Music, the Poconos

So I just spent the past two days in a resort/timeshare in the Pocono mountains, near the Delaware Water Gap, sitting with my father and my brother-in-law David on plastic couches, swapping cds and talking. This was technically the "Manis Girls' Weekend"--an annual event (as of last year) brought about by the passing of my Grandma Bea and her imprecation to my Aunt Judy to "keep the girls together." Somehow the men of the family ended up as part of the whole thing--we get our own townhouse and do not see the females for three days. It's kinda silly, but kinda fun too. It's really the only time I ever get to spend basically one-on-one with my pops.

Last year it was just me and him in the Boys' house. We canoed down the Delaware river for four hours, which caused me to get heatstroke (because, like a complete idiot, I failed to put on any sunscreen) and be confined to my bed for the rest of the day and night. This year, it was me, David (my sister's husband) and my Dad, and outside there raged a biblical storm--so it was vinyl, beer, whiskey and music, punctuated by a couple of meals out.

My dad just got an ipod--60GB--and is in a process, not unlike the Google/Library of Congress Scan Everything Project, of putting all of his music into it. Mostly he has jazz (an extensive collection based on recommendations by a dour but aesthetically acute uncle of mine who sometimes writes Jazz criticism in magazines) and old musicals like Brigadoon. On this visit, he was open to new influences, so I chose a stack of my CDs for him to rip, including some fairly challenging (for my dad) material ( Gogol Bordello, Radiohead) , and some tamer stuff (Beth Orton, Nick Drake).

While we were ripping CDs, we talked about why I hate Frank Sinatra: how our generation has a completely different sense of authenticity in music from my dad's generation--I find most crooners (johnny Hart, Johnny Mathis, Sinatra, Bennett) soulless and difficult to tolerate. My dad, on the other hand, can't seem to get into Bob Dylan. "That voice! It's like nails on a chalkboard! How did that guy ever get a recording contract?!"

We also talked about musical self-education: how David and I, when we were kids, systematically bought and listened to everybody IMPORTANT (to modern music)--Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles, The Velvet Underground, the Sex Pistols. How nowadays we just listen to whatever we have any reason at all to believe we might like--because the foundational understanding is there to anchor anything new that comes along. That sounds kind of fusty and square--like all new music must somehow be contextualized within the neural net of everything that's come before in order to have meaning...but I suppose it's true, for me, that most worthwhile pieces of art can be understood better in relation to their influences, than simply on their own terms.

We listened to Kurt Vonnegut being interviewed on the radio. His advice to writers was something like: "Write in such a way that your reader will not feel that his time has been wasted."

On the way back home, we passed a kind of Bosnia of roadside deer corpses, including that of a very tiny fawn. It was quite sad. I don't understand why there were so many recently dead deer along that one stretch of route 80--there were six or seven.

In other animal news, there was a family of groundhogs living in a huge hole/tunnel at the foot of the steps to our townhouse. Every time we would come home, they would run out from under the house (God knows what they get up to under there...) and disappear into the hole like three fat croquet balls in quick succession. Also, there was a small bird with a worm in its mouth who kept trying to peck through the sliding glass door this morning. When that failed, he tried running against it a couple of times.

What else shall I tell you, dear reader? Let's leave it there, for now.

--Jason