2009年11月16日星期一

Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin (BWV 1001–1006)


黄灿然在翻译里尔克的《杜依诺哀歌》时候曾经说过:“即使是里尔克的大门为你敞开,你也不一定每次进去都见到主人。有时候,甚至可能经常地,你进去,见不到主人,枯坐多时,你会感到沉闷;或见到了,但并没有 获得期望中的热情接待。是的,里尔克有时候会令人感到沉闷。”我想说的是,巴赫对于我,也是这样。但是,在某次遇见他的时候,我遇见的是绝无仅有的体验,深邃而庞大的美。感谢米尔斯坦!

2009年10月31日星期六

Happy Halloween!

I didn't expect this, but it really makes my day. "Trick or Treat?"



I didn't have any candies home, luckily I found some beef jerky. The children said "Never mind~" I think I chose "Treat"? Here are we, Bla~~~~ Happy Halloween!

2009年10月18日星期日

We have had enough about LOVE, Let's talk about LIFE.

When we talk about love, we always describe it as sweet, fantastic, happy ... While when we refer to life, stuff always comes with hard, tough, miserable ... In Leon, Mathilda asks Leon:"Is life always this hard, or it is only when you are a child?" Leon thinks for a while, then answers "Always this hard." And, we all take it as true.

So, we spend a lot of time to seek a sanctuary for us escaping from the miserable life. Some fantasy on love, is the most common sanctuary. A lot of friends talk to me like this :"I need a relationship , or the boring life will kill me ... bla bla bla" When I turn on TV, I always find the same stories : no matter what age the character is in , he or she run into a passion of love, go through with a lot of dreamy things. That makes me feel even more pity. Then I almost take it as true, although struggling a lot : "We are born to suffer from life", when I met this movie : Julie and Julia.

I didn't expect much from this movie for I even didn't know it before I went to the cinema. Overworked quite a lot, I just want a comedy to turn me into a good mood ---- I had watched the same type of movies in the last few months, The Proposal, The Ugly Truth, etc... That's why I chose this woman topic movie among a batch of horror movies, and besides, there's Meryl Streep in the movie , I'd admit this is the only reason I bought the ticket.

I found it not long after the movie started: It is a similar movie to The Hours, less serious, smaller topic but more comedy. Two women, who are in similar situation, similar mood, lead a similar life. Though they are not living at the same ages, they even get communicated and understood from each other (maybe not each other, but at least one from another). The story is simple: Cooking changes the lives of the both two women.

The interesting thing for me is, how and why did it change the lives? When I was watching the movie, I was not eager to write down the answer in some kind of theory. I tried to feel what they are feeling , what they are going through, what they are "suffering". No big deal happens in the movies, but a strange magnificent feeling of happiness crashed into me. That's what life looks like, not only the sweet scene on the birthday party, but also frustrating experience, fighting with who you love, bitter things you can never tell others. I am always thinking: How can we lead a life without these negative things? I am keeping thinking about this that sometimes I am confused: Does the depressing stuff make the happy ones more shiny, or, we sometimes mentally thirst for the "bad feeling" itself and we enjoy it. I am coming to know why there're ascetic monks. The man with the most property may not lead the happiest life for they have no chance to suffer from life. We make our life a treasure only when we get the both side of coins, even stupid Korean TV series know this, though they make it in a silly way ---- turn one of the lovers to death by some disease.

That is why, love is always some parallel dots over the life, it can never replace the life. Life itself, is the most beautiful thing ever, not only the love. We are pacing to our 30s, we need to take the last time to dance with passion, we also need to learn to taste the life. There's a survey on kaixin001.net, of which the participants are mostly at the age of 20s. The title is "Women at what age do you think are the most fascinating?" I voted at 16-20 (Don't beat me, you know me), but the one get the most votes is "30-40". I think it is reasonable because at this age, women can know not only love but also life. I'll talk it more when I give remarks on the actress later.

OK, enough labouring on the simple philosophy of life and love. Let's move on to the actress. I have told you that I came into the cinema to watch it only because one name "Meryl Streep". But I get more than I thought: the film itself, the director, and, AMY ADAMS.





Let still begin with Meryl. When we refer to Meryl, words always begin like this:"What else can I say about her? She is a legend!" I totally agree with this, but it is too inane. "She is widely regarded as one of the most talented and respected movie actors of the modern era."----quoted on the wikipedia. It is the same inane. For me, she is great because of two reasons. First is she can act anyone and make character real. Some of the greatest actors can not do this. Like Al Pacino, he is talented, too. But his acting is labled. For Meryl, From Kramer vs Kramer to Sophie's Choice, to The Hours, The devil wears Prada, MaMa Mia, Doubt, and this Julie and Julia, can you find a little common ground among the characters in these film? May there is, but these characters is so different that sometimes you feel shocked when you find they are acted by one actress. And, that is Meryl. But the situation of Meryl is subtle: every time she did a great performance, people take it as customs : She IS Meryl. So she get 15 nominations of the academy and only get two in her early age. She was nominated again last year but was beaten by Kate. Do not blame Kate, she is quite OK. What I mean is , Meryl, she can rest like Robert or Al Pacino, for there's no honor she still needs to chasing after. But she is still acting, isn't it amazing? That is the gift for us. Second thing of Meryl is, that she can act in a way of low profile but still touch your heart, which few actors can reach the state. She don't need to perform exaggeratedly to make the audience think she has skills. She can make you forget she is acting someone, get an illusion that you are facing the real person. At least, in her film, she really did it. And I have to say, when Meryl is getting older, she is more likely to show she has the talent to make some exaggerated performance. Take Julia Child in this movie for an example, she designs a French style English accent for the character which gets a lot applause. She shows the positive attitude to life of Julia Child and turn her into an adorable fat woman. Maybe the real Julia Child in the history is exactly like this, but for me, I feel a little uneasy for the character herself. Anyway, it is a comedy, so it is not a big deal. Edited: I call back what I said on Meryl's Julia, after I have watched the real Julia TV show, Meryl did a phenomenal job!




