it at the time. We cemented friendships and got to know Louisville, which is an interesting and multifaceted city. 

The inmate roster changed a bit over the years. We began with the four of us, and then one guy left to fly an airplane in the Iraq War; he was replaced by a woman who had helped my commuter buddy and me get hired here. She left when the military guy came back (no loss for her; she never took too kindly to the place, as one can imagine). But as we got more seniority we bid schedules that let us fly more and sit less. And the crash pad got less and less use. We brought in a couple more people, since nobody was using the place much and more bodies meant cheaper rent. But the place was crowded with four; having six would never work except by there never being more than two or three folks there at a time. Time passed, and our usage continued to dwindle. Finally, a couple guys pulled out and a couple others expressed interest in doing the same. (You can't really get here except by car, and as our old junkers would break down and get sent to the crusher we had to decide whether to shell out another couple grand for a different car or just spend that money on an occasional hotel room instead.)

We hung on in this tentative state for about 18 months, and now it's recently been decided that it's time to pull the plug. And I find I'm in mourning about this. Part of it is just simple nostalgia: a lot of water has passed under the bridge in these dozen years, and this is (to borrow Hemingway's phrase) The End Of Something. Though the place is really a dump, I've grown fond of it and comfortable with its quirks. It's hot in summer and cold in winter, but it doesn't leak. And it's in the best inner-city location imaginable, I'd say. Plus, our landlords--who live in the main house for which this carriage house was once the garage--are really first-rate people. We've become fast friends, the guy and me, not least because we're both drummers and movie buffs and we both despise what has become of political conservatism in this country. I could always count on Scotty to bring me back to sanity after a week-long trip with a bunch of Faux Noise devotees. I've lived in four different houses in Appleton in the time that I've been in this one crash pad, so in a sense it represents a continuity that even my main domestic living arrangements have not matched. I've had the same foam mattress (on the floor) with the same bedside clock radio and rickety floor lamp for a dozen years, while almost everything else in my life has changed. It's hard to just let this go. I've walked around this block or up and down these brick-paved alleys while talking to my wife on the phone hundreds of times. I've walked into Cherokee Park or Cave Hill Cemetery and around their meandering trails countless times.

Of course, I can drive my car over here (if I should have my car in Louisville) anytime and walk the streets and the park, but that's a whole different matter than living amongst these things. I feel a certain sense of ownership, of belonging, that I will lose when I drive away for the last time. And I just don't want to accept this; I have no desire to be done with it. It serves a practical function for me, allowing me to bid reserve to ensure getting specific days off. But more than this, it gives me a handhold on another place in the world. For one who loves to travel, this little rathole makes me feel invested in a place that is not my home. And my life feels richer for that--and will feel poorer and smaller for its loss.

But there it is. I will try to avoid bidding reserve--all the other guys at the crash pad manage to do it--and if I cannot I may have to look for a new crash pad. I could look into buying a small condo here (an option I actually find very attractive--maybe more so than staying here) or I could find an established crash pad that would take me in. But maybe not surprisingly I have little desire to spend MORE time with pilots than I already do. This is one of the reasons this place has been so remarkable: my roommates have been quite atypically congenial.

Life goes on. This will all sort itself out. But Monday afternoon I will pack the last of my junk in the car--that which I did not throw away or donate to neighbors or take to Goodwill--and turn in my key and leave this place.

It's a sad day.

Mostly disassembled, though it never looked much better than this. Microwave on top of the fridge, shelves groaning with junk; these pictures are about two weeks too late to catch the full glory.

There used to be three sets of cockpit posters on the walls--DC-8, MD-11, B-757.

Only the B-757 posters remain.

The upstairs layout has always been a bit of a mystery. Hallway with bathroom at the end and two bedrooms. But the doorways don't really make sense. Nobody seems to know the building's history.

One bedroom. Air mattresses, makeshift curtains, no storage (ergo, air conditioner sitting on the floor until summertime).

Other bedroom. Two dressers just departed for the neighbor's. We pulled the louvered closet door off and put it over the narrow opening coming into the room (far too narrow for any normal door). Awkward to open and close, it managed to keep the air conditioning in reasonably well.

Shenzhen

(Hotel room view.)

This has been my first proper layover in Shenzhen, China. I flew through here a few months back on a commercial flight, but was picked up at the airport and spirited across the border to Hong Kong to lay over there. So I didn't see much. This trip laid over for 40 hours, which gave two full daylight cycles to explore.

Shenzhen is a relatively new destination for my airline. As I understand it, we long planned to operate here but time was needed to build a large facility at the Shenzhen airport. And the airport itself has been undergoing a massive, China-style upgrade with a two-mile-long runway added (built out in the water on entirely created land, a la Hong Kong) and a new gargantuan terminal building (still in process). So while the company waited for this work to be done we operated in and out of Guangzhou, which is about 70 miles or so to the North of Shenzhen. I had numerous layovers there and came to have an affection for the place; I was sad to see it go as a layover, but I also understood we were swapping one Chinese megatropolis for another, and a nearby one at that. And to look at a map, there hardly seems to be any real line of demarcation between Guangzhou and the massive belts of population that surround it in every direction, or between Shenzhen and same. It's all very nearly one continuous supermassive city--something I've noted before on the rare daylight flight into Guangzhou when one can see through the thick smog. (By contrast, the separation between Shenzhen and Hong Kong--which is closely adjacent to it--is much more complete due to some mountainous terrain.)

