CUL-DE-SAC

I was reminded of my favorite piece of sacred music today as I heard my friend Angela Carone speak, in a public radio interview, about a new production of Handel’s Messiah in San Diego.

I’m sure that when I say that this is “my favorite piece of sacred music” I sound unoriginal at best. Is Handel’s Messiah performed too much at the expense of other good stuff? Sure. But its overuse is our problem, not Handel’s. And it doesn’t diminish the greatness of the piece, which I consider to be the ultimate mix of powerful music and top-notch story telling.

I performed the Messiah many years ago in the Royal Albert Hall. I was a college kid in London who decided, on a whim, to audition for the London Philharmonic Choir, which was attached to the city’s Philharmonic Orchestra. During the Christmas season we did two performances of the Messiah that I will never forget.

My view from the choral section at the back of the stage took in the circular, multi-leveled auditorium and its sold-out audience. In front of them I saw the orchestra and the four vocal soloists who were as handsome as film actors…. or so they are in my pink-hued memory.

My strongest memory was of the tenor solo, “Thou Shalt Break Them.” The singer would wrap up the song’s signature phrase as the violin players launched their bows in unison from the instruments’ top to bottom strings as they played the thrilling orchestral part.

These fiddle players, by the way, were definitely NOT choking up on their bows. I mention this because that’s literally what the members of a San Diego orchestra do – they hold their bows as if they are ballplayers attempting to bunt – in order to mimic the quieter sound of early 18^th century violins. I learned this during Angela’s radio chat.

I’m not sure why musical directors try to recreate the sound we would have heard in a performance during Handel’s time. Everything was quieter back then. They used boys instead of women to sing the alto and soprano parts. Pianos were not as noisy. The same was true, apparently, of the period’s gut-stringed violins and cellos.

I guess ears were more sensitive in the days before amplification and heavy machinery. Not so sensitive today. I think it’s okay to shout, when you do the Messiah, just as long as you do it in tune.

Blackouts happen infrequently enough in San Diego that I see them as a novel adventure. Our city’s first notable winter storm of the year happened on Monday. Around 8 pm we saw the lights start to flicker in our house and a minute later the power was gone.

 When the power goes out you talk to your neighbors a lot to find out who’s got the latest word from the power company. You also hear their war stories of past blackouts. Chuck and Rae, who live across the street, say they lost power for a full six days a few decades past. In this case, electrons started arriving again at 3 pm the next day.

But for a while we got to rough it. The central heat shut off and I closed off half of the house to sequester the warmth, generated by body heat and candles, in the bedrooms and bathroom. We read by candlelight and located the odd things we needed with a flashlight.

We’ve gotten very accustomed to electricity always being there and this was made obvious in the way we would reach to turn on a light switch as we entered a room, even after the power had been off for hours.

A neighbor told of how she walked into her garage and threw the switch although she was going there to look for candles to replace the lights that weren’t coming on. It occurred to me to look for a space heater to warm us up until I realized you had to plug those things in too.

If the power went out in San Diego as often as it does in Bagdad I’d start to consider it irritating. Until that happens I’ll enjoy knowing what it was like to live when the world was dim at night and when you didn’t have to be plugged into the TV or the Internet at all times.

The Internet is the address where our common knowledge resides. Now, the most common of all common knowledge has a name. Wikipedia. In fact, Wikipedia is what they say.

We’ve all used that careless attribution from time to time. “They say a seatbelt won’t really protect you in a serious car crash.” Who said that? Who are they? Today, they are Wikipedia.

This electronic encyclopedia can be written and edited by anyone. They write it and we read it. We have no idea who they are. They may know what they’re talking about or they may not. Earnest college professors tell their students not to use Wikipedia as a source of information.

But we use it (and other websites like it) when we’re curious about whether some famous movie actor is alive or dead. We use it to learn the date when Charles Darwin was born and to get a broad idea of what is meant by the theory of relativity… just to choose a couple of random examples.

It is an encyclopedia, after all. And it’s faster, easier to use and more up-to-date than any other encyclopedia. But I suspect the World Book I grew up with had an editor whose name was found on the masthead. Now we’re going to them for information. They are unaccountable and the things they say have always been a collection of fact, fiction, myth and legend.

They also don’t tend to present information that challenges the common wisdom in any compelling or responsible way. Okay, maybe the World Book didn’t either! But at least you knew who to blame.

I remember hearing a lecture by an African scholar named Ali Mazrui more than 20 years ago when he spoke about oral and literate cultures. The problem with the oral tradition, he said, is it passes on information that is agreed upon and homogenized. It doesn’t pass on information that is challenging, obnoxious or brilliant. That stuff has to be written down to stand the test of time and lend itself to the progress of future generations.

Wikipedia is literate in the sense that it’s written down. But it’s like oral culture because it’s information that’s agreed upon and that no one person is responsible for. I will admit that the knowledge of the masses is a vast resource and common wisdom is usually correct, based on reality we see every day. Just don’t believe everything they say.

