BAD SINGING

I listen to music constantly. Everything from Van Morrison to The Boss, from Coldplay to Miles Davis. I listen to rock music when I am exercising my body, and smooth Jazz when I am exercising my brain while doing crossword puzzles. Music is ubiquitous in our household, to the point where our 18 month old daughter Vivienne stands in front of the stereo speakers, swaying back and forth in a semblance of rhythm that is already far superior to what I will ever attain. They say that white men can’t jump, but in my case my totally earthbound state also implies a disturbing inability to match the tempo of whatever is playing on the radio.
I read an article once that claimed that music activated more centers of the brain than any other activity, 6 in all as I recall. But, for me anyway, the center that music seems to activate the most is my memory. I hear the first strains of NORWEGIAN WOOD and I am immediately transported back to Christmas week in San Mateo, circa 1966. My sister got the album RUBBER SOUL for Christmas and she played it over and over as we lay on the floor playing board games. Neither of us ever tired of the album even though we were wearing that vinyl out. We read and re-read the liner notes, memorized the words, picked our favorite songs.
The audacious opening guitar licks of Led Zeppelin’s WHOLE LOTTA LOVE brings me immediately to the smoky confines of a funky turd-brown Ford Fairlane station wagon streaming along Skyline Blvd through the Redwood trees in 1970. I am with my two best high school buddies, John Peterson and Paul Gilleran, and if I didn’t have their friendship I would be a total outcast and loser. But in Peterson’s parents’ station wagon, smoking Panama Red and listening to the blistering rock of Santana, the Zep and so many other great bands, I can almost forget for a time how truly miserable my adolescence is.
Play any song from James Taylor’s MUD SLIDE SLIM AND THE BLUE HORIZON, and I am magically transported to Madison, Wisconsin in the fall of 1971, in love with a terrific girl and holding her hand as we stroll through the University’s arboretum, the sheer glory of the red and gold trees reflecting my own inner fire.
You get the idea. When my teens came along rock and roll was busting out all over, and so music sort of defined my youth, and necessarily, my sense of self. Music was the background to everything that was going on through my life. We played music at parties; we played music when we were mellowing out and when we were all jazzed up. So there is sort of like a movie soundtrack going on in the background of my life.
Now, I don’t consider myself unique in this regard, I assume that everybody who was around at that time had the same experience of music being a quasi-transformative influence on one’s life. And so I am always surprised to meet people who listen to talk radio or NPR. Whenever anybody is talking on my radio, either in an advertisement or with the news, I change that channel lickety-split, and keep changing it until I get some music. I don’t like disembodied voices talking to me –they might say something I don’t want to hear – but I really get off on disembodied voices singing to me.
So you might think that with all this music going on in my life that I would have a real bent towards the musical arts. And alas, fine friend, this would be another case of your begin dead wrong in public. Because it’s not that I am completely tone deaf, it’s just that I am the nearest thing to it. But it’s not my fault; it is genetic. And if you doubt that, I present exhibit A, my older brother Stephen.
When Stephen was fourteen and thought he was going to grow up to be a priest rather than a real estate lawyer he went to Maryknoll Seminary, where choir participation was a mandatory part of the studies. And Stephen loved choir. He loved to sing. The only problem was that his voice was so bad, and so loud, that it stood out among the sweet clarion-like tones of his fellow seminarians like a loud fart in a yoga class.
The choirmaster, Father Junipero we will call him, upon hearing my brother’s dulcet tones, stopped the practice and methodically went from pupil to pupil having them sing a few notes until he came upon my brother. Cringing mightily at my brother’s vocal feats, he informed Stephen that he was excused from practice.
“But I like choir,” my brother said. It was really the only part of the seminary experience he did truly value.
“Yes,” Father Junipero said. “But, nonetheless, you are excused.”
“When can I come back?” Stephen asked.
“Hopefully, never.”
And so my brother’s choir experience was ended, and shortly thereafter his seminary experience as well, for he left Maryknoll to return to the secular life.
Like my brother I can’t sing and I can’t play a musical instrument. And just to prove that point, when I retired from gainful employment I determined that I would take singing lessons. And just to fully realize my inner Billy Joel, I would also take piano lessons.
