mango pudding blues 2.0

THE MIDDLE

I’m middle class now; middle-aged, steamed clean, pressed and tidy. Pink and tender like milk-fed veal. I move around in heated seats and get parked underground; people bring my car around. Shiny shoes, not boots because I’m middle class now. I eschew jeans! I eschew jeans in favor of grey trousers now. My threads aren’t frayed or stained, my hair’s not moussed, juiced or back-combed, ponytailed or teased or dyed. My belly’s soft and my wallet’s fat. I’m in the taxman’s favorite bracket. I’m Christmas shopping in the mall and tattooed teenage girls and cops don’t see me at all; the clerks call me sir and only the strolling old fellows in the food court know that I passed by.

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RAVEL

1) Yes, we meant ‘exhausting’ and not ‘exhaustive’ when we referred to the Nick Tosches Dean Martin biography the other day. And yet, we couldn’t quite quit the thing. We finally finished it yesterday.

2) We did take a break from it on Saturday to read Piano Lessons by Noah Adams, which delighted us. It’s a month-by-month account of this guy’s attempt to learn to play piano, but told in the kind of sprawling, polymathematical style that we like over here at Mango Pudding Blues. Adams, who is some kinda journalist from NPR in America, is thrilled equally by the music of Glenn Gould and Jerry Lee Lewis and Keith Jarrett, as are we, and he had plenty to say about all sorts of interesting things. We read the last of it, slightly tipsy on red wine, sitting on the floor with our keyboard in our lap, learning.

2.5) And but what the hell is NPR anyway? Yes, we know it stands for National Public Radio. Is that like the CBC here?

3) And the book contained an interview with Leon Fleisher about Ravel’s piano concerto for one hand, which, not entirely completely coincidentally, we had seen performed, by Fleisher himself, at the National Arts Centre just the day before, which is to say Friday. We loved it dearly, and were going to tell you extensively how highly we think of Ravel’s flashy orchestration, but then we read somewhere that Stravinsky sneered, about this particular number, that there is something missing from a piece of music if all you notice is is its orchestration. And Stravinsky was Ravel’s friend.

3.5) And the reason L. Fleisher plays this one-handed concerto (which, incidentally, Ravel composed for Wittgenstein’s wounded brother), is that he fell in love with it while trolling the one-handed repertoire of classical piano music after he lost the use of one hand. And in his interview with Noah Adams in Piano Lessons he says he was profoundly depressed when he lost the use of the hand and had self-destructive thoughts and even contemplated “taking a Vespa and riding around the streets of Baltimore, helmetless.”

3.6) Which we think is a pretty cool way to end it all.

3.7) But note, he’s all better now. Although he still plays the Ravel piece. Wonder what Stravinsky would say about that?

4) And so now we are at long last reading Uncle Tungsten by Oliver Sacks, book design by the ubiquitous Chip Kidd.

5) And this post is about as exhausting as the Tosches book was.

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