OK, I’ve Finally Had It

By Jeremy Denk | Published: March 4, 2009

I’m not saying I want to be understood, or claiming it’s worthwhile either.  It seems to me understanding me is one of the most boring things to do with me, or to me.  But! …  if someone wanted to understand me this parable is probably key:

THE PARABLE.  I am lying on the beach in South Beach, on a glittering cloudless day.   A coolish ocean unrolls gentle waves diagonally against the sand.  Scurrying attendants fetch towels, drinks, snacks, and beautiful, beautiful people walk by in the prime of their lives, acting like perfectly cooked steaks in the steakhouse of life.  Similarly greased, plated.  I appreciate them!, but dourly remind myself that they are “just” bodies.

I begin to read a book entitled Netherland.  I begin to dislike it.  But the more I hate it the more I continue to read it, the more determined I am to finish it.  I sigh and E laughs and I sigh and sigh, then I moan and say “get over yourself”–talking to the writer who is not there except in form of his book!–and E just looks at me and asks why am I still reading and I just continue to read and read, as if entranced.

Then we swim, E and I.  The water is perfect and one could spend the whole day there in the salt water only a few feet deep, swimming from one small goal to another.  I love the water—my being relaxes into more being—but even as I love where I am, I feel the riptide of the book.  Soon am back in chair, a smaller being, reading the hated book.  A woman in front of me is really “doing the beach”; she is drinking Coronas aplenty and talking to some handsome men she just met and describing that whoa she was so wasted she thought but then in Vegas maybe more wasted etc. etc.  I disdain her.  I think I am better than her, reading this book that I hate.  I look around at the lovely world, then I keep going back to the book.  I think about the lovely world while I am reading the book, why the world is vastly better than the book, but I keep reading the book.  END OF PARABLE.

Several days later, I was on the NY Times site and I was surprised to read that the author of Netherland …

… seems incapable of composing a boring sentence or thinking an uninteresting thought…

But I present to you:

But mostly the diners were cricket men and their women—players and officers of the American Cricket League, the Bangladeshi Cricket League, the Brooklyn Cricket League, the Commonwealth Cricket League, the Eastern American Cricket Association, and the Nassau New York Cricket League; of the New York Cricket League, the STAR Cricket League, the New Jersey Cricket League, the Garden State Cricket League, and the Washington Cricket League; of the Connecticut Cricket League and the Massachusetts State Cricket League; of my very own New York Metropolitan and District Cricket Association; and, by particular invitation, Mr. Chuck Ramkissoon, whose guest I was.

—Netherland, p. 136

… a sentence so stupefyingly boring that I fell asleep three times while typing it into my computer and had to wipe the drool thrice lovingly off my mousepad.  Not only is Joseph O’Neill capable of a boring sentence; he is one of the most gifted writers of boring sentences in the last decade.  Example 2:

Considered, too, was the depth and density of grass roots and the crucial disproportionality of a blade of millimeters-high wicket grass traveling six inches underground, and of course we talked of the constant battle to defeat moss and bluegrass and clover and the other weeds.19_oneill_lgl.jpg

I might enjoy this sentence more if it didn’t begin with “considered, too”?  But with apologies to all the intelligent and perceptive critics and civilians who have loved this book, I really am flabbergasted, flummoxed!  What has happened here?  I would like to settle on the convenient thesis that I am right and everyone else is an idiot, but I am also generously willing to consider the possibility that all these happy critics were the victim of some simultaneous hallucinogenic attack brought on by the collapse of Lehman Brothers.  Compared to GATSBY?  Really?

