Out of My Mind (12 page)

There are thousands of social organizations that help form the fabric of our society and many of them are exclusive for some reason or another.

We prefer to mingle and we're happiest mingling with our own. “Our own” can refer to national origin, religious affiliation, or something like having served in a war, or bowling with the same people every Tuesday night. We join bridge clubs, sewing groups and political organizations.
They all provide a place for us to exchange and express opinions with people basically like ourselves.

I belong to a club in New York City that was all male for the first 125 years of its existence. Around 1988, after a bitter battle among members, women were admitted. Many enlightened members who didn't like the idea of letting women in nonetheless voted in favor of it because they thought it was the right thing to do. The club is undeniably different but not worse.

New York City wrestled with the problem of what to do about replacing the destroyed World Trade Center with another building or group of buildings.

It isn't often that putting up a building involves so many practical, emotional and artistic considerations as this does. Usually, when steel, stone and cement or wood are laid out, squared, rounded smoothed and fitted together into various shapes, it is to make working or living space for people. Decisions about the final appearance of a building by people who look up at it as they pass by on the street, are incidental to how it will be used. This accounts for why there are so many ugly office buildings, apartment houses and homes in the world.

Because of the trauma associated with the deaths of 2,800 people in the World Trade Center, no one is satisfied with the idea of erecting just another office complex. They want it to be a beautiful monument, a practical working space and a work of art, too. That's some order for an architect.

When we use the word “art,” we're usually referring to a painting, so I was surprised just now to look up the word in my dictionary and note that the words “painting” or “picture” aren't even mentioned. “Architecture” isn't mentioned as an art, either, but that didn't surprise me.

Under “Art,” the dictionary says: “Human effort to imitate, supplement, alter or counteract the work of Nature; 2) The conscious production or arrangement of sounds, colors, forms, movements or other elements in a manner that affects the sense of beauty . . .” Architecture seems to fit in there.

The trouble is that architecture has to serve too many practical purposes to be routinely called art. There is nothing artistic about most buildings, but some of the world's great structures certainly are art: the Taj Mahal, Chartres Cathedral, Notre Dame, the Pyramids, the George Washington and Golden Gate bridges, the Capitol in Washington, the Arc de Triomphe, the Parthenon and the Colosseum, the Alhambra in Granada, the Tower of London, the Duomo in Florence. One of the best buildings erected in recent years is the CBS headquarters building in New York, known affectionately as “Black Rock” because of the great color of its fired granite exterior.

It was unfortunate when some long-forgotten writer started calling tall buildings “skyscrapers.” The word sounds like a small joke and has none of the majesty or grace about it that some of our best tall buildings have. In their own modern way, much like the Chrysler Building, the Empire State Building and Rockefeller Center, the World Trade Center's twin spires were art, too, even though, as in the case of the other three buildings, ultimate decisions about their construction were dominated, not by how they would look to the eye but by what their function would be.

At the bottom end of architectural art are the homes we live in. Most of them have been put up by carpenters of modest ability and no aesthetic sense. Over the years, as families grew, homes have been enlarged with additions that were tacked on with no consideration given to their appearance. Even worse than the homes built without the direction of an architect are those mass-produced houses in residential “developments.” An architect draws plans for a basic house and makes small changes to alter its appearance, so that every fifth structure is identical to a previous one just down the street.

I hope some architectural genius designed a new World Trade Center that will meet all the specifications of work space, memory and art.

Nothing divides one generation from another so definitely as its popular music. Those who grew up listening to the Beatles are either not interested in, or actively dislike, the sound of rap, hip-hop or heavy metal.

One night I had a lot of time to think about music while I forced myself to stay up through four hours of Grammy Awards. I don't want to be left out of what's going on even if what's going on doesn't appeal to me.

The music of the youth of people my age was jazz and you'd have a hard time convincing any of us that Eminem, Bono or even the appealing multiple-Grammy-winner Norah Jones can match the musical talent of the great jazz musicians. It seems certain to us that people like Louis Armstrong, Dave Brubeck, Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie or Charlie Parker have a better chance of achieving a permanent place in the history of music than the Dixie Chicks. To prove I'm fair, I wouldn't give much chance to the other music of my youth known as “swing,” played by the forgettable Guy Lombardo.

Only occasionally does a musician's popularity span several generations. Frank Sinatra's did and so does that of Tony Bennett. (In spite of his limited talent, I'm soft on Tony because more than forty years ago I wrote a television show he did.)

The appreciation of music doesn't come naturally to me. My hearing is perfect. My shortcoming is listening. I hear better than I listen. My brain doesn't have whatever faculty it needs to understand carefully arranged sound. I want music to mean something that can be expressed with words and music doesn't do that. It's hard for me to believe there are any ideas expressed in the music of the Grammy Awards—or even
in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, for that matter. Maybe I'm asking something of music it isn't meant to provide. I accept that, but I don't accept the suggestion that there is something profound in the caterwauling of a rock group. Some of the appeal of music is the predictability and anticipation of rhythm and too much modern popular music doesn't even have that.

If art of any kind doesn't have an idea behind it, I'm not interested. I can do without artificially induced emotion. It accounts for my apathy toward the paintings of so many modern artists. I don't understand their work and if there isn't anything there to understand, I don't want to waste my time looking at it.

I remember reading once that Beethoven said music is a higher revelation than philosophy. I don't doubt Beethoven's genius with music but I don't agree with that.

