Musical Oddities IV

I saw part of a TV interview with the jazz pianist Bill Evans from about 1971 in which the interviewer, who I think was Swedish, asked Evans if he had a favorite classical composer. Evans said J.S. Bach. That's what all the jazz musicians say, the interviewer said.

It's easy to dismiss Evans's answer, as the interviewer did, for being too obvious. But far from doing that, I'd like to offer it as a piece of evidence for a theory I've been developing: that the deceased jazz pianist Bill Evans is actually the same person as the deceased classical pianist Glenn Gould. At the least, I see them as two sides of the same coin. There are the superficial resemblances: the severe profiles, the dark slicked-back hair, the studied elusiveness. Evans was born three years before Gould, and died two years before him.

But something about their playing unites them too. Bach was of course the most important composer to Gould. Though their sounds were radically different from one another, Gould and Evans were both committed to a kind of lucid polyphony that mirrored one another while setting them apart from other musicians of their time. Gould said that he was only interested in contrapuntal music; Evans, for his part, solved the limitations of bop by creating a contrapuntal style of group improvisation. Later he went a step further by recording an album in which he by himself was all the multiple voices—breaking the jazz taboo against overdubbing by making a whole album of overdubs—and he recorded it on Gould's favorite piano.

Gould was notoriously indifferent to contemporary music, but public about his admiration for Evans. And I think what happened between Gould's first and last recordings of Bach's Goldberg Variations—the bookends of his career—was jazz phrasing; in 1981 he stretched time and hid or hit notes in a way that would not have made sense in 1955. It might not be a stretch to say that what made Gould himself was Evans, and what made Evans himself was Gould.

The Year in: Vampires

Part V

In April I went to London, where my younger brother was studying abroad. We had been in touch throughout the semester, but when we spoke it was always a little hard to gauge how he was doing.

Me: How’s your reading going?

My brother: I’m growing out my fangs and adam’s apple. Those are my main goals for the semester.

Me: That’s good. Who needs books when you’ve got elongated canines?

On the plane, I watched a movie in which Will Smith hunts zombies in an overgrown and abandoned New York City. When I arrived, newspapers reported that a man who claimed to be 101 years old had run the London marathon. According to several sources, he drank no water during the race. In the meantime, an inquest was being held on the deaths of three people whose boat had capsized in extremely bad weather off the coast near the town of Whitby.

A few people in their late twenties who shared a house in Whitechapel were gracious enough to host me for the week. At night I slept there on a couch, on a sort of mezzanine floor with big French doors that opened onto a terrace, during the day I visited the British Museum and historic houses in Chelsea and tried not to get caught in the chronic rain showers that cast a disquieting pall over the city. Girls passed me on the street in pairs, speaking in unison. No use waiting on the waking dead, I thought I heard them chant. Before going to sleep I lay on the couch, trying to take notes on a Bram Stoker biography, but the terrace door blew open again and again, invading my thoughts.

On my last day in London, my brother and I visited Highgate Cemetery in the north part of the city. As the burial place of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Karl Marx, among many other notables, it has become a bit of a tourist destination. But I wanted to visit because Stoker used the cemetery as the setting for the scene in Dracula in which the un-dead Lucy Westenra is staked in her tomb by her former fiancé, thus preventing her from becoming an accomplice to Count Dracula’s plans to take over London. It also became the nexus of a bizarre vampire craze that gripped London in the 1970s. By the late 1960s, the cemetery had become fantastically overgrown and vandalized, and was a favorite gathering place for young occultists. In February of 1970, one of them claimed to have seen a supernatural figure while he spent the night in the cemetery. Soon, rumors were running rampant, with rival groups of occultists offering various theories, one of the more popular being that a 'a King Vampire of the Undead' from Wallachia, a region adjacent to Transylvania, inhabited the cemetery. Before expiring, the affair climaxed in claims of exorcisms, vampire slayings, and a mass, televised vampire hunt on Friday, the 13th of March. Somehow, I hoped, this would all find a place in my article.

I thought my brother would be interested in Highgate, but it had been difficult to convince him to come with me to the cemetery. My brother ran track and cross-country throughout college, covering dozens of miles every week, and is in much better shape than I am, but on that day he seemed drained and listless, and as we climbed the hill to the cemetery entrance I had to stop again and again to let him catch up with me.

“I feel like shit,” he said. “What are we doing here?”

“Did you not sleep enough?” I asked.

“No, I did. You’re just exhausting me. This entire week.” He stopped walking. “Why are we walking up this hill?”

“That’s where the cemetery entrance is.”

“Oh yeah. Why are we going there?”

“Because that’s where all the vampire stuff happened in the ‘70s, remember? I told you.” Behind an iron fence to our right, the cemetery's tombstones drooped, choking under the weight of a century's worth of ivy.

“Oh yeah…” He sat down on a bench. “Can we rest first? You’re exhausting me.”

By the end of the week I was glad to leave London. On the plane back to New York I drank Mr. & Mrs. T’s Bloody Mary mix and watched On the Town.

