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What can I tell you tonight, lovelies? I'm finding it difficult, at the end of long working days, to do anything but stare blankly into the television. Have seen some interesting things there. Daybreak, a rather violent show about a cop who keeps living the same day over and over again groundhog day style - but he uses it to try to solve the murder of which he's accused and save his family and friends. I only see it every so often, but tonight it made me think. The same scenario, involving a drug-using ex-cop (not our hero), ended three dramatically different ways. My momentary eureka was that actions, sometimes rash and terrible, and sometimes life-defining, or life-ruining, are the product of chance impulses, reactions to tones of voice or perceived slights or failure to empathize. Perhaps a little gentleness really can change the world. I also watched a bizarre show called Show Me The Money, hosted by William Shatner (whose renaissance I enjoyed in its more fully realized version - the lawyer Denny Crane - last night). This show has many dancing girls, and hires contestants not based on their intellect (a la Jeopardy) but based on their ability to be entertaining and/or charismatic – by which I think the producers mean outright buffoonery, apparently. Some poor shmo from Texas couldn’t say that Holly Golightly was the protagonist of Breakfast at Tiffany’s (“I wasn’t even born in 1959&rdquo and then the next contestant guessed that Elton John was the singer of the 70s classic (and hopelessly boring song) “Show Me The Way.” (I know I don’t need to tell you that was from Frampton Comes Alive). The whole show seems to be a kind of 50s throwback, except that intellectual prowess is largely frowned upon…give me Herbert Stempel any day, you know? Now for the last while I’ve been watching 20 20 about why are Americans so cheap. It’s mostly been a parade of interviews with billionaires who, even though they give away billions of dollars, are actually cheap because they could give away so much more. The point of the show, I think, seems to be for us all to learn how generous, righteous and charitable our host is (he’s on the board of the Central Park Conservancy , after all). I think his name is John Stossel. But speaking of self-righteousness, now they’re playing a clip of Oprah telling her audience that each member gets to leave with a thousand bucks, but has to spend it on someone other than his or her own famiy. Good for you Oprah, pat yourself on your back for your endless generosity – I mean who else graces us with her own face on her own magazine every single month? Gosh darn it, how did I wind up talking about Oprah?? Absolutely must be bed time.

When I was a kid, a remember vigorously flipping through Cue magazine - the tv guide - starting in late November, scanning the listings for the holiday specials. The one I loved best, A Charlie Brown Christmas, always played on a Monday night on CBS (channel 2). I can still remember the thrill that ran through me as the CBS Special intro began, with swirling text graphics and pounding drums. So imagine my delight – mine and Alex’s actually – tonight, when I per chance flipped on the tv at 8 o’clock to hear the opening strains of “Christmas time is here.” It must be safe to say there has never been a better half hour animated special in history. Every moment of it is a classic, the music (of course), the voices, the lines (“of all the Charlie Browns in the world, you’re the Charlie Browniest&rdquo, and perhaps above all, the dancing (in my day I perfected a few of those steps). As if to illustrate just how bygone is the era of this sixties memento, ABC (not CBS) followed it up with some more new-fangled Charlie Brown Christmas special that was, in a word, unwatchable. The voices all wrong, the graphics too posh, the imitation Vince Guaraldi score entirely unsatisfying. But if they couldn’t leave well enough alone, at least it’s good to see that the original 40+ year-old Christmas special is now treated as the clear cultural treasure that it is (NPR specials, books on the making of, yearly broadcasts still). Merry Christmas Charlie Brown indeed.

Back from sunny New York, and in cloudy Maine. But Southern Maine today is something quite special, misty, chilly, it's romantic weather is what it is. And very New Englandy - makes me want to walk along the craggy coast smoking a corncob pipe or something. December will not be denied, it approaches with the fiercest of irresistible impulses, and I'm just letting it wash over me. Meanwhile the powers that be, in their wisdom, have left one tennis net up even this late in the season, and Neil Sattin and I are fighting the calendar with each passing volley. Today we played for about a half hour until Neil's fingers froze.

