Language of the Universe

I’ve never really understood the compulsion to climb a mountain just because “it’s there”, but I’ve always had a soft spot for explorers. The drive to discover, sometimes at great risk, is a phenomenal human trait. We might now cringe at the colonial implications of early European exploration, but there’s no denying the awesome human spirit at work in someone like a Captain Cook, or a Burton and Speke. Which is precisely why I love pianist Dotan Negrin’s work. Negrin is not just a musician, and a fine one at that. He’s an explorer in the truest sense of the word. His goal is to explore the power music has to connect people. And his means for doing so isn’t just a jam session in his basement or his local bar, or in the comparative safety of a conservatory classroom. Like so many great explorers before him, he’s taken his quest on the road.

His first project was Piano Across America, in 2011. Negrin emptied his savings account, bought a sturdy upright piano and a sturdier truck, and took off across America with his piano - and his dog, Brando, who has a habit of perching on top of the piano like a furry masthead, and is unfortunately occasionally prone to motion sickness. Negrin traveled over 15,000 miles and played on the streets of 32 cities and 8 National Parks. His website chronicles his adventures: the wild beauty of playing in the parks, impromptu dance parties on the streets of New Mexico, jamming with – and getting robbed by – an Oxycontin addict. But it wasn’t for the sheer wild ride of it all, or for some journey of self-discovery. It was to show that, in the words of famed neurologist Oliver Sacks, music “quickens” people. It brings them to life. And it can knit them together in a shared experience.

You can feel this power if you listen to some of the music he’s posted on his website. Go to his website and listen to him teasing out the blues from his piano, or creating impromptu jazz sessions with friends and strangers, or inspiring a bunch of Hasidic men to dance in circle around his piano in New York City. And listen to him absorbing the arrival of an entire marching band led by a bridal couple on the streets of New Orleans. If you can watch that clip without smiling, well, you’re made of sterner stuff than I.

Negrin’s latest project, which just got funding through Kickstarter earlier this week, is Language of the Universe. His plan is to drive from New York City to Panama with his piano and Brando in order to document the importance of music in peoples’ lives. I’m not quite sure what it would be like to drive a piano through Central America…in fact, I don’t think anyone could be. As far as anyone knows, it’s never been done before.

The project’s title sums up Negrin’s feeling about why music is such a great connector. As he put it to me, music connects because it’s in many ways a “universal language”. While he hastily added that he’s not the first person to say that, he’s actually seen what that means when he’s played on the streets of America:

“Everyone can feel a piece of music. You see how people react every time they walk by, even just for a second. Almost every person has a smile on their face. They brighten up a little, even if it’s just a little bit.

"I think when I play piano on the street, it becomes this ice breaker. Like there was this one time I was playing and I had this nice little crowd of seven or eight people surrounding me, and five or six of them were there for something like two hours. Just hanging out and talking and listening to music. And I would tell them how I practice and play.

"And what’s interesting is that I talk to people I’ve never met before. Total strangers. As if I’ve known them for years. And one thing that I’ve noticed is that I never have that opportunity unless I’m playing piano on the street. Like if I’m walking in New York on the street, I would never meet these people. I wouldn’t…I wouldn’t get that same opportunity without having the piano there. Without playing the piano.”

There are some fascinating studies (Negrin’s read them, I look forward to doing so) about how our brain processes music and why it affects us so strongly. And, as Negrin says, performing piano on the street (especially with a dog perched beside you) is a heck of a conversation starter. But I was lucky enough to have Negrin over for dinner last summer. We talked about music over gumbo and wine, and afterwards he played our piano and gave our daughter Mira a lesson in playing the blues scale.

I saw what the philosopher Albert Borgmann has written come to life in front of me. A skilled musician playing his instrument commands attention. A musical instrument is a wonderful thing in and of itself, something beautiful and redolent of human tradition. But in the hands of a good musician it reveals itself. Negrin made the playing look effortless, though I know from Mira’s own hours of beginner’s practice, it’s anything but. When Negrin played, the piano became something. Mira, playing alongside him, blossomed. And the rest of us were caught up too…we laughed, taped our feet any my three year old son jumped up and danced.

And one can see how Negrin’s power really would come to the fore in the public sphere. Borgmann writes about the power of street music – especially jazz – to create communities of celebration. His words might have been written directly for Negrin. While Borgmann notes that a “community” in this context as often as not is anonymous, and tends to form and dissolve quickly, it doesn’t need to be anything more than that to create something meaningful. “The bodily presence, the skill, the engagement, and the goodwill of the musicians radiate into the listeners and transform them to some degree.” And Borgmann adds that “Music as a celebration that is real all the way down will also sink its roots into the reality of the public space where it takes place. Celebration and place will inform one another.”

Piano Across America and The Language of the Universe are fantastic projects. It’s important for psychologists and neuroscientists to continue to study our relationship to music. But it’s equally important to have old fashioned explorers who hit the road in pursuit of a quest. Negrin’s mission, to explore the role of music in our lives and how it can connect one, is as emblematic of the new good life as anything I’ve seen. And by playing in the streets of North and South America, he’s not just studying the good life – he’s creating it.

