Mix Tape: Rhythm Trumps All

My favorite moment in elementary music class was when the teacher would pass out percussion instruments--wooden sticks, sandpaper blocks, finger cymbals, triangles--and give each one of us a certain rhythm to play. I could count to 4 easily enough and knew when to hit my instrument. If the others could do the same, it was always an exciting result. Relatively simple, but always exciting.

It wasn't until my junior year of high school that it went any further. The band director was looking for recruits for the percussion section. Seeing as how most of my friends were the ones goofing around the drums in the back of the room, I was quick to volunteer. They put me on the simple instruments, and it seemed easy enough. 

But when I first took those crash cymbals, shoved them into my gut and clapped them together to create a backbeat for the entire band to follow, something special happened. This was a whole new experience. It was something liberating, something powerful, something to be felt.

On the saxophone, I was banished to play the harmonies that were originally intended for the more sophisticated French horns. I liked harmony well enough to not mind if I was a handwritten transposition of an afterthought. But that backbeat. I liked harmony, I loved rhythm.

I didn't understand the depth of it in 11th grade. But I'm growing convinced that our bodies are knit together in rhythm. The heart's constant eighth note lub-dub, blood pulsing in quarter notes to every extremity, the lungs keeping a steady half note lull, the accents of firing synapses, the resulting tempo we keep when we have some place to walk. It's in our very fiber.

So when we hear the right rhythm, we instantly connect. Even if we don't recognize it, our foot does. At the very least, our fingers tap, our heads bob. It's as if the piece of music already knows us and we already know it. That rhythm is already there, it's the fabric and story of our lives, but to tap into it, to find it, to tell it, to translate it, to communicate it, that takes work and talent and luck.

And this is the essay that was written in my head this morning while listening to Anathallo's "All the First Pages." It's been a favorite for a long time and has already found it's way on to plenty of mix tapes. But this morning, especially around the 2:20 mark, all I heard was rhythm.

There's a lot that could characterize the music of Anathallo. But through many years and many albums, they went through a long and careful refining process. In the end the songs and their titles were shorter, but one thing remained unchanged and at the forefront: rhythm. You can hit your notes perfectly, but if you can't hit them rhythmically, you have no place in this band. Every element right down to the poetry of the lyrics serves the rhythm of the music before it serves anything else.

I guess it probably sounds weird, but in listening to a song like this my heart seems to beat a little faster, as though it's trying to catch up and match a rhythm it's already known.

See also: When a kindergartner's stutter about Valentine's Day becomes the perfect syncopated foundation for a surf-jazz song, by Charles Spearin's Happiness Project.

We Miss You, Anathallo

I've declared today Anathallo Saturday. We're working through their entire discography while spring cleaning, and it's bliss. This is, was, always has been special music. Today it's already incited frenetic scissor kick dance parties, passionate turret-syndrome shouting, living room flashmobs, gang-vocal singalongs, thigh-and-belly drum circles.

The celebration just got interrupted by Thomas the Train, but as soon as afternoon naptime begins, we'll get back to the festivities.

What's Right With This World

Family

1) "Put your shoulders back," my mom always told me. I've been told more than once I have poor posture. But I was surprised during a pause on a hike with a bunch of retired people when one lady came right over and scolded me, placing one hand on my back and the other on my shoulder and pushing me upright. "Who wants scoliosis?! Stand up straight! Shoulders back! No, I say it because my sister had her back cut open at the age of 40 so that they could glue all over vertebrae back in place. You are tall. Be tall. Stand proud. The ladies like a tall, proud man." And then the jokes began about her being my mother. "It's true, my mother always said the same thing," I added.

2) The other kid thinks that if you have a belly, you must have a baby inside. He comes over to me and to his brother and lifts our shirts to pet our bellies saying, "Baybeeeee." We try correcting him--no baby here, scientifically impossible--but it's no use. I caught him the other day gazing at a magazine with a pregnant lady in her underwear on the cover. He was caressing her overgrown stomach gently and I heard him softly mutter, "Ders a baybee inder."

3) The most amazing thought of parenthood is imagining the perspective of a two foot tall toddler. There's good reason he's got a look of wonder in his eyes when he cranes his neck to look up at me. I'm three times the size of him, which means it'd be like me looking up to a man who is 18 feet tall. And can you imagine an 18 foot tall giant picking you up? Swinging you around by the arms? Putting you on his shoulders? Throwing you up in the air? Wildly inconceivable. 

4) I picked up the kid from school and we ran an errand. On the way home, looking out the car window, he said out of nowhere, "Papa, I want a puppy named Bubbles. Is that a good name?"
"Bubbles? Um...yeah."
"You like it?"
"Yes, it's a good name. Bubbles the dog and Banjo the cat. Bubbles and Banjo."
"Yeah," he said in a daydreamy tone, still gazing out the window.
"Bubbles and Banjo. Best of friends."
"Yeah," he said in the same sigh of a tone, as though he were wishing it into existence.