Looking at Wikipedia, it seems that there's not much to choose population-wise between Guangzhou (12.7 million, making it China's third largest city) and Shenzhen (10.4 million); both are huge, dense places. And more germane for our purposes, they're both part of the huge manufacturing sector of Southeastern China, the place where everything we use in America and elsewhere in the world is made. This is, of course, why an American shipping company has a big presence here.

I love exploring a new place (something I wrote about recently with another new Chinese city to me, Chengdu). A map gives you a general introduction, but these cities are typically quite old and there's often no standard grid. So a map only gets you so far and you don't really know what navigation is like until you see things firsthand. Shenzhen in its current form is a newer place, having been designated a Special Economic Zone by the Chinese government in 1979 due to its proximity to Hong Kong (always the region's economic and shipping powerhouse). So much of the roadways and architecture seem new and expensive. And true to form, there is massive construction going on here almost everywhere. Construction cranes and bare concrete buildings are in every vista, though I understand that a good many of these sites are idle due to the economic slowdown. Still, I saw lots of construction work underway on my wanderings.

We arrived from Sydney about 2:AM on Monday morning and went directly to the hotel to sleep. We stay here at the J.W. Marriott, which has to rank (along with the Fairmont in Dubai) as the swankiest hotel I've ever seen. We stay at some really swell places internationally (more for security than for any kind of status reasons, I think--a good hotel is a simple way to guarantee that we're safe and well-looked-after in a foreign place; this places less pressure on our Crew Planning staff), but this place takes the prize. Marble and tigerwood everything, power shades and curtains, all-glass bathroom. And a staff that seems practically ready to bear your children. Very, very nice.

This series of flights involved training for a new captain, so for legality reasons (which we needn't go into) I was called in to serve as a second co-pilot. And of the four of us, I was the only one who hadn't been here before. So a plan was formulated for us all to hit the shopping hot spots after some rest, and we dutifully met in the lobby at 10:AM and took a cab about 15 miles to an immense shopping mall down near Hong Kong. In Shanghai there is a favorite shopping spot for airline crews called "The 580 Market," and this mall in Shenzhen has come to be called the "Super 580" as it carries the same kinds of stuff but is about five times the size.

Lest I sound irredeemably snotty, I'm truly grateful that the other crewmembers were willing to show me the sights. But this kind of exploration is maybe best done alone or with a single other person, as everybody is just slowed down by having to accommodate the whims--however minor--of the others in the party. So this was fun, but maybe more valuable for giving a sense of what one might want to come back and look over solo. After a couple hours of shopping, we took another cab back to the hotel (after a bizarre incident where a homeless person reached through the front window and grabbed the captain's soft drink bottle and refused to let go of it without some force being applied) to drop off our stuff (movies for me, purses for another guy). Then the captain and I headed out on foot for a huge electronics part of town some four miles distant. We walked between raindrops for the 75-80 minutes it took us to get there, navigating via an oversized map with very little English on it--the hotel concierge had circled a couple areas of interest and we tried to find our way to these. The captain had been to this electronics area a couple times before, but never on foot. So we had to kind of feel our way.

But these are the kinds of things that help you to get a feel for a place. The map says go from HERE to HERE via THESE STREETS, but the reality doesn't really work out that way. What you might be able to do with a car is impossible on foot. Walkways are variable and they don't necessarily follow the roads on the map. Plus, straight lines are almost never really straight, and with the meandering paths and under- and over-passes it's easy to get turned around (as I discovered again today). We would occasionally pass a subway station, and this told us we were basically on-course (we could have taken the train, but, valuable as that is, it doesn't really help one to get to know a place nor do you get any exercise that way). Due to the much heavier rainfall after we were done shopping, we did take the train back to the hotel later that night.

But the electronics markets. I had been told to expect to be wowed, but I wasn't sure what to expect. I had seen an electronics part of town in Guangzhou and kind of thought it would be like that. And it was, but on steroids. This electronics shopping area of Guangzhou was already quite unlike anything I had seen in the US (or elsewhere), being a couple blocks in every direction and made up of several densely-packed mid-sized malls, each building kind of specializing on a particular range of products: computers here, audio equipment there, cameras here, cell phones and tablets there, etc. The electronics area in Shenzhen was like that, but was really a whole city unto itself--the main drag was about the size of Appleton's downtown district, but with many more skyscrapers. Electronics were mixed in with clothing and other things and the whole area was considerably more extensive than what I had seen in Guangzhou or Shanghai. The region was much newer than the Guangzhou shopping district, and seemed maybe two or three times the size. 

Our visit was mostly a quick scouting mission--the other guy was looking for a cover for his old iPod which, surprisingly, no one had--and after looking through two or three of the zillion malls we caught a train back to the hotel and called it a day.

Today I was on my own, and I again walked to the electronics area. But this time I spend two or three hours looking around the area and then walked back via a slightly different route. And here's the main thing one walks away from after this: there are a vast number of people here making a basic free-market living on the periphery of the smart phone and tablet industries. It's hard to wrap your head around the size and scale of these marketplaces, and so many of them--hundreds of booths per floor, many floors per mall, mall after mall for blocks--are engaged in selling phones and tablets and cords and covers and headphones and screen protectors for them. Literally thousands of tiny booths engaged in selling slight variants of the same things. I've seen the same stuff in the other Chinese cities I've visited--Hong Kong and Guangzhou and Shanghai and Taipei and Chengdu--but there's just so much more of it here. I noticed in Chengdu that there were many more booths than there seemed to be customers for them, and I had to conclude that each booth also has an online presence; and so must it be here, though the malls were packed when I went through them (well, many of them). The booths themselves are varied, of course, but many of them are piled floor-to-ceiling in willy-nilly fashion with inventory, and quite a few of them specialize in particular brands or models of phone or tablet--not just selling that particular brand or model, but even specializing in the accessories for just a couple brands or models. Lots of vendors for Apple accessories, of course--signs for "iPhone 5" are literally everywhere--but also Samsung and LG and Sony and others. 

