Lionfish and unsympathetic complaints
Sharon's Weekly Head Dump
It feels incredibly snotty and ungrateful to have any complaints about doing what I love for a career—I mean, I started out being a small child dreaming about playing the piano and writing, and now here I am as an adult complaining that playing the piano and writing give me anxiety, while other people in the world are having real problems. Come on, me.
This week I thought about the stuff I had to write—this Substack post, a book chapter, any kind of a pitch for VAN—and had to chuckle at the irony of any of this causing me stress whatsoever. Having not one, but multiple platforms, for which I get paid to verbalize the nonsense in my brain, is the dream, especially considering that writing isn’t even my main profession! My main profession is playing the piano and my main upcoming project is that I get to perform a piano concerto arranged for me and I cannot believe I am complaining about ANY of this.
That being said, I do miss the joy of creating things without any real pressure involved, or with my whole identity wrapped up in the stuff I produce. I remember writing being a fairly easy thing for me; if I had an idea (for a story, poem, persuasive essay, whatever), it used to just come spewing out, raw for sure but with an ease that I have a hard time summoning now. It also used to be so easy to channel my energies into music; granted it’s easier for me to express things exactly the way I want now (that’s skill for you) but it’s way more difficult to use music to distract myself from my worries when music is so often now the source of my worries.
This year one of my small goals for myself is to do more creative stuff for myself that isn’t in service to my career or my “brand.” How I will accomplish this when I barely have the energy to do basic career things is…something I will have to figure out.
(I also will try not to feel bad doing/posting about things that aren’t music related, which is very convenient as the rest of this newsletter will have nothing to do with music. I contain multitudes etc. etc.)
An alternative to doomscrolling
I followed Alexandra Petri, a Washington Post columnist and incredibly sharp satirist, on Twitter for literal years without knowing that she’d actually written any books. It wasn’t until she mentioned that she had a book coming out soon that I went to go look it up and found that…she’s published two books already, and I had no idea. This is why I need to not feel bad about promoting my stuff more on Twitter.
Petri’s A Field Guide to Awkward Silences is hilarious, self-deprecatory and weirdly relatable writing—I always appreciate people who are smart but don’t always take themselves super seriously. A lot of the book—chronicling Petri’s misadventures putting herself in bizarre situations—feels very similar to Jessica Pan’s Sorry I’m Late, I Didn’t Want to Come, which is great because I loved Pan’s book and could always use more of that vibe in my life.
Underneath all the laugh-out-loud hilarity (I had to stop myself from constantly taking photos of passages and sending them to friends) there’s a current of keen-eyed observation that surfaces in flashes of exasperation or bittersweetness, a welcome anchor amidst absurdity. Highly, highly recommend reading this book as an alternative to listlessly scrolling through your social media timeline.
I went down a lionfish hole
You know how sometimes a friend sends you a thing and you read it out of obligation and then before you know it you are glued to an obscure, blurry half-hour-long unedited first-person video of a diver spearing lionfish underwater? No, just me? Cool.
One of my friends texted me a photo of a lionfish in someone’s aquarium and we had a very deep intellectual conversation that went something like this:
Me: ooh pretty
Friend: apparently they’re an invasive species though
Me: what
Friend: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/09/12/killing-invasive-species-is-now-a-competitive-sport
Me: oh they sound yummy
I highly recommend the New Yorker article, which successfully converted me from “aww poor lionfish” to “let’s spear and eat the suckers,” and features amazing passages like:
Conservationists tried to gently goose nature. [T]eams in Cuba, Honduras, St. Kitts, and the Bahamas attempted to encourage sharks to develop a taste for the invader by having divers offer them skewers with speared lionfish on them. This didn’t really work, either, and the sharks grew distressingly interested in the divers.
(I need a comic of this situation, stat. It’s just so funny to me.)
And:
The lionfish community is “really collaborative,” she told me. “You become friends—you’re dive buddies shitting off the back of the boat together.” (She contrasted the fellowship she felt among lionfish hunters with the behavior of other conservationist types: “Turtle people treat each other like shit and backstab each other.”)
(I feel so betrayed?? I am a hardcore sea turtle fan and have donated to turtle conservation groups and now I hear that turtle people are toxic?!?)
When I finished the article I was, like the invasive lionfish itself, not sated. I needed MORE LIONFISH KNOWLEDGE.
I really enjoyed this video, which not only talks about lionfishing but also demonstrates Bahamian approaches to incorporating it into local cuisine (and, frankly, makes lionfish look freaking delicious):
I also weirdly enjoyed this edited video that features a montage of lionfish spearing. I say “weirdly” because I generally cannot stand to see animals getting hurt, much less getting killed, even in nature documentaries, and yet watching this did not make me feel remotely sad. Maybe it’s because the speared lionfish get deposited in a FISH TUBE. It’s oddly, primally satisfying—if you’ve ever read the lesser-known Roald Dahl classic Danny the Champion of the World (in which the protagonist and his father drug hundreds of pheasants and gleefully poach them to get back at a horrible landlord), watching this video makes me feel exactly the same way as when I read that book.
