Unpopular Culture

Art I Like (#3 in an Occasional Series): Edith Piaf

Last night, on the spur of the moment (and on a faint recollection of an afternoon's high-school French class), I downloaded Edith Piaf's "Non, je ne regrette rien."

Zut alors, but that's a hell of a song. She doesn't exactly belt it out - her voice is too controlled and, really, human for that - but she milks it for every beautiful syllable. When she hits those trilling r's in "rien," it is positively electric. And the musicianship is awe-inspiring: the fourth time through the main verse, as the music rises behind her, she waits a fraction of a beat before letting the "Rien de rien" line fly. One needn't even understand every word - I can't make out more than half the lyrics - to understand the defiance inherent in her clean, crisp tone. Even the cheesy musical accompaniment (horns and strings) can't detract, and actually adds to, her brilliant delivery.

[Edited, 9/30/04: emended with additional materials]

Hot, Steamy Action

It's the middle of September, and here in Minnesota, the air already tastes like a yellow-red fall and its white consequent. The early dusks, the cloak of cold air that settles on your shoulders, and above all the scent of wood-burning stoves make me, a good half-Finnish American, long for a sauna. This travelogue of a sauna tour through Finland only makes me want a sauna - the event or the place - more.

Growing up in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan amidst lots of suomalainen-amerikkalainen, I was lucky enough to have saunas nearby all the time. I didn't know it at the time, but (according to the article above) the saunas were all the best kind, the ones Finns call a "smoke sauna."

For five years, I lived with my family on my grandfather's farm in North Ironwood, an district populated by Finnish-Americans who, like my grandpa, bought farmsteads with money earned from a few years of backbreaking labor in the iron mines. Next door we had the Estolas and the Niemis, across Pump Station Road were the Jarvis, and all around us were other Tassavas. For many of those Tassavas and for many of my grandpa's ancient "Finlander" friends, Saturday night meant coming over, "talking Finn" over some boiled coffee, and then taking a long sauna in the little square building behind the farmhouse, just at the edge of the front 40 acres.

Grandpa, or maybe my dad or his brother Marvin, started the stove up before dinner, stoking it with tinder and then adding logs they'd cut in the back 40 and skidded home with the old International Harvester truck and a modified Farmall tractor. The smell of that wood burning in the sauna wafted through the whole house: dry and hot and inviting. Depending on who came that day, my family went out to the sauna when we had the chance. I remember the dressing room always smelled of damp heat. Even in winter, there were often spiders climbing the walls, enjoying the heat and the moisture and sometimes falling into the towels you left out there with the boxes of Lifebuoy soap.

But the reason for being out there - the reason for being Finnish - was in the next room: that huge roaring stove, set on a concrete floor, paired with a tall cistern full of increasingly hot water, and blazing with the hours-old fire. You walked over a plank platform to get from the dressing-room door to the two benches along the wall opposite the stove. One of the benches was low, at about the height of a chair, while the other - where I loved to sit - was much higher, so that an adult's head nearly reached the ceiling of the sauna room. A special sauna thermometer hung on the wall about as far from the stove as you could get. I was always awed by the brutal honesty of that thermometer's round face, for it included "normal" temperatures - your fifties, your eighties - but soared all way up to 200 degrees, which occupied the midnight position on its dial.

You needed that upper range because the whole point of the sauna was the steam. After a moment of settling in and getting used to the immensely dry heat, one of us - usually my dad, a full-blooded Finlander, but sometimes my sister or me - would take a long dipper from the cistern and toss the water onto the heap of smooth Lake Superior stones atop the stove. The instant, satanic eruption of steam - , the loyly - was literally spine-tingling. My hair would prickle, sweat would pour out of my body, and that thermometer's needle would jump from 150 to 180.

We would make a loyly periodically throughout our stay in the sauna, spiking the temperature again and again. Being a nerd then and now, I often took a volume of the World Book encyclopedia into the sauna with me (a juvenile indulgence equivalent to, but less hazardous than, the couple beers my dad often took in with him). My mom still has all the volumes, and you can still see the steam-warped pages. Finally, after what felt like hours but was probably no more than thirty minutes, we all washed off with soap and hot water from the cistern. Back to the dressing area to towel off, back into our clothes, back along the path through the cold night air to the farmhouse. After a sauna, sleep is an onrushing inevitability, because your body temperature dips and your consciousness plunges with it. But the sleep is peaceful and very, very warm.

Alas, it's unlikely that I'll get to indulge myself anytime in the near future. Unless, that is, the New York Times wants to send me and my family to Finland for a look at sauna culture in Helskinki, Espoo, Lahti, and above all, Tassavanlahti , which is apparently my family's ancestral home near Keitele. Heck, at this point I'd be happy with a long weekend in Embarrass, Minnesota, which is one of the most Finnish towns in America . But someday, that empty half of the garage will be walled off, two benches will be installed opposite a big cast-iron stove, a few cords of wood will be stacked up along the wall, and I'll be able to sauna again.

