I went to school to learn how to play the bass. This thing:

And I’m not talking about jazz or bluegrass. I went to school for classical music. I had to take Powdered Wigs 101 and 102 in order to graduate.

Look at how shoddily this man wears his wig. I don’t even think he remembered to powder it! This is why an expensive university education is so important.

The skills I learned in school are not in high demand. The options open to me are to get a job in an orchestra (this is extremely competitive and an average of 2 orchestras go bankrupt a month in America) or as a classical bass soloist. No one is interested in hearing a classical bass soloist. Almost no one, that is. Your main audience is aspiring classical bass soloists and they are all fools.

As a result, I have a day job. At its core, a day job is doing something you don’t particularly like for money. It really sounds glamorous when I put it that way. I’m not so sure that a day job is a bad thing, though. When I look back at history I see that there may be some advantages to separating your creativity from your financial needs. Lets see some examples from my milieu, the Milieu of Classical Bass Soloists (MOCBS).

First let’s discuss Giovanni Bottesini.

He was known as the Paganini of the double bass. This means that he was Italian and played really fast for no good reason. Was he able to make his living as a bass soloist? No! Of course not! He was only the best bass soloist in the world. We don’t expect the best maker of paper hats to be able to make a living at it and playing the solo bass is even more worthless.

So what was he forced to do as his day job? He was an opera composer and conductor most of his life. While in America a job like that sounds worse than digging ditches, in Italy in the 1800s an opera composer and conductor was considered a respectable job like a janitor or door-to-door bible salesman. He even became somewhat well known as a conductor. But the shame must have been unbearable when Verdi asked him to conduct the premier of his opera Aida.

For us, though, there is no shame. We were robbed of an irrelevant bass soloist and given a musician of note. He would much rather have been performing his Concerto for Double Bass in B minor, but luckily music lovers got something worth listening to. Hooray for day jobs!

Next, there is Serge Koussevitzky.

Koussevitzky’s Bass Concerto in F# minor (the reason solo bass repertoire is all in stupid keys has to do with the fact that bass players hate you) is beloved by no one and the recordings of his playing are frankly ridiculous.

You’d think that someone who slides between all the notes would be able to end up in tune, but he manages to deftly avoid this. The tune is mildly charming but wouldn’t it be more charming on a cello? The problem is that a cellist has repertoire by actual composers like Haydn or Brahms and doesn’t need to play cutesy garbage composed by a nobody.

Once again we can look to the day job for salvation. To avoid starvation, Koussevitzky became conductor of the Boston Symphony in 1924. He used his frustration as an artist to turn that group into a real orchestra and conducted the premiers of excellent modern music and commissioned a lot of it. If it weren’t for Koussevitzky we would not have Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms or Gershwin’s Second Rhapsody. If people were interested in solo bass playing those pieces maybe would never have been written.

Finally, we have Gary Karr. Due to globalization people can increasingly specialize. As a result, Gary Karr didn’t need to get a day job. This is what we get:

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH!!!!

Just look at this screen shot:

What’s so funny Gary? Is it that you are playing a boring Baroque sonata and making enough money to live on? That is pretty funny. There are a lot of people playing music worth listening to who can’t make that claim so I guess all of life is a sick comedy. We have to wonder what he would have been able to contribute to the world if only he were forced to have a day job. My guess is he would have designed the Guggenheim. Or maybe he would have been I. M. Pei. Definitely something in architecture.

Join Another Flavor next week when I return to my day job and stop sitting around my house thinking about the double bass.

-PTD

It has been pointed out to me (remember, aspiring writers: passive voice makes you sound super smart [I mean: You are made to sound super smart by passive voice]) that my recently introduced feature, Sartorial Sursday, has not been effectively living up to its name. First off, Sursday isn’t “technically” a day of the week. Secondly, satorial means “of or having to do with tailoring,” (I’d like to cite my source, my 8th grade vocabulary book, but I have no idea what it was called. Let’s go with Vocab Up Your Ass.) but I have not really discussed the cut of clothing or the quality of the stitching in my posts.

I’d like to address these criticisms head on. I believe it was Gandhi who said, “I’d love to convince you that I am right with words, but it is generally easier to hunger strike.” Truer words have never ( ever! ) been spoken, but I get headaches when I am hungry so I’ll try to explain myself using English words typed on a computer and transferred, through world-wide- web-related magic, to your computer screen to be read using your eye-grapes.

Point number 1: The existence of “Sursday” as a day of the week. Now, if you look at most of the calendars “the man” wants you to use, you will not find Sursday listed. I did not invent it, though. I stole it from the musician Peacey P whose album perpetually “drops next Sursdai.” Once two people use an English word it instantly becomes legit and we can expect to see it in the next edition of the Oxford English dictionary which I believe will drop next Sursday.

Point number the second: Actually writing about tailoring. This is difficult for me because I don’t know anything about tailoring. I know that Motel Kamzoil was a tailor and that the emperor isn’t wearing clothes but that barely makes me expert enough to write an article for about.com. I will endeavor to do my best, though, by writing about a music video that is about tailoring.

