the king zucchini

Q: What’d you do this afternoon?
A: I ate a salad and a sandwich and read while listening to Suede on the stereo.

A Raga For Every Weather

I may have given thought to ragas, the main musical format of classical Indian music, more than most folks who don’t hail from the sub-continent, but I wouldn’t call myself an expert. Yes, I did have a phase of buying every Ravi Shankar album I could find. And yes, I did at one point own a sitar (even learned how to string it). But that’s not why I bring up ragas.

I bring them up because some of them roughly correspond to the time of day. Think of it, soundtracks for your morning. Or your afternoon. Or evening. For me, it might be Mogwai. Except Mogwai really only works if you find yourself on a rainy day, with the occasional sun ray slashing through the clouds. We all have music we put on, depending on the weather, or whether we’re going out, but do we have music we play for a specific time of day?

It’s afternoon as I write this, and so I found an afternoon raga to put on: Bhimpalasi. This also happens to be my favorite raga, mainly because of the title. It’s bhimpin’. If it’s afternoon where you are, use Spotify or some other internet device to listen to it.

It starts out meditative. Most ragas do. Ravi runs through the ascending notes, then the descending notes. This is how he’s going to climb up and down through the song, for roughly the next ten minutes. The music is bright, the beat a steady pace. Not too fast, but not slow. Perfect for the afternoon, which is when you really want to hit your groove. The steady climb after lunch to the quitting hours. This mood and musical attitude could easily stretch itself out another hour or two, and I wouldn’t mind. Buddha box style.

The Guardian put out few podcasts last year (in the Guardian Culture Podcast) that tried something similar. There was one that was designed to be listened to while searching for Christmas presents, another designed to be heard first thing in the morning with a cup of coffee, another should be listened to at 5:30pm while shopping at the grocery store. I haven’t tried these yet, mainly because I haven’t thought of it. If you do, let me know what you think. Because even if we don’t listen to things designed to be heard at a specific time, we rarely listen to nothing.

Gripes About Tennis Grips? Not Here.

I started playing tennis again. Since it’d been a while, around fifteen years, since my last lesson, I took a refresher course. Turns out, they have a new-fangled way of holding a tennis racquet these days.

When I first learned how to swing a racket, the continental grip was all the rage. Think about it like this: a tennis racket handle is a rectangle with the corners taken off, so if you look at it from the bottom it looks like an octagon. If you hold the racket in front of you (so the frame is all you see, not the strings) the continental grip would the right bevel run right into the crook of your thumb. It’s like holding an axe.

Well, I was told people no longer did that. Now, everyone learns the semi-western grip, which has the racket twisted 90 degrees in your hand. This makes it easier to hit topspin, to play back on the baseline and drive the ball over the net.

At first I was annoyed. Then, I realized this is kind of awesome. This means that tennis is evolving. It’s a changing sport, with fads and techniques that work, but are far from finished. Which means it won’t become the checkers of racquet sports. And may mean that my great-great-great-great grandchildren will think it’s cool I played tennis, and not quaint.

Stargazin’

This past summer, out in the wilderness of Wisconsin, I made a sort of confusing discovery. There were a dozen of us at a bonfire, all college educated to some degree. It was a perfect night, and the stars were out, Milky Way dripping its way across the sky.

But when we put our heads together, we could only identify three constellations between us: Cassiopeia, the Big Dipper, and the Little Dipper. That’s it. If we were lost at sea in the Age of Discovery, we’d have no idea how to get home. That’s a lame way to say we couldn’t navigate by the stars, but you know what I’m talking about.

The next day I swore to correct this, and went into three book shops to find a collection of star maps. I know, I know, there’s an app for that. Even the bookstore people pointed it out. Well, I don’t want an app, I want knowledge.

A few bookstores later, I found it. The National Audubon Society Field Guide to the Night Sky. Armed with this book, and a hopefully a few clear nights to come, I will be reporting on my discoveries.

Watch this space.*


*no puns are ever intended, unless I find them clever after you bring them up to me.

What’s in a name?

I’m a lifelong Packer fan (first time caller, long time listener, God Bless the Packers), but I’ve decided that I really like this name for a football team: Giants. New York Giants. It’s like being called the Denver Mountains. And why not take your name from the impressive, awe-inspiring Manhattan skyline? I think flying into New York and seeing the skyscrapers packed together for the first time is the best preparation we have for when we finally visit the giants of Jack’s bean stalk.  

The Electronic Reader

I had avoided digital readers. I was righteously Luddite, a pure romantic about books. Afraid I’d lose the sacred relationship between getting lost in the pages and digital ink. Like an old testament prophet faced with new testament knowledge.

Than I read a book on a digital reader. Phenomenal. So easy to get lost in the story, the experience. With one problem.

How the hell do you hold it? It’s so little, and then when I hold it, I went to grab it where the page flip buttons are, so I’m accidentally advancing and retreating through the book. Really, that only happened a few times, but it was  a concern.

Then there was the weight. So light, so easy to hold. It made the book feel ephemeral. No longer will the big hardcovers bully the thin paperbacks. Everything is equal on a digital reader. It’s like the death and taxes of literature.

Maybe.

N: Hospitals are like starships.
All the beeping and warnings, subtle klaxons and expensive equipment. But it’d have to be a discount starship, because the clientele look like the same people I see at Walmart.

