Grave Error

I do apologize for not tending to Grave Error this past year. As I have mentioned already, I am quite busy these days between work and parenthood. Yet it is definitely a shame because not only do I write this blog for you — my loyal reader (no need to use the plural these days), but also because I (used to) write it as a diary to keep track of what’s going on in my life over time. And this last year has been an amazing year with plenty of major and trivial things to record. Hopefully, I will find some time to document some of this year’s special moments.

But as is tradition here at Grave Error, I did want to make a quick appearance to so mark the commencement of the Most Wonderful Time of the Year. And this year I hope will be even more special as it will be my first Christmas as father — that is, of the 39 Christmases I have already celebrated, it will be the first one I celebrate with my own family. I have already downloaded all of my favorite Christmas specials and am planning on decorating the house this weekend. Tomorrow, I will start the day off with my favorite holiday tunes.

So let the Season begin!

Now after little over three months of being a father, I would think that what I missed the most from my pre-parenthood days would be alone-time and sleep.  But actually what I miss the most are (in no particular order):

• Writing
• Reading
• Jazz

In a sense, I have learned to compensate for each. For example, instead of writing in Grave Error, I have followed the Twitter trend (btw, follow me) . Just as “video killed the radio star”, Twitter has killed blogging (which previously killed journalism). Now I tweet what I used to blog, just in a dozen words.

While I no longer have any justifiable excuse to lay in bed and read a book (or the news for that matter) instead of sharing the parental responsibilities of an infant, I have learned to do all of my reading almost entirely on my metro commute to and from work, at the expense of listening to podcasts. Surprisingly for only a 30 minute commute, in just three months, I have already finished Jonathan Frazen’s Freedom, Ryu Murakami’s 69, Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn, and believe it or not, Tolstoy’s War and Peace! And I am about to finish Rafael Yglesia’s A Happy Marriage. Not bad. Meanwhile, my consumption of other written media has been relegated to merely previewing what others post on Twitter.

Finally, with regards to Jazz, unfortunately, my baby’s ears are simply not ready yet for the angular sounds of Coltrane, Monk and Dolphy. Nonetheless, with his confusing daily exposure to Arabic, English, French and Spanish along with his multiple nationalities, I am forcefeeding my boy healthy doses of that other great and uniquely American, American music genre: Motown and old school R&B. He gets lots of Diana Ross and the Supremes, Smokey Robinson, Stevie Wonder, Curtis Mayfield, and others. His favorite songs, I have decided, are “People Get Ready”, “Me and Mrs. Jones”, and “Where Did Our Love Go”. Almost every Motown song that exists seems to have the word “baby” in the lyrics, making singing them to him appropriate at almost any time.

But regardless of those three sacrifices, I more than delighted with the lack of mobility that parenthood has forced on mommy and daddy — meaning no more weekend commutes to and from Paris. And, of course, there is my favorite substitute past time — when not changing diapers and soothing a crying baby — seen in the photo above (though now at three months he barely fits anymore).

Is blogging dead? Bloggers, including myself, just don’t seem to be writing as much and readers have definitely followed suit by reading less. This is probably due to two factors: over-saturation in the so-called blogosphere and the briefer, less time consuming tweet. As a matter of fact, most of my friends who were big bloggers four or five years ago have almost all abandoned the practice in favor of the lazier tweet.

So now other than the blogs of Glenn Greenwald and Paul Krugman, there is not much out there that I turn to for news and analysis. Nevertheless, I do have a few friends who are still writing interesting blogs. For example, one of my favorite reads these days is Rice and Coca-Cola by my friend Martina.

Martina recently decided to quit her job and travel around the world, almost entirely on her own. She left a few months ago from her native Sweden and has already covered Algeria, Mali, Senegal, Gambia, Rwanda, Tanzania, Malawi, South Africa, Swaziland, Madagascar, Nepal, and has now just landed in India. She still has South East Asia, Australia, and South America left. While the idea of a trip-around-the-world-blog may seem a touch cliché, Martina has turned out to be a very good writer. Furthermore, I thoroughly enjoy her writing, learn vicariously from her adventures, and eagerly look forward to being updated on her whereabouts. I only wish there were more gratuitous stories of sex, lies, deceit and gnashing of teeth.

Start from the beginning and give Rice and Coca-Cola a try.

