Sometimes you have to stare at something for a long time for it to become real. A copy of Caleb J Ross’s Charactered Pieces was sitting on the table in front of the television for almost two years. Someone brought it home, said I might like it, and so I left it lying about, good intentions surrounding it, along with junk mail, the TV remote, empty bottles, and sweating tumblers. It became the smallest coffee table book I’d ever propped my feet on watching the tube.
Then, the unthinkable happens. My morning newspapers don’t show up at the appointed time. I go fog. Man, I can’t start the day without my New York Times and Wall Street Journal. I’ll even settle for a USA Today, even though that’s like ingesting bootleg rather than store-bought. Then I start to shut down. I search desperately for something to read, something that might fill the same time slot. I pick up Caleb J Ross’ slim 65-page volume with its yellow orange cover and an artistic rendering of a tiny foot pushing through, what, a pillow, or something? (When you read the story that image refers to, better have a prayer book by your side). Oh, and the cover really is yellow, it didn’t age waiting for someone to pick it up.
Perhaps I read under extreme duress, as a prisoner of my morning routine. Perhaps.
For several years, I reviewed short story collections at the The Short Review. For most collections I read, the common shortcoming I identified was that, while one or two stories ranged from “worth reading” to “gems,” the rest of the collection I found lacking.
Charactered Pieces is NOT like that. Each story has momentum. Characters take what society gives them and deconstruct under their own illusions or delusions. Ross’s language is crisp, even as the sentences accelerate you effortlessly into the story, the unimaginable becoming all too real, then gently guide you into a deep pool of reflection and contemplation at story’s end. His themes offer about as much uplift as the Wright Brothers first experimental airplane, but they make you think at exit velocity. Regardless of how you feel after you read these stories, you can’t help BUT feel, with empathy and tolerance for the lives portrayed, and respect for the author.
Thank you, newspaper delivery guy. When Ross’s next volume arrives, believe me, I won’t be staring at it.
I am reading Standards: Recipes for Reality, by Lawrence Busch (http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=12691). I purchased the book because of the review I read in the Wall Street Journal (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204012004577073253871935524.html). Serving an infrastructure business, the electric power industry (http://www.pearlstreetinc.com/) , I deal with standards all the time, but usually not overtly. I’ve only read a small portion of this book so far, but I am impressed with the expansive view the author takes about what constitutes a “standard.” Busch is a professor of sociology at Michigan State University. I am (slowly) working towards a doctorate in Sociology and have been fascinated with the field since I took an intro level course in college. This is a book of philosophy, organizational dynamics, technology, innovation (and how standards inhibit it), and many other things, but it boiled down to, for me, a study in masking the complexity of human endeavor, and the use of standards as a proxy for trust.
Audits, certifications, licenses, playbooks, scripts, recipes, musical notation, compositions, protocols, weights and measurements, tests, titles and occupation, rank, validation, verification, rules, laws, guidelines, norms, tolerances, precision, awards, prizes, authentication – all of these are part of standards and standardization. Standards engender prestige, garner trust, and facilitate mechanization. Any garden hose I might buy in a store will have the same connection to the sprinkler I just used to water the lawn. I can write and post these words because of a standard protocol for transmitting information digitally over the Internet.
I probably felt more comfortable purchasing this book because the author is “a Distinguished Professor in the Center for the Study of Standards in Society in the Department of Sociology at Michigan State University…” Distinguished Professor is capitalized because a professor at a prestigious university holds a higher standard in society than the title of garbage collector. The book is published by MIT Press, which undoubtedly holds a higher “standard” for books on this type of subject that one out of a local community college. Forming an academic “Center” undoubtedly leads to recognition as the “standard” for information and analysis about standards.
I have worked with clients and innovators most of my career who want to revolutionize the electric power industry with technology. But new technology means risk. Infrastructure businesses take as little risk as possible. Not because they are business run by bad people but because their customers only care about one thing – in the case of electricity, that the power stays on for the lowest amount of money possible (and more recently, with an acceptable level of environmental impact). I hate to break it to my clients but my industry mostly wishes for three big dog suppliers of equipment or technology who will respond to a specification (itself a standard of sorts) such that three credible bids can be received and evaluated. It’s a business that craves standards and shuns innovation. Being highly regulated doesn’t foster innovation either.