And here's another difference from what I'm used to seeing in, say, Guangzhou: there are clearly lots of people here who are repairing older phones and / or recycling the components. One of the pilots on this trip said that on a previous trip he brought over an older iPhone with a bum power switch and they repaired it on the spot for about $15 (after trying to buy the older model from him. He eventually brought two old iPhones to them and they took them off his hands at a fair price). I've seen computer malls elsewhere where one can buy every little component and assemble a machine from scratch, but here they have the same thing but devoted to phones and tablets. Booth after booth with, say, individual iPhone components--screens, for example, but in colors never offered by Apple. LED lights--there's a whole mall devoted to LEDs--and individual electronic components in huge rolls. Again, with each booth kind of specializing in a product or an aspect of a product, and all of them employing two or three or five young folks. You have to wonder at the specialization of knowledge that a person would need to have to run a booth among hundreds of others selling obscure electronic components--stuff that on its own seems of virtually no value whatsoever. In the dumpier shopping centers that surround the core of high-profile malls one sees more and more of the components and less and less of the finished products. Eventually one comes to booths with just individual components, and workers are busy squatting on the floor assembling cords or individual bits for resale, counting them out and putting them in binders or little ziploc bags. One wonders how these little packages of, say, iPhone home buttons or replacement screens find their way to a repair shop in Sacramento, and here's your answer. Very instructive. In these "component malls" there are fewer and fewer wandering customers, and almost no one tries to wrangle you into their booth. This work must be almost all online sales rather than sales to individuals.

I didn't buy anything today after yesterday's haul of a few movies and a couple phone cases for Susan and myself (I found these great aluminum bumpers for the iPhone 5 that I'd been looking for. Score!) but it was quite enough to just look around and get the lay of the land. I find that Shenzhen is not as walker-friendly as Guangzhou. The sidewalks here are better and there are more of them, but walking paths have almost all been compromised for needs of the huge highway system here. So walking is easy but actually walking to a specific place is bothersome, requiring quite a bit more distance traversed than one expects. And though I found a place that would sell me DVDs, they had less stock and much higher prices than my favorite vendors elsewhere. I hoped today would yield a good movie vendor, but alas I must keep looking.

But we can file that under First World Problems. For a day of wandering around a new and strange Chinese city, today was an unequivocal success. I look forward to my next visit, where I can pick up where I left off.

(Shopping area adjacent to border with Hong Kong.)

(Another new Chinese subway. Busy but clean and quiet.)

(Lots of these tree-covered sidewalks in the Chinese cities I've seen. Nice.)

(Engrish. They'd get a much bigger laugh out of my butchery of Chinese.)

(Construction and amazing architecture everywhere.)

(Huge new Civic Center.)

(Temporary worker's housing. These are everywhere around the city, thousands of  little cubicles in hundreds of locations.)

(One of the electronics malls. A small section of one floor thereof.)

(Hard to see, but the woman has her son on top of the counter where he's having his lunch. Lots of folks with their kids at these workplaces.)

(Huge bundles of cords. Workers assembling things, presumably for shipping elsewhere.)

(An entire mall dedicated to LED lighting. A small section of one floor of the mall. It's immense.)

(Looking one way down the shopping street.)

(...and the other way. Cross-streets full of more shops head off for blocks in both directions.)

(A clothing district. Once outdoor, a canopy has been erected over the sidewalk to make an "indoor" mall.)

(Can't quite see it, but this booth has a stack of DVD burners and thousands of blank DVDs. This is presumably where the copied movies I buy come from.)

(Chinese bicycle fetish, part #5371. There's a bike under that styrofoam!)

(A palm tree on every fourth floor.)

(The civic center from a bit further away.)

The Enemy of My Enemy...

My latest down-time project has been an ongoing survey of the Showtime series Dexter.

I watched the first two seasons years ago, but I read something the other day that reminded me that the series might be worth watching. It's been long enough that I felt I should refresh myself before moving onto the unseen episodes, so I re-watched the first two seasons again and have continued on, now up to Season 5 (season 8 is currently filming).

I've dived into several TV series over the years only to have my interest flag after a season or two (Weeds, Rome, The Tudors--the exception to this rule has been the original Law and Order; I seem never to tire of that). Maybe this is because there are a limited number of variations one can make on a given theme. The last time I watched Dexter I filled up on the plot points that have to accompany this kind of story--the tensions, the near-misses, the twists and turns. But I'd forgotten how delicious it is. The essential concept--a bad guy you root for--isn't especially new, but for the most part it's well-written and -acted and otherwise skillfully done. The writing is terse and often darkly funny, and the core characters are quite magnetic.

