Postcard from the Psyche: The Subject Was Me

All this week, I’ve been sitting in a dark room behind a two-way mirror in a market research facility, watching people be interviewed on behalf of one of my former agency’s clients.  More often these days, I’m on the other side of the mirror, interviewing people who are the subject of clients’ research.  But several weeks ago, I had a unique opportunity: to be the subject of market research myself.

I’ve been a subscriber to the New York Philharmonic for quite a few years now.  I was contacted by phone to see if I would be interested in participating in some research among subscribers.  Normally, I’m screened out of invitations to market research, since I’m in the business.  But The Philharmonic didn’t ask, and maybe they didn’t care.

I received my instructions for a 1-hour Skype interview.  On the basis of what I was asked to prepare for the interview, I knew the very methodology they were using:

“PLEASE SELECT 5-6 IMAGES THAT EXPRESS YOUR THOUGHTS AND FEELINGS ABOUT THE NEW YORK PHILHARMONIC AND WHAT IT MEANS TO YOU.”

This is the proprietary ZMET^® Process (Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique), developed by Dr. Gerald Zaltman at Harvard Business School in the early 1990’s and practiced commercially by Olson Zaltman Associates.

During the interview, the subject is asked to describe the images they’ve chosen to represent their thoughts and feelings, and why they’re meaningful in terms of the brand or subject being discussed  — in this case, what the Philharmonic means to me.  The interviewer carefully probes the subject’s use of particular language: “When you say the word X, what does X  mean to you?”

On their website Olson Zaltman claims, “A good ZMET^® interview feels more like a psychological counseling session than a market research interview.”  And, indeed, it does, in my experience both as a strategic planner involved in ZMET^® projects my clients were doing and now as the subject of one myself.

I thought it would be fun to share the pictures I chose, because they reveal things about me in a unique way.  Probably things that my family and friends would think were obvious, but which I might not have said about myself, if asked to describe myself.  We’re often the last to realize things about ourselves.  (If you really want to know something about yourself, ask your Facebook network to answer a question about you, and tally the responses.  You’ll see yourself as others see you.)

IMAGE #1: MUSIC APPRECIATION

I’ve always wished that I’d taken a music appreciation class in college.  Because I studied foreign languages and literature as well as comparative literature and drama, I have a fairly good sense of broad artistic periods in western art and culture.  Years of going to museums all over the world, particularly enjoying paintings, have deepened that understanding.  So I know something about the craft and techniques of poetry, prose, drama and painting.  But not about music.  Pop music, yes; but not “art” music.  So one of my primary reasons for subscribing to the Philharmonic was to learn about that music.

This image of a note of music becoming a three-dimensional object, floating above a sheet of music represents the music becoming meaningful to me, being “decoded” from symbols on a page.

IMAGE #2: LUSH AND BEAUTIFUL

One of the houses we lived in when I as growing up in West Palm Beach was heavily landscaped with lots of flowering plants and bushes — azalea, hibiscus, bougainvillea, night-blooming jasmine, gardenia, and lilies. I loved the colors, the fragrances, the shapes of them all — because they were beautiful.  When I first listened closely to some pieces of “classical” music that friends turned me on to in college, I was overcome by their beauty.  The beautiful melancholy of the first movement of Copland’s Clarinet Concerto or Satie’s Gymnopédies.  The lustful beauty of Orff’s Carmina Burana.

When I first started attending Philharmonic concerts, often a piece of music was more like a “wall” of beautiful music — a single piece.  But as my ear grew more sensitive, I could distinguish the contribution of different instruments and hear the conversation among them, hear how they worked together to create the sound, much like the flowers in this image — each beautiful in their own way – combining to create a lush and beautiful image.

IMAGE # 3: SOPHISTICATION AND ADVENTURE

Here I start to go a little deeper.

In my mind, this couple is at some very sophisticated party on a country estate, and they are escaping the house party, running off into the woods on some adventure.   Something about the trees makes me think of the Russian nobility in a Chekhov play.  I think I saw a production of The Cherry Orchard where the set was literally an orchard of bare, leafless trees.  The couple could be young lovers in a modern version of a Chekhov play — not with the melancholy and loss, but with the culture and sophistication and the appreciation of the beauty of the country.

