SOUNDTRACK: GABRIEL GARZÓN-MONTANO-Tiny Desk (Home) Concert #147 (January 19, 2021).
Gabriel Garzón-Montano did a solo Tiny Desk Concert a few years ago, as the blurb quickly points out
If Gabriel Garzón-Montano’s solo Tiny Desk back in 2017 was an exercise in restraint and vulnerability, his home set is the polar opposite. It beams ingenuity and unveils multiple layers, figuratively and literally. In this performance he brought the full band, sporting all white from mask to toe and bringing to life all the sonics we hear on the record, last year’s genre-snubbing Agüita.
They play three songs.
Garzón-Montano morphs into three different characters from Agüita and stretches the boundaries even more, adding salsa flavor to “Muñeca” and delivering some bonus bars on the set opener, “With A Smile.”
“With A Smile” opens with just his face surrounded by flowers as he plays a pretty acoustic guitar. The flowers move away as the Gracie Sprout’s harp adds more pretty notes. As the song moves along with Gabriel’s soft and sexy voice, Itai Shapira’s bass and Lenny “The Ox”‘s drums come thumping in.
Like the rest of his band, Gabriel is in all white, including white Uggs and a long white coat with tails. The only color is from the sweater underneath.
At the end of the song he raps in Spanish, which has a really nice flow.
Taking advantage of of the rare opportunity to gather musicians in quarantine times, he says “It’s like being a child who’s allowed to do what they always wanted to do when they didn’t wanna get up for school, and it’s also felt like an adult who didn’t know what to do at 3 p.m. on a Tuesday afternoon. I’m focusing on oscillating between those states with ease.”
For “Muñeca” he takes off the big coat and shows off the colorful sweater which has a fascinating cut, including tails. For this song, it’s a trio of bass and Daniel Rodriguez on drums. Rodriguez plays a funky middle with conga and cowbell as Gabriel gets up and dances. He picks up the guitar again at the end of the song for a little strumming outro.
Before the final song, Gabriel moves to the piano. He takes off the colorful sweater to reveal a sleeveless shirt underneath (which shows off his tattoos).
“Tombs” features the KROMA Quartet and everyone else on synths. Nicholas Semrad plays the lead, but everyone else adds melody. It’s a delicate song with an interesting and slightly creepy synth melody. About half way through this six minute song he gets up and picks up an electric guitar. He and Justin “Jhawk” Hawkins play a harmony solo together, which sounds pretty cool.
I am quite intrigued by this singer, and I love the description of genre-snubbing.
[READ: February 28, 2021] Pops
I have often said I wanted to read more books by Michael Chabon. And after finishing this I realized that the only novel by him that I’ve read is Kavalier and Clay and that was 21 years ago. So maybe it’s time to get into some of these other books.
Pops is a collection of (very) short essays. Most were written for Details Magazine (which folded in 2015), one for GQ and a final one I’d already read in the New Yorker.
“Introduction: The Opposite of Writing”
It’s not too often that you really enjoy an introduction, but this one was pretty great. In it, Chabon talks about when he was an up and coming writer and he met a well-established Southern writer. This writer told him that the secret to being a good writer was not having children. That for every child you have, you will lose one book.
Chabon had no children with his first wife but has had four with his second wife (the writer Ayelet Waldman). So clearly they have lost eight books between them.
The writer’s argument was that children take away time from novel writing and that novel writing takes away time from children. Chabon had always felt that his father was not very present (as one of the essays says) and he promised to be much more involved in his children’s lives). These essays suggest that he was. So how did he find time to write? He does not say.
“Little Man” (originally written as “My Son, The Prince of Fashion”) in GQ.
This is the longest (45 small pages) essay in the book. It’s about Abe, his then 13-year-old son’s trip to Paris Fashion Week. This trip was the boy’s bar mitzvah present. Ever since he was little he has loved clothes. He dressed himself in natty attire all the way back n grade school. He was made fun of (his hat stolen and tossed around the playground) but he never once got upset about it. He was proud of himself and his choices and a few years later, even some of his bullies were taking fashion tips from him.
I am much like Chabon in this story (except without the fashionable kid), who went with his son. Meaning I have no idea what’s going on and would be bored out of my mind. But he agrees to act only as his son’s minder and lets the boy choose where and when they went to events. This sets the tone:
It takes a profound love of clothes and some fairly decent luck to stumble on somebody who wants to converse about cutting-edge men’s fashion at a Rush concert, and yet a year before his trip to Paris, in the aftermath of the Canadian band’s last show at Madison Square Garden, Abe had managed to stumble on John Varvatos whom Abe regaled with all of the fashion he had seen in Soho.