Guess what? If someone acts against Meryl, she need to take tons of courage. If she can get noticed in a positive way, or even be mentioned at the level of Meryl in some way, she will definitely become a leading star. Anne Hathaway failed, but this Amy Adams made it. I was keeping asking myself, why I knew nothing about this actress before and she is 36 now. Can you believe this? The Julie Powell's performer is 36 years old! And further more, she has been highly spoken of in her last film with Meryl ----Doubt. I've watched last year's Oscar Ceremony but I did not even notice her. What a shame! Let's take a look at what she did in Julie and Julia against Meryl. She was acting a 30-year-old woman in the modern era whom we are so familiar with. There were not many spaces for her to rebuild the character in her own way. She has a hard task to convince us this is the Julie who lives with us, not a fiction one. Then I met this Julie, friendly, real, like the neighbor. She is adorable with some jumpy nerve. She made me to have an idea: I need a woman like this and it would not only in a fiction, I can find her somewhere. Isn't it fantastic? Isn't it the most wonderful thing that you want to jump out of your seat, pointing at the character on the screen, shouting "I know her, I have some very same friend!" Last time I felt like to doing this was on An Equation of Love and Death which Zhou Xun was in it. I would like to repeat again: But Amy Adams is 36 years old, can you believe this? I was joking with some friend after I watched the movie:" I think the world is distorted, 91 is captured by a 36-year-old woman, not a lolita~ Holy shit!" Besides this woman has neither a beautiful face nor an attractive body. I have to admit, I will still vote 16-20, but the Oscar belongs to, the world belongs to the women in her 30s and 40s.

And, that is the age the woman start spend LIFE with you, after the great passion of LOVE.


2009年10月13日星期二

在李俊博客里的留言,纯搬运。

我有这样一个父亲,他义正言辞地对我说:“你要做一个对祖国,对社会有用的人,将来为中华民族的复兴作出自己的贡献。”我丝毫没有讥笑这番话的意思,也从不认为我父亲说这番话是为了show他思想觉悟的崇高——他是真真切切就是这样想的。我也从不怀疑他是一个真正的堂堂正正的人。然而,我,这样一个有典型代表性的80后,天天在父亲的呵斥下长大,却从来无法让自己做事的动机以此为目标。于是,我成了社会的渣滓,成了千夫所指。太多人看着我,痛心疾首,就和李俊老师一样。

为什么这会成为80后的特质?因为他们在世界观形成的时候正好赶上了中国最特殊的时期。他们看到了计划经济的尾巴,也看到了市场经济和改革开放。太多的破立让他们世界观里写下了最大的关键词——“否定”。还有另一个关键词,“自我”。这是个在70年代写在反面教科书上的词,我不想去讨论自我和集体还有社会的关系,这么辩证的东西我们学过了几百遍了。有一点可以肯定的是,70年代或者再往前去10年,那时对于自我的认识是错误的,或者说偏颇的。这便让整个80后有最坚定的信念去否定它,结果显而易见,80后已经被戴上了“太自我”的标签。这没错,怪谁?到底是什么让80后已经不能把“民族振兴”作为自己行动的直接目标?社会给了他们太多鲜活的例证来质疑这些东西了,这比李俊老师严肃的说教(没有任何贬义,李老师说的都是毫无疑问正确的)有冲击力多了。给出这些例证的和示范的人又是谁呢?大多也是和李俊老师同一辈或者同时代的人吧。很讽刺,也包括了李俊老师崇拜的杨先生。非常有趣,80后们一边骂着杨振宁,同时把周恩来奉为有史以来最伟大的网络偶像,一边却在干着截然相反的事情——出国,发表大量的paper,然后定居美国,娶妻生子,企盼着成为下一个杨振宁或者类似的人,你看多好,老了还可以娶个年轻貌美的妻子。杨振宁们的私生活与你何干?很抱歉,很有关系,请问有当父亲的愿意在孩子面前show出混乱的私生活吗?然后抛出一句,私生活与你何干?传统在80后这里式微
的最大原因,便是那些传承者没有用自己当作示范来作例证,而另一些人,他们无心,却在做着这些。我们都很钦佩李俊老师的造诣和为人,但是如果你去问问我们中的大多数,你愿不愿意将来做一个李俊老师这样的人,过和李俊老师一样的生活?答案不用我说大家也可以猜到。是
真的李俊老师这样的生活和为人不如某些人吗?我看不是,但是李俊老师没有告诉过我成为他那样的人有怎么的好处,他告诉我的只是,成为另一类人有多么的不好。

