The Man Who Wore Mismatched Socks

Persistence. And How it Relates to Fun.

Fun.

Is it going to a beach and drinking oneself into a stupor?

I have heard students speak this way a lot in recent years. Sometimes dental and other students, whose parents I know are cutting checks for tens of thousands of dollars every semester, talk about their three vacations a year to the Caribbean, the goal being to drink and eat and overall to be a hedonist, presumably to escape from the process of learning a scarce set of skills and making a difference for people.

What??

My older daughter wanted to go away on her Spring Break last year. She went to Israel and helped build a community center, as well as performing some other service projects. The raw contrast of her actions to "Wasting away in Margaritaville", if I may quote a song, made me so proud of her. A particularly fine nuance is that she often had a glass of wine at dinner, but the focus of her trip was making a difference, not the wine. The wine was incidental, a normal part of a meal in Israel.

Our modern American society has trained (read brainwashed) us to believe that having fun is being mindless, turning off everything and "zoning out" as an escape from the battles that we fight every day. Pop culture celebrates the outrageous Spring Break, the celebrity cribs and Jersey Shore hedonists and Kardashians (I don't even know how many sisters there are and don't tell me!) who do absolutely nothing for a living and yet get paid more in a year for it than I will probably make in my lifetime.

But is oblivion the best form of fun? Not to me it ain't.

Many forms of fun make a difference for others. My daughter's help with the community center for instance. Coaching a fledgling business owner in Permission Marketing and seeing their company grow because of it. Getting a few interesting folks together and solving an interesting problem.

Other forms of fun are just for ourselves and our friends. A game of basketball, a group bike ride, taking an easel out on the Drive and painting Boathouse Row and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Writing in public.

I see evidence that corporations and the marketers out there despise when we do this sort of thing. They want us to consume their content, not create our own. They want us watching the game, the reality TV show, buying their music. Seeing their film in the theater at an outrageous price, to push the box office total to record levels.

Well, we have near-infinite choice now. The world is all cluttered and messy, and we can cut through the clutter with Google on a computer and even on our cell phone and find whatever we want, whenever we want, wherever we want. This newfound power leads us to ignore the mass market more than ever before, which leads the mass market to yell at us louder than ever before so that we pay attention to them, which leads us to ignore them even more, etc. in a vicious cycle in which the consumer is bound to win in the long term.

Because we can.

The key, though, the absolute, vitally important key to all this, is that we create, not just consume. Oh, sure, we can consume content often. Sometimes movies, books and sport are great fun. They may even educate or edify us. More and more, though, we wish to create things on our own, and the power to do that is increasingly in our hands, not in the hands of some omnipotent Gatekeepers of power and knowledge.

Join me then as one of the characters in my novel, Dr. Peter Saunterton, demonstrates this restless creativity by his words and actions. Aloysius and Victoria are about to be married in 1944. Aloysius and his father, Archibald, own the Gack&Bacon Ltd brewery. Peter and Nancy Saunterton are the parents of the bride.

Dr. Peter Saunterton goes a long way to have fun, that is for sure. Many of us might prefer something a little simpler and immediate. But he is creating and contributing. He and Aloysius share an odd but intense interest in wainscoting and Boiserie.  (For the explanation behind that, I'm afraid you will have to wait on the novel's release.) I will say that I like presenting odd niches rather than always dealing with highly popular things; this is one of my themes. Anyway let's listen in as Dr. Peter hammers the people who live in, well, Margaritaville...

*****

1944

And so it came to pass that  Victoria and Aloysius were to be married by Vicar Grahame Henley in his Benevolentia Ilustre church. This was also the preferred choice of Nancy and Peter Saunterton, even over their own parish. They were familiar with Reverend Henley’s virtuosity on the harpsichord and both quite taken with the vitality, intelligence and noble spirit of his sermons. Also Peter was bewitched by the splendid wainscoting in Henley’s vicarage. He was “on one of his rampages”, as Nancy termed his more obsessive academic pursuits, in an attempt to identify the artisan who had created it. When she had teased him about it as they were planning their children’s wedding, he had sent Archibald into gales of laughter with his defence, spoken excitedly with wide-eyed innocence: “But Nancy, my dear, ferreting out this artisan and elucidating the connections between him and the others that we know of in his period could totally redefine our understanding of English wainscoting and interior wall treatments!”

It was, indeed, 11:59 for more than just Archibald and his brewery, and the elder Gack was more than a little pleased to find a kindred spirit among his future relations.