I have a degree in chemical engineering. I have been walking around, and analyzing, complex engineered systems my entire career. That hasn’t stopped me from being in awe the next time I am at a power plant, a refinery, a recycling center, or even get in my car, buy groceries, cross a bridge, or text my daughters on my cell phone. It all works! Over and over and over again. Sure, there are blips, bumps, service interruptions (it’s 98F and the compressor on my AC just conked out after twenty six years), but this really complex stuff works just about all the damn time. Yes, I know, that just creates unrealistic expectations. The better something works, the better it has to work, or the customer isn’t happy. That’s why we have standards.
Often I think we need fewer standards. Busch points out how the formation of standards clashes with democracy, confers power and influence, and lead to domination. They extend beyond those who “established them, standards take on a life of their own that extends beyond the authorities in both time and space.” I know in my work standards are written by technical committees and it requires time and money to participate in the committee. They are usually written so the “big dogs” win.
But I also think we could use some new standards. A standard of zero outages is unrealistic, yet that is what most of us expect from electricity, water, and fuel suppliers, and Internet service providers. So wouldn’t it be helpful if we had a standard to compare to when we experience outages? Some standard for climate modeling might amp down the rhetoric around global warming. We might be less surprised at catastrophic events if we could benchmark them to a standard.
Perhaps more importantly, we should understand that many “standards” are anything but. Standards used in accounting and by financial engineers are often so ambiguous, they allow each firm to apply their own valuation models. Who can you trust when everyone has their own version of the truth? It’s especially insidious because the fact that “numbers” are involved- mathematical, computer, and statistical models and algorithms-masks the fact no real standards are in place for how money is invested and transacted by Wall Street firms. I hope Busch gets into this aspect of standards. Many standards I deal with simply add to the volumes of paperwork, but don’t lead to faster, better, or cheaper.
Finally, it’s interesting to participate in an endeavor that has a decidedly different framework of standards than the one I am used to (engineering and complex systems): fiction writing. Sure, you have to follow rules of grammar and punctuation (style sheets are another form of standard!) and construct a logical flow to your ideas through sentences and paragraphs and chapters. But, after that, what constitutes bad, mediocre, good, great, or superior fiction? If you have a Masters in Fine Arts (MFA), you may enjoy a higher standard for how your fiction will be received by agents and publishers and the academic community (which published the vast majority of short stories).
In one sense, fiction writing may seem like a profession with a weak framework of standards. But maybe not, since a huge pool of would-be novelists (we all have a story to tell, don’t we?) are stopped at the gates of publishing glory by a relatively small band of gatekeepers (agents, editors, professors, etc). Apparently, they know what the standards are but you don’t. You can try to reach readers directly through self-publishing (which ends up being 99% self-promotion), but that’s the wild west of publishing right now. Standards don’t exist.
When a community lacks transparent standards, it has to achieve trust and validation in other ways, usually by a buddy system. Sadly, a buddy system isn’t conducive to innovation either. The Fifty Shades of Gray that has become the 5-million shades of gray kind of tells that story. The community (publishers, writers, agents, bookstores) learns to trust what sells. Self-publishers rely on friends and family to “MAKE SOME NOISE” to send a work viral. That might be a standard for promotion but not necessarily for quality.
Whether your endeavor is governed by set of sophisticated but transparent standards, or a buddy system standing in for a set of weak or non-existent set of standards, it appears that the “system” will converge sooner rather than later and stifle ideas and innovation.
I invite you to learn more at the Center for the Study of Standards in Fiction.Yes, just kidding 🙂
It’s time to get beyond the 1%. Who really controls the economy? Click above
If you leave a comment and a place to send, I’ll provide you a really cool graphic that illustrate the slides rather eloquently
Tagged with: big banks • economics • federal reserve • Financial Engineering • Occupy St Louis • Occupy Wall Street • tea party • Wall Street
Reading in The New Yorker (November 7, 2011) that the highly acclaimed pianist, Helene Grimaud, ranks Brahms Piano Concerto in D Minor one of her favorite pieces, a work I have been obsessed with since I first became acquainted with it thirty years ago, I’ve reprinted here a short story I wrote incorporating that Concerto, originally published in Marginalia, the literary journal of Western State College of Colorado.
Hallucination in D Minor
By Jason Makansi
Only a second or two separates the dream from what is on the other side of it, another meeting. Up here in the clouds, above the city of New York, almost everything is dreamy. You never forget about the magnificence. If there was a cloud in the sky, it would be undulating. Every gaze you steal out the window is like peering through a slit of space-time continuum.
