Art

There is no more unreliable narrator than the one within, I always say. The latest petty concern digging at my mind has to do with my renewed struggles with writing a memoir. And when I say ‘petty’ I am referring to scale. It is not though I haven’t done this before. Or maybe it is. I do not find it easy to reveal myself. So regardless of the writing challenges, the self-revelation challenges are even greater. Lighten up, I say.

Actually, I only say this in retrospect. In bitter truth, things lightened for me today due to causes that are not readily apparent. Who needs apparent? We take good fortune where we can find it. And most of the time it finds us. Or doesn’t.

I have been wringing my hands about devoting insufficient keyboard time to the big rewrite. Things keep getting in the way. And I blame the things. Most recently, a family visit. My brother and nephew are here for a few days. And like all visitors, they take time. But in my present buoyant mood, I find fault with the expression. Time cannot be taken. It can’t be taken by storm. It can’t be taken away.

So on this particular day, the second of my brother’s visit, I took the reins. Yes, there were things to do. My brother is always very helpful around the house. My brother had planned to introduce his son to Philz Coffee, a local manifestation of Western America’s caffeine industry. Which involves, okay, the petty details…a reversion to brewing coffee instead of using steam pressure to drive it through an espresso machine. Honestly, how bored and spoiled can San Franciscans like me get?

Anyway, it was Sunday morning, and the livin’ is easy. Virtually no one on the city’s subway system. And an easy walk to Blue Bottle Coffee. This establishment is located next to San Francisco’s former mint. The latter has long been shuttered. And on any given morning, a remarkable queue stretches out the door of this particular coffee place. Yes, their coffee is very good. But how good can any coffee be?

Naturally, I ordered avocado toast, that internationally trendy repast. Whatever. We sat there taking in our overpriced caffeine and small plates of food. And for a long and very pleasurable moment, one could completely forget that we were sitting opposite the glass tubes of a cold brewing apparatus. And that coffee has supplanted stamping coins and printing paper money as the major industry in this San Francisco neighborhood. A fact that is utterly effete. But only if one thinks about it, which for the moment, I wasn’t.

No, I wanted to have a look at the Walker Evans photography on display at San Francisco’s Museum Of Modern Art. We breezed into the place, and for a moment I was grateful for having signed up as a MOMA member. We kept on breezing, up to the top floor just to have a quick look around. One of the museum guards suggested we check out the sound installations. Well, why not?

The museum’s seventh floor was given over to various rooms with different abstract sounds. Some responded to people in various ways. But one room, one very large room, was pleasantly dedicated to the making of actual music. Videos of players on piano, cello and so on…had been taken simultaneously. Each musician occupied a large video screen. There were nine. All the musicians were in various rooms of an old mansion on the Hudson River. Their situations were different. One very thin man played piano in an empty room. Another played guitar seated on a bed shared with a nude woman, mostly under the sheets and her back turned to us. In another room a young woman played the cello. And on a terrace a group assembled with various instruments. In each scene, they were struggling to pull together a very pleasant musical theme. It would have taken an hour to watch them finish their effort. It didn’t matter. The effort was worth it. There was something utterly pleasing about the whole thing. The essence of communicating through music. Somehow this came through. Meanwhile, I forgot about my writing and everything else. Let’s hear it for art.

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