"At least they didn't shoot out the window this time"*

Two in the morning, we woke up to our downstairs neighbors giggling in the hallway while they tried to fit key to door and stumble into their flat. I heard the clink clink of vodka glasses and then the loudest fellow, in a rush of enthusiasm, flung himself onto his balcony and started to bellow. No one answered, and after a few more romantically sobbing rants, he came inside, his friends settled him down and the party turned up its music as loud as it could go. Ukrainian turbo pop, meet the rest of the world. Do check out the purple pants suit in the sample below:



Glassy-eyed and on edge from an overdose of synthesized flute music set to an oompa beat, I woke at six and steeled myself for our neighborly construction workers to start their day. No sound came. An hour later, still no creak creak crashes. We opened the windows, checked again for their tell-tale beany hats and realized the date of today.

Ukrainian Pascha has just begun. The construction workers (almost all from the Ukraine) are on holiday. So are our neighbors. We figure we’re in for a weekend of late night celebrating, but if it means we can sleep late for three days, that’s one trade off I’m willing to take.

* Quote from Will, on the increasing regard for safety our neighbors display as they grow older.

An Equal Music

The smell of rosin on a bow, the satisfaction of slow scales played with a partner, the sleepy somnolence of working a piece through in your head just before sleep - I miss these things. I forget them too. Viktor Seth lent them back to me this week, in his novel An Equal Music.

I’ve read An Equal Music before, quickly. This read, with bed rest time to spin through, I read it page by page, at half tempo. It was delicious. Seth recreates the world of a violinist in a string quartet, bringing in the human element of chamber music, and, more bravely, the music. Music is frustratingly difficult to write about - what seems glorious to experience becomes trite on a page, or simply does not show up. But Seth does it well, mixing chewably real details with tone poem text to help you hear the music.

Or almost. After the first few pages, when he really started to dig into the sound, I had to stop reading and start looking up pieces so I could hear them too. Some of them I've played and know well, like Mozart’s Sonata in E Major, and the Prelude to Bach’s Partita for Violin No. 3. Others I could only find as snippets on iTunes and Amazon. A snippet wasn't enough, but I didn’t want to download entire albums (classical music used CDs have a higher sound quality and are cheaper than buying digital). After a day of searching the web for individual pieces, I thought of YouTube.

Not all the music mentioned is there, but about half of it is, and I made up a list for anyone who needs to hear, straight away, some of the music in the book before they can locate a CD. And as an extra bonus, the old recordings of players like Nathan Milstein, Jacqueline du Pré and Glen Gould are remarkable in their own right, not just as introductions to the music in the book.

Ralph Vaughn Williams: "The Lark Ascending" Janine Jansen

Mozart: Sonata for Piano and Violin in E minor, K. 304, Hilary Hahn

J.S. Bach: The Art of the Fugue, Contrapunctus 1, recent Glen Gould and younger Glen Gould, slightly out of tune but also beautiful.
Partita for Violin Solo No. 3 in E BWV 1006, Preludio, Nathan Milstein

Beethoven Piano Trio in C Minor, op. 1. no. 3, Allegro Con Brio, Isaac Stern, Eugene Istomin, piano, and Leonard Rose on cello.

Franz Schubert: Piano Quintet in A, "The Trout"
For a complete recording, follow the movements through this link. To see one of the most famous concerts of the Trout, featuring Itzhak Perlman, Daniel Barenboim, Jacqueline Du Pré, Zubin Mehta and Pinchas Zukerman, try these excerpts: cello snippets; 3rd movement; 4th movement; documentary of concert.

Geographically challenged

Google "Europe country" tonight and the first link you’ll see points to an inspiring, all-American, YouTube clip.

The clip, if you don't follow the link, is to the Kellie Pickler video so popular Prague taxi drivers are talking about it. The same guys who quizzed me last week about the contest between Obama and Clinton are now asking, "Is it possibly true about this girl? This 'Europe is a country' girl? Are Americans this dumb?"

Such a good question. My short answer, when I quit blushing and start thinking about it, is no. First, and I always mention this first when responding to generalizations, because my European friends (and taxi drivers) perhaps forget this or have a hard time grasping it without having experienced it themselves: the U.S. is a giant country. There are lots and lots of people there, 301 million and counting. Making a generalization about a country that big based on one person is about as silly as getting a continent confused with a country. After all, the kid on the show knew the answer, and who talks about him? Her audience, both on the set and across the U.S., was just as ready to laugh at Kellie as the world now seems to be. I don’t buy the sudden worry that we have a national deficit in gray matter.

And besides, not knowing geography isn’t about stupidity, but about ignorance and lack of experience. It's easy for me to remember the capitals of Europe and untangle the Balkans on a map - I have the stamps in my passport to remind me. Most Americans won’t ever leave the U.S. even once*; in a country the size of the Czech Republic (the size of South Carolina), people cross the border on a Saturday morning to do a little grocery shopping. Europeans have more time, too, to take vacations and actually travel. Four weeks of vacation a year and at least 8 public holidays gives people time to see the grandparents and venture beyond their usual haunts. Some of my friends in the States get 10 days off, total. Ten days is not a lot of time to see the world.

So, while I do admit to feeling intense chagrin when I saw the clip last weekend, and I must also admit to spending an hour (or two) on the internet, brushing up on Middle Eastern and African countries, if you were to ask me today about Americans and geography - I would confess to "Not stupid - but challenged, and here's why." Then I might ask you to reel off the countries bordering the UAE, and for bonus points, please list the 7 emirates themselves.

*From 1996 to 2006, the U.S. government issued 85 million passports. Passports for adults expire in a ten year period, passports for kids in five years, so I assume that up until 2006, less than 30% of the population had a passport.