MY PRIVATE BROADBAND

Dear Deanna,

Beth's piece about driving around with music on the car radio that allows her to instill greater opportunity and choice for her children is well-written but to me it describes a life where cultural para-olympics are the only games in town. I never thought I'd say this but the word "broadband" is becoming an oxymoron as what Beth brilliantly calls "corporate algorithms" shrivel choice, chance and, with them, taste. I still feel obliged, as a matter of intellectual citizenship, to discover the music of genius that fell through the cracks decades ago. And so blackfaced black entertainer Bert Williams gets the regular air time in my private broadband he doesn't get elsewhere because his music, most of it recorded before WWI, doesn't lend itself to pilfering by the samplers of hip-hop nation. W.E.B. DuBois wrote his incandescent book, "The Souls of Black Folk," as a reflection on the transformative experience he had listening to a recording by the Tuskegee Quartet. So when I taught excerpts at Temple, where I was judged unfit to teach, I found the record and asked my kids to turn off cell phones, place their head on desks and go back in time to 1910 and try to hear what made DuBois write so eloquently. Then I asked the students to bring in music that had so transformed them. While most of the music they brought was Top 40, a few brought examples of very personal exploration. For just for a couple of hours, I think my classroom redefined broadband.

Sis, I am the pure product of personal discovery precisely because my own algorithms are based on discontinuity and lack of familiarity. "Make it new," Ezra Pound commanded me in my freshman year. Now his charges must KEEP IT NEW--and that increasingly means going as far back as the quenchless thirst for true music will take me. I still am reeling from the first hearing of a 1920 record, "Turn Back the Hands of Time" that places the impact of WWI and the great destroyers of inherited certainty like the theory of evolution into a sentimental parlor- song context about the common, contagious ache of alienation. Back then, when people were more likely to buy the sheet music for a song than the record they heard of it, music was communal and performance meant learning the music and its words for oneself. This is participation beyond any Rhapsody can give.

Last night, Mo and I watched an extraordinary childhood reminiscence by British director Terence Davis called "The Long Day Closes" that used music from Mahler to Doris Day, with lots of Catholic hymns thrown in, to SUMMON Liverpool circa 1956. The 1992 movie was non-narrative, non-linear, and yet it made the deepest impression on Mo and moi of any movie that pretends to conjure history that we can recall. To do so, it must serve as a centrifugal broadband. Much of the endlessly streamed music is songs sung by the hero's mother. Right near the end of the movie, when Bud, the hero, must face his "queerness," she sings "If I Had My Life to Live Over (I'd Live It The Same Way Again)" to help him affirm himself. Jesus, Deanna, I thought I was going to explode in tears. This was meta-memoir.

So, let me return to car and home life, and the music that is essential to it. When I'm alone in the car, I take my musical chances with four pre-progammed stations--Temple's, Princeton's, NPR, and a bona fide oldies station that play music mostly from the 1930s, 40s and 50s chosen by old geezers like myself who believe that more worlds can open with an old Ray Noble record than with White Stripes or Beyonce. Many a time I am the radio, and choose to complete a Mahler cycle or listen to the Webern Mo hates. I admit it: At home or in the car, I am a stranger in a strange land. But now I wouldn't have it any other way. This alienation is life-sustaining.

Love,

Yr Bro

P.S., I beg you to watch "The Long Day Closes."