The essay starts with designer Virgil Abloh (never head of him) singling out young Abe for the way he was dressed (Abe was the youngest person there by far, but also looked amazing). Abe thought Abloh was lit (a very high compliment) and Abloh clearly approved of Abe’s outfit. He wore a Maison Margiela shirt (?) and $499 silver Adidas that he bought for $250 (he had worked in the neighborhood raking leaves and such to earn the money fort hem). He wore off-white athletic socks pulled up to his knees which is where the rolled up cuffs of his gray twill trousers rested. The attention from Virgil actually had some reporters interviewing him.
Chabon found Paris week tedious beyond belief–each venue seemed further away than the last–driving across town for a ten minute show. But Abe was in heaven. One night Abe wanted to go to a late night event, but his father was wiped out. Abe pleaded and then GQ offered to take him along. Abe came home gushing about how amazing it was–the best of the week. It was only later that Michael realized it was probably the best one because he wasn’t there holding Abe back.
I love this assessment. All of his life, Michael has assumed Abe was happily flying his freak flag high, but
he was not flying his freak flag, he was sending up a flare, hoping for rescue for company in the solitude of his passion He did it in the hope of attracting the attention of somebody else–somewhere, someday–who was the same.
“Adventures in Euphemism” (as “The Unspeakable in Its Jammies” on atlantic.com)
This is wonderful essay about reading Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn to his children when they were seven and nine (jealous already). He discusses the trouble of saying the n-word aloud to his children. It only occurs 8 times in Tom Sawyer–he substituted the word slave. It was no big thing.
They finished Tom Sawyer and the kid wanted Huck Finn. But in this book it is used at least 200 times. So he decided he needed to talk to them about it. He told them that saying the word made him very uncomfortable. But Twain was a great artist a moral man and an accurate writer, as a writer Chabon was driven insane by the idea of somebody “taking the words I had worked so hard to get absolutely correct and spatcocking in whatever nonsense made them comfortable.”
His daughter said he was uncomfortable with the word Negro. He felt that it was, these days, offensive but not taboo “I could say it without feeling like I was licking a battery.”
His son at one point said
“How come you kept saying INJUN Joe, because that’s offensive too.”
Because I’m an ass, I said. Only I didn’t say ‘ass'”
“The Bubble People” (as “One of Us” in Details)
Living in Berkeley, the Chabons are comfortable with the number of freakazoids around them. He has just returned from a middle-sized city in the middle of the country where “people keep their freaky on the inside.” He told his daughter you’re lucky you get to grow up here. You can be as weird as you want to. She said a little sadly, “Then I should probably be even weirder. It’s kind of a waste.”
The people of Middleburg were “scary normal.” But at the same time they were kind and generous, and yet he couldn’t help look around and think “Is this my country, are these my country men?” He felt he had as much in common with people in Africa or Kyrgyzstan. But Middleburgians are his countrymen because of all of the nonverbal clues and unspoken language that they shared.
“Against Dickitude”
This short essay is his was of teaching his son not to be a dick to women. A girl was texting his son and Michael felt that he was being a bit dickish to her. The boy seems flattered by her attention but also a little embarrassed. But his response was to consistently shut her down and give her nothing: g2g bye. Chabon admits it would help if he himself were not a dick to women. He says he is a pretty nice guy to women overall but through no fault of his own: its purely a matter of long years of training, conditioning and unstinting effort by women–my mother, my first wife, and my current wife of twenty-five years
He talks about how beloved character Hawkeye Pierce (Alan Alda) of M*A*SH was not just a total dick but a creep whose primary pastime, apart from alcohol was unremitting sexual harassment of his female coworkers–or as it was known at the time, rather chillingly, “being a ladies man.”
He says men often denounce sexual harassment by saying “As the father of a daughter…” with the implication being that until a man has a daughter he remains incapable of mustering the empathy required to grant women full status as human beings whose rights and integrity must be respected. He is saying the opposite–it was not until I had daughters that I fully because aware of and truly horrified by the damage that I myself in my latent dickitude was capable of inflicting.
To be a feminist, as a man, it’s not enough to acknowledge the violence behind the power that you inherited at birth, along with all the entrenched structures, from language to custom to religion that have been put in place in order to help you maintain it. To be a feminist–defined most simply, so that even an eleven year-old boy can understand it, as the radical assertion that women are human beings–you must repudiate the legacy of violence and resist those implacable structures of power. But even that’s not enough. Even after all the hard work of repudiation and resistance your privilege will still be there, assigning higher value to your labor, giving your words more time and attention, and basically letting you be as big a dick as you want, whenever and however you please. Against that the only hope is empathy, and for empathy you need to call upon the greatest of all your human inheritances, stronger than violence, able to leap the most entrenched hierarchies in a single bound. Too feel the proper horror of the power you have to break someone, you need to use your imagination.