Natural Disasters?

I grew up in the suburbs, a bubble, protected from most of the world’s calamities. But I still collected guides that would come in good use if the world collapsed: star maps, nature manuals, and National Audubon Society field guides. Essentially, owners manuals for planet Earth.

There’s something comforting about that. In the same way the book on plate tectonics and the supercontinent cycle was: things are supposed to move and change. And while we can’t do much about it, we don’t have to fear it. We can even track it. For example, I recently learned that Orion (an easily identifiable constellation), moves from east to west over the course of a the winter months. Every year. In the same arc. For tens of thousands of years, or so.

So much more comforting than watching the rotating tenants of the local strip mall.

N: A list of places you may have heard my jokes before.

1. In my dorm room.
2. At the cafeteria.
3. In the laundromat I visited twice on Craven Terrace.
4. The one open-mic I did in Chicago.
5. Stuck in the car with me during rush hour.
6. At a random party.
7. On the basketball court.
8. Hanging out at a BBQ.

Subways: Violent Underground Beasts

They’re subterranean beasts of burden that carry us from one hole we’ve dug to another. To ride one is what it must have felt like for Paul Atreides to ride the sandworm, although few on the J train might think of it like that. Ok, it’s not really like riding a sandworm. But if we were on Dune, would the ground rumble and shake like a subway platform every time a sandworm passed beneath?

Did they fear waking up some subterranean terror when they dug the underground tunnels in London? If you google it, you’ll find underground rail systems are fertile ground for the supernatural. Websites dedicated to listing the ghosts, weird creatures, spooks of all sorts are a dime a dozen. My favorite, though, is what I’ve read about “Quartermass and the Pit,” which involves the BBC’s first sci-fi and it’s take on an ancient Martian mind control machine uncovered during the war in a disused underground station. I have yet to see it, and if anyone wants to watch it, let me know.

But the beasts that brought us here, the subway train, has also tamed the underground for us. For most of human history, below the dirt has been the dominion of devils, the place no one wants to end up: Hell. Now it’s a convenient way to avoid traffic topside. And thanks to the stylized maps that go along with it, it’s an idealized parallel world. Major cities line up their bones on straight lines, points of interest connected by colored tangents and labeled with type chosen for clarity.

I was introduced to the hearts of London, Paris and New York this way. Local leviathans that tour you around and stop running around midnight. Not a bad way to go, all the violent shaking aside.

N: Fear is bombing down a dark lane in a strange country, where you’re in the backseat, don’t speak the language, and can’t get the attention of the man behind the wheel.

Q: What do you like to read about?

A: Other people’s epiphanies.

Catching Up

On Wednesday I ran into a man who lost his sight. I’d met him once before, when he could still see fairly well. He didn’t explain what was happening then, but now he told me the whole story.

The doctors couldn’t explain it, just declared it inevitable. They all said the same thing, even though he asked for and received multiple opinions. He clicked his tongue, and silently walked home.

What do you do, when you lose your sight? They gave him pamphlets and books to read, but he took them as an affront. Like putting a clock in a man’s hands and telling him when it runs out, so will his time on this earth.

What do you keep? What do you forget? He asked himself this while he waited for the bus. Staring off into the middle distance, which is soon to become his existence. Eyes open without seeing. So in the ark of his mind, he decided to store colors. He wanted to remember vibrancy.

He went primary. If he could remember those, he could cover off on the in-betweens. Also, he was having trouble remembering green. He’d stare at a verdant plant in full sunlight, close his eyes, two minutes later it was gone.

Like a digital camera, he worked to fill his memory with images. He questioned photographers on their craft, arriving at the conclusion that it’s all about light. Sunlight. That was when we first met. I was the one who showed him how to use a light meter.

But the strength of light wasn’t exactly what he was after. He carried around a small white square in his wallet. A white balance. As the vignette of blindness began to creep in on his vision, he’d find a spot in the afternoon sun to sit and gather the gold off the square.

The doctors were right, it was inevitable. Like the emptiness of space between stars, the darkness expanded, pushing the vibrancies he’d stored away further and further apart. The white card faded in front of his eyes.

He had already read all the pamphlets and books the doctors gave him. It felt like years ago. He’d learned to use a walking stick. He’d learned to keep track of the sums of money in his wallet, arranged his apartment to appeal to his current life. He’d prepped for everything they told him.

But it wasn’t enough, he told me. He felt like an astronaut, stepping out of the capsule into space. Interstellar space. Even in the city he grew up in, the expanses between buildings felt huge. The yawning gaps between crosswalks. The prairies of parking lots. The endless stairs.

After a while, things took shape. They began to correspond to the vibrant colors in his head, separated by the negative space he never realized was there. A universe, all his own, placed on top of the old one. What was it like, to be the sole astronomer? He smiled and clicked his tongue, eyes staring purposefully into the middle distance.

“It’s brilliant.”

Fauna

The other day I spotted an emerald green parakeet chilling in my plum tree. Brilliantly vibrant against the purple and light blue sky. Must be someone’s pet, although the only lost pet signs I’ve seen on telephone poles are for cats.

How do you catch a parakeet?

Maybe you don’t. Maybe it’s earned the freedom to sit a dozen feet off the ground in a plum tree, with the local grey finches a few branches away, curiously eyeing this visitor to their neighborhood.

I hope it makes a new life for itself in Mexico.