The main theme of Netherland seems to be the moroseness of its narrator.  The author, perhaps fearing understatement, really piles it on!   For example he’s walking down the staircase of the Chelsea Hotel:

I found myself freshly eyeing the pipes and wires and alarm boxes … These tokens of calamity and fire, taken in conjunction with the fiery and calamitous art, gave a hellishly subterraneous aspect to our downward journey … and I was almost startled when we reached the bottom of the stairs not to run into chuckling old Lucifer himself …

When I walked those Chelsea Hotel stairs, the pipes didn’t Satanically manifest.  Maybe I wasn’t writing a post-9/11 novel?  I understand all this fear of pipes plays wonderfully into the theme of post-9/11 impending disaster everywhere.  But maybe “fiery,” “calamitous,” “hellishly,” “subterraneous,” “downward,” “calamity,” “fire,” “bottom,” “Lucifer” could be a bit over the top?  And if you think this narrator gets spooked going down the stairs, well buckle your seatbelts:

The low ceiling was supported by an extraordinary clutter of columns; so many, in fact, that I could not avoid the perverse impression that the room was in danger of collapsing.  An enormous counter ran around three quarters of the office like a fortification, and behind it, visible between crenellations made by partitions and computer terminals, were the DMV employees.  Two of them, women in their thirties, screamed with laughter by a photocopying machine; but as soon as they reached their positions at the counter they wore faces of sullen hostility.  One could understand why, for assembled before them was a perpetually reinforced enemy, its troops massing relentlessly on the hard pewlike benches.  Many of those seated were hunched forward with hands clasped and heads bowed, raising their eyes only to follow the stupendous figures … that randomly appeared on screens with the purpose, never achieved, of moderating the agony of suspense in which visitors were placed.

Oh, come on.  “Agony of suspense”?  With penetrating novelistic insight, O’Neill reveals that it’s not really very fun to go to the DMV.    Does anyone else find the use of the word “crenellations” pretentious?  (Raise your hands.)  O’Neill’s technique seems to be:  1) find a metaphor, the more obvious the better; 2) find every possible modifier that goes along with that metaphor (fortifications, hostility, enemy, troops, reinforced, massing, egad!); 3) move on to another exaggerated metaphor.   Hey, the book writes itself!

As I was reading this passage, particularly, I began to feel I’ve read this before, but much much better, and very soon it hit me:  the passage at the beginning of Austerlitz, where the narrator visits the formerly SS-occupied fort of Breendonk, which sebald.jpghe has studied in diagrams, and now encounters in reality:

… I still had an image in my head of a star-shaped bastion with walls towering above a precise geometrical ground plan, but what I now saw before me was a low-built concrete mass, rounded at all its outer edges and giving the gruesome impression of something hunched and misshapen:  the broad back of a monster, I thought, risen from this Flemish soil like a whale from the deep … the longer I looked at it, the more often it forced me, as I felt, to lower my eyes, the less comprehensible it seemed to become.  Covered in places by open ulcers with the raw crushed stone erupting from them, encrusted by guano-like dropping and calcareous streaks, the fort was a monolithic, monstrous incarnation of ugliness and blind violence …

… it was only a few years later that I read Jean Amery’s description of the dreadful physical closeness between torturers and their victims, and of the tortures he himself suffered in Breendonk when he was hoisted aloft by his hands, tied behind his back, so that with a crack and a splintering sound which, as he says, he had not yet forgotten when he came to write his account, his arms dislocated from the sockets in his shoulder joints, and he was left dangling as they were wrenched up behind him and twisted together above his head …

I realize that misery is not a competition, but why does Sebald’s writing make me feel he’s “deserved” his melancholy more?  Poor multimillionaire Hans, aww, had a bad day at the DMV.  Jean Amery had a slightly worse day, and Sebald’s plain “sound which … he had not yet forgotten” is so much more powerful than O’Neill’s metaphoric noise.

Maybe it’s endemic to our modern world that we’re all looking for something to be miserable about, some way to replicate and endure the terrible cataclysms of the past–as if that would “prove” us, our existence, as opposed to all the pixels and megabytes we consume–though all around us even worse cataclysms hover.   The gratuitous cultivation of sorrow, which devalues real sorrow?  It seems to me a shame with all the real menace in the world these days, that Joseph O’Neill must resort to exploiting metaphors for more tragedy, so ham-handedly, so post-modernish, e.g. this parade scene:

… I turned around just in time to see Ronald McDonald veering away and crashing into the barriers.  There were screams.  A man in a doughnut costume was knocked over …

