The space between notes: listening to the whole of Beethoven in 2020 – Part II

Instead of a long meander through Michelangelo on the way to Beethoven, how about if I cut to the chase and give you a Top Ten list – the swellerest goodest of the best, the pieces and performers that throw me onto my back so I can see again the stars floating just above me in the beautiful emptiness of space? Without further ado, if you wish to hear Beethoven freshly and newly, trust me and do yourself and Beethoven a favor by listening with good speakers or headphones and, for God’s sake, listen to the music without distraction.

Op.20 – Septet in E♭ (1799) – This is the first piece, a sweet and lovely piece for woodwinds, that jumps out with a sound that isn’t very Beethoven-like but has a lively, beautiful sound. My favorite recording is a YouTube live one with Janine Jansen and friends but it’s not on iTunes, where the rest of my selections can be found. It’s on this list because it was the first piece that made me say, Oh! Beethoven has a lot of sounds I don’t know.

Op.30 – 3 Violin Sonatas - No.2: Violin Sonata No.7 in C minor (1803) - This sonata feels like the first time we see Beethoven’s maturity and understanding of the piano and violin playing with each other seamlessly. The sonatas before this sound like he hasn’t yet figured out how the voices of these two instruments work together, but unfortunately many of the recordings still feel awkward like that. One of the things I noticed throughout my listening is that many of the “great” soloists who also perform pieces like this (duets, trios, etc…) want to remain soloists and instead of two instruments playing together there are two separate ones vying for dominance. The 1962 recording by David Oistrakh and Lev Oborin is breathtaking, especially the adagio, an intimate conversation between the two instruments, two lovers, so sensitive and gentle between these instruments/voices.

Op.53 – Piano Sonata No.21 in C, "Waldstein" (1803) – (See Part I for commentary.) Ronald Brautigam on the fortepiano and there’s also a live recording on youTube that is fantastic!

Op.61 – Violin Concerto in D (1808) – Violinists have written cadenzas (crazy-ass guitar solos, except for the violin) for this piece, beginning with Louie himself, who started the whole business for this concerto when he reworked the piece for piano and orchestra (Op. 61a) and wrote one, which others transcribed back to violin or wrote their own. This is a piece that I think has suffered from some of the great mid to late 20th century conductors who have weighed it down. Then along comes Patricia Kopatchinskaja (with Philippe Herreweghe conducting the Frankfurt Radio Symphony) who, for my Minnesota friends, is a Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra Artistic Partner, and her blazing energy and profound sensitivity reignites the greatness of this piece. Her violin emerges from the unanimity of the strings, pulling them, drawing them out, dancing above them and never dismissing them – although sometimes leaving them, and everyone else – behind, as she goes into raptures. Again, this is a recording that needs good speakers – the violin’s high notes will sound like a screech without it.

Op.67 – Symphony No.5 in C minor, “Triumphal” (1808) - Da-da-da-daah! We hear those four notes and think we know the 5th symphony, the most familiar notes in all classical music, the equivalent of “To be or not to be.” The joy, the majestic narrative sweep of this symphony never hit me until I had the thrill of listening to a live recording of John Eliot Gardiner and his Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantique wearing a good pair of headphones with the volume turned up and the swell at the beginning of the fourth movement shivers me and I think this symphony should be called the “Triumphal” symphony! A pioneer in historically informed performances – thus sayeth his website – Gardiner and the ORR – so sayeth me – brings clarity, energy and the musical tension of different voices in the orchestra by letting them be heard.

Op.95 – String Quartet No.11 in F minor, "Serioso" (1810) – Holy shit, listening to the Chiaroscuro Quartet playing on gut-stringed period instruments with an interpretation that sounds like Beethoven doing acid with John Cage. Wow. There are times when the music almost falls apart and at its edge, the dissolution of sound, he pulls it back together with an aching beauty. The end of the second movement, the third movement, is breathtaking. Like Op. 30/2, he pushes sound beyond what it’s been capable of before, a sonic dissolution that threatens the order of sound and, for a moment, sound decays the structure of the known world until by the brilliance of the composition and playing, the world comes again into focus and when I hear it I think of the ending of V. Woolf’s The Waves, where language breaks down until its limitations render Bernard and others incapable of speech and word but still, still, they fight against this cosmic anarchy and return to a pattern of the world that allows for human connection and contact, lets us be in each other’s presence and be able to communicate.

Op.97 – Piano Trio No.7 in B♭, "Archduke" (1811) If Beethoven was alive today he’d be a hip hop artist called Fat Louie and he’d be sampling and mashing sounds and making new ones like no one’s business. What fascinates me the most about Beethoven now is when his music decays and almost falls apart and yet there’s a tension in it that even at the edge – especially at the edge, of dissolution its belief, hope, certainty – what do I call it? – in life and the ability or power of music to bring back to life that which was on the edge of death or non-being – silence, in fact, nothingness, no atoms against which to collide and create friction and heat and energy and love and life and he stares into the abyss of silence and draws even greater energy from it, and the indomitable spirit of his, even in despair, affirms life like nothing I have ever heard, and it is the musicians who bring this music to us today, their courage and sensitivity to devote themselves to being instruments themselves, a discipline that is monastic in its intensity and focus, and what they bring to us is this vision of life, of light, of sound on the boundaries of silence, joyous and alive. Two equally brilliant recordings are worth listening to: one by Isabelle Faust, Alexander Melnikov and Jean-Guihen Queyras, and the other by the Van Baerle Trio.