Here in Spain everyone celebrates the Christmas Season all the way up until the Epiphany on January 6th. Nevertheless, instead of letting Christmas drag on, I strictly follow the day-after-Thanksgiving to December 25th schedule. So while I will keep the Christmas decorations up until January 1st (maybe even until January 6th if my wife gets her way), starting yesterday, December 26th, there is no more Christmas music until Black Friday 2011.

As a result, for the past two days I have been listening to a random selection of my favorite Jazz piano trios (piano, bass and drums), a good transitional genre for what’s left of the holiday spirit: Ahmad Jamal, Andrew Hill, Barry Harris, Bill Evans, Bobby Timmons, Brad Medlhau, Bud Powell, Cecil Taylor, Chick Corea, Duke Ellington, Herbie Hancock, Herbie Nichols, Horace Silver, Jaki Byard, Kenny Kenny Drew, Kenny Drew Jr., McCoy Tyner, Oscar Peterson, Phineas Newborn Jr., Red Garland, Sonny Clark, Thelonious Monk, Tommy Flanagan, and Wynton Kelly.

And of these, Herbie Nichols always surprises me both because of his virtuosity and lack of notoriety. For anyone interested in Jazz piano, I definitely recommend Herbie Nichols’ The Complete Blue Note Recordings (with Al McKibbon or Teddy Kotick on bass and Art Blakey or Max Roach on drums).

As a farewell note to my favorite Christmas tunes, I would like to recognize the perpetual greatness of Vince Guaraldi’s A Charlie Brown Christmas (also a piano trio album). They just don’t make music like that any more. And a special mention goes to the quasi-Christmas song “The River” from Herbie Hancock’s 2007 Joni Mitchell tribute album with vocalist Corinne Bailey Rae. Although I don’t ice skate, I do love the imagery from the song: a long frozen river to fly away on . . .

After almost four years of commuting back and forth between Madrid and Paris – with 27 round trip flights in 2010 alone, not including the ones my wife took to Madrid this year – it looks like we have finally settled on and in Madrid.

Weather and an air controllers’ strike came close but ultimately were not enough to delay our move to Madrid.

Here are a few photos from our neighborhood in Paris.

It is almost Black Friday (the day after Thanksgiving) and that means the season for me to play Christmas music non-stop for an entire month is just days away.  There is no mystery here that I love Christmas. But, alas, this year we won’t be home for Christmas. It will be the first Christmas ever in my lifetime that I spend away from home.

The good news is that over the past few years I have done everything I can to infect my wife with the joys of Christmas, and just as I have learned to love Ramadan from her, she too is catching on. And while we spent the last couple of Christmases in the U.S. with my family there, this year we get to build our own Merry Little Christmas in Madrid. The bad news, though, the possibly traumatic news goes something like this: (more…)

This morning on the metro, I was listening to a stomach churning segment entitled “Dirt, Mircobes and the Immune System” on the Leonard Lopate Show with guest Dr. Joel Weinstock, chief of gastroenterology/heptology at Tufts University Medical Center. Weinstock was discussing “his research into how exposure to certain microbes may help us develop resistance to allergies and autoimmune disorders like Type 1 diabetes, asthma, and multiple sclerosis.” In particular, he explained how various living organisms, bacteria, worms and the like, live harmoniously within our bodies. Apparently, for example, a particular type of worm that was very common in our bodies at the turn of the past century, has now due to enhanced hygiene been largely eradicated to our detriment.

While most of this topic was unpleasant, I found Weinstock’s concluding remark that we as humans “are not creatures onto ourselves but colonies of organisms” ground breaking. Beside the fact that we have an obsession with the self and thinking of ourselves as unique and uniquely autonomous individuals, consider how this notion of not being a single entity but rather a colony of smaller entities (most of them kind of gross) ups the ante in the traditional conversation in metaphysics about the mind-body spectrum. It looks like the materialists and the Buddhists (who reject self outright) have the hands to beat.

Maybe no man is an island after all . . . he’s an archipelago.

My favorite dish. With my mother and grandmother on the other side of the ocean, I resort to my own means.

Last weekend I took my twentieth flight to Paris this year. While the back and forth gets tiring — and hopefully will be resolved soon — the colors of autumn, so prevalent in Paris and so absent in Madrid, reminded me of just how much I miss this time of year back at home.

Unfortunately, I also started seeing the first hints of the impending Christmas shopping season, and knowing that this year I won’t be home for Christmas (something I will write about soon), opens a whole other box of worms.

After four weeks of rubble – during which I did an intensive three week parenting internship within the Sigliano family household — I am now starting to put the pieces back together. Beneath the dust filled air, I finally get to spend a night in my own bed.