For the next year I took singing and piano lessons. And I was a really good student, as you can imagine with one of my obsessive nature. I rented a keyboard and played all the time. I sang constantly, I really practiced. But in this case, practice did not make perfect. At the end of a year all I had succeeded in accomplishing was the near destruction of the fragile sanity of my elderly teacher.
I will never forget our last lesson together, in the cluttered studio of my sweet natured teacher, a woman in her 70’s with a slight Viennese accent, a beautiful voice and a rich history of training concert ready singers and musicians.
I was standing at the music stand, booming out discordant notes as she played the piano. After one particularly disturbing note she stared down at the keyboard, completely flummoxed. Though game to continue, I did sort of feel bad having brought this innocent woman to such a state.
“Mister Finn,” she said, very polite as she delivered the bad news. “Perhaps the music is not for you.”
“But I practice all the time,” I told her, sounding disturbingly like my brother at choir practice. If practice was all it took I would have been Elton John by this point.
“Practice is not your problem, Jeffrey. No,” she sighed and looked out the window, no doubt thinking of other, less musically impaired students she had trained in her glorious European past. And now here she was in Sonoma County trying to beat some musical sense into a tone-deaf middle-aged musical Neanderthal.
“You are painter, are you not?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Perhaps you stick to the painting,” she said as her hands straightened her sheet music, perhaps to keep from pulling her hair out.
“What about my piano playing?”
A visible shudder ran through her slim frame. “No,” she whispered. “No, no piano playing for you, Jeffrey.” She looked me dead in the eye and delivered the grim news. “You stop now with the singing and the piano playing, Jeffrey. It is best for all.” Meaning the rest of humanity, no doubt.
So that is how melodiously talentless I am – a women I paid to give me lessons actually fired me.
One final cap on the Finn melodic epoch.
About ten years ago we were hosting Christmas at our home here in Santa Rosa. As my brother Stephen arrived I pulled him into the den. From the mantle I took down Xeroxed copies of some Christmas music.
“I’ve got a great idea,” I told him. “You and I are going to entertain everybody with some Christmas tunes.”
“You’re right,” he said, his eyes alight. “That is a great idea.”
“And to make it even better, I got these,” and I handed him one of those cheap disposable microphones you buy your kid for his birthday party.
Stephen awarded the plastic and foam mike the same wonder Indiana Jones reserved for the Holy Grail. “I love microphones,” he informed me.
“I thought we’d start off with Adestes Fidelis, you know, Come All Ye Faithful.”
“How did you know that was my favorite Christmas song?”
“Just a hunch. And you know Latin, right, from high school?”
“I love Latin.”
“Well, what I thought was, we’d sing the first verse in English, kind of soft, I think it’s what the Italians call Sotto Voce.” I have no clue what Sotto Voce means, but it sounded good to me.
“This sounds better and better.”
“And then we’d really let ‘em have it with the second verse, sung in Latin. We sing this louder, you know, because they can’t understand Latin, so we have to emote a little more.”
To Finns louder is better.
“I totally get where you’re coming from,” he agreed. “This is going to be great.” And he really believed it. He looked like he had just received the swellest Christmas gift ever.
Later during the festivities I motioned for Stephen to join me at the center of the room, right in front of the Christmas tree, where no one could miss us. Once I’d gotten everyone quieted down we crooned our way through the first verse of the hymn. We thought we sounded like Bing Crosby though it was probably more akin to Rosanne Barr on steroids.
It was gratifying to see the rapt looks on all our relatives’ faces; akin to the jaw-unhinged stare you get when viewing a really bad collision on the highway. We definitely had everyone’s attention. As we swung into the second verse, in Latin, we amped up our vocals. People appeared visibly stunned. They’d never heard anything like this before. And, safe to say, no one had anticipated while making the drive up from the Bay Area, that their Christmas would include such a treat as this!
As we blasted out the triumphal hymn, in Latin no less, my mother gazed out the window with a look that said, Why didn’t I strangle them at birth? My next-door neighbor’s dog began to howl and the car alarm went off on my nephew’s SUV in our driveway.
One of the grandkids began to weep, and put her head in her mother’s lap, sobbing, “Make the bad singing stop, Mommy.”
And when we finished, my dear sister, who is acutely attuned to everyone’s mood, jumped up from her place on the divan and yanked the microphones and sheet music from our hands, spun around and sang out loudly in a false-happy voice; “Time to open gifts everybody!”
And thus ended Jeffrey and Stephen’s Christmas recital.

