Tag Archives: Friends

All About my Mother of a Daydream

27 Feb

A rough week at work led to a short break for daydreaming toward the end of my shift tonight. Recently, daydreams tend toward thoughts about my mom, who died last month. Tonight’s catalyst was “Manuela,”  the name of the woman on the other end of the phone.

Enter (brain right) another “Manuela,” this one played by Cecilia Roth in Almodovar’s Todo Sobre Mi Madre. Toward the end of the film Manuela comes face-to-face with Lola, the baby daddy (now baby mami — it’s Almodovar, after all) of their son, who dies near the beginning of the film, so I can skip the spoiler alert.

Lola’s past actions and Manuela’s pain have led us to expect a confrontation marked by anger, rage, and hatred. Instead, there is calm, peace, and acceptance, although not reconciliation, since there is nothing to reconcile.

Anger is an abandoned possibility. Manuela would not choose to hate, and she understands that a person must decide to be angry. Anger, she has learned, does nothing for those you love, including (especially?) your own damn self.

Back to the then present moment, I opened up a web-browser to check my Facebook newsfeed. Cabby Dave had written a thoughtful post, “A Dishonorable Man,” about an easy target for the Madison Left, Dick Cheney. Scanning  the post’s comments, I jumped to the words of Rebecca, my friend, life coach, and coworker:

Wishing an asshole like Cheney dead does, in fact, commit spiritual violence, which is why it’s a self defeating wish that plunges the wisher into his world. Not a world I want to be part of.

Whereas pain can be inflicted,  anger is an emotional state we enter by choice, usually but not always a bad one. My job is filled with moments where understanding this can make the difference between comfort and exasperation.

My own mother, however, would have freely admitted she did not teach me this lesson. She would sometimes revel in her anger, refining it to a point whereupon she was clearly having fun, such as that time when out of nowhere and with great pride she announced during her last Thanksgiving dinner that she hoped Rick Santorum would someday “get caught fucking his cat.” (I think he preferred talking about “man on dog,” but whatever.) My mother was more like Manuela’s friend Agrado, who ruffled her costumes until they were real. She had fun faking it til she was making it, having learned to love it by the time she succeeded.

Super(star) Bowl

8 Feb

While watching the Superbowl, my friend Rebecca and I discovered that what went came out of the TV speakers as

went into our ears as

Marriage and Music Education.

10 Nov

If more and more people want to participate in a given institution, the institution had better welcome the new energy or risk crumbling.

Preventing large emerging groups of people from participating in “marriage” will ultimately do for marriage what keeping large groups of emerging musics from participating in music education did for music education programs.

(Hint: they aren’t exactly thriving these days).

Your fundamentals of music are likely not mine. Her fundamentals of marriage are likely not his.

I ain’t sayin’ we need to throw out moral codes.

But maybe it’s time for music educators to focus once again on the songs we’re actually singing, not just the ones that seemingly confirm the theories of harmony, counterpoint, and other distilled “elements of music” promoted for all sorts of weird historical reasons by a steadily shrinking group of increasingly anachronistic people.

Lord knows it’s certainly time for the “institution of marriage” to enrich the relationships we’re actually in, rather than dismissing the ones that don’t conform to the beliefs no doubt also promoted for all sorts of weird historical reasons by a steadily shrinking group of increasingly anachronistic people.

[self-editing note: It should—but I admit probably doesn't—go without saying that many of my friends and I belong to one or both groups of the aforementioned "increasingly anachronistic people." I would never wish to exclude you, them, myself, nor anyone else from either institution.]

Poolboy, Tags, and Labels

2 Apr

A running (and perhaps somewhat childish) inside joke in my inner circle of Madison friends involves no more than a scripted, indignantly delivered one-liner: “Why do you always have to label me?” Other variations include “Why do you have to label everyone?” or “What’s up with you and your categories?”