The intellectual pleasure of listening to a symphony concert or an opera escapes me and, while I recognize this as my shortcoming, not the music's, it doesn't make it any easier for me to sit through a concert. My ability to appreciate music is limited to my recognition that consonance is soothing and dissonance is irritating. My idea of a good evening of music is a virtuoso performance by one talented singer or player of an instrument like a piano, guitar, saxophone, trombone or violin. There's something about the solitary sound that appeals to me more than a blend of many sounds from a hundred instruments. I keep trying to isolate one sound and cannot so it's cacophony to my ears, the audio entry to my brain.

It isn't clear how the brain makes sense of music so there's no way we're ever going to explain why some of us like some music that others do not like.

I do know one thing. Next year, when the Grammys are on television, for entertainment I'll just go to bed early.

Some time ago (actually quite a while), I read a story about a homeless man who struck it rich with a winning lottery ticket. It annoyed me because it was the kind of story that encourages idiocy.

The homeless or unemployed have no business buying lottery tickets, and if they do, they're only going to win about once every 5 million times. Because I was more irritated than amused, I amused myself by writing several news stories that are closer to the way things are more likely to happen.

First story:

A man known to the people who pass him everyday simply as “Big John” has been homeless for six years. Last week, Big John took the nickels and dimes he'd begged from passers-by and bought a $2 lottery ticket.

Yesterday, he was sleeping over a warm sidewalk grate when a windblown newspaper caught on his foot.

John looked at the headline announcing the winning lottery number, reached into his pocket, and with bleary eyes, read his lottery ticket. He didn't have the winning number, of course, and he went back to sleep, $2 poorer.

Next story:

Elizabeth and Esther Murray, twin daughters of Ralph and Mary Murray, were six when their parents divorced. It was agreed that the father would raise Elizabeth and the mother would raise Esther. Ralph Murray's job took him to Paris, where Elizabeth graduated from the Sorbonne and started a successful business designing and selling women's shoes. Back in the U.S., Esther dropped out of high school and was fired from several jobs. Hearing of a new French company opening an expensive women's shoe store in town, Esther
got an interview with the manager, a woman who had recently arrived from Paris.

When Esther was shown into the luxuriously furnished office, she saw a well-dressed woman seated behind the desk and her heart stopped. It wasn't her sister, Elizabeth, though, and she didn't get the job.

Last story:

The Santleys had lived for years on a quiet street in Nutley, N.J., with their beloved golden retriever, Dirk. John Santley's company decided to move to Seattle and if he wanted to keep his job, he had to move there.

The Santleys packed their worldly possessions and prepared to leave.

When movers arrived, Dirk was nowhere to be found. The Santleys delayed their trip for two days, but Dirk never returned home. Heartbroken, they left without him.

On their third day in Seattle, 2,900 miles from Nutley, the Santleys sat despondently over a second cup of coffee in their new kitchen, when they heard a scratching at the front door and the soft, pleading whine of a dog. Mr. Santley raced to the door, threw it open and there sat a small white poodle that looked nothing like Dirk.

The moral to all these stories is this:

If it sounds too good to be true, the chances are, it isn't true.

Every time someone makes a statement about abortion, capital punishment, affirmative action, Iraq, Hillary Clinton, George W. Bush, Pepsi-Cola or Coca-Cola, I disagree no matter which side the person is on.

Sometimes I don't know what to think, and if I do think it, I don't dare say it. It's not that I'm afraid of what people will think of me.

We didn't find the weapons of mass destruction that were supposed to be the reason we attacked Iraq. Should we blame the Bush administration
for lying to us to justify the action it took for some other, more devious reason? Gee, I don't know.

And, if we attacked Iraq because they had weapons of mass destruction, should we attack every nation that has them? Having such weapons isn't always bad, is it? We have them and we aren't bad. The British have them and they're our friends. The French have them. North Korea has them. China has them. Where do we start, where do we stop?

The Supreme Court decided that the University of Michigan can give black applicants for admission preference over white applicants with the same qualifications. I approve. If we're ever going to have racial equality we have to take positive steps to make the races equal.

Wait a minute, though. Does that mean it's OK to take race into consideration when we decide things? I thought it was always wrong. If you consider race in college admissions, you're admitting that it's OK to accept or reject a person because of his or her race. That's not right.

The question is too hard for me.

What about capital punishment? Is it ever right for a government to take the life of a person as punishment? It seems wrong to me. The United States is one of the few countries left in the civilized world that still puts people to death. Killing a prisoner reduces those who do it and all the citizens who approve of it, to the level of the criminal.

So then, I disapprove of the death penalty—Well, sort of. I do and I don't. Every time they decide to execute some particularly vicious murderer, I notice I'm willing to make an exception to my opposition to the death penalty. Why should we spend $60,000 a year providing food, housing and medical care for someone the world would be better off without? Is there any reason not to dispatch the creep David Westerfield, who sexually attacked, then murdered seven-year-old Danielle van Dam?

And then, there's abortion. Once again, I disendear myself to both sides by being on the fence, although I'm more often in agreement about other issues with the “pro-choice” people. “Pro-choice” is the
loaded name they've assumed for themselves in the propaganda war against those who call themselves “pro-life,” an equally loaded term.

But then, confronted with the demand for an answer to the question, “Don't you think a woman has the right to choose what to do with her own body?” one answer comes to my mind that “pro-choice” people don't like. That answer is: “She already made the choice of what to do with her body when she had sex with a man knowing it could result in the conception of a new human being.”