Each concert I attend is a sophisticated adventure.  I get a bit dressed up, as befits the culture.  I can never remember what it is I’m going to hear, but it’s always an adventure in beauty.

In the final two images, I unpack the two dominant ideas in the previous image — sophistication and adventure.

IMAGE #4: ARRIVED

I see this as me listening to a Philharmonic concert. Obviously, not me in my chronological age, but perhaps as I see myself in my head. A handsome young man, impeccably groomed and dressed (OK, it’s aspirational!) is concentrating intently on something.  I see him as having arrived, wherever his destination.

When I was first in New York, as a student at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, I was so poor that to save money I walked over 60 blocks to and from school every day, even in the middle of winter.  I would cross Central Park from the West Side where I lived and then walk down Fifth or Madison Avenues on the East Side to school. I would fantasize about the lives of the people who lived in the beautiful buildings along those avenues.

As I sit in my front row seat in the orchestra of Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center, a few feet away from a master like Joshua Bell, performing with one of the world’s great orchestras under the baton of a famous conductor – all of them masters of their crafts – I feel I’ve achieved the life I imagined those Fifth Avenue residents to have.

IMAGE #5: VOYAGE

Music takes me somewhere. Often to a place of indescribable beauty. In this image, under an other-worldly moon of huge proportions, a ship sails out into the unknown, perhaps to edges of the known world. Who knows what it will find. It’s an adventure.

It’s being led to the Gate of the Sun with my eyes closed, then opening them and looking down on the Machu Picchu I’ve only read about and seen pictures of until now.  It’s opening the door to a stranger I’m about to make love with.  It’s stepping off an airplane in Kiev in the Ukraine several weeks ago.

It’s an unfamiliar piece of music that will transport me I don’t know where.

Let’s let go.  Let’s go.  Let’s find out.  That’s what it’s all about.

Postcard from Inside My Head: See Lorin Leap

In the first semester of my college sophomore year, I was taking two Spanish classes — Introduction to Spanish Literature and Spanish Drama of the 19th and 20th Centuries, both conducted in Spanish — and Advanced German.  I’d studied both languages in high school and had tested into the higher levels as a college freshman.  For some reason, I’d decided to take up French as well, so I had an Elementary French class to boot.  That was my entire class schedule for the semester.

Oh, yes, and Skills in Volleyball (I neither had nor developed any), because I needed to fulfill a required PE credit.    You could get away with taking nothing but foreign languages for a semester, but you had to take PE.  Liberal with the arts, certainly, but conservative when it came to sports, I guess.

There were days when I had three language classes back to back, all conducted in-language.  I recall discussing Spanish literature one morning in my first class, and then walking into French class immediately afterward.  My French professor — who was somewhat effeminate and extremely enthusiastic such that we called him Ooh-La-La — addressed me in French, and I responded in perfect Spanish.  He looked at me for a minute and then said, “Ça c’est la classe de Français, monsieur.”  That part of the brain that processes foreign languages was just not switching tracks that morning as quickly as the curriculum.

Late at night, in the apartment I shared with two friends, I’d sit in my room feverishly reading existentialist novels in translation like Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar and Sartre’s The Roads to Freedom trilogy.  I was mesmerized by the characters in these novels — artists and intellectuals, bohemians all, wandering around Paris, constantly crossing the Seine on one or another of the ponts, drinking and smoking, having tortured love affairs in garrets on the rue Whatever, and questioning if life had any meaning or if we should even care whether it did or not.

I wanted to be those people.

Other than a study tour after my senior year in high school that included four weeks at Oxford followed by a whirlwind tour through Belgium, Germany and Scandinavia with 250 other American high school students, I’d never been anywhere other than the East Coast of the United States.  I was attending an all-male college with a reputation as a southern, frat-boy, party school in rural Virginia.

Did I mention I was in the process of coming out as gay?

If I couldn’t be in Paris, at least I was having my own tortured love affair.  Or, actually, the aftermath of one that was more tortured than affair — a platonic first love that had gone bad (Do all first loves go bad?  Maybe that’s redundant — a first love gone bad.)  Unfortunately it had been with one of my roommates, who had chosen not to speak to me anymore, even though we were living in the same apartment.