It started with “Poolboy,” who earned his nickname in part with his handiness and helpfulness, but mostly, to be sure, on account of his appearance. Poolboy rolls with lots of different folks, including his young, cute, and clever kids, and a large, diverse group of friends and family. Perceptions of Poolboy vary remarkably from person to person and situation to situation, and he’s well aware of this phenomenon. So frequently it’s surreal, he’s asked oddly personal questions by strangers and acquaintances alike.

“Are you gay? But don’t you have kids? and wasn’t there a girlfriend?” he might get asked in the local gay bar.

Then there’s the just-as-frequent line of questioning: “You’re straight? But the purple hair!” someone will ask when they notice his lingering glance at a physically attractive woman I somehow failed to notice. (The hair, I’ve observed, is a conveniently mentionable symbol for any confidently expressed flamboyant mannerisms that usually go unmentioned.)

Generally, acquaintances feel forced to conclude, usually in a whisper, that “he must be bi.” All this unnecessary–and to him, pointless– speculation gets to be a little much for Poolboy. If pressed, he’d probably admit that his resistance to these categories is partially a political response. Mostly, though, the questions just annoy him. “I’m a doer, not a labeler. Can’t I just be ‘Poolboy’?”

Of course, without labels we’d have no language; without categories, education as we know it would be impossible. (We might, however, pay more attention to which sorts of words make for the best labels, describing processes, not things.) Moreover, many of us feel that gay (somewhat more so than lesbian) politics is based in the knowledge that people are born gay, and so “gay” must be a category.

In academic circles, there’s a push to embrace more and more narrowly defined labels as we specialize in ever smaller areas of expertise. I will admit to consciously resisting this trend in my own scholarly and pedagogical endeavors. But there’s no denying that labels–some helpful, many meaningless–are at the heart of “music analysis,” whose apparently jealous sibling discipline, “music theory,” constantly strives to label bigger and better systems.

Academic careers can be built on the coining of a new term or theory, especially once people adopt and/or reproduce it. This might not be a musically sensitive process, but it’s power. After all, academics are capitalists, too; especially, so it sometimes seems, when they claim not to be.

Admittedly, in talking about labels and categories we could be talking about any cultural phenomenon. Think: advertising and political demographics, like “Soccer Moms,” “Nascar Dads,” “Green-collar workers,” and “Obamicans.” How many tags–or should I say labels?–should I affix to this post? and why?

Poolboy, I think, is right to resist. Sure, the rest of us initially teased him, throwing what we first heard as trivial protest back at him. Now, though, questions like “Why do you have to label her a ‘bartender’?” have become a way of poking fun at each other while embracing the absurd. The childlike banter has evolved beyond the “your mom” joke into surprisingly sophisticated real-life sketch comedy.

A lot of power lies with those who frame a debate. We can, however, challenge and teach the debate framers, and refuse to answer with a simple, confirming or denying “yes” or “no.” We’re better off reformulating those questions that serve no purpose other than to divide us.

Poolboy reminds us that we can fight the power by playing around it.

A Visit

13 Mar

A good friend–and that’s the understatement of the year– is coming to visit next week. The 2+ years we’ve gone without seeing each other is a new record, and one I’m slightly troubled by, if only because it means we’re getting to that age where things move so fast we begin to ignore those “bff” pledges from way back when. Like me, he has one foot in popular culture and one in academia. And each of those two feet has its own one smaller foot in something and another in something else. It was with him that I learned to embrace everything, and to criticize it, too.
The timing of his visit couldn’t be better. It’s the first time in my life that I’ve come to find the weight of infinite open-mindedness unbearable. No, I don’t mean I’m questioning relativism. That was never an issue: being open to everything never meant avoiding making judgments of value. I am, however, reluctantly beginning to accept that most people settle down into a style, a career, a belief, a property, a spouse, a pattern. And they’ll try to box you in, too. Regardless if they succeed, they’ll nonetheless ultimately box you out. Not this friend, though. I can’t wait to reconnect.