The Test Tube and the Scale

I had to mature into my admiration for Michael Feinstein’s singing gifts. At Sound Warehouse, we stocked Feinstein’s catalog in the Easy Listening section, enough for me to disqualify him from fair consideration as serious pop artist. Easy Listening recording artists adhered too closely to the genre’s conventions, without any sense of creative risk, for them to be of any interest. What my bias caused me to miss was a vocalist with such a thorough understanding of the Great American Songbook that his renditions of standards owe as much to the influence of the legendary pop interpreters of the last century—Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, et al—as they do to Original Cast Album orthodoxy. Covering Joni Mitchell’s best known, beloved song of self-discovery, Feinstein does not meddle with the song’s emotional points, plotting them instead along those same recognizable paths where they’ve played in our memory for all these years. Feinstein’s orchestral arrangement is rich with the uncomplic...

  Our will to generate fantasy is like a tireless bureaucrat of the imagination, plotting the dissolution of reality with a despotic sense of self and office. Fantasy operates in the dream world’s shadows; it is dreams repaired and ordered by consciousness, and, in the same way that dreams feed subconsciously from the detritus of memory, fantasy owes its efficacy to the unstable storehouse of our aggressions and pique. Los Zafiros, based in Caya Huesa, a ward in the municipality of Central Habana, Havana, were a vocal quartet, with Manuel Galbán on guitar, who released the fantastically delirious Bossa Cubana in 1962 amid the chaos of the Cuban Project and the ensuing missile crisis. Bossa Cubana’s restless tempo is near frenzied; it suggests the attempt to outrun annihilation, but it also centers around an elegant spirit of world capital sophistication, a boldly and timely stated pop endorsement of human sensuality from the inside of a Communist Revolution only three years old. Bo...

  The second or third person in my family that I can remember struggling with mental health issues was my father’s older brother Manuel. Born the fourth child of six, Manuel was the uncle who, at family gatherings, I gravitated from not towards. It wasn’t Manuel’s mental distress that frightened or intimidated me, but the permanent damage that distress had inflicted upon him, stranding him amid the religious obsessions that haunted his psyche, gave the grim impression that he was somehow capable of enveloping you in madness. He appeared stricken most acutely around the eyes, as if epistemology had given him the inability to distinguish between faith and doubt, and he could no longer see beyond the blur of his tortured mind.  His dark eyes were forever lost in a dramatic squint, and he spoke with the wounded rasp of a desert saint. Refusing to share the eschatological secrets of his spiritual investigations, he preferred instead to quiz his nephews on our banal childhood ambiti...