For the uninitiated, Michael C. Hall plays Dexter Morgan, a blood-spatter analyst for the Homicide Division of the Miami Metro Police Department. He's very good at his job, thanks to a sharply analytical mind and a vivid imagination that enables him to put himself inside the heads of the perpetrators. He can do this because--the main detail that everyone knows--Dexter is a serial killer in his free time. This could be the most horrific subject matter possible, but the details, however improbable, make the idea... acceptable. Dexter's deceased father was a cop, and he recognized early on that his son was improperly wired, as it were. So the father basically taught Dexter how to give vent to his antisocial urges in a way that will keep him out of prison and that provides a net benefit to society. So Dexter lives a more or less normal life and his "hobby" is only exercised on... bad people. It's this delicious sense of vigilante justice that makes the premise palatable--even (dare I say it?) satisfying.

And the story is told with a dollop of humor. Dexter's normal-seeming daily interactions are often served up with a voiceover of his darkly comic twisted interior monolog, and a couple of his workmates provide comedy relief. His younger sister is a junior detective on the police force, a passionate and good-hearted kid with an incredibly foul mouth and a thin skin. He shares lab work with forensics investigator Vince Masuka, an über-nerd with a gaping social skills deficit and a penchant for saying scatalogical or wildly-inappropriate sexual things at precisely the wrong moment. The rest of the office is more typical cop fare. Detective Angel Batista is another good-hearted cop trying to navigate life's turbulent waters, and the office is overseen by Lieutenant Maria LaGuerta, a competent cop in a tough job.

Pitted against these "good guys" is an array of criminals who are dispatched--some legally, some otherwise. And there's always someone on the police force itself who just gets a bad vibe from Dexter--despite his sister's fierce protection--and this keeps the heat on Dexter to some degree.

Maybe watching them in short order this way, this immersion, makes everything seem more compelling than it would be with some space. But I find myself daydreaming about the characters as though they were real people. That's kind of disturbing in the case of Dexter himself.

And I can't help thinking about the mechanisms for writing an ongoing story where we root for the bad guy. For eight continuous seasons. Part of it involves making the bad guy as sympathetic as possible; Dexter's voiceovers tell us how deranged he is, but he often seems the smartest guy in the room, and he often manages to imitate sympathetic human behavior better than those who supposedly feel these things for real. Another part of this like-the-bad-guy formula involves making his victims really odious so that we're not unhappy to see them go--our sense of justice is satisfied this way, and our natural dread reaction is kept at bay. Once these lubricants have seeped in and eased the resistance, we find ourselves pulling for, well, the serial killer. It's especially delicious to see Dexter in a dangerous situation where a normal person would be shitting their pants with fear--fearing their own death or some such; but Dexter knows that no one arrayed against him really poses much of a challenge. The character is given extraordinary talents in stealth and jiu-jitsu, and his easy dispatch of people who are targeting him is, well, very satisfying.

But good drama naturally hinges on conflict, and it's not all smooth sailing for Dexter. The series goes from one near-miss to another, typically with someone we've come to care about hanging in the balance. It's often Dexter himself, but not always. And I think it's this tension that I get filled up with eventually. There is typically some resolution in each episode, but the underlying tension of a serial killer hiding in plain sight never abates fully. And I can see having a limited appetite for that, no matter how brilliantly presented.

I have Seasons 1-6 on hand, and Season 7 is available on disc now. We'll see if I make it to the end.

Why Does It Sound That Way?

Of course, now that the music blog is dead I'm inspired to write about music. (Perfect way to guarantee continued anonymity.) The domain name for TheToneBigot.com has expired, though the site remains. But I expect at some point I'll go there and the link will no longer work. Anyway.

***

Guilmant: Complete Organ Sonatas
MDG Dabringhaus & Grimm MDG 316 0340-2
Ben Van Oosten at St. Ouen, Rouen


Alexandre Guilmant (1837-1911) was a prolific composer for the organ as well as a teacher and virtuoso performer. He held the titular organist's chair at Trinité in Paris for 30 years (the same chair held 30 years later by Olivier Messiaen) and taught organ at the Conservatoire. These eight Sonatas are really a collection of multi-movement suites very much along the lines of what Vierne and Widor would later call Organ Symphonies--and what César Franck experimented with in his single-movement Grand Piéce Symphonique. The harmonic language is firmly tonal and reminiscent of Franck (who was only 15 years Guilmant's senior). Melodies are strong (though Franck is a tough act to follow in this regard) and Guilmant shows a masterly sense of how to make the organ sound and to work its resources.

I'm familiar with Ben Van Oosten, having his complete cycle of Widor symphonies. I see he has an extensive catalog of recordings, including the complete works of Marcel Dupré in 12 volumes (among other things). After his initial training in the Netherlands, he came to Paris to study with Andre Isoir and Daniel Roth. He has a superb feel for this French repertoire and his performances here are really excellent, feeling and technically perfect. His tempi are stately without dragging in any way, and he rises to the grandeur of the pieces in most convincing fashion. This instrument is said to be difficult to record, as the acoustic is vast and plays havoc with one's attempts to capture the "real" instrument. But MDG has done their usual fine work, and the disc is a sonic delight. Happily recommended.

***

Much as I appreciate the repertoire and its presentation, the real star for me is this magnificent organ. Built by Aristide Cavaillé-Coll in 1890, the organ at the Cathedral of St. Ouen in Rouen is a singularity, a true masterpiece. It was Cavaillé-Coll's last instrument, its dedication recital, by Widor, occurring a year after his death. Despite rebuildings in 1941 and 1955, the organ exists virtually in its original state and it lives in a space that is tailor-made for organ music--indeed, St. Ouen is no longer used as a church, but rather exists as an art space, a museum to gothic architecture, and concert hall (the best possible use of a place like this).

