Friday Miscellanea

This has been known for decades, but since Paul McCartney revealed in a 60 Minutes interview that he doesn't read or write music, the media are treating it as a big revelation. I've always been a bit puzzled by this because, frankly, it isn't that hard. I taught myself to read and write music when I wanted to include orchestral instrument parts in some songs I was writing back when I was eighteen years old. Oddly enough, one of my inspirations was, yep, songs by the Beatles. Their producer, George Martin, a trained musician, was able to provide them with notation skills when necessary. But I have often wondered what the block was. Psychological? Cultural?

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The New York Times, oddly enough, has a piece containing a critique of the trend in the arts to become a "battleground of social justice."

The real-world and social-media combat we’ve been in for the past two years over what kind of country this is — who gets to live in it and bemoan (or endorse!) how it’s being run — have now shown up in our beefs over culture, not so much over the actual works themselves but over the laws governing that culture and the discussion around it, which artists can make what art, who can speak. We’re talking less about whether a work is good art but simply whether it’s good — good for us, good for the culture, good for the world.

We have language that helps do the sorting. A person who insults, harasses or much, much worse is “problematic,” and certain “problematic” people, and their work, gets “canceled.” Recent cancellations include Bill Cosby, Kevin Spacey, Louis C.K., Roseanne Barr, Kanye West, Ian Buruma’s stewardship of The New York Review of Books, Matt Lauer, Woody Allen, Netflix’s flagrant high school satire “Insatiable” (but only figuratively since it has been renewed for a second season), the YouTube star Logan Paul, the Nation’s poetry section. People you love but who’ve misstepped are “problematic faves” — Scarlett Johansson, Dave Chappelle, Cardi B, Justin Timberlake, M.I.A. — and you don’t outright cancel so much as temporarily block them until they get their acts together. The people who know who’s who, what’s what and when’s when are “woke.” They tend not to be black, because black people are born woke; the trick for them is to stay that way.

The nomenclature is supposed to make the moral sorting expedient. The “hot or not” lists of yore have, more direly, become “O.K./Not O.K.” Individuals are not necessarily permitted a say in the cancellation — or, for that matter, in the coronation — of artists or their work. A temperature is taken and you’re advised to dress accordingly. What’s bad for some people is deemed bad for everybody, and some compliance is in order, lest you wind up problematic, too.

That leads to something farcical like the Grammys’ rumored prophylactic shunning of the popular white musician Ed Sheeran from the three biggest award categories, lest he triumph over Kendrick Lamar or Childish Gambino and cause a firestorm of upset.

I think that this is the inevitable result if you prohibit aesthetic evaluation. Without that the only way to judge art is by whether it entertains you or not, or whether it fulfills some social purpose. Art that merely entertains tends to be, well, entertainment, so that leaves social justice.

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 While we are in New York we can drop in on Alex Ross' piece on the opening of the season at the Met and the New York Philharmonic:

What made this “Aida” indelible, however, was Anita Rachvelishvili’s magisterially hell-raising performance as Amneris. The young Georgian mezzo-soprano, noted for her Carmen, has a huge, piercing voice, and she isn’t afraid to sacrifice purity of technique for the sake of intensity of expression. Not all the sounds she made were beautiful, but all had dramatic point. A sign of her charisma is that during the final tableau, as Aida and Radamès are expiring in the tomb, Amneris continues to transfix the attention: even when she isn’t singing, she dominates the stage. The Met should let her do whatever she wants: artists of this calibre are the reason opera exists.

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Ross was reasonably positive about the New York Phillies and their new conductor, but David Gelernter had a different opinion:

For years, the maniacal self-absorption of Music Director Alan Gilbert allowed the New York Philharmonic to deteriorate into a sloppy shambles and become the worst of the world’s best orchestras. This season, there is a new music director, Dutch conductor and violinist Jaap van Zweden. Van Zweden gave his opening subscription series this weekend, and the transformation was obvious: Under his baton, the orchestra is no longer sloppy. Now it is merely unmusical.

I like it when reviewers just go ahead and tell us what they think! You should go back and read Ross' comment on the premiere of the piece by Ashley Fure then compare to Gelernter's take:

The concert opened with the debut of Filament, a new work by contemporary composer Ashley Fure that sounded like a parody of late 60s experimental music. The orchestra was supplemented by three soloists in casual hipster attire on spotlit pedestals: a trumpet, a bass, and — out in the aisle — a bassoon. These were in turn supplemented by fifteen “moving voices,” singers who prowled around the audience with black plastic megaphones that resembled witches’ hats. The piece lasted 14 minutes:  roughly ten minutes of demonic possession followed by four minutes of a traffic accident in the Holland Tunnel.

