Updike at Rest

John Updike is dead. The news came to me via a text message from Peter, who described the author as “the last strand of spaghetti.”

As a tribute, here’s the final paper from the Updike/Roth seminar I took ten years ago, when I was a senior at Franklin & Marshall College.

“Accept it that soon you’ll be drenched to the bone”:  The Plight of the Aging Athlete and the “Dirty Realist” Tradition in Updike and Roth

Both John Updike and Philip Roth have explored the fate of the high-school athletic star, tracing the decline of adolescent glory into middle-aged malaise.  In this paper, I intend to compare Updike’s Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom with Roth’s Seymour “the Swede” Levov and discuss the manifold ways in which they are similar.  In addition, I will address Linden Peach’s assertion that American Pastoral is a piece of “dirty fiction” and will determine whether the same is true for Updike’s Rabbit tetralogy.
Rabbit and the Swede were, in their adolescences, the heroes of their communities.  Throughout the Rabbit books, Updike mentions Rabbit’s fame as a high-school basketball star.  When Rabbit takes over the daily management of Springer Motors from his father-in-law, he puts framed copies of the newspaper articles written about him in his heyday on the walls of his office.  In fact, one of the main ideas of the Rabbit tetralogy is that high-school glory only gets you so far in life.  After high school, Rabbit stayed in the Brewer (Reading, PA) area, married a department store clerk, Janice, who grew up to be an alcoholic, had two children, one of whom drowned and the other became a cocaine addict.  Rabbit’s despair, which permeates the four books, is because his perfection in high-school, as expressed on the basketball court, has given way to the dysfunction of his family and personal life.
In Rabbit, Run especially, Rabbit’s thoughts of the past are his comfort.  When, in the beginning of the novel, he takes shelter with Tothero, his high-school basketball coach, and goes to dinner with Tothero and two prostitutes, Rabbit’s contributions to the conversation all seem in some way to refer to his basketball days.  The women do not care about Rabbit’s ball-playing days.  Even Tothero has forgotten.  Rabbit tells a story about a game against a rural school, Oriole High, whose coach served all of the players cider after the game.  Rabbit is surprised that Tothero does not remember this episode, which has taken on mythic importance in Rabbit’s mind, and “[i]t puzzles him, yet makes him want to laugh, that he can’t make the others feel what was so special” .  Tothero does not even recall, at first, that Harry Angstrom was known to his friends and teammates as “Rabbit.”  It just does make sense to Rabbit that he, to whom all of his high school, including Coach Tothero,  looked to win basketball games, could have faded into obscurity so quickly.

In American Pastoral, Roth’s character Nathan Zuckerman recalls, in his advanced middle age, the athlete revered by his Newark Jewish neighborhood.  The kid’s name was Seymour “the Swede” Levov, and to Zuckerman, he represents the hopes of second-generation immigrant Jews to be a part of WASP society:

The Swede starred as end in football, center in basketball, and first basement in baseball.  Only the basketball team was every any good…but as long as the Swede excelled, the fate of our sports teams didn’t matter much to a student body whose elders, largely undereducated and overburdened, venerated academic achievement above all else…Nonetheless, through the Swede, the neighborhood entered into a fantasy about itself and about the world, the fantasy of sports fans everywhere: almost like Gentiles (as they imagined Gentiles), our families could forget the way things actually work  and make an athletic performance the repository of all their hopes. Primarily, they could forget the war.

