From a series where GOOD Magazine asked four grownups what they'd always wanted to learn to do, then sent them to lessons.

disciplines, education, horizons of the possible, music, piano, practice

Nate

:

Two major ambitions defined my childhood. One was to become what I imagined headlines would refer to as “the first kid in space.” The second, which seemed more reasonable, was to become a great pianist. I realized when I was very small that I wasn’t like most people: I was double-jointed. I could bend the top joints of my fingers forward at will to create a sharp right angle, and pull my thumb all the way forward or backward to touch my wrist. This would, I thought, give me abilities at the keyboard that no other pianist could boast. I could only imagine the wild flourishes and the daring arpeggios I would master. I had a natural advantage, and I intended to use it.I was also a bit of what you might call a quitter back in those days. So when my mother took me down to the music Conservatory and the stern woman in charge told me I would have to learn the recorder—that fat, beige, orthopedic-looking thing—I walked away in disgust.

I nurtured no lack of rock-star fantasies and concert pianist daydreams over the next couple of decades, but I never touched another instrument—until now, at the probably-too-late age of 31. Maya, my enthusiastic and very patient teacher, begins the process by explaining the basics of music theory: tones, pitches, harmonics, chords, rhythm. I’m also learning how to read music, a completely different challenge than the instrument itself. Getting from this theoretical stage to actually playing a song feels like learning to dance by studying the properties of gravity. How do you turn these concepts and rules into something beautiful?

Well, for one, you play a lot of scales. I play them until my hands ache. I feel like every sullen adolescent forced to practice by well-meaning parents. When was the last time I actually had to practice something, anyway? I’m out of practice at practicing.

I love this vignette from Neolithic times, especially how recognizable the event described seems to me—I think of the first-ever tailgate party. The pull of culture is ever strong.

civilization, england, europe, food and drink, pilgrimage, stone age

Nate

:

Stone age people drove animals hundreds of miles to a site close to Stonehenge to be slaughtered for ritual feasts, according to scientists who have examined the chemical signatures of animal remains buried there. The research suggests that Neolithic people travelled further than archaeologists had previously realised in order to attend cultural events.

Durrington Walls is a stone-age village containing the remains of numerous cattle and pigs which are thought to have been buried there after successive ritual feasts. The site is two miles north east of Stonehenge and dates from around 3000 BC, 500 years before the first stones were erected.

“We are looking at communication networks and rituals that are bringing people from a large area of southern England to the Stonehenge area before the Stonehenge stones were in place,” said Dr Jane Evans at the British Geological Survey in Nottingham. “I think what we are seeing is basically a sort of bring-your-own-beef barbecue at Durrington Walls.” The evidence points to groups of people driving animals from as far away as Wales for the feast events.

*culture is not optional is an endlessly inventive network of friends who create some truly wonderful cultural goods. Among them is the current issue of their magazine catapult. There are several treasures here—don't miss Tala Azar Strauss's spare and eloquent meditation, "Nameless community," or Meredith Kathryn-Case Gipson Hoodendam's column "Community is bullshit" (not least its arresting and hopeful final line). Then there's this short essay by editor Kirstin Vander Giessen-Reitsma (yes, the folks at *cino do tend to have complicated, hyphenated Dutch-inflected names). It sums up what I love about *cino: their patient attention to particular things.

community, cultivation and creation, family, home, writing

Andy

:

A photo is floating around our attic somewhere, probably in a Converse shoebox. In it, I am just barely fifteen years old, a sophomore in high school, wearing an oversized green sweatshirt, jeans, and perhaps the shoes that came in the box that now holds the photo. The setting is my school library. I am sitting at a table where I appear to be studying, but across from me is Rob, another fifteen-year-old sophomore. The look I’m giving the yearbook photographer is an exaggeration of innocence. Though our books are open, pens in hand, Rob has just finished giving me directions to his house for the party he plans to have while his parents are out of town.

At twenty-eight years old, nearly eight years in to my marriage to Rob, I can see this sly study hall meeting around a library table as a fulcrum on which much of my life story turns. I can also see tables—those ubiquitous pieces of furniture that invite gathering by their nature—as a key image for exploring where I’ve been and where I may be going.

I wonder if it's that architects in general tend not to retire, or if it's just the well-known, successful ones? It is comforting that longetivity in architects and longevity in buildings would seem to be such parallel values—though in this age of teardowns, many architects are probably outlasting their own creations.

3 12 120, architecture, community, retirement, teardowns, technology and change, work

Nate

:

What is it with architects that they don’t—or can’t—retire? In part, it is the nature of their profession. Architecture is a delicate balancing act between practicality and artistry, and it takes a long time to master all the necessary technical skills as well as to learn how to successfully manipulate the thousands of details that compose even a small building. Requisite skills for the successful practitioner include dealing with clients: individuals, committees, communities, boards. The architect, proposing an as-yet-unbuilt vision of the future, must be able to persuade, and it’s easier to be persuasive if you have a proven track record.

For all these reasons, architectural wunderkinds are few and far between; architects have traditionally hit their stride in late middle age. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was 62 when he started designing the Lake Shore Drive apartments, which became the model for all subsequent steel-and-glass towers; Le Corbusier was 63 when he built the marvelous chapel at Ronchamp, setting the architectural world on its ear; Louis Kahn was 64 when the Salk Institute was built; and Frank Gehry was 68 when he produced the Bilbao Guggenheim. So once you finally get really good at it, why stop?

It’s not so hard for an architect to keep going. Since building is a team endeavor, the old master is surrounded by scores of assistants. For any slowing down that occurs in later years, there are plenty of younger hands and minds to pick up the pace. The younger minds propose, but the master disposes, and the big decisions still benefit from years of practice and experience. From the client’s point of view, since buildings represent large investments, it is safer, by far, to know that a seasoned practitioner is overseeing the process.