Except when you meet the eyes of the honcho at the head of the table sipping coffee, his supervisors to his either side. You and the other direct reports line up and down the sides of the long table. Paper is passed around. The honcho clears his throat, cracks a joke, compels everyone to get started, and the discussion about some dull engineering project begins. You look past him at, well, nothing, nothing in the sky but one tone of blue, with something huge barreling through it toward you.
After a few seconds, the tremolo opening chord sounds, the violent strings descend two notes, then a short hop and back up, reaching, for what? The ominous roll of the tympani completes the phrase, and the stylist in your hand is on automatic, like a pen recorder, tracing the modulations of Brahms First Piano Concerto on a tablet of graph paper. Then it escalates. You are a member of a Philharmonic. What is coming at you in the window disappears.
How many times during these meetings have you found your left hand clamping your right hand to the table so it wouldn’t obey the subconscious signals from your brain to conduct the music that you hear, as clearly as the solid blue you see out the window? This is one of those times.
You see other musicians separating from you, physically sliding away. Instead of looking at the floor, you turn to look at the principal French horn player. She looks vaguely like a woman who had been sitting near you, who has captured the lusty ventricle of your heart. You’ve longed for her the way the ram-like curly-cues of that horn are nurtured by the cashmere fabric folding in delightful patterns around her breasts. And her lips, oh her lips. They are red, puckered from her craft. You want your lips to be where her musty breath is before it is transmogrified into the bittersweet sounds coming from that horn. How delicate a kiss must be, like the lighting of a butterfly, so she doesn’t feel pain.
Her horn sounds the clarion call after the notes from the strings extend, despairing to hang on, only to slip, descending level by level, like a body falling, hitting sections of building on the way down, back into the depths of the base.
On the other side, expressions of horror and fear float around the room, separated from their owners, but on this side, your French horn player only looks puzzled, as if she had just played a wrong measure, as if the conductor is tapping the stand, and admonishing her. In a fragment of a second after she glances at you, she acknowledges the melodic bond between you.
Instinctively, you move towards her, but then you notice that you are moving away too. The orchestra is spreading apart quickly. Your organs accelerate into your throat, the same sensation as when the elevator in this building rises very fast, whisking its occupants to the stratosphere. Your music stand falls over but the music pages defy gravity. They hang suspended in front of your eyes, like an image on film in a darkened room.
Flames vaporize the bits and pieces of everything on the other side of this dream. Your piece of graph paper, though, is floating somewhere over the city. Parts of you, and parts of others, are ahead of other parts, behind, to the side, above, and below. There are parts of the imaginary musicians floating amongst the parts of everyone sitting here a moment ago. All are just the parts of the sum now. There is no cashmere-cloaked horn player, and no you, yet you still hear.
Pages of music defy gravity, defy relativity. Just when what is left of your mind praises the resistance of the music to this calamity, the air where your hand was grasps at the music, something to hang onto, in the absence of a person, the horn player, anyone. Then the glue and string of the spine explode, the pages drift away, and the paper dissolves. Still, the notes of the concerto hang in the air, intact, each one where it is supposed to be relative to the other ones. They appear like organized dots between your eyelids and your eyeballs.
The concerto continues. The unbearably sweet but firm entrance of the piano, “I am here now,” it seems to say, coquettishly, the triads and chords ascending up, then down, back up, and ending on the same notes as the melody begins, a pause, then the melody in a long ascending rush. The shrink and swell, the outline of the horn player’s small, powerful frame flows through her instrument. But she is not there.
Finally, the notes disintegrate. Now you know what is the last sense to survive. But, as the propagation of your last brain pulses crash toward the asymptotic zero, it comes to you, the years you’ve been in love with this concerto, its tortured path from the composer’s brain to notes on the page, the microsecond you’ve embraced the empty space that was once this woman. You glide on a bed of air, the serenity of the piano’s melody, the gentle perpetual breath, a conveyance away from the rebellious tonality collapsing underneath. At the final moment, a weak human bond suspended on a melody is better than no bond at all. Maybe Brahms knew that.
