Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon

It’s time to move on, methinks. I’ve been doing this blog in one form or another for nearly seven years. It is possible, of course, that I’ll resume blogging at some point in the future, but for now it’s time to try other pastures.

The original appeal to me in blogging was the opportunity to engage in the pleasures of purposefully purposeless writing–to string together and polish up sentences for the sheer enjoyment of doing it. Putting the results out there in public brought a measure of discipline to the proceedings: it made me want to write as well as I could do. I’ll still engage in the playful stringing of words together, but it will be in other sorts of venues.

I don’t much like Twitter (@sayonaraamerika), since their 140 character limit doesn’t allow for much in the way of creative composition. But I’ll still use that account to announce new publications, etc., if you want to keep track of what I’m up to. I’ll also still maintain my homepage (www.bourdaghs.com).

I’ll keep the existing blog contents on-line for a few more weeks. Then, at some mysterious moment early in 2011, they will disappear from the Internet. My sincere thanks to all who have stopped by to read this over the years. I hope our paths cross again in other realms.

As for us, aside from shoveling snow and watching our daughter play Debussy beautifully in a piano recital on Sunday, we spent a good part of our weekend giggling over these television commercials for Panda cheese.

Last night we attend my daughter’s high school winter concert here in Chicago. She sings in the choir, but we also enjoyed sets by the school orchestra, chamber ensemble, band and jazz ensemble. The band played a very striking piece I’d never heard before: “Whirlwind,” composed by Jodie Blackshaw. The worktakes a number of important elements from twentieth-century avant-garde classical styles (aleatory passages, nonconventional instruments, offbeat instructions to the players) and briiliantly arranges them into a form that is fully accessible to an amateur youth orchestra. The kids seemed to enjoy playing it last night.

I snooped around today a bit and came up with this website from the publishers of the score. The site informs us that Blackshaw won the Frank Ticheli Composition Contest with it. On YouTube, I came up with video of a performance by the Singapore American School Sixth Grade Band. It’s just cool to see an ambitious composition like this enter the musical repertoire of high school bands.

I’ve just stumbled across this very nice video clip introducing the Suicide Commandos, the godfathers of the Twin Cities musical scene that produced the Replacements, Husker Du (add an umlaut or two there), Soul Asylum, Trip Shakespeare, Golden Smog, the Jayhawks, and eight dozen other great bands you’ve never heard of. The clip combines archival footage with interviews and concert footage from the reunion gig they did earlier this year as part of a tribute to the late Bruce Allen, guitarist for the Suburbs (another fabulous band from the scene).

In 1977-8 (which is to say, my junior year in high school), the Commandos defined cool in Minnesota. I only got to see them play a couple of times in their heyday, because I was too young to get into the Longhorn and the other clubs around town, but I wore out my copies of their records. They really laid down the cultural pattern that other Twin Cities bands would follow: they insisted on fun, on an ethical rejection of pretension (no mohawks or safety pins allowed!), and on an appreciation of the revolutionary potential of pop. They even covered the Monkees’ “She,” except the line “why am I missing her/I should be kissing her” morphed into a commentary on the Nixon/Ford national security bureaucracy: “why am I Schlesinger/I should be Kissinger.”

“Complicated Fun,” the last song the band released (and later a Target TV commercial jingle), is one of the great unknown rock anthems of our time.

One of the things on my to-do list this past week was to compose a blurb for a forthcoming book on modern Japanese literature. I get asked to do this once or twice a year; often it is for a title that I’ve already reviewed as an external referee, meaning that I’m already quite familiar with the work. I’ve even had a publisher approach me once for permission to use a blurb they had composed by patching together key phrases from my referee’s report. In case you were wondering, we don’t get paid for supplying blurbs, though the publisher usually sends us a free copy of the book once it appears.

There’s an art to writing a good blurb. If you’re too effusive, you lose credibility and might even offend the potential reader you are trying to charm. I remember many years ago reading a blurb on a study of Japanese literature that asserted ‘there is no comparable study in any language.’ The arrogance of this pissed me off: had the reviewer really read all the books on Japanese literature published in Polish, for example, or Swahili? Through no fault of the book’s author, I acquired an unfavorable gut feeling toward the work.