[to be continued]

An Issue of Good Living

Hearing about the demise of Gourmet magazine felt almost like losing my grandmother again. I never really read the magazine, but in my mind it was inextricable linked to her. She was a dedicated gourmand, for whom Christmas was not so much a holiday or even a family gathering as it was a series of meals—turkey, asparagus, and mashed potatoes like mounds of snow for Christmas Eve dinner; Hungarian coffee cake, sausages, and fruit salad for Christmas breakfast; and for dessert on both days, a tin full of sour-cream twists, butter balls, miniature linzer tortes, and toasted almonds and pecans, all homemade. Appropriately enough, Gourmet's inaugural release, in 1941, was a holiday issue.) Visiting her house, where she lived alone for my entire life, was a glimpse through a window to another generation, a very quiet one full of detective novels and Ella Fitzgerald's voice, the lingering perfume of cigarette smoke, and, as I recall, stacks of Gourmet in a wicker basket in the living room. My grandmother passed away when I was in high school. Luckily, she raised her four daughters to be exceptional cooks, and one of them is my mother. Any of my own knowledge of, or interest in, food emanates from her, and so in a way from Gourmet. It’s strange to realize I was emotionally attached to a magazine I barely ever opened, and now probably never will.

The Year in: Vampires

[Sometime this spring, despairing that my article on vampires and tourists would ever be published, I gave up this thread. Now that the article is appearing in this month's Believer, I've decided to revive it.]


Part IV
In early 2008, a few weeks after I got the advance copy of the Vampire Weekend album, the band began to emerge from the shadows, but as they got closer the scent increasingly repulsed me. First I found a music video online. It featured a lot Ray-Ban sunglasses, sailboats and deck shoes, and so many swirling scarves and pastel sweaters it could have been a Gap commercial. Suddenly, the album’s reggae beats and West African guitar parts gained a more sinister aspect. Then I started to see the posters, hung around Chelsea and Williamsburg. The image seemed innocuous at first glance: a Polaroid of a chandelier, the very tops of a few youthful heads, and the band’s name in white block letters. But something about the poster gave me a shudder. The chic pallor of the photo; the kitschy, faux-gothic chandelier; and the creeping feeling that the haircuts just below it belonged to a swarm of pale, pretty young Columbia students writhing to fashionably tribal sounds.


My picture of a good-humored, harmless little pop band contorted into one of lurking, ironic cultural predators—weekend vampires behind designer shades. The lyrics about the college green and summers on Cape Cod only deepened my feeling that these Columbia-educated world-music fans hid a dark side. Wasn’t the Cape where Norman Mailer had planned to set that novel about crazed rich-kid hippy-bikers who murdered vacationers in the dunes? The devil did the backstroke/all the way from France…the kids don’t stand a chance, indeed. And that line about Peter Gabriel—“it feels so unnatural”—conjured scenes of Patrick Bateman lecturing his hapless victims about Genesis in American Psycho.

And what was that specter looming behind the young band? Each time I listened to the opening of “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa”—there’s a young girl, Louis Vuitton—I heard, lurking just behind it, an older song with a similar beat—she’s a rich girl, she don’t try to hide it, diamonds on the souls of her shoes. The long shadow of Paul Simon on vacation in South Africa stretched over this band, reaching out of its two decade-old grave—the specter of Paul Simon in 1985, pale aristocrat of pop, forced out of the tower of his crumbling fame to find something fresh, descending on Capetown to draw on the healthy pulse of township rhythms. Like any good vacation, Graceland revived Simon's career. Twenty years later, Vampire Weekend was transfusing some vigor into their songs of ivy league travails through a kind of abstracted musical tourism.
[to be continued]

Aphorisms (on vampires, on tourists)

"Everywhere has vampires."

"Every tourist is a traveler visiting a place for something that isn't there."

For these and similarly grand statements on the connections between vampires and tourists, read my article, "The Undead Travel," in the October issue of The Believer.

Thoughts on Walt Whitman, Pt. III

Whitman in Class


When people ask me if I've considered going to grad school for writing, I think about Walt Whitman. I try to imagine him going to grad school for writing. I try to picture a world without Walt Whitman, in which a grad student at NYU named Walt Whitman walks into a classroom where his fellow grad students are about to workshop one of his pieces.

What constructive criticism would they offer him about about this passage, for instance?

The cloth laps a first sweet eating and drinking,
Laps life-swelling yolks . . . . laps ear of rose-corn, milky and just ripened:
The white teeth stay, and the boss-tooth advances in darkness,
And liquor is spilled on lips and bosoms by touching glasses, and the best liquor afterward.

Stiff Lower Lip

This is the face of public shame in America. The New York Times' homepage featured this picture today:



I recognized it immediately, but not as the face of Ken Lewis, who announced his resignation as chief executive of the troubled Bank of America, my bank. I recognized it from last spring, and the picture that suddenly blanketed New York media:

Governor Eliot Spitzer's grimace was usually accompanied by shots of a frank prostitute from New Jersey.

But Spitzer must have got it from somewhere, right? A few years prior saw this fine example across the Hudson:

Then again, we probably shouldn't give Governor McGreevey too much credit. I'm sure you could find plenty of other examples. There's also this notable forebear: