Oblations and obligations

I ask my father what his mom was like. I'm curious because a childhood friend of his who hadn't seen me for a good decade once burst into a big grin to say, "Susan, you remind me so much of your Grandma Frieda!" Thinking the resemblance might be deeper than skin, I wonder what else I inherited from our clan's Swiss matriarch.

I have her obituary, a yellowed clipping from a country paper of the day. She was a church woman, she helped people and organized other people to do the same.

Mrs. Weber, having raised three sons of her own, was particularly interested in the religious welfare of young people and many times would go out of her way to see that some boy or girl had a ride to church or Sunday School. One of the last things she did was help to organize the Singing Club of the Dingman’s Ferry Methodist Church. Without her help, and that of her devoted friend, Mrs. Paul Schuepp, this Club would never have been started, since almost half the young people relied upon these two kind ladies for transportation.

Dad has told many a story about their early days in a New Jersey enclave of Swiss immigrants. His mother learned English, put up with cockroaches and kerosene lights after leaving a bug free, electricity emancipated life in Europe, raised three sons and buried her husband before he came to old age. Spinster sisters Lisa and Liny joined her at the homestead in PA adjoining Child's Park, a place of magic for the grandkids. The Swiss inflected voices of my grandmother and her sisters laced their plum and apple pies with a certain old world flavor.

As far as I know, Grandma Frieda published no words (her husband Theo and his father were the poets). She left us no recording, she never formed a band or went on tour. So what had she passed to me besides a strong chin and earnest eyes? What was she like?

My Dad, just rebounding from his own health imbroglio, spares few words about his mother. "People said she was serious. But she was friendly. And she was happy."

And if she left me these ingredients for my own swiss-english pie, I smell a rite of passage baking.

Squirrel traps

What fascinates me about the film, Capote, is the elusiveness of the protagonist's character. It's as though Capote is walking around in one of his books, not quite sure if he's the hero or the villain. Harper Lee, his friend and counterpoint, punctures the messianic bubble with her blades of integrity.

Business schools take a page from Harper Lee.

At Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business, about half the grades are handed out for work that's done in teams; members of each team provide one another with anonymous feedback, and the school has hired counselors to help students absorb the lessons from this criticism. "In the past, you could go through business school and nobody would say you were coming across as a jerk," says Paul Danos, dean of the Tuck School. "But that might have been the most important factor in your future success as a manager."

Experienced sound engineers pay attention to the way a recording's inner workings come across to the listener. George Massenburg recently told a Sweetwater masterclass:

There are two types of balance with any kind of mix: internal balance, referring to the relationship of the sounds in a piece of music to one another, and external balance, which is how your mix relates to the outside world...

I see the internal balance in a mix as not being so technical, I see it as more musical. An external balance would be, "okay, when I play it in my car, I can't hear the kick." Or "I can't hear the cowbell," or the playback circumstance is such that it just doesn't work.

On the world stage, our I'm-the-decider president reminds us who's boss as Rumsfeld digs the mass grave in clueless spades, behavior coaches nowhere to be found.

Why we fight

Fear is the main reason. Hubris the second. Ignorance the limping third. Ironically, it all boils down to love, the milk and honey of desire.

What's the point of a loveless life? What if there is not enough love for you to get your portion? You can't make people love you. It's not a thing you earn. It's not a right. It's a gift. So you wake up in the morning, you don't feel particularly loved (or lovable?) and angst crawls in under the covers. Abandonment. Loneliness. Emptiness. Better fill the void. Stockpile ambition, ostentation. Erect billboards that tell the world, 'look! I exist! I've got all this stuff. I'm important! You gotta love me, right? Right?'

You're after love, you fall for pride instead. Ah, but hubris wears the tailored suit with a rosebud boutonniere. Hubris tips the maitre d' in twenties. Hubris parks the SUV in VIP garages. You think I'm talking rich people here? You can have your biggie fries and a chip on your shoulder, both. Vanity is classless, and clueless. From Donald Rumsfeld to Ronald McDonald, all you need is empty calories in your hungry gut to send you off to fight your wars. Once you're weaned of love by demon pride, respect is what you're after and nothing fills the bill like the cantankerous guns of Generalissimo Ignoramus.

Contrary to the staid annals of rational inquiry, thought is not well served by the passionless mind. Passion comes bundled with conscience. Love is a lubricant, if you will. Without it, heat and friction wear your brain to smithereens. You begin to think in riddles. What's the best way to signal Stalin we can crush him? Nuke the Japanese! How to tell jihadists we're the superpower here? Occupy Iraq! Terrorize civilians, here and abroad, in the wake of unmitigated angst, unconscionable ego, unfathomable ignorance.

As I watched Why We Fight, frame after frame of military-industrial-congressional-thinktanking crowded me, gasping, into the shadows. Eisenhower warned us not to follow love lorn weapons dealers to this monstrous state. We ignored him and now we are citizens of New Rome. Who am I, a serf, to stir the ashes?

If there is a merest spark of hope in this, it is to be found in the finest capacity of a human will. In a word, love. Not the smarmy pretense that got us here, blind and foolish, breathless at the sight of the headless maiden's breast. My countrymen and women can do better than swallow Caesar's vapid lies.

We can study the curves in the broad sands of compassion. We can liberate our flawed logic from a tendency to expect love, respect and wisdom to bore into us from without. We can fight with impassioned desire to create an empire of expansive beauty that emanates from within each unblemished being.

And when our children ask us why we fight, we'll have an answer. We fight for milk and honey, dear, we fight for you, we fight because we love.

Yellow submarine

On a dust plain, much is made of a hot air balloon the Beatles plan to ride. One by one the dear lads coaster in on parachutes, John and Paul intrepid, Ringo with a prone thud, George an afterthought. Their handlers herd them brusquely to the blimpish buggy. John and Paul go arm in arm, the sherpas. The airship owner sways and stokes the flame. Reporters ask him where he learned his trade -- he shrugs and says he never really learned it.

Beatles entouragers climb inside to party for the boys who can't be bothered. Someone's whisked them to a private berth. The crowd gets motleyer and louder as the hot air rises. At the last minute, a young man offers me the sky. "Sit on this platform, you can join the party once we're in the clouds." I don't believe him, really, but I'd love to meet the Beatles so I fool myself, pretending I can handle heights -- I do it in my sleep!

Cut to later. Amidst the mill of revelers, a sober woman dubious of entropy, a lighter and a kid anointing boxes that fall into the cosmos and explode.

Through a glass

Sometimes, in the studio, I forget the performance angels floating just beneath the skin of engineer, producer, session player, writer. But a strange thing happens when I listen back to a freshly minted song, like Wide Open, with a Hammond organ whirling its signature sound from intro through denouement. I remember watching Chris play the part, sideways to the keyboard, nonchalant and focused, both. But when I hear the finished song, I see a band in full regalia, pounding out the sounds, organ player juiced and joyful. My mind flips back and forth between these images of studio and stage, session and performance, focus and abandon.

To say there is a performance artist in every human is to recognize this flip-flop game of the mind we play out on formal and informal stages. Some of us never step beyond the studio -- kitchen, office, gym -- to serve our muse. Others of us leap onto stages at the least provocation, flashing our potential at the wide eyed crowds.

After all is said and sung and done in either sphere, there enters excellence. This is where the artist sheds her mortal skin and for some time bound eternity, reveals her muse's world. This can happen sitting sideways to a keyboard, it can happen under colored lights and amped up airwaves. Its requisite preamble is a passion honed to near perfection over years of unquestionable fondness for the muse.

Miracle road

Christian bikers did not spoil Walter's sound check last night, nor did the dog poop. When you book a rock show in a folkatorium on April 1st, I guess you take your chances. The bikers took their confab elsewhere and the next door neighbor's guard dog lost all interest in my bassist-manager and his freshly odoriferous loafer. Walter, the road warrior, spritzed his sole with holy water Fantastik and proceeded with load in.

Midway through sound check entered the Hendersons and Krista. Peter, having recently stared down countless health demons, looked terrific, though his smile-at-the-ready can often fool you. Ann and Krista settled him in and beamed their own beacons around the shipyard. One by one, the listeners -- weldor, therapist, contractor, teacher, chef, working mom, Marine -- docked at Scott's Folkatorium, dipped into Ann's meatless chile and Dottie-mother-of-Scott's potato salad and plopped down to feast on music.

A successful show feels to me like some kind of miracle. With theater, suspension of disbelief is to be expected, as stage sets, costumes and extra ordinary scenarios draw you in. Music, where imagination reigns, has neither bread nor circuses to prop up the puppet regime. You rely entirely on the integrity of your songs, the quality of your musicianship and the willingness of your audience (and you) to be transported. And inspired.

Last night's show seemed all the more miraculous because my laryngitis-laced voice was still recovering from the flu. It occurs to me at times like this how fragile is the borderline dividing earth and heaven. All the careful song craft and disciplined practice, in the end, brings you to a lover's leap where anything, from bikers' alleluias to canine skank to audience malaise might land you on the rocks below, hugging your broken bones.

As we tore down the set, Doris showed me some of her filigreed poems and one by Daniel, her son, as husband Kevin looked on and spoke of his sculpting muse. An artist family, honoring my art. The road to miracle is paved, it seems, with delicate invention.