Horns

Sometimes I think that amateurs acquire equipment in inverse proportion to their skill. A mediocre amateur photographer might have a dozen cameras. An unskilled aspirant to gourmet cookery might clutter his kitchen with expensive pots, pans, knives, and other paraphernalia.
So it is that I own four saxophones and two clarinets, as well as an electronic wind instrument, plus a bunch of ethnic instruments, drums, and recorders. If I were really good, I would own, let's say, one saxophone and a back up horn, or a B flat and an A clarinet, and that would be enough.
There are of course experts who also collect the tools of their trade. I remember reading that Eric Clapton has a massive number of guitars, and I have heard that the virtuoso, versatile reed player James Carter owns an impressive array of instruments. So owning too many instruments isn't necessarily an indication that one isn't a skilled player.
My main instrument is now the baritone saxophone, a huge, heavy, clumsy instrument, which is such a pain in the ass to bring to places where I am expected to play, that I wonder how I ever got involved with it.
Gerry Mulligan was the first musician I ever heard of who played the baritone sax, but I wasn't a fan of his when I was first getting enthusiastic about jazz, back in the late fifties when most of the gods of jazz were still alive. Sonny Rollins and his tenor were what swept me off my feet.
Many years later, in Israel, a few years after I took up music again, and I had acquired a brand new Yanagisawa tenor, a friend of mine invited me to play a couple of times with a saxophone quartet that needed to include a second tenor on a couple of pieces, and I met up with a real live bari player. I was distinctly uninterested in the instrument and wondered why anyone would choose to play one.
However, in the late 1980s I was playing tenor saxophone in a short-lived amateur bigband, and there was no baritone player, and at the same time I heard of a musician who had decided to sell his baritone, so I decided to buy it. I overpaid for his mediocre quality Italian horn (a Grassi), but I got to like playing the instrument, and a few years later I decided to treat myself to a really excellent baritone (a Selmer Super-Action 80, for those who are involved in that sort of thing). My father had died, and I was sad. I needed something new in my life to perk me up, and he left me some money, so I could afford the instrument (good baritone saxophones are not cheap). And, it turns out, not-s0-good baritone saxophones are hard to sell. I was stuck with that Grasssi for quite a while.
As I mentioned, I own a bunch of other instruments, including a decent alto saxophone (Selmer Mark VII) and a classic vintage Conn tenor (my wonderfully generous cousins Lewis and Ellen gave it to me when Ellen's father grew too demented to play anymore), as well as a decent clarinet (my second clarinet is a Turkish metal G clarinet that is more of a novelty than an instrument that I can play), and I feel that I owe it to the instruments to play them now and then. What's a sadder object than a musical instrument that no one plays?
Individual musicians have their own personalities, which are expressed in their playing, and every instrument has its own personality. Not only does every type of instrument have a personality (trombones versus violas, let's say), but each individual acoustic instrument has a special character. So what comes out is always a blend: the musician's personality expressed through the instrument's personality. For example, Eric Dolphy, who played alto sax, flute, and bass clarinet, was always Eric Dolphy, but each instrument enabled him to express a different aspect of his protean musicality.
To step down from the Elysian Fields, where Eric Dolphy is still playing, I hope, recently I have been playing clarinet a little more frequently than in the past, and it's taking me a while to feel comfortable on the instrument, and I don't yet have a clarinet me. The lowest note on the B flat clarinet is a concert D below middle C, and the lowest note on the baritone sax is almost an octave below that. The clarinet is an agile instrument, the baritone sax is kind of elephantine. Their expressive potential is different.
The problem is that it's so much easier for me to play sax than clarinet, that I tend to avoid the challenge and settle back into the place where I feel comfortable. My music guru, the late Arnie Lawrence, used to say that you shouldn't keep doing what you're already good at, if you want to progress. That's something to keep in mind.

Pottery Fantsy - Pottery Reality

I have installed a well-equipped pottery studio in the back room of our house, which we call the "blue room." I have a wheel, a kiln (outside in a shelter), work tables, shelves, tools for working and decorating clay, engobes, glazes - the works. I have essentially quit working as a translator and editor and given up writing projects and ambitions. My main activity in life is now producing attractive, mainly useful forms. Every day I get up and work in the studio, on a variety of projects, both throwing on the wheel and hand-building. I sell the work that I make at moderate prices, and I am not aiming at producing perfect pieces - just pleasing ones.
I travel to ceramic supply shops, to the studios of other potters, to exhibitions.
I read about making pottery and experiment with techniques - gradually.
I take on projects - in order to learn - sets of things - exploring forms.

Suppose I had gotten bitten by the pottery bug back when I was in high school. Would I have been happy as a potter? That's a stupid question, of course. Stupid because I can't go back in time, and stupid because, had I been the kind of kid who was swept up into a craft like pottery, I would have been a totally different person, because I wasn't that kind of kid. So then I'm asking, would that other person have been a happy man? Or, perhaps, I'm asking: would I rather have been that kind of person?

