Rachmaninoff, beer bellies, teenage acne and joy

You can still get to joy, if you know where to start.

Fascism is coming out of the closet in America. In defiance of the Hatch Act, Trump used the White House as the location for the Republican Convention, in effect just another Trump rally, except that this time it consisted in large part of his own family members telling the nation that he is the best leader we've ever had in our history. You don't get much closer to the cult of personality than that. 

Republicans in the Senate are complicit in this illegal act, but they are not entirely to blame for the larger shit show. The reason they show such cowardice in standing up to him is that his lies are working and they are listening to their constituents, as one is supposed to do in what's called a democracy. A significant number, a critical mass of Americans are just fine with his lies and would turn on their "leaders" if they did otherwise.

Top of the list are the Christian nationalists, those who take their cue from the likes of Jerry Falwell, Jr., Jimmy Swaggart, Pat Robertson, and Jim Bakker, the hijackers of Christianity who build their political version of it around white supremacist goals.  And current polls show the lead Biden once had has largely disappeared and there is a real possibility looming that Trump could be reelected in November. 

He can count on the Electoral College to help him in this, as well as widespread gerrymandering (which turns Democratic states like Pennsylvania into Republican States, for example), and he's doing all he can to suppress the votes of African Americans, right down to and including dismantling the post office, so people afraid to go out because of the Corona Virus can't vote by mail. He could very well pull it off. He's already laying the ground to refuse to recognize the legitimacy of an election in which he loses by a small margin, and even the most ardent Democrats are insisting that we have to win by a wide margin to keep that from happening, thus surrendering the battle even before it is fought.

Fortunately, there are ways to keep the faith in the human race. What keeps me from despair, more than anything else, is the world of music: people with the ability to carry you away with their superhuman talent, people like Alexander Malofeev. I've followed him since he was about five years old, and I never tire of watching him perform.  As he grows, he just gets better and better. He has been my favorite concert pianist for some time now.

This morning I did something I have not done in a long while. I listened to him play Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto, a very familiar piece of music I've been listening to for most of my life now, and never tire of, and as soon as I was done, I went back and listened a second time. All the way through, including that stunning encore. I'm planning to do it a third time before the day is over.

I have a bunch of favorite composers. I go to Mozart for overall brilliance, Bach, when I feel the need for calm and for order in the universe, Liszt and Chopin, when I want to marvel at what human hands can do, Brahms, for drama, and Rachmaninoff for passion. Maybe it was giving in to passion today that made me want to get up close and personal with Alexander. Watching Alexander play Rachmaninoff this morning I realize that I've come to feel a strong personal draw, as if I have a stake in watching him grow and mature, like I might a grandson or a nephew.

Or maybe it's just sentimentality, that too-cute-for-words blonde hair.  He was somebody I wanted to listen to in awe and then hug to pieces when he was small. Now that he's growing, he's like somebody you want to thank the gods for - thank you for giving me a son/grandson/nephew who can dazzle the world with such talent. "That's my boy!"

I don't make a personal connection with all the artists whose performances I follow. Some, like Lang Lang and Yuja Wang and George Harliono, I marvel at and love from a distance. Alexander, probably because I've watched him grow for so long now, I feel a more direct personal connection with.

Here's that Rachmaninoff performance I'm talking about, the Second Piano Concerto in C Minor, Opus 18.

Beautiful music often brings tears to my eyes. This one almost had me sobbing.

And while I was grooving on the fact that this child I've taken to heart is now already 15 years old, I began to notice other things. The paunch on the director, Kristjan Järvi, for example. Järvi, another superb musician, was born in Estonia. He's now an American citizen, but he's obviously kept close ties with his original homeland. He is the founder of that marvelous youth orchestra, the Baltic Sea Philharmonic, backing Alexander up. It consists of young people from around the Baltic - Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Germany and Russia.

That's how you fight the fascists. Focus on something bigger than the tragedy taking place as democracy goes into the toilet in America. Focus on braces on the teeth and pimples on the face of Wunderkinder now entering adolescence, and on the belly of a handsome man who gets young people to make beautiful music.

That performance may well be the last one Sasha was able to give while still holding on to the angelic face of a prepubescent boy. Here he is, only a month later, playing another Rachmaninoff piece, this time the "Little Red Riding Hood" Etude, Opus 39, No. 6, sweat pouring down off a still youthful face, but now one giving way to teenage acne. Our little boy is growing up and we're going to be watching him as an adult from now on - even though people routinely remark that he has already played with the maturity of a much older person for some time now.

Real people. Love watching them grow. And sweat. And develop bellies. And take your breath away with their almost inhuman talent.

The belly and the pimples remind me that the word "inhuman" is totally inappropriate. These are people who share our space on this planet, people who provide reasons for not losing faith in the human race. Very human people. Just samples of the best of us.

Most of you, probably, will just enjoy the music and not need the pimples and the belly to remind yourselves these geniuses are human. More power to you.

But I sit here in lockdown, watching time go by. Yesterday it was March. Tomorrow it will be September. Little Sasha is entering puberty and will soon be all grown up and time is way way out of my control. It's my way of using melancholy to root out fear and sadness. I find it hard to move from sadness to joy.  But it's not so hard when starting from melancholy.