Christmas Quiz— The Answers

Answers to yesterday’s quiz:

1. Hannukah. Jesus was Jewish.
2. None. I think you know why.
3. None. There can be snow in a Bethlehem winter, but no reindeer.
4. No one. Ain’t no mistletoe where he lived. And they didn’t have office parties back then anyway.
5. No one. Hallmark hadn't been incorporated yet.
6. Huh?
7. None. St. Francis added them into the story over a thousand years later.
8. They didn’t. But they did have pine trees.
9. Get up and go to work. The first recorded reference to Christmas (Christ’s Mass) was in 1038. Easter was the main holiday until the Virgin Mary and Santa Claus came into the picture. (Huh?)
10. Irving Berlin. And he lived in L.A. where it never snowed. 

If you can think of a weirder, wackier holiday pieced together with so many diverse traditions, I’d like to know about it. So as I go hang out with Frosty the Snowman in a San Francisco Winter Wonderland and Deck the Halls with ivy while looking out for Rudolf’s Red Nose flying over a Partridge in a Pear-Tree, this Jewish Unitarian Buddhist practicing pagan rites says, "I Wish You a Merry Christmas."

Christmas Quiz

When my daughter Talia was little, we drove past a front lawn displaying both Santa and his sleigh and Jesus in the manger. With all that honest innocence of children, she asked, “What’s Jesus doing there? What does he have to do with Christmas?!!” 

This little anecdote could be a confession of our failure as parents to take our kids to a Christian church— or a prelude to the Christmas Quiz I just made up. I’m going for the latter. See how you do:

1. What holiday did Jesus celebrate around Christmas-time?

2. In what book of the Bible did Santa Claus appear?

3. How many reindeer brought the Wise men to Bethlehem by sleigh?

4. Who did Joseph kiss under the mistletoe?

5. Historically speaking (and grammatically correct), to whom did the Popes send Christmas cards before the 20^th century?

6. Did the Easter bunny and St. Nick ever meet?

7. What animals surrounding Jesus in the manger are mentioned in the Bible?

8. When did the Israelites decorate their Christmas trees back then?

9. What was a typical Christmas celebration like in the year 1000?

10. What Jewish songwriter wrote “White Christmas?”

 Answers will appear in the next Blog (thus upgrading my reader count). Good luck!

Records of My Life

I know many of you are enduring sleepless nights wondering whether I ever got to cleaning my front room. Well, today I opened that Pandor'a box, beginning with the videos, DVD’s, CD’s and records. Yes, records. (And yes, videotapes.) In my 1,000 plus collection, most are stored in my basement, but 150 or so took up valuable shelf-space that I’ve desparately needed from my overflowing CD collection. (And I predict in a year or so, I’ll have to say to young people, “Yes, CD’s. You actually bought them in a store and put them on a shelf and put them in a player to play. And occasionally read the micro-printed liner notes.")

When records first switched to CD’s, I vowed not to duplicate the ones I had bought. That, of course, changed and over the years, I assumed I had indeed replaced the important recordings I cared about— things like Coltrane’s  A Love Supreme, Duke Ellington’s  Live at Newport, Sonny Rollins Tenor Madness and into an “and so on” that would take up several pages. But going through the records above, I realized that indeed I hadn’t. And looking again through my collection, I felt like the kid in the candy store, re-discovering old gems I had forgotten. Made more amazing by the fact that I tried out my old turntable and discovered it worked just fine. I could actually listen to them! And listen I did while I continued to sort, discard, re-shelf.

Damn, it felt good to hold the old records in my hand! To relish the art work on the cover, to be able to read the print on the back, to remember sometimes where I bought it and who I was at that moment and who that recording helped me become. Indeed, these records in my life are also a record of my life. Without a strong cultural identity to mold and shape me, I realized early on that my American gift (and limitation) was to try to create my own identity from the confluence of my passions and interests. Of course, TV and movies did their part to define some of my dreams and notions, as did my family, my friends, my schools, my time— whatever was in the news or being talked about in the day-to-day conversations. But the act of conscious cultivation of the person I hoped to be came from books and records— and to some extent, still do. With the added attraction of me writing and recording my own.

I was sharing with a friend my frustration with the floating cloudworld of recordings these days, how hard it is for me to find space on my computer for the digital files and how much I missed the concrete object in my hand, be it a record or CD— or book (though still resisting Kindle). By the end, I realized I may indeed have to capitulate and go the i-Phone route. But I'm trying to imagine growing up in this digital world and 50 years from now, going through old digital files and seeing a title on the screen. Ain’t no-way no-how that can compare with the whole gestalt of the trip to the record store, the prized object brought home, read, listened to, shelved and proudly displayed as the next chapter in “the emerging Me.” And then held in the hand again all those years later. I'm grateful for it, am loving listening to them again, am determined not to get rid of them. I just have one nagging question:

“Anyone have an extra attic to store them all in?”