This instrument in St. Ouen is typically cited along with that in St. Sulpice in Paris (1862) as being the greatest works of probably the world's greatest organ builder. Cavaillé-Coll built magnificent instruments for many of Paris's great churches (most of which are now quite altered and all of which have their strengths) but these two are large instruments in expansive acoustics, and both exist in something close to their original states (his famous organ for Notre Dame in Paris has been extensively altered, though it remains an impressive musical instrument).

I can't field this acclaim without feeling, nestled like a Russian doll, the further question of what makes an organ great. I've harped on these themes before, I know, but listening to this instrument in St. Ouen raises fundamental questions about how organ sound works, about what an organ is supposed to sound like and how this sound relates to historical models and existing repertoire. There are no absolute answers to these questions, of course, only established practices. The pipe organ is an intrinsically conservative instrument, with a huge and historic body of music composed for it which any new instrument must accommodate, and this simple fact makes innovation difficult or at least slow-moving. Innovative present-day builders (I think of the American firm C.B. Fisk, for example) must make their mark by doing the expected things with excellence while introducing innovations at a measured pace.

Recent innovations in organ design (setting aside the growth of electronic sound production in the organ world) have been more technological than sonic: taking big concert hall organs as representative of the state of the art, most now feature a mechanical console and a second, flexible console that connects to the instrument electronically; most now have a recording system that allows performances to be captured and recreated in minute detail; most now have computerized control of the pistons which allow for large-scale changes in registration and setting. But sonically, a large modern organ must pay homage to what has come before it, to allow the instrument to do justice to Bach and Buxtehude, to de Grigny and Clerambault, to Franck and Widor and Vierne and Messiaen, to Sowerby and Herbert Howells, and to allow new composers the flexibility and versatility to venture out in new directions.

But when we listen to the great organs of history we are often hearing something quite new. I think of Cavaillé-Coll in this, naturally--the brilliant compositional Parisian school that I so adore arising from César Franck and continuing onto the present day literally owes its very existence to Cavaillé-Coll's vision and work--but also of America's Ernest M. Skinner. Neither builder was re-inventing what an organ was or the fundamentals of how it was supposed to sound, exactly, and yet both created a distinctive sonic world that changed the instruments that followed. They weren't trying necessarily to perfect somebody else's vision of what an organ was supposed to be; they had their own ideas and they pushed them out into the world. And in this way they carved out a niche for themselves in this long history of folks building these complicated machines.

When I listen to the organ at St. Ouen, I'm always a little shocked by how brash the sound is. It strikes me every time, even when I know it's coming. The organ is large, but not excessively so--64 stops and 84 ranks over four manuals and pedal (the organ at St. Sulpice is considerably larger--102/137 on five manuals and pedal), but it speaks into an immense, reverberant space. It has beautiful and varied solo stops, as expected. But given that organ sound is as much felt as heard, and that a certain volume is expected as a component of the awe the organ inspires in people, it's the task of filling so large a space that seems so challenging. Especially in 1890. So how does he do it?

This, to me, is his secret: he is not afraid to use rather ugly sounds in pursuit of a beautiful and awesome whole. Specifically, the big pedal reeds--and the upperwork needed to balance them--are really shocking in their harshness. French organ reeds are known for being brash and aggressive, but the big pedal reeds on this instrument are actually violent. Played on their own, I can't imagine most people thinking "that's a great, musical sound for an organ." It's an assault on the ears! Likewise the mixtures and other high-pitched stops that provide the organ's harmonic development: these are shrill, almost painful sounds on their own. But like Einstein looking at the world and realizing that reality is really something other than what it appears to be, Cavaillé-Coll was able to see that the roughness of these sounds would be smoothed out a bit by the rest of the tutti, and their edges would give shape and character to the sound overall. It's an odd concept to me; I'm used to thinking about non-solo registers as being good blending sounds, as being not terribly distinctive but useful for giving weight and body to the organ's massed sound. But here is one of the master builders giving non-solo registers an assertive, non-blending character, a character that intuition tells us will not play well with others. And yet here we are.

It's this violence that stays with me. The scale of the pedal reeds, especially the Bombarde 16' and Contre-Bombarde 32', seems absolutely immense, again almost to the point of producing non-musical sounds. I'd love to know the deliberations on how the scale was arrived at. In any organ the 16' and 32' pedal reeds will likely sound a bit anti-social on their own, but in this case the effect is extreme. For all the power of a big organ like the Skinner at Woolsey Hall or the Fisk organ at the Meyerson Symphony Center in Dallas, I've never heard volume and power made in the way this Cavaillé-Coll does it.

It's the rarity of this approach, and this instrument's inclusion on every list of the world's greatest organs convinces me these two things are related. I feel now like I must prioritize getting to see the instrument in peson.

Lots O' Blood and Bad Teeth

I've never been exactly sure about Quentin Tarantino. I remember squirming through Reservoir Dogs and thinking it brilliant but uncomfortable to watch--not a film I care to revisit; and then Pulp Fiction exploded onto the film world, similarly graphic and violent, but this time with a larger dollop of dark humor. Pulp Fiction hit the screens at about the same moment as I was beginning to pay closer attention to movies, and so it holds a special spot for me. Tarantino's scripts for both these films were amazing, endlessly quotable, and his style mashed unexpected things together, like humor and violence or using oldies soundtracks in the present day.

But where Reservoir Dogs seemed a pure nugget of that style, each successive film has seemed to me more and more self-conscious in its effort to recapture that signature style to the point of self-parody and beyond until even the self-parody becomes a stylistic element. This doesn't need to be a negative thing, but as I say it leaves me unsure.