Sounds, uh, exciting? He continues:

The composer’s stated goals included “to democratize proximity” and “to activate a theater for the social.” I feel compelled to note that, once the singers had finished hissing into their megaphones like a suite of deflating tires and van Zweden had turned slowly and balletically to stare at the audience as the lights were gradually dimmed to black, we were not left feeling that our proximities had been particularly democratized.

Now that's my kind of review. Not to say that I would share his opinion, I just like that he had an opinion.

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A short miscellanea today, so let's have a double-barreled envoi. For something a bit different here is Yuja Wang playing the Piano Concerto No. 1 by Brahms with the Munich Philharmonic conducted by Velery Gergiev. There are two encores. Also on the program Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky and Glinka.

And another composer I don't talk about a lot, Mendelssohn. This is his Symphony No. 4 "Italian" with the Frankfurt Radio Orchestra (who have an excellent series of videos online) conducted by Paavo Järvi.

The Music of Leo Brouwer, part 2

One of the reasons I wanted to do some posts on Brouwer was that I have been re-learning the Elogio de la Danza, a really impressive piece, and, while in Montreal, I picked up a nice collection of his solo pieces from Max Eschig:

It is good value because for less than what just the Estudios sell for in individual volumes you get all twenty of them, plus the solo music published by Eschig (Aires and Temas populares cubanos, Piezas sin titulo 1-3, Danza del Altiplano, Preludio, Fuga plus Parabola and Tarantos and his cadenzas). Today I want to talk about the four books of studies.

Brouwer has composed twenty studies for guitar, titled Estudios Sencillos, in four books, five studies in each. I have found them invaluable for teaching and used them for decades in my private teaching. They are not only extremely good for teaching technique, what makes them particularly useful is that they are very good for teaching musical values as well. Estudio I for example is not only good for RH thumb independence, it is also an excellent study in learning to phrase and control dynamics. The second study, a chorale, is very good for LH finger independence and balancing chords. No. 3 is a good prep for tremolo and, again, dynamics. No. 4 uses changing time signatures and, again is good for phrasing. No. 5 is good for arpeggios and syncopated rhythms. No. 6 is an excellent arpeggio study. No. 7 is a study in slurs and in counting rests. No. 8 introduces counterpoint so the student has to learn how to phrase and balance two melodies simultaneously. No. 9 is a challenging study for slurs, LH finger independence and syncopations. No. 10 is a study in syncopation, LH finger independence and slurs. These ten studies were published in 1972. They are invaluable in teaching because they can be played by students early on. Until I discovered these and some other pieces by Bryan Lester, I despaired of finding good material for beginners other than those dreary studies by Aguado, Sor and Giuliani. Nothing against them, of course, but musically they are, except for a few by Sor, rather uninspiring.

In 1983, Eschig published ten new studies in two books. The first few are roughly at the same technical level as the first ten, perhaps a bit more challenging. As we move on, however, they become more difficult. The first five are essentially just developments of the ideas in books I and II: arpeggios with fixed fingers, legato treatment of chords, slurs (but now double slurs with fixed fingers) LH finger independence and so on. Estudio XVI introduces some new problems. Sub-titled, "para los ornamentos" this study is in Baroque style and has a lot of very intricate melodic and harmonic ornaments written out. The technical challenge involves both arpeggios and slurs that have to be executed with rhythmic precision and clarity:

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Nos. XVII and XVIII are also for ornaments involving tricky grace notes and slurs. No. XIX is for chords with slurs while two fingers are fixed and slurs with bar chords. No. XX is a variation on that with repeated arpeggios. It shows the influence of the "minimalism" of Steve Reich and Philip Glass.

I am going to talk about Parabola and Tarantos next time. Written in the mid-70s, they come at the end of what we might call Brouwer's avant-garde phase. Sometime around 1980 I think he underwent an aesthetic crisis or transition and I think that we see some of this in the second group of ten studies. He develops a keen interest in both Baroque music--he recorded a whole album of Scarlatti sonatas and later published the transcriptions--and in the return to pulse and tonality of the American minimalists. I attended a guitar festival in Toronto in the early 80s that Leo was also at and he along with Stephen Dodgson and Gilbert Biberian gave a discussion session on composition that I was at. I asked the three of them the question why they had all returned to composing tonal music (the question was mostly directed at Leo because of his recently published El Decameron Negro)? I will get into that more next time!