(Also, about at this point in my journey down the lionfish hole, I found myself really wishing there was some kind of a lionfishing video game. I don’t do first-person-shooters, but I would totally do a first-person-fisher.)
Finally I went hunting for a video showing Rachel Bowman, one of the primary lionfishers profiled in the New Yorker article, and found this video. (I’ve set the link to start sometime after the 3-minute mark, because the first few minutes show Bowman accidentally spearing another fish and having to dispatch it, and that does make me sad.) It’s naturally a slower pace than the video above, and is strangely meditative to watch.
If you, like me, now deeply wish to eat lionfish, this page lists restaurants that serve it. I am very upset that apparently no restaurants in California serve lionfish to their knowledge; most of the US restaurants are located in Florida. I guess now I have two reasons to go to Florida (the first being to visit a sea turtle sanctuary, despite what I know now about turtle people).
Articles not about lionfish
Believe it or not, I read a bunch of things not about lionfish this week, and these were my favorites.
Catalina’s project revealed some troubling findings: Grown-ups’ manners aren’t as good as you might hope.
Her work began with field observations of human subjects and their behaviors in two Santa Fe coffee shops, one primarily frequented by tourists and the other more of a local joint.
She stood within earshot of the cash register and listened to a total of 85 people order coffee at the two shops, marking down whether each customer said “please,” “thank you,” both or neither while requesting their order.
Now THIS is science. (Girls in STEM, but more specifically this girl right here.)
Evan Osnos: The Getty Family’s Trust Issues (New Yorker)
Wealth managers like to say, “A submerged whale does not get harpooned.” In this case, one of their own was allowing one of America’s richest clans to heave into view.
The arc of an American fortune, it is often said, goes from “shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations.” Other cultures have similar admonitions. The Japanese version is bleak: “The third generation ruins the house.” The Germans dwell on the mechanics: “Acquire it, inherit it, destroy it.”
This piece was utterly fascinating; both the Getty Center and Getty Villa are two of my favorite museums in LA (I accept the article’s sideswipe at the Getty Villa!), both featuring J. Paul Getty’s How to Be Rich for sale at the checkout counter, and while side-eyeing it I have found myself wondering about the wealth behind the name.
I also found myself wryly LOLing at the bit about inherited wealth being anathema to the original American ideals. ‘Thomas Jefferson believed that steep inheritance taxes would encourage an “aristocracy of virtue and talent,” which he regarded as “essential to a well ordered republic”’—dear lord, can someone please tell more Americans about this??
Haley E.D. Houseman: All Clothing Is “Handmade,” Even When You Can’t See It (Catapult)
Right now, you may be curled up in soft loungewear, or at a desk in business casual. Perhaps you are en route somewhere on a subway in jeans and a sweater. No matter what you are wearing, it was made by a skilled team of workers. Somebody gently joined the toe seam of your socks on a machine where a human hand must stretch each individual knit loop in a row across a series of long teeth as fine as a comb. Every single seam of your shirt and pants was pushed through a sharp sewing machine needle by a person. Fabric was carefully laid out in broad stacked sheets, and then someone bravely cut individual sizes of a garment’s pattern pieces like slices of a layer cake. The zippers, buttons, and other crucial fastenings that keep your clothes on your body were attached—and only made possible—by the supple dexterity of fingers, even this late into the industrialization of clothing production. Every single label was carefully sewn in. Finished garments were ironed, folded, and packaged by someone flexing sore wrists at the end of a long week.
I am increasingly obsessed with the craft, history, and economics of clothing; as a consumer I’ve been familiar for years with the difficulty of 1) rejecting fast fashion, 2) finding well-made clothes that use non-synthetic fibers, and 3) navigating the tension between affordability and ethics. This article was, imho, a really good overview of all the labor and care—and exploitation—that goes into every stitch of the everyday clothes we take for granted. (It has a lot of the same themes as Sofi Thanhauser’s Worn, which I highly recommend.)
Okay, I lied about not writing anything about music
Earlier today I thought about J.S. Bach’s Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue and went to pull out the score I used when I was a teenager and it immediately brought back so many FEELINGS.
It’s one of those pieces where…yeah, I could say it’s one of my “favorites,” but it’s sort of not, and also so much more than that. It is not a “favorite” in that I never choose to listen to it of my own accord. It is, however, a piece that meant a lot to me, that I really poured myself into at an inflection point where music had become something more than just an extracurricular activity. It’s a piece I love wholeheartedly and if I were for some reason in a burning library of the only copies left of Bach’s music, I would grab this and the Chaconne without hesitation and leave the rest to burn. Sorry, cello suites.
I am also very sure that the way I played it as a teenager was probably overwrought and heavy-handed and not remotely sophisticated, but I also feel strongly about the fact that I have never heard an interpretation that sounds the way I would play it. Today I spent a significant chunk of my precious practicing time sight-reading this work for the first time in over a decade and found myself experimenting with phrasings and ornamental decisions and realizing that I still have so much I could say with it.
I would love to relearn this at some point, maybe even record it??? For now, some music for the road (not actually for the road, this is terrible driving music) courtesy of András Schiff:
Have a great weekend! 🎹