Margaret Wente’s Startling Conclusions

Last week Globe & Mail columnist Margaret Wente attacked locavorism as “the most wasteful, inefficient way to feed the human race you can possibly imagine.” She said it was, “bad for the environment” and perplexingly, claimed that the purported “core beliefs of locavores – that organic is best, chemicals are bad, and genetically modified crops are evil – are responsible for keeping large parts of Africa mired in poverty and food deprivation.” I’m not quite sure how to respond to her comments about Africa. I would like to think she’s joking, but just in case she’s not I’ll point to the more conventional arguments about that continent’s intractable problems with food: drought, desertification, distribution and food security issues, and politics and corruption on both sides of the north south divide. Enough said.

As for the rest of the column, Wente’s arguments seem more ideological than data or even common sense driven. For example, she asserts that “modern, mass-produced food (not junk food, real food) is cheaper, more nutritious, safer, higher-quality, more reliably available and far less wasteful than the local kind.”

Wente is right when she says that industrially-produced food is more reliably available. Global distribution networks are amazing. If the strawberries in California fail, we can get them from Mexico or Israel. This is a luxury of the modern world that many of us wouldn’t want to do without as part of an overall eating strategy.

And I will grant you that industrial food can be appear to be cheaper. But this is where Wente’s points start to become less persuasive. Industrially produced food seems cheaper because we’re not calculating or paying its full cost. For example, who’s picking the cheap food on which we gorge ourselves? It’s often migrant or easily exploited workers. And we often ignore the environmental cost of intensive food production, including its transport, because we haven’t formally introduced any systems that force us to account for it.

To this point, farmer Joel Salatin, speaking in Michael Pollan’s book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, argues that with his [local] food , “All of the costs are figured into the price. Society is not bearing the cost of water pollution, of antibiotic resistance, of food-borne illnesses, of crop subsidies, of subsidized oil and water – of all the hidden costs to the environment and the taxpayer that make cheap food seem cheap.”

And the rest of Wente’s arguments are also a stretch. Industrially-produced food isn’t higher-quality or more nutritious. It’s usually picked before it’s ripe. It’s often stored and always transported, which gives its nutritional value lots of time and opportunity to degrade.

And I’d be curious to see how Wente arrived at the idea that industrially-produced food is safer, especially when our government is so intent on cutting back on food safety inspections. Those same glorious food distribution networks that bring us Israeli strawberries in February are the ones that can ship E Coli round the world in just a few days.

But let’s set aside the point and counter-point here. Read Michael Pollan’s books, or, if you’re policy-minded, the European Commission’s report “Opinion of the Committee of the Regions on ‘Local food systems’", published in January 2011. After having studied food production and distribution extensively, the Commission has come out strongly in favor of what they call ““short supply chain” food distribution because, pace Wente, they’ve identified many social, cultural, economic and environmental benefits. Naturally, they don’t prescribe local eating as the only way to eat. But I’ve not heard “locavores” say that either. The point is to make local eating part of an overall approach to eating.

To me, one of the most critical points about local eating is actually one that Wente raises in the context of a dismissive aside. Perhaps facetiously, she asks why it’s become “the rage to look in the eye of the people who grow your vegetables?”

She answers it in part by theorizing that we romanticize the land because we live at such a distance from it. And because we long for the personal, and artisanal, and for connectedness.”

Well, yes.

The thing to bear in mind hear is that connectedness isn’t just some upper-middle class indulgence.* Connectedness is price of entry to being human. And food is, and has always been, one of the most fundamental mechanisms to connect us. Producing food connects us to nature, tradition, the seasons, a local ecology and even our own bodies. Producing food also connects us to our human vulnerabilities. There’s a reason we give thanks at mealtimes, or at least, we used to when we were more attuned to the significance of food in our lives.

When I buy at the Farmer’s Market at the Evergreen Brickworks, I experience all of these connections more strongly than when I shop at the local grocery store. They are in the foreground, rather than some invisible background. The food there is connected to my own place, experience and time, not a commodity produced by parts and in places unknown. In other words, a zucchini is more than a zucchini. It is something that draws me deeper into place, time and relationships. This has always been as much a part of food’s job as providing calories on which to run, like so much gas in a car.

Buying food at the Brickworks is exciting, not because I’m getting some validation of yuppie values, but because connectedness in engaging and enriching. That itself is a kind of pleasure. A nourishment beyond the cheapest possible calories. And, as Albert Borgmann says, “pleasures embedded in engagement will not betray us.”

* Joel Salatin says his customer aren’t “elites”, “We sell to all kinds of people.”

Towards a New Model of Health and Well-Being: Practice Makes Perfect

Anthropology News published an article of mine today as part of their series on health, well-being and happiness.  It argues that the dominant, consumption-based vision for the good life in North America is making us sick and that, moreover, our individualist model for understanding health and well-being all too often compounds rather than helps the problem. That’s the bad news.  The good news is that there’s a new way of thinking about the good life that actually sets us on to a much better path for health and well-being.  We can see it in the work of writers like Mark Bittman and Laurie David, and articulated brilliantly by the philosopher Albert Borgmann.  Theirs is a vision of a good life characterized by activities that engage and connect us to each other and the world around us.