Op.106 – Piano Sonata No.29 in B♭, "Hammerklavier" or “Symphony for Piano” (1818) – What a wild sonata! I keep listening to it – I don’t know if it’s my favorite but I keep coming back to listen again and again because there’s so much in it. This sonata keeps growing on me, layers and textures of sounds and themes and melodies and at first it was just a big mash and now I’m listening for how these parts of the sonata make a whole. It’s like Beethoven had three different things to say and put it all in one place, with digressions, sidebars and an eventual return to the points he wants to make. Rather than naming this a sonata, perhaps it should be called a “Symphony for Piano”. But to come back to Annie Fischer (the Bruce Springsteen of the piano,) she plays with an intensity that Beethoven would appreciate, especially for this sonata. And then a definitive interpretation by Ronald Brautigam, who demonstrates the tension in the fortepiano better than modern pianos and techniques, clearly articulating the different voices.

Op.120 – Diabelli Variations (1823) It’s like someone takes your PB&J sandwich and turns it into a 33 course Michelin-starred meal. So many choices – Alfred Brendel, Daniel Barenboim, Ronald Brautigam, Andras Schiff…

Op.125 – Symphony No.9 in D minor, "Choral" (1824) – Go old-school on this one, or maybe David Zinman conducting the Zurich Tonhalle Orchestra.

Op.130 – String Quartet No.13 in B♭ (1825) is searing, he takes apart sound, dissects patterns he sees in it, pushes instruments to the brink of what they can do to further this exploration of sound, relying on the sheer will of the music and the performers to accomplish this exploration of sound. There is literally a struggle in the music, the performers, and my goodness, the Artemis Quartet, struggle to actually play the music, there is struggle in the music because the sounds have not before been shaped this way, put together in this fashion and the actual struggle is aural and so is the resolution and consummation between instruments, performers and audience. We are baptized, confirmed, and married in this music and shall be sanctified in its last rites.

Op.132 – String Quartet No.15 in A minor (1825) – Starting this penultimate quartet with a 1930s recording of the Busch Quartet – great playing! These last quartets are religious. The third movement – molto adagio, is trembling. His dive into the human spirit and the depth of feeling is revealed so beautifully in this movement, and it’s so different from other pieces where he is pushing the boundary of sound or an instrument. Here, he teaches us how to pray – with all our heart and attention and devotion. Layer after layer of sound coming in waves, pushing down the music that precedes it and building upon it in a slow rhythmic swell after swell, and the Hagen Quartett’s end of the third movement is spectacular.

Op.135 – String Quartet No.16 in F (1826) And here we are at the end, together again, beginning with Artemis Quartet. Jesus, the relentless strings of the 4th movement before it resolves itself.

It shouldn’t be difficult to share how profound this year-long endeavor was but it reveals the gap between art and our apprehension of it, demonstrates that unless the art itself is seen heard read touched or otherwise engaged with by you the reader then it’s as worthless as the ingredient list on the side of a cardboard cylinder of Comet cleanser with its bright green color and in a small font at the bottom there’s a number to call if you have questions and maybe pieces of art should include a number to call and likewise a warning label because as an old girlfriend and I wrote on the tee shirts we made, poetry kills, and unless the viewer reader listener engages with the work at hand it’s just a bunch of scribbles or words or sounds and it’s why we can say, I don’t like jazz or I don’t like contemporary music or art – we have failed to engage with it and art is an act a verb and the viewer is an integral part of the art and whether it’s Pablo Casals who found sheet music for Bach’s cello suites in some back alley music store as a boy and committed himself to understanding and explaining them with his cello, pulling them from forgotten obscurity and ensuring they don’t remain just squiggly lines of ink on pieces of paper, or you on a Tuesday evening walking through a vacant lot with dandelions pushing with insistence through cracks or maybe a cleansing bone-cold day in late January when the air you breathe hollows your lungs or perhaps any other time when you look, listen, write,