整个大学给了我正确的形式,却没有给我正确的说服力示范。我明白了社会公德和民族气节,我将它埋于深心,how to do in the future?那些教我大义的没有教我,或者没有证明他们的吸引力。这便是现在教育的缺失。社会反面例子太多,正面人士做了太多的指责,却没有做示范。我只坚信一点,教育而言,身教大于言传太多了。

庆幸的是,80后的荣耻观还是正确的,这还得感谢各位老师。他们至少会在网上用各种低级的谩骂来证明他们知道道德的制高点在哪。将来如何,大师会不会从他们中走出,我也持悲观态度,但是,我明白一点,如何再造大师,不能再学前一辈大师走过的路,他们生于民族危难之
时,他们的动力是目睹千千万的苦难,那依然是鲜活的例子,而现在,民族已然不能算是危难,那些苦难也只能从李俊老师和我的父亲的口中得知,我再也不能亲见,难道指望我们动力来自这些话语,真的,太空泛了。到底如何成材,我们并不是不在摸索,我只觉得,一定是另一种模式,我们没有放弃过传承,李俊老师的人格魅力,我们需要更多去模仿的理由。我们现在并不是不在模仿,但是我的父亲还有李俊老师,我们希望更加快乐和感觉理所应当的去模仿。

补充:

据我所知,所有浪子回头的故事,里面让浪子回头的,没有一个是正气凌然义正言辞的喝骂。或是一个让他心悦诚服的人,或是一件触发内心的事,或者其他鲜活的让他反思和动容的后果及其他东西。李俊老师以及您的朋友熟读中国古代的故事,相信能找到比我所知还多的故事。我爱看老一辈拍的《大宅门》,里面是什么让顽劣的白老七回头的呢?不是她母亲的各种呵斥——她母亲也是个伟大的人。一切都来自白老七那句——“嘿,真神了。”对80后爱之深痛之切的李俊老师,希望我的这些看法能给您和某些80后论战一些新的视野。

一个上过李俊老师高量但是没学懂考试靠背题目和李俊老师手下留情才通过的80后留。

2009年9月17日星期四

91买包

91打算给老妈过生日买个名牌包,于是跑去Orchard Road. 为了显出自己高端的品味,91故意在出发前换下自己超级有型的Jeans and Tee,换上白衬衫和西裤,陪上金属框眼镜,那一看简直就是《时装》杂志的封面。

出门一位的士司机在向91微笑,但是91这种社会名流是不会做的士的。91绕过的士,走上了143路公交车,消费1.31元来到Orchard Road。

下车抬头一望,有一店名字叫Louis Vuitton。91虽然不认识这个牌子,但是以他无比奢华的品味一看店边上的广告,就判断出这家店实在不够档次——居然请麦当娜做广告。

再往前走,看到一店名曰Prada,气派非凡,果然比较适合91的档次,于是91整理了下领子,挺了挺胸,打算推门走进去。一伸手,还没摸到门把手,门自动开了,一个美女对我微笑:"Good Evening, Sir." 91定了定神,露出迷人的微笑,向美女点了点头。

进了店,91发现店里的顾客都很低端,大都穿着91平时穿去工地的那种jeans,——哦,不,这里有个高端的顾客,西装笔挺。91走上去一看,他胸口还有一个铭牌,恩,写的什么?哦,Prada Staff? 嗯嗯,好像没看清,不管了。

91逛了一圈又发现一个问题,就是这里的面的衣服和包都没有标价。这怎么行?不过这难不倒91. 91一打响指,美女带着微笑走上前来。
"Could you tell me the price of this handbag?"91指着一个一看就是适合91档次的漂亮女士包说。
"Sure, sir. The price is 3980."
"Pardon?"
"Three-Nine-eight-Zero.Singapore Dollar."
91的用高端的英语听力听懂了美女在说什么,于是91极为绅士地向美女微笑:
"Thank you."
然后昂首,头也不回地走出了这家什么叫Prada的店。

2009年3月22日星期日

神经病(二)——如何成为月欠一族

神经病的财政状况是这样的,每月开始的时候信用卡里欠款3000-4000元,之所以在这个数目是因为再多就还不起了。然后发工资,还完信用卡欠款之后再缴纳房租水电并作一定消费后,现金和存款为0,继续刷卡,下月开始继续欠款3000-4000。据说这被称为月欠一族,是超越月光族的存在,据说中国大多数月欠族是因为买车和买房的缘故,但是本人既无房也没车。

群众对我为什么会成为月欠族表示不解,因为我没房没车没女人。但是我觉得这简直是太简单的一件事情了,如果你周末保持去吃150块/个的burger,或者如下图所示的晚餐,这简直太轻而易举了:



垃圾手机垃圾像素拍的,因此作下说明。其实我只点了2道菜一