It didn’t make for a great living situation, but it was great fuel for the poetry I was writing.  I’d won a $100 prize from Phi Beta Kappa in my sophomore year for maintaining a 4.0 GPA, and not having read many English or American poets beyond the syllabus of high school English classes, I used it to buy poetry books in the college bookstore.

I made my selections simply by pulling down slender paperbacks that looked interesting from the poetry section, scanning a few poems, and keeping those in which I’d found something I liked.  I ended up with ten or twelve books including volumes by Wilfred Owen, Sylvia Plath, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Ted Hughes, Adrienne Rich, W.H. Auden and Richard Wilbur.  I was at the cash register, and a professor who was standing next to me with one small purchase looked at my stash and wryly said, “Catching up on the moderns?”

One of my lost-love poems was published in the school literary magazine.  It was about walking into X’s room in the apartment we shared when he wasn’t there and feeling compelled to touch his things — longing for contact with someone who avoided and evaded me.  I received a note in the mail from the head of the Romance Language Department, one of my Spanish professors, telling me how much he appreciated the sentiment of the poem.  Somehow I found out later that he had had a daughter who had died.

I went to Spain for my Spring semester that year.  I ran around Madrid with a student from the University of Madrid — each of us had a “friend” who was getting a small stipend to help us with our projects.  My project was on contemporary Spanish poetry, and my hired friend would take me to bookstores, where we’d go into a back room with the owner.  There I’d purchase volumes of poetry that were banned in Franco’s Spain.  The owner would wrap them up in plain brown paper, and my friend advised me not to leave them lying around the room I had in the apartment of an elderly woman and her blind, paralyzed brother, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War.

Many years later, I would make it to Paris.  I took a six-week sabbatical from work, enrolled in a half-day program at a French language school for foreigners , and rented an apartment one block from the Seine on the rue Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois in the First Arrondissment.  In the afternoons, I saw everything there was to see in Paris; went for walks in the evening; came to know all the bridges; and had a bit of a tortured love affair,  in addition to the one I was having with Paris.  It was a wonderful time, and I was horribly lonely for most of it.

I’m in a particularly reflective mood these days.  Partially, it’s because I’m consciously going about changing some things in my life.  I completed my first full year as an independent brand strategist last year, and despite my fears about it, I didn’t end up homeless on the street or in negotiation with American Express over a credit card bill.  But now I’m continuing to refine and define how I want to earn my living, at least for the foreseeable future.

And then there are other things that matter to me that I never found the time or energy to focus on, except in fits and starts.  Those love-lorn poems I wrote in college have been burning holes in folders, both manila and digital, for decades.  Over the years they’ve been added to from time to time.  And there’s some sort of book in these Postcards — the images, the words, the thoughts and feelings.

But mostly I think it’s because I ‘m approaching my 60th birthday, and I have a keen awareness that there’s one “age” left to me, one last leg — perhaps a long haul, perhaps not; who knows? — to my own particular journey.  What should be my destination, and how do I want to travel?

I’m also keenly aware of the incredible distance I’ve traveled so far.

I recall something that happened when I was a boy in high school in West Palm Beach.  The choirmaster at our church was driving me home one evening after I’d been helping him sort through some sheet music — a small job he’d asked my father if I’d be interested in doing in exchange for a few bucks.  An essential part of the story is that shortly before, in the church, he’d tried to put his hand down my pants.  He at least asked me if I minded, to which I replied I did, and he immediately backed off.  So I imagine that it was with some guilt, embarrassment, shame and perhaps fear that he made this offer to me in the car.  “If you ever want to go to the ballet or the opera or theater,” he said, “I’d be happy to take you.”

I’d been to none of those things.  I’m not sure I had any real concept of the world he was referring to.  But after 37 years in New York City with everything it has to offer and having traveled to more than 37 countries all over the world, I do now.

As I sit in the front row seat I’ve had for the past few years at Lincoln Center for performances of the New York Philharmonic, I’m struck by the amazing talent — masters — I’ve watched perform less than two yards away from me.  I knew almost nothing about classical music when I first started attending, but now my ear hears the conversation between instruments as the composer designed it.  And I got there without performing unwanted sexual favors for creepy guys!  (I only did that when I wanted to.)