With the Kill Bill duo he seemed to look back unashamedly at his favorite childhood film genres and consciously add a new entry to their numbers. And again the style is very backward-looking, a present-day story told with a '70s style. But his results are always engaging and entertaining.

His last couple films are kind of in their own history-revisited pigeonhole. 2009's Inglourious Basterds glories in a fantastic re-imagining of historical events, with the entire Nazi leadership corralled into a movie theatre where they are incinerated amid satanic laughter and a swell of '70s chicka-wocka guitar riffs. Now we have (I'm a couple months late to the party, I know) another in this same righting-history's-wrongs-in-a-frenzy-of-retributive-violence genre: Django Unchained.

Jamie Foxx plays Django, a slave in pre-Civil-War Texas who is enlisted by the bounty hunter Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz) to help bring in the men Dr. Schultz is after. Dr. Schultz has never seen the men, while Django has and can identify them; and in exchange for his help Django is given his freedom. The duo turn out to be so good at bounty-hunting that they form a partnership and quickly amass a fortune. This fortune is then used to find and rescue and free Django's wife (Kerry Washington), who was separated from him when she was sold to a different master. That master turns out to be Calvin Candy (Leonardo diCaprio), a particularly unsavory character in a land of filthy, unsavory characters. This all occurs with an abundance of style and, well, little attention to historical fact.

And that's just fine. Few of us probably have much stomach for three hours of the gruesome truths of slavery, though Tarantino's portrayal of the South and its "institution" make any violence visited upon the region a welcome turn of events. Django Unchained is a comic book, a gruesome fairy tale populated with archetypical characters at all the key posts. But in typical Tarantino fashion, those key posts are written with flair and humor, and the protagonists cut an atypical swath through the landscape.

The story flags a bit in the middle, and doesn't quite seem to know how to end, or rather how to get to its obvious ending. But it eventually gets there, and it's mostly engaging and entertaining to watch. Oh, yeah, and there's lots of blood and comic-book violence if that's your thing.

Christoph Waltz and Jamie Foxx and Leo diCaprio and Samuel L. Jackson are all fun to watch, and the fantasy is as mostly delicious as it is unrealistic. Recommended if Tarantino's style is your thing.

Grade: B+

End Of A Blog

No, not this one. Though I suppose that time will come (insert crickets chirping here...)

***

Another year passes, and with it comes the notice that the domain name for my music blog, The Tone Bigot, will expire unless I pay to extend it. It's only $10 (or it was), but there's been almost no activity on that site now for a couple years--and not much before that. And now the domain extension has become more involved. So I think that little experiment has reached its end.

I began The Tone Bigot (originally Ultrasonic Scattershot) in 2007 as a safe place to take my occasional posts about musical topics from the Journal Wunelle and concentrate them in an indigenous setting. This promised to reduce by one the myriad sins against the Rules of Good Blogging that I committed on the JW. From the outset I have failed to keep to a single topic (or a small number of topics), thus making it less likely that anyone stopping by will stumble upon a subject they care about.

And I had vague hopes that by focusing on a single subject matter in a single place I might garner an audience of similarly-oriented folks. But I learned after a few posts that I simply don't have a deep enough background to sustain an ongoing discussion about more than a couple topics. The rest just represent interests of mine, and I can get only so far by saying "I like Mahler." And the topics that I do know a bit about----pipe organ design and construction, piano design, drumming--are themselves too disparate and / or esoteric to find much of an audience.

And so it ends quietly. Not wanting to lose the writings, I've merged the 100 or so posts from The Tone Bigot back into the JW, so the posts are still there and available, if harder to find. With things quiet lately on the JW, the occasional music post has no one to scare off. Maybe this is a good balance after all.

Anyway, life goes on.

Don't Feed The Gods

Tonight's film, Ang Lee's Life of Pi.

Based on a novel by Canadian author Yann Martel, Life of Pi recounts the life of an Indian boy, Pi Patel. Specifically, we are immersed in a seminal central event of Pi's teen years, an event which changes everything that follows for the character. We first meet Pi in the present day as a middle-aged man living in Montreal. He is approached by a writer who is looking for a story to write about, the writer having been steered by a mutual friend to Pi and his remarkable tale. After preliminaries, the two men sit down and Pi tells the long story.

This tale begins with a quick summary of the boy's life up to his 16th year. Pi's parents run a zoo in Puducherry in Southern India, and when Pi reaches his teen years the political situation in India becomes unstable. The parents decide to uproot and move the family to Canada to give Pi and his older brother a chance at a normal life. The zoo's animals are sold and the fees used to pay for the family's transport across the Pacific on a cargo ship. Many of the animals are transported on the same vessel.

But the ship encounters a terrible storm and sinks (whether because of the storm or not is never really determined), and the boy is the sole survivor. He ends up in a lifeboat with several escaped zoo animals. Soon enough it's just the boy and a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. (Yes, not Sparky or Simba or Nails, but... Richard Parker. this is due to a paperwork mixup, we are told.) We know, of course, that Pi survives to tell us this story, but what follows the shipwreck is a magnetic and unexpected tapestry of visual spectacle and unbridled fantasy and mythology and tribulation.

Pi's motivation in reliving these events is to assist the writer in "finding god," despite Pi himself adhering to several religions with seemingly equal fervor. I suspect this element, which felt a bit non-sequitur to me, will resonate or not depending on the viewer's worldview. But from my view this element did not stand in the way of the story, and it provides some glue for the ending (which is not to say that it makes sense exactly).

