Classical Music in the MP3 Age

How are aficionados expected to organize classical music in iTunes? The whole artist-album schema seems grossly inadequate for dealing with composer, conductor, orchestra, quartet, soloist, etc.

What I've been doing is putting the composer in the artist field (last name first), the name of the work in the album field, and the other rubbish in the comments section. Because when I listen to Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra, it's Bartok I'm listening to, not Leonard Bernstein. The drawback here is if there is more than one version of the same work in my library. I have two versions of Mahler's Second Symphony so I'm forced to come up with differentiating album titles. Not ideal but it'll have to do until something better comes along.

Horrible Rodent

Horrible rodent, you've got a lot of nerve coming in here with teeth bared and bringing us your rot. It's a gloomy kind of Sunday in this city of ghosts and all the raindrops have been collected and sorted by the gleefully damaged. Unearthed bloodworms lay strewn about the town square where we sit on cinder logs, swinging buckets between splayed legs, and watch the buses lumber past like domesticated animals. The cold sun is concealed by coughing clouds and a tremendous wingspan, accompanied by an unholy flapping. Insects emerge from the pores of the city, clamoring for food. The organ grinder's monkey goes around the square taking donations for the funeral.

Here comes Tom Mustard, lost in deep smoky wonderbout, his skull trapped in a balloon. Up to his old tricks again, it seems. Time to feed the parrots and teach them dirty words. He knows what makes the clock tick as well as tock. They say he once released the hounds on his own daughter. Imagine that level of disassociation. Electroplated memories in the sawdust cellar. Surrounded by the smell of fermenting money. No one raises their head as he strides past and disappears down an alley which leads presumably nowhere.

There's a pawnshop on fire down by the broken drawbridge. Someone pawned a grenade and evidently the heat from the store room radiator was too much for it. Ladies conceal blades in their garters but gentlemen prefer bombs. Lethargic firemen carve salami on the running board of their truck. They've given up the fight. Meanwhile traffic signals go dead within a vulture's radius and faces go grey as gauze. Across town the funeral is over and all the mourners gone home to sleep or play cards.

Belief & Technique For Modern Prose

Jack Kerouac's List of Essentials:

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house
4. Be in love with yr life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Dont think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In Praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. Youre a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

Come Back to the Fold

Come back to the fold, precious one. Perhaps we acted a little hasty before but we're hoping for a little exchange of forgive and forget. We miss your charming company, your enthusiasm and youthful vigor. We feel it's time to bury the hatchet somewhere far out back where it won't be dug up again soon. We just want you to be comfortable here again, as before. Look, we've saved all your precious things, your knickknacks, your paddywhacks, your dog's bone. We kept your room just as you left it, just as you'll remember it, the good memories as well as the bad. We've even taken the surveillance equipment out of your bathroom.

Weekly playlist

Charles Mingus: Mingus Ah Um
Kyuss: Blues for the Red Sun
Bernard Herrmann: the Essential Bernard Herrmann
Gentle Giant: Octopus
King Crimson: Red
Van Der Graaf Generator: Godbluff
Porcupine Tree: In Absentia
Beach Boys: Pet Sounds
Super Furry Animals: Fuzzy Logic
Chopin: Grand Fantasia on Polish Airs
Air: Pocket Symphony
Vampire Weekend: Vampire Weekend
The Dukes of Stratosphear: Chips from the Chocolate Fireball

Walk This Way

Having left my antigravity boots at home, I waited at this crosswalk for hours, unsure of how to proceed, before finally opting to walk around the block, thereby avoiding the situation entirely.

Tragedy of the Common

After forty minutes of cooling my heels in the impossibly clean lobby of Mongoose Studios, I was led into an inner office decorated as tastefully as possible under the circumstances in a theme of oak and raccoon. There I was introduced to one E. Winston Monocle, whose handshake felt like reaching into a bucket of moist grapes. His hair looked like it was combed back with black shoe polish, his wormy lips strangely vacant without a cigar clenched between them. He settled back in his chair facing me across the imposing span of desk and asked to hear my pitch.

