Words of Danny O'Bigbelly My idea of a good time

This morning I ran into an old friend who had just returned from his twenty-fifth college reunion. It turns out that back in 1986 he graduated from Harvard, a small liberal-arts college back East somewhere, probably in New England. You might have heard of it, but if not, no matter.  It’s just the backdrop to this tale.

He told me that he’d run into a bunch of his college friends, most of whom were his fellow bandmates, and I was quite surprised to learn about this aspect of his life. I’d never heard him play and instrument, or sing in the church choir, or even mention an interest in the performing arts. Even if he was no longer musically active, I was surprised that he’d never even mentioned being in a band. In my experience, this is the sort of experience that can leave an indelible mark on the participant.

I gently probed for more information, and he grew wistful. For a moment his eyes seemed to focus on infinity and his face took on the expression of a traveler, lost in a strange city at midnight, trying to figure out which highway lane has EZPass. And then he smiled, and told me a story I didn’t expect, a story so unusual and unique that I knew I that I could bank on getting several page-views from it.

He told me about the Harvard University Band.

I have to be careful in what I write, because he made me promise that I would not repeat any of his stories verbatim or connect the names of any of the many people, now living quiet and respectable lives, who might not want to have their names associated with actions they were said to have taken in their younger, wilder, more carefree days. There was too much rumor and innuendo; too many crazy stories. It couldn’t be true, of course; the tales of under-age drinking and wild parties were clearly pure nonsense. My friend, although kind and reliable, is a nerd’s nerd, and the idea that he could have played a role in such goings on is ridiculous.  There were even hints at recreational drug use, casual and spontaneous sex, the stealing of signs, and the violation of any number of university regulations and state and city ordinances against loud noises, buffoonery, and general jackassedness. All false, of course; he could not offer me a shred of evidence of any sort to support his claims. If signs had been stolen then there would be a room somewhere filled with them; if students had been arrested or angry letters written then there would be some written record of all of this.

I’ll give you an example of this–the friends of my friend used to tease him that they had to carry him home after a party in the Fall of his Freshman year because in the midst of the revelry he had been overtaken with fatigue. They continued to insist that this had happened, even though my friend has no memory of this event. Imagine having all of your friends come over to your dorm in the middle of the night and not being able to remember any part of it–unthinkable! How could this be?

But my friend is honest–even if his friends liked to pull his leg. I trust him, and I trust his judgment, and therefore I know that there must be some kernel of truth in his story. My job as a blogger is to embellish that kernel up in a long-winded monologue and pimp it out for you, dear reader, to enjoy, and so that’s exactly what I’m going to do. Between my friend’s story and my nimble Googling, I think I have enough to begin…

If you’re not from Harvard, or haven’t seen them perform, then it is very likely that the Harvard University Band is not what you think it is, except in the most superficial sense of a being a group composed of people who play music together and wear Harvard insignia.

A little history: the Harvard University Band (which I will refer to as “The Band” in future references, because that’s what Bandies, which is the polite name for people who have been in The Band, call it, except in the few cases where the term would be ambiguous, in which case they call it The Band) invented the notion of performing at football games. They invented the idea of performing at halftime. They invented the idea of playing on the field, and then the idea of arranging themselves in some formation other than a concert shell, and then the idea of moving from one formation to another during the course of a single show, and then the idea of having a running narrative to accompany these changes in formation in order to augment the expressive options. In short, if you have seen a band perform at halftime or between the periods of any sporting events, you’re seeing an art form that was invented at Harvard by The Band.

The Band is also considered in some circles to be pioneers in the field of exaggerating their importance and historical significance, although in my opinion their contributions in this crucial area of human endeavor, although notable, are overstated and in any case are utterly overshadowed by the accomplishments in this field of other organizations in their cohort at Harvard.