A couple of weeks ago, Lorin Maazel returned to conduct the Philharmonic.  I was astounded to read that by the age of 14, he had conducted every major orchestra in the United States.  At one point, during the performance of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony, he was literally leaping in the air as he led the orchestra — there were six to eight inches between his toes and the platform.  Repeatedly.   He’ll be 83 years old in less than two weeks.

I want to see how high I can still fly.

Pont Alexandre, Paris, February 2006

High School Trip, Oxford 1971, courtesy Pat Hinds, seated far left; YT seated far right

Postcard from the End of Days: 10/28/11

When I first went to the Yucatán, I did a little research on the Mayan calendar.

You might have heard the Mayan Long Count calendar predicts the world will end on 12-21-2012.  Maybe I’ve been working in financial services too long, but to me that looks like the bank routing code on the bottom of your checks, which you have to supply if you want automatic bill payment from your checking account.  You might want to make sure that date isn’t hidden within your bank’s routing code; I’m not sure you’re covered by the FDIC in the event of the bank’s disappearance in the Rapture.

Actually, according to one theory, the Mayans were not predicting the end of the world.  Rather, they were counting to the completion of the process that started when the Big Bang created our Universe.  Or perhaps better said, they were counting to the culmination of Creation, the achievement of its perfection in terms of the evolution of Life’s consciousness.  Kind of like a wine being finally just right to drink.

Yes, a lot of shit probably has to get cleared away before perfection is attained.  But I think it only need concern you if you’re, say, a psychotic Libyan dictator who’s been oppressing people for decades.  Or maybe a corporate CEO and his politician bedfellows, siphoning obscene profits off the meager wages of everyday people.  (How many former Goldman Sachs and Halliburton guys have held high-level posts in our government?)

I think the rest of us will probably be OK, along with Occupy Wall Street and our friends in Libya.

What is also questionable, according to this theory, is the enddate of 12/21/12 itself.  Instead, proponents of the theory maintain that the date was actually 17 minutes ago, as I write this at 12:17 a.m. on October 29, 2011 —  that is, 10/28/11.  (Nothing much seems to have happened 17 minutes ago, although I did notice that I’d finished my vodka-on-the-rocks.)

There’s a justification for this “correction” of the enddate that has to do with another Mayan calendar, called the Tzolkin, a sacred count of 260 “days,” best pictured as two interlocking cogs of 13 and 20 “days.”

Courtesy the Starseed Network

The choice of October 28, 2011 has something to do with that date’s matching the enddate of a Tzolkin count called 13 Ahau.  The Mayans had a third count called the Haab, a secular calendar of 365 days.  Any given date is actually described using “days” from all three calendars.  (If you’re ever embarassed that you can’t remember today’s date, just be thankful you’re not Mayan.)

The author of this theory is a Swedish toxicologist named Carl Johan Calleman.  I’ve read his book, The Mayan Calendar.  But I first encountered his theory through a random Netflix video I’d ordered before my trip.

In the video, a guy named Ian Lungold explains Calleman’s interpretation of the Mayan Long Count calendar.  The presentation was filmed in what seemed to be a seminar in a hotel conference room somewhere.  Ian was a very calm and centered presenter, though I had to get over the de rigueur new-age ponytail and that wink-wink tone of irony that truth-speakers use when talking with the initiated — that we-know, don’t-we? tone of voice.

Despite the new-age, wink-wink, Best Western ambience, I have to say I was riveted.  My sister used to have a poster hanging on a door in her house.  It was one of those grainy black-and-white photos that “proves” the existence of UFOs.  And the headline on the poster was “I WANT TO BELIEVE.”  That pretty much sums up my feelings on these things.

Lungold describes a 9-step countdown (or maybe I should say a “count-up.”) Each step or “underworld” is shorter in terms of years by a factor of 20.  The first underworld lasts 16.4 billion years; the ninth, only 260 days.  However, the same amount of evolution in consciousness is supposed to transpire in each one.  (“If it’s your impression that things are going faster and faster,” Ian winks in the video, “you’re right.”)

