[as if in dreams] A newsletter from Joseph Zitt #005
16 October, 2020
This is the fifth issue of the newsletter. So far, so good.
The big news: There is now a print version of the newsletter. At least there should be, if everything goes as planned.
I’m almost at the point where I can create a nicely formatted PDF version of the newsletter with a single click. The print version is designed for, well, printing, though you can also read it online. It looks like a classic newsletter. Links to other sites appear as footnotes, so humans can read them. If you’re online, they’re clickable, like links on web pages.
Try it out. Let me know what you think. There are lots of ways in which it can be improved, as I learn the typesetting software better. (It’s done by passing Markdown source through pandoc and then PDFlatex, for those keeping score.)
As always, please pass on the newsletter to anyone that might enjoy it. If someone passed this on to you and you like it, please subscribe! (There should be a link to do so at the end, as well as a link to unsubscribe.)
I’d love to hear any comments you might have on the newsletter and how it might be better. You can find me via email, Twitter, and Facebook.
Onward! (over the frog?)
Contents
This Week’s Posts
Friday, October 9th, 2020
The tiny pharmacy inside the Heart of the City is quiet and fast. There’s no need to take numbers. The lockdown only allows five customers inside at a time. A short line of people waits outside, where the doorway opens into the center of the mall. Many wear the black and white garb of the ultra-Orthodox. Others stand in flip-flops and jeans cut off so short that their pockets dangle beneath the edge of the denim. I only need to wait behind one other person. When I reach the counter, I hand my health plan ID and the empty box of what I need refilled to the pharmacist. He opens a drawer and pulls out another box. It costs fifteen shekels, less than five dollars. I pay, drop the box and receipt into my shopping bag, and leave. I get my challah at the usual bakery. Watching the workers, I figure out some of their rhythms. The two of them use a single register. One worker handles cash transactions. The other handles credit. The cash and cards move between them so quickly that, in other situations, I might expect a scam. At the produce shop, I look for leafy greens. I’m pleased to find kale. At the counter, the workers stand behind a sheet of clear plastic. That’s new. I get the kale and, on a whim, some sliced pineapple and a package of dates with walnuts inside. I know that if I bring snacks home I eat them too quickly. These, I can justify without too much guilt. Across the street, the cafe with the mystery sandwiches is open, though without seating. I see that they have homemade burekas for sale. The worker meets me at the doorway. I order a cheese burekas (the singular and plural is the same) and a large iced coffee. I step inside as he prepares it. I pay at the counter. “You have to stand outside now. I have to hand this to you there. It is now the law. Your coffee is on the counter. Don’t forget it.” I take the coffee and step outside. He comes around and reaches over a display. The burekas is on a plate, with a chopped egg and separately packaged sauces, neatly tied up in a red plastic bag. I will eat it when I get home. I am hot and thirsty and need the iced coffee right away. I sit on a low wall and take off my mask. I breathe in what I recognize as a thick cloud of pot smoke, though I don’t see anyone smoking nearby. That’s OK. In its presence, even the flies are calm.
Saturday, October 10th, 2020
I head out for an afternoon walk at 6 PM. It’s later than I intended. It’s getting dark. I planned to do too many things today. Each has taken too long. I still haven’t gotten to some of them. Outside, the streets are quiet. It’s the last day of the holidays, but it’s hard to tell. While outside of the country, today’s a solemn holiday followed by a joyous one tomorrow, here they happen on the same day. It’s also the Sabbath, but that doesn’t complicate things much. Today’s morning prayers would normally take much longer than usual. As part of the joyous holiday, congregations dance outside, carrying torah scrolls from synagogue to synagogue. Not today. With the lockdown, few synagogues are having services. No one can go between places that are more than a kilometer apart. At dusk, the city square is busy. No shops are open but families swarm about. I sit silently on a stone wall, observing. Many of the people go past me on wheels: baby carriages, strollers, tricycles, scooters, bicycles, skateboards, walkers, and wheelchairs. The caregivers and the elderly gather at the front of the square. The dance party hasn’t started yet. I expect to see the usual Saturday evening protest. One woman stands by the curb. She may be waiting for others. Another younger woman walks past with a flag, but she doesn’t stop. When night has fallen, I get up and head back. The Sabbath cafe is dark. In theory, they’re doing deliveries, but the chain may be handling them from a central kitchen. As I turn the corner onto the pedestrian street, a family passes me with flags, balloons, and protest signs. Democracy proceeds as usual. I could join in, but I have cooking to do.