I know about incandescence, I’ve been the victim of incantations (don’t ask), and have heard of contatas. Last Sunday, I heard Paul Muldoon’s Incantata, a long poem, read aloud by Eamonn Wall, and interpreted by St. Louis composer Barbara Harbach for nine instruments – violin, viola, cello, piano, flute, clarinet, bassoon, horn, and trumpet. This was quite an original performance combining spoken word and music, distinctive forms and sounds, side by side.
A nice thing about a city like St. Louis is that it is large enough to attract some of the world’s finest artists, especially in the classical music scene. But it is small enough that you can actually engage these folks and learn some things without being intermediated by the media. I had met Ms. Harbach at a literary function earlier this year and have struck up an email dialogue with her.
She was gracious enough to answer two questions I had about her premier work:
-Why this number of players? Answer…the poetic story is on a large scale and she needed a small chamber orchestra to match that scale (as opposed to, say, a quartet or a trio).
-Why a conductor? Answer…the piece has complex cross rhythms that needed a conductor to keep together. More than six players gets a bit tricky to keep it all together.
As briefly as possible, the story concerns an Irish artist, Mary Farl Powers, with whom Muldoon had a tumultuous romance with, who elects not to treat her cancer using modern treatment methods. The liner notes for the program note that the poem is both a lament and a dissent from the artist’s fatalistic world view.
Each of the five movements, or musical interludes (?), has an easily identified fragment, that builds effortlessly into the theme. Memorable moments in the music for me were the transition from happy and spritely to somber and cautious in the first movement (“Powers”); the beautiful piano solo in the second movement (“Nocturne”) and the few measures of a string trio; the way the third movement (“Composed of Odds and Ends”) changes from a Irish jig like dance to a march, from pastoral and rural to patriotic; and the low jazzy rumblings building into a slow long crescendo to end the fourth movement (“Bitter-Sweet”). The fourth movement also features a lovely piano entrance.
I wished the fifth movement (“Coda”) gave me more of an impression of an ending, a wrap up, a tying together of the loose ends, rather than an abrupt piece of punctuation. I wanted more, not less, is what I mean.
Harbach’s complex rhythms were nevertheless quite approachable and appealing. I mean, it wasn’t like it went from Rastafarian to boogie or anything. I hope a CD is forthcoming so I can spend more time focusing on both the reading and the music. Even for the writer that I am, I have a terrible time focusing when I listen to a reading. It is so much easier for my mind to accompany music than the spoken word. I can’t wait to try get both sides of my brain working on this one again, though!
About the group that commissioned this work – Poetry Scores (St. Louis) apparently is known for pushing boundaries, synthesizing forms, and multi-media. It was noted during the intro that the group recently staged a combination of poetry readings and burlesque dancing. Sorry I missed that!
For those unaware, Harbach is an organist, harpsichordist, and prolific composer and much of her music is available on CD. I’ve got several of them. She incorporates subtle American themes and sounds, and has been compared to Aaron Copeland, but after I listened a few times, I kept thinking about Dvorak and how his New World Symphony, to me anyway, whispers America although I doubt I could ever articulate why. It just does.
Harbach’s music is beginning to whisper to me as well. And, let’s not forget, she’s a woman. How many lady composers of “classical music” do you know? I know only one – the obscure Amy Beach from the early 1900s. That alone makes Harbach’s music uniquely interpretated compared to all the male masters you know all too well.
Time’s a wastin’ for times to be changin’. This lady should be heard whether you are around to see her or not.
Tagged with: Barbara Harbach • Incantata for Chamber Ensemble • Mary Farl Powers • Paul Muldoon • Poetry Scores • St. Louis
So, last week I arranged to conduct a “forum” at Occupy St Louis (ground zero is a few blocks from my office) on practical solutions to Wall Street. It took me a while to figure out their very democratic system and in the process I had a few great conversations with a union organizer and a woman from NYC flogging her book and donating the money to the movement. Turns out all I had to do was get on the PA system and announce my workshop. One person showed and we had a fruitful conversation, but our ideas were largely theoretical.
Things at OSL got more organized and this week I agreed to conduct another forum, “Practical Solutions to Wall Street Power and Excesses.” I was actually on the schedule at their FB page and on the written schedule at the site. Yesterday was the big day.The weather was awful, having turned from sunshine to cold autumn rain. I prepared a two page handout and made seven copies, figuring I’d take five home with me.