The space between notes: listening to the whole of Beethoven in 2020

The one time I visited the Vatican museums I stayed in the Sistine Chapel for nearly five hours, but before the famed Chapel Raphael, Matisse, Gauguin, Van Gogh, and a beautiful Redon, always the delicate pastels, a cruel Max Ernst crucifixion, just like his slabs of meat, a stunning hall of cartography, but nothing, nothing like the Sistine Chapel, the scale the perspective the narrative sweep the wholeness of the space, but wandering in I first thought to myself, is this it? Is this all it is? Maybe I was looking for something familiar so I could say to myself, oh, this is God creating man, feeling that if I identified it I had seen it, or maybe I was surprised that it was a finite, contained space. Instead, I wandered, and hours later, was floating in a sea of perceptions, each one informed by the order and the framework that Michelangelo painted across the vault of the Chapel, giving us time to consider his art. If tasting wine is about allowing our taste buds to be receptive, to taste what we taste not what we want to or think we should, but to let the wine roll across our tongues, cheeks, throat, and just look, look, what do you see? Not what we know, not what someone has pointed out to us, although those bits of information can guide us at certain points, but first, or second, or at some point we have to pull up our anchor and let the winds push us, float across the deep blue sea and travel on fresh water and waves, not where someone else is leading us but alone, alone in the wind, the night, the dark sky the blazing sun, letting our own senses guide us as we look into the work before us, asking, what is that, and letting the work speak through its color, form, composition, narrative structure, and giving ourselves the freedom, the right, the responsibility to look at Michelangelo for the first time, to be alone with his art and say this is what I see, this is what unfolds hour after hour, as this arch and that takes form, as one panel leads to the next, the beginning of time to the creation of light and darkness, the creation of sun and moon and the glory of mankind, and always looking, looking, at aspects large and small, the overall scope and scale to the details of one look, the direct eye gaze of one African wise man staring right at us as only the one man on the altar wall, one hand covering half his face, Michelangelo himself, perhaps, gazing and gaping, is this all there is, is this the end, is this it, but the wise man with a kind, compassionate, intelligent and sophisticated plain look stares straight at us like no one else in the whole chapel and I wonder, who is this man, who is he? And down at the other end the Last Supper and I wondered where Judas was and I look and see a devil on his back, black and winged, whispering into his ear his heart his thoughts all the while sitting there with Christ and yesterday in St Peter’s a man talking below in a chapel in the crypt, evangelical almost but moved by the power of the place, and saying, god is there when you are broken, a failure, riddled with mistakes and half formed ideas, broken hopes and bad decisions as parents, spouses, humans, and we think about our glory when perhaps we should be more open to our frailty, our faults, our many almosts, and perhaps why the Church really survives, because God is God but we only know that when we’re weak and incomplete, filled with failure and regret, there’s the space where we’re receptive and open, willing to admit what is right before us and that’s our own shortcomings and failures and know that we’re only vessels for god’s word, God’s ability to – no, that’s not it, that’s not how I started, I meant to say to think to express that in our silence we can hear something besides our own voice, but that’s not it either, because – right before the Sistine Chapel a glorious delight of Matisse, a man filled with the joy of the Church – the pilgrim church on earth – long before Vatican II gave permission for joy; in 1950 or 1952 he made a vestment, simple crosses, a tree of life, a joy in creation and God, and a large Mother and Child and she is a vessel, a face of circles, the eternity of infinity, wise and joyous, a church that is procreative and open to happiness. Michelangelo is glorious. He praises God forever with his work, and the Pieta is the most sublime sculpture imaginable, a liquid, limpid, sensual, dignified, caressed piece of marble, coursing with the soft quiet of sorrow, the deep sadness of death of loss and the ultimate triumph of life after all.

After St Peter’s I thought, why are we what we are? How do we become this, and why, if we are expressive beings, are we who we are? Shouldn’t all life be a constant prayer of thanksgiving, a hymn of thanks for life for life itself? What exists except to praise God? All art is the magnification of God, the pushing of a boundary that gives voice to what could not be said or shown or thought or sung or read before we gave it that voice, those words, those thoughts. We are needed because each of us reflects the light of God a little differently, piece after piece of tessera/tesserae used in the many mosaics in the basilica, the Raphael one – not by him but a copy of one of his painting into a mosaic, with pieces so small that it looked like an oil painting. I returned to our hotel room near dinner time, the whole day having passed, and I was quiet with a full soul, having drunk in the glory of art celebrating creation, itself an act of creation.

 

And then last December, shortly after a particularly good concert by the Heath Quartet, I realized that for all my love of Beethoven’s string quartets and symphonies I knew little of his other music and decided – essentially on a whim – to listen to the whole of his catalogued, published music, from Opus 1, a piano trio published in 1795 to the final string quartets that I thought I knew. Cataloging a musician’s work reminds me of the difficulty we sometimes encounter when we look at wine labels from an unfamiliar region. Beethoven’s music is catalogued using opus numbers, opus being Latin, meaning work or a work. The ordering of opus numbers is not strictly chronological and there are a few notable exceptions of early works being assigned a late opus number – like Op. 103, which was written in 1792/3 but not published and assigned an opus number until much later, but the chronology of opus numbers roughly matches the order of composition. However, many of his pieces, especially well known ones, are known by multiple names, like the Emperor Concerto, which is also known as Piano Concerto No.5, as well as Opus 73. Sometimes, an Opus number has several pieces in it, like Op. 59, which is comprised of three string quartets. Op. 59, No. 1 is also String Quartet No. 7, and Op. 59, No. 2 is String Quartet No. 8. All three pieces in the opus are also known as the Razumovsky Quartets, named after the patron to whom Beethoven dedicated the quartets. There also are pieces that were not published during Beethoven’s life, and were never assigned an opus number. They have a different numbering system, Without Opus, or WoO, but Beethoven’s WoO pieces were not part of my listening repertoire. Nearly a year later, all the way through the 250th anniversary of his birth in 1770 and the devastation of Covid-19 and the final year of Trump’s destructive, annihilating presidency, I’ve listened to one, two, sometimes six or more recordings of every piece of Beethoven’s catalogued works, and these last pieces, sometimes blistering and other times limpid with grace tremble on the edge of knowing, pushing sound and instruments to their limits, diving too into profoundly personal, soul-aching tenderness, and I struggle to find a framework even to begin to fashion a response to his call.