Zuckerman recognizes that the Swede was, during the second world war, a symbol of Jewish assimilation.  The Swede was a way for Jewish boys to be a part of the larger Gentile society.  He proved that Jewish kids could play sports, and play them well.  Even though nobody else at Weequahic High came close to matching the Swede’s athletic prowess, they all shared in his victories.  American Pastoral is the Swede’s story as imagined by a star-struck Zuckerman.
Rabbit and the Swede.  Two high school athletic stars, each the best athlete to come out of their respective schools thus far.  During high school sports careers, each idolized by their peers, their schoolmates, their communities.  For Rabbit, however, to play basketball as a Pennsylvania Lutheran against teams of Pennsylvania Lutherans did not have the same symbolic importance as the Swede, an Ashkenazic Jew playing baseball, football, basketball against teams of Irish, Italian, or Polish Catholics, or suburban WASPs.  Rabbit, though the best basketball player his high school had ever seen, was not the hero that Swede was to his high school.  That, I believe, is why while Rabbit’s achievements are pretty much gone from the collective memory of his community by the time Rabbit, Run begins, the Swede is still known as the best athlete the Weequahic section of Newark ever produced.  The Swede’s fame endures long after Rabbit’s has faded.  Rabbit is replaced by other players, some of them just as good or better than he is, while the Swede’s legend and records endure.
Even high school athletes grow up and get married.  This in itself is not remarkable.  Many people get married.  Another common thread between Rabbit and the Swede, however, is the infidelity of their wives with men of whom they, the men, are a bit jealous.  Rabbit Redux finds Rabbit dealing with Janice’s affair with Charlie Stavros, a younger, left-leaning man who works at Springer Motors.  Rabbit is envious of Charlie’s smoothness.  When the Angstroms — Rabbit, Janice and Nelson — go to dinner at a Greek restaurant and Charlie is there alone, Janice invites him to join them.  Charlie’s presence makes Janice happy, which makes Rabbit uncomfortable, so he picks a fight about patriotism:

[Janice] tells Stavros, “If you hadn’t shown up we would have starved.”
“No,” he says, a reassuring factual man. “They would have taken care of you.  These are nice people.”
“These  two,” she says, “are so American, they’re helpless.”
“Yeah,” Stavros says to Rabbit, “I see the decal you put on your old Falcon.”
“I told Charlie,” Janice tells Rabbit, “I  certainly didn’t put it there.”
“What’s wrong with it?” he asks them both. “It’s our flag, isn’t it?”
“It’s somebody’s flag,” Stavros says, not liking this trend and softly bouncing his fingertips together under his sheltered bad eyes.

Rabbit is understandably upset to discover that his wife is cheating on him and lashes out in the only way he knows how: to attack Charlie’s ethnicity by making verbal jabs at “people who come over here to make a fat buck…and then knock the fucking flag…like it’s some piece of toilet paper”   even though he knows full well that Charlie’s family has been in the United States for several generations.
Of course, Harry Angstrom has several lovers of his own throughout the Rabbit tetralogy.  Ruth, Jill, Peggy, Thelma, Pru — all women that Rabbit is not married to.  Some of them are married themselves.  That Rabbit gets upset at his wife’s affair is evidence of one of his unlikable characteristics, to be sure.  Rabbit is never sexually or emotionally fulfilled.  This incompleteness in conjunction with his attempts to hold on to his youth, are what makes the Rabbit tetralogy so sad.
The Swede’s wife, the former Miss New Jersey Dawn Dwyer, has an affair, too.  Hers is with Bill Orcutt, the Swede’s friend in the WASP suburb of Old Rimrock.  Orcutt takes the Swede out on driving tours of Morris County, showing him the places where George Washington had headquarters and where the various ancestral Orcutts who were close friends of governors and presidents and other celebrities lived.  The Swede eventually discovers at a barbecue at the Levov’s house that Dawn’s professed dislike of Orcutt is an act:

According to the Swede’s interpretation, all of the guy’s effervescence seemed rather to go into wearing those shirts…Well, perhaps not all, the Swede discovered as he stood peering in through the kitchen door from the big granite step outside. Why he hadn’t just opened the door and gone straight ahead into his own kitchen to say that Jessie was in serious need of her husband was because of the way Orcutt was leaning over Dawn while Dawn was leaning over the sink, shucking the corn.  In the first instant it looked to the Swede—despite the fact that Dawn needed no such instruction—as though Orcutt were showing Dawn how  to shuck corn, bending over her from behind and, with his hands on hers, helping her get the knack of cleanly removing the husk and the silk.  But if he was only helping her learn to shuck corn, why, beneath the florid expanse of Hawaiian shirt, were his hips and his buttocks moving like that.  Why was his cheek pressed up against hers like that?  And why was Dawn saying—if the Swede was correctly reading her lips—“Not here, not here. . .”?  Why not  shuck the corn here? The kitchen was as good a place as any.

