You're OK

Oh, no, not another quote from the title song of "Oklahoma!" Don't worry. The title of today's blog is a take on a book title from somewhere back in the era of helpful advice....I'm OK, You're OK.

I'm thinking about how the path to greatness begins with OK. It almost never begins with GREAT. With luck, it might begin with GOOD, but if greatness is the prize at the end of all the work, good is not usually something you achieve at the beginning.

It turns out that I am an expert on being no good at the beginning. When I was 18 or so, (OK, I'll fess up; when I was 20 or so), I thought that poetry was something that sounded like the verses we were trained to revere in high school, and I thought it was necessary to write sonnets, so when I noticed that all of what passed as "folk music" in the mid-sixties was pseudo-folk pop music, I composed a disgruntled sonnet that began:

Someone has fashioned an arid, barren plain
Where hordes of rhymesmiths forge false yesterday

I was right proud of the assonance in the first line, the aa sounds of arid and barren, and the way they struck the ear like small anvils in a forge. My pride increased when I noticed that I'd placed internal rhymes in the second line (hordes -- forge), and I nearly knighted myself over the repeated effs of forge and false.

Luckily for you, I can't remember offhand how that embarrassing beginning continued, and it is SO not worth the time to see if it is in my stash of saved garbage. I sent it to my high school English teacher, Reese J. Frescoln, Jr. He was tactful and kind in his note of reply, as I recall, stressing his happiness to have heard from me and saying very little about the sonnet.

About that time, perhaps a year later, I began to waste my free time writing pseudo-folk songs in the style of the day, which is to say, absurd on so many levels, yet so indicative of what might pass for "promise" on a bleak, dry day, where creative juices never flowed, but just formed dust bunnies.

I'd had it with singing covers of Bob Dylan tunes and Pete Seeger tunes and I decided to be a song writer at the lone coffeehouse in town, The Jawbone, an outreach program of the Lutheran Campus Ministry. So I wrote up a repertoire of love songs and topical songs and inflicted them on my peers.

Love songs had to include the phrase, "my love," I imagined, and there had to be some overt sensuality in the lyrics because Eric Andersen had changed the rules of the game with his "Come to my Bedside, My Darlin'."

I was sort of smart enough to realize that Andersen's line, "lay your body soft and close beside me/And drop your petticoat upon the floor" was horrible writing, as if "your body" were something disconnected from "you" and subject to being set down like a coverlet or shoe, but Andersen was BIG at the time, having written an even worse line in "take off your thirsty boots and stay for a while."

He was the one to beat, though, so I worked out a little musical hook that lay easily under my fingers and "wrote" a lyric that began like this...

Relax your mind and close your eyes and linger for a while,
And I will spin a thread of sound and it will be your smile,
And if you want to hear another song on my guitar,
Well, relax your mind, my love, I won't be far...
I'll save a song for you.

The highways of light are fading now to a gentle hue,
So let your spirit sail with me and I'll play you a dazzling view,
And you will feel your senses rise and float across the glen
To settle on the mornin' dew and then float back again.

It went on for a few more verses, and I can testify that this song did not turn out to be a "chick magnet." Nosir! It had most of the requisite veiled references to love, "morning dew" being a favorite of mine, but on any scale from OK to Great, this was "not OK." I fell into the same trap with "relax your mind," as if "your mind" were disembodied from "you." The remainder was earnest silliness.

This next perilous dive into the deeps of Metaphor was much admired by my friend Lynn, though not for the lyric. She smiled at the fetching little guitar hook I'd provided for it.

My love, my love, my lo-o-o-ove,
She greets me every morning with the dawn.
My love, my love, my lo-o-o-ove,
Her breath has made the sky no longer wan.

My love's a steady breeze of true devotion,
Blowing kisses in the sun from off her palm,
And I'm a lofty ship on the briney ocean,
Without her I'd be lost in a boundless calm.

I should have been jailed then and there for literary abuses, and I was still Not OK as a song writer.

In my senior year, inspired by a new knowledge of classical art songs and by a poem that began "Oh, death will find me long before I tire of watching you," I composed a one-verse song and recorded it at The Jawbone for an album that showcased all the student song writers.