Yo Heave Ho Amen!

I did it again. Went to the Sea Chantey sing-a-long aboard the Balclutha ship on the Hyde St. Pier. People of all ages, sizes and shapes huddled together in a simple low-ceiling room while the song leader enters, sits down, sings a line and the room erupts in a lusty full-bodied response. Those who don’t know it quickly catch on and off we go! Two hours, with breaks for hot cocoa and cider, of song after song begun by whoever has the spirit. (I finally screwed up the courage to do one!). No big egos or efforts to impress, just the pleasure of people singing together with a power that I’ve only found in the African diaspora with it’s call and response traditions. Indeed, I sometimes felt as if I was in a Baptist church in the American South or a candomble ceremony in Brazil, no tambourines or drums, but an earthy beat in every ditty matched by glorious bass tones and whole body singing, witty lyrics, little stories and the longing of sailors to be “homeward bound.” We simply sat and sang the songs the sailors traditionally worked to, but you could feel the heave of the anchor and the pulling up of sail, the chapped and blistered hands, the sweat of your neighbor joined with you on the rope, it all came through.

No performance this, no ticket price, a room of strangers (though obviously regulars) instantly connected, a palpable energy in the shared tones that shook every atom of the body. It was everything that church should be, minus the dogma and theology. Indeed, I’ve always wondered why we need the word God and why all the fuss about a book with blatantly contradictory and often downright weird stories? God is not something to believe in or wonder about or accept on faith or be converted to by somebody else’s story. God is to be experienced in the marrow of the bones, the chambers of the heart, the electrical and chemical explosions in the brain, the rise and fall and bellows of the breath.

Prayer is not asking for something with mere words. It’s in the very act of chanting, poetically praising, singing from the bottom of your toes that God comes out from the hiding place. We’re not primed to find the Holy Spirit in lusty songs praising alcohol and the lovely maidens of Plymouth Town, but there it was.

Stepped out from the warmth of singing bodies to the winter night of a sparkling San Francisco, the lights of Ghiradelli Square, the waters lapping at the shore, the songs echoing in my ear and to quote my friend Chris Cunningham, “it doesn’t get any better than this.”

Forgiving Mr. Salcito

The mercury dropped last night in San Francisco and a rare frost covered the morning ground. And now, the rains have come and all these commonplace happenings take on a mythological significance as Nelson Mandela has crossed to the other side. The rains are both an auspicious sign of life renewed and tears of farewell to a great man. Listening to the radio this morning, I couldn’t help but be struck by the personal stories of journalists who had had the good fortune to meet him, all moved by his humble and personable manner, his humor, wit and gracious bearing, his listening ear, made all the more remarkable by his stature of a man of great inner power, courage and vision. And made yet more remarkable by his stories of 27 years in prison, a prison within a society already imprisoned by hatred, fear, racism, ignorance and brutality.

27 years! I’m still bitter that I didn’t get my promised prize for winning the pie-eating contest in 4^th grade! This man spent almost three decades in jail and emerged loving his enemies, forgiving his tormentors and meeting each day with optimism, hope, gratitude forged from the depths of human suffering. What a story.

It occurred to me that almost everyone else of his stature, those who combined spiritual victory with political struggle for human rights and dignity— from Gandhi to Martin Luther King and so on down through Malcolm X, JFK, Robert Kennedy, Che Guevara— all met an untimely death from an assassin’s bullet. To reach the ripe age of 95, to achieve the unthinkable and become President at an age when most people had packed away their dreams and are content to go golfing, to see some of the fruits of his work ripen, is an extraordinary achievement. And equally to see some rot and spoil, to see some of his own people squander the full measure of freedom and responsibility and stay caught in the tangle of violence that still characterizes some of life in South Africa, must have been cause for another kind of bitterness. And yet he seemed to keep his whole humanity intact. People often lament that they don’t make ‘em like they used to—no new heroes coming down the pike. And yet here he was amongst us, spanning two different centuries and keeping his eye on the prize. As the radio commentators said, “We’re not likely to see a person of this caliber again.”

Or will we? I have a few candidates amongst my students between 3 and 13 years old. If we keep feeding them what they need to grow a true character and a constant vision, who knows what can happen?