“The Old Ball Game”
This essay is about baseball, obviously. His son wanted to try out for little league. He discouraged it knowing that his son would hate it. But his son really wanted to try. When Michael was a kid, his father discouraged him from playing because he has no coordination. So he never played organized ball. But he did play pick up games (and was not very good). So he let his son play. And his son hated it. But he made him stick out out.
What I came to dislike about Little League that spring was not he regulation per se or the fathers–whose consciousness had generally been raised at least a little bit–or the tedium, or the low quality of play or the pain of watching my son strike out a lot. It was the way I got reminded every game, that this was the world my children lived in: The world in which the wild watershed of childhood has been brought fully under control by the adult Corps of Engineers. Looking at my son and the other boys on his team I felt the way I do sometimes when I look at a poodle and think about wolves.
Chabon has always loved baseball but he had been suffering from baseball depression. People who love baseball but are attached to its past more than its present–steroid scandals, baseball parks that change their names all the time, salary arbitration, rock and hip-hop songs being blasted at the park. He was on the verge of giving up on baseball when he was watching a game and his elder daughter came in and sat with him. She really got into the game and asked questions. It was a good game (almost a no hitter). He wondered if he has
somehow spoiled baseball for my son and me by laying too much emphasis on it as something for fathers and sons to share. If my daughter has been just waiting al these years for me to admit her onto the playing field.
“Be Cool or Be Cast Out” (I love that this is a Rush lyric, and clearly Chabon is a big Rush fan)
When Chabon was 12 or 13 he had a T-shirt printed (you could do that fairly easily back then) with the word “Libertine.” He told people it meant freethinker (as opposed to a person without moral principles, the word’s primary definition). Obviously he was not a libertine–he was a geek. He is surprised he had the confidence to wear such a shirt to school.
Meanwhile his oldest son(wondering if this is Abe) was struggling with his sartorial choices. In seventh grade he asked for a peacoat which he wore all the time–until he was made fun of at school: you look like mushroom, you look all emo. Did you know fashion originally meant a behavior engaged in by a group? But by the end of eighth grade he came to the car wearing a burgundy velour blazer, plaid ultra bell bottoms (that were part of an Austin Powers costume) over a black Rush T-shirt to whose collar he had clipped a tartan bow tie. He looked preposterous. He looked splendid. What did kids say abut what he wore? “Nothing. I don’t know. Whatever.”
Pops (published in The New Yorker as The Recipe for Life). A summary of what I wrote:
His father was a doctor–an excellent doctor, by all accounts. He worked all day as a hospital pediatrician and then at night he did house calls for U.S. Public Health Service for insurance claims.
He often took Michael with him. And Michael often had his own doctor bag (made of plastic) and his own stethoscope (made of plastic) and a needle (made of plastic).
He recalls one night when the patient asked him if he wanted to be a doctor like his father. He felt, even then, that he could never live up to his father’s work. He saw (and still sees) his father as an excellent diagnostician (he gets every diagnosis correct very early on while watching Marcus Welby). But Michael is more impressed at his father’s ability to reassurance patients. He is warm and thoughtful and consoling.
Except toward Michael: “Unless I am gravely ill or seriously injured–and I am almost never either of those things–I don’t even rate the bedside manner. My father’s response when I cut a finger, stub my toe, twist an ankle or fall of my bicycle never varies: ‘We’ll have to amputate.’”
His father was also very smart outside of medicine. He knows history and music as well as films and literature. He even knew things like Underdog’s arch-nemesis so he could talk with kids.
The night that the patient asked if Michael was going to be a doctor, his father laughed and said he was too squeamish. Michael didn’t know that word, but he felt it sounded like sensitive. And he knew sensitive was not a good word. The patient asked what he wanted to be when he grew up. He told the man I’m going to be a mad scientist.
The story jumps to present day, fifty years later. He says he thinks of his father once a day, although he calls barely once a week. But when he heard that his father was very unwell, he dropped everything to go up and see him. His father told him not to bother, it wasn’t urgent, but of course he was happy to see his son.
They watch a movie together but his father can’t speak without exhausting himself. So he imagines the conversation they would have–talking about Fritz Lang and film in general. He gets the tone and cadence of their conversation down just right.
This essay made me think a lot of my own deceased parents. I miss them, but now that I am older I miss them in a different way–I’ll never have the opportunity to ask them things that I didn’t care about when I was a kid.
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