Another time, I was thinking about buying one of Thomas Pynchon’s novels. When I picked up the thick paperback at a bookstore, a blurb on the cover proclaimed it “a 747 of a novel.” I immediately put the book back down and left the store. I hate 747′s. Why would I want to read something that would remind me of stale air, crying babies, bad food, smelly bathrooms, and crabby flight attendants?

In other words, it’s important to find the appropriate tone. Sometimes, I think I get it right — like here, for example, or here and here. The one I submitted this past week was only so-so, I’m afraid.

What’s the worst experience you’ve had with a blurb–either writing or reading it? Or, conversely, has a blurb ever single-handedly sold you on a book? I’d love to hear your stories on this: comments, please.

Last night we headed down to the Museum of Contemporary Art for a concert by Stew and The Negro Problem. Stew is best known for his recent Broadway musical, “Passing Strange,” but I’ve been a fan for more than a decade, ever since I bought a copy of the album Joys and Concerns (1999) after reading a rave review in the L.A. Weekly. I’ve followed his career closely since then, but this was the first time I’d seen him and his collaborator Heidi Rodewald perform live.

It was a terrific, witty show — but also unexpectedly somber. The light and lush tone that characterizes Stew’s studio recordings gave way in concert to a darker, jazzier sound. The show opened with “Bleed,” with Stew fingering a plastic toy horn that he would pick up again from time to time throughout the evening. This was followed by a heavily reworked version of “Re-Hab.” The set included a few new songs — “Speed,” “Curse,” and one about young upscale Brooklyn mothers and their aggressive stroller-pushing habits. They also played many older songs, including “Gary Come Home” (the tune Stew wrote for an episode of SpongeBob SquarePants, albeit with a few choice new lyrics), “Bong Song,” “Black Men Ski,” “Ken” (a comic take on the sexual preferences of Barbie’s male companion: “My name’s Ken/and I like men”) and “Kingdom of Drink.” Stew apologized for performing just one number from “Passing Strange,” (“We Just Had Sex”), promising he would do more songs from that show on his next visit to town. He hinted about ongoing negotiations from an upcoming residency here in Chicago.

The main set closed with “Peter Jennings” in a jazzed-up epic version that somehow morphed midway through into a tribute to John Coltrane. For the encore, they did a marvelous version of “The Naked Dutch Painter,” one of Stew’s best compositions. All through the evening, Stew held up his legendary stage patter–very funny riffs on how cold it is in Chicago, on how great it was to having washing machines in their backstage dressing room, on what it was like to be the sole black man at an upscale resort in Aspen.

Stew was in fine voice all night, repeatedly hitting even very high falsetto notes. He showed off some slick guitar work in the last few numbers, as well. Earlier in the evening, he’d done what he later joked was his museum performance piece: playing his guitar by setting it upright in its stand and throwing coins against the strings.

After the show Stew and Heidi came out into the lobby to mingle with the audience. We were able to chat briefly with them. I got to thank them for the special Valentine’s Day song they recorded for my wife in 2006 (Stew offered to make personalized songs as special Valentine’s Day gifts that year, and I took him up on it: by far the best VD gift I’ve ever managed to come up with). Heidi said that they’d met a few of the other Valentine’s Day couples from that year during the current tour.

A new album is due early next year, and they continue to develop new theatrical projects. I’ve written here before that I think Stew is a living national treasure. It was a pleasure to find him that he is also approachable and down-to-earth in person.

If like me you grew up a Beatlemaniac, the release this month of Come and Get It: The Best of Apple Records, a compilation of recordings by the other artists signed to the Beatles’ indie label Apple is a revelation. We finally get to hear music we’ve been reading about for decades—Jackie Lomax’s “Sour Milk Sea” (1968), written and produced by George Harrison, for example, or the original studio version of Billy Preston’s “That’s The Way God Planned It” (1969), a song we know from the scintillating live performance at The Concert for Bangladesh.

Some of the material is very familiar (Badfinger’s hits, for example, or James’ Taylor’s debut single, “Carolina on My Mind”), but much of it is new to my ears: Trash, Brute Force, Lon & Derrek van Eaton, Doris Troy, etc. And it all starts off with Mary Hopkins’ beloved Klezmer-meets-The-Band smash hit from 1968, “Those Were the Days.”

