2020-04-21
Buy Hyacinths
If, of thy mortal goods, thou art bereft,
And from thy slender store two loaves
alone to thee are left,
Sell one & from the dole,
Buy hyacinths to feed the soul.
– Muslihuddin Sadi, 13th Century Persian Poet
Strung Up
When I was a child, my parents would put me to sleep by playing The Woods So Wild, a suite of Renaissance lute suites performed by the great Julian Bream:
Ever since, I’ve found the sound of classical lute and guitar exceedingly relaxing. Enough so that I even purchased a nylon-stringed guitar myself some years back, and have spent time practicing at least semi-regularly since. While it’s far below the trumpet, and really even below the piano and upright bass and possibly even drums, in terms of my instrumental competence, I can still play a mean “Packington’s Pound” (track 3 above), which is pretty much all I need.
Anyway, also throughout my childhood, I spent a bunch of time on various Pacific islands. My father, a pulmonologist at Stanford, sub-specializes in ocean medicine – if you get the bends in the Pacific, there’s a decent chance you get med-evaced to him. So, during summers, he would head to islands on work trips, to meet local physicians and dive operators and the like, and I got to tag along. (Rough, I know). As a result, I also picked up an early love of slack key guitar, a style of open-tuned, finger-picked playing invented in Hawaii after the military left a huge number of guitars on the islands after WWII, and young-musicians there self-taught without knowledge of traditional tuning and technique.
For example, I’ve listened the grooves off of Keola Beamer’s Mauna Kea (White Mountain Journal) ever since it was released, and I was thrilled to see it used, a decade later, as the soundtrack for Alexander Payne’s wonderful The Descendants:
So, in the midst of this pandemic, and particularly in need of musical soothing, I was particularly excited to discover Yasmin Williams, an unorthodox finger-style lap guitarist. On her latest album, Unwind, she also uses tap shoes, a cello bow, and whatever else she can think of to make music that sounds both contemporary and timeless:
Unwind is great, as are the other albums above in this post. Especially in these anxious times, I give all of them two very enthusiastic thumbs up.
2020-04-20
I went to Hogwarts for seven years, and now I can’t get a job.
Inaudible
For the first time in a while, I have unused Audible credits, and a pile of unplayed episodes from even my favorite podcasts. Turns out, the vast majority of my prior listening time was either commute- or shopping-related, and I’ve jettisoned both of those almost entirely from my quarantine life.
Indeed, as my daily rhythm has shifted during this pandemic, I’ve dropped a ton of habits and technologies that were otherwise just defaults. If nothing else, it’s been a good chance to see which ones I actually miss in their absence – and miss enough that I’m willing to proactively find ways to add back in.
As I’m still using Streaks to track a more limited daily habit rotation, and still sticking to a wildly pared down project / to-do list, those constraints, plus rebuilding my schedule from scratch, are a pretty excellent way to hone in more generally on what matters to me in everyday life.
2020-04-19
2020-04-17
Some of the most thoughtful Tweets these days are coming from… Steak-umms?
2020-04-16
Need some zen? Try six hours of sheep grazing.
Somnambulate
Out of an abundance of caution, Jess and I have been staying almost entirely indoors, aside from our weekly-ish trips to the grocery store and our building’s laundry room.
But as recent research seems to imply that longer-distance airborne transmission is unlikely, and as we had started to go a little stir-crazy with apartment fever, last night we strapped on masks, and braved a long walk through Central Park.
The paths were almost entirely deserted. Which, on top of our general anxiety these days, gave everything a subtle undercurrent of dread.
Still, as we looped around the Reservoir, I was increasingly glad to be out, reminded of how beautiful NYC is.
Even if, at every turn, we were confronted by small reminders that these aren’t normal times.
Or, at least, not normal times for humans. The rats and squirrels and ducks and racoons were out en masse. And the flora had begun to awaken for spring, flowers sprouting and trees budding all around us.
At the top of the reservoir, we saw lights that weren’t normally there, and realized it was the (controversial, evangelical-run) COVID-19 field hospital.
It was still a ways off in the distance, but we were doubly glad to be wearing masks nonetheless.
So, again, a slightly strange trip. But, on balance, a comforting one. Even in difficult times, New York keeps on being New York. We’ll be alright.