Death will tire me.
Death will tire me long before I see your face again.
But everywhere will your swift shadow be:
Here your perfume in someone else's hair,
And here are lips like those in darkest night
That warned me not to share.

A little closer to OK, I think, but still struggling with overripe linguistic effects.

One rainy day two years later, in a state of angst, I wrote a song I called "Slowly Failing:"

Dark all day on the lonely side of town,
The light behind the clouds is slowly failing.
I will set my mind at peace before the night comes trickling down,
I'll provision all my thoughts and set them sailing.

The song never got beyond two verses, a rather tiny fleet to set sailing, and the persistent awkwardness in my style shines through unmistakably, though I like the feminine endings and the final metaphor. Not on the Map of OK yet and my sophomore year is at this point four years behind me.

Five years later I tried another, for my little girl:

One more night with the window wide open,
One more phrase of a song to recall,
All the sounds I could sing but a token
Of your bright spirit's rise and fall.

Ride a weathervane,
Ride a weathervane,
The wind, it will blow it,
I'll come if you call.

In my opinion, this one is on the map of OK.

Eighteen years later, with the sound of baby talk still in my mind, I wrote a song called "All The People," my daughter's way of requesting a repetition of the Humpty Dumpty rhyme. I worked out a tune that went round and round, postponing musical resolution, as if in suspended animation, and I put words together with an ear for elision, all syllables flowing together easily. My daughter was leaving to continue her education in Texas, prompting the line about "when they are leaving" near the end of the song. The year was 1991, and it's the end of my songwriting story. I'm very attached to this one, both music and verses, so whatever you think of it, this one and "Ride a Weathervane" are the peak of my abilities in a genre I was not meant to master, but where I made a little journey from Not OK into OK.

Someone's playing on a guitar,
Songs of long ago...
Swaying dancers seen from afar,
Round and round they go...
Gentle music over the lawn,
Rainbow, sunset, and sky.
I remember days that are gone,
Seen with a toddler's eye.

Sing me a ballad, sing me an air,
Sing me a girl with yellow hair,
Radiant hair, delightful to see,
Sing me the woman who married me.
Radiant hair, radiant eyes,
Sing me a ballad for all our lives.

Someone's playing on a guitar
All my bygone days...
Ocean water...rides in a car...
Rows of new-mown hay....
Conversation, people at ease,
Tying ribbons and bows...
Bedtime stories, all that we please,
Only Daddy knows.

Sing me a ballad, sing me an air,
Sing my family then and there.
All the people here tonight,
When they are sleepy, bid them good night.
All the people ever I'll know,
When they are leaving, let them go.

Sing me a ballad, sing me an air,
Sing me a daughter ever fair,
Sing me a boy who looks like me,
Sing me a woman happy with me,
All the people in my song,
May they be dancing all night long.

An Halucinatory Oratory

"An" is a pesky word. People are afraid of sounding natural or appearing uncouth, so they stick "An" in front of a word with a voiced H, such as "historian." The strict grammarians who taught me some of what I know stressed the importance of smooth elision. They said that "an" only belongs in front of an unvoiced H, such as one might hear in a Cockney accent....'istorian. Used in a sentence, 'e's come up i' the world, 'e's an 'istorian.

Actually, that's far-fetched, it's an honor to say.

I shouldn't, but I shudder when someone writes "an historian," but I don't pass a remark on the subject.

In honor of dear, misplaced Anne, I wish to report "an" halucinatory incident this morning while taking Lola the Poodle on her morning constitutional. I saw an white egret looking for breakfast at the well-stocked pond at Lewis Park, and, just beyond th' egret, I saw a fish bicycling fast in the opposite direction, but getting nowhere.

How this story turns out, I cannot say. Th' egret was 'appy to 'ave me snap a picture or two, as long as Lola and I kept our distance. So 'ere is the evidence, that I am not crazy.

The Storyteller and the Editor

Recently I finished reading a story that held my interest week after week, reading a half hour here, and hour or so there, until I got to the end. The book is Richard Russo's Bridge of Sighs. I don't intend to summarize the story here or to review the book. I like to read them for myself and make up my own mind, and I suspect you do, too.