I cleared my throat for my big moment, as rehearsed. I told him it was about a spy named Rance Gladwell who works for a covert organization, so covert not even the CIA was aware of its existence. He's like James Bond, only instead of suave and sophisticated he was an incompetent fool.

"Maxwell Smart," he interjected with a dubious squint, "Inspector Clouseau."

I shook my head, no that's the thing because it's not a comedy. See, he's this totally incompetent being who makes a muck of everything he attempts. He's sent to Lisbon on an important assignment, the details of which we never learn, but before he even gets started he forgets his plane ticket, lose his suitcase with top secret papers inside, is unable to locate the embassy, and basically spends the whole mission tangled in bureacracy. He's a sad, unfortunate person, with expert training and a good heart but he can't do anything right. The kind of person who goes to the grocery store for cereal only to discover they're invariably out of his favorite brand. Elevators close in his face. Taxis already have a fare. It rains when he's forgotten his umbrella. See, it's not an action picture, it's a character study of a decent man betrayed by the little things. Foiled by the fine print, as it were. The terrible human sadness of it all.

E. Winston Monocle folded his hands into a pyramid and peered across the desk at me. "No one wants to see people fail at mundane things, kid. It reminds them too much of themselves. Remember, we're in the business of helping them forget all that. If you're going to fail you have to do it on a grand scale, where the stakes are high. No one wants to see you louse up a convenience store robbery, they want to watch you shot down while burgling the Louvre. See what I mean?"

But the tragedy of the common, I protested.

"Pales next to the tragedy of box office poison."

But wait'll you hear what happens when...

"Forget it, kid. Anything else on your plate?"

There wasn't, I was forced to admit. Many eggs, one basket. He rose and thanked me for only wasting a few minutes of his time. I'm not sure what I mumbled in response. Before shooing me out of his office he offered a kindly suggestion that perhaps this wasn't the right industry for me, that perhaps I should give theater a try, where I could experiment my face off without anyone getting hurt. His office door sounded unreasonably heavy as it shut behind me. On my way out I spit on his receptionist.

Em-Bov

If Madame Bovary was alive today she would likely be first in line to join one of those Sex and the City tours of New York. Certainly she'd be a member of Oprah's book club. Wonder what she'd make of her own tale? Would she weep with approval at her own tragic demise? Or more likely grow impatient with the lengthy prose & return her copy to the bookshop in favor of some twilightian vampires.


Flaubert's masterpiece does contain one of literature's great quotes: "Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to while we long to make music that will melt the stars."

Romeo's Blues

Romeo sat on the sofa waiting for Juliet to come home from her bridge club. His rump formfit the sags in the cushion, his eyelids dropped from insomnia, his frayed bathrobe had seen better days, though not in quite a while. He aimlessly fondled the TV remote, dismissive of the Cheeto dust under his fingernails. He clicked past a golf marathon, a documentary on WWII battleships, and paused on a crime drama with a jazzy soundtrack. Recognizing he'd seen this particular episode before, he made another cycle of the channels before giving up and shutting off the tube. Maybe he'd give a call to the grandkid, find out how archery practice had gone. He located the cordless receiver under a bag of onion bagel crumbs. He glared at the taunting keypad. He'd forgotten the number. After a good ten minutes spent rummaging through a drawer looking for Juliet's address book it occurred to him the number was programmed into the speed dial. He let the phone ring until voicemail answered, at which point he forgot why he was calling. He hung up without leaving a message.

His powers of recollection, he had to admit, were getting to be an issue. Underwater light in the murky tank of his brain. "You should write down your memoirs while you can," Juliet had suggested. "People might be interested in that whole 'faking our own deaths and fleeing the country' thing." Maybe, but he couldn't muster up the enthusiasm. Verona was worlds away. His adopted land of America had treated him decently. He'd settled down, rose to a respectable rank in the labor union, invested in some real estate. Juliet had squeezed out a couple pups, joined the beautification league, licked a fairly severe illness. A few years of travel after the nest emptied, nothing overly ambitious. And then the gradual succumbing to inertia.

