Bernstein on Canal

Today on a Chinatown errand in my role as Girl Who Likes Things “Just So,” my search for a rare ingredient led me down and up Mott and finally into the fishy heart of the large grocery/housewares emporium on Canal. Amid the aisles and aisles of tea dishes and sake sets on the lower floor, I wandered, half looking for the granulated honey I’d come in for and half browsing domestically and thinking that some day between gigs I might use a bamboo dumpling steamer set. These acquisitional imperatives—which alarm me in their insistence that I become my mother— battle with my inner minimalist who in addition to liking the look of all the clean visual lines in dwell, arrives home after seven weeks at Marlboro and looks around her apartment thinking “when did I ever come to needed all this s^%$?!”

In evidence of this struggle, several articles and foodstuffs of Asian origin were chosen, carried around for a while and then put back. As I moved through the wok aisle, I listened to the radio on the megaphone taped to the ceiling and heard that it was playing a synagogue service and I remembered that it was Shabbat. I’m not Jewish, but as a former bread and falafel maker for Oberlin kosher co-op, I sometimes remember these things.

The choir- it sounded like they were two or three on a part- began to sing the last movement of Bernstein's Chichester Psalms with organ. I love Chichester. I sang it for the first time at sixteen when a wonderful and ambitious new choir director used it and Poulenc’s Gloria to announce to the town and the school board that he meant business.

Chichester Psalms is the most Well Meaning of all the very Well Meaning works by Bernstein who in this case had set out to write something academic and twelve-tone and instead wrote something subjective, modal and heart-on-its-sleeve. Parts of it are unbelievably beautiful and moving. The whole thing ends with the opening of Psalm 133 and despite having learned some choice dirty words from naughty Israelis this summer, I won’t try to type the Hebrew, but just the translation: “Behold how good and how pleasant it is for brothers to dwell together in unity.”

The cultural vertigo I felt hearing Bernstein's setting with its super-solemn chords (and its personal meaning for me) crackling down to me from hilariously awful speakers in the housewares section of a Chinese grocer somehow spurred me to take ownership of the whole moment and I thought, “Damnit, I’m going to stand here stock-still among the styro-foam ramen bowls until they get to the chord change I love…” (7:08) So I did. Some shopping NYU students thought me a little wierd, but whatevs. Never found the granulated honey. Didn’t buy a thing. Lenny Bernstein-1/Impulse Shopping-0.

On the way out into the early evening, I passed the live blue fellows below- I wish the picture showed their movement- and wondered whether their "dwelling together in unity" was good and pleasant to them.