 

Haunt, v., n., from Middle English: to reside, inhabit, use; from old Norman: to go back home. Proto-Germanic and Proto-Indo-European: village.

 

We all of us at times are haunted – the word has for the most part turned negative, except when we say someone visits their favorite haunts, and I’m thinking of a pull that was deep in him where phrases, tunes, melodies - kept returning, ones that he was always recapitulating, putting forth as a sonata here and then part of a trio later in life, but why do these phrases resonate with him the way they do, why do they become the foundation for an entire new piece again and again? And these notes, phrases find their way into so many pieces. He is returning home, going back home, and we are haunted – by a melody, a fragrance, a memory, a glance, or maybe a composition of the sky melting into the sea on a grey day cloudy with drizzle in November when color absolves itself of any role in the world and we for a moment live monochromatically with no differentiation between the elements of the world and it is hard too to avoid the dissolution of our own boundaries and these moments, remembered from childhood and lived through until now, these notes are my emotional repository for so many slow movements of Beethoven, falling first in love with the second movement of the 7th symphony in college in the 80s, and then I’m in 2020 and the scraping of a bow across a string, a vibration just barely willing itself into being and when I first heard David Oistrakh (violin) and Lev Oborin (piano) play Opus 30, No. 2 and its adagio – this, I thought, is the sound of two lovers who have over the course of their lives loved and fought and shed tears and laughed and still they held on and waited for the other and this, I thought, is where we begin to hear the emergence of Beethoven as a mature artist, writing voices for instruments that meld seamlessly into one another, the vast differences between the piano and violin diminished as they engage in a hushed conversation we are privileged to be welcomed into, and the human, deeply personal articulation of emotions, thoughts, and feelings that are so visible and present in the three sonatas of Opus 30 disarm us with gentleness. We listen to these pieces vulnerable, open, tender. Here is Beethoven so empathetic, human.

 

What do we look for when we walk in the woods? Do we try to spot that migratory warbler, identify the spring ephemerals that gild the forest floor, forage for ramps and morels, or just smell the perfume of spring, the ripeness of August, the November earth? I did not know I would have to reckon with nearly a century of recordings, traditions passed from one pianist to the next generation of students, orchestras with conductors whose careers spanned both sides of WWII, as well as contemporary musicians who eschew the well wrought, finely tuned instruments of today and choose to play with gut strings on period instruments, studying manuscripts and striving for historically informed performances, recognizing as well that their ears and ours cannot unhear Philip Glass, Frozen 2, and Straight Outta Compton. My early exposure to Beethoven was pretty standard for a kid from Buffalo who grew up listening to Yes, Grateful Dead and other rock and prog rock combos. One of my mom’s parenting regrets was that none of us ever learned how to play a musical instrument. She did all the cooking, driving, clothes washing, shopping, and sewing, and if she added music lessons for eight kids she would have walked out on us one Tuesday afternoon and never returned, so I’m glad she stuck around and instead instilled in us a love for learning, and her many years of listening to Peter Allen’s Texaco-sponsored broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera eventually rubbed off, too, because one of the best jobs I ever had was as an usher for the 1987 Metropolitan Opera season at Lincoln Center. I got paid pretty well to direct people to their seats and then stand by the door and listen to the best opera in the world. Some years later I was the assistant director at Greater Buffalo Opera Co.’s production of Il Pagliacciand had to be onstage, in costume, for a scene change with all the union stagehands during the performance and once, because I couldn’t read music and still don’t know what the second measure after C-sharp means, I walked onstage during the middle of a singer’s aria and, halfway onto the stage, realized I was about three minutes too early and had to stand there like I belonged, with 3000 audience members and one director looking at me. That being said, my permanent– in the same way that Jamestown was the colonists’ first permanent settlement in the Americas – love for classical music, especially opera, began while painting houses in the summer and getting tired of the three-minute rock and roll songs when we had a ten hour day in front of us, so I started listening to operas and suddenly The Magic Flute helped the time go quickly, and Rigoletto’sdramatic arc made sense when I had the patience to listen and nowhere else to go. But, I got started with all of this as a fourteen or fifteen-year old because a friend’s older brother would wow us with his great stereo and sometimes after a few bong hits would play Pachelbel’s Canonor Beethoven’s 9th, which he discovered watching A Clockwork Orange, and I guess it stuck with me. With virtually no musical knowledge or training I was more than a little lost when I started listening last December, thinking this journey would be an interesting exercise of listening to one or two recordings of each piece, checking it off, and moving on. I wrote notes from the beginning, quick half sentences and sentence fragments documenting the performers and year of recording, but by the time I got to Op. 5 added in my notes that I didn’t know how to listen to the piano and cello playing together and knew I had little context to assess what I was hearing.