Whoop! There's my bagel....gotta run.

Well when it rains it pours. Actually the sun came out this morning and Connecticut is enjoying a beautiful brisk fall day. But Monty Grossman's time has come. Beloved spaniel and loyal friend, Monty had been stumbling these last weeks. In the middle of the night he bumbled into our room confusedly, as calls from Jane Sutherland (Alex's mom) beckoned him back to bed. Then this morning, as I ambled in from my morning run, I found the entire family gathered, half crying half laughing, and Monty slumped awkwardly, his head hanging off the couch. LIttle brother Nelson (the terror) looked on dejectedly as one by one we sidled up to the ailing hound to pay our last respects. And then, at 10:30, it was off to the vet - one final visit. Alex and I stayed behind and comforted poor Nelson, who from this point forward is an only child. As I feel I've said so recently, he had a good long life, and died peacefully in the company of his extended family. Shortly before he left to meet his fate we all raised a glass of Taittinger in his honor. I couldn't help but think of Paul McCartney's line, which he attributed to Pablo Picasso on the last night of his life: "Drink to me, drink to my health, you know I don't drink anymore."

Our Thanksgiving has been dampened, literally and figuratively. Herb Loebel, my great uncle and the family maverick, was taking his usual walk down to Friendly's in Southbury, CT on Monday when a pick-up truck ran into him. He was 89 and recovering from heart surgery, and was a survivor in every sense of the word (including the Auschwitz sense), but in the brute impact of chrome and steel he had met his match. He hung on for a day and then passed away yesterday, 43 years to the day after the death of a president for whom Uncle Herbie had very little sympathy. Having escaped from Auschwitz during the dissolution of the awful final days there, he found himself briefly conscripted by the Red army, and quickly developed an aversion to communism that dwarfed even his considerable fear of Fascism. Herbie made it to the States in '46 and reconnected with his sister, my grandmother, who had long given him up for dead. And then he set about establishing a profession and climbing to the top. At first he did fashion photography, but eventually he got into the special effects racket, and had a significant hand in such neat tricks as that old Canon AE1 commercial (where they jump from a plane), and perhaps most famously, the Energizer Bunny. In retirement, he devoted himself to political causes, and his politics were diametrically opposed to those of everyone else in the family. Herbie's world view, understandably, was shaped by an overriding anti-totalitarianism, and he saw communists around every corner. Of course, when you live through what he lived through, even the most far-fetched scenario can seem possible. So Herbie vociferously supported Ronald Reagan's tough stand against the Soviet Union, and over the years picked up many of the other talking points of conservative dogma, fueled I suppose by the vast conservative media to which he loyally subscribed. His politics were the cause of many a Thanksgiving meltdown, so it's somewhat ironic that we gather today to remember him. But despite forbidding political views, we all loved Herbie dearly. He was a jovial great uncle with a brilliant wit and, in later years, a softer side. I remember him commenting once about the "do not drink" labels on detergent. "Would the world really be worse off without all the detergent drinkers?" he asked. He also let me drive his Mercedes sports car when I was 14, and over the years subscribed me to numerous wing-nut newsletters, and engaged in friendly but pointed debate through email and the US mail. Recently he would address me as "grand nephew # 1" and say that he feared he had lost me to the socialists. But that didn't stop him from trying to pull me back from their clutches. Here's a letter he wrote to the Kingston Daily Freemen in 1989, when I was across the river attending the topic of his disdain: Bard College. And here's a letter he wrote to the New York Times. Amidst the many things he stood for with which I disagreed, I did also learn true things from the man. He often told me that "Hitler was an amateur," and that the true mass-murderer of the 20th century was Stalin, who killed more than ten times as many people. He also was a frequent and vocal critic of the de-Jewification of the Holocaust (as you can see from his letter to the Times). His argument was that while yes, it's true others suffered at the hands of the Nazis, Hitler's campaign was so thoroughly focused on the annihilation of the Jews - and was so successful in virtually wiping out the Jewish population of Europe - that to deny the Jewish-centeredness of the Holocaust was in itself an act of anti-semitism. His one return trip to Auschwitz was undertaken with camera in hand, in order to document the anti-semitism that still prevailed in the memorial that stands there today.