This blog is about a sentence I found after I finished the book. "Nat Sobel has made every one of my books better, but he absolutely saved this one." Until I read that, I'd been wondering about the role of the editor in this book, and here it is...he improves what the author creates.

A year ago I performed an editorial service for a friend who had written an essay that no one would touch. I wanted to publish it because it was an interesting account of culture shock and compulsive reading as a therapy. What interested me in it wasn't coming through clearly, though, so I wrote back with some suggestions for reshaping the piece. My friend wrote back that I was the only person who had actually engaged his text, and he said he would work on it.

We went through this process of back-and-forth revision and critique a couple of times and he lost interest in further shaping of the piece. I think he didn't see the reader interest I saw in it, and so it wasn't worth the time to him that it was worth to me. Maybe he'll pick it up again some day and see what I saw in it.

Back to Bridge of Sighs now. What I absolutely loved about this book is the distinctive and consistent "voice" of the characters, particularly the central character, Lou C. Lynch, who has taken to writing a summary of his life as he approaches retirement. This is a relaxed, thoughtful voice, and the life is that of a person who lives in a small town that has been cursed by the toxins of the industries that kept it alive for generations.

Structually, the story Russo unfolds is complicated by shifts of focus and shifts of narrative voice. Lou C. Lynch tells his own story, first-person. At the end of Chapter 1, Lynch speaks of his boyhood friend, Bobby, who has been much on his mind of late.

The narrative voice of Lynch is replaced by an omnicient narrator in Chapter 3, when the scene shifts to Venice and the focus shifts to a man named Noonan, who we later surmise is Lynch's old friend, Bobby Marconi. We are in the dark, though, about the name Noonan.

I was drawn into this story as Lou C. Lynch unfolded the details of his childhood, of his father's and mother's natures, and of their relationship with the gritty secrets of the Marconi family. Late in the book, though, I began to notice passages, turns of phrase, that I thought belonged in a discarded draft. What I have to say about those passages is pure guesswork. I haven't contacted the miracle-worker, Nat Sobel, or the masterful yarn-spinner, Richard Russo, to confirm. This is what I think happened:

Russo delivered a mountain of typescript pages to his publisher, and Sobel spent many days in a very careful reading, making copious notes, just as I did last year with my friend's essay. Sobel prodded Russo to preserve and protect the integrity of that distinctive voice and tone of Lou C. Lynch, and to sharpen characters or scenes, and to cut passages that didn't really advance the story. Russo got back to work and sent revisions. Sobel sent more suggestions.

Meanwhile, time was running out at Alfred A. Knopf, publishers. Knopf wanted to release this blockbuster just after the start of school in 2007, when people are looking for something to read again or to buy for the Holidays. As the deadline approached, did Nat Sobel tire of the constant process of tuning the book? Did Richard Russo grow weary of the work? Or did they just run out of time?

What I noticed is that there was more than one "omniscient narrator" in the book, and that is a flaw. There are passages where the narrative voice resembles that of a guy making wisecracks with you in a tavern. There are other passages where the narrative voice is psychoanalyzing the book's characters. I thought I was reading the equivalent of notes Russo wrote to himself about what was going on in the mind of his characters. Given the quality of the first half of the book, this sense of "mission creep" for the impersonal narrative voice was unwelcome. I would gladly have put up with many more pages of the real thing rather than the fewer pages of this new voice.

Then there are small turns of phrase that hit the ear like lead. When seventeen-year-old Bobby Marconi moves into a vacant room above the drug store, it is a sorry, run-down place with a toilet and sink over on one wall, unenclosed, and when the toilet is flushed, the whole setup shakes and rattles "like an epileptic." In a book in which Lou Lynch has mounted a map of town and placed a black pin on the location of every death from an exotic form of cancer, the epilepsy metaphor is both unique and utterly out of place. It's the kind of writing one expects to see in college fiction-writing classes. It's amateur, just as Russo was an amateur at one time, and Nat Sobel no doubt would have red-lined it if time or energy had not run out on them. Nat would have also raised an eyebrow, I imagine, at the alarming similarity of the scene in which Noonan sees Sarah Lynch through the window of a departing train just as a wierd physical event wracks his body. It's too much like the movie death of Dr. Zhivago, so we're reminiscing instantly on the film careers of Omar Sharif and Julie Christie and the miraculous cleanliness of their clothing in that winter they spent in the abandoned house in the middle of nowhere, probably with no running water. Richard, what were you thinking???? But the clock ran out on Bridge of Sighs and it had to go to press, ready or not, and it was not...quite...ready. There is a finer book in there than got into print, and I highly recommend it, even so.