I have about 20,000 songs stored on my I-Pod. A few months ago, I became haunted by the bizarre notion that I should listen to them all at least once: some vague idea about the ethics of ownership, about taking responsibility for music that I’d decided to hoard. I started going out of my way to listen to tracks with a 0 play count, proceeding alphabetically by artist name.

I’d gotten up to K with that method. But I was faltering, because this procedure required me to devote, for example, several days to listening solely to the Beatles or Blur. I’d get bored listening over and over to the same artist. Wasn’t there a better way?

I finally figured it out this past Monday: I’ve created a “Smart Playlist” consisting of all the songs that have zero plays (excluding those from the genres of classical and podcast) and then use the “shuffle songs” setting when I play it. The I-Pod now randomly plays songs from the list and, because I used the “live update” setting, it eliminates them from the collection once they been played. I started out with about 3500 songs in the playlist; that’s down to 3300 at this point.

You can’t imagine how pleased I am with myself over this technological breakthrough. I’m exploring the nether regions of my music collection, skipping around from artist to artist so rapidly that I never find any particular style tedious.

While typing in this entry, I’ve listened too:

“All Night Stand,” The Kinks (bootleg unreleased demo)
「慕情」, Southern All Stars
“Love’s Gonna Walk Out on Me,” Toots and the Maytals
“COLORS,” Utada Hikaru

Four down, 3296 to go…. I’m so excited about this.

It’s kinda sad, really.

It’s been a jumbled week, with little time for arranging thoughts into anything so orderly as sentences.

A week ago Thursday, I made my first visit of the season to Symphony Center to see Jaap van Zweden lead the local favorites in a very fine program of Mahler, Shostakovich, and John Luther Adams. Both Andrew Patner of the Sun-Times and and John von Rhein of the Tribune loved the Shostakovich but had reservations about the Adams and the Mahler, but I heard it the other way around. My usual bad taste, of course.

Adams’ “Dark Waves” was a hypnotic piece, a single sustained wave of sound that develops details of texture and dynamics across its twelve minutes. Adams was in the house and took a bow with the orchestra after the piece. The Mahler consisted of four songs from his “Des Knaben Wunderhorn,” in which the composer wears his charming hat, as opposed to his bombastic helmet (think, for example, of the last movement from his Fourth Symphony). Measha Brueggergosman was the guest vocalist, and she performed with grace and wit. Patner and von Rhein complained about her vocal chops, but my only fear was that we might all be blinded: she wore a shiny all-platinum dress and I thought somebody might take a flash picture. The program closed with Shostakovich’s magnificent (and seldom played) Symphony No. 8 in C minor. The local newspaper critics both fall over themselves in their rush to praise the performance, but I thought the long first movement was rather perfunctory. It did come to life in the latter half, though, with particularly brilliant performances from the woodwinds.

I’ll be back to see the Chicago Symphony again in early December, when Pierre Boulez conducts Janáček and Schoenberg: more glorious twentieth-century classical. I can’t wait.

In the meanwhile, out there in the world there appears to have been an election of some sort. Why anyone would hand the keys back to the same people who crashed the car two years ago is a mystery to me, but then again democracy always is a little bit mysterious.

David Byrne, in the meanwhile, is marrying folks in NYC. Stew is out on the road, playing gigs (he’ll be here in Chicago at the Museum of Contemporary Art next week). And Dave Davies makes it painfully clear that the Kinks won’t be reuniting anytime soon.

Older brother Ray, on the other hand, continues touring in Europe. Let me leave you with some fan video from Sunday night in Paris and Monday night in Amsterdam. Here’s hoping next week is a quiet one, for you and me both.

We held the memorial service for my father yesterday afternoon in St. Paul at Dayton Ave. Presbyterian Church. That is the church my family attended when I was young. It was a beautiful autumn afternoon in Minnesota, and the whole service was touching and celebratory. Many old friends and family attended (more than we expected: we ran out of bulletins), and they told stories about the good my father did in his life. I was glad, in particular, that my children could learn about the work my dad did on behalf of the poor, the afflicted, the ostracized.

It’s a strange boast, perhaps, but I always liked that fact that my father was on a first-name basis with every panhandler in St. Paul and Minneapolis. He knew them not as cases (he was a social worker), but as human beings. He genuinely liked them and, perhaps even more remarkably, they liked him.