In any case, it doesn’t take an enormous amount of skill to get a large number of people to wear snappy uniforms, carry shiny instruments, and march around in formations while playing schmaltzy pop. It takes a few people who have good organizational skills, and a lot of people who are decent musicians, good at following directions, and have plenty of time to practice, practice, practice. When done well, the resulting spectacle is truly impressive and inspiring. There’s nothing wrong with the direction that precision marching bands, drum and bugle corps, and the like have taken. If you’re a member of one of these organizations and are waiting for me to say something insulting about them, you will be disappointed. I have complete respect for anyone who does something very well, even if it is a thing that I have chosen not to do.

One of the great lessons of Harvard (or any other decent college, of which there are allegedly several others) is that there isn’t very much value in doing things that other people can do. Competition is fun for a while, but steamrolling your competitors lets you sleep better at night. If you really want to set yourself apart, you need to find the thing that you can do that nobody else can do. And thus is was that The Band continued to evolve until it reached a form that no other organization has ever been able to successfully mimic.

The most notable and unequaled innovations by The Band can be loosely categorized into the areas of professionalism, rehearsal technique, rigorous selection of most talented and dedicated musicians, and strict adherence to a rigid code of moral conduct. The Band eschewed them all equally.

Most college bands have professional conductors, use professionally-arranged music, have professional choreographers, and a staff of other adults that make sure that travel arrangements are made, lodgings, booked, and the like. The Band is an entirely student-run organization. It writes its own shows, arranges and/or writes its own music, designs its own formations, makes its own travel arrangements, raises its own funds, recruits its own victims freshmen, etc.

Most bands rehearse incessantly, or at least give that appearance. They gradually build up a repertoire that culminates in a magnificent show at the end of the season, but if you attend their shows every week, they begin to seem very repetitive. The Band does a new show every week, written from scratch during the course of the week and fine-tuned, often at the last possible moment, depending on the weather, the instrumentation that shows up at the game, and whether they’ve been able to steal a copy of the script from the other opposing band. It is not unheard of to be handed a fresh piece of music, ink still wet, key signature a rumor passed from person to person along each rank, moments before stepping on to the field to sight-read in front of an audience of 50,000.

This sort of thing might sound like unpreparedness, but it is the exact opposite. A Bandie is always ready to adapt to changing situations, to abandon a bad plan when a better plan is offered. For example, at one game the weather was so cold that all of brass instruments–which typically play the lead and carry the melody, while the woodwinds provide counterpoint and harmony–were rendered inoperable, their slides and valves frozen solid. The opposing band was helpless; their music was unrecognizable crap, hollow and empty of melody. The Band’s clarinet players ad-libbed the trumpet parts, and it sounded like crap, but it sounded like recognizable crap and people could sing along with it.

As implied by the two previous paragraphs, which any decent expos teacher would ask me to restructure so that they followed this point instead of foreshadowing it, the defining characteristic of a successful Bandie is the ability to play fast and loose; to react to rapidly changing circumstances, and to get things done even when it’s not clear what is being done. One of the central principles of Taoism, principle of p’u–the uncarved block that can become anything; the water that has no shape of its own; these are familiar to any Bandie.

The cadets at West Point have a tradition of picking people up and passing them up through the stands. Usually it’s a cadet, but once they grabbed an unwilling and somewhat terrified Harvard student and began passing her up. A Bandie charged into the cadet section of the stands and retrieved her.

Someone will opine that the cadets were simply reacting politely to the protestations of the young woman and the effect of the Bandie on the outcome of the situation was probably negligible, but those people weren’t there. The cadets were young, horny boys in a foul mood–possibly because they weren’t permitted to sit down during the entire game, perhaps because their team wasn’t beating the spread, or perhaps because some unknown and unseen agent, allegedly harbored within The Band itself, had recently pelted them with dead fish. Any reliable witness or student of human nature would agree that the grope-less outcome hinged on the actions of the Bandie.