I mentioned this "editorial fatigue" to a writer the other day. He said it's common in the publishing world. Once a writer scores with a hit, the publishers are afraid to do serious editing any more for fear of deleting the magic. He named several best-selling writers who complain about lax editing and bloated books.

As I say, I have no idea if I've guessed right about Bridge of Sighs. There was one opportunity for a huge misstep that Russo either avoided or Sobel averted, and I won't tell you what it is because I think it would spoil some of the mystery and magic of this wonderful story.

Social Networking With Books and Ideas

Social Networking is one of those expressions that creates less interest rather than more. There is one unnecessary word there, “Social,” making the expression a (stand back!) pleonasm. Just when you thought “tautology” was the only vocabulary word you’d need to express this verbal excess, along comes “pleonasm,” which our intern, Kara, just found on the internet when I explained the need for a term. Isn’t “networking” enough?

Now I can pretend to have a vocabulary!

I know “social networking” from email discussion groups called “listservs.” I subscribe to several of them and participate in few. In the few I read regularly and contribute to, I have the feeling that I’m engaged in a real community and I have the sense that my contributions “shape” those communities. Participation has that effect, even if it’s negative in tone.

Last month I wrote about Facebook in connection with the readmoremissouri.org web site. There’s a social networking possibility for people who want to talk about The Starcatcher Trilogy by Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson. I signed up for a Facebook account, wondering what in the world I would do with it. In setting up my Profile, I had to respond to a question like, “Do you have religious ideas?” or some such thing. Rather than write a confessional, I responded, “Yes, much of the time, don’t you?” No one in this vast social network has taken me up on that, and probably no one has seen it. However, I did receive an immediate e-mail from a county library employee who reads my newsletter and subscribes to Facebook. I suppose that is how social networking begins, with a neighborly “howdy” across the electric fence. But after, “howdy,” what is there to say, unless you have a common interest?

Now it seems that Amazon.com is trying to implement social networking on its bookselling page. I stumbled upon their attempt while looking for a digital image of the cover of Goodnight Moon. I Googled for the title, clicked one of the links that came up, and landed on a page devoted to the “board book” version of that title. Here is the link I clicked:

http://www.amazon.com/Goodnight-Moon-Margaret-Wise-Brown/dp/0694003611

Behold! There is a small set of family photos depicting parents and children with that book. What a great idea! I thought some of the pictures were truly charming, so I tried to contact the parents who uploaded them to ask for permission to use those pictures on a Family Education web site.

That’s where “social” and “networking” broke down completely. There was no way to directly contact those parents as there is on a photo-sharing site like Flickr.com. I had to try to do it indirectly, by clicking through layers to their “Profiles” and then clicking something that provided me a way to invite them to become my “Friend.” Doing this made me feel like a stalker, but I did it, explaining who I am and giving the URL to my completely legitimate web site at the Missouri Humanities Council. That was on March 14, and I have not heard a peep in reply.

There are several possible reasons:

1. Amazon hasn’t created a way to get such an invitation to the intended party, not yet, anyway. Amazon makes no mention at all of “social networking” in its vast array of topics about managing “My Account,” so maybe Management at Amazon doesn’t know that something new has been rolled out.


2. Amazon has created a dumb way, such that the recipient only discovers the message when they log in to their Amazon account, which may be very infrequently.


3. OR, Amazon has done this smartly by sending the invitation directly to the e-mail address the recipient provided; but the recipient has changed email accounts recently, doesn’t use the account they gave Amazon, or doesn’t check email that often.


