Producer's Note

I am writing this surrounded by screaming Italian children and dark skinned girls whose faces rush forward towards their thin triangular noses, whole bodies focused on their noses, like the prows of oceanliners, girls poised over the water like caryatids holding up temples, like perfume models, like perfumes themselves, Botticelli bodies, monokini wahines. A light breeze rustles the palms, cypresses climb the terraced hills, bougainvilleas vibrate against the green sea. Ninety-three boats, I've counted them (not including rafts, which scoot about too confusingly to count), from orange kayaks to five-story yachts, bob between me and the Faraglione, those trademark Capri sea pillars. The polar opposite of my life so far. I have run from glaciers to gelati. I am in hiding. In my own witness protection program, escaping from cold death with tiramisu and these dusky, sloe-eyed girls.

    Keats said there's many a trip twixt the quip and the lip, or was it Nabokov? Let me explain myself. Obscurity is the first indication of people who have nothing to say. That is, by the time I say what I mean, I don't mean what I say. Meaning is lost in words. A verb may be an action word, but it is the enemy of real action. Never believe what you've been taught. Thought is a proverbially pre-verbal thing. Einstein used to think in images of elevators, waves, rays of light, and only later flesh them out with the numbers which lesser people require as proof of dreams.

    I think musicians feel the observation principle. When the producer is looking, trees do nothing but fall in the forest. As soon as the microphones are turned off, trees grow, leaves wave, branches dance. So many of the best moments in music are unrecorded, as if recording introduces the lurking, muttering piano tuner, saying under his breath, "well, that wasn't very good," or at least that's what the pianist imagines in his paranoid hands, perhaps transferring his own failures to producers and tuners.

    Perfection is always in the offing, just over the horizon. Like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, it is by definition a moving target, which easily eludes the flesh. Like the end of the rainbow, perfection is a figment of simple perspective. It is never here; it is always there. But, like all answered prayers, perfection, when gained, kills any concert. It is the enemy of spontaneity. The well-made play is what we call a potboiler, a cliché. When I see a Caprese with a perfect physique, I am quick to conclude that something else has been sacrificed in the struggle towards superficiality. A town without graffiti is usually also a town without soul, like a ski resort with only second homes, filled with golfers looking for the local charm they have economically displaced. But I ramble.

    So maybe it was these beliefs, culled over the years from the many so-so recordings which I masterminded, or minor-minded, which drew me to the totally unknown story, Brinkerhoff, a man who was fond of observing that Chopin only played for his friends, after experiencing the cold drafts and long distances of the public arena. Playing in a large hall, so many musicians have told me, is like looking down the wrong end of the telescope.

    Brinkerhoff, like Chopin, at least in this detail, played only for his friends, in settings of his own distracted choosing - power plants, shoe factories, cisterns, moving his Steinway in the dark, surrounded by muscular thugs, traveling farther and farther away from recognition.

    His early life had been so charmed, I came to learn, that nothing afterwards came very easily. No one is so paralyzed as those to whom everything has been given. I include below, in the section called "Turret," a brief autobiographical snippet given to me, not by Brinkerhoff himself, but by a climber who found himself in the sudden possession of a heavy, tied-up parcel after encountering Brinkerhoff's former head porter late at night in Khatmandu, the capital of Nepal, that mysterious mountain kingdom overrun, thanks to us, with the very amenities which contradict its existence. The observation principal. We ruin an exotic climate by our presence. We are not exotics. We are tourists. Fifty years ago we had a world of natives. Now we have a world of tourists. And it's the same people, in different locations.

    So, anyway, this is my project, I can say what I want. That's what a producer is. He turns the pianist into a tourist in his own country.

    But the producer is also a fan. He is a listener, a sponge, not even a very exotic type of sponge sold on a small reeking Greek island to sweating tourists, for instance, but a cheap brand name of sponge sold in sixpacks, who soaks up the dirt and dreams and suds of his victims, of pianists, those neurotic busboys of culture, and who becomes a dishwasher himself, a kind of culinary Oedipus, to continue abusing my metaphor, wandering cursed from dish to dish, knowing that the rack on which he dries, or dies, will be blessed, that his stack of tattered plastic spools and reels, by the grace of which he is excluded during life, will be the ultimate trophies for which he will be remembered. The producer is a thing of patchbays, of wires, snakes, and harnesses, the strange electronic entourage which gives credence to rock groups at Madison Square Garden and so dismays classical artists when faced with its Medusa-like tentacles, as if the aliens will absorb them into their hideous, mysterious, sinuous carapaces.

    "How can Chopin go into that?" Brinkerhoff would snort at my array of pathetic black boxes. I was looking like a traveling Elizabeth Arden saleswoman, a kind of walking Tupperware party, trying to convince disdainful genius that my own brand of worshipful mediocrity could serve his art, that my inappropriate sneeze could wring echoes from otherwise dull halls, that my foggy, myopic vision knew precisely where in a great cave to hang my sagging satellites, my anonymous, androgynous, overpriced surveillance gear, the way I used to spy on golf tournaments as a child with my paper periscope, its mirrors turned obliquely at either end of a long cardboard tube, so my eyes were two feet higher than my head, like someone out of Doctor Seuss or a Lucas film.

    I risk my life's savings, I lose my family, my reputation, my friends. I travel to outlandish places when I could be safely selling stereos or fixing vacuums in a small mid-Western town. I inconvenience myself. I am a high-tech stalker.

    Any why? Because I believe that moments can be captured, remembered, reproduced, transfigured by the principal of my observation, that the electric silence that surrounds sopranos now and then can be differentiated from the infinite silence which is the future, that the only gesture which will save me from the anonymity I face every day is the laboriously preserved musical photo, the plastic substitute for a smile, that tiny round icon, the CD, that stores the world the way a triptych by Simone Martini stores and then unleashes all that forgotten gold.

    We make fools of ourselves, like a photographer at a family wedding, so that our gawky motions and emotions will be seen by neatly-preserved, formerly petulant posterity as suave. Why we should humiliate ourselves for posthumous purposes is a mystery I leave to the smirking journalists whom I can see even now hovering by the dock, waiting for me to fall asleep. I sound as paranoid as Brinkerhoff. Another motive perhaps. I have become Brinkerhoff. His actions are my dreams. He did what I only thought. What he played was what I imagined.

    So I lugged assistants, cables, coffins filled with mics and batteries, boots, parkas, crampons, axes, you name it, urban life packed into a few steamer trunks, like a refugee trying to preserve the status of having once had possessions even in the act of fleeing them.

    I packed the trivia on which my life depends, for example toothpaste, into a stuff sack, and made my way across continents, braving airport riots, flaming taxis, nonexistent flights, criminal police, and in the end my own increasing doubt, to face at last on a strange slab of mud and stone where nothing I had become over thirty-odd years meant anything to the hard-eyed porters who seemed waiting for me to look the wrong way my own menacing nemesis and maybe my enemy, as well as my one last chance at immortality in a mist-mad monastery.

    I take no credit for what is contained on this disc, only blame for whatever deficits result from my inability to deal with truly wretched conditions: blizzards, failing batteries, yaks stomping on cables, avalanches, even deaths: conditions not part and parcel of your average studio session.
     -- The Producer