Tag: music

Things of Little Importance

Posted on by Shelly Strebel in For Real Though, Humor, Lampoon
Read Time: 02:06

Imagine, if you can, a time before apps that identify music instantly; go back and remember, if you can, a time before radio stations needed websites, before algorithms reiterated music you already definitely like. If you can’t imagine such far-away times, you can Google them.

During the wild, grungy and flannel-filled years known as the 90s, I came across one of these idiosyncratic pieces of music you love so suddenly and incredibly that you remember exactly where you were the first time you heard it. 

I was in college in San Francisco, reading philosophy in a computer lab. The song passed on through the radio without my knowing its name. And it didn’t have lyrics, because it was a classical song. I should have acted resourcefully and written down the timestamp and just called the radio station, but as I mentioned, I was in college, and I was studying philosophy.

Back then, we had Netscape, but that was only a browser; it wasn’t a Google. No YouTube. No Shazam. No Spotify. (Imagine!) I couldn’t figure out the song, its name, its composer. All I knew was that there was a clarinet and a piano. And I loved that clarinet.

During quiet or elapsed moments while drinking water or waiting in the car, wonder about the clarinet would sneak up on me, and then I would wonder about me still wondering about the clarinet. 

For years this went on. Friends would ask me about (what happened to) the nice guy I’d been seeing, and I’d wonder about the clarinet. I’d be in the grocery store figuring which garbage bags were cheapest, pondering the stupidity of people buying garbage bags to line garbage cans at all, and deciding that we should all just line our garbage cans with dollar bills instead. And then I’d wonder about the clarinet.

Like I said, this went on.

Six, maybe seven years later, when San Francisco still had a classical radio station (and people were still riding around in wicker carriages drawn by horses, obvs), the radio is on, and there are the opening notes of the Prelude. I’m uncertain for a few measures, but then yes. There is the piano! The clarinet! And this is when I come to know Gerald Finzi’s “5 Bagatelles for Clarinet & Piano.” 

The very definition of bagatelle is ‘a thing of little importance.’ It’s a trifle, a trinket, something purely decorative, like a bauble or knickknack. Like the way we treat wonder and remembering and old things in a world apparently very busy with its progress, its purpose, its diet.

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Every Good Boy Does Fine

Posted on by Shelly Strebel in For Real Though, Humor, Lampoon
Read Time: 01:12

Before I’d even met him, my idea was to end up in Malibu like it was still the 60s, where music and art and writing and complicated relationships were the things.

Still, he didn’t mention that he was married when I met him.

He couldn’t read tablature, but he was a good enough guitar player that his Laurel Canyon friends would ask him to play at art openings or dinner parties hosted by Vogue people. He played stylized covers. It was fine enough.

He invited me to one of these numbers up on Wilshire, an art opening where he was playing, and there was an open bar. I left with a beautiful art book and a new Moleskine gilded with the gallery’s emblem, though they weren’t necessarily giving them away.

About the fact that I had just stolen beautiful books from an art gallery where he performed, he said, “Bonnie & Clyde.”

Later, he’s telling me about his cheating wife, and each pour of the 2015 Rombauer Merlot is warming a perilously close confidence. Everything he says feels like an admission, but to me, admissions feel like secrets. Admissions talk like they’re related to honesty and truth, but they’re second cousins at best.

He said, “I could love you.”

I said nothing.

He said, “So then, hire me as your assistant when you make it.”

I said, “You can’t even read music. You have to learn to read music.”

And he said, “That’s fine.”

 

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