4. My invitation for Friendship was lost in a Spam folder somewhere or turned over to the local Police or FBI.


5. My invitation was received but was viewed as an unwelcome intrusion.


6. My invitation was received but was saved for “later” because the baby needed changing, and “later” now means “forgotten.”
   

In any case, Social Networking at Amazon is not functioning two-way at the moment. It’s just one-way, and that’s a surprise and a letdown. I think there’s a great opportunity there to make it easy for parents to share ideas about the benefits of books in the home. I think it’s such a great idea that you’ll find it implemented on our own family reading web site ASAP.

The Art of Lieder Singing

After I bought my iPhone, I discovered a treasure of classical music on YouTube. Here is one by the German Baritone, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. This one performance is sufficient to convey the essence of German Lieder singing, what we aspired to do and be when we first learned this repertoire as undergraduates.

The song is “Gute Nacht” by Franz Schubert. It is the first song in a sequence of twenty-four in a cycle titled “Die Winterreise” (Winter Journey). There is a lot of commentary about this song cycle on the web, and you can spend a day or so getting into the context of German art songs, German Romantic poetry, and Schubert’s place in the history of song.

I suggest you look at the performance first, and don’t fret about the lousy video quality. It’s probably from an old source, as the performance dates from 1966, perhaps on Japanese TV. Look and listen, and then follow along as I describe what I see and hear, and why this would suffice if all other Lieder recordings were suddenly to disappear.

You Tube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tc_GCguYgHw

The first thing one notices about the song is the regular pattern of sound that the piano lays down. It evokes the thought of footsteps. The minor key is somewhat somber. There is no figuration in the piano part, just the steady “footfall” of block chords. We know from the title that the time is night and the season is Winter.

The job of the singer is to create a sense of the personal situation that prompts these lines of poetry, set in just this way by the composer. The text is not a play, so the actor’s craft here is to imagine what sort of “character” utters these words.

Now is a good time to have a look at the text with a line-by-line translation by Professor Celia Sgroi from the State University of New York at Oswego (by coincidence, the place where I had my first college teaching job).

What is distinctive about Fischer-Dieskau’s art is his ability to “place himself” in the currents of emotion that lie between the lines and between the stanzas. In this song, he must be observed by the audience as he mutters to himself about what has just transpired. In many art songs, there must be no direct eye contact with the listener. This song is a soliloquy.

Someone has lost in love and is leaving town after everyone has gone to bed. “A stranger I came, a stranger I leave.” When you watch the video again, just look at his body movements. I think all of them are expressive of the emotional currents in the text.

As you watch, listen very carefully for changes in vocal tone and intensity in the text. At the start of the second line, when “Fremd” is reiterated, did you hear Fremd? He leaned on “stranger.” It pains him.

Then when he sings “Die Mutter gar von eh’” the second time, it’s a blow. The mother even spoke of marriage, (and now look where I am)! But then, in the space between that line and the next one, Fischer-Dieskau takes a hard slap to the face. You can see it. He is stricken to think of the reversal of fortune, and we believe it. We are no longer watching Fischer-Dieskau, we are watching the unnamed fellow who is, literally, left out in the cold and on the way to who-knows-where?

He modulates the sound in the next phrase, “Now the world is so gloomy.” And after the repeat of that phrase, I sense shame in his downcast look. He leaves with a sense of disgrace; can’t face the people in town, or the girl he lost, or her mother.

Then a fleeting look of resignation to his fate, and the soft utterance of his powerlessness to affect his course. The active word is wählen in the second line. Listen closely to how the character of the tone changes on the important word. Then, as soon as he comments on the darkness, he thinks of the moonlight overhead and sees it before he sings it. But then, as he sings of deer tracks in the snow, his mind is obviously back inside the house he is approaching, where his former love lies sleeping.

His art consists of knowing what to transmit; certainly not deer tracks in the snow, but the emotional affliction that sets the scene for what is to follow.

The next verse is edgy, combative, and he avoids the sophomoric trick I’ve seen recommended elsewhere on “Lass irre Hunde heulen/Vor ihres Herren Haus?” The trick is to exaggerate the rolled Rs to mimic the growl of dogs. To do that is to draw attention to a detail “on the outer surface” of the performance, when the whole point of this song is to draw attention to the inner life of the sufferer.