The Swede has been usurped as husband and lover to his former Miss New Jersey, usurped by Orcutt, who symbolizes the landed WASP gentry amongst whom the Levovs have been trying to live.  Perhaps Roth is saying that the only way for the Jewish grandson of a glovemaking immigrant and his Irish Catholic wife to live in a place like Old Rimrock is to sleep with its Protestant inhabitants.
The Swede, of course, has an affair of his own, with Sheila Salzman, his daughter Merry’s speech therapist.  Zuckerman says that having a “mistress” like Sheila “does not quite make sense in the untarnished context of that life—and yet, for the four months after Merry disappeared, that is what Sheila was to him”  .  The Swede was Weequahic’s golden boy, the one who could do no wrong, and yet he took for himself another man’s wife as a lover.  Zuckerman has trouble with the very idea of it.  The Swede too has trouble with it, refusing to talk to Sheila alone after the barbecue.  Rabbit’s affairs are “in character” for him because of his inability to be fulfilled and his innate restlessness.  American Pastoral,  however, portrays the Swede as a man who has found happiness and settled down with a beautiful wife in a nice suburb, the picture of the American Dream.  Except, that is, for his daughter, the bomber.
Meredith “Merry” Levov is a girl who grew up with newfound wealth.  The Swede is the one who makes his family business, Newark Maid Gloves, really profitable.  Merry lives her life without knowing the poverty that her grandfather knew growing up the son of a poor uneducated immigrant.  She is raised in a wealthy suburb, unlike her father, who grew up in Newark.  Merry eventually decides that the Vietnam War is an unjust war and dedicates herself to getting the United States out of it.  However, she believes that the way to do so is to bomb the general store in Old Rimrock, killing a local doctor.  She later bombs other buildings in the American west.  The death toll from her activities reaches four before she decides to abandon violence and become a Jain.
Merry is the one major problem in the Swede’s life.  American Pastoral asks what happens when a man thinks he has found his ideal life only to have it turned upside-down by the violent acts of someone close to him.  Merry’s bombings seem to hurt the Swede more than they hurt even those that she kills.  The Swede can not understand why his daughter would want to live underground, in abject poverty, running away from the comfortable home that he has spent his life earning the money to buy.   Merry, on the other hand, wishes to rebel against capitalism, which her father embodies.  The epigram to Roth’s novel Letting Go —“The Son / And the father alike and equally are spent, / Each one, by the necessity of being / Himself” —is appropriate for American Pastoral as well.  The Swede is burnt out by dealing with Merry, by thinking about her, by coming to terms with his daughter as a mass murderer and domestic terrorist.  Merry, too, is burnt out, living an ascetic life in inner-city Newark, hardly eating, sickly.  What the Swede worked so hard for, the health and happiness of his family, is negated by the bomb blast that Merry sets off in the Old Rimrock general store.
Nelson Angstrom, who readers watch grow up and become a father himself in the course of the Rabbit tetralogy, is also a destructive force.  By the last book, Rabbit at Rest,  Nelson has seen his parents’ dysfunctional marriage, has witnessed the death of Jill, an older-sister figure, and has harbored huge grudges against Janice and Rabbit.  Rabbit at Rest, which takes place in the late 1980s, sees Nelson become a cocaine and crack addict whose drug habit destroys Springer Motors, the Angstroms’ Toyota and used-car dealership.  Nelson’s lack of self-control is the opposite of Merry’s political dedication and adherence to Jainism.  However, both wind up tearing their families apart.
The Swede and Rabbit embody traditional American values.  Each rises from lower-middle class urban existence (Rabbit’s father was a printer) to suburban affluence.  Neither really understands the malaise expressed by young people in the 1960s: the Swede is completely confused by Merry’s sudden dedication to the tenets of the Weathermen and Rabbit’s relationship with Skeeter, the self-proclaimed “Black Jesus” in Rabbit Redux is one of fear at best.  These two old-fashioned fathers watch their carefully built worlds fall apart under the influence of social changes, although the Angstroms’ dysfunction is also partly because of Rabbit’s restlessness and Janice’s alcoholism.  In his book The Fiction of Philip Roth and John Updike, George J. Searles discusses this idea at length.  “[P]ractically all of Updike’s protagonists, like Roth’s,” he writes, “are locked into extremely complex, psychologically demanding family relationships that in many cases become Updike’s principle subject”  .  Family relationships are difficult at best, Searles continues, because these families exist “in a period of shifting values and changing assumptions” .  There is more to the troubles of the Angstrom and Levov families than the behavior of their individual members.  The real problem lies in the confluence of these people and their personal character issues with the turbulent social change of the mid-twentieth century.
Updike and Roth both write in a style that can be described as “dirty realism.”     American editor Bill Buford defines “dirty realism” as “realism…stylized and particularized…informed by a discomforting and sometimes elusive irony” .  Linden Peach’s Critical Survey article “ ‘K-Marts and Lost Parents’: ‘Dirty Realism’ in Contemporary American and Irish Fiction” compares American Pastoral   to Irish author Roddy Doyle’s Barrytown trilogy, which consists of The Commitments, The Snapper, and The Van.  These novels, and the “dirty realist” approach in general,  Peach says, were “developed more with a British than an American readership in mind at a time when British fiction was essentially middle class in its range and subject matter and intended to reawaken British interest in contemporary American fiction by appealing to memories of 1960s working-class fiction” .  “Dirty realist” pieces, Peach later writes, looks at consumer culture and the “common ephemera which constitute the self at the convergence of small-town and postmodern culture” .
Peach makes a strong argument for describing American Pastoral as influenced by “dirty realism.”  The Swede sees his old home, Newark, become the car-theft capital of the world, his old Weequahic neighborhood a dangerous and run-down place far removed from what it was like in his youth.  When he goes into Newark to see Merry for the first time since the Old Rimrock bombing, even the Swede stops romanticizing his boyhood and sees what happened to Newark for himself:
Merry’s street was just a couple of hundred feet long, squeezed into the triangle between McCarter—where, as always, the heavy truck traffic barreled by night and day—and the ruins of Mulberry Street.  Mulberry the Swede could recall as a Chinatown slum as long ago as the 1930s, back when the Newark Levovs, Jerry, Seymour, Momma, Poppa, used to file up the narrow stairwell to one of the family restaurants for a chow mein dinner on a Sunday afternoon and, later, driving home to Keer Avenue, his father would tell the boys unbelievable stories about the Mulberry Street “tong wars” of old.