I have not read the novel on which the film is based, but it sounds like an almost unimaginable candidate for making a film (like The English Patient, I would think), but once again Ang Lee shows an almost superhuman ability to translate a complicated mental image into a compelling filmic vision. The film's visuals wander from straightforward to whimsical to dreamscape, and we are bathed in a luxurious visual world throughout.

Most of the story is devoted to the stretch of days after the shipwreck, and these events are extraordinary enough to make one wonder how much of the preceding material was necessary. It helps us to get to know Pi, his family, and his relationships to them, but I suppose the goal is to tell the larger story of who the boy was and how that starting material and the events that unfold lead us to the man Pi is today. But the shipwreck and aftermath take up the bulk of the film, and the rest seems maybe a touch appended. Three or four actors play Pi over the various ages, but two actors get the most screen time. The present-day Pi (Irrfan Khan) and the 16-year-old Pi (Suraj Sharma) are both really fabulous, as are the actors playing the small roles of Pi's family. The Bengal tiger, who should be listed as a co-star, is pretty convincing, though at times the CG seems evident (but how else to tell a story like this?). It feels like Lee's ambition was not to find worthy actors or even the mastery of the CG tiger, but to bring such a visual treat to the screen at all. Highest marks for this.

There's a twist at the end that I won't give away, but one leaves the theater chewing on lots of stuff. It's a film that would benefit from repeated showings (like his Lust, Caution, another Ang Lee film I loved). The story is too "spiritual" for my tastes, but he keeps most gobbledygook at arm's length, and it's a real treat to watch. The group of us had much to discuss afterward. As a work of art it seems a rousing success. And for its improbability and the virtuoso display of storytelling it moves to my high spot for the year's Best Picture nominees.

Grade: A

Hollywood Magic

I didn't see nearly the number of 2012's Best Picture Oscar nominees as I typically do. I saw and reviewed Steven Spielberg's Lincoln shortly after that released in theaters, but didn't get to see several others of the interesting candidates before they were gone from theaters. But wait long enough and stuff becomes available streaming or on DVD, and so we sat down last week to watch the Best Picture winner, Ben Affleck's Argo.

As everyone probably knows by now, Argo tells the story of the so-called Canadian Caper, a ruse whereby six American diplomats are hidden and then spirited out of Tehran during the hostage crisis of 1979. The film begins with a few minutes of voice-over summarizing the history of Iran and our meddling in the country's internal affairs. This meddling leads to the overthrow of the legitimate, mostly-secular government of Iran in 1941 and the ascension of our handpicked successor, the Shah. When the Shah is deposed by a popular uprising in 1979, the Muslim cleric Ayatollah Khomeini ascends to power and the country's descent into religious madness begins. After his overthrow (apparently for too much secularizing and modernizing), the Shah, now ill with cancer, goes to the US for medical treatment, and when the US government refuses to extradite him back to Iran to face charges the country responds violently. The American Embassy is overrun and smashed by an immense, spiral-eyed mob, and the diplomats inside barely escape and go into hiding in the Canadian Ambassador's residence.

This is the setup, and the bulk of the film covers their attempt to get out of the country in one piece--this is very clearly not what life in the diplomatic corps was expected to deliver. Ben Affleck (who directed the film) plays Tony Mendez, a CIA operative specializing in undercover escape work. Mendez is in on the State Department briefings as various bad-to-worse options for rescuing the hiding diplomats are debated. And his solution, the solution eventually agreed to (though without any enthusiasm by State), is for Mendez to fly over to Tehran and coordinate the group of them impersonating a film crew scouting locations for a big Hollywood blockbuster film. Fake names, false documents, the works.

It's a fertile enough concept, and the film is brilliantly cast and directed. Ben Affleck's directing style always reminds me of Clint Eastwood's. Argo is mostly quiet and self-assured and keeps its focus entirely on the story without distraction and gimmickry.

It's really a high-tension setup, and we are on the edge of our seats for the whole two hour ride. There are moments of dark humor, but not like a Coen Brothers film where (drama or comedy, it doesn't seem to matter to them) dark and light are intermixed in almost equal measure. The opening scene of the embassy being overrun and the sheer, destructive violence of the mob are visceral and terrifying. And the ambassadors seem almost continuously on the verge of being found out, an event which we feel certain would be brutal and horrifying.

And I wanted to say that it's the skill of the film--and its director--that this tension is not overplayed or steroid-infused; it's simply the drama intrinsic to the elements in play. But afterward I was a little frazzled and exhausted by what felt like two hours' of balancing on the spire of the Empire State Building. All this tension is effective and deftly done, but to my mind it's just too much and too much of a single thing. I felt further reservation after the fact by my research into the historical events on which the story is supposed to be based. I certainly don't want to insist on documentary-like accuracy in telling a historically-based story; this is, after all, an entertainment. But so many of the details that keep us with our fingers in front of our eyes for the duration of the film turn out to be Hollywood inventions. And in this case I feel put off that the drama of the actual story was deemed insufficient to hold audiences' attention. Most of the near-misses and razor-thin close calls, as Wikipedia tells it, "did not happen" as depicted.