It’s true, this unending self-pity annoys me, but I’d forgive it if the book had aesthetic virtues:  for instance, some sort of shape, form, some barely discernible vector.  This is why the Gatsby analogy mystifies me.  I have never read a more aimless mess of a novel, ever.  Is Netherland about Hans and his wife, a barely-sketched relationship, or Hans and his child, used as an endearing prop, or his shady friend Chuck, or is it about the man who dresses as an angel in the Chelsea Hotel?   Luckily, our narrator lives there, where he can meet all sorts of quirky New York characters whom he can saddle with Symbolic Garbage, while he’s slouching from subject to subject.  At some point of course he saves the angel from jumping off the building, and buys him some clean wings at a sex shop.  High school essay writers, sharpen your symbolism-loving pencils!  And if you like symbolism:

  … life carries a taint of aftermath.  [editor’s note:  YICK].  This last-mentioned word, somebody once told me, refers literally to a second mowing of grass in the same season.  You might say … that New York City insists on memory’s repetitive mower—-on the sort of purposeful postmortem that has the effect, so one is told and forlornly hopes, of cutting the grassy past to manageable proportions.  For it keeps growing back, of course.

Ah, I see now!, I see clearly, mowing is a metaphor for memory and so all the ensuing tedious discussions of grass are symbolically necessary, whew!, thanks for explaining that to me.  (The author should NEVER explain his symbols, hello???)  Harrowingly, Gatsby drives to its doom through a series of ineluctable events; Netherland oozes and whines through a series of unavoidable cricket matches.  Some unnamed critic opines that Netherland’s prose “glows”?  Agh.  Well, to conclude this rant, I give you this incandescent morsel:

By the standards I brought to it, Walker Park was a very poor place for cricket.  The playing area was, and I am sure still is, half the size of a regulation cricket field.   The outfield is uneven and always overgrown, even when cut …  and whereas proper cricket, as some might call it, is played on a grass wicket, the pitch at Walker Park is made of clay, not turf …

…. zzzzzzzzzzzz.   I rest my case.  Maybe it glows when you turn your computer screen’s brightness all the way up?  I welcome your offended comments.

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Elegy for Toothpaste

By Jeremy Denk | Published: January 25, 2009

Midtour; slight insanity.  The alarm goes off at half past five, and there is a (black, prepaid, lemon-scented) car waiting outside muttering in various dialects, burping greenhouse gases into frigid 91st Street, with its windswept foothills of filthy ice.  Away from city joy, away from my beloved grottos of iniquity, away from my slothful intellectualism, away from my disgusting carpet which I have meant to replace for years!  No—these must be left behind, for balmy palmy Florida!  The lemony hearse waits.  All roads these airporty days lead through the X-ray machine … can it see my soul? … or through that cute, plump machine (made by GE!) that spurts air at you and then calculates your emanations.   Even the dust coming off me tells a tale, the dust which adheres to me now, the dust which I will become.  (Oh, I’m so deep!)

Some morning soon I fully expect to be stopped by a TSA official, who will say:  “Mr. Denk, President Obama has alerted us that you are far too much of a pain in the a** to fly today.”  And I will abjectly consent.  “Go home,” they will say, “write a poem, eat a bagel, have a massage, do a crossword puzzle, fall in love, and then, only then, come back. “  I will kiss that TSA official.  From my bed, somehow, in my underwear, I will then record the piano part of the Franck Sonata and email it off to Myrtle Beach or Peoria or wherever, and some Denk Stunt Double will be found to sit at the piano, thrashing around a bit, but not too much!, looking up at Josh every so often, assessingly, caressingly, oh-so-artistically, while my recorded performance is played … meanwhile the real Denk sits throned half-nude amidst a thousand takeout containers on his moldering carpet and inhales ginger and lemongrass and contemplates the various vessels in which he has entombed the word “love.”

I was tired.  29 hours passed, after this alarm went off, and several mood swings swung.   (Have you ever travelled from misery to ecstasy on the magic carpet of a pulled pork sandwich?  I have.)

Now it’s a sunny Florida day.  Josh, Josh’s assistant H, and myself are in the car.  We share a terrible, terrible predicament.

