Arrivederci!
Family, Poland, Italy, Wu Man
Last summer, I broke my ankle because I jumped off a lighthouse trying to impress a girl. This summer, I broke someone’s heart and, like last summer, impressed no one.
Last fall, I was supposed to go to Poland with my mom. We were going primarily to pay a visit to our family in Poraż, a little village near the Ukrainian border where our relatives—the Maciejowskis—still live on the same exact property as our shared ancestors did before some of them emigrated around 1914. At the Mróz farm down the street—where my grandfather’s mother’s side of the family lived—a Cossack is buried behind the house. He tried to steal hay from my family and my great-great grandfather ran a pitchfork through him and buried him in the manure pile. When my other great-great grandfather, Michael Maciejowski, came to New York, he stopped by a farm stand, bought a shining red globe, and took a bite out of it thinking it was an apple. It was a tomato. He spit it out and never ate a tomato again.
I come from stock who don’t settle.
We didn’t go last year because I couldn’t walk. I didn’t walk from July 16, when I broke my ankle, to the first week of September, when I got a boot. I didn’t walk in a regular shoe until the first week of October. It’s getting cooler now and I think the changing temperature makes my ankle sore sometimes. I twisted it walking down the stairs the other day and panicked. The surgeon said it was one of the worst breaks he’d ever seen. He assured me I would not beep when I go through the airport metal detectors because the plate and screws are titanium. I shutter each time I think about the fact that I will be buried with this thing in my leg. I was hoping to die with a body free of pollutants.
Next Tuesday, we’re finally going to Poland. Take two. We’ll start in Warsaw and then slowly make our way southeast to Częstochowa, Kraków, and at last our old Galician home at the base of the mighty Carpathian Mountains. Maybe we’ll visit the manure pile.
I’m excited. I started getting excited on the first of the month because I don’t usually get excited about things until they’re close since I can never believe that I’ll be alive more than two weeks out. I mean, I’ll probably be alive. But who knows? I can never understand people who can plan things months or even years ahead of time. Remember thou art mortal. I also feel like “getting excited” is a very American thing and I try to be as un-American as possible at all times. But I still sometimes get the chills and tear up during the national anthem.
After Poland, my mom is flying home and I’ll be left by myself to traipse around Italy. I’ll fly to Trieste then take the train to Rome. I wanted to go to Trieste in part because for a long time I’ve been fascinated by its situation as a German-Italian melting pot that was once the southernmost point of the Hapsburg Empire. I also wanted to go because a lot of writers have gone. I wanted to go to Rome because it’s Rome and because Sicily, where I wanted to visit some people on the other side of my family, is just too far for this time around. Next time. This time, I will challenge myself to get over my bias against Northern Italy that was drilled into me since childhood. Or maybe I’ll enhance it.
I have no plans for those two places in Italy. I know not a soul in either of them. I don’t speak Italian. I know much slang and many slurs in bastardized Bensonhurst-Sicilian. But I can’t imagine calling someone a faccabrute or a jamoke will do me any good. I’ll be staying in a hostel in Rome ($200 for four nights in a six-bed room!), so I’ll meet people there. I don’t really want plans, but if you have any music-specific recommendations, please tell me in the comments or however you usually talk to me. (I’m already planning to see the pianist Jan Lisiecki play the Brahms D minor concerto with the Warsaw Philharmonic; earlier this year, at David Geffen, I heard him play the most delicious wrong note.) I mainly want to think and be alone. I feel like I haven’t really done either since I was in Europe three years ago. I’m an only child. Alone feels good.
I return to the States October 7. Best case scenario is something happens in my psyche or in my world that makes me want to stay for longer or forever. I’m a dreamer and I dream.
The last few months, I’ve been publishing regularly on Evenings with the Orchestra. I’m grateful to all my new subscribers and the day-ones who were reading me when I started this thing in the summer of 2023. Back then, one day—it was Monday, August 14—I had just finished a live broadcast of The Best Is Noise at the Radio Free Brooklyn studio in Bushwick and, almost on a whim, I went to a cafe, sat down, and resolved to start being a music critic. I knew nothing about pitching and I knew nobody who was a critic. But I knew of the good old days of The Village Voice and I idolized Alex Ross and Lester Bangs, so I emailed Bob Baker, editor of The Village Voice, and he called me up. I told him about my love for the old Voice, Ross, and Bangs, and he said if I could somehow combine the styles of both of them, I could write for him. The Voice’s future is uncertain, and I might never achieve the fluency and insight of Ross and Bangs, but I’ll always remember it as the first real publication that took a chance on me. I won no awards for music criticism. I did not study music at an Ivy League school. Besides college essays, I wrote one published article about music before 2023 (in my college paper). Whatever readers I’ve amassed, whoever will read me in the future, I’d like to think is because they enjoy the substance and voice of my writing. And I’m proud of that, even if sometimes it gets me into trouble. I hope I am never allowed into the Yale or Harvard Clubs. I hope I always have enemies, even if I lack manure piles for them.
I might write here while I’m away and I might not. I want to focus on plans for some longer-term writing and editorial projects and I really just want to think and drink and talk and feel and see and eat and smell and maybe kiss.
So I guess I’m writing this just to say you might not be hearing from me for a few weeks on Substack. But stay tuned, because I have some things planned. I can’t tell most of you what they are yet, but they could be good. For music and for writers.
I’ll leave you with one more “sound of the city” before I shove off: I reviewed world-famous pipa player Wu Man’s recent performance with The Knights for EarRelevant:
…I am an American, Boston born, so the words that came to mind while listening to Wu Man play Chinese folk music were Italian analogues: “fantasia” and “toccata.” In Xi Yang Xiao Gu (“Flute and Drum Music at Sunset”), which, she explained from the stage, is composed in the “lyrical style,” and others, which included a tea-house tune from her hometown as well as a Kazakh tune she learned from a Kazakh musician, she plucked and strummed with a delicacy and a sense of humor that made some members of the audience let out single sniffly laughs.
It’s unclear whether there is something funny in this music or if this was just an American isn’t-that-cute response to an unfamiliar plucking style. Whatever it was, a distinct through-line seemed to emerge; in each of these pieces, there was dreamlike improvisation tempered by passages of driving intensity, sometimes bordering on the violent. The “Toccata” from Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin might be a worthy comparison. Wu Man let individual notes and chords resonate just long enough and mixed elegance with rustic passion as she let the instrument both sing and rock and roll. Westerners tend to think of Chinese music as all tranquility and flowers. Wu Man’s choice of compositions and her committed artistry convinced me that this stereotype must die.
You can read the rest here.
And for good measure, here’s an interview I did on last week’s episode of The Best Is Noise with Bach scholar Edward Klorman about his new book, Bach: The Cello Suites. We marveled over implied polyphony (his term), phantom counterpoint (my term), the flexibility of the term “sonata,” and hidden religious meaning in the Suites (something we’re both skeptical of). It was one of those conversations that make me wish my show were four hours instead of one.
For some reason, as I was writing this, I felt so much more love than usual. For all of you. But not for Cossacks.
Never for Cossacks.