This was not an isolated incident–unusual things happened around The Band with some regularity–but there’s no training for something like this. You can either do it, or you can’t, and the outcome almost entirely depends on the ability to judge situations that are both challenging and highly dynamic and your belief that you will succeed. It is also useful to be slightly insane or inebriated.

The technical musical requirements for being in The Band were minimal when compared to other musical groups. It was necessary to be able to read music–particularly to sight-read music–and play the standards well. There is no excuse for screwing up The Star Spangled Banner or Fair Harvard.  The Harvard marches and fight songs–the staples of any parade or post-game performance–are not particularly hard in comparison to the standard repertoire of a college wind ensemble or concert band, but in my opinion they are considerably more challenging than the average college fight song. This the sort of thing that is to be expected when Leroy Anderson and Tom Leher write your college pep tunes, I guess. Nevertheless, the emphasis in The Band is not on virtuosity, but on playing ones role; not of standing out, but of filling in. There is no place for a high-strung prima donna soloist with a custom-built instrument on a cold October morning as freezing rain falls and a thousand intoxicated Dartmouth freshman rush the field in Hanover–there is only a place for a team player who has the trust of his rank-mates and understands that there are ways to use the length and heft of the brass he carries that were never mentioned anywhere in any of his Rubank method books; a man who watches the conductor instead of the onrushing mob, a man who has faith in the strange and inexplicable powers of the prop crew, those smiling ninjas in white, who seem to enjoy this sort of thing in some perverse way.

A trait that is more important that musical virtuosity is punctuality. With such limited rehearsal time (and gigs beginning and ending at times chosen by the whim of the football team), the worst thing that a Bandie can do is to show up late. Latecomers are singled out and publicly humiliated by being forced to act out Debbie Reynolds’ verse of the “Good Morning” show tune from “Singin’ in the Rain”, or something like that. I confess that I didn’t really understand this part and I half suspect that my friend was making this up, because none of it seemed to make any sense at all.

Finally, there is the irreverence. Some have called The Band obscene, profane, crass, lewd, rude, childish, immature, uncultured, disgusting, or even perverted. My sense is that the use of any of these words is misplaced, except in cases where they are preceded by some qualifier such as “very”, “extremely”, “notably”, “painfully”, or “excruciatingly”. There is a ready explanation, of course–they were just trying to be funny, and humor is different when done at the stadium scale than when performed more intimately. The same jokes don’t work. Grand gestures are necessary.

Unfortunately, decorum prevents me from describing any of the alleged grand gestures.

It is a documented fact that The Band often found itself in hot water with the Harvard administration. Very few student organizations had their scripts reviewed before every performance, but The Band did–and this was complicated by the very short lead time on the scripts. There was barely time during the weekly cycle to write a show, have it be reviewed by the appropriate Dean, rewrite the objectionable jokes, have the script re-reviewed and approved, and then figure out how to slip the original jokes back in somehow before finalizing the show. And all of this was done without the aid of computers or even Xerox machines, apparently. It seems like an enormous over-reaction, a symptom of some dreadful insecurity complex, that the administration would demand to oversee the entire process simply because The Band had mentioned that Radcliffe, Harvard’s sister school at the time, had a stronger linguistic tradition than Harvard. From what I can tell from some shallow Googling, the question is still considered open, even though the Harvard students, whom both sides acknowledge to be masters of debate, have begun to eat away at the edges of the argument.

So, where are they now? Where are these zany kids, these people about whom such crazy stories were told? When he saw them at the reunion, what were they like? Had they mellowed with age? Did he still recognize them? Did they recognize him?

When I asked him these questions, it took him a moment to gather his thoughts, and then he answered in a way that told me that I’d asked the wrong question.

They all seemed successful, in their own ways. Most had families, and despite the running jokes of the reunion about trophy wives (or trophy husbands), they mostly seemed to be in happy and long-term, stable relationships, several of which with other former Bandies.