Despite the millions of times I have packed my suitcase, I still regard each packing “event” as a kind of metaphysical decision, a harrowing choice of self.  Am I the person who cares not for image?  Pack a hoodie and black sneaks, maybe some underwear, and your concert clothes, and fill the rest of the suitcase with Horace, Pound, Susan Sontag.  Or, am I the snazzier metrosexual?  Suddenly, my suitcase blooms with flowered shirts, orange sneakers and strange shirt-jacket amalgams, leaving no room for verse.  (Always pack a notebook; then, you say to yourself, I can “work on my writing.”)  In the midst of this decision–this quasi self-realization–one often forgets one’s toiletries!  A concert without deodorant is not to be tolerated, especially by the pageturner.  And so, at the eleventh hour, you assemble your sundries.  Don’t forget your music, you idiot!!!  And fill the humidifier.  Hide incriminating evidence.  Breathe.

Believe me that no piece of fabric has ever suffered as deeply as my Tumi toiletry bag.

The real sorrow of my life, the real criminal undermining my every best effort, is toothpaste.  There has been a recent falloff in toothpaste tube design:  Crest has decrested, has headed (if you will) down, and out, the tubes.  Now, every time I pull my toiletry bag out of my suitcase, and set it upon the faux marble of my hotel bathroom counter, next to the wildly percolating coffee maker, I unzip the bag with fear and loathing in my heart:  out comes a canister of deodorant, glopped heavily with blue grit; so, too, my shampoo, wearing an obscene outer fluoridated sheath; and, my razor … alas! … how can those four magnificent turbo-blades slice after such an ordeal?  No, no, they cannot; and later each evening, just before the concert, I work these microengineered blades roughly over my cheeks, watch my blood pour out in torrents …

But toothpaste sins worst at home.  You place the tube at long last upon the white pure porcelain of your sink, you revel in being home, you go out for coffee and live your life, as if nothing is wrong, as if love were your oyster, and you come back to find that the innocent, supposedly inanimate object has somehow found a soul, and the purpose of that soul is expressed through a great sigh—an expiration!—a thick blue lake of Crest Pro-Health has spread upon the whiteness of your recently cleaned sink, a blotch of wasted, cleansing sorrow, and the scariest part is you have no idea why.   Why?    Why?  This tubal sigh is so profound, so inevitable, so ineffable.  I find myself wondering, in my spare hours, what the musical parallel might be:  perhaps the austere entrance of the quartet in Chausson’s Concert, 3rd movement:

chausson-excerpt.jpg

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… (which I played last week)?  A simple, tragic sigh, an all at once release.  OR it might sound more prismatic, sensual, like the first measure of Brahms Op. 119, #1:

brahms.jpg

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Or perhaps it is more like the entire last movement of Mahler’s 9th symphony, a tube crammed with Weltschmerz, with regret for teeth once brushed, capped and loved?  There is no way of solving these primal Colgate conundrums.  And, this problem is not mine alone.  Josh and Josh’s assistant have been wrestling with the selfsame paradox!  In fact, H has been dutifully and mythically cleaning and re-cleaning Josh’s toiletry bag every day, much like Penelope weaving and unweaving something in some famous Greek poem or other.  But I have no H.

Josh is working on a top secret invention which should solve this problem once and for all.

Meanwhile, I labor on, fighting the blue tide, making music against all odds, while toothpaste oozes all around me.   Maybe the presenters realize I am squeezed, when I grump at them.  No really I’m a puppydog, I’m a nice guy!  And maybe they hear me practice, over and over, before the concerts, the same old passage in the Brahms D minor Violin Sonata, a piece I once imagined I would never have to practice again, because I “knew it so well.”   (What an idiot).  I practice the second theme … isn’t it always the second theme? always coming back to haunt you, like an ex-lover?   Maybe I remember from the old days of being coached relentlessly at Oberlin, some teacher saying I should breathe out before I begin … because now, every night that I perform it, I breathe out just before that strange syncopated sad legato, in order to ease myself into its stream, one toe at a time, in medias res.  But I prepare very differently for the second theme!  If the opening theme seems to be an expiring, squeezed-out thing, dying out in one sigh after another, leaving its remnants cast off, the second theme, well …

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Maybe no audio clip can capture this theme’s magic.  But for me, it is amazing; I become full, round, I love again; some deep well in myself is refilled, some bittersweet reservoir.  What you have cast off (first theme), you still love (second theme); it swells again with all the futile, beautiful hopes, and you drink Brahmsian bliss.