Of old. Stories of old.  There were no longer stories of old. There was nothing.  There was a mattress, discolored and waterlogged, like a cartoon-strip drunk slumped against a pole.  The pole still held up a sign telling you what corner you were on.  And that’s all there was.

This passage, reminiscent of the description of Tommy’s flat in Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting , one of the quintessential pieces of Scottish “dirty realism,” marks the first time that the Swede comes to grips with what used to be his home and now is a dangerous urban jungle.  Although the location of Merry’s apartment, near Mulberry Street, brings back fond memories of his youth, the Swede realizes that the neighborhood has changed with the times.
John Updike’s Rabbit books are themselves fine examples of “dirty realism.”  Concerned with the rise of the Angstrom family from urban lower-middle class life to suburban upper-middle class comfort, the four books show the reader Rabbit’s romantic memories of the Brewer area alongside the new reality of the declining city:

On his right, toward the mountain, Weiser stretches sallow under blue street lights.  The Pinnacle Hotel makes a tattered blur, the back of the Sunflower Beer clock shows yellow neon petals; otherwise the great street is dim.  He can remember when Weiser with its five movie marquees and its medley of neon outlines appeared as gaudy as a carnival midway.  People would stroll, children between them.  Now the downtown looks deserted, sucked dry by suburban shopping centers and haunted by rapists.

Brewer, the city of Rabbit’s youth, has become a dangerous place.  Updike’s blaming of “suburban shopping centers” fits well with the “dirty realist” archetype.  In the consumer-driven world of the second half of the twentieth century, cities, once thriving economic and commercial centers, have become places for poor people to live, the more prosperous residents having fled long ago to the suburbs.  In this way, both Roth’s Newark and Updike’s Reading have become menacing urban jungles.  I myself, who grew up walking around in New York City, still dread driving around Reading at night.
“Dirty realism” is in large part about the decay of urban centers and high culture and their replacement with tawdry consumerism and selfish goals.  This decline from greatness to something less than that is paralleled in John Updike’s Rabbit tetralogy and Philip Roth’s American Pastoral.  Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom and Seymour “the Swede” Levov, revered in high school because of their great athletic talents, see in their aging the disintegration of their dreams of idyllic American life.  Rabbit’s restlessness and inability to fully commit to his wife lead to tragedy; the Swede’s daughter, caught up in the idealism of the 1960s, becomes a terrorist and an ascetic.  The two men, whose lives seemed perfect in their youth, learn that things, as Chinua Achebe says, fall apart.