Now let's listen to the Brouwer studies. The guitarist is Ricardo Cobo:

There is an even newer set of studies by Brouwer published by Chester Music that I have not looked at.

The Music of Leo Brouwer, part 1

Leo Brouwer (1939 - )

The Cuban composer Leo Brouwer is one of the most significant composers for the classical guitar. He became widely known, among guitarists at least, in the early 1970s and I picked up the scores to several of his pieces not too long after they were published. He started composing in his teens and studied with Vincent Persichetti and Stefan Wolpe in the US and later with Karlheinz Stockhausen in Germany. While in Europe he became familiar with the music of Hans Werner Henze, Luigi Nono and Iannis Xenakis. He also studied the performance practice of early music with harpsichordist Gustav Leonhardt. Some of this is in the Wikipedia article, other information is from my personal knowledge.

Brouwer is a complex figure. On the one hand he is anything but an aesthetic ideologue. His music draws from the structures and ideas of modernism and the avant-garde, but also from Cuban and African folk music. He has created purely electronic music and at the same time done very lush settings of traditional lullabies. He has written film music, such as the soundtrack to the movie Like Water for Chocolate, and also beautiful and instructive technical studies for guitar. He has made a career as a solo performer (one outstanding example is his brilliant recording of Scarlatti sonatas in his own transcriptions) sadly cut short by an injury to his right hand index finger, and as a composer. He has written several concertos for guitar and orchestra that have had numerous and continuing performances. For a while he was the music director of the symphony orchestra of Córdoba, Spain. A recent edition of his music describes him as

Composer, guitarist, conductor, researcher, teacher and cultural promoter, Leo Brouwer is a central personality in Cuban musical life ... His guitar output is an example of cultural mixing, fusing elements borrowed from Cuban traditional and nationalist music, from Afro-Cubanism and from the music of the European avant-garde in an individual style in which the sensual and the structural, the archaic and the scholarly, achieve a fascinating balance.

On the other hand, he is a member of the Communist Party of Cuba, one of their subsidized artists, and for many years was head of their institute for film music in which role he composed music for what were essentially propaganda films.

I have met Leo Brouwer on several occasions. The first was a master class and concert in Montreal at McGill University in the late 1970s that I helped to arrange. I think I played his Elogio de la Danza for him on that occasion. A few years later I met him again in Toronto where he gave another master class and I think I might have played Memorias por El Cimmarón for him then. Then I met him again in Quebec City in the 90s at a guitar festival when he was kind enough to compliment me on my recording of his El Decameron Negro. I gave a talk on his Concerto No. 3, Elegiaco on that occasion.

I think we can discern three stages in his compositional output and they can be represented, somewhat accurately, by his three main publishers. His early music, from the late 1950s to 1980, was published partly by Schott and partly by Max Eschig. The earliest of these pieces include arrangements of popular Cuban airs and pieces related to dance rhythms such as the Danza Caracteristica of 1957. Let's have a listen. The guitarist is John Williams.

Another lovely piece from this period is his setting of Canción de cuna by Emilio Genet. The guitarist is Leo Brouwer and the clip is given the title Drume negrita, the name of the original tune (the music is published under the title Canción de cuna however). There are lots of ornaments in this performance that you won't find in the published music!

The influence of European modernism, Bartók in particular, starts to be heard in his Tres Apuntes (Three Sketches) from 1959. All of his music is now published by Schott. The guitarist is Cristina Azuma:

But the real breakthrough came with Elogio de la Danza in two brief movements of 1964. Here is the cover of the score I purchased in Spain in 1974 (it was published in 1972):

Getting a bit beat up by this point. But I treasure it because it contains a couple of pencil marks Leo made on the score when I played it for him, emphasizing that a rasgueado needs to be more accented. I recorded this piece for the CBC in 1975, but I don't have a copy any more so let's listen to this performance by Pepe Romero. He doesn't get the dynamics quite right, but everything else is great.

I'm just re-learning Elogio after not playing it for decades and I am so impressed by how brilliantly it transfers the harmonic and rhythmic idiom of Stravinsky to the guitar and adds all the rich timbral resources the guitar is capable of. Brouwer has remarked the the piece is a tribute to the "ballets russes" of Stravinsky.