(A final note: If you're like most Americans, you've probably been pronounced "sauna" like SAW-nah. Stop it, or at least only say it that way at the freaking health club. Sanaa is a city in Yemen , not a kind of steam bath. The word is pronounced SOWW-nah.)

Art I Like (#2 in an Occasional Series): William Gibson

William Gibson, the science-fiction novelist, has to be numbered among the most important fiction writers of the 1980s and 1990s. His frequent books are mostly set in a near American future, but a couple are set in the imagined past or even the present, which makes him an especially accessible - and debatable - SF thinker. Not for him are wacked-out alien worlds of Kim Stanley Robinson or the sheer weirdness of Neal Stephenson. Rather, Gibson likes to imagine life in San Francisco after the Big One, or, more radically and importantly, the social effects of the rise of a worldwide computer network, which he famously called "cyberspace." Not a bad word to have coined, or idea to have, in a real sense, invented.

Gibson's novels are loaded with fascinating ideas and increasingly well-rounded characters (including quite a few women who are actual people, not a male writer's fantasy), but he also has a knack for the set piece that just blows the reader away. The best example of this is a scene in his first novel, Neuromancer (originally published in 1984 - tellingly). The sorta-protagonist, Case, is trying his damndest to elude an artificial intelligence named Wintermute, which is doing anything it can to attract Case. At a crucial point, the computer goes all teenage-suitor and calls him up:

The phone nearest him rang.
Automatically, he picked it up.
"Yeah?"
Faint harmonics, tiny inaudible voices rattling across some orbital link, and then a sound like wind.
"Hello, Case."
...
"Wintermute, Case. It's time we talk."
It was a chip voice.
"Don't you want to talk, Case?"
He hung up.
On his way back to the lobby, his cigarettes forgotten, he had to walk the length of the ranked phones. Each rang in turn, but only once, as he passed.

That is good stuff. The overtone of HAL from 2001 is true and clear. Of course, cigarettes will still be around in 20-whatever. And so what if Gibson picked the wrong telecom technology here, relying on pay phones to do the computer's dirty work here. Big deal. In an age whose sound track is composed of cell phones omnipresently ringing and where the radio-frequency identification (RFID) chip is capitalism's tech du jour, the spectre of a computer tracking Case through a hotel lobby (a Hilton, too, Paris and Nicky!) is dead-on perfect fiction writing, realer than our reality.

[Note: the excerpt above appears on p. 97-98 in the 1984 Ace paperback edition of the novel.]

Art I Like (#1 in an Occasional Series): Bill Evans

Though I'm a pretty untutored listener, I like jazz a lot. My favorite moment in all jazz music is a point about two minutes into "Autumn Leaves (Take 1)," from the album Portrait in Jazz by Bill Evans and his trio. Evans starts the song with some of his smooth, sharp piano playing, but soon the song slows and turns into a conversation between Evans and Scott LaFaro, playing bass. For almost a minute, Evans plays a figure and LeFaro responds, with the snatches of music slowly getting more and more complex, going somewhere you can't quite fully anticipate. When the tension's built to near-unbearable levels - at least for me - Evans takes the briefest pause, really just long enough to give me the same sensation that I get when I almost but not quite stumble. Then, in the nick of time, Evans rushes to tie together all the bits and pieces of the melody, his avian piano floating momentarily without accompaniment before Paul Motian's snare and hi-hat catch and roll and LaFaro's bass falls back in. For the rest of the tune, Evans plays a soaring melody line that repeats some of what's come before but also expands the song in the most brilliant, heartwrenching, and inspiring way - and suggests autumn leaves blowing around an empty yard. That little pause/start section never fails to make me smile like a fool, marveling at Evans' ability, his trio's skill, and at the subtle beauty of jazz.

Churchisms: Fake Wisdom and Weak Wordplay

The silly but cleverly worded aphorisms which churches often place on their outdoor signs are worth recording, but not because they're smart. As I read them, there're attempts to convince actual and prospective congregrants that, wouldn'tcha know it, Christianity can offer non-Biblical or at least non-Christian wisdom. The trouble, of course, is that the proverbs and saying aren't very wise. Here's my first bit of proof:

"Too many people stop looking for work when they find a job."
8/28/04, Asbury United Methodist, S. Bloomington Avenue and E 45th St., Minneapolis

Uh, yeah. This one tries to trade on the synonyms "work" and "job," but in an opaque and, frankly, kinda stupid way. Is "work" supposed to be "spreading the Gospel"? No, probably not: too in-your-face. More likely, "work" is supposed to be "vocation." But of course, people with true vocations don't think of them as "work" in the sense of "job." They think of them as fun or duty or something - certainly not the tiresome thing from which one flees on coffee breaks. So that weak link dissolves, and poof! We're left with something better suited to be the sign-off of a crummy local radio call-in show.