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

I recently went on a long car trip. My car is from 1997 and has neither CD nor tape playing capabilities. It also gets terrible radio reception. This means that I usually only have one option for radio stations while driving through rural areas. These stations, of course, play country music.

Country music means a lot of things to a lot of people. To some people it means pedal steel and fiddles. To others, it means twang. To me, it means country pride. What is country pride? People with country pride were raised poor and rural with old-fashioned values. They are proud of this fact. I think this is terrible. Achewood said it best, “Oh Lord but we’ve got country pride simply because we were able to escape starvation in the richest nation in the history of the world.”

There’s a certain fondness always placed on the past. Cracker Barrel had an advertising slogan: “If the world has a front porch like we did back then.” First of all, that isn’t even a sentence. Second off, what the hell does that mean? It means that things were better in the past without saying why or how. It is just understood. That is at the core of country pride. Things used to be better when everything was simpler. The world was smaller and we had less money, but we were happier. This past is something to be proud of.

Why would you be proud of being poor? Being poor is the easiest thing in the world! I don’t mean it is easy to live a good life if you are poor or even to live a life at all. I mean that it is easy to become poor. More people are doing it every day in America. You shouldn’t be ashamed of being poor, but it is nothing to be proud of, either. If you are proud of it, it means that you think there is something noble to being poor. That it makes you a better person. And that if your kids are living a better life than you, they are weak and ultimately worse off. Well, guess what? [Kids now are likely going to be poorer than their parents](http://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/oct/12/middle-class-young- people-future-worse-parents) so I guess these kids will be more noble and thus better off. Great!

I think that we, as a country, should be trying to reduce the number of poor people, and that means we stop glamorizing a poor childhood. Look at this:

This music video is pretty terrible. What does the American Southwest have to do with anything? I’ll assume the video was filmed in Arizona to celebrate the deportation of brown Americans. That’s something to be proud of.

The lyrics to this song really show what country pride is all about. The singer’s father says, “We were cane switch raised and dirt floor poor. ‘Course, that was back before the war.” The chorus goes on to say, “That’s something to be proud of.” So, you were hit with a switch and you couldn’t even afford a floor. But this was during the depression, right? No. The verse mentions his father flying an F-15. F-15s didn’t enter service until 1976. Since the Vietnam War ended in 1975, either his father doesn’t know what kind of plane he was flying or the war they refer to is the Gulf War. Anyways, based on the singer’s age, I believe they are talking about fighting in Vietnam so these people are proud of living in the dirt during the 1960s. I guess the thing they are proud of is not being dead?

I really don’t want to disparage poor people here, that is not my goal. My goal is to separate the pride in overcoming obstacles from the pride in having obstacles. Nowhere in this song is there any mention of real success that people are proud of. I can see being proud of overcoming all of the difficulties poor people face. I don’t think that is what is happening here. I think the singer is proud of being poor in the first place. The second chorus states, “Just be thankful that you’re working, if you’re doing what you’re able and putting food there on the table.” Having a job and food should be basic rights that every American can expect. Right? Or should people have to struggle to not starve? I don’t think there is anything noble in that struggle and that we should be ashamed of ourselves as a country that we have hungry people.

People should be able to expect more. I can’t imagine having to put all my energies towards getting enough food. I have a job, but I don’t like it very much. I’m glad that I have a job, but I’m mostly frustrated that it is difficult to find a new one. Am I spoiled? Am I an ungrateful little shit? I don’t think so (obviously). I think it is reasonable to expect more out of life than working at a shitty job to barely make enough money not to starve. Everyone should have more than that. People should have reasonably fulfilling jobs and make enough money to be able to afford food, housing, and health care plus a little more. Anything less than that is not something we, as a country, can be proud of.

So we have two options. We can follow the Dead Kennedys’ advice, or we can stop it with the country pride and start helping poor people. Because that is, ultimately, what country pride amounts to. Being proud that you didn’t starve even though nobody helped you.

-PTD

“The ham sandwich theorem takes its name from the case when n = 3 and the three objects of any shape are a chunk of ham and two chunks of bread — notionally, a sandwich — which can then all be simultaneously bisected with a single cut (i.e., a plane).” - from Wikipedia

Wow! They (who?) say open with a quote and I sure picked a doozy today. I think I’m going to throw the clause, “notionally a sandwich,” into some of my conversation and see just what kind of friends I make.

Today is the first edition of Free-for-all Friday where I let my inhibitions run wild and write about whatever catches my fancy. I’ve been thinking a lot about sandwiches lately. Ham sandwiches in particular. What is it about a ham sandwich that makes it the go-to ‘wich? Muslims and Jews don’t eat them, for one thing. That can’t be the only reason, though.

There is also no real standard for what constitutes a ham sandwich. You have ones like this:

That seems like mostly just two pieces of bread that might have something between them. On the opposite end of the spectrum you have this:

That’s really more of a pile of meat than a sandwich. Finally, there is this:

That is practically a work of art. But would you eat it?

Which brings us to this video:

The video seems to be for children based on the name.

However, the letters are talking about how they are so hungry. They can’t eat. Is it because they are too poor? Is it because they are letters and letters, obviously, can’t eat? Is it because the bounds of their mouths sometimes move past the edges of their bodies? This does make us wonder where anything put into they mouth would go. I think children would be terrified by this gang.

Anyways, they decide to sing about sandwiches and they’ve gotta do it…

OLD SCHOOL! No child would understand this.

One of the sandwiches they sing about is the BLT, which for some reason in this song contains cheese.

That’s crazy, right? Does every sandwich need cheese? It isn’t the BCLT!

The song does bring up the ham sandwich question. Naturally cheese is included.

Based on this song a ham sandwich is two pieces of bread with ham and possibly other ingredients (cheese, mustard, mayonnaise). That is our definition.

Armed with this, we can immediately reject the band Ham Sandwich (possibly Ham SandwicH?!?) who appears to be from some sort of foreign country where they speak English. Since this is ostensibly a music video blog you may watch a mildly interesting video for their song Ants:

It’s fine. In it an ant makes dinner and then is foiled in his suicide attempt by a human woman.

Okay, now I think we are ready for our top 5 list, alluded to in the title of this post. I’m proud to present Another Flavor’s Top 5 Ham Sandwiches. As is traditional, we will start from number 5 and work our way up to number 1.

Number 5 :

I like that this ham sandwich is coming soon. It is important for sandwiches to arrive promptly when desired.

Number 4 :

Is this ham sandwich grilled or something? That seems amazing. The cheese looks melted and a bit greasy, but in a good way.

Number 3 :

I feel like there’s something interesting and exciting happening here. Is everything shredded up and all mixed together in there? I don’t know but I’d love to find out.

Number 2 :

This ham sandwich is boldly frank. There is something about the thick slices of tomato and big folds of ham that is really exciting. This sandwich is not fancy, but it is lots of what you want and nothing you don’t.

And now, the ham sandwich you’ve been waiting for, Another Flavor’s Top Ham Sandwich. Number 1 :

This one is really for connoisseurs. Is that a sesame bagel or just a hearty sesame roll? The round shape goes well with the [pile-of-ham approach](http://www.theguardian.com/football/2013/nov/24/premierleague- westhamunited) to the meat. It appears that there is no cheese to distract from the flavor of high quality ham. Excellent looking sandwich. WOOOOOOOOOO!

I’ll be back on Monday. Have a wonderful weekend.

-PTD