I got there and no one could locate the PA system (probably stored away so no one would electrocute themselves in the rain), someone was playing loud music (I asked him to turn it down and, in his mind, I guess he did), and someone else apparently was going slightly bonkers with a metal folding chair. So, a couple of young guys screamed out, and others repeated, that the such and such forum would be starting now at the top of the stairs. “We’re all gonna get educated!!” the guy screamed, in a voice that would land my throat in Hall’s cough drop territory for two days.
Turns out I got the education. We had a very civil meeting, a great discussion, which took little prompting. There were 10-20 folks around me at any given time. The one person who looked the least likely to contribute (and looked the “least likely” period) had an impressive command of the facts and figures about Wall Street, the global economic system, and our political process. And he originated the “big idea” which I am going to share with you.
That the movement generate a nationwide petition making a demand that, say, the corporations sitting on $2-trillion in cash currently be forced to invest it, or some portion of it, in this country on things that create jobs. If, within 90 days, they refuse, then the movement (and sympathizers) boycott their businesses, walk out of the job, etc. A national strike.
This seems like a worthwhile idea for the following reasons:
-It’s an action with an immediate affect. this was the biggest complaint about all the other solutions. Everyone kept saying “we need jobs now!”
-It does involve any legislation or tax policy.
-it forces U.S. domiciled corporations to acknowledge that they must be part of the solution in creating jobs here instead of in China or India.
-It involves the unions which can bring organization and numbers to the effort
-It forces awareness because demand (boycott) and the means of production (strikes) both stop at the same time.
-It can build in strength as the movement builds.
Even it such an action turns out to be symbolic, that’s something.
My larger point here is that this is an important exercise for me, working with others who are so frustrated by the current system that they are willing to sleep in public spaces, risk getting beat up and arrested by the police, and so on, to create some alternative means of “hope and change,” since the last movement in the vein (you listening, Obama?) seems to have netted the 99% little, if anything.
I’ve been studying financial engineering, Wall Street, and the global financial system for five years (go figure – I just get interested in these things). I am working on a sociology degree with a focus on these topics. This summer, I was talking with my daughter who is at college and I kept wondering, how come no one is protesting what Wall Street (see my definition) is doing to this country?
Wonder no longer. I am energized!
Here’s what I handed out at my forum:
Solutions for Restraining Wall Street Excesses
First, a proposed definition of “Wall Street”: The circuit of political and financial hegemony that runs through the global financial services firms; the administration and the regulatory agencies under its control; the Congress, its committees and subcommittees, and the agencies it controls through budgetary proceedings; K street and the corporate lobbyists; the Federal Reserve, International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, other central banks, and sovereign bank systems; and elements of the global media. The most important characteristic of Wall Street under this definition is that its power completely and utterly transcends political parties. It is a system unto its own.
Some ideas (talking points) we the people can consider:
• Make the U.S. Federal Reserve accountable to the people. Currently, the Fed operates independently of the President (even though he/she appoints the Chairman and Congress approves) and the Congress, or any official elected by the people, for that matter,
• Enact a transaction tax on all Wall Street activities. If politicians seriously consider a “sales tax” or value added tax on people, then why not a “sales tax” on Wall Street transactions?
• Nationalize the banks. Three years ago, U.S. taxpayers handed them $750-billion, and while they paid most of it back, they also fattened their own compensation packages. Where is the improvement to the economy for the other 99%?
• Repeal the Commodities Futures Modernization Act of year 2000. This act prevents oversight of derivatives and other exotic financial products at the heart of repeated financial crises of the last thirty years.
• Insist that appointments for key positions within the federal government come from outside the system, not the same people that have been corrupting the system for thirty years.
• Force Wall Street to invest a portion of its profits and revenues into rebuilding the infrastructure of this country. Wall Street gets an F for managing the nation’s finances. The American Society of Civil Engineers has given the state of this nation’s infrastructure a D for many years. Invest in infrastructure engineering, not financial engineering.
• Start nation-building here at home. Take every dollar saved as we get out of Iraq and Afghanistan and invest in the foundation of this country – education, infrastructure, and energy.
• Break the circuit of Wall Street power.
• Force the use of comparative accounting procedures and rigorous standards on corporations. Financial engineering has become so complex, regulators allow each of them to use their own “proprietary models” to value their balance sheets. No one on the outside can discern what their real value is. How do you tax an entity that has the right to report whatever the hell it wants to? How do you invest in a company that offers little real transparency over its activities and accounting?