So, this Thanksgiving will be a mournful one, in which we lament the passing of an unmistakably great man. It's not often I can say that about someone with whom I so thoroughly disagree on so many issues, but I'll say it today.

Like, I suppose, many in America, I didn't find out about Michael Richards' racist tirade until he apologized for it last night on Letterman - in a special satellite link-up arranged by Richards' old friend Jerry Seinfeld. Full disclosure here: I'm a huge Seinfeld fan, and I think Kramer ranks right up there with Reverand Jim Ignatowski as among the greatest zany sit-com characters ever (others on the list? Definitely Burt Campbell, from Soap, and I guess Mork, tho that's different). So while I was watching Richards beamed in on Letterman, I had not yet heard the really awful, epithet-laden tirade he unfurled when two hecklers pushed him over the brink. I, and Alex too, were just struck by how truly despondent the guy seemed. The papers today referred to him as at times defensive and frustrated, but what came across to me was someone who was genuinely angry and confused with himself. Some have compared the mea culpa to Mel Gibson's apology for his somewhat recent anti-Semitic outburst to a police officer. But let's be serious, Gibson already has some pretty serious cred as an anti-Semite, what with his Passion and standing by his lunatic Holocaust-denying dad and all. Richards' hate speech seems thus far to have had no precedent in his past. After the Letterman segment I found the clip of Richards' act on the internet, and yes, it's really that bad. And all the talking heads are out saying it's a career-ruiner for him, and maybe so. Alex and I talked about it for a while after Letterman. I pointed out those very rare but awful fights we've had, where we'd say just about anything to get the other person - really go for the jugular, say hurtful and even hateful things that in the calm and rational time that followed we understood to have no or little relation to our actual feelings. "Going for the jugular" generally involves sussing out the other person's vulnerability. Generally there are certain lines that are held sacred even in the worst of times, and I'm glad to report that in my own relationship these borders have been preserved. But I can imagine how in the heat of battle, on stage, a comedian might grow to truly hate his hecklers and the audience of which they were a part. I can see how someone could get pushed to the breaking point and beyond, fueled by adrenaline, and reach down and find these poisonous verbal arrows that have no possibility of missing their mark. I can see, in other words, how the awful, awful things Michael Richards said several nights ago could in fact be uttered by a non-racist. Is he a non-racist? How can I know. To borrow a line from our fearless and clueless leader, I haven't looked into his heart. I believe his emotional distress and his apology the other night were sincere, though, and I found particularly apt his reference to the need to do "personal work." This seemed an acknowledgment of the fact that many of us, no matter how liberal or politically correct we feel ourselves to be, have absorbed into our unconsciousness some of the standard historic attitudes about race that have permeated our society for so long. It's easy for all of us to point the finger and condemn Richards, and speech like his should indeed be condemned. But the notion that the rest of us are so squeaky clean down to our core, and that no amount of provocation could call forth from us the bile of vestigial prejudice seems questionable to me. Richards' concern - "where does this come from?" - strikes me as a reasonable and thoughtful response to his actions...that is, along with the apology that he so clearly owed. We'll see what happens, but I hope we're spared much more of the self-righteousness that's already begun to pile on.

When I was in college - eons ago, I kid you not - a fun and music geeky thing a few of us liked to do each week was this: gather on a Thursday early evening, turn down all the lights, listen, in entirety, to a late Beethoven string quartet, and then stumble, starstruck and woozy, up to Kline Commons to watch the Simpsons. This was around 1991 or so, and the Simpsons was seriously good back then, and there were three, maybe four television sets on campus. Somehow we were all enchanted by brilliance in any medium, sparked into whirling contemplation and endless expostulating by the slightest sudden change of texture, or the perfect sight gag. We actually devoted good wind to the similarity between inspired moments of Bart Simpson and opus 131. The world was our oyster, to borrow that hackneyed phrase, and we sucked at the shell with ravenous desperation, our faith in art blind, and our belief that we were the only ones who could really connect entirely unshaken.

