THE MANGO TOP TWO

The top two records here at Mango Pudding Blues this week? Number one is the superb Il Sospiro by Rabih Abou-Khalil, which came to us as a gift from our wise brother. If you had told us that our number one favorite record would one day be a solo oud player who sounds like Robby Krieger warming up to play The End for about an hour, we would have laughed heartily and told you that we don’t even really know what an oud is.

Number two is The Rising, by Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. Look, we’re no fans of the Boss normally, although we will always stand by 1987’s Tunnel of Love. But we’re guiltily delighted by this ringing, uplifting record set so squarely in the now-abandoned rock and roll tradition.

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ONTARIO RESIDENTS ALERT!

The LCBO is now carrying Bonny Doon’s Pacific Rim Dry Riesling, which we at Mango Pudding Blues just cannot recommend enough. We think it’s just the thing with, say, the coconut chicken soup (or its brother, the coconut shrimp soup) that Killer makes from the Donna Hay Flavours cookbook, which we feel certain is at your local library. Go!

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OUR LIFE’S WORK

We have, at last, discovered our life’s work here at Mango Pudding Blues. We are going to learn to play Linus and Lucy on the piano. Yes, the Charlie Brown theme by Vince Guaraldi. We decided this last night at 11:30 after tinkling around for a few hours, marvelling at the differences between the key of C major, C minor and C minor harmonic or some such thing.

Imagine us, sweating, shirtless, ensconced as we are in a neverending heat wave here, hunched over the piano with a gin and tonic, playing scales, improvising; like we were spelunking at the mouth of the great cave of music. Hunched over the piano in a trance, in love already with only the very beginnings of music, the junior baby-step music that is all we can grasp so far. Playing, at one moment, for no particular reason, for maybe the 100th time, an arpeggio on the lowest C major scale and hitting some note out of order, and springing up like Archimedes from his bathtub. We had accidentally played the rumbling opening left hand notes of Linus and Lucy, and suddenly it was all so clear. This would be our summer project. No, our Indian Summer project, summer being all but over.

Next we had one of those what-the-hell-did-we-do-before-the-internet moments. We actually got the cd off the shelf and started playing it, determined to pick the number out by ear. We got maybe a minute in before we realized that at our level of play, that would take a year. Online it took five minutes to find and print it.

And it’s harder, of course, than we thought. It’s gonna take more than an Indian Summer. It will take forever.

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AUSPICIOUS

In Bali, you’ve got the Pawukon calendar, which has 210 days, divided into ten different week systems, which have escalating numbers of days and run concurrently. There’s a week with one day, a week with two days, a week with three days and so on, up to the ten-day week. Every day of each week has a unique name, making 55 day names in total (1 + 2 + 3 … + 10 = 55). Ergo, each day has ten different weekday names, and, since all the weeks are a different length, the tapestry of permutations is constantly shifting like an early Steve Reich phase composition.

Now, the Balinese are highly attuned to the portentiousness of any given combination of days. They know which combinations augur well for starting new ventures and for birthing lucky babies, for harvesting and for honoring certain gods. And yesterday happened to have been Tumpek Wayang, the anniversary of the arts, in which all artists and musicians and musical instruments and dance equipment are given blessing.

Yesterday was also, auspiciously, the first live gig of the gamelan ensemble I’m in. We opened the bill of a celebration at the Indonesian embassy to a packed auditorium of enthusiastic guests. We miffed a few notes and we got lost momentarily in one of our two numbers, but we were, nevertheless, an all-around success. We were all sprinkled with water from a blossom and had rice pressed into a spot on our foreheads, and we all wore sarongs and white shirts, and we rocked.

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