sarah lisanick

Sarah Lisanick

"Pick up your wrists," she told me again.
    She nodded her head with the suggested rhythms of the piece I was butchering.  When I blew an accidental and trotted past the legato marks, she circled them and insisted I repeat the surrounding four to six measures until I no longer needed the music. 

    Sarah Lisanick played the piano exquisitely.  She was a bespectacled, short-haired blonde with a love of floral prints and pearls. She taught more than technique; she nurtured the unteachable.

    In the second week of my study with her, she figured out my secret: I was a lazy sight reader. Instead of working out the rhythms and actual notes, I would ask my teacher to play a piece once for me, then I would play it by ear.  I had never progressed in my sight reading abilities because my old teachers hadn't figured out what I was doing.  Mrs. Lisanick nailed it in week two.
    The work of sight reading was excruciating to me.  I think it utilized a part of my brain that would’ve rather been left alone.

    She studied with Béla Bartók.  To me, this makes her something akin to royalty.  In the genealogy of musical training, this makes her my pedigree. 

    My ear pulled away from Beethoven and Chopin; no matter that these are the masters to learn when developing technique, she eschewed them for my sake and brought me Erroll Garner.  She filled my head and ears with Johnny Mercer.  She introduced me to Stephen Sondheim. 
    "You need to work out the counterpoint between the hands.  There is a slight syncopation toward the end of the measures that is truly his signature style."
    "I'm really not seeing it.  Would you?"
    She acquiesced and took the bench. 
    "Right here, and again here.  Once more, and then we repeat."
    And then I played it perfectly, not reproducing her nuance but creating my own.  There is great intelligence in the balance of Sondheim's harmonies, but the beauty of his lines can be devastating.

    I saw her for the last time a few months before she died.  Her ex-husband John had moved back in with her for the end. 
    "It's so sad," he told me.  "All the time we were apart.  Now something wonderful has happened, but it's too late." 
    She looked the same as I remembered; short, blonde hair, large, thick glasses-- except she wore a housecoat instead of the usual florals and pearls.  We sat for tea and I told her that while I was still studying music, I had switched from piano to voice. 
    If she was disappointed, she didn't show it.  I played a bit for her, to prove that I was keeping up with the piano, even if I was no longer studying formally. 

    In every musical experience I carry her mark.  I feel her love of music, I remember her emphasis on interpretation and her rejection of histrionics.  Interpretation, as an art of the musician, crosses the span of all instruments.  In the drift from piano to voice to guitar and around again, I have discovered something fundamentally changed. On the good nights, when the technique is strong and little more than impulse, my hands and throat have become conduits for something greater. Mrs. Lisanick molded me into an instrument.

seven random questions with emily flake

I conducted the following interview via email back in 2006. Emily Flake remains my favorite comic artist.

1. Name a musical act that you would enjoy destroying. What is your preferred technique?
Sufjan Stevens. Immolation.

2. Where is the best place to get shitfaced when one is visiting Baltimore, and how many times have you been thrown out of there?
There are so many great bars in Baltimore that it's difficult to pick just one... if you held a gun to my head I guess I'd have to say Hogan's Alley, nee Cox's, which is so cheap and friendly that it'll make you weep giant salty tears into your two-dollar cocktail. Oh, did you ruin your cocktail by crying into it? No matter - IT'S TWO FUCKING DOLLARS. Maybe like $2.50. But still.
I'm proud to say that as of this writing I have never been thrown out of a bar. I have fallen straight on my ass in a bar, I have engaged in quiet, desperate vomiting in the ladies' room in a bar, I have threatened to break someone's nose in a bar, but never have I caused myself to be ejected from the premises. Maybe "proud" is the wrong word here. It is not as if this makes me a good person.

3. Lamer of two lames: Bil Keane or Brad Anderson?
Anderson. Bil Keane's preachiness and ghostly grandpa bullshit is irritating, but there's just nothing there in the Marmaduke. Plus I've always hated that fucking baby. Whatsername. Trixie. Ugh.

4. What is your favorite food that takes less than five minutes to prepare?
Five minutes for me or five for someone else? 'Cause those fuckers at Rice Thai Kitchen can serve up a duck in about 4:40. But if you mean the former, I like a big whack of Dubliner cheese and some avocado. Or carrots and hummus. Or bell pepper and goat cheese. Or HEAVY CREAM STRAIGHT FROM THE CARTON.