At this point in my narrative, a scene from the aforementioned Simpsons comes to mind. Must have been the third or fourth season. Bart is despondent at his perilous standing in his fourth grade class. He’s something like one test away from failing out completely, and he bemoans this fact to Otto, the school busdriver. And Otto looks at Bart and says – and please, I’m paraphrasing here – “Hey man, no worries. I failed out of fourth grade and now I drive the school bus!” You see, because all these years later I find that I myself am the music professor, and in this capacity I get to prance about the room spouting forth my insights about Beethoven and Schubert and Monteverdi and the Beatles – all the masters. And yet as engaging and thought-provoking and enlightening as I always hope I am, a good two thirds of my music appreciation class – first I’ve taught in years – seems unaware or disabused of this notion. After our third quiz of the semester I gave an impassioned speech about B’s development in the first movement of the 5th symphony. About how he chooses to hone in on the little insignificant link from the first to second theme in the exposition, and then hone in on the joint between the two halves of the link – revealing a piece of musical material that was right before our ears all along, yet that went entirely unnoticed. And then the oboe cadenza of the recapitulation, the touching and brilliant moment of introspection in that otherwise most extroverted of musical compositions. What does it mean to you, I asked. And I was pacing and huffing and puffing and singing sections of the movement and I might even have visited the piano in the far corner once or twice. And then after the 8:15pm break, about 35 or 40 of the 135-member class returned to hear me wax poetical about Schubert and his Erlkönig. I used to take this personally – but now I’ve learned to love it. Because those 35 or 40 who stay, into the darkness of night and our 9:30pm conclusion – the ones who aren’t there just to punch a hole in the dreaded “fine arts history” core requirement – have a special wide-eyed energy to them, a curiosity and a faith in artistic expression I’ve seen or felt somewhere before. Goes around comes around, I guess, even if in diminishing returns.

Finally extracted myself from Planet Fitness and its wonderful array of televisions for a run around the trusty old back cove. It’s foggy and unseasonably warm today, and as I waded through the soupy mist the soothing aromas of baking bread, on one side of the cove, and beans from the B&N factory, on the other, enhanced my tuneful reverie. Those who know me have probably heard me proselytize at one time another for ipod shuffle. Complete shuffle that is, no genre-specific crap. There is much to be learned from handing the selection responsibility over to the heavens. As if to prove the point, the first song selected was “Let it Be.” It’s a great song, and contains probably some of the best rock drumming ever. No fancy fills or pyrotechnics, as if there ever really was with Ringo, but just the heavy behind-the-beat soulful thumping that established Starr as among the best and certainly most underappreciated drummers. Next was Matt Schickele’s “Enemies,” off his Cities Filled With Lights. In addition to ghostly and painfully direct falsetto singing, this song has production values through the roof – especially Schickele’s patented dental drill guitar technique. I’ve never heard anything like it. Joan Armatrading’s “Willow” is the perfect song for a warm foggy day – it’s just so unremittingly lovely. Then Stevie Wonder’s “Looking for Another True Love,” off of Talking Book. Did I hear him whisper “go Jeff,” during the guitar solo? Jeff Beck? I had no idea. Perfect solo. I think Stevie plays just about everything else himself, including the drums, with some very fine cymbal work. On it went – Steely Dan’s ode to heroin addiction, “Charley Freak,” reminded me how good they were before Aja and all that endless wanker jazz (I only half mean it). Then Lennon chimed in with “God,” which speaks for itself, and could have only been followed by art music – and ironically the choice was “Simple Song” from Leonard Bernstein’s Mass, sung by Roberta Alexander. Had some fun discovering “Hey Mama,” by the Black Eyed Peas – didn’t even know it was on the pod, but it had me shaking my booty in the mist. Lots of other great stuff, and then, as soon as I stopped running, Berlitz Italian lessons came on. You just never know what you’ll get, and that’s the beauty of it really (all of the albums pictured above were represented during the run).