Courtesy: preventdisease.com

Supposedly, the nine levels of the pyramid of Kukulkan at Chichén Itzá represent the nine underworlds, with the temple to Kukulkan perched on top.  Perhaps not coincidentally, the primary pyramid at Mayapan, another Mayan site I visited in 2010, has the same number of levels.

Pyramid of Kukulkan at Chichén Itzá

Pyramid at Mayapan

If you’ve ever seen a technology adoption cycle chart, which demonstrates how technological innovations have mainstreamed exponentially ever more quickly, this concept of increasing speed of evolution doesn’t seem so crazy. (Click on the image to expand it; then hit the back button on your browser to return to the blog.)

Courtesy: New York Times

Each “underworld” is divided into 7 days and 6 nights of Creation.  They correspond to the stages of development of a fruit-bearing plant from a seed.  The days represent movement forward; the nights are reaction to or synthesis of the forward movement.  There’s something special about the breakthrough of the 5th day and the subsequent reaction of the 5th night.  For example, in the Fifth Day of the 4th Underworld, we harnessed fire.  Then that night, we had an Ice Age.  (Bear in mind, each “day” and “night” lasted 160,000 years at this level.)

In matching the Mayan calendar to dates in the Gregorian calendar, Calleman “explains” much of history in this template of evolution.  Each underworld
is fully contained within the 7th day of the level below it, and they all complete on 10/28/11 — exactly one hour ago now, New York time, as I write.

If anyone’s interested, a young man has posted a video on YouTube of himself explaining the theory in a very clear and cogent way.  (WARNING: The kid has an Afro, sits cross-legged on the floor in front of some kind of wolf wallpaper, and has a new-age flute playing in the background.  But he does a really good job of explaining it, and I especially like his aside when he mentions the 7 days of creation.)

When I did this research back in 2009, I put an entry in my calendar for 10/28/11  just to remind myself about it.  And I forgot all about it until a couple of weeks ago, when scheduling things, I noticed it.

Thank god I had a 15-minute alert set.  And I’m glad to know I was “busy” on the last day of Creation, even though I wasn’t working.  Here’s what I did:

1) I met my trainer at the gym at 9:oo a.m. for my usual workout.

2) I had an 12:00 Noon appointment with my chiropractor in the Village.

3) I got a haircut at Dop Dop salon at 1:00 p.m., so I wouldn’t be shaggy on my upcoming 2-week vacation.

4) On the way home, I stopped at Così for some lunch and then at Paragon Sporting Goods for quick-dry sock liners I wanted to take on vacation.

5) I took an hour’s nap.

My evening was  a bit more appropriate for such a momentous time.  I went to hear the New York Philharmonic at Lincoln Center.

Kurt Mazur was conducting.  He’s 84 years old, and his hands shake a bit, though often that was just him timing the music.  He came onstage wearing a black silk tunic top with silver collar and cuffs over tuxedo pants.  It looked a bit like he was halfway into his PJs after a night on the town.  Watching him walk somewhat gingerly up to the podium, I was inspired by his resilience, particularly in the light of my aching arthritic knees as I walked around the city today.

The first part of the program was Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony in B Minor, two movements of  beautiful orchestration.  The program notes explained that Schubert died of syphilis at age 31 in 1828 when “the disease was then incurable, and the attendant treatments were dreadful and ineffective.”  I was struck by the parallel to AIDS.  His diagnosis in 1822 is offered as a reason for his never having finished the symphony he was working on at the time, though he went on to write other masterpieces.

The second half of the program was Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 13 in B-flat minor, Babi Yar, set to poems by the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko.  The poems were published and the symphony written in 1962, in the cultural opening that blossomed after Stalin’s death in 1953.

Five poems are the basis for the five movements of the piece.

The first, Babi Yar, commemorates the massacre of 33,771 Jews on September 29th and 30th 1941 in the Ukraine.  Marched to the edge of a cliff at the Babi Yar ravine, they were shot in groups of ten, after being “relieved” of their valuables.  Yevtushenko’s poem denounces anti-Semitism couched in Russian nationalism.

The second movement, based on the poem Humor, is about how humor is the unextinguishable release from tragedy.

In the third movement, the poet reflects on the resilience of Russian women, observed as they queue for groceries in a store.