As for me, I publicly proclaim that I forgive Mr. Salcito for neglecting to give me that pie-eating prize. I’m over it. No more bitterness, ready to embrace the world with wholehearted love, compassion, empathy and optimism. And I owe it all to Nelson Mandela.

Life in a Square of Cardboard

Yesterday’s 8^th grade jazz history lesson began with me showing a 12-by-12 blank square of cardboard. “This changed my life,” I proclaimed and I believe I had their attention. A little more banter and then I turned it around. It was the album cover (just the front—the back had been torn off) of Joshua Rifkin playing Scott Joplin rags. I told the story of the 1971 Thanksgiving dinner at my college where someone was playing this album. Thoroughly enchanted and intrigued by music unlike any I had ever heard, I went and bought some of Joplin’s piano music. In addition to some F blues I had been fooling around with, my entry into the world of jazz piano began.

From my personal story to Joplin’s story of success, dissolution, fall into obscurity, rise to fame a half-century later with Joshua Rifkin’s album and the movie The Sting. From Joplin’s story to the greater story of the emergence of ragtime and its influence musically (Joseph Lamb, Eubie Blake, “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” Debussy’s “Golliwog’s Cakewalk,” Stravinsky’s “Ragtime” and on to why it wasn’t quite jazz yet (no swing, all notes written and composed without expectation of improvisation, no blues, etc.). From there to the greater story of Queen Victoria’s death two years after Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag” topped the sheet-music sales, the shift in atmosphere as her libertine son Edward helped unleash white culture from its prudish and proper ways. How ragtime was the soundtrack of youthful freedom, folks looking to black culture to learn how to loosen up, get in touch with their hips and learn how to party beyond the upraised pinky holding the teacup.

Back to Joplin’s music, me playing the Maple Leaf Rag on the piano in his style and then loosening it up with a Jelly Roll Morton version that was swinging, with a more percussive touch and some improvisation. And now on to Mr. Ferdinand La Menthe Morton, his life in New Orleans, the Plessy vs. Ferguson case that pre-dated Rosa Parks by some 60 years that ended in the Jim Crow laws, throwing educated Creoles like Jelly Roll together with the black folks from the Mississipi Delta. One group helped the other learn instrumental technique and how to read music, the other shared the soul of the blues and improvisation and now the roots of jazz were fully nourished and prepared to flower into a genius named Louis Armstrong. To be continued next week.

In one 45-minute period, music, history, biography, culture, personal anecdotes, politics, aesthetics, film, architecture (Victorian and Edwardian houses in San Francisco). On one hand, open to critique as TMI for any coherent understanding, on the other, a model lesson of how all things are interconnected. Not only isn’t it enough just to play jazz without knowing its history, but it’s a lost opportunity to show how that history started things in motion that changed and evolved through time to become this present moment. How they continue to affect the way things are, how we think, who we are and what different choices we might make as to who we will become if only we knew. And though a significant part of my jazz history class uses my personal DVD collection and Youtube to help make that history come alive, this class was taught via the ancient art of storytelling, aided by the technology of a piano.

And most importantly, a square of cardboard. 

First-World Problems

Twelve hours in the car yesterday and now preparing my way back to the workaday world. The re-entry began with a lost school planning book, a sketchy printer, six pounds heavier on the bathroom scale, a refrigerator with condiments only until I get to the store. Each one annoying and eliciting inappropriate small oaths and each worthy of the new mantra my daughter introduced me to: “First-World Problem. Get over it.”

Really, in light of famine, tsunamis, war, openly repressive governments, these all are so small and deserve being put in their proper perspective. Don’t get me wrong— all of the above are possible and can (and do) exist in these so-called First-World countries. And I certainly don’t mean this in any arrogant “I’m so glad I’m an American” kind of way. But truth be told, I live in a prosperous country in a privileged position and become accustomed to things that are supposed to work, that are supposed to be fair, that seem to exist to serve my every need and are deserving of my outrage when they fail to please me. From the bus that’s late to the wireless that cuts out in the middle of sending an e-mail to the Xerox machine that’s broken just before my class. First-World Problems that deserve to be cut down to their trivial size.

My sister called from my Mom’s place and it was another bad day for her 92-year old body and mind. This is an All-World Problem, even as she is being given care in a fine facility paid for by insurance. In this, we are united and in these moments, called upon to enlarge our compassion. For no one escapes from the ravages of time, the capriciousness of health, the disappointments of dreams that never found their feet— and if that’s not enough, the battlescarred fields of love and marriage. We’re all in it up to our necks—might as well slog through it together. And commiserating over broken printers just ain’t enough to … Dang! My wireless cut out!