In 1968 he wrote another modernist masterpiece, Canticum, also in two movements. This sounds less like Bartók or Stravinsky and more like Stockhausen or Ligeti. Some innovations are the more extensive use of timbre as a structural device and the scordatura of the 6th string to E flat for the second movement. The guitarist is Artyom Dervoed:

And finally, for this post at least, the piece that to me is the best of Brouwer's avant-garde pieces, La Espiral Eterna of 1971. Here he uses a number of guitaristic devices, such as arpeggios with pull-offs, hammer-ons, sliding on the string winding and Bartók pizzicati along with some aleatory elements to create a masterpiece of 20th century music. The effect in places is that of tape loops. Luckily we have Leo's own recording:

I am going to continue with a couple more posts on Leo Brouwer.

Victor Borge

I suddenly had the terrifying realization that I may have never put a Victor Borge clip up on the blog! Since I just ran across one I have never seen before, I can rectify this immediately:

I have never heard him do singing impressions before. Just think, you could be watching Victor Borge clips instead of, well, Senate Judiciary Committee Hearings.

Sometimes he even plays the piano...

Friday Miscellanea

Back home and it's time for the Friday Miscellanea. Let's start with a nod to fellow blogger WenatcheeTheHatchet, who has, lately at least, been a bit more prolific than myself. Recent posts have dealt with Charles Ives, in some detail, and new guitar music by German Dzhaparidze.

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We have talked about the music software Auto-Tune before and now there is an article on its brief history: How Auto-Tune Revolutionized the Sound of Popular Music. Auto-Tune, for those not in the know, is music software developed for use in recording. I haven't used it myself, but what it does is take the feed from a microphone, typically recording a singer, and filter it so all the frequencies that pass are in tune, hence the name. It is kind of a Procrustean bed for pitch. It was developed to "fix" the notes when a singer sang out of tune. Here is the slightly more fervent description of how it came on the scene from the article:

It happened exactly 36 seconds into the song—a glimpse of the shape of pop to come, a feel of the fabric of the future we now inhabit. The phrase “I can’t break through” turned crystalline, like the singer suddenly disappeared behind frosted glass. That sparkly special effect reappeared in the next verse, but this time a robotic warble wobbled, “So sa-a-a-ad that you’re leaving.”

The song, of course, was Cher’s “Believe,” a worldwide smash on its October 1998 release. And what we were really “leaving” was the 20th century.

And here is the song so you can hear for yourself:

That "crystalline" effect is when a note not quite on pitch is shoehorned into being on pitch by the software. The first time you hear it, it sounds robotic--people just don't sing like that. Here is how the inventors thought about what they were doing:

The expressed goal of Antares at that time was to fix discrepancies of pitch in order to make songs more effectively expressive. “When voices or instruments are out of tune, the emotional qualities of the performance are lost,” the original patent asserted sweepingly—seemingly oblivious of great swathes of musical history, from jazz and blues to rock, reggae, and rap, where “wrong” has become a new right, where transgressions of tone and timbre and pitch have expressed the cloudy complexity of emotion in abrasively new ways. As sound studies scholar Owen Marshall has observed, for the manufacturers of Auto-Tune, bad singing interfered with the clear transmission of feeling. The device was designed to bring voices up to code, as it were—to communicate fluently within a supposedly universal Esperanto of emotion.

If you know a bit more about music history you would realize that pushing the pitch one way or another for expressive purposes is as old as singing itself. I remember doing a song by John Dowland with an early music specialist where he flattened and sharped certain notes according to expressive needs suggested by the lyrics themselves: "My music, hellish jarring sounds, to banish friendly sleep."

The crucial shift with Auto-Tune came when artists started to use it as a real-time process, rather than as a fix-it-it-in-the-mix application after the event. Singing or rapping in the booth, listening to their own Auto-Tuned voice through headphones, they learned how to push the effect. Some engineers will record the vocal so that there is a “raw” version to be fixed up later, but—increasingly in rap—there is no uncooked original to work from. The true voice, the definitive performance, is Auto-Tuned right from the start.

The article has a lot of information and mentions as an example of the more comprehensive uses of Auto-Tune a song by Kanye West that I have talked about before. In "Lost in the World" a whole chorus of voices is processed through Auto-Tune:

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In Commentary magazine Terry Teachout muses about the fate of opera in the US: The Fat Lady Is Singing.

Is American opera as a whole in a terminal condition? Or are the collapse of the New York City Opera and the Met’s ongoing struggle to survive purely local matters of no relevance elsewhere? Heidi Waleson addresses these questions in Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America.2 Waleson draws on her experience as the opera critic of the Wall Street Journal to speculate on the prospects for an art form that has never quite managed to set down firm roots in American culture.