In the beginning I listened to recordings on YouTube and read much of the accompanying commentary, written by aficionados, musicians, crackpots, and casual listeners who shared sometimes-poignant stories about a significant encounter with the piece of music, and these comments led me to other recordings I hadn’t heard before. Before I knew it I was listening to multiple recordings of a single piece of music, mesmerized and sometimes confused or enthralled by the differences between performers playing the same piece. I was learning to listen, and realized that an interpretation of Beethoven in the 1940s can be as different from one today as the difference between episodes of I Love Lucy and Giri/Haji. So many traditions and styles are handed down and passed on while others are rejected or changed or evolve into something altogether new. Interpretations and recordings of music bear just as much a mark of their time as other mediums. I didn’t expect that and so discovering new ensembles and quartets and conductors became just as significant as hearing a piece of the Beethoven repertoire for the first time and falling in love with it. First, this happened with pianists and his piano sonatas because everything was new. I had to learn how to listen to the piano for the first time, really listen to it and over time I began to notice the differences between Brendel and Perahia and Barenboim and Annie Fischer and Ashkenazy and Sviatoslav Richter and Goode and Paul Lewis and Gulda and Emil Gilels and Fazil Say and Maurizio Pollini and then I heard Ronald Brautigam, a Dutch pianist who plays the fortepiano, which Beethoven used and played on because the big-ass Steinway Concert Grand pianos that we hear today every time we go to a concert didn’t exist and when I heard the Waldstein Sonata, Sonata No. 21, op. 53, I listened to it again and again, enjoying Vladimir Ashkenazy’s 1988 recording and wavering between the intensity – which does not lose its clarity – of Annie Fischer, and the timing, beauty, and phrasing of Ashkenazy, whose second movement reduces the universe to one quivering string, a single vibration left alone in the universe and it is from that simple, profound beginning that all life, all energy springs – a single vibration. Fischer pours all her feelings into every note as though it’s the one time she will ever play this note, this piece, and she wants us to know how much it matters - she is the Bruce Springsteen of the piano. But listening to Ronald Brautigam playing on a period fortepiano, there is a clarity that isn’t heard on modern instruments – beautiful, and in the space of several notes in the 2nd movement, an adagio, we witness

the dissolution of time and space,

the world reduced to silence, a world without vibrations,

time with nothing to mark it, resignation. And in that silence

a single note

– the Big Bang –

posits life as the alternative to that silence, and in one, two, ten, twenty notes – sound, music

again swells in its life affirming majestic triumph – life and sound and music and friction and vibrations will regenerate this barren world. And he does this with a piano.

 

(To be continued...)