Can you brush your teeth with it?

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Live-Blogging?

By Jeremy Denk | Published: December 16, 2008

Steven Isserlis has turned 50! And happily I flew to London to play on his birthday gala concert, with performers Andras Schiff, Radu Lupu, Dame Felicity Lott, Mark Padmore, Joshua Bell and yours truly.

Now, in the official accounts of this concert, I think it is fair to say, my name does not take a particularly prominent place. Since the newspapers perversely seemed to focus on these totally no-name pianists who I guess were also on the program, I thought I might offer a bit of a foil, or a counterpoint … the concert from my point of view, from out the Denkish eye, if you will: a kind of “live blog” perverted into a “post mortem.” And so, with some regrets, I offer:

12:52. Arrive Paddington Station. Check into hotel.

1:23-1:30. Purchase most absurdly British sandwich I can find at Marks & Spencer: Cornish gammon crunchers with Persnickety Cheddar and Wiltshire Bits and Bramley-Oxford-Hobnob Recycled Apple Chutney, extra Cress. Get text from Josh saying he’ll arrive at 5 pm and to be sure to be early. Set alarm and climb into bed.

3:32. Tormented by dreams of insane sandwiches. No, Jeremy, sleep.

3:34. I dream that I wake up too late, and thus ruin the Wigmore rehearsal schedule. Andras Schiff, Radu Lupu, and Josh are all yelling at me in a circle. I am twelve years old and I smell peanut butter. Meanwhile, Steven Isserlis from some mysterious undisclosed location, like the voice of God, is accusing me of never replying to his emails. I wake up, trembling, and discern my hotel clock blinking blue in the darkness: ah yes, everything’s fine, there is plenty of time, I am not twelve, I do not want to play Dungeons & Dragons. With that jetlaggy, clawing feeling where sleep (that siren) is calling to you, pulling at you, singing to you a song of nothingness, telling you there is nothing better than sleep, nothing in the whole world …

3:43. I dream that I wake up too late … etcetera …

3:48. I stuff all the coffee packets into the hotel coffee maker. I wish to break absolutely every rule regarding jetlag. Nap in afternoon, check; huge amounts of caffeine and mild overeating, also check. I also drink a minimum of water.

5:00. Arrive at Wigmore with steamed, steaming clothes. No one is on stage. I play the piano for a dreamy while, orgiastically absorbing the sound of that most beautiful of concert halls. I imagine I am Edwin Fischer and I play Bach; then I imagine I am Johnny Depp and I am a pirate.

5:31. Josh arrives.

5:32. It becomes clear I shall have to sit on a bench calibrated either for Radu Lupu or Andras Schiff. RL’s is extremely low, which is exciting and exotic, as if the piano were a distant, mountainous island on which you rested your hands. But AS’s height feels safer. I become slightly neurotic about this–there is always something wonderful to become neurotic about just before a concert! The lovely staff of the Wigmore offer me more coffee, which I accept.

6:16. Josh and I purchase chicken & bacon sandwiches from the Wigmore cafe. Exactly how many pork products with mayonnaise can I fit into this one day? Only time will tell. This sandwich is heavily piled with scallion, which Josh and I discover, but alas!, too late … my breath will reek of scallion all night long.

6:42. Scallion-related stomach issues. I decide to go out and seek another sandwich to settle the effects of the last one.

6:50. The sandwiches aren’t wacky enough. I get a coffee instead. I laugh at jetlag.

7:35. Enjoying Italian Concerto, immensely. Sudden desire to go practice Bach for 988 hours. It is not good to listen to AS or RL just before you have to go on stage, not good at all. Inspiration and intimidation are at war within my heaving, caffeinated bosom. Do I even have a bosom?