And then a shift of mood toward “distraught” on “Love loves to wander, it’s God’s plan.” Listen to how he spins “einem” and “andern,” “one” to “another.” Then he backs the sound off into bleakness as if to say, “God meant me to be the loser.”

As the piano finishes that verse, Fischer-Dieskau weaves in space as if blown about by the winds of a cruel fate. The interpretation continues through the spaces in the text.

And then, amazing!, Schubert suddenly changes the key to major, and any sensible pianist makes the slightest delay in the forward motion of the rhythm just before entering "the atmosphere" of those major chords, and then the walking rhythm is as before. And even before this major tone is sounded, the singer is bereft, and his vocal utterance a moment later is delicate, bordering on inaudible, but with the slightest emphasis on “shame” in the second line.

The climax of the piece is “an dich hab Ich gedacht,” On you I thought! The musical peak is “An dich” but there’s a slight portamento downward to “dich” to continue the sense of emphasis. (None of these nuances are notated in the score). At this point, you can hear something new in the way the pianist is presenting those repeated chords. There is a sense of small blows falling, again not notated, but part of inhabiting the spirit of the story.

You may have noticed that there is no sense of physical effort in his vocal production. He will not be exhausted physically after twenty-four songs without a break, but you can already imagine how emotionally drained he will be. This level of commitment is what distinguished Fischer-Dieskau when he launched his career at the age of twenty-two in 1947. He was forty-one when he gave this performance.

If you listen another time or two, you can make a study of “perfect” legato delivery. True legato is a seamless flow of sound from one syllable to the next while retaining clarity of words. In this performance, legato is the norm, and any breaks are for textual clarity or emphasis.

You can see quite a few other examples of Fischer-Dieskau’s art on YouTube. I was so enchanted with this that I bought two DVDs of full performances of this song cycle and Schubert’s other big one, Die Schöne Müllerin.

I remember when I first heard his name. I was a college freshman on a tour with the Penn State Singers, and our leading student baritone was going on and on about the quality of Fischer-Dieskau’s sound. It would be two years before I first heard him on recordings, about the time I was first assigned some Schubert Lieder for my senior recital. Then in my senior year, my voice teacher organized a group trip to hear him give a recital in Carnegie Hall. I was wonderstruck. I started collecting his records. My teacher said I would never succeed at that; he was the most-recorded voice in history.

I saw him in recital again in Montreal in 1975, and again in Carnegie Hall for a series of recitals in the mid-1980s. One of my DVDs is of a Schubert performance he gave in 1992, a couple of months before he decided that he was no longer meeting his standard of excellence. I can hear the voice of a man of 67 in that recital, but only now and then. For most of the time, I hear the same quality of sound he always had, and the same world-stopping penetration of the emotional life of the songs.

For me, Fischer-Dieskau did not “interpret” a song. He was the song!

i phone, i tune, and now i tube!

For a long time I thought iTunes was software for someone else. I even deleted the software and its icon from my desktop computer to minimize personal cultural shock. Little earphones and tinny little tunes, so I thought, were not for my high-expectation ears. Note that I wasn’t being a snob, please. It’s not the tunes I disdained, but what I supposed was the audio quality.

Then I bought an iPhone, which is a dressed up iPod to some people and a tiny entertainment device-with-phone for others. I underestimated the entertainment potential when I decided to buy it, and then many things changed.

I no sooner decided to buy the gadget than I decided to learn to use the iTunes music library as a real library for myself. I decided to create a little sonic autobiography on my laptop. I started to remember songs that were so vividly woven into memory that I recalled scenes and situations related to each song. Please Mister Custer, a song I didn’t want to hear again, is still in my memory of riding in a car with my friend, Jim Nickell. We played in a little rock band in high school and we palled around now and then as we both got drivers’ licenses. Jim was driving in the day I remember, the car was a big blue Buick, I think, and he turned up the bass on the radio so that Please Mister Custer really boomed out. I remember the joy of that moment, how we both relished the things that could be done with sound.