1957

Dr. Peter Saunterton banged open the front door to the Gack&Bacon brewery complex and strode onto the main floor. Normally the very politest of creatures, most especially so to his dear wife Nancy, on this occasion he left her to her own devices, which involved re-opening the heavy oaken door which her husband had just let close in her face.

“His name was Blaise Bonenffant!” he exclaimed, hair disheveled, wild look in his eyes. “I found him!!”

Archibald, Greinhalm and Canfield looked up from their fermenting tanks in complete puzzlement. The elder Gack spoke: “Found who, Peter?”

“Blaise Bonenffant, the artisan, nay, artist, we must call him that now, who created that magnificent wainscoting in the vicarage at Benevolentia Ilustre. I found him!”

Nancy Saunterton sauntered up, looking a mixture of cross and amused.

Archibald straightened up to his full height, jutted out his bearded chin and quietly intoned, “Bloody well took you long enough, Peter. Now have a go at the woodwork in Admiral Heaneage’s house. He rubbed away half the detail with his white glove inspections, so you’ll have your work cut out for you!”

Dr. Peter laughed; he always enjoyed the way Archibald managed to come up with wainscoting jokes, no small feat considering that most folk, for some inscrutable reason, didn’t find this, the most elegant of uses of wood, to be very exciting.

Drawn by the commotion, Aloysius came up, Lauren in tow. It being the Saturday, they had been down by the Thames again, exploring nature as she enjoyed so much. “What’s up, Fathers?” he asked.

Archibald: “Your father-in-law has discovered something that will surely rock the world of architectural history to its core.” An impish grin sprang to life under his white beard.

Not even noticing the hyperbole, Peter went on, “I’ve found the creator of that magnificent wainscoting in the vicarage at Benevolentia Ilustre. His name is Blaise Bonenffant. Two ‘f’s, like many a good Norman name.”

Aloysius’ eyes widened considerably. “That is splendid news. Absolutely topping! Do you know much about him?”

Archibald groaned. Now they were going to prattle on all afternoon about it.

“Well, his life spanned from 1700 even to 1771. So, to put it in perspective, he was twenty and greatly affected financially by the South Sea Bubble, was rather lucky to have missed the Boston Tea Party and all that controversy, and he saw five monarchs: William III, Anne, George I, II and III. Not a bad show, what?”

“Certainly not!” beamed his son-in-law. “We have records that show that our brewery was most active during the reign of that rather difficult man, George II. People must have preferred to face his shenanigans in a mildly inebriated state. Though he was the last English king to lead an army in battle, at Dettingen…”

“Quite so, quite so, Aloysius. A complex monarch, to be sure! Anyway as to Bonenffant’s style, I can trace certain elements to Jethro Nagle, yet there is also a strong influence from Beerepoot Grodefoote, that brilliant Dutch fellow who I’ve studied so intently for years!”

The ever-pragmatic Greinhalm intoned, “May I ask- is this research for a textbook, or part of a course that you teach?”

Brows furrowed in thought. “Well, not precisely. I mean to say, certainly all my findings shall work their way into my course on the history of interior design. And I shall certainly write a paper on Bonenffant. But, no, at the moment, this has all simply been for fun.”

“You’re insane!” sang Canfield. “This has taken you over a decade!”

“Well… If something is important to us, and better yet, brings us joy, we have to show up. Again and again and again. People commonly think that fun is the easy stuff. Sitting back and getting drunk, or watching someone else play a sport, or whiling away the time with idle gossip. The truth is quite different.” Here Peter took on a very professorial air, waving his hands about as if he were speaking to his students about the Belgian Golden Age of Dutch Elm Boiserie. “The truth is, it is far more fun to brew a beer, to play a sport, and to give a meaningful talk on a subject than all that other foolishness. Fun is hard!” And here he laughed lightly at his own paradox, showing that he wasn’t taking himself quite as seriously as it appeared.

Nancy chimed in: “As many years as I’ve been suffering with his going on these intellectual rampages, I must admit that my dear husband is right. I once spent six months trying to master one of the voices in Josquin’s Missa Malheur me bat. Once I’d got it, it was so satisfying that Peter threw me a party, just as if it was my birthday. And I can tell you, that party meant more than some silly reminder of how old I am.”

Peter positively beamed at his wife. She understood him. What a magnificent thing that was.

Count Basie Swings The Pig & Trebuchet

In March of 1947 Count Basie and his Orchestra came to The Pig & Trebuchet for the first time. Like everything the Gacks tried to do there, this event was different from the average. Most concerts or dance sessions at any venue with any of the famous Big Bands followed a pattern of people paying, people filing in, then everyone listening or dancing or perhaps drinking to the music, and then everyone filing out.