What are your talking points?
jmakansi@yahoo.com
Tagged with: Financial Engineering • global economy • Occupy St Louis • Occupy Wall Street • Wall Street
I’ve been posting on my Facebook page a “fact” or message a day about Wall Street to show my sympathies with this movement, even though my definition of Wall Street is different from that of the movement. I define Wall Street as the the circuit of elite power that runs through Wall Street, Congress and the Administration, K Street, and elements of the media.I think the movement’s definition is more like “an economic system that is unjust and unfair to 99% of the population.”
My interest here is to contribute in my own tiny way by getting these people focused on how we got where we are with the corrupt financial and political system we suffer under today and practical things we can all think about to solve the problem, or something more practical than sleeping in public spaces. Not that I object or hold that against them in our democracy. I just think once the occupation ends, governing has to be restarted and there really are concrete steps that can be taken to fix things.
Most of this comes from my studies of financial engineering over the last five years, now embodied in my graduate work towards a Doctorate in Sociology. In any case, I’ve re-posted my daily messages here (in reverse chronological order):
- The current recession is only the latest crisis properly laid at Wall St’s gilded door. What about the junk bond scandal, the Savings and Loan fiasco, the collapse of Long Term Capital Management, and the dot com, telecom, and energy com failures? After each, financial services got stronger for the next round because regulatory oversight got weaker. The system has become a siphon for the few who get transaction fees in current dollars by inflating the perception of future value estimated from their “proprietary” models.
- In 1985, 14% of American business profits went to financial firms. In 2006, at the height of the housing bubble, it was 33%. Today, it is still 25%. Is it even close to appropriate that one of every four dollars of profit comes from moving money around a corrupted system, instead of investing that money for the long-term good of Americans?
- In 2009, the AmericanSociety of Civil Engineers gave the condition of our nation’s infrastructure a grade of D. $2.2-trillion over five years is needed to fix it, accompanied by tens of thousands of jobs. Its pretty clear Wall St gets a F for managing the nation’s finances. We need long term investment in the foundation of the country not minute to minute speculation by the 0.001% that runs Wall Street.
- Repeal the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, passed by our Congress in year 2000 expressly to PREVENT regulation and oversight of derivatives and the exotic financial products at the heart of our financial crisis and the profits of the 1%
- Make the Fed transparent. Under current law, no elected representative of American citizens has the right to examine the Fed’s dealings with US banks or other global or central banks.
- Break the circuit of global economic power and influence, the handful of elites in the revolving door through Wall St, DC, K Street, and academia, and the media amplification of their message
- In less than 36 hrs in 2008, the Fed converted Goldman Sachs and the other investment banks into commercial banks so they could receive their share of TARP funds. Government works lightning fast when the right people have their hands out begging.
- When your personal net worth is $4-billion, every zero after that first digit represents the sweat and toil of others in the service of your vision.
- (The lack of) Money is the root of all evil. (with gratitude to Mad Magazine where I read this several decades ago)
- Reduce speculating. Expand educating.
- End Financial Engineering. Support Infrastructure Engineering.
Tagged with: Banking • Financial Engineering • Financial Services • Infrastructure • Infrastructure Engineering • Occupy St Louis • Occupy Wall Street • Wall Street
In 1980, I saw U2 at a small venue called Privates on Manhattan’s upper east side. Believe it or not, I went for the opening act (I think, memory getting fuzzy), Teardrop Explodes. Anyway, I remember thinking after hearing U2 that this was a group that whose fame would grow larger than anyone, probably even they, thought possible at the time. They were tight, and even though their rock and roll didn’t push at the complexity envelope, Bono’s voice made every song an anthem. They had an “energy” unparalleled at the time.
I felt similarly last night when I went to hear Nicole Atkins and The Black Sea at a dive of a club in St. Louis. I had heard their song, The Tower, on the community radio station earlier in the week. She’s got a powerful voice with incredible range. We’re talking power like Grace Slick, Annie Haslam, Janice Joplin, Annie Lennox, and Evanescence. Not only is their music influenced by classical overtones, but it has this exotic Russian or slavic backdrop. Maybe that’s because the lead guitarist is Russian, or at least has a Russian name, Irina Yalkowsky, and looks to be of Russian extraction, and she is every bit as talented at Ms. Atkins.