Does such a thing exist, you ask? Sort of. Losing You by Solange:

Specifically take a look at this:

See! The video takes place at a tailoring shop. This post is decidedly on topic! Yes! I’m finally doing it!

Now, on to the history of the saxophone. The saxophone was invented in 1840 by Adolphe Phone. He also famously invented the other instruments in the phone family, the sousaphone and the xylophone. The saxophone, commonly associated with the homeless and filthy, was legitimized in 1992 when Bill Clinton became the first person to play saxophone while wearing a suit. Many people took note of it and started dressing better, frequently wearing tailored clothing. (More details can be found in the Norton Anthology of Saxophone Histories, volumes 1

• 4, and 6. DO NOT read volume 5.)

Eventually Solange discovered this and made a music video while wearing a suit and was joined by a bunch of dudes in suits.

Okay, I think we are back on track. Tailoring. I’m not super interested in the outfit shown here, although it is quite Christmas-y. (Yes, I am fighting the war on Holiday. Have a great Christmas this January 1, January 20, and July 4. It is offensive to call those days Holidays. They are Christmas.)

Whoops, almost got lost again. Tailoring! Look at this:

Try to ignore those two nattily dressed gentlemen. Look at Solange. First of all, long sleeves and shorts are usually a misteak. I mean, mistake. I don’t even think you can call those shorts because they don’t have any leg sections. I think it would be more appropriate to call them “parts coverers”. Also, those are some high waisted parts coverers! I did some research and discovered that Solange is a mother so those must be the parts coverer equivalent of mom jeans. Crazy.

Next, look at this:

It is vital to match your outfit to the wallpaper, even if the wallpaper is made out of magazine covers. Solange is clashing here and that is a major faux pas.

Next week we’ll see if I can include a little tailoring again on Sartorial Sursday. In the meantime, look forward to an exciting edition of Free-for-all Friday tomorrow.

-PTD

In Get Lucky, Daft Punk tells us:

She’s up all night ‘til the sun
I’m up all night to get some
She’s up all night for good fun
I’m up all night to get lucky

This paints a clear picture. Women are out to party and have fun and men are trying to have sex with them. This is the usual narrative. How can a man trick a woman into sleeping with him? Here’s my message to any young men out there: If you need to trick a woman into having sex with you then she doesn’t really want to have sex with you. It is my firm belief, and also the belief of all right thinking, moral Americans, that you should only have sex with people who want to have sex with you. If you find that you need to resort to tricks maybe you should work on developing a better personality or get a killer butt and ass-less chaps. I’ve also found that rakishly winking at women while shouting communist slogans gets great results exactly 20% of the time.

I think I got a little off track there, but it is an important message. Anyways, if you are doing it right you can find women who, without tricks, are interested in sex. Do you know why? Because women want to have sex too! Just ask Salt-N-Pepa:

This song is fun! I especially love how the opening line sets up the song, “Here I go again. Girls, what’s my weakness? Men!” The video starts with Pepa flirting.

She is interested in this man.

She sees him out on the boardwalk and is super into him. She asks for his number. “A ho, no that don’t make me. See what I want slip slide to it swiftly,” she says. Yes! Women should be able to chase men and it doesn’t make them hos. This is great. I think this whole song has a really positive message.

The video, on the other hand, gets confused. She is singing about seeing a stranger, feeling “it in my hips”, and then wanting to have sex with him. If the genders were reversed and this was a song by men wanting to have sex with women the whole video would be sexy women on the beach jumping around. Instead, we get this:

It makes no sense! Did the person directing this video not listen to the song? There should be men dancing and thrusting their parts around! The sign should say MEN MEN MEN. It’s raining men! MEN! This is a real bummer. The video is shot from a man’s view and it pretty much ruins the message of the song.

The second verse doesn’t fare much better. The women, Salt in an amazing hat, go to a basketball game.

There is a pretty good part where Salt says, “I wanna know how does it hang,” and the man responds like this:

I imagine he is saying, “This big.” I would hope so because otherwise I can’t see a reason for those baggy shorts. Based on the content of the song I think the man should be wearing short shorts and doing this:

The third verse brings the women to the beach.

Finally we get some hot man action.

This little piece of man-on-man face-to-butt stuff is pretty good, but neither of them seem to be enjoying it.

Then we get this man.

Finally:

Okay, this is what I’m talking about.

This video finally gets on the right track. Then, though, they have a man do a verse! What?!? Salt sees this man and gets very excited.

All the women crowd around him.

Just when things were going well everything gets screwed up again. Rather than confidently seeing this man and trying to pick him up, the women are just fawning over him. You never see the guys in Ratt doing this to a woman, so I don’t want to see Salt or Pepa doing it.

The video ends with some of the right stuff.

Those guys in the background are wearing the right type of shorts.

Everything except for the look on this guy’s face is good:

And then there is the men grabbing each other in the butt area.

I think this video really missed a great opportunity to say something about gender and sex in music videos. I guess it did say something. It said that women are the sexual objects that we want to look at, no matter who sings the song or what it is about. I guess I just wished it said something else.

Note: Due to the religious holiday I will not be posting tomorrow, December 24, or the day after, December 25. I’ll return on Sursday!

-PTD