TRUTH AND BEAUTY

I met with my old friend David at our usual haunt, the IHOP in Petaluma. We have been friends for close to thirty years and thus we rarely discuss the superficial any longer. We used to spend time trying to figure out a solution to the apparently inexorable decline of western civilization but have finally thrown up our hands in failure. So we are left to discuss the vital matters of truth and beauty.
David was telling me of a film that had moved him to tears and it got me thinking about the works of man that had moved me in a similar manner. When I returned home from my time with David I went to my bookcase and pulled down BELLE CANTO, by Ann Patchett. I plopped myself down on the couch and started reading. Within the first five pages I had goose bumps on my arms and tears in my eyes.
This was art.
There is a room full of 18th & 19th century artwork on the second floor of the Musee D’Orsay in Paris. When I walk in there my heart skips a beat and my jaw goes slack with awe. Down the street and across the river at the Louvre there is a gallery devoted to sculpture. I wander around it in a daze, lost among the marble figures and wondering at the grace and splendor around me.
Around 2001 I went with 4 others to see the musical AIDA on Broadway in New York. We were all weeping by the intermission, and the truly tragic events hadn’t even unfolded yet. It was the staging, the voices, the music, the passion; the sheer inventiveness of humankind that had struck us dumb and weepy.
Occasionally I will rerun one of my favorite movies -- MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING, SHAPKESPEARE IN LOVE, ROMEO AND JULIET, LAST OF THE MOHICANS, KEY LARGO, SAVING PRIVATE RYAN -- and inevitably I end up sitting alone in a dark room sobbing into my hankie; moved to tears by the tragedy, the comedy, the folly of man, and the truth and glory of our ability to stage and present these emotions.
Long ago I memorized the T.S. Eliot masterpiece, THE LOVE SONG OF J. ALFRED PROOFROCK. At moments I will recite to myself the immortal first stanza, beginning;
“Let us go then, you and I
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table”
And my stomach turns over and my arms dimple with goose bumps.
What is it that causes this reaction in me?
Perhaps nothing more than being human, and being able to recognize what makes humanity so great. Our emotions, our caring, our love, our feelings. Our innate ability to express ourselves to another, and thereby reveal something of who we are. To pull the curtain aside on our own self, our pain, our sorrow, and our joy and love.
And when presented truly, and artfully, this engenders in others a truthful and beautiful reaction.
So that’s what David and I talk about now. We can’t prevent the ongoing destruction of our environment, or the folly of our leaders. But we can take a moment to revel in the seemingly indestructible and everlasting ability of mankind to write, sing, paint, act and otherwise tell the truth of our kind.
Man is a glorious beast.

SLUGGO

My wife and child went to Florida for five days for a family reunion and while they were gone I morphed into a big fat slob.
Now, sure, I took the dog on a couple of six mile runs, but more for her sake than mine, and I even did yard work one afternoon. But basically I spent the entire time lolling on the couch in the dark eating bowl after bowl of popcorn and watching basketball on the television. Occasionally I would stir from my stupor long enough to fix a meal, park myself in front of the computer playing Spider Solitaire, or go to the gym and soak in the Jacuzzi, but none of that can really be considered a gainful use of my time.
And when I thought of all the high-quality acts I could be performing, like painting a picture, discovering the cure for cancer, or even just sticking to a diet, it made me sort of disappointed with myself; but not enough to change my direction.
What it is about myself that makes me think I should be responding to some higher calling, when obviously the rest of the world is content to eat Pringles while lazily scratching themselves and watching Jersey Shore?
Is it my parochial school upbringing that makes me such an unrelenting judge of my life? Or good old American work ethic? Or is it just in my nature to carp incessantly about my perceived failures, all the while missing the bounty of what I have achieved, or, more likely, been blessed with?
I don’t pretend to understand this. And yet by now, you’d think I would have found at least a clue.
Something tells me I am probably not going to be finding a clue any time soon.
The noble Akita just wandered in from where she had been sunning herself on the deck and stood by my chair so I could scratch her butt just the way she likes.
She licked her chops and seemed strangely unencumbered by self study.

WHAT’S IN A NAME?