Election day

Sympathy? You have got to be kidding. Last week I wrote this rather foul-mouthed diatribe and sent it only to my sister and a friend, knowing it was too raw to share publicly. But after the debate and positive Covid test, I saw people wondering how they should respond. So, I removed the (really) foul language from what I wrote, although it's still raw and I’m still unable to rationally talk about this miserable creature. The man’s ability to blind people to his malice and play the victim is confounding and leaves me unable to simply say, just look at what he’s doing, and my voice goes into near-hysterics as his followers point out all the reasons Hillary should be in jail. I lose my general good humor and flexibility with language and words and instead froth and fume at his continual abhorrent behavior and despicable disrespect for democracy. What’s worse is that he would wipe his filthy ass with the flag if it was nearby, and his followers wouldn’t care because he’d simply say, the left are socialists who don’t love America, and they fall in line and ignore what they just saw and know to be true. And I get apoplectic and start shouting, don’t you see that he just wiped his filthy ass with the flag and that he doesn’t actually care about our country, and they say something about how they suffered under Obama and that Biden will do monstrous things. And I fall over myself and forget how to be calm and rational and instead find myself with bursting blood pressure and the vocabulary of a drunk sailor. My negligent, disrespectful behavior becomes the object of condemnation and I’m left feeling shame-faced at my inability to stand and deliver the indictment this mockery of a leader deserves, a man who would beat his mother before he suffered any discomfort, who would give this great country to Russia in order to protect his guilt, who would sow dissension among Americans and make us mistrust and even hate each other before he would allow his sins against this country to be known, his ruthless plundering of the goodwill that’s been built in neighborhoods for years and years, where Americans, everyday ordinary Americans who are white and black and fifth generation and new immigrants and struggling and loud and poor and brash and irritating and generous and in your face and intimidating and freedom loving and all of us are the real thing, salt of the earth Americans who push cars out of snowbanks and look for lost dogs and he, he wants you and me to think we don’t care about each other or don’t want to sit in our camping chairs next to each other by the curb on Memorial Day when we watch the middle school band and fire department pass by and we cheer and clap as one community, one nation, and it doesn’t matter what party we’re in because we all want a good, safe, strong town and he, that fucking horrible person wants you and me to argue with each other so we ignore him while he grabs and takes and pilfers and pillages and lies lies lies all the time, so indifferent to any facts or the truth that he will say anything he wants, anything he thinks of and won’t care if he’s never thought it before or ever cares about its veracity and he will try to divide you and me and I sit here silent, unable to stand up and point out the raw basic and simple truth that the man is a despot, a desperate, unholy man with no regard for life, certainly not the unborn because he would abort his own child if it inconvenienced him and he will turn and say he loves life and his followers will ignore everything they see the man do and say to one another, see, he cares about life, he just said so, and meanwhile his weak, bloated body festers with his evil soul and when he dies a dark stain of horrid smelling mucous will remain, even after it is hosed down and rained upon, and dogs will avoid it and cringe when its malodorous spirit drifts too close, and nothing will grow there and his grave will be barren and smell of death and the putrid flesh he inhabits now will not return to the earth because the earth will reject it and so it will rot and fester and the spot will forever be known as the stain, and for generations historians scientists and poets and bartenders will gather stories of his and the accumulated wisdom in those tales and books and jokes will let us know that we survived an evil of this magnitude because we finally understood that this almost man was in fact a piece of shit who no more deserved to be admired than the coward he is. And me? I wish I could calmly say all the things that people have been uncovering for years and barely need repeating, the words of diplomats and generals and regular bureaucrats whose public service keeps this country running and we haven’t listened to them, people who have dedicated themselves to putting pieces together and understanding and telling stories so that we’re a smarter, better country, better able to make decisions and face challenges and adversaries and adversity, and their words have already told such a story that I can add nothing new except, perhaps, if I take a few deep breaths, exhaling and inhaling deeply between each one, and center myself with a decade of Hail Marys as I am wont to repeat when I run, walk, or feel restless and unsettled, when I know that I am agitated and perhaps not thinking straight and when I call to mind the wisdom innocence grit fear courage and generosity of Mary I know that my foul mouth diatribe does no good and probably only incenses his followers and that the stillness of Mary when her spirit is troubled and she wonders if God is with her, if God is, if she knows anything, and somehow she, she who is young and naïve and bare footed is the one to teach me, the one I should listen to and look to for guidance and courage and an example and I think she would tilt her head down and to the side and pass him by silently, shrinking a bit into herself hoping to pass by unnoticed because he’s the kind of bully coward who would taunt a young girl, mock a disabled man, and make their hard life even harder by his hubris and callous tongue, his hands rapacious paws that claw and swat what’s nearby as he manhandles even the new fruit just brought to market, and he makes even that feel dirty, and I remember Mary and her calm and pray to have some of the patience and restraint she does, and some of her strength to expose this man who is wholly unfit to occupy an office held by some of the most courageous and honorable men to have lived in this country of ours, this one nation under God. But it’s unlikely I’ll gain any patience or wisdom from Mary or anyone else because I’m still sitting here, fretting about November and wondering how in the world we Americans can’t see what the rest of the world can, that the man debases the dream of America, the idea of America, and that’s really what we are, an idea, born in the restlessness of centuries of people who chafed at being the youngest, the poorest, the kookiest beliefs, the frightened sad and lonely ones who made their way here and in one generation or ten became Americans and fought against some of the despots and dictators and regimes that threatened that idea, that idea that there is a place in this world where you don’t have to be from a certain class or race, that you can show up and be part of the mix, part of the fabric that we’ve woven, so I just want you to know that this blustering slick talking talking from the hip using his gut to rouse people into malice kind of almost man isn’t my choice on election day. What about you?

Home life

I walked with my daughter after dinner earlier this evening and we turned back because the rain started falling hard and we didn’t feel like getting wet, even though it was an April shower rather than cold March sleet. Yesterday we celebrated Easter, and with everyone home for the past month it was nice to break out the good china for dinner. A few weeks ago I decided to get a lot of starts going for my garden, including herbs like parsley and holy basil, which are slow to germinate and sometimes forgotten until it’s too late to plant them. Being home all the time, it’s easy to make sure they stay sufficiently moist and warm and it’s nice to see that everything is coming along fine. Because the ground is still quite soggy I also started beets and mustard greens in flats, which I usually direct seed. One of the reasons I like starting spring plants like beets indoors is that when I transplant them I can ensure that there’s some regularity to the spacing, which doesn’t always happen when I start them in the ground. It often rains while the seeds are still germinating, and half the seeds end up pooling in a six inch square space while the rest of the row is staggered with one plant every foot or two.
I’ve been happy to read that yeast is in such demand these days that it is selling out in stores around the country, and when I look at our own kitchen I’m not surprised. My youngest daughter loves to bake and it seems like she’s in the kitchen most nights after dinner, wondering what she can make. Sourdough breads are experiencing a home renaissance, too, and as a dedicated sourdough baker I am so happy that people everywhere are beginning to taste how good a loaf of home baked sourdough is, and that yeast shortages aren’t a cause for concern! Hopefully it’s more than a Covid fad and more people begin to bake their bread regularly. I have never been exact with timing or measurements when I make bread and as a result I’ve had my fair share of loaves that have failed to some degree, but I’m okay with that because I bake through the ups and downs of work and parenting and schedules that pull me from the kitchen, and my indifference to most schedules and rules for kneading and rising has shown me that dough has a very wide range of tolerances. The gold standard for a good sourdough loaf these days seems to be those big-holed, high hydration loaves that taste great and look beautiful on social media, but in my many years of baking I’ve never aimed for them. Maybe I don’t have the patience for weighing my water or taking notes, but I also like a more uniform crumb so when I make sandwiches the butter and honey and mustard and melted cheese doesn’t fall through the holes. Pragmatic failure, perhaps.
After St. Patrick’s Day my son and I made a big batch of sauerkraut and this weekend, a month since it began percolating on the kitchen counter, I put a half gallon or so into a smaller container in the fridge, and put the remainder into a cool, dark corner in the garage. With a diagnosis earlier this year of high blood pressure, I have significantly reduced my salt intake, much of which comes from fermented foods, and this batch of kraut is the first since I’ve started taking medication, so in response to it I’m rinsing all the kraut off before I eat it; I think a significant amount of the salt remains in the brine I dredge the sauerkraut from, and by further rinsing it I hope that my blood pressure remains in a healthy range. If not, it may be the end of fermented foods for me, which would be sad because I have a big crock of Korean doenjang fermenting for more than a year on the back porch, and an even larger crock of gochujang right next to it.
We go through phases of eating certain things and when my wife recently found an old pack of sprouting seeds I began watering them, and am happy to see that long-expired seed still has good viability. The sprouts will be ready in another day or two and after a few batches we’ll get sick of eating them and won’t make another batch for a year or two. As long as we don’t lose the strainer lid, we’re good to go whenever the mood strikes us. Eat well, stay well!

