Daily Office: Tuesday
¶ Matins: My idea was to mention the video that we watched this evening, after LXIV reminded us that JKM had strongly recommended it when we visited her in the place where, in the Ealing Comedy, at least, you could get a Passport to Pimlico. It’s an adorable movie, and I’ve just spent £9.95 ($100,000) on shipping to make sure that I have my very own copy of the DVD, which is not available in the U S of Movies, within the next ten minutes.
¶ Lauds: Speaking of Édouard (and this will make sense only to those of you who clicked through at Matins), I was very touched by a comment that Jérôme posted at the latest Sale Bête entry. The end of incognito?
¶ Tierce: Nice fix-it columns in the Times: Clyde Haberman on the Rockefeller Drug Laws, and Andrew Ross Sorkin on Kenneth Griffin, a hedge-fund whiz kid who thinks that Wall Street let the young ‘uns have too much fun with the car keys.
¶ Compline: Another season of Orpheus at Carnegie ended last Saturday night. At first, I thought I wouldn’t be able to go, so I gave the tickets to LXIV. Then I could go, and he didn’t have a taker for the other ticket — and I went. But I let LXIV play host and sit in the aisle seat.
Oremus…
§  Matins. As you can see, I stuck with that idea. But I must also mention a site that Édouard cites in his latest entry: Things Younger Than … John McCain. Did you know that Senator McCain is older than the chocolate chip cookie? I would have, if I’d ever thought about it. But we won’t be going on about what the senator is older than, because the blogger (that would be moi) is also older than most of the things cited on the site. Moi, however, is not running for POTUS.
The other day, as I was walking through the mid-block alleys that take one from the kitchen to the conservatory 55th Street to 52nd between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, Leslie Gore’s big 1963 hit, “It’s My Party (And I’ll Cry If I Want To)” blasted through the earpods. I reflected that, like so much else in life, the song was forty-five years old (or older). But the idea of my listening to a song that was forty-five years old in 1963 simply did not compute, even though I was already crazy about Eddie Duchin’s cover of “The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea” — one of my mother’s 78s, but only about twenty-five years old at the time.
Come to think of it, my mother was forty-five in 1963, and a newborn in 1918 when Paul Whiteman’s “Whispering” was the transformative hit of American pop. I wouldn’t hear that amazing song for the first time until about 1975, on the eve of its serving as the as the foundation of August Darnell’s disco classic, “Cherchez la Femme”. So: 1918, a time that could not even be imagined, except as a date in a history book, in 1963, is to “It’s My Party” as “It’s My Party” is to Now. Whoa! 45 + 45 = 90! Do I hear a century?
§ Lauds. (To read it, you have to scroll way way way down — but stay when you get there. A regular reader, Jérôme, writes (in my loose translation):
Can it be that we can finally see your reflection in one of your photographs? Could this be the beginning of the end of your incognito?
The photograph in question sits directly above the comments — it’s the one in which the Commissioner of Mental Hygiene assures you that he’s not going to have any rats trampling through your mesclun at brunch. Just above this notice, you will discern the upper half of a head.
— Is that [Édouard], I asked myself? Well, I suppose it might be, although I’ve never noticed the Clark Kents. No, it can’t be. Even if he just got a haircut.
I threw up my hands. And that, I’m sure, is what I was meant to do, as someone who has actually met the author of Sale Bête and who knows what he looks like. Memo to Jérôme: if this picture is the beginning of anything, it’s the start of a Cindy Sherman phase.
§ Tierce. It’s pretty to think about reform, but we have had enough of it in the past two hundred years or more to know that the self-improving projects of nation states and large corporations alike are beset by the self-preserving gunk called bureaucracy. Wingnuts have sold Americans on the notion that “regulation” and “bureaucracy” are the same thing, but they don’t have to be. We have much to learn from engineers, I think, about efficient regulatory schemes. Engineers can’t count on God to fix an overheated circuit; they can’t even count on themselves. Modern technology depends upon and idea of self-regulatory agency that doesn’t hinge on the concepts of approval and permission.
§ Compline. It was a very nice concert, but the applause got to be annoying. There are times to break the rule against clapping after movements that aren’t finales, but they are far from frequent. After the bravura performance of a whopping concerto’s opening, perhaps. But not after each and every movement of The Birds. (ESPECIALLY before “The Nightingale” is quite over.) Applause spattered unpredictably throughout The Four Seasons.
I still have a fistful of musical events to write up. They’re fairly recent; it was only in April that I fell completely off my regular schedule. For a variety of reasons, it was difficult to think clearly in April. Megan’s wedding was of course a contributing distraction, one that I don’t regret for an instant; and then there was spring, which unfolded this year with an inexorable magnificence that was all the more powerful for seeming to start late. This will sound crazy, but it feels as though spring and summer were brand-new inventions, ours to try out for the very first time. I took another dreamy walk in the park and along the river this afternoon. If I stopped to ask myself why it took me so long to put these walks on my regular schedule, that might spoil, or at least complicate, my pleasure — so I don’t. Besides, I’m too busy listening to David Fromkin’s Europe’s Last Summer, which I’ve finally installed on my silver Nano.