AH, YES, BIG CITY LIFE

There was an interesting episode in my life a couple weeks ago.  It happened in San Diego, California   Not the largest city in the country, but larger than South Hadley, Massachusetts, where I grew up, or Holyoke, where I went to school and where my grandparents lived.  It is certainly bigger than Enfield, New Hampshire and even bigger than Enfield, Connecticut.  To put a finer point on it, it is even bigger than Springfield, Massachusetts which I think must be a city of about 1,000,000 by now.  I say all of this because big cities have some very interesting moments along the course of any given year.   I know because I have been around some of them along the course of my life.  Rome, Italy was the one that I was the closest to for four years.  Boston, Massachusetts is familiar to me; Los Angeles is a place that I know fairly well; I started by disliking San Francisco and a long association (six years) with that city didn't change my initial impression.  Paris, France I do not like because of the people, but the place, I like.  I much prefer Lyon and Grenoble in France and that might be because they are more than somewhat smaller than Paris.  The big difference though is the people.  I won't mention Manila, Tokyo and Hong Kong.  I was in Taiwan for three days once when I was younger and I have some very nice memories of of it.  One story of what happened to me there is heart warming and humorous all at the same time.  I'll have to remember it so that you can enjoy it too.
Of them all, as well as some that I have not named, San Diego, California is my total favorite.  
So, a little while back I was in San Diego and I followed my habit of picking up both alternative press newspapers.  I like them both. One is small and artsy (San Diego CITY BEAT) and the other (The  San Diego READER) is a lot more prosperous and runs about 150 pages on a weekly basis.  It is edgier, as you can see by the cover indicating a piece of investigative reporting.  I read them both every time I am in San Diego.  I always start with the City Beat because it is about a fifteen minute project.  Then I move on to the Reader and that can take as much a almost a week because of the crossword puzzle and other interesting nooks and crannies.  It also features one of the oldest and best investigative columnists I have ever read.  He has to be at least 90 years old by now, and he keeps on writing edgy, well researched, in your face columns.  So I try not to miss any of his writing.  
Back to my "big city" story.  
Turns out that a historical building in downtown San Diego had just been bought by a group that plans to remodel and refurbish it to suit its needs.  Turns out that it was a parachute factory early in its history.  When it became known that it had been sold and that it was going to be torn inside out, a cooperative art group of young and starving artists was able to get permission to have a one day graffiti art exhibit inside the building.  I thought that the idea was brilliant.  I thought that the buyers are marvelous to give people a chance to express themselves in such a challenging venue.  In fact, it was not just the artists who were expressing themselves.  We visitors were too.  We didn't just put our $5.00 on the table.  We walked around, met one another, told ourselves our level of appreciation and by our very present, made a statement about the meaning of the event.  I made the tour three times in the hour that I was there.  I made the dumb mistake of forgetting my camera at home.  I took pictures with my telephone but they did not succeed very well.  The introductory picture at the top of the page shows you what kind of art we saw that night.  There was not a single wall left untouched...even those what were not plastered.  They turned everything into an artifact.  It was great.
Three cheers for a series of initiatives that didn't let ceremony, rules and/or regulations stand in the way but facilitated a life event for the good of the community.  I can only hope that someday you can have a similar experience.

IS A HUMAN DOING THAT?

There may be one or two of you who remember my reflection on Fake Christmas Trees.  Today I was driving while the Voice from the Kitchen was softly snoring as we smoothly hummed down the sweet Southern California Freeway.  I was breaking my custom of not playing the radio while she sleeps.  On this day, when I noticed that she had slipped under, I fed a CD into the player.  Soft, languorous Polynesian music.  It was according to my mood for the moment.  When the soft stuff ran out, I went for broke and slid a very nice collection of SKA music into the player.  I, like my second Son, like SKA.  I like it because of its insistent beat.  I came to like it the very first time I heard it about three years ago.  I don't hear it much because when I listen to music as I'm traveling alone in the car, I listen to the USC classical music station.  The only time I hear SKA is when I borrow our son's vehicle.  Anyway, now you know I love SKA. So that's the intro.  The thought that shot through my head during the "concert" took me back to the time about five or six years ago when I was having a drink with our sons and they had some jumping music, not SKA, on the player.  One piece came on that featured drums and it was very rhythmic and very fast and mathematically "perfect" from beginning to end.  About half way through I felt compelled to ask the boys, "Is a human doing that or is it a computer?"  They put insulted looks on their faces and assured me that it was completely and purely human.  From that moment I began to notice the beat in every piece of music I hear.  I hate to admit it, but I'm looking for the nanosecond mistake to prove to me that it is really human.
You see, I know that music is arithmetically based.  I know that before audio editing machines and computers came on the scene, there was some rather awesome music played.  It is beautiful to hear, but it is often not as "perfect" as what we hear these days.  I am of the opinion that it is this lack of "perfection" that gives human work its beauty.  As I mentioned in the piece on the "Fake Christmas" trees, Nature Herself teaches us the same thing.  She teaches us that perfect symmetry is not synonymous with beauty.  I also know that I and most others, demand that good art adhere to certain rules that have come to "govern" the appreciation of the expressions of the art in question.  There is very little music that I don't like.  Rap is my least favorite.  It is because it violates too many of my rules all at once.  It is too repetitious and too much alike on the music side and it is crass "poetastry" on the language side.  I suppose that I am too much of an iambic pentameter admirer to be able to appreciate Rap, but that's the way I am.
I have an example of "a human vagary" enhancing art.  "Lucia di Lammermoor" is my favorite opera.  Many years ago, more than I want to admit to, we were sitting around watching the opera on television.  We were in Rome and the opera was being played in Milan.  At one point, and not during the most difficult part of the opera, the leading lady missed her cue by about 1/4 of a second.  The silent audience in live attendance did not break silence, but since we were safely out of high class human contact, many of us noticed it and started to put in our two cents about the gravity of the error.  The room was about evenly split, with some saying that, "Hey, it was only a 1/4 beat."  Others were intransigent, saying, "1/4 beat is like an hour at that level of performance."  There were one or two of us who provided the group with some semblance of conciliatory philosophy by making the point that the missed cue did not make the performance "ugly," it made it human and it made it more attractive because of that small dose of human error.  We conciliators felt vindicated when the other two factions came together and even in front of the television set actually stood up in awe after the diva had performed at a heavenly level during the awesomely difficult "scene of madness."  We conciliators did not fail to point out to the others that their appreciation of the success of the diva that what they were now celebrating was in part based on her peccadillo of thirty minutes prior.
Without these two experiences and without the technology of our age, I guess I would never have had the need to ask myself this question.  I am glad that I did.  I am glad that I can know that music is arithmetically based but that even with that, human performance is more beautiful after all than technological creations.  In the end, the serendipity of the human soul is what fills the heart with the copascetic serenity and comfort that the human practice of art brings to the community.