Alexander "Lexo" Toradze is the center of a community of Russian and Georgian pianists—not in one the usual cosmopolitan centers, but in South Bend, Indiana.

3 12 120, changing the world, community, exile, food and drink, indiana, music, performing arts

Nate

:

In 1990, he married an American girl, a fledgling pianist from Florida. In 1991, he accepted a piano professorship at Indiana University at South Bend—a place best-known for Notre Dame’s football team. Transplanted to northern Indiana, he proceeded to recreate the intense mentoring environment he had known in Moscow, as well as the communal social life he had known in Tblisi. To date, he has recruited more than seventy gifted young pianists, mainly from Russia and Georgia. They bond as a family, with Lexo the stern or soft surrogate father. They make music and party with indistinguishable relish. Lexo’s big house, on a suburban street without sidewalks, is their headquarters. Since separating from his wife in 1999, he has densely decorated the downstairs rooms with an assortment of American, Russian, and Georgian books and embellishments; the upstairs walls remain blank. The basement comprises a Ping-Pong room, a table-hockey room, and a Finnish sauna. The swimming pool outside is used in winter for furious ice baths in alternation with languorous sauna sittings.

South Bend is welcoming, comforting, and incongruous. As new Americans, the members of the Toradze community eat pizza, play basketball, and barbecue salmon in the backyard. They are addicted to such gadgets and amenities as giant TVs and state-of-the-art audio systems. They shop for steak and vodka in the early hours of the morning in vast twenty-four-hour food marts. Their social rituals are Russian or Georgian. So is their informed enthusiasm for jazz, which preceded their arrival. Though they do not attend the football games, Lexo’s excitement was boundless when he discovered that the forward pass was a South Bend invention.

Posting about Benched reminded me of this encouraging article by Corby Kummer about the Neustras Raíces community garden program in Holyoke, Massachusetts—a place where neighbors have taken ownership of long-term transformation.

agriculture, communities, cultivation and creation, gardens and cities

Andy

:

Even in the middle of winter, when I visited, it was apparent how meticulously the gardens are maintained—unlike many other urban gardens I know, which out of season can resemble the trash heaps they started out as. Everything looked freshly groomed: the wooden fences separating individual 15-by-20-foot plots, the gaily painted casitas, tool sheds that are “artistic statements,” Ross told me, and gathering places like stoops. Several gardens had plastic-covered hoop houses, greenhouses that in the dead of winter can get pretty grungy. I didn’t detect a rip. 

“We have nine community gardens in some of the toughest neighborhoods in the city if not the country,” Ross said, “and the incidence of vandalism has been almost zero.” Joel Cortijo, a colleague along for the tour, said simply, “It’s ours.” . . .

Gardens are the heart of everything Nuestras Raíces does. Children can often be found playing in vegetable patches and in adjacent playgrounds built on land cleared of needles, broken glass, and brush that gave dealers a place to hide their drugs. Grandfathers and fathers, many of whom grew up on farms in Puerto Rico, teach schoolchildren how to grow peppers and eggplants and experiment in greenhouses on the farm with exotics like papayas and avocados, to see what they can get to grow in the New England climate. “During the summer you’ll find a dozen guys sitting on tables and benches,” Ross said, “shelling beans and telling lies about the size of their tomatoes.”

Christianity Today has an extended interview with me on its Web site, much longer than could fit in the magazine . . . read it all for some good thoughts provoked by my exceedingly capable interviewer, Derek Keefe. By the way, I expand quite a bit on the transition from consumption to creation in my contribution to the subscription-only Q Words series, "From Purchases to Practices."

citizenship, consumption, cultivation and creation, evangelicalism

Andy

:

If cultivating and creating are so central to our biblical vocation, why have they been put aside?

The disenfranchisement of conservative Christians from cultural power at the dawn of the 20th century elicited strong reaction. Just two generations after evangelical Protestants had been intimately involved in building almost every major post-Civil War cultural institution, they either were kicked out or left voluntarily. People who wanted to hold on to theologically conservative beliefs thought you couldn’t do that and participate fully in mainstream culture. We’ve spent a century working our way back from the fallout of that.

Last century we also saw the rise of mass consumption as a way of life in America. When you look at newspapers from 100 years ago the principal word used to refer to Americans in general was citizen. Now the word USA Today uses most often to refer to all of us is consumers. And if we want to talk about people in their civic role we don’t usually call them citizens but voters. Think about how different those words are, how much thinner a word voter is than citizen. It’s not just Christians but Americans in general who have adopted a posture of waiting passively for cultural offerings. We think it’s our job simply to figure out what we like and buy it.

Finally, being an effective cultivator and creator requires certain disciplines—cultivating a certain awareness and willingness to work at things in the world. Consumer culture has made it easy to get along in many spheres without learning basic skills, whether it’s how to keep the garden growing or how to cook. Although technology gives us an amazing sense of power and infinite capacity, it does so by taking over all these things that our parents and grandparents knew how to do. But there is a backlash. People are starting to realize that we’ve lost some capacities that we don’t want to lose.

Your book returns us to a much older story—the biblical story—and shows where humans stand in that greater, ancient narrative.

One of the things that has hindered evangelical cultural creativity has been a nostalgia for the nineteenth century when we were dominant culturally in a way that we will probably never be again. Ancient Israel is a much better place to start because it was so small, always beleaguered, always overwhelmed by empires around them, and yet they sustained this incredible, world-changing culture. That’s a much more instructive picture than hoping that we can reclaim the kind of cultural control that evangelicals briefly had at one point in American history.