Sunday, October 11th, 2020
The lampposts on the way to work are out of sequence. I pass three of them. I notice, for the first time, that the numbers stenciled on them are 2472, 2473, and then 2471. That bothers me more than it should. The one a little past them is 18172. It and the rest appear to be numbered arbitrarily. That’s OK. But these three look like they had been planned and set down as a group. I would think that they would be sequential. I wonder about it for a while, but there’s nothing I can do. I go back to my usual pastime of sorting the digits on the license plates of the cars that I see so that, in my head at least, the numbers are more symmetrical. I usually walk up this side of the street on the way to work and down the other side on the way home. This evening, I walk down the morning side so I can double check the number on that last lamppost. I make a note of it and continue walking. Despite all the streetlights, this side of the street is darker than the one on which I usually walk at night. The sidewalks are narrower here. I avoid several collisions with people going the other way. I have to silently negotiate who is to step aside and who is to keep going when I encounter other people who, like me, are wider than most. The streetlamp on the walkway past the kindergartens is still out. When I think that I have reached the first set of steps, I remember to pull out my phone and light the way. I see that the staircase isn’t for another few meters. Where I had paused, the stones dip a little, but not as much as at the stairs. I walk both sets of steps easily, then go on to where the streetlamps work again. I juggle my groceries and the phone to get it back into my pocket, then continue on.
Monday, October 12, 2020
The line of people waiting for takeout at the city’s most popular shawarma joint is gone. It had formed there every weekday evening throughout the lockdown. Tonight, the doors are closed almost all the way. A worker sits at a makeshift booth several meters to the right. A sign on the booth reads “Orders for delivery people only.” A cluster of scooters and electric bikes surrounds it. Another worker shuttles back and forth between the shop and the booth, darting inside the half-open door and retrieving the orders. The large bakery is open, as usual, but without seating. I go inside and get what I think is a cheese sandwich and a bottle of soda. I take it to the city square. The last few caregivers and elders are dispersing for the evening. At the toy store, someone is yelling at someone else in English to shut the lights off and leave, already. I sit down at a stone table with a built-in chess board. I bite into the sandwich. It isn’t what I expected. I remember that the word that I had thought was “cheese” actually means “omelette.” It’s good. A whole wheat bun and the usual vegetables surround a flat layer of chilled scrambled eggs, with a sauce that I can’t identify. As I eat, I see a woman quietly going around to the trash cans and digging out plastic bottles. People can return them to stores for about a dime apiece. She’s halfway across the square when I finish my supper. A coterie of cats surrounds her. She bends down and places some sort of food on the ground for them. I leave my soda bottle next to a trash can, in her line of sight. I walk over to a small grocery store to get a frozen candy bar. The owner sees me, nods, and taps the side of his face. I have forgotten to put my mask back on. I do. I buy the dessert and sit down on a stone wall to eat it. It’s a cool night. There aren’t any flies.
Tuesday, October 13th, 2020
The grocer is talkative tonight. He’s eating a sandwich as I come in. He calls out from the back of the shop, still chewing. “Hello! Peace and blessings! Welcome!” I consider getting some of the small green apples from the tables outside the store. I don’t. Those that are left don’t look good. There aren’t any apples left inside. I get plums instead. I look for peppers. There aren’t any on the shelves. I see them in the refrigerated case. I get a few and try to shut the case’s door. It doesn’t close completely. I try again. “Don’t worry. You have to do it exactly right. And it doesn’t really matter.” He keeps talking as I come toward the front. I understand little of what he says. He talks with his hands. It helps. I try to open a plastic bag for grapes. I can’t get the right grip on it. I’m wearing a mask, so I slide my finger along my forehead, hoping to pick up some sweat. There isn’t much there. The grocer has stepped behind the counter. He hands me an open bag. “I know how hard those are to open. I cheat. You see this glass of water here? I’m not drinking it. It’s for the fingers and the bags.” I get a small package of blueberries and put everything on the counter. He combines most of what I’ve gotten into a single bag. He puts the grapes in another, even though they’re already in one. “You need another bag for the grapes. They would spill from a bag this small.” He rings me up. The register calculates the bill from the weight of the items. He rounds it down to an even number. “Here you go. Thank you. We’ll see each other again. Peace and the best of health.” I head out. He goes back to his sandwich.