The financial challenges for opera production are formidable:

The Met had particular difficulty managing the reduced circumstances of the 21st century when it came to opera. Its 3,800-seat theater has an 80-foot-deep stage with a proscenium opening that measures 54 feet on each side. (Bayreuth, by contrast, seats 1,925, La Scala 2,030, and the Vienna State Opera 2,200.) As a result, it is all but impossible to mount low-to-medium-budget shows in the Metropolitan Opera House, even as the company finds it is no longer able to fill its increasingly empty house. Two decades ago, the Met earned 90 percent of its potential box-office revenue. That figure plummeted to 66 percent by 2015, forcing Gelb to raise ticket prices to an average of $158.50 per head. On Broadway, the average price of a ticket that season was $103.86.

Teachout concludes that, in the absence of European-style state subsidies, opera may not be able to survive in America.

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The question of the moral worth, or even moral status of music, is one that is often critiqued by the hipper musicologists and Alex Ross. Has classical music been permanently compromised by the fact that the Nazis were fond of it? He seems to think so. But the sense that perhaps the sublime beauty and transcendence of the music of someone like Bach does have a positive moral effect still prevails in some quarters. The New York Times reports that Yo-Yo Ma Wants Bach to Save the World.

His trip to Leipzig was part of a sprawling project related to the album: Over the next two years, he will visit 36 cities — winking at the fact that each of the six suites has six sections — on six continents. (His next stop is Washington, on Nov. 29.)

In each city, he will pair a performance of the full cycle — nearly two and a half hours of labyrinthine music, played with barely a pause — with what he’s calling a “day of action” that brings Bach into the community, as in his trip to Neustadt. It’s a small and glancing, but also deeply felt, attempt to suggest that this music, with its objectivity and empathy, its breathless energy and delicate grace, could, if heard closely by enough people, change the world.

The cycle mentioned is the set of six suites for solo cello by J. S. Bach, almost unknown to audiences until the Spanish cellist Pablo Casals recorded them in the 1930s. My thinking on this is that the process of learning to play music, particularly classical music, because of the focus, concentration and discipline required, is a very valuable pastime, leading to the development of moral character. Hopefully some of this is transferred to the listener in performance, but I am less sure of that!

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And for our silly segment: Classical Pianist Glenn Gould Is the Next Artist Prepping for Posthumous Hologram Tour.

Eyellusion, the hologram entertainment company behind tours for Frank Zappa and Ronnie James Dio, is working with Gould's rights holder Primary Wave Music Publishing on a Glenn Gould Hologram Tour with dates expected to be announced in late 2019. 

"Glenn Gould would have loved this new technology that will bring his very best performances to venues across Canada and around the world," said Faye Perkins in a statement on behalf of the Glenn Gould estate. "Glenn's live performances were always an event and we are thrilled for fans old and new to be able to experience what it was like to see him on stage."

What the article fails to mention is that Gould gave up all public performances quite early in his career. How ever did they manage to talk his estate into allowing this?!?!?! Here is an interview in which he states why: "I detest audiences!"

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I think that this calls for an envoi of Glenn Gould playing in his natural environment, the recording studio. Here he is in a performance from a television studio with a Beethoven sonata. He gives an introduction, the piece begins at the 5:37 mark:

Wrapping Up Montreal

My trip to Montreal this year was a lot different from my trip to Madrid (and Valencia and Bologna) last summer. It was a lot shorter and I only saw one concert. There were likely others on, but the major orchestras were not playing at all in the eleven days I was there. Instead I spent time simply relaxing, enjoying the food and visiting with old friends. Montreal is a city for lovers of food, wine and culture. I mentioned Schwartz's Hebrew Delicatessen before and it remains one of my favorite places to eat. St. Viateur Bagel is another one. Both of these are not high-falutin places, but where people in general go. The Greek restaurant Jardin de Panos is another popular place where the food is quite good, not expensive and where you can bring your own wine. That is one way Montreal foodies keep costs low.

The Quebec government liquor stores, the Société des alcools du Québec, does not have a monopoly on liquor sales as you can also purchase wine, beer and so on in grocery and corner stores, but they are where you go for the widest selection and the best wines. The staff were very knowledgeable and helpful even though I spoke in English. (I used to be pretty fluent in French, but not using if for twenty years means that now it is pretty bad.)