There were only 50, maybe 75 people in the club, though the band apparently has played on Late Night with Letterman, the Bowery Ballroom in New York, and other name joints so their story obviously hasn’t made big news out here in the Midwest. And if her Wikipedia entry is accurate, one of her first music purchases was Traffic’s John Barleycorn, which, if not on my top ten favorites of all time (which changes with my mood), always hovers close by.
This is a group worth keeping tabs on!
Baclava is the world’s greatest dessert and my extended family has the world’s greatest recipe. I claim nothing else so bold for me our my family (although my other family members may vehemently disagree). It is best made by two (although one can do it). Make it with someone you love, or like a lot. Share liberally. Here it is (the “secret” is at the end):
Makansi Family Baclava
Equipment: Baking pan, brush, damp cloth towel, etc
2 – 16-20 sheet boxes of filo dough
1 lb – crushed pecans
1 tbl – cinnamon
¼ cup – sugar
1 lb – butter
½ cup – water
2 cups –sugar
1 cup – honey
Few drops – lemon or lemon juice
- Melt butter in a small pan. Yes, all of it!
- Make filling – mix pecans, cinnamon, ¼ cup sugar in a mixing bowl
- Pop a beer or pour a glass of wine –the next steps require patience and you need to relax!
- Layer dough into a 9 x 12 or 10 x 13 pan that is at least one inch deep. Brush the pan’s entire inner surface with butter. Lay one sheet of dough, brush it with butter, lay another, brush it, etc, until the first box is empty. [Don’t dawdle on these steps but be patient as well. The dough can dry out easily. In-between each layer, it is best to cover the dough with a damp towel. It can be difficult to separate out the extremely thin sheets of dough from the package. Be delicate. Fingernails may come in handy].
- Pour pecan filling into pan and spread as evenly as possible.
- Repeat step 4 with second box of dough. The first layer of dough on top of the filling will be difficult to brush with butter
- Cut into diamond shaped pieces of your desired size. The smaller the cuts, the more difficult it is to make these cuts without hurting the top layer. [Be sure to cut all the way through to the bottom of the pan.] This also is a delicate operation. Hard to explain – just cut slowly and deliberately.
- Bake at 350F for 40-45 min or until top is golden brown
- Make syrup – heat ¼ cup of water, dissolve 2 cups of sugar, bring to a boil, add a few drops of lemon, and simmer until dough is ready to come out of the oven. [watch this pot – it can boil over if flame too high, and boy , is that a sticky mess to clean up.
- And now the secret! Pour the hot syrup over the dough in the pan as soon as you pull it out of the oven. Let cool naturally.
Distribute far and wide. You’ll be amazed at how many new friends you’ll make. Even beats being the one in the neighborhood with the pool!
I gravitate towards fiction that judiciously weaves in my favorite topics, interest areas, and passions. Music qualifies.
Recently, I read A Visit from the Goon Squad (Jennifer Egan) and An Unfinished Score (Elise Blackwell) back to back. The former, which weaves in rock and roll, is known for winning the Pulitzer, the latter, weaving in classical music, for just being published, I guess.
Blackwell makes music and musicians far more interesting and entertaining as fiction than Egan does. An Unfinished Score is a tight, compelling novel and while the basic plot won’t shatter glass ceilings, what you realize about classical musicians, compositions, conducting, composing, and instruments is deeply gratifying. It is rare indeed to learn through entertainment but Blackwell pulls off this feat, sadly with no prize for her achievement.
Believe it or not, the story has a few twists and turns worthy of those books you buy when delayed at an airport. The climactic scene had me in the dark until it was sprung on me.
What Egan should have won perhaps was a prize for the chapter that is a power point presentation. Not because it really contributes much to the novel, but because it is a tragic-comic parody of power point presentations everywhere. I know. I give them. I listen to hundreds a year. Don’t most of us? If you pick up this novel, pay attention to that chapter and in particular how the “presenter” draws broad conclusions from the flimsiest of data. Another hallmark of the form for the most part.
Elise Blackwell is a writer to watch.Under another’s pen, the very beginning could seem beyond trite, a contrivance to grab your attention like an IED going off on the street where you live. The basic plot, female musician with inferiority complex has affair with superior (and arrogant) male conductor type, would probably be scoffed at by any self-respecting professional woman or enlightened lady. But Blackwell injects magic into this time weary plot just like Star Wars made fighting a war in outer space something more than good guys and bad guys.
I think this book will be worth your time and energy.
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