About ten years ago I screwed a metal socket to the frame of my garage door to hold an American flagpole. And over the years I’ve done a pretty good job of flying the flag on the appropriate holidays… 4^th of July, Memorial Day, etc. But last week I forgot to fly the flag on Veterans Day.

I should be ashamed for being unpatriotic. But it wasn’t my fault. It was the Union Tribune’s fault.

The San Diego Union Tribune used to provide a useful service to good Americans by putting Old Glory on the front of the paper, top left-hand corner, on patriotic holidays. On July 4^th you’d walk out your front door, look at the front page and be reminded it was a day when you should show the colors.

But then came September 11, 2001. After that, the UT management decided the paper needed to show the flag all the time. So there it was on the front of every edition, Sunday through Saturday.

That would have been fine if they’d put a limit on it. The paper could have observed a period of mourning, so to speak, and then gone back to the old way of doing things. But I guess removing the flag from the front of the paper, for any reason, is like a politician arguing we should have shorter prison sentences for rapists. It never happened.

The result is the flag on the front page has become wallpaper; a cliché. Because that’s what a cliché’s is: An expression that becomes so familiar you stop listening to it… in this case, you stop seeing it.

Getting back to Veterans Day… I picked up the paper and I didn’t see the flag, even though it was right in front of me. I’d been ignoring that graphic for years, so why should I notice it on Veterans Day? Ergo I didn’t bother to put up the flag.

My point is symbols only have meaning when they catch our attention. Turning the American flag into wallpaper doesn’t make us to think about being Americans. So drop the daily flag! It’s the patriotic thing to do.

Halloween this year was like it always is on my street. Little kids start coming with their parents while the sun is still out. Older kids come late. At 10:30 a 20-year-old girl rang the doorbell as I was heading for bed.

Trick or treat, she said. I told her I was out of candy.

My neighborhood in Normal Heights becomes a great thoroughfare on Halloween. Most of the kids seem to come from other neighborhoods where they might feel less safe at night or where there are lots of apartment buildings. My street is lined with small single-family homes and it’s greatly desired by trick-or-treaters and their parents. I see minivans pull up on the corner and disgorge bunches of kids dressed as ghouls.

So I buy tons of Halloween candy and I always run out. We welcome the dress-up parade by carving pumpkins and lighting candles. I love Halloween. And I don’t just say that because my wife and I have two kids.

Halloween is the only day of the year when neighbors (I call them neighbors whether they come in minivans or not) come up to your door to say hello. The only currency they want is a piece of candy. But it’s not about the candy. It’s about the fun, the adventure and the exchange of community spirit.

Why does this happen so rarely? People in California don’t go caroling at Christmas. Is that because the holiday is not ecumenical (mustn’t offend Jews and Muslims)? Maybe it’s because people in this state stopped learning to sing when Prop 13 killed off grade school music classes. Or maybe it’s because we just don’t bother to create a neighborhood community.

The life and shape of our communities have changed over the years as political customs and technology have moved them to and fro. Today, a lot of people are more at home on the Internet than they are in their local neighborhood park… that’s assuming they have a local neighborhood park.

I can’t predict the future, but I will celebrate human interaction when it happens on the street and on the front porch, as long as it’s not somebody just coming by to ask for money. Sorry. I still have a “no soliciting” sign next to my front door.

Disneyland has a small town main street and a little New Orleans on its theme park grounds. It may never build a model of Mecca. And that’s good because the irony would be overbearing. I took my first pilgrimage to Disneyland last week as I headed for Anaheim in a car loaded with kids, wife and expectations that were years in the making.

Disney has been a force in shaping our culture and politics. Would there be an animal rights movement if generations of Americans weren’t raised mourning the death of Bambi’s mother? A former co-worker of mine received her marriage proposal at the Disneyland wishing well. If small town main streets and the city of New Orleans were actually as safe, clean, bustling and friendly as their Disneyland mock-ups they would be better places.

Even so, I didn’t think Disneyland was the happiest place on earth (I’m just not into theme parks). But I was awestruck at the pure efficiency of the place. The theme park was stuffed with people on the Sunday afternoon I was there, yet the lines to the rides moved with remarkable speed as the Disney machine moved people in, gave them a few shakes and dazzles, then filed them out the door.

The whole product was delivered with such good cheer that it seemed the entire staff was drunk on a Disney fiz. From the ticket cashier who bid me a magical day to the popcorn vendors to the people who stuffed you into the rides, they were cheerful. I don’t mean be-cheerful-or-you’ll-lose-your-job cheerful. I mean really cheerful. They kept it up in the face of patrons irked by the weight of the crowds and parents who’d lost patience with their whining kids and were telling them to shut their magical mouths.

The visit to Disneyland reminded me of my trip to Mount Saint-Michel, the island fortress just off the coast of France. True, the French attraction was more authentic in its portrayal of medieval architecture. But once you’ve stood in enough lines and dodged enough visitors in their weary search for fun, an ancient monastery looks about the same as the Disney castle.

It’s a wonder that I held out this long, putting off going to Disneyland while having two kids under ten and living only an hour and half away in San Diego. But I may manage never to go back, knowing that even devout Muslims are required to do the Haj only once in their lives