My last couple of days I headed out to Chinatown for dim sum on Sunday morning, a traditional Montreal activity. I didn't get any pictures of the food, unfortunately, but a friend snapped this one of me trying to explain something or other:

My last day I had won ton soup in a Chinese restaurant for lunch as I really miss good Chinese food as there is none to be had where I live in Mexico. Then, in the evening I did visit a palace of cuisine, Moishes Steakhouse, an old-fashioned and long-standing place to dine well. It is just a couple of doors from Schwartz's, but rather a different experience. Where in Schwartz's you are going to be sharing a long table with eight or ten other people, or be at the counter, at Moishes the surroundings are a bit more elegant. It was early in the evening, as time went on most of these tables were occupied:

And here is what a serving looks like:

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They bring you water, of course, and while you are waiting for your order they bring, from left to right and back to front, cole slaw (really good cole slaw), a little bowl of butter, a bowl of bread and a bowl of pickles. I ordered a half bottle of Brunello de Montalchino as well. Here is what the main course looked like:

That is their aged ribeye steak and some french fries. That was probably the best steak I have ever had in my life. I'll bet you are wondering why there is no apostrophe in "Moishes." This is a casualty of the 70s language wars on Quebec. When the Parti Québécois won election in 1976 they put in regulations controlling the appearance of English in signs in Quebec. As the possessive apostrophe is English and not used in French, any establishment who used it had to get rid of the apostrophe. The mystery is why Schwartz's was allowed to retain its apostrophe?

So there you have it. My next trip will be in the first week in December to Toronto for two recording sessions of two pieces of mine with violin. So that will be quite a different experience entirely.

For an envoi, let's listen to a previous piece I wrote. This is "Nuits de Juin," a setting of a poem by Victor Hugo for voice with guitar. The singer is Cherie Hughes and Roberto Limón is playing the guitar part.

Uber, Diversity and Taxes

I have used Uber more in Montreal than I have anywhere before. This is partly because I am not close to a Metro stop and where I am staying I don't know the bus routes. The incredible convenience of the service makes up for the cost, at least in the short term. In highly-developed first world societies like Canada, "diversity" is a goal that is constantly promoted. Based on my Uber experience, I think Canada can relax: mission accomplished! I have had only two native Quebec drivers so far; the others have included drivers from Cameroon, Russia (a marine engineer from Moscow), Lebanon, the Congo and Kyrgyzstan!

If we look at an Uber receipt, we notice another feature of Canadian life: the ubiquity of taxes:

The actual cost of the trip was $8.89 or about $6.82 US. I'm not sure what the "booking fee" is, but the remainder, $2.79 or about $2.16 US, or almost 32%, was taxes. This does not include, of course, the hidden taxes: a hefty tax on gasoline, taxes on the purchase of the automobile and so on. I once saw an analysis of the hidden taxes in the cost of a bottle of wine in British Columbia. I kid you not, the actual cost of the wine was about two dollars with eight dollars in tax! Canadians, through lifelong propagandizing, sincerely believe that these taxes are all to the good and ensure a safe and healthy environment. Certainly true for the hoards of workers employed by the government. An article I read this week in Canada's National Post stated that in seven Canadian provinces the highest income tax rate was over 50%. And these rates kick in at a fairly low level, around $140,000 CAN or a bit over $108,000 US. I think this is called being a "junior partner" in your own life. No wonder that for many Canadians, when they make any significant life decision the first thing they ask is what the tax consequences will be.

Let's end on a happier note! I made it back to Schwartz's yesterday for lunch. I guess there is always going to be a line-up. After a fifteen minute wait I sat at the counter and had my usual, a smoked meat sandwich and a diet coke. You can ask for more or less fat on the meat so I asked for more. The waiter teased me saying "I guess the diet coke balances out the fat?" My personal view is that it is the sugar that kills you, the fat is ok.

Now that's a sandwich! Yes, structurally there are issues, which is why there is a knife and fork on the side. You can't actually see the bottom slice of bread, to pick up the sandwich you just have to feel around for it. But wow, best sandwich I have ever had. They prepare all their own meat. "Smoked meat" is beef brisket pickled and smoked according to a secret recipe. Then it is kept in hot water until needed. The meat for every sandwich is sliced when the order comes in.

The other Jewish palace of food in Montreal is probably Moishes Steakhouse which is right next to Schwartz's on St. Laurent. According to Wikipedia both Moishes and Schwartz's are influenced by Romanian cuisine--Moishes was founded in 1938 by Moishe Lighter, a Romanian Jewish immigrant. I have never eaten there, but I have a reservation for tomorrow night!

Now I'm really stumped for an envoi. I know, how about some Romanian Jewish music?