I browsed the iTunes library for some old favorites like The Drifters singing Under the Boardwalk and Judy Collins singing The Hills of Shiloh. The more I browsed, the more I found alternate possibilities for the songs I remembered, and the more I found music I’d never heard of but which I wanted to have for repeated listening.

I’ll give one example. I wanted to look up the title of a tune on the CD “Meeting By the River” by Ry Cooder. I looked up Ry Cooder and discovered a world of recorded music I hadn’t known anything about. One of his old CDs was titled “Bop Till You Drop” (1979). It is a joyous look back at infectious material from the 50s and 60s. Little Sister is my favorite track. It has the feel of informality, horsing around, in the vocals, but with very clean, tight instrumental backup. The utter lack of “rehearsed” ensemble when the gang sings “oo-oo-oo-oo” in the refrain tells me this is about the fun of playing the music, and not about the what the lyrics are narrating.

I finally imported Ry Cooder's rendition of Isa Lei from the CD I own. Once I knew the title, I found it in other versions and discovered an outstanding guitarist, Ed Gerhard, who I hadn't known about. Wow, the things you discover!

The earphone experience was another revelation. Those inconvenient little ear buds that come with the iPhone created surprising amounts of listening pleasure in the few moments the buds remained lodged in the right position. Real earphones made a huge difference for me. The surprise was how good everything sounded. A minor addiction was under way. I imported a vast number of songs from my CD collection and in no time had nearly 800 items on my computer and iPhone and still more than half of the iPhone’s storage space available. Listening to Joni Mitchell's All I Want from the "Blue" album is a great example of "earphone music." With the ear buds in, Joni and her dulcimer sound like they are in the center, between my ears as it were, and I hear other distinct things on the right and left. On the right, as I imagine things, sits James Taylor, who is listed as a guitarist on this song.

As I listened to my newly-captured tunes, I began to organize some into a “playlist” and started to goof around with the order of things so that my chosen songs made sense in their juxtaposition. The making of a playlist can be a creative project, and I’ve derived a lot of satisfaction from working up a long one.

I spent much of yesterday surfing YouTube for video versions of some songs I liked. The “library experience” at YouTube is much like the one at iTunes. You can type in a song title or you can type in the name of an artist. Either way, the search results show you some related material that you can easily browse.

One type of music video is a photo montage over the audio recording, there being no video of the artist performing the piece. A gorgeous example of this is thomasj157’s upload of winter pictures to go with Gordon Lightfoot’s Song for a Winter’s Night.

Another style is the candid video of an artist either in rehearsal or in a non-concert setting. I love the one I found of Joni Mitchell singing Night Ride Home in someone’s back yard.

She recorded the CD in 1991, so I guess this video is from the 1990s. I like it a lot better than the “produced” music video she made.

There are a lot of gems in the list of Joni Mitchell clips on YouTube. I like to watch her play guitar in the distinctive way she developed over 40 years ago. Distinctive lyrics, distinctive guitar, she’s one of the songwriting giants of that long era.

“Produced” music videos, for me, are less interesting than live performances or informal renditions. I looked up Kathy Mattea's Asking Us To Dance because the listening experience was outstanding with those little iPhone earbuds. I found a produced music video from 1991 with a "ballet" of sorts intercut with a secondary ballet between the camera and Mattea's wonderfully expressive face. I had seen these things before....where? Aha! The choreography and cinematography were taking ideas from recent movies: a sex-in-a-downpour scene from 9 ½ weeks (1986) and the after-hours dances in Dirty Dancing (1987). The video is a sensual viewing experience, not R-rated by any means, but Kathy Mattea’s mocha mezzo voice is the loser here. A voice like that deserves earphones-only listening, eyes closed. She’s photogenic, though, and the camera tours her face like a lover’s lips.

I prefer the style of Mike Reid’s Walk on Faith video from 1990. It’s like looking at a college yearbook for me. I knew Mike years earlier, when he was an All-American defensive tackle at Penn State and a classical piano major studying in Earl Wild’s studio. I was a few years ahead of Mike, but I saw him give impressive, piano-shattering performances in student recitals, and I watched him play pro football with the Bengals on TV. I had no idea back then that he wanted to sing and be a songwriter, so I treasure my CD of his music and this video of him in lip-synch with his recording. It’s a really cute montage of images, and it captures the Mike Reid I remember, though with a thinner neck and more hair than when he was a Nittany Lion!

p.s. If you liked that one, I think you'll have fun with another of the same era, Poor Boy Blues, with Chet Atkins and Mark Knopfler.