Diamonds and Sparrows

It was this performance that pushed me to discover and enjoy Edith Piaf as much as I have over the course of the past year. But would it be too irreverent to say I might prefer this version? The slow, quiet, descending guitar serves the song quite well, making it more of an appropriate lament.

Version aside, I'll go out on a limb and say this is music's best melody ever written. Anyone wanna disagree?

Paperman

When the kid and I went to see Wreck-It Ralph, we came home raving more about the short-film that preceded than the main feature itself. Maybe it was in part because we didn't have to understand French to enjoy it, but surely it was more than that. We both watched mesmerized, with boyish grins. I searched the web for it afterwards to share it with E, disappointed with a lack of results.

Apparently I wasn't the only one searching. It was uploaded 5 days ago, already with nearly 8 million views. For good reason.

Teaching Vicariously 2

Though the effects of group-think and mob-mentality are pervasive, the number one rule of teaching is to remember kids are always smarter than we give them credit. And if you want to keep a room full of little gremlins under control, the number two rule of teaching is to move quickly and keep them guessing. And then there are beautiful moments when those two rules come together perfectly: the teacher moves quickly and the kids actually follow.

The most magical moments during my short teaching career were when certain kids picked up on my irony and sarcasm and played along. I was in the zone and so were they, and suddenly the classroom dialogue unrolled into a surreal ping-pong match of quick wit, something fit for a sit-com or indie screenplay.

I had been reading Stuart Little with the kid, pleased by the prose but underwhelmed by the story. But something changed when Stuart pulls up to a despondent superintendent of schools randomly pouting on the side of the road. What's his problem? He's got plenty, but today's is finding a substitute teacher for Miss Gunderson. The doctor says she may have rhinestones, and there's nobody in this town who knows anything, and school is supposed to begin in an hour.

It's this wonderfully offbeat setup that peaked my interest, and it only gets better from there. Because Stuart the mouse becomes the heroic substitute teacher for the day. And it only gets quirkier and more off-kilter, something fit for a Wes Anderson film, reminding me of those rare, beautiful moments of my own in the classroom. The moments where the goodie-two-shoes are slightly nervous, the bright rebels are delighted and take the lead, and the rest are a little bit lost but more than happy to observe. Move quickly. Keep them guessing. Hope they'll join you.

"Let me have your attention please!" repeated Stuart. "As you know, Miss Gunderson is sick and I am taking her place."
"What's the matter with her?" asked Roy Hart, eagerly.
"Vitamin trouble," replied Stuart. "She took Vitamin D when she needed A. She took B when she was short of C, and her system became overloaded with riboflavin, thiamine hydrochloride, and even with pyridoxine, the need for which in human nutrition has not been established. Let it be a lesson for all of us!" He glared fiercely at the children and they made no more inquiries...
"What's the first subject you usually take up in the morning?"
"Arithmetic," shouted the children.
"Bother arithmetic!" snapped Stuart. "Let's skip it...what next do you study?"
"Spelling," cried the children.
"Well," said Stuart, "a misspelled word is an abomination in the sight of everyone. I consider it a very fine thing to spell words correctly and I strongly urge every one of you to buy a Webster's Collegiate Dictionary and consult it whenever you are in the slightest doubt. So much for spelling. What's next?"
..."Writing," cried the scholars."
"Goodness," said Stuart in disgust, "don't you children know how to write yet?"
"Certainly we do!" yelled one and all.
"So much for that, then," said Stuart.
"Social studies come next," cried Elizabeth Gardner, eagerly.
"Social studies? Never heard of them," said Stuart. "Instead of taking up any special subject this morning, why wouldn't it be a good idea if we just talked about something."
The scholars glanced around at each other in expectancy.
"Could we talk about the way it feels to hold a snake in your hand and then it winds itself around your wrist?" asked Arthur Greenlaw.
"We could, but I'd rather not." replied Stuart.
"Could we talk about sin and vice?" pleaded Lydia Lacey.
"Nope," said Stuart. "Try again."
"Could we talk about the fat woman at the circus and she had hair all over her chin?" begged Isidor Feinberg, reminiscently. 
"No," said Stuart. "I'll tell you, let's talk about...the Chairman of the World. The world gets into a lot of trouble because it has no chairman...The Chairman has to have ability and he must know what's important. How many of you know what's important?"
Up went all the hands.
"Very good," said Stuart, cocking one leg across the other and shoving his hands in the pockets of his jacket. "Henry Rackmeyer, you tell us what is important."
"A shaft of sunlight at the end of a dark afternoon, a note in music, and the way the back of a baby's neck smells if its mother keeps it tidy," answered Henry.
"Correct," said Stuart. "Those are important things. You forgot one thing, though. Mary Bendix, what did Henry Rackmeyer forget?" 
"He forgot ice cream with chocolate sauce on it," said Mary quickly.
"Exactly," said Stuart. "Ice cream is important"....