5. How would you build an alarm clock for deaf people?
Why, genital electrodes, of course. Next!

6. Speaking of deaf people, you have just come down with selective smallpox, a rare (but heart-wrenching) disease that makes you choose one sense to lose. What's it gonna be?
Well, if it's smallpox, I guess I'd go with touch, 'cause maybe then it wouldn't itch so bad. I can see that having some really disastrous side effects however, so I'll go with taste. Lose my fat ass some weight maybe.

7. The Michael Jackson song "Billie Jean" was inspired by a crazy woman jumping the fence at Jacko's house and insisting that one of her twin sons was his child. For whom would you go off the deep end, and what is your preferred method of Heche?
Pruitt Taylor Vince. Best of all, he's got some fucked up eye condition that makes it hard for him to see, so I probably wouldn't even have to be very crafty to get close. I think I'd just creep very quietly into his lap, curl up, and take a little snooze.

Thanks, Emily. I feel the need for some bourbon and cookies.

_______________________________________________

Emily Flake is the creator of Lulu Eightball, my favorite comic of all time. You can peruse more of her work at eflakeagogo.

blue springs

Cason and Virginia Callaway “discovered” Blue Springs in 1921, and it was the extraordinary beauty that brought them from LaGrange to live in the Hamilton area. However the spring has an unwritten history extending back centuries and beyond. In the late eighteenth century, a hospital on-site utilized the pure water. Prior to that, Native American people knew of the spring and clearly visited it with some regularity. The spring’s location is peripherally marked with trees, centuries old, that were bent in their youth to point toward the water source. The water ranks among the cleanest in the world, as it has since Franklin Roosevelt first commissioned a study to determine drinking sources around Harris County.

At the front entrance, the wood and stone gates blend seamlessly into the grove of giant magnolias. More impressive still is the rear entrance, loping through pine forests and over a mountain ridge from the log cabin home of my great-grandparents. However you get there, the swimming pool will immediately pull you in.

When my great-grandfather Cason purchased the Blue Springs watershed in 1930, he had already envisioned the swimming pool that he would build seven years later. Drilled out of the native hollis quartz, the pool at Blue Springs stretches just over two acres. The water shares an exquisite blue color with its source, though not the same intensity. At the south end of the pool, the water reaches a depth of twenty feet, at the north it is as shallow as one foot. The majority sits at roughly eight feet deep, with quartz bottom shining through the pristine water. A swim pavilion constructed from hand-hewn oak, salvaged from a barn on the property, has hosted many thousands of guests over the past seventy years. A matching pavilion atop the overlooking ridge seats eighty guests at an arc of long oak picnic tables, surrounding a twenty foot barbecue pit and combination butler’s pantry / kitchen, built from the quartz taken from the pool. The architecture of the structures compliments the extraordinary landscape, cultivated over decades by dedicated horticulture enthusiast Cason and his equally green-thumbed wife, Virginia. Cason and Virginia were well-known for their hospitality, and frequently entertained their friends, including Mr. Roosevelt, at Blue Springs.

The pool and the pavilions make an ideal party spot, but their beauty dulls in comparison with the spring itself. Approximately one-hundred yards north of the pool winds a trail, at first paved with stone then worn dirt tangled with rhododendron roots. Mountain laurel lines the sides of the trail in thick walls, and their bloom in late spring delights the eyes and the nose. Continue down the trail for thirty yards, and quite suddenly, the spring will appear. The deep blue color of the water is shocking, almost as shocking as the temperature of the water. A moment in the spring and skin immediately looks blue through the water. Five minutes in the spring and lips will turn blue from the cold. Moss banks line the wall of the ridge that embraces the spring and provide vantage points for jumping in. The visible bottom begins at a depth of fifty feet and slopes downward into infinity. Divers sent to examine the caves below have reached three hundred feet, at which point the undertow and the narrowness of the caves make continuing all but impossible.

Here, in these waters, on these grounds, my family marks every major milestone. When we marry, the showers, rehearsal dinners, and receptions thrown here bring us back. When we are baptized, it is with the cold, blue spring water. When we die, it is to this sacred spot that we repair, with our family, resting in the beauty and strength of those who came before. It couldn’t be more fitting that the family mausoleum sits atop the mountain ridge overlooking the watershed, emblazoned with the family crest and motto: “St. Callaway, Ora Pro Me.” Made from the same native quartz, it currently houses five beloved greats of the Callaway family, four inside the mausoleum and one, my grandfather, outside in the north center plot of the graveyard, where he will watch over his grandchildren as we, one by one, come home.