Sleep was his greatest diversion of late, putting in a good 10-12 hour shift most nights. The Institute had diagnosed apnea, which sounded to him like an exotic vegetable. They'd rigged up a snakey network of electrodes to his skull which measured the amount of REM sleep he was getting. Very little, as it turned out. Oozing with concern, the doctors offered to sell him some contraption that clamped over his nose and mouth and would ostensibly improve his nocturnal breathing. He quickly lost interest on learning his insurance didn't cover the cost. To be honest he didn't object to sleeping all the time, though Juliet had booted him out of bed due to his herculean snoring. During this exile he fashioned a sort of fortress for himself on the sofa and quickly adapted to sleeping in an upright position. Nothing to complain about.

Were those headlights flashing in the driveway? Bridge club must be over. Romeo noticed the TV was off and switched it back on, having forgotten why he'd shut it off in the first place. His creased face was illuminated in the moony glow of a wafflemaker commercial as he waited for the familiar scratch of a key in the deadbolt.

"Waffles sound good," he thought.

Weekly playlist

Miles Davis: Milestones
Duke Ellington: Okeh Ellington
Johnny Mercer: Capitol Collectors Series
King Crimson: In the Court of the Crimson King
Charles Mingus: Pithecanthropus Erectus
Bernard Herrmann: From Citizen Kane To Taxi Driver
Radiohead: In Rainbows (bonus disc)
Dexter Gordon: Our Man in Paris
Porcupine Tree: The Incident
The Roots: Game Theory
Hoagy Carmichael: Ole Buttermilk Sky

Weekly playlist

Porcupine Tree: Deadwing
Charles Mingus: The Black Saint & The Sinner Lady
Outkast: Aquemeni
The Mars Volta: De-Loused in the Comatorium
Thelonious Monk: Monk's Dream
Dexter Gordon: Go
Duke Ellington: Money Jungle
Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Johnny Mercer Songbook
Evaline: Postpartum Modesty
Regina Spektor: 11:11
Muse: Black Holes and Revelations
The Residents: Not Available

The Disappearing Mayor

Someone spiked the donuts. There's no other explanation. Everyone who partook are staggering in seasick parabolas on the church lawn, eyes crossed, tongues swollen, and complexions like paint thinner. Meanwhile some wastrel in Bermuda shorts hoisted himself up the marquee pole and with toothy chomp sanses the serif off the "J" in "Hang Ten With Jesus."

Nothing's been the same in town since the mayor disappeared. Not a word to anyone, his car engine left running, laundry still in the dryer, secretary's pen still poised for dictation. Everything's gone downhill since then. The master keys to the post office have been mislaid, though no one can afford stamps anymore so it hasn't really been noticed. Trash piles up uncollected, roadkill left to rot, traffic lights blinking out lyrics to popular showtunes in morse code. Professionals can't afford office space so everyone works out of the parking lot of a boarded up tarpaulin factory.

"Sure, it's gonna hurt," says the Belgian dentist, hunched over his hapless patient in the back seat of his Volkswagen. "Who told you otherwise?" He gives a little prod for emphasis with a rusty retractor. "Strange place for a snakebite, I must say." Before starting the procedure he knocks ash from his cigar into the sanitizing bowl balanced uncertainly on the drink tray.

Here comes a wily character wheeling a stolen shopping cart loaded with back alley prosthetics. Times are tough, even for black marketeers. Hardly a leg to stand on. At least you can still buy cheap fish tacos from the stand along the highway, at least when the old seadog's in port. Which is admittedly not that often these days. But the locals set their lips firmly and tell themselves when there's a down there's an up, or when there's a back there's a forth, or when there's a will there's a way, or whatever will help to keep their spirits up. It's that kind of town.