The last night of the reunion, many of the Bandies who attended the reunion gathered at the big, climactic dance party. They drank and danced and told stories about the old days until the small hours of the morning, and then dragged themselves back to wherever they were staying and collapsed, exhausted.

Only a few hours later, early the next morning, was the memorial service for deceased classmates. My friend entered the church a little early, because he wanted to get a seat near an exit so he could slip out if his kids needed him. The church was very empty and very quiet when he arrived, unlike the crowded, deafening tent where the dance was held. Only a small fraction of the people who came to the reunion came to the memorial service, but as my friend waited for the service to begin, he watched people enter. One by one, he saw nearly all of his bandmates come in and be seated. Perhaps they all did; he couldn’t see all the entrances.

They were, as he described them, living in the moment; doing the right thing; showing up on time. They hadn’t changed in any way that seemed particularly important or significant to him. There wasn’t any reason for them to change; they are happy with who they are, and with very good reason.

INC

Nearly thirty years ago, I was a freshman in college.

It’s hard to fathom now, but things were a bit different back then.

In order to keep track of who was whom and in particular who was entitled to eat in the freshman dining hall instead of one of the other dining halls, each student was given a sticker to attach to his or her student ID card.  The way that the stickers were assigned was simplicity itself: there was a roll of stickers, numbers 1 through 1600 or so; one for every member of the class, and the first time someone went to the dining hall, the checker would look up their name in a big book and discover whether or not they should be there.  If so, then the checker would peel off the next sticker on the roll and put it on your ID card, and then she (it was always a woman, as far as I can remember) would write down the number next to your name.

Every subsequent trip to the dining hall, you would flash your card to the checker, and she would read off the number and then check off the corresponding box on an enormous matrix that covered most of the desk in front of her, and make a tick mark in a pad to count how many students had eaten at that meal.

This ritual was repeated every semester.  The stickers needed to be replaced every few months.  They were color-coded, and so at some point your color would be wrong and it would be time to get a new sticker.  The lines at the checker could be quite lengthy during those periods, except when there were two or more checkers working in parallel–some handing out new stickers, and the others checking off students who already had their stickers.

I was a chronic early riser.  Early to bed and early to rise was always my way, which means that I missed a lot of interesting things that happened in the small hours of the morning, but I also got the treat of having the campus almost all to myself very morning.

I was one of the few regulars at breakfast every morning.  I rarely missed breakfast, and I was rarely even late.  In contrast, I think that many of my classmates weren’t even aware that breakfast was served.

When I say that I was usually early at breakfast, I mean this in the most literal way.  The first semester I got sticker number 0002.  The second semester, sticker 0003.  I never discovered who got the lower-numbered stickers, despite trying to sneak peaks at the cards of the other early birds.  Initially I figured that whoever got their number before me on the first day of the semester would probably be another early riser, but I never found them.  Eventually I formed a different hypothesis: the first number or two on each roll was damaged by being near the edge, and therefore maybe I really did get the first number.

It was strange eating alone in such a cavernous hall–and cavernous is the only want to describe it, with fifty-foot ceilings, dark walnut paneling, lit poorly by chandeliers constructed from the countless antlers of creatures slain by Teddy Roosevelt, according to the local legend.  I was never really alone, but I often had a row or two of long tables between myself and the next person.  Most of us early birds weren’t terribly social.  In fact, some of them seemed positively antisocial, and I left those people alone, but sometimes I would try to join people who made eye contact and gave me the sense that they wanted someone to talk to, unless they were already muttering to themselves.

I didn’t make the cut with a lot of my potential conversation partners.  If it was pretty clear that they preferred to eat alone–or at least not with me–then I wouldn’t force myself on them again.  Because I’ve always been sort of a gawky, awkward nerd, and never a particularly scintillating conversationalist, this turned out to be a fairly high percentage of the people on whom I inflicted myself.