Wednesday, October 14th, 2020
In bright light, this shirt is army green. In shadows, it looks like it’s navy blue. If I were to jump up high, it might turn some other shade. I don’t know for sure. I’m not good at jumping. And I don’t know what color represents the air force. My current set of masks is purple. I was planning to stick with the usual pale sky blue, but the supermarket downstairs from work is out of them. I got what they had. It’s a good shade of purple, lighter than grapes but brighter than lavender. In a world of uniform blue masks, they stand out a little, but not too much. The only other people I’ve seen wearing them are the supermarket workers. Since I don’t wear a yellow vest, no one has mistaken me yet for one of them. I see fewer distinctive masks now than I did when people started wearing them. Maybe they’ve stopped thinking of them as fashion statements. The newest person at work wears a lovely floral mask. The purple streak in her blonde hair almost matches my mask, though she’s so tall that I only noticed it when I was standing and she was sitting down. Most of the masks that I see at the supermarket today are either the usual surgical blue or black. Many of the black ones have a small Adidas logo at the lower left corner. Some children have fancier and more whimsical masks. A small boy in the cereal aisle has a mask that looks like Spider-Ham. They seem to call most cereal here “kornfleks.” I’ve never seen anyone eat them. A lot of people eat salads at breakfast. I don’t think I would have the energy in the morning to prepare one. I miss the cafes’ Israeli breakfasts. I look forward to having them again, if the lockdown ever ends. I’ve gotten making breakfasts here down to a pattern. It does involve vegetables, but that’s usually just a pepper, washed, torn apart, and munched as I sit at my computer. When I buy them, I try to get peppers of a uniform color, different from the last time. It helps me know which I should finish first. It works. In the morning, I have just enough energy to grab a shirt from the stack and put it on. I find out what color I’ve chosen after the coffee kicks in.
Thursday, October 15th, 2020
The power goes out while I’m in the shower. It’s just a blip. The light and the water heater go off then, almost immediately, back on. When I emerge from the bathroom, I see that the digital clock is still correct. The room is too quiet, though. My computer is off. That isn’t good. I have been doing a full backup of a very large hard drive. It was supposed to take a week. I was four days into it. I sit down at the computer and boot it up again. It starts without a problem, as do all the apps that had been running, except for the backup. I start to set that up again. I remember one thing that I had forgotten to do before starting the last one. I was going to move some files from a drive that doesn’t regularly get backed up to the one that does. I set that process up. It will take three hours. OK. Moments after it gets rolling, the power goes out again. This time it doesn’t come back on. I have to get to work. I pull my stuff together and head out. My landlady is at the top of the stairs. I tell her, in Hebrew, that there is no electricity. She answers in English. “Yes, the electric company is working.” That tends to take all day. I leave everything as it is. I see more people and hear more voices than usual. The weather is relatively cool. The temperature hasn’t gone above 90 degrees Fahrenheit for a couple of days. People are walking their dogs and sitting in their yards. A city worker is sweeping up fallen purple petals from a jacaranda along the pedestrian street. More grapefruit and oranges have dropped from the trees. A toddler struggles to walk past me, holding on to his stroller as he stumbles along. When he lets go, he falls in front of me. He looks up at his mother. He didn’t expect that to happen. His mother lifts him off the ground, stands him up, and puts his hand on the bar of the stroller. They continue on. So do I. I hear several air conditioners come back to life. A light in a yard comes on. I wonder how long that will last.
On writing as if in dreams
I spotted some common features about these posts early on. I turned them into ground rules.