The fourth poem, Fears, tentatively suggest that the time of fears in Russia is over; that now, one should be afraid of not speaking out.

And the final movement, to a poem called A Career, is the poet’s vow not to compromise his speaking of the truth in pursuit of a successful career.  “I pursue my career/By not pursuing it!” he exclaims in the closing stanza.  There is a lovely, hopeful melody played on a solo violin that floats throughout this movement.  As I left Lincoln Center and headed home on the supposed last night of this Creation, I remembered that melody.

If we believe Dr. Calleman and his theory’s proponents, then today is the first day of the perfection of Creation.

The weather forecast in the Northeast is for a winter storm (what happened to Fall?) with a 2-5″ accumulation of snow.  I assume it will be gone by the time my plane leaves Sunday night.

I intend to pack for my vacation — a two-week tour of Egypt, visiting the ruins of one of our civilization’s first great nation-states (formed at the beginning of the 6th underworld in Calleman’s explanation of the Mayan Long Count) and  home to some other spectacular pyramids and ancient temples.  Should I assume  some coincidental connection?

I have two things on my schedule Sunday before I leave: a visit to the 9/11 Memorial and a deep tissue massage.  Both appropriate, I suppose, if indeed we’re onto something new from here on out.

Postcard from the Blogoshpere: Beauty and the Post-Digital World

I spent three days last week in a digital training class, the Hyper Island Master Class.  The class itself wasn’t digital; I was physically there, as were my classmates and the instructors.  It was about the digital world and how it’s changing our lives and, specifically,  the business I’m in — advertising and marketing.

Professionally, we’re all struggling to understand, incorporate and profit from  digital venues like Facebook and Twitter to which consumers (you might know them as “people“) have flocked in such numbers.  It’s a challenge; there’s a lot to learn.  Or perhaps more appropriately, there’s  a lot to explore and discover.  It’s all so new and immediate that the lessons to be learned from experience are few.

That said, personally, I’m not exactly a digital babe in the woods.  I blog, I post to Facebook, I check-in to Foursquare.   (In fact, I just earned the Sixteen Candles badge for having five birthday shout-outs on Foursquare.  So there, you geeky digiscenti!)

But every once in a while, I’m made delightfully aware of how my  “digital life” enhances my “real life;” in fact, how the two are now really both of one piece.  I guess I’m becoming “post-digital.”  It’s only the fact that I can remember a time when I had no “digital life” that I’m able to be aware of a distinction. 

And here’s a great example of the richness of being post-digital.

Several weeks ago, I went to see Joshua Bell perform the Sibelius Violin Concerto with the New York Philharmonic at Lincoln Center.  I’ve seen him many times.  I guess you could say I’m a bit of a fan.  I once stood in line for thirty minutes after a concert with what seemed to be a bevy of 15-year-old girls to get an autograph on one of his CDs.  (He is young and cute, after all;  something which 15-year-old girls and 50+-year-old gay men both probably appreciate to a greater extent than does the general population.)

Most people would not like the seat I have for this concert season: it’s in the very first row, dead center.  I understand why.  You can’t actually see the players toward the back of the stage, and you’re probably hearing a bit too much of the violins relative to the other instruments in the orchestra.  But if you like to watch the soloists as much as hear them, this seat is heaven.

At this performance, Joshua (I think I can call him that, can’t I?) was no more than six feet away, directly in front of me.  If I concentrated, I could block out the audience around me, and it was as if he were performing only for me.

It’s always a mesmerizing experience to watch and listen to him play.  It almost seems silly to attempt to describe it, so I won’t, other than to say it’s more like he dances with the violin with his eyes shut, and  amazing music comes out.

Unfortunately, there’s no video of him playing the Sibelius concerto on YouTube (it’s a wonderful piece of music), but if you’ve not seen him perform and want a taste, here he is doing the first movement of a Bruch concerto.

At the intermission, I turned my iPhone back on and checked into Avery Fisher Hall on Foursquare, letting the check-in post automatically to my Facebook page.  This was my post.

Don Hogle Just heard Joshua Bell play the Sibelius Violin Concerto after L’Apres-midi d’un Faun. Preparing for Lindberg’s “Kraft”.