Running (?) Again - at my age?

I swore to myself that I would keep jogging until I turned sixty, even though I was suffering from chronic tendinitis , but after I took that "last" run, I stopped. That was four years ago. I'm coming up on my sixty-fifth birthday, and every time I see somebody jogging, I feel envious. So the other day, I decided I would start jogging again, very gradually and very slowly.

Having a vigorous young dog to walk is clearly another incentive. I used to jog with our two dogs in the Peace Forest, not far from our house. I'd let them off the leash, and we'd have a good time. But one of the two dogs is dead, and the other old one is so lame she can barely walk around the block. But our new, young dog needs a lot of exercise, and so does this aging human. After only 5 jogs, I can already feel the positive effect.

The first 3 times I only jogged for 6 minutes, but yesterday I got it up to 15 minutes, and today to 20 minutes. My muscles seem to remember what it was like to run, though they are still weak. But today, when I started my slow jog, I could feel my body asking for it, telling me, where have you been? I'm trying very hard to avoid injuring myself, to avoid overdoing it. When I jogged regularly, I never tried for speed. I took the advice of that great book, Running and Being, and tried for LSD: Long Slow Distances. The only one I'm competing with is me. If I manage to keep jogging for twenty minutes three or four times a week, that will be fine.

As for the dog, he sticks close to me but takes ten steps for every one of mine, zigzagging around, smelling things, dropping back, racing to catch up, running to the side, observing.

Fasting and Belief

Last night, after the Yom Kippur fast, we ate dinner with some friends, one of whom, a man in of seventy, has recently converted to Judaism. He admits that it was an odd thing to do. He married an orthodox Jewish woman, who was there with him. They both said that people ask them, at your age, why did you bother to marry? After all, you're not going to have children. Bill, the convert, usually responds, "Really?" After all, they're both very young looking.

Bill noted that it was the first time in his life that he had fasted, gone without food or water for 25 hours. I was a bit surprised, because I can't count the number of times I've fasted. It's almost normal for me.

The purpose of the fast is to keep the message of Yom Kippur in mind: God judges us between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, when we have ten days to repent and change our ways, and He delivers our sentence on Yom Kippur, when our fate is decided (actually, there's supposed to be a grace period until the end of Sukkot). If we repent for our sins now, we won't die this year. Otherwise, our fate is sealed.

Did any of the six of us around the table last night, all of whom had attended the long Yom Kippur services and fasted, take that message literally? I doubt it. I know that my wife and I don't believe it, because we discussed it.

So why do we bother?

Solidarity, for one. Jews have been fasting on Yom Kippur for a couple of thousand years, and for many otherwise completely unaffiliated Jews, fasting on Yom Kippur is still a sign on their part that they feel an allegiance to the Jewish people. The Marranos in Spain used to fast on Yom Kippur for the same reason. It's the kind of religious observance you can practice without people noticing it.

Okay, but why sit through and participate in the long and repetitive liturgy? Why pound your chest endlessly, confessing to an alphabetical list of sins? Why get to your knees at certain points in the service? Why not just stay home, fast, and listen to music or read a book?

The best answer, for me, is one that a learned friend of mine proposed: "Spiritual Theater." I know that, like an actor, I am speaking with a kind of sincerity when I recite the prayers. But what am I acting out?

First, I'm responding to the terrible uncertainty of life. I looked around the packed synagogue while we were reciting one of the central prayers, "Unetane Tokef" (Let us now relate the power of this day's holiness), and I realized that, without doubt, some of the people present in the room will not be alive next year at this time. Perhaps I myself won't be. Maybe I don't believe specifically that by observing the Sabbath more meticulously, I will avoid that fate. In fact, I don't think that anything I might do will be helpful, except exerting caution, watching my health, and so on. But I know that, as carefully as I drive, a car could veer into my lane and cause my death, just to name one of the many reasons why I might not make it through the year.

Second, I'm responding to the need to repent - maybe not in the orthodox Jewish sense of trying to observe more of the commandments more scrupulously - but certainly in the sense of trying to be a better person. It's easy to avoid examining one's life. The High Holidays push you in that direction.

Third, let's not forget solidarity. After all, publicly observing Yom Kippur as part of a community is much more powerful than privately observing it. Part of my identity is that I am the kind of Jew who attends religious services quite frequently, setting aside the issue of belief.

Fourth, the High Holiday liturgy is very beautiful. Even though it is too long and repetitive, there are some aesthetic high points, some great poetry, some dramatic moments in the service, some beautiful music in the hymns we sing. It has a lot of emotional depth and power. Not only is it "Spiritual Theater," it's good theater, and theater of a unique sort, in which the spectators are also actors.

Last, it's therapeutic. Yom Kippur brought up many deep and disturbing memories in me, memories of people I had disappointed, relationships I hadn't done justice to, personal failures of various kinds. I barely slept at all on the night of Yom Kippur. I felt that my life was shattering. But over the day the pieces fell together again - I hope not in the same way. Because self-improvement is a process of dismantling, sometimes painful and frightening, and reconstruction, often challenging and uncertain, with some of the bad pieces left out and the whole structure different from what it was.