Filed under: Matters Literary

Raveonettes and Nickel Eye at Paradise, Boston.

Just before this gig started, I passed distinctively chiseled Strokes’ bass player, and front man of Nickel Eye, Nikolai Fraiture, coming out of the bathroom at the Paradise. Just a little star-struck, I mumbled “have a good show” to him, and he thanked me casually, before disappearing backstage.

I really meant it too. But just a few minutes later, as Nickel Eye ran through some of the songs they have been playing around the country from their upcoming first album, “The Time of the Assassins,” I had changed my tune completely. By that point I had stood listening to them wander through track after track, looking, frankly, like they might fall asleep on stage. This is not a criticism of their music particularly (although I wasn’t taken with it – it was weak and generally lacking in drive), but of their incredible complacency. I have rarely seen a band apparently less interested in an audience’s opinion of them. I suppose that’s what they call ‘cool’ in musical circles. Nikolai sang “Don’t let them get you down,” and I suppose I am now the object of his statement. So be it – the band can’t be given a free pass to ‘phone it in,’ on the basis of the momentum they have gathered from Nikolai‘s past life.

The Raveonettes, who followed them, are cool in quite different terms. Their style, melding 50s harmonies and guitar drenched in spring reverb with massive bass and screaming noise-core distortion is still fresh and engaging, even after several years at what many critics label the cutting-edge. A friend who came to the show with me argued afterwards that they are not so new as they might want us to believe – that bands like Suicide have been over this ground before.

Perhaps he’s right. Perhaps this incarnation of ‘cool’ has overcome my judgment. I could tell they wanted to keep up appearances for the crowd when singer Sharin Foo broke at our applause, from her sultry passivity, into a smile. She looked like she had given something away – a secret that, perhaps she feared would damage their dark image. A secret that they really do care what we think, and that they need us.

How ‘uncool,’ and how endearing.

[Nick also writes for Ryan's Smashing Life and Nick Sounds Off]

Filed under: Matters Musical & Artistic

What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them

Happy 1/20/09, everyone!, originally uploaded by One Ping Only.

The day is here.
1.20.09.
I sat, as did, I’m sure, most of the nation, if not the world, speechless, a little teary-eyed, as Barack Hussein Obama took the Oath of Office (patiently allowing Chief Justice Roberts to correct his own mistakes before repeating after him) on a frigid high noon. I watched from the Greenwich High School Media Center’s classroom, the one equipped with the plasma TV and seventies-licious speakers, with a couple dozen colleagues and a few students.
I listened to the speech, sure to go down in history as one of the better Inaugural addresses, and thought about the new President’s first set of words after taking that office.

For as much as government can do and must do, it is ultimately the faith and determination of the American people upon which this nation relies. It is the kindness to take in a stranger when the levees break, the selflessness of workers who would rather cut their hours than see a friend lose their job which sees us through our darkest hours. It is the firefighter’s courage to storm a stairway filled with smoke, but also a parent’s willingness to nurture a child, that finally decides our fate.

And I realized that an era has come to an end. I don’t know if Obama’s going to fulfill the huge hopes we all have for him, but I do know that his ascent to the Presidency means that something fundamental has changed. It means that we–young people, post-Boomer people–have finally wrested control from the generation or two before us.
A lot of ink has been spilled about the significance of an African-American family moving into a White House that was largely built by slaves. A lot of ink has been spilled, too, about Obama’s humble origins. And yes, those topics are huge and important and worth far more words than have already been written about them.
To me, though, the Obama Presidency means that we have a chance, as a nation, to work with a President for whom the divisions that we set up for ourselves–divisions of race, religion, sexual orientation, etc–don’t really matter so much. I have to think that as our first post-Boomer President, Obama brings a new outlook to the office. His talk of unity and cooperation is so stirring to me because, for the first time, I feel like he actually believes it.
There’s a good chance I’m just projecting myself onto this very public figure. I’m 16 years younger than our new President, and come from a very different set of circumstances. But I feel a kinship with him, a sense of the possible, and I wish him all the luck in the world as he tries to lead a very tired nation into a future of which we can all be proud.