I've been neglecting you again, dear blog readers. Have had my hands full with various matters, not the least of which being this brand new song. Just wrote it - a New Year's anthem, of all things. I thought I'd post a sneak preview right here. It's written for the Truth About Daisies new year's eve gig, but you can imagine it's going to sound QUITE different in that context! It's called "Resolution Time." enjoy...
(Sorry - this song's time has run out (I needed to delete it because I'm running out of space here...check back or email me if you want to here it))

p.s. I'm also going to experiment with re-enabling comments...

Caught Bobby Dylan last night for the first time. He played Portland with his band, and it was a tight enough affair, but let's face it - Dylan, who was once one of the great singers in Rock (round about 40 years ago - those who say he could never sing are just flat out wrong. He had a unique quality, excellent sense of pitch, brilliant phrasing and control...you couldn't ask for anything more) has completely lost it. Every song is a monotone, a caricature of his voice of old. I literally had no idea what song he was singing until I managed to make the words, so thoroughly stripped away was any sense of melody. The band is hyper-competent, but far too precise, and too much chorus on the guitar. At times it felt like an absolutely grade-A wedding band (with a hack for a singer). Other moments were better, and in general Dylan, who dressed all in black, played an inaudible keyboard the entire night, and didn't say one word to the audience until he introduced the band during the encores, did better with his new material than with the old. But the new material is pretty much boring, if authentic. The Raconteurs, who were the opening act, were enormously tight and lots of fun too - great vocal harmonies, screaming guitar licks, and cool stagecraft - like having a completely distorted microphone set up at the back of the stage for the lead singer to scream into with his back to the audience. Cinematic gold, I tell you.

Just briefly checking back in as I promised I would last night. It seems the American people finally have found some sense. But we're still hanging on to see what happened in Virginia and Montana. So the "night" isn't really over quite yet.

I have that hopeful feeling again, even more so this time around. Lying on my back and pondering the future, it seems the darkness of the times may be poised to abate, if only somewhat. Of late these early morning election day hopes have been roundly crushed come evening, but still I keep hope alive. Alex's approach is different - she assumes the worst and lets any positive development come as a pleasant surprise. I'll check back in tonight and update you on my mood. So get out there and vote (unless you're a wingnut).

Only this photo from yesterday, which I love. Taken at the Laurel Canyon Country Store, where everyone is beautiful and the frozen drinks sublime.

No time for details dear friends, but I just had to post this picture...what is it? Why it's the "Ladies of the Canyon House." Joni Mitchell's late 60s abode which for a time she shared with Graham Nash (this is the house of "Our House"). I made it, finally, to Laurel Canyon and walked among the blinding sun, checked out the stunning panorama of Appian Way, basked in the lovely unspoiled vibe of the Laurel Canyon Country Store (where tomorrow, alas not today, is Photo Day, a famous local once-a-year event where all the community is photographed in front of the store...but for a day I could have been immortalized in this way). Have better photos on the real cam, but his will do for now. Now I'm back enjoying scholarly powerpoint presentations on Mozart's debt to the Romanesca. Envy me I say.

We Northeasterners have all sorts of lines about how we'd never want to live in California...you know, we love the seasons, love the snow, feel exhilarated by the changing and falling of the leaves. I've been singing this stuff my whole life. But on an early November evening, when it's 34 degrees back in Portland and you're sitting outside by the 7 Mare fish taco stand, chomping on the most perfect of foods as the cars zoom past on Sunset Boulevard, or better still, on Friday afternoon, out among the palm trees and the gentle breeze, you just might come to your senses. Let's all stop the madness and just move to California, okay? We've been lying to ourselves long enough. I'm here for a music theory conference - but tomorrow I'm going to try and find Joni Mitchell's old house in Laurel Canyon. I promise updates if I can send em.