There was one woman who was somewhat social, and I ended up sitting with her fairly often–maybe once every week or two.  She was from a town that I’d never heard of that was only an hour or so away from the town where I grew up, so we almost knew some of the same places, but not quite.  The malls I went to were not the malls she went to.

She must have been one of the smallest people in our class–perhaps she was a precocious fourteen-year-old or something like that.  I never asked; “Why are you so petite?” seems like one of those questions that is never appropriate.  She was pre-med, and I imagined her as a doctor some time in the future, doing rounds in a hospital, barely tall enough to see her patients over the edge of their beds.

She wore puffy sweaters and knit scarves, as were the fashion of the time, and no time before or since.  She often wore a skirt, which was not the fashion of the time.

We didn’t develop a close friendship and I don’t think I saw her more than a few times outside of the dining hall.

A few weeks, I got my class report–a large book where my classmates list their accomplishments over the last few decades (a very impressive set of accomplishments), accompanied by photos both from our freshman facebook and recent lives.

I started to leaf through it, looking up old friends.  The photos and reminiscences of people I’d forgotten I’d ever known brought back many memories.

I wondered what had happened to the petite pre-med with whom I’d shared so many breakfasts, and tried to look her up, but then I realized that despite my clear memory of how the checkers handed out the stickers for our IDs–a procedure that I only saw twice–I couldn’t remember any part of her name, or even clearly remember what she looked like.

Perhaps it’s a good thing that I went into computer science instead of political science.

One of the challenges that I face on my treadmill odyssey is keeping my mind occupied.  I’ve got books, and a Kindle, and television (which I can tolerate in small doses), but the best thing that I’ve found so far is to watch sub-titled movies or television shows on my little Sony Dash.  The Dash looks nice, and having the subtitles means that I can follow the dialog without turning up the sound so much that it bothers the other occupants of my home.

The next challenge, of course, is to find the a steady supply of subtitled shows to watch.  The best solution that I’ve discovered–although I will gladly take suggestions for better solutions–is watching serial anime from Japan.  Each episode is short enough and peppered with enough commercial breaks that there is always a convenient breaking point if I need one, but the episodes are entertaining and tie together into long story arcs that give me some motivation to stay on the treadmill and keep watching.  I’ve even been tempted to watch some of them when I’m not on the treadmill, but this would set a dangerous precedent.

I’ve written before about Trigun, a story that revolves around Vash, a peerless gunman with a heart of gold, a $60,000,000,000 (yes, that’s the correct number of zeros) bounty on his head, a complicated and troubled past, and a brother who has a small army of minions, weapons of mass destruction, and concrete plans to kill every man, woman, and child on the planet except himself and Vash.  It’s exactly the sort of story that Homer would probably come up with, if Homer had spent more time thinking about space colonization, donut-loving gunslingers and the difficulties of running a successful insurance company when some jackass is nuking cities now and then, and less time trying to find ways to blame the gods or men who don’t pay enough attention to their wives for every little thing that goes wrong.  In any case, there’s enough grist in this setup to keep the mill grinding in a lively manner for about ten hours–probably longer.  I understand the books went on for quite a bit longer than the show, but I’ve never tried to find them.

One of the mysteries of Trigun is why it is called “Trigun” at all.  There aren’t any characters or anything else named Trigun and as far as I have been able to tell the word never appears anywhere in the script.  The answer, I believe, is because Vash has three handguns.  The first–and the only one that nearly anyone ever sees–is an enormous .45 LC breaktop that he wears on his hip.  (Don’t bother telling that there’s no such gun, or that making a .45 breaktop would never work because the stress on the hinge would be too much–it’s a frickin work of fiction, there’s advanced technology involved, and I just don’t care.)  Despite his global renown as a gunman, this gun is often unloaded, broken, in the shop, or packed away somewhere safe.  If you want to see what he can do with it, you’ll have to wait until episode 5 to see him actually fire the thing, but it’s worth the wait–the sequence where the faces of the hostages Vash is trying to protect are reflected in the barrel of his revolver when he draws it for the first time deserves some sort of award and will probably be stolen by other directors ad nauseum. The second and third guns are revealed much later, but I won’t spoil it any more than that.