New York Philharmonic – Avery Fisher Hall

Don just checked-in @ New York Philharmonic – Avery Fisher Hall (w/ 9 others) (New York, NY)  October 12 at 8:48pm

 

I settled back in for the second half of the program, a wild performance of Magnus Lindberg’s Kraft, which included percussion made with found junk, musicians blowing air bubbles into tubs of water, small ensembles scattered around the perimeter of the concert hall, a huge gong suspended in the middle of the hall, and Alan Gilbert directing in Converse sneakers and a polo shirt.

After the concert, I got on the M5 bus at Broadway and 65th Street, and checked emails on my iPhone.  There was a notice from Facebook; I had a message from Jud Cairns, my sister’s former next-door neighbor in Chantilly, VA with whom I’m friends on Facebook, now that we’re no longer in proximity in “real life.”  Here’s Jud’s post:

Jud Cairns He once played the L’Enfant Plaza Metro stop in DC: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/04/AR2007040401721.html

October 12 at 9:42pm ·

 

The link is to an article in The Washington Post about an experiment they conducted with Joshua Bell to answer a philosophical question.  As the article states, “In a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?”

Someone has conveniently posted a video on YouTube about the event, which describes it as well.  (One of the comments to the posting says, “Woah [sic] there, I don’t think this clip needs a loud douchebag to introduce the video like that.”)  Personally, I sort of enjoyed the douchebag’s narration (he’s also kind of cute in a douchebaggy sort of way), but if you don’t have the time or inclination to watch the video or to read the article itself (it’s lengthy but great, and contains several clips of the performance), I’ll give you the bottom line on the experiment below.

Joshua played six masterpieces for violin over a period of 43 minutes.  Of the 1097 people who passed by, only 7 stopped to listen for at least a minute.  27 people gave him money; he made $32.17, which is a bit more than $1.19 per paying customer.  Actually it’s considerably less, when you note that the one person who recognized him, having just seen him give a free concert at the Library of Congress, gave him a Jackson.

The article is quite worth the read, if you’re willing to spend 10 or 15 minutes to do so.  I was able to read it in its entirety before I got off the bus that evening at 17th and 5th around the corner from my apartment.  More than just a human interest story about what happens when one of the world’s most famous musicians plays a few tunes anonymously in the DC metro, it’s a marvelous essay on the role of beauty in our modern lives.

I go to watch and listen to someone like Joshua Bell play a gorgeous piece of music like the Sibelius concerto, because I crave those moments of exquisite beauty.  Even though my father told me when I was in high school that I should never use the word “exquisite” (which I’d just used) because boys didn’t use that word.

I love the beauty of an exquisitely crafted, thought-provoking essay like the one Jud shared with me  on my Facebook wall.  That I consumed this one courtesy the internet, social media and a mobile phone while I was still reflecting on an immediate experience of beauty in the “real world” made it all the more potent.

I’ll close with a poem about beauty.  I wrote this many years ago, after watching a college friend toss a frisbee in the dying light of a late spring evening on the expansive front lawn of the campus.  Fireflies were pirouetting in swarms over the lawn.  My friend was not only physically a quite beautiful young man, he also moved with the incredible grace of a natural athlete.  We were crazy about each other; in love with each other’s mind, really.  But I was deeply in love with him as well in a way I was frightened to reveal  for fear of losing him. But you can always write poetry instead.

The poem is to him, but the title is my answer to a broader question that underlies The Post’s  experiment:  should we care about Beauty wherever we happen to find it? If you are a student of poetry, you might appreciate the precise and tortured rhyme scheme.  You might find it beautiful in its own tortured way.

Art for Art, Man for Man
                        To Brock 

Though I be censured, forced to face
A foe insensitive to grace,
Incensed that I see no disgrace
In worshipping your graceful beauty;

Though they may chastise, purge this page
For unchaste words, with saintly rage
My choice deny – such saints enrage
And worship your courageous beauty;

My love will not succumb to fear.
My love, I fiercely will revere
Our love, and I will persevere
In worshipping your virile beauty.

Lexington, VA
1975

Perhaps, if I ever own a car, I should have a bumper sticker made that says,  I brake for beauty.