About a year ago I was re-financing my home and the lender sent out a Notary to witness my signing of the documents. She arrived at our home in a sleek silver Mercedes as Kebu, our large grey and black Akita, announced her welcome with ferocious barking. I opened the door and greeted a chic, middle aged Oriental woman, with graying hair and stylish glasses. Her business card told me she was of Japanese descent and her accent, when she introduced herself, told me she was not born in the USA. I asked her where she was from and she told me Tokyo.
In a very business-like manner we established ourselves at the dining room table and I set about signing the forms. As we went about our work we chatted about this and that, inconsequential small talk as we got through the tedious business of signing multiple copies of legal real estate forms. Kebu sat beside me, watching it all. After a short time, our visitor noted the dog and so, big show off that I am, I put Kebu through all her tricks. The woman nodded with approval.
“Your dog is an Akita,” she said.
“Yes. There must be many Akitas in Japan.”
“Ah, yes, but not so well trained,” she said. “Sign here.”
I scribbled my signature.
“In Japan the dogs are headstrong. Akitas are not very easy to train.” She looked at Kebu suspiciously, as if my dog might at any moment revert to true Akita form and begin acting up. “Sign here,” she told me.
I obediently signed where indicated.
“Well, I trained Kebu from the moment I got her,” I said. “I knew I had to tame her at a young age, or, as you say, with an Akita it would be hopeless.”
She paused as she leaned over the documents, a puzzled look on her face. “Sorry, what did you say your dog’s name was?”
“Kebu,” I said helpfully. “It means hope in Japanese.
“Sign here,” she said. “And here.” She gave a faint shake of her head as if to knock some nonsense out. She had a cryptic smile on her lips.
I signed, once, twice, with a flourish. I was getting pretty handy at this signing business.
“In Japanese,” my guest said, “the word for hope is Kebo, not Kebu.”
She sounded faintly like a school teacher when she said this. And since I am an immature adult who has authority issues I got my umbrage up.
“You’re kidding,” I told her, though she didn’t look like the type to kid.
“No, so sorry. But Kebo is hope in Japanese.” And she stressed the last syllable. Again a faint smile crossed her face. “Sign here.”
I signed. For some reason I didn’t like where this conversation was heading.
“But my wife got the name Kebu from a Japanese/English dictionary.”
“So sorry, but your wife is wrong,” the woman informed me and she ducked her head in embarrassment. “Kebo is hope, not Kebu.”
I looked over at my dog, who was giving me a flinty stare, her ears pointed forward and the hackles on her back flexing upward.
“Sign here.”
I signed.
“Then what does Kebu mean in Japanese.” I asked, thereby breaking one of the cardinal rules of life; never ask a question you don’t already know the answer to.
The woman paused in her work, straightening up from where she was bent over the table. She looked at the dog, she looked at me. “Kebu means nothing. No word.”
When she said this her eyes did not meet mine; her gaze wandered out the front window to her shining car.
I didn’t believe her for a minute.
“Sign here,” she said.
I put down the pen. “What does Kebu mean?”
“It is unimportant,” she said.
I settled back in my chair and crossed my arms. I was on signing hiatus.
She read my posture and so said, “Kebu means, like a wind. I am not sure how you say in American.”
“Wind? Like a gale or hurricane. I thought that was Kamikaze?”
“Sorry, wrong word.” For a very classy, put-together, professional woman, she suddenly seemed uncomfortable. “Breaking wind,” she said at last.
“What?” This was getting worse and worse.
“Sorry. Stinky bottom wind,” she said. And then, just to cement the image, she held her nose with one hand while waving her other hand back and forth behind her fanny.
I sat bolt upright. “You mean I’ve been going around calling my dog Fart?”
This was simply appalling.
“Yes, very unfortunate name. Japanese would never call a dog by this name. Kebu is stinky bottom wind.” Her cheeks slightly reddened with embarrassment,
Obviously deeply apologetic at having to inform me of this unfortunate circumstance, she looked at me with a glum expression.
I looked back at her, I am sure, with a look that said I wish I had never brought this up.
And then we both looked at the poor dog. “Very well behaved dog,” she said in way of some mollification. “Best behaved Akita I’ve ever seen.”
Apparently this was the consolation prize for naming my dog Stinky Bottom Wind. Yahoo.
My guest regained her crisp demeanor and, leaning back over the table, handed me the pen and the documents.
“Sign here,” she told me, and I did. Again and again.
When finally we had finished, we exchanged farewells and I saw her out. Returning to the dining room I found the dog leveling a flat gaze at me.
“It wasn’t my fault,” I told Kebu. “Your mom picked out the name. I wanted to name you Mariko.”
“Are you the pack leader?”
“Well, yeah, I guess.” At the moment I didn't sound too pack-leaderish, I had to admit.
I sat down and tried to scratch her ears, but she wasn’t having any of it.
“The pack leader,” she said, “is responsible for everything that goes on in the pack.”
“I would never have knowingly named you Stinky Bottom Wind.”
“Please don’t say that name again.” A visible shudder ran up and down her thick hide.
“We must never speak of this again,” she informed me.
I was only too happy to agree. “It never happened. Your name is Kebu, and it means hope.”
We sat silently, considering this for some time.
“You know what would take this bitter taste right out of our mouths.”
“Let me guess.”
“That most recent batch of biscotti you made has just the right crunchiness, don’t you think?”
“I wondered when you’d get to this.”
“Why don’t you get us a piece?”
I went into the kitchen and took a piece of biscotti out of the cookie jar. Kebu had followed me and was watching my every move with an intensity that would have scared the bejeezzus out of anyone but a seasoned pack leader like me.
I bit off a small piece and fed it to her. She crushed it between her powerful jaws, the thick muscles moving beneath her black fur defining her skull.
I took a bite of and savored the anise flavor. Kebu was right; it had just the right crunchiness.