We go back to the beginning

Early April and cold rain falling, chilly enough in our house that I still have to bring my starter into the living room where the wood stove is pulsing its heat, the most basic slurry of wheat and water dancing an evolutionary chemical dance with wild yeasts as we go back to the beginning and start again. Wheat and rye both beckon still in the raw spring air, and this lump of life I pulled from the fridge after dinner last night will today be split into bowls and for the next few days the bubble and slush of a growing starter reminds me that the very space we inhabit, the air we breathe is a biome of its own with dust and disease and fungi and bacteria and small bits of life we knew nothing about in previous centuries but had, through luck and practice and observation and long told stories that documented the hows and whys, developed scientific thinking through what we even today call superstitions or mumbo jumbo that contained embedded collective wisdom passed on across generations and today we may not think it necessary to drag clean linen over dew beneath an apple tree, and squeeze that moisture onto the wet flour mix, but they knew how to start a starter, and with all our advances in knowledge and science we almost ignored the old ways to make bread or preserve cabbages, ferment milk or brew our beer, and thirty years ago it looked almost as though our doom had been pronounced and we in these United States would be relegated to eating factory food and dead nutrition but in pockets around the country and globe, in small towns and crowded cities, still there were a few who continued to say yes to the old ways of teasing yeasts from the air or the skin of an apple from a long abandoned tree, a remnant of last century’s orchards now neglected and half dead, mostly overgrown, part of a hedgerow or just forgotten down in a gully, its unpruned branches a jumble of angles, and now a new generation has relearned many of the traditions of their grandparents and great grandparents and it’s not just cideries and bakeries that are doing this but you and I, who bake and press apples and say yes again to the possibilities of simple wild-yeast fermented food, the nutritional, caloric foundation of life in much of the world for millennia, and every time we knead a mass of dough or pull an umbered loaf from a hot oven and listen to its skin crackle as it cools, waiting, waiting just long enough to pull it apart and taste the transformation and spread it with butter and honey or wait a few days and grill it with cheese in an olive oiled pan, even though it’s just a weekday lunch or a snack before bed, the bread, beginning with its tug on our jaw, the edge of char almost realized, heating a mass of dough until it dries just as it pushes and prepares to burst, we bow to the ordinary, and every time we sit together and pass the peas and sop up the gravy with a hearty crust we’re in the midst of it all, and a deep love of the daily, which in these days of sheltering, working from home, and re-imagining family life, this return to the beginning, starting with the most basic forms of life – yeast – means we can begin to meditate on what tomorrow could look like, when the rain stops falling.

Almost spring again

And a fire pulses in the wood stove and today’s blue sky masked the chill in the air and though I planted my peas two days ago and a floating row cover whose edges are held down with smooth Lake Superior rocks and leftover bricks keeps birds and squirrels from pecking and pawing them, and started a whole flat of holy basil (Ocimum tenuiflorum), hoping to have more for my favorite Thai dish which calls for a large colander of it but my soil has so much clay in it and this basil with fine hairs on its leaves never gets as big as I hope it will when I’m thinking about my garden in the winter, this coming week still calls for cold rain and sleet and maybe it’ll snow but the flats are in a bay window indoors wrapped in a big translucent bag getting all warm and humid on the inside and science and life systems are all a go and the long slow germination of holy basil is similar to parsley, of which I sowed a half flat at the same time, but come August the flat leafed parsley is an herb that can stand by itself in so many dishes – maybe a grilled mackerel stuffed with onions tomatoes and parsley, wrapped in foil and when it opens I think of Turkey and now I just hope the soil warms and remains moist for those first pushes of green through the long darkness of a seed underground – a seed, packed with knowledge and enough nutrients to get it into the light, overcoming dormancy, and the lightest feather-like wisps of tendrils so delicate they waver in even the stillest dawn quiet hush when only a bead of dew weighs upon this urge into light into the sky and around the rough galvanized wire stapled to the wood lattices stretched down the garden row next to the longer row of yet to be planted beans, long tall beans that taste like summer and sing in the hot wok when they’re chopped small and flash fried dry, an edge of char to overcome the raw push of life today needs to be nourished and nurtured and held warm and close against the still looming chance of snow and cold and a below ground darkness that admits no warmth, no hope for that long awaited perennial movement of the earth on its course, steadfast perhaps as our universe expands, grows, pushes us in new directions as we wonder what these coming weeks will bring as waves of illness and fear lap at our feet and now it is time or still it is time to graze with our fingers so lightly on the skin of the ones we love so deeply and feel the same urge that draws us into the light, into spring again