 No matter how much fun the actual music and dancing might be, the stultifying routine of the rest of it was simply not the sort of thing that would do at The Pig & Trebuchet.

And so this gig was different. There were twice the number of sets, each half as long as usual. Between sets, patrons could freely mingle with the band, asking questions, talking shop if they were musicians themselves, and just generally connecting. With a room that held a maximum of 150 patrons, plus staff, this was actually feasible. Some of the Big Bands and other performers who had achieved great fame wanted none of this; they wanted the Fourth Wall to remain solidly intact, and strenuously avoided close contact with their fans whenever they could.

Count Basie loved it, though.

That was partly because of the sort of person he was, Aloysius could tell by the talk they had that afternoon, before the show. Yet The Count understood something vitally important too, something that Aloysius had learned from his father early on. It was one thing to sell some vast number of records, measured in the hundreds of thousands, and to pack concert halls and smaller venues with apparent ease. But Count Basie knew that his real audience wasn’t ten thousand. It wasn’t a hundred thousand either.

It was one.

By influencing (and perhaps delighting) one person at a time, Basie recognized that he would influence many more, and in a tighter, more powerful way than the mass marketing of his label could ever manage. A fan who had had a chance to really talk to him, or to guitarist Freddy Green, or to drummer Jo Jones- such a fan would tell twenty, fifty, perhaps even a hundred people about the experience over the course of many weeks. The ripple effects would be huge. Fans, old and new, would think about and talk about the relatively strong tie that was formed by face to face interaction for quite some time. Advertising, no matter how clever, was far too weak an influence to form attitudes this strongly held.

Aloysius was working behind the bar on this night. He did that fairly often. It was an extraordinary exercise in quirkiness- the owner of a substantial brewing concern working the taps for his customers. Yet it was the same concept- talking personally to The One, not yelling at The Many. He did relish seeing their enjoyment at his products and services, and there was no better place to do it from. He also particularly wanted to serve the band members, as they were all such friendly and interesting chaps. Victoria joined him. She was a huge fan of The Count and his music. The man had incredible "chops"- the basic set of musical skills a musician possesses, particularly in jazz. He could shed arpeggios with blinding speed. And yet he often started a piece or took a solo with just a few spare notes. Why did he forego musical density for minimalism so often?  Victoria wasn’t sure what was in his mind, but she had her theory. He may have only played a few notes, but they were excellent notes. They mattered. Basie also understood that the spaces between the notes were just as important, if not more so, than the notes themselves. Such a lesson in human communication! He always left his audience wanting more.

The event was a huge success. The frequent breaks and the favourable ratio between the musicians in a Big Band to the fans in a small “joint” such as The P&T allowed all kinds of fascinating conversations to spring up all throughout the evening. What pleased Aloysius the most however was Count Basie himself.

It was obvious that he was the one who had the very best time of all.

 
(Count Basie signed this picture to me when I was 13 years old. He wrote: "To Rick, Basie '74." This magnificent musician- and magnificent human being- also talked to me and my Dad during an entire one of his breaks. I chatted with his second alto sax man Curt Pegler during another. I am so happy to honor them and all his band members with this passage in my story.)

The Cards We're Dealt

How often are we called upon to do the best with the cards we're dealt, lousy as they might be at times?

Have a peek at a passage towards the end of the novel that asks this question, as Gack is given his photo recon target for his ultra-low-flying night reconnaisance plane, the magnificent Hapax One.

*****

“Yes. Well. In any event, your photo recon target is at the Ctpyktypa Hotel, a 19-story building on Kurortnii Prospect, right on the Black Sea Coast, with 330 rooms, its own private beach, fitness center, congress hall, 6 luxurious villas, tennis courts, and an extraordinarily large dance floor surrounded by tables and multiple bars.”

“The Russians do like their vodka, Major.”

“Indeed they do. Oh, and Gack, it will be a little light. August 18th, the Saturday night in question, is only four days away from the full moon.”

“I’d never have figured that out in my head, Major. I’m very calendar challenged. In any event. Considering your bloody mountains, that will make me quite happy.”

“Yes, but you’re going to have a lot more moonlight than we consider ideal. You’ll be able to see the mountains well enough to avoid them, which is good. But any MiGs will be able to see you a lot better than on your previous missions.”

“Which is bad.”

“Yes. Sorry about that, Gack. But we can’t miss this party.”