I can quite sympathize with the viewer who finds no validity in this criticism. So much of our film entertainment has little or no link to mundane reality (and why should it?). But this story plunks itself amid tumultuous historical events and is essentially trying to portray real things--why else would we bother to match the looks of the actors almost identically to the real ambassadors? And so I find myself taking a wee bit of umbrage: either tell a compelling story and don't worry about historical events (like Tarantino in Inglourious Basterds) or hew to the facts and educate us about a real and dramatic event from history.

And that's enough to keep it out of my top spot thus far. We have Ang Lee's Life Of Pi on the list upcoming, and I expect to see Django Unchained as soon as it's available on DVD. For now, Lincoln has my top spot for the year.

Grade: A-

A Final VSG Follow-Up

(Me at 280#)

I say "final" because I feel as though I've basically reached a stasis point and there will be little further to report on, at least as relates to bariatric surgery. (Of course, I will surely pipe up again if this proves wrong.)

(The posts about my deliberations leading to the surgery and the surgery itself can be found by following the link to the tag flabbergastery.)

As of today I'm just past seven months post-surgery. Everything has played out in my case exactly as I was told, without exception really. My experience with the surgery was just what I was told to expect. The recuperation and weeks immediately post-op were precisely as I was briefed. My return to normal life was right on schedule, and my medications were spot-on for the results I was trying to achieve. I had a couple slightly unpleasant experiences--exactly the experiences I was told to expect--as I learned to cope with my new limitations. Everything has played out right on schedule. I'm down now just shy of 100 lbs (my highest pre-surgery weight was 283, and my weight last Friday was 184). I have gone from a BMI of 41 ("morbidly obese") to a current figure of 27.2 (just slightly into the "overweight" category--normal BMI extends up to 25). I lost most of my weight in the first three months, and a bit more during the next two months. My weight for the last six weeks or so has been steady between 187 and 184. I expect to lose a few more pounds leading up to my 1-year anniversary, but am quite happy to stay here at 185. And given that I go up and down a bit from here, it's quite possible that my weight loss may be done. And that's just fine; 185 is a great weight for me, and one I never expected I would see in my life (I used to dream of some "miracle cure" that would let me get down to 200 lbs).

My scars from surgery are now almost invisible, and I feel at this point entirely normal on dietary matters. My brain seems to have adjusted to a new normal for meal size and food quantity--about 1/3 of what I used to eat--and I have no sense now of things being different than they were, even though everything has changed. This is just how I eat now--simple. As I expected, my food brain itself is not fundamentally altered; I still would eat Double Stuff Oreos or Peanut M&Ms 24/7 if I let myself, though the sleeve prevents me from indulging in very much of that stuff--or anything. I concentrate on protein (though not very hard), and the space left over for dessert is pretty small. That's the way it works. I have had a slight return of physical hunger, though--as before--most of my desire to eat is purely psychological. The sensation of being full has changed, and I now have new triggers for that feeling. Overeating is easier to achieve now, since it takes relatively little food to get there, and what used to be uncomfortable is now a slightly different, and *slightly* more unpleasant kind of uncomfortable. These sensations are all much more of a slight shift in "normal" than any kind of major change. In sum, this change has been easy and painless--and effective.

My buddy Tom had the same surgery as I about three weeks before mine. His results have mirrored and bettered my own. He's down a whopping 130 lbs now! These radical changes have inspired him to embark on a pretty vigorous exercise regimen, which of course further assists his weight loss. The paths opened up to, literally, the "new you" are varied and exciting. I think it's really fascinating that both he and I made it to our early 50s before realizing what it feels like to be a normal-sized person. (And how inspiring for the doctor and clinic workers to see so many of these new-life stories.)

I have purged every single scrap of clothing in my closet (except for socks) a couple times now. I went through a bunch of transitional sizes and have now been wearing the same stuff for a couple months. I've gone from a 44-46" waist to 34"s (and a couple of 33"s)--that's an entire foot off my waistline!--and shirts have gone from XXLs to M or L. I kept a couple favorite clothing items from my heaviest weight as a reminder, and these seem really shockingly large now. How quickly we adjust to a new reality. The idea of weighing myself down now with, say, 100 lbs of flour bags and going about my day is a really mortifying idea. Literally.

I get a lot of compliments now on how much better I look, but I'm very much aware that this is no great accomplishment of willpower or philosophy on my part--which is what people traditionally think about someone who has lost weight (that or illness). My great results are the result of a surgical procedure, not an act of will. But I think this desire to "conquer" our weight issues hearkens back to an older way of thinking about these problems--a way that doesn't get us anywhere. I spent a couple decades trying to "fix" myself, feeling wretched not only about how I looked and felt, but about what it is in my psychology that makes me look and feel this way. And all the while, like much of the rest of American society, I just got heavier and heavier, and looked and felt worse and worse. Enough of that.

For me, the VSG is simply about results. It's not a way to fix my fouled food brain (a subject we could explore in quite some detail); it's a tool employed to circumvent this maladjustment and bring a normal life within reach. And from where I stand it has worked brilliantly. The specter of morbid obesity affects every aspect of life--how I fit in cars and airplanes and theater seats, what I spend on food, how I fit in my clothes, how my joints feel, my love life, my self-image, every single thing. To anyone contemplating this step, I can only give encouragement. The people I know who have undergone this procedure have gotten, nearly to a person, the same results as I have. Bad experiences are pretty rare, and, near as I can tell, almost always accompany some other complicating factor (additional health problems going in, say). I join my fellow surgery mates in saying that I wish only that I had done this ten years ago. As it is, I feel 10 years younger (even if I have a wattle under my chin now; it's worth it).

(Me at 185#)