8:22. RL is able to play–pretty well, actually!–from his super-low bench. I become neurotic again about the height of my own bench, and flee the hall.

9:10. Josh and I are both handed a bottle of champagne; that means we are done playing, I think. I burp scallion at Dame Felicity Lott while telling her how much I love her recording of Suleika I.  My bench was too low, still. When do we get to eat again?

9:49. Getting into the Scherzo of the F minor Fantasy. It’s funny: when you’re playing them, you never realize how long these Schubert scherzi truly are.

10:12. Spectacularly beautiful rendering of Schubert A major Rondo. I go backstage and wander about. It is a zoo, a cocktail of craziness and schmooziness. I tell Andras Schiff how much I enjoyed his Bach, and he says … get this … “I enjoyed your Sarah Palin blog.”

There was a magnificent Hungarian emphasis on the word blog, and his eyes widened a bit, as if he were surprised to find himself saying that word. I consider this to be the existential climax of the whole, strange evening, I’m speechless, I have no idea how to react to the idea that Andras Schiff read the Sarah Palin blog, and my life may never be the same. Is there a world where Andras Schiff says the word “blog”? There is, and we’re living in it.

11:32. Excellent wines and company at star-studded post-concert dinner. A late-night four-course meal with red wine: the perfectly, eloquently, triumphantly worst thing imaginable to do for my jetlag.

And furthermore, I note with satisfaction that the guest I have brought is getting drunk, even verging on belligerent. A scandal of course could be either excellent or terrible publicity, I muse semi-cynically; I am in fate’s hands.

4:02 AM. Is it legal to open champagne on a London city bus? (The answer is no.)

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Good For You

By Jeremy Denk | Published: December 5, 2008

The night before Thanksgiving, I walked into the no-frills liquor store.  Maybe you know it; it sits near 88th and Broadway and lends its merchandise no illusion of glamour, its patrons no solace of disguise.  Rows of bottles climb up utility shelves to a dismal ceiling, and every last dust particle adhering to every last bargain Chianti is visible in the remorseless fluorescent gleam.  Aesthetically, it is so much closer to a hardware store than a wine shop, and if you really must know, the point of all this verbose pseudo-Dickensian scene-setting is that I was quite surprised, while pondering a Wine Spectator blurb, to hear the strains of Rachmaninoff’s Suite for Two Pianos.

I tried to concentrate on selecting a wine to bring to the Thanksgiving Feast.  It was impossible.  The two pianists on the radio had become implacable demons in the back of my head, and the wine blurbs blurred into a haze of chocolate-currant overtones and melodies with far-too-obvious orgasms.  Just as I was asking myself, in manufactured outrage, how Rachmaninoff in his earnestness could manage to screw up even the orgasm (musically speaking), the shop owner walked in the door, and said to the guy at the counter …

“What?  Ya got the opera on now?”

His tone was wry, mocking, redolent of rye breads in Long Island diners on desperate Saturday afternoons.  Especially—may I add?—the word “opera” amid his sentence came in for particular opprobrium, a kind of harsh bridge-and-tunnel emphasis, as if it were a sour chunk of verbiage amid the fruit salad of his thought, or a flat tire on the Garden State Parkway.  I tuned my ears reluctantly back to the radio, to make sure I had not misheard … but no … no voices were to be distinguished:  just the two pounding pianists, and the ongoing, repetitive search of Rachmaninoff for something profound to say.

There was a 30-ish fellow standing at the cash register (Yankees cap, sweatpants) and he shrugged.  He could not explain the opera on the radio.  I looked back at the owner, whom I now regarded as a sort of genius.  How on Earth did he manage to identify it as “opera,” despite the complete lack of the human voice?

“Well, it’s good for ya, good for the brain,” the owner said.
“Yeah, well, too late for me,” said cash register.
“You can’t hear anything any more?”
“Nah, my brain’s burned out, since college.”
“So why you listening to this?”
“Hell if I know.”