- They are always in first person. This limits me in a good way. I can’t write about politics or stuff happening at a distance, since I’m not there. This is freeing. Rather than turning into posts about, say, Zionism in general or how the weather or the lockdowns affect other parts of the country or the world, I have to stick to things that I see myself.
- They are always in the present tense. They are always about things that happen on that day, though I might flashback for a few sentences to something that set up what happens. I don’t go off on riffs about history or stuff that I saw in the past. They are always anchored, at least, in that day’s events. (At first, I occasionally posted after midnight about the previous day’s events. That got confusing, as my mother pointed out that I was posting on Saturdays about things that couldn’t have happened on the Sabbath. I now give myself a deadline of posting by midnight.)
- I don’t include links. I can spend an immense amount of time digging for the right links for things (as I do in writing the other parts of the newsletter). All I have is the words themselves.
- I don’t include images. Again, all I have are the words. That constrains what I do, and also means that making the books and, now, this newsletter, is a whole lot easier.
I think I’ve violated the first two a few times. The latter two are easy to avoid and to spot if I have.
These rules also came into play when I was writing my previous, very different, large project, The Book of Voices. Those were pieces of short fiction, in the form of monologues from characters in the Bible. I didn’t think I was creating another project where these rules came into play, but after a while I discovered that the guidelines that I set down for that were working well again.
If I go on to another work, I may try something that expressly chooses contrasting constraints. But that won’t be for a while yet.
Things of Possible Interest
One thing I’m watching
Julie Taymor’s new film, The Glorias is a knockout. I’ve been a fan of hers for years, since seeing Across the Universe and her version of The Tempest. She also does renowned stage productions, including, most notably, Broadway’s The Lion King, though I haven’t seen any of those. (I’d be most eager to see her original version of Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, even though, by all accounts it was a train wreck.)
The Glorias is a biography of feminist icon Gloria Steinem. She’s played by five actresses, including Alicia Vikander and Julianne Moore. Over the course of the film, the Glorias talk to one another over a long bus ride. Scenes appear out of historical order, which works. It all hangs together well, including a riotous animation of the first cover of her Ms. magazine.
It’s a long movie, well over two hours, but there’s a lot of story to fit in to it. A lot of other well-known actors show up in significant roles, including Timothy Hutton as her father, and Bette Midler, perfectly cast as Bella Abzug.
In the States, it’s on Amazon Prime. If you can get at it, see it.
One thing I’m hearing
I had known of Jon Gibson as a performer for decades. He was a key performer in the downtown minimalist scene in the 1970s, playing with Philip Glass, Steve Reich, and Terry Riley as well as other more or lesser known ensembles. But it wasn’t until I read the obituaries and tributes, after he passed away on Monday, that I became aware of him as a composer.
I had accumulated a lot of his recordings, but, as with much of my collection, hadn’t listened to much of it yet. I had heard his Two Solo Pieces from 1977, but didn’t recall much about it. Bandcamp has his latest retropective release, Songs & Melodies, 1973-1977. I grabbed it and started listening.
It covers a wide range. The first track, “Song 1,” combines the kind of repeating phrase common to the minimalism of the time with what sounds like country fiddling and a droning cello. The violin work reminded me immediately of Barbara Benary’s playing. I checked the liner notes. Yup, she’s playing on the track, as is Arthur Russell on cello. Partway through, it breaks into a very different section with a strong bass-like cello line then comes back, repeating somewhat less. While other composers were focused on strict, audible processes, Gibson was willing to use those as an element in his works, but broke away when he wanted to. It sounds rather like more recent post-minimalism than the “purer” minimalism of the time.
The second track, “Song 2”, builds up instruments from a pulsing drone, then breaks into triplet patterns that continually change harmonically.
“Melody,” a solo piano work played by Gibson, doesn’t seem to have much of a melody at first. He plays a single note repeatedly, loud, for the first two minutes or so, bringing out the resonances from the piano strings, sounding somewhat like Arnold Dreyblatt or Charlemagne Palestine. At about the two minute mark, a second note comes in, alternating with the first. A little less than a minute later, a third note comes in, and so on. It’s a simple idea, and could probably be notated on a single music staff, but it’s as hypnotic as the best works of its kind.