(t-shirt, by the way, by Bryan Shaffer)

Filed under: Matters Political

Thing of the Day: Inauguration Celebration

VOTE, originally uploaded by Ben Kimball.

So I was sitting in my soon-to-be-tableless livingroom watching Full Metal Jacket in preparation for my brand-new Film as Literature class. I marveled at how joyless the recruits seemed, and how willing they were to put up with the abuse of their drill sergeant in order to become Marines. And then my mom called, telling me to put on HBO, which apparently is free today so that the Inauguration festivities can be watched everywhere.
Right now, all I can think about is the joy that so much of the country and the world is going to feel on Tuesday at noon. It’s more than just having your guy win the election for the first time in three campaigns. It definitely goes deeper than the almost-too-sweetness of will.i.am, Sheryl Crow, and Herbie Hancock performing the most bizarre version of “One Love” that you can possibly imagine.
I’ve been trying to wrap my mind around the Obama victory since it happened. I remember when the election was finally called for him, late on that Tuesday night. I still have the text messages saved:

“Yessssssssss!” (my friend Megan)
“Mazel Tov! Yasher Koach! now we dont have to move to canada” (my sister Hannah)
“Happy best election day ever!!!” (my friend Kirsten)
“We just made history. All of this happened because you gave your time, talent and passion to this campagin. All of this happened because of you. Thanks.” (Barack Obama)

And now, watching Garth Brooks performing “American Pie” on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, with the President-Elect watching, slightly bobbing his head, a huge grin on his face, I’m beginning to feel something like hope. I’m seeing the reflecting pool surrounded, even in crappier weather than you would expect, by happy Americans and, I presume, foreign visitors. There’s a festive air that I haven’t seen in TV images of Washington in a very long time.
I can’t help but worry about what might happen, though, if Obama doesn’t solve all of the problems that he inherits. I’m not talking about immediate solutions. I’m just wondering about what happens if, by around 2011, our economy’s still in the crapper, we’re still involved in a wasteful foreign war, our national education system still turns out ignorant students who can answer multiple choice questions but can’t think critically. Will the people who already think Obama is the Antichrist blame those problems, the ones he failed to mop up completely, on him? Will his Presidency really bring us all together, or at least more all together than the divisive politics of the past few decades have done? Am I, at the age of 31, about to be prouder and happier to be an American than I’ve been since, well, ever?
The question is, then, how much of this is really about Barack Obama himself, and how much is about ordinary Americans finally getting together to see through some–not all, but some–of the lies that have been foisted upon us by cynical political operatives for so long? I feel now the same way I do when I read a book by Dave Eggers or listen to the Flaming Lips–that so much sadness and pain can give way to hope, a wise hope that we can learn from and progress and become better people.
When my grandmother died, almost two years ago, I was devastated. The older I got, the more I wanted to know about her, and I felt, when she passed, that I was losing a major connection to my personal and family history. Grandma knew stuff that I’d never know, but that I hoped to glimpse. When I got that call that she’d died, I knew that everything had to change, and that I had a responsibility to keep moving forward and only do things that would make her, and my entire family and circle of friends, proud.
Tonight, the Terryl Lee Band plays at the Inauguration Funk Fest at Toad’s Place in New Haven, CT. Tonight, we hope to take the stage and bring our very best to a hopefully-crowded room of people who are ready to get down TOGETHER. Tonight, we want everyone smiling and dancing and toasting and not stopping until they throw everyone out of the club.
Tonight is our night. And the day after tomorrow, it becomes our world.

Filed under: Matters Musical & Artistic, Matters Political, Thing of the Day

Thing of the Day: Soulive

Two weeks ago, in the midst of my Christmas vacation, Pete and James and I headed down the Highline Ballroom in NYC to catch Soulive.

This was my third Soulive show, and it blew the others away. The usual tight grooves were there in abundance, but there was something more to it–it really looked like the band members were having the collective time of their lives, like they wouldn’t've wanted to be anywhere else at that exact moment. It was, as Pete said, one of those shows with no songs that I ever wanted to end.

Because I was so happy to find it, here’s the link to the show on archive.org, which hosts live recordings of taper-friendly bands. Give a listen; I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Filed under: Matters Musical & Artistic, Thing of the Day