Read Out Loud in British English

A while back I had a little story accepted by a creative British organization called The Liars' League. Every month they hold an evening at which actors read short stories that have won their contest, and they also post the stories and the MP3s on their web site. I've attached the MP3 to a video and I'm uploading it here.

The pictures aren't really connected to the words. I found out that the only way to upload an audio file is to use Windows Move Maker to make the audio file into a sound track, and then you can stick whatever picture you like on it.

It was very amusing to me to hear my work enunciated very carefully in British English. It was also amusing to me to hear the audience's reaction: it took them a while to figure out that it was supposed to be funny. Probably because of the deadpan delivery. I wish I could have been there in person. Next trip to London!

Being Away and Coming Back - Awareness of Change

I just spent a bit more than three weeks in the United States, in the suburbs of the capital, and once again I had to deal with the intense and contradictory feelings of familiarity and strangeness. It's the country where I grew up, where I speak the native language like a native, but so much has changed in the 36 years that I've lived away from North America. Frequent visits and keeping up with the media - seeing American films and TV shows, reading American books and magazines - all that is not the same as living there.
On my last day in Washington, DC, I went into a Borders book store for the first time (!) and bought a couple of books, including The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell, who may be a bit too glib for some people's taste, but he's definitely very smart and insightful. I read the book within a couple of days, on the plane home and in bed when jet lag gave me insomnia.
I was especially taken by the chapter on context: if you change the context in which people act, you can change their behavior. I began to wonder (and I am far from coming up with any answer) how it would be possible to change the context here in the conflicted Middle East so that the epidemic of violence would tip and an epidemic of non-violence might begin.
Long ago I was involved in Tai Chi, where, as in many Asian martial arts, the theory is that you can defeat your opponent not by overpowering him but by using his strength against him. The sub-title of Gladwell's book is something like: how a small change can make a big difference. The peace movement doesn't have the power to make big changes, but if it makes the right small changes in people's attitudes, in the context of behavior, they could lead to a big change. Up to now, the Israeli peace movement has been largely ineffective in changing attitudes. Obviously it's been doing the wrong thing. What would the right thing be?
So what's the connection between my opening paragraph about the strangeness of being in America for me and the rest of it, about the Tipping Point and changing the context of behavior? For me, the strangest (and most wonderful) thing about America was the visible change in racial relations. Over and over again I saw mixed groups of black, white, and Hispanic people walking in the street, sitting at tables in restaurants, passing each other on the street, in the most natural way.
When I was growing up, even in multi-racial New York City, it would have been very rare to see people of different races mingling. Something has tipped in America with respect to race, and the election of a man with an African father as President is a symptom of the change, not a cause of it.
I'm not so naive as to think that discrimination is gone, or that people of darker color aren't disproportionately poor, incarcerated, and badly educated compared to people of lighter color, but the open, unselfconscious mingling shows that some of the fear and hostility that had marked race relations in the America I grew up in has abated. Black people are no longer invisible in the United States.
So couldn't the same thing happen between Jews and Arabs in Israel-Palestine?

A Challenge

My cousin N. H. an accomplished, professional printmaker with an international reputation, a woman who has devoted her life to art, as an artist and as a teacher of art, challenged me in a phone call, in response to the blog entry about the Jerusalem Craft Fair. What exactly did I mean when I put down the man who was trying to make a living as a potter? (I didn't mean to put him down. I have a lot of respect for his skill. I know how hard it is to do the kind of work that he does. It's just that if I did have his high level of skill, I don't think I would use it to make 100 mugs all the same, etc.).

I respect N.'s responses enormously, because she's thought about these things, taught about them, and also lived them. She's a fine artist, not a craftswoman. But printmaking has a lot of craft to it, a lot of technique, a lot of process. As she pointed out to me in the phone call, my profession - I am a translator - is also a kind of craft, and I have spent years and years trying to get better at it - even when the task at hand is a routine, even boring, I try to do the best job I can, to use all my skills. So how is that different from the potter who applies all his skill and experience to producing a series of mugs, jugs, bowls, and so on?

I guess it has to do with the level of creativity involved in the task. If I'm translating a carefully written work of literature, a work that embodies creativity, then I need creativity, too. The same goes for making pots.

There were 3 other ceramicists showing their wares at the fair, whose work I respected more than that of the man I mentioned. All three were prolific - they had a lot of ware for sale - but they were also more creative, more experimental, and they made fewer examples of each type of their work. It's very challenging not only to start off every day, making things, but also to make new things and new types of things every day, to master new processes. I'm still at the beginning stage in pottery, where the basic techniques are challenging: centering a pot, building it up, getting it thin and light, controlling the shape. But I can already see that meeting the early challenges only brings you face to face with new ones.