My Product is a Memory

The President of a Chamber of Commerce once said to me, “my product is a memory.” We were in a roundtable discussion of leaders of various cultural organizations. The leaders were thinking together about what “tourism” means in terms of a few specific kinds of visitors. Our facilitator had conjured up three sets of imaginary travelers and had divided us into three teams to consider their interests and needs.

We imagined those visitors and sought answers to a short list of questions. Why are they traveling? How did they decide to come to this place and not some place else? What time of the week are they coming and for how long? What month or season are they coming? What will they hope to experience while in this place? You might imagine this hypothetical exercise is useless, but it was amazing to see what the group realized about their town as they tried to imagine it as an outsider. They realized, for example, that some of the key businesses that weekend travelers would seek out are closed on Saturdays.

Tourism is a buzzword. “Readiness” is the soft underbelly of that word. To make an organization ready is one thing; but to make a town ready is a whole other ball game, and it’s a hard game to win.

“My product is a memory” sounded like an excellent theme statement for someone at the head of the Chamber of Commerce. A less thoughtful person might have said, “my product is a 50% increase in membership by year’s end,” or “my product is a measurable leap in public awareness of our town as an attraction by year’s end.” But she got right to the heart of why people come back: they remember having a good time. They found their way easily to whatever brought them here; they found parking without getting lost; they found an interesting place to eat near an interesting place to shop; they found the Church Directory they needed; they found things to do with their children; they found who-knows-what and they were happy they found it.

The President of the Chamber of Commerce was on target with her word choice. She would have missed if she had said, “my product is a favorable memory.” It isn’t always favorable, after all. If the Chamber’s members do nothing attentive to visitors, their product will be an array of bad memories. The Chamber has to do something within that community of members to turn their attention to shaping visitor experiences toward favorable memories.

Here is a quasi-hellish memory of mine from a recent stay at the Hospitality House in Williamsburg, Virginia. I stopped in for lunch one afternoon around 2 and decided on quick service at the pasta bar. I asked the server to prepare some sausage and spinach to mix with penne and a marinara sauce, which he did in a cordial way. The flavor of the first bite was totally distinctive, like no Italian pasta dish I had ever tasted, an alien, surprising, un-right combination of herb, tomato, and….what, exactly? What’s that sweetness? Then I realized that the restaurant had passed off unused maple-flavored breakfast links as “Italian sausage” at the pasta bar.

The food was by no means spoiled, but the experience was one of shock rather than satisfaction, and I resolved to go there no more during a four-day stay. Even worse for them, the experience gave me a 24-karat conversation item with the convention-goers I was there with. Bad news has a way of multiplying faster than good news, which is why smart managers try to get it right on the first try.

“My product is a memory” turns out to apply to a variety of venues. Over the weekend as I raked a mountain of leaves into the street, my neighbor was doing the same with his two young boys. My neighbor seems like such a gifted and resourceful dad. He made the work of gathering leaves a memorable and fun social experience. He and his wife seem to have a knack for creating great memories while getting work done. No household chore is done without child participation with Mom or Dad. Dad involves the kids in thinking about what sort of care the deck will need in the spring. Naturally, they will scrub the deck together; they will brush on the sealer together, some with large brushes and some with small ones.

My college choral director learned from one of his mentors that “every rehearsal must be a musical experience.” That means that no rehearsal is devoted simply to learning diction, rhythms, or pitches. The group has to sing whole passages in a musical way at some point, and that experience has to be memorable. The consequences of it not being memorable are (1) having to do the same work over again, and (2) a decline in morale. I think this applies to all forms of instruction. Whether we are talented or not, when we are in the role of teacher, our product is memory of some kind. We have to do something to shape it.

Why leave out friendships? Our product is a memory. If we neglect those we associate with, at any level of the love continuum, we are negatively investing in memories. Those are the ones that begin to ache.