Alright, I said to myself, I’m outta here.  I didn’t know why I was listening to all this, either.  It was as depressing as an empty can of generic cranberry sauce.  I smacked my wines in front of the cash register—who knows what wines they were at this point—and paid and fled.

But of course as I walked home up Broadway, I couldn’t help digesting what I’d heard.  If you start from the premise:

Classical music equals opera.

And you add the further supposition:

Opera/classical is a mental vitamin; it is “good for you.”  (It is useless if you drank too much in college?)

It seemed to me fairly clear the next logical deduction was:

Classical music is broccoli.

Yes, baby, yes. The Broccolization of Classical Music had been going on for some time, I suddenly realized in retroactive historical insight which certainly deserves the next MacArthur Genius Grant.  You might say classical music is often over-esteemed; and broccoli is almost always over-steamed!   Its leafy tops tend to soak up a lot of liquid—in the same way that Classical Music seems to soak up a lot of tradition!  I rest my case.  If only we had known a bit earlier, we could have stopped this rampant Broccolization, or slowed it, with public service announcements, a cooperative effort between the ASOL and the Broccoli Council.

All this thought of soggy stalks made me crave sharp pixels.  When I got home, I turned my TV to its most reliable HD channel:  PBS.  And there, of course, was André Rieu.  (André on PBS is as ubiquitous as Huang Ruo press releases in my email inbox.)  Oh, André!  I watched for a little while, sank into vegetal despair, and realized another great law, to set beside the last:

1)  Classical Music is Opera is Broccoli in the Eyes of the World.
2)  André Rieu is the Absolute Zero of Cool.

I don’t presume to say that I am any great cool cat.

I have been, on lengthy occasions, as great a nerd as anyone should ever be.

But I propose that these André Rieu telecasts, complete with phone banks and PBS pledge drive emcees, are the least cool thing ever created.  I mean, look at those ornate, gold-coated music stands, and the campy, pillowy outfits; look at his hair, for God’s sake (then look away, or you will go blind); watch the camera pan over some woman’s eyes as she leans on her boyfriend’s shoulder, brimming with tears at a saccharine arrangement of “Memories;” look at the fonts, etcetera, etcetera!  Drink it in, the complete absence of cool.  Swim in this black hole of hip.

And the painful thing for me, of course, watching all this, my eyes thrown back in bewilderment, is knowing that I am attached to André in some way.  He and I are plying the same trade.  In the eyes of much of the world, we are both broccoli.  I reached out, mentally, to my broccoli brother, I sent out leafy tendrils of tender embrace, before recoiling in horror.  My mental state at this point could possibly be represented by the following chart:rieubroccolichart.jpg… which is the stuff of nightmares.  My kinship with André tormented me; I found these thoughts eerily echoed at a comedic website entitled Deadbeat:

…Who is [Andre Rieu]?  Who isn’t Andre Rieu? Me, I hear you saying, I’m quite sure I’m not Andre Rieu. But how sure are you?

Not as sure as I’d like to be!  Culinarily, the André solution to Broccolization is to dump cheese on the broccoli.  Now, as you put more cheese on broccoli, the more delicious it becomes, but simultaneously, and proportionally, the less cool it becomes.  (The closer it gets to Peoria and the farther from the olive oil coasts.)  If I may merge culinary and calculus terminologies, I believe André represents the absolute limit of broccoli as cheese approaches infinity.  It is not possible to get cheesier than him, as it is not possible to go faster than the speed of light.  I believe this formulation deserves yet another MacArthur Genius Grant (is it possible to get two?).  But why do I find this limit so appalling, when people in the audience seem so happy and musically enthused?  I want music to be good but not “good for you,” I want music to be fun but not frivolous, I want total emotional involvement but maybe not too much, I want music to joke without demeaning itself or others, I want the concert to be serious but not Serious, I want people to want to suffer, oh who knows what I want, I want it all, I want classical music to go beyond broccoli, to Japanese eggplant, or sesame leaf, hell, the whole produce section, preferably prewashed and prepped by some patient sous chef of the soul, and ready for delectable consumption, and clearly, judging from the length of this post, I will do anything to avoid all the practicing I really really really should be doing.

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