OK, I know nobody ever clicks on the links… so I’ll have rehash them for you. By the time we see Vash actually shoot a gun for the first time, people are starting to doubt that he’s who they thought he was because he just seems like a goofy kid, not a terrifying, merciless gunslinger who kills in the blink of an eye, but then, for reasons that are not germane to this discussion, he pulls his gun as he is diving headlong to the ground and fires five shots before he hits the ground, each perfectly hitting his target, which is the size of a fist and is hurtling past at 120 miles per hour.  There is some who believe that the fifth bullet left the gun before the first bullet strikes the target.  It all happens so fast that it takes forty seconds of super slow motion to cover less than 1.5 seconds of real time.  Thus it is established that Vash has skills.

Similar to Trigun, there’s no clear reason why the serial Bleach is named “Bleach”, except perhaps that the main character has hair color that looks suspiciously like something that required L’Oreal’s deep involvement.  I am not the only person who has pondered this mystery; apparently it is a question that comes up quite often, but the creator of the story has never publicly offered any reason other than that he thought the name was pretty cool.

After a few minutes of the first episode, in which Ichigo, a typical teenage boy, banters with the ghost of a young girl who recently died but has who not yet passed over into the next world, the viewer begins to suspect that this will not be a formulaic teenage comedy of manners, but might instead take a different path.  Then a demon appears, apparently eager to consume the girl’s fresh soul, but it is foiled by Rukia, who, it can be said with complete accuracy, both floats like a butterfly and stings like a katana-carrying, samurai-trained killer bee, who dispatches the demon and saves Ichigo and the dead girl.  I was a little surprised that Rukia didn’t follow up on this introduction by mentioning that she was out of bubblegum, but I guess that’s not part of bushido, and it can also be explained by the fact that she didn’t know that Ichigo, unlike most humans, can actually see her.   Anyway, from there things just continue on from there in a perfectly logical manner.

Bleach is a typical love story–well, I assume that there’s love at some point, although I’m still less than half of the way through and the central protagonists are not currently on speaking terms–between Ichigo, an average teenage boy who can see dead people and who is pursued by demons and Rukia, an ancient yet cute reaper of human souls, also known colloquially as a death god.  It’s pretty much a rehash of Romeo and Juliet, where Romeo is a regular guy, and Juliet is a supernatural entity from the world beyond death whose brother is more or less a Tybalt-like jerk, if Tybalt had a talking sword that transforms on his command into a swirling maelstrom of 1,000 all-shredding steel cherry blossoms.  Their relationship is not made easier by the cultural tension between Rukia’s supernatural cohort and Ichigo’s high school buddies, and the fact that they are all pawns of powerful forces conspiring to destroy the twin universes of the living and the dead certainly keeps everyone on their toes, but before you can say “Harry Potter” Ichigo is sneaking off into the spirit world to run errands for Rukia (after loading a spare soul into his body so his friends and family won’t know that he’s gone, naturally) and Rukia takes the form of a human so she can steal Ichigo’s sister’s clothes and impersonate a 15-year-old transfer student in order to hang around with Ichigo and his friends during the day.

One of my favorite things about Bleach is that each named character has a signature hairstyle and look.  I believe that a lot of thought went into this, and it’s spawned a cottage industry of sorts to cater to people who want to look like the characters.  Pick your favorite Bleach character and do a search, and I’m confident that you’ll find people dressed up like that character and/or who are eager to help you dress up as that character.  Be aware, however, that there are no exceptions to Rule 34 and I can’t be held responsible for what you find.

But I digress.

Maybe next time I’ll explain where I was going with all this, but it’s time to greet the dawn by watching a few more episodes and walking a few more miles.