What’s left

Here we are with crusted mounds of traffic-weathered snow on the edges of roads, dragged grey through the long weeks of February, an oscillating weather pendulum punctuated by sheets of cold rain and dumps of snow and now at the end we’re wondering what’s next. In the kitchen, though, it’s mostly been sour rye, risen and proofed and baked hot, a thick chewy crust and memory after memory of my Buffalo childhood and the smell of Kaufman’s rye bread drifting over the neighborhood, and when I slice this bread and toast it lightly and skim a thin sheen of butter the rich earthy caraway seeds and the springy dense texture of this bread satisfies some primordial memory, maybe that of ancestors in the wilds of cold northern Europe equally satisfied with a tear of this bread, frothy and alive and bubbling as it’s built, a mostly forgotten grain these days and as we head into Lent I went to an ecumenical Christian service and liked that they used the traditional, remember you are dust and to dust you shall return, the rough texture of ashes beneath his thumb and onto my forehead and those words are liberating because you who read this and I will both in three hundred years be dust again and with that certainty we can and should do what we will and in this season of want I remember so many past years when I believed in the trajectory of the church and thought it an institution that weathered the ages because of some grace and after these recent years of unending revelation of decades-long indifference to the abuse, molestation and rape of children by innumerable priests I continue to feel an anger and rage toward those men who used the power and moral authority of the church to intimidate and silence the very people they vowed to lead and protect, and the administrative, institutional authority of God’s church on earth crushed so many girls and boys that it’s hard for me to go into a church because when I do I want to interrupt the priest saying Mass and challenge his holy vows because I think of all the times I served as an altar boy for years and years and it’s only luck that a pedophile rapist priest was never assigned to my parish because then it would have been me and my friends whose lives would have been torn apart and filled with fear and doubt and mistrust but instead it was a parish over there, and over there, and over there and I feel an anger that can’t be forgiven but even with those feelings when I walk into a church there is a texture to the silence and I feel the pull of the sacrament of the holy Eucharist and even when I feel such anger toward the priests and the institution of the church the ritual ceremony sacrament they perform or conduct connects me back again to an even older, deeper mystery of life and death and the life of a soul or spirit and our unending desire to know and feel what lies beyond the edge of death and if the church sells its gold and vestments and art and churches and properties and jeweled chalices and priests are the people who hear within them a silence that calls to be voiced then perhaps the church has a chance and will not succumb to the fate it currently faces, a slow fall into indifference and irrelevance, and now, as these forty days unfold I wonder what’s left of the church I knew and gospels are filled with references to bread and after a long generation of bad bread in this country, the past decade or two have given us remembories of what bread is, fermented with wild yeasts and shared among neighbors and friends, constantly used and saved and used again, grown and depleted time after time, a continuous nurturing of life even when it slows down and rests in the fridge in an old pickle jar, a chunk of starter just waiting for warmth and wild spores floating through the air.

New Year reflections

Happy New Year! When I wrote my first blog post in 2007 I was interested in gardening, the way we thought about food, how and where it was produced, the culture of dinnertime, and the role it played in fostering community.  I loved writing while observing my own family and circle of friends as we raised our children, but over the years ended up feeling marginalized and too amateurish to continue. It seemed that overnight everyone became a foodie and blogs and television food shows became increasingly competitive, and the aspects I love most about food were diminished. I lost heart and confidence and over time the blog withered.

As this new decade begins, I can see how my own life has changed since the last one, especially since 2012, when we moved from Minnesota to Vermont.  A job change means I now travel to Asia four or more times every year, and the perspective I’ve developed wandering through markets and neighborhoods from Japan to India has deepened my appreciation for the central role that food plays in our lives and its importance in shaping cultures and economies. Sitting at the dinner table and talking long into the night is as relevant today as it was when our kids were kids, and a bowl of chicken soup or a thick slice of crusty sourdough bread continues to nourish my spirit as well as my body. And, more than ever, the need for community compels me to pick up my pen and write again, even though I’m not always sure who or where my community is. It feels a little disorienting - or maybe disheartening - that I can feel at home in the wet markets of Seoul and Bangkok but out of place in the co-op around the corner from our home. I continue to believe that sitting down with people and sharing a meal is one of the simplest and most important ways to build community but rarely manage to do it with the friends I’ve made here in Vermont.

You who are my friends know that I can get excited when I talk, and what I hope to continue with here is a mixture of that excitement and passion for a grilled cheese sandwich or a profound bottle of wine as well as more thoughtful, reflective pieces about things that matter to me – food, family, culture, politics and, of course, God.