The article is publicly available at this link http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2012/03/15/towards-a-new-model-of-health-and-well-being/ if you’d like to read more!

“Celebrate Convenience” : Seriously?

I was out for a run early Sunday morning, savoring the quiet streets and letting my thoughts dwell on the pleasure of movement, the fun music I was listening to, and – above all – Advent and Christmas.  This is by far my favorite time of year.  I love the weak winter sun that shines through the bare trees, the early dark in the evenings and the comfort of the fire to get us through it, the anticipation of seeing or at least talking to family, my children’s Christmas performances, Christmas morning service…you get the picture.  Given that my husband is German, our family has the double enjoyment of keeping two Christmas traditions.  One of the German traditions I’ve come to love is lighting the Advent wreath.  Every Sunday afternoon in Advent, we gather at the table and light a new candle on the wreath, until, just before Christmas, all four blaze.  We eat the German Lebkucken and Stollen that my mother-in-law sends from Germany every year, and if the children aren’t too wriggly, we read a Christmas story they like, such as ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas. Given that it was Sunday, I was thinking particularly about lighting the next Advent candle as I ran, both keenly looking forward to it and wondering if the children would fight over the cookies or if we’d pull the whole thing off calmly.  With my thoughts thus pleasantly occupied, I ran on to Broadview Street, whereupon I was stopped in my tracks by an advertisement hanging in the window of the Toronto Dominion Bank.  “This season, celebrate convenience!” the ad said brightly;  beneath these words, a relaxed woman beamed joy and contentment.

This was the most depressing rendering of the seasonal spirit that I had ever seen.  Poof went all my happy Christmas thoughts, replaced with something akin to outrage.

I took a deep breath and started running again, leaving the sign behind me.  As I jogged past the quiet shops with their merry window displays, I tried to figure out why “celebrate convenience” bothered me so much.  After all, convenience is sort of the TD bank’s “thing”, the way they distinguish their big-Canadian-bank-brand from all the other big Canadian banks.  And convenience is nice, no doubt about that.  It makes life easy and…convenient.

As I rounded towards home, it dawned on me that my irritation went beyond the fact that the ad trivialized and commercialized the season.  We’re all used to that.  Rather, my reaction centered on the bank’s use of the word “celebrate”.  Celebrate is a big word, an important word.  In my understanding of it, it doesn’t just mean “be mildly happy about”, it means marking something with rites and ceremonies, to praise it publicly, to honour it.  Celebrations are profound parts of human existence:  they tell us what matters to us personally and communally.  The philosopher Albert Borgmann has argued that to live human lives rich with depth and meaning, we need to understand celebration as “centered on some concrete thing…a joyful engagement with the physical presence and radiance of that thing”, be it a space, a gathering of people, an event, an Advent wreath, or some other thing that is powerful enough to collect us with its presence.  Celebration by its nature requires engagement.

Whereas…convenience?  Seriously?  If convenience matters to us in more than a fleeting way, we’re in pretty bad shape as a society.  Is this what really matters to us?  While you could try to make a case that convenience is important precisely because it frees us to focus on more important things than our banking, you just can’t get all the way to “celebrating” it.  Convenience doesn’t collect us together in an enriching common life, in fact, it arguably does the opposite.  It permits us to be passive, disengaged, focused on ease.  At a macro-level a culture that worships convenience can even be poison to feeling engaged and alive, because it facilitates consumption without connection that's emotionally and spiritually enriching.  Thus, in an important respect, convenience is antithetical to celebrating the Christmas season.  Christmas calls on us to be engaged, connected, mindful, generous and willing to work on things that matter.  It’s a time to feel alive to the world and its spiritual, moral and material possibilities.

Here’s another thing that happened over the weekend.  I was just a couple of blocks from home when one of my front tires gave out and the car lurched sickeningly to the right with a horrible crunch.  I coaxed the car into the parking lot of a nearby grocery store and got out to inspect the damage.  Flat as a pancake.  I don’t have a mobile phone, so I went into the store to ask if someone could help me call the Automobile Association.  Instead, the manager of the store came out to help me.  He took a good look at the tire, opened the trunk to confirm there was a spare, shooed me and my children inside where it was warm and changed the tire himself in fifteen minutes flat.  To thank him, I bought him a bottle of wine and a box of biscuits – small tokens of appreciation, not just for his help, but for the fact that he was willing to help in the first place.  Not only did his generosity delight me, it has delighted everyone I’ve told this story to.

Getting the flat tire was inconvenient – it scuppered our day’s plans.  But through that inconvenience, some delightful things happened.  A generous act.  A gift of thanks.  A story.  This is hardly a Christmas miracle the likes of the divine intervention of It’s a Wonderful Life, but it illustrates the potential of human kindness, which, as reflected in the season, is worth celebrating.  Let’s hold those things dear, and keep convenience in its place.