Here is what I said during yesterday’s service:

My dad always told a story about when he was a student at the University of Wisconsin at River Falls when I was born in 1961. He had a keen interest in history, and his professors thought he had real potential to become a historian. One of them even offered to get him into graduate school with a full scholarship. But with a wife and a child, Dad felt he needed to go into something that was more likely to provide a stable income to support his family. He chose to major in sociology and launched into a career as a social worker that was devoted to helping people who needed a hand: ex-convicts, poor people, veterans dealing with post-traumatic stress. It was a life spent serving others.

He never forgot that he was a frustrated history professor, though. He always enjoyed reading history. And as for me, from about the age of five, when we were driving somewhere or out for a walk, I’d find myself being drilled with questions about history: could I name the presidents in order? Who was the first governor of Minnesota? Which American secretary of state bought Alaska from Russia? So I figured out from a pretty young age that I was supposed to grow up and become a history professor.

The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree: I’m now a professor of Japanese literature and culture, and if you read my work you’ll see that I’m really a historian in disguise. This past summer, I finished writing a history of popular music in Japan, and I was planning to surprise my dad next year when the book is published, because it is dedicated to him. My dad is the one who opened my ears to the pleasures of listening to strange music. When I was a child, he brought home LPs for us to listen to that sounded nothing like the music they played on KDWB or WDGY. He brought home copies of Alan Lomax’s field recordings from the American south, the strange blues music of Taj Mahal, the folk songs of Buffy Sainte Marie. One of the lessons he taught me is not to be afraid of the world out there, that when you hear strange music, don’t run away: if you give it a chance, you might end up liking it. It was a lesson that set me up to write the book about music in Japan decades later.

So I didn’t fall too far from the tree: I became the history professor my dad wanted to be. My father did a better job of rebelling against his father: Wilfred Bourdaghs, my grandfather and Ron’s father, was a lifelong employee of Andersen Windows in Bayport, the town where my dad grew up. Wilfred was against Ron going to college in the first place. If Wilfred had any say in the matter, my dad would have spent his life working for Andersen’s. Dad figured out how to run away from home, though: shortly after graduating from high school he enlisted for a stint in the army, where he spent time stationed in Germany, one of the great adventures of his life. It got him where he wanted to be: far, far away from Andersen Windows.

Dad suffered some hard knocks in his life. He lost his mother to cancer when he was just nine years old. Later in life, when he was just beginning to enjoy what looked like it would be a very active retirement, full of skiing and golf, playing with his grandchildren, he suffered another tough blow: during surgery, he suffered a traumatic brain injury that impacted his memory and mobility. His last seven years were hard on him. His loss hurts us all, but we also feel a sense of relief today that he doesn’t have to struggle any longer against a body that had stopped cooperating with him.

I have to say a special word of gratitude to my stepmother, Donna. My sister and I both live away from Minnesota, and during these last years, when Dad needed constant help, Donna was the one who was there, every day. She has taught me much about devotion and what it means to be a caregiver, about not giving up even when the situation seems impossible. I am eternally grateful, Donna.

My dad was a wonderful, patient grandfather who so obviously loved my children, Walter and Sonia. When I talked to him on the phone, he just wanted to hear how they were doing. He also always wanted to know how my wife Satoko was doing. He didn’t have to ask about what I was doing. He already know what I was up to, because I had become the history professor he intended for me to become.

23 years ago, my dad spoke at the funeral of his own father—the man who wanted Dad to go to work at Andersen’s. I remember vividly the conclusion of my dad’s eulogy for my grandfather that day. He said, “My father was not a famous man or a wealthy man. But he was a good man and a responsible man. I believe that his whole life he never knowingly hurt another human being.”

My dad didn’t end up working at Andersen’s, like his father wanted him to. And he didn’t end up as a history professor, like he wanted to. But he did end up a good man and a responsible man, just like his father, and I too believe that my dad his whole life never knowingly hurt another human being.

Last Tuesday afternoon, as I was driving up to Minnesota from Chicago after hearing the news, I suddenly had the unmistakable sense that my dad was there in the car with me. I couldn’t see him, of course, but I could feel his presence strongly. He was happier and more content than I had seen him in many years. Dad, rest in peace. We will miss you, but you are in a better place now, and you should know that you made the world a better place.