The most striking work is the closer, “Equal Distribution.” A large ensemble (including Julius Eastman on piano) plays a sort-of-repeating melodic line, sort of in unison. No one plays all of the notes. It seems like the players play those that they want to and leave out others, with volume, articulation, etc, left up to the players. Notes from a performance are online, as well as composition sketches (on pages 14 and 15 of an excellent anthology of graphic notation).
It uses a ten note line that expands and contracts. Dean Suzuki’s notes to another recording by Petr Kotik say that the melody “consists of predetermined pitch materials, generated from various systematic processes. These usually involve permutation, based on Pascal’s Triangle and the binomial expansion theory, and stem from a 10-note prime melody.” Three of the notes also change pitch on occasion. I’m not entirely sure how it all works. The notes in the graphic notation book pointedly say “The system by which all of the combinations of the ten pitches are found is not explained here.”
At first, with the instruments moving in unison, it sounds a litlle like Anthony Braxton’s “Ghost Trance Music,” but it’s gentler and more variable.
There are a couple of recordings of a related work, “Equal Distribution No. 1” for solo flute, on YouTube, including one by Petr Kotik and two different recordings by Gibson himself. In one of Gibson’s recordings, from the Music for Merce collection, he starts with solo flute then adds a harmonizer. In the other, from his album Criss X Cross on the Tzadik label, he plays with harmonizer throughout. The recordings by the two players are quite different. While Gibson himself gives a relaxed performance, emulating speech rhythms, with distinct phrases and silences, Kotik marches through with mechanically steady rhythm and volume, rarely pausing to breathe.
I’d love to know how it works. And I wish I had written it.
The works on this album are from over forty years ago. He kept on playing and composing. I don’t know where his music went from there, but I’m eager to find out.
A lot more of Gibson’s music is available, much of it, like this record, recently rereleased by the Superior Viaduct label. As with Julius Eastman’s music, it looks like I should plan on doing a deep dive to catch up.
One thing I’m reading
The biggest event in the arts this year was, I think, the release of the film of the musical Hamilton on Disney Plus. I had never gotten to see it on stage, though I’d found some not-too-shaky bootlegs of it. Seeing the real thing, wonderfully filmed, brought it to life as other media hadn’t. (The soundtrack, which is back on the charts, is stellar, though. They had the time and resources to do it as a thing in itself, rather than just the kind of Oh-by-the-way documentation that theater scores often get.)
I finally got the companion book to the show (not counting the biography that inspired it). In Hamilton: the Revolution: Being the Complete Libretto of the Broadway Musical, with a True Account of Its Creation, and Concise Remarks on Hip-hop, the Power of Stories, and the New America, Jeremy McCarter provides a background and insights into the production. He interviews most of the people involved in the creation and performance of the show, tracing it from its genesis as an idea for a mixtape and Lin-Manuel Miranda’s first performance of the opening number at the White House though its Broadway opening. The interviews run in parallel with the text of the show itself, illustrated with performance shots and other images and documents. And Miranda provided sidenotes to the text, bringing out how he wrote the show, the influences on it (including pointers to key figures in hip-hop whom I hadn’t known), and his process in working with his creative team.
The design of the book is gorgeous. The layout of the text echoes the design of older newspapers and the pamphlets that Hamilton continually wrote. The libretto wraps around the production images sso that each brings out new depths in the other. The layout of the libretto itself works well, too. With all the simultaneous dialogue and complex movement, it could be confusing, but they got it to work.
It’s a big book, and a bit expensive, but it’s worth it. See if your local library has it.
One more thing
Singer/songwriter Kate Tucker has a new video out. I’m pleased to have participated in it. Director Miriam Bennett, my friend and teacher from my days at Tri-C, asked video people from around the world to shoot evocative images from their areas.
The video “A Little Bit of Love” premieres today at American Songwriter. It’s a fun, warm, and catchy song and a beautiful, varied video. You can see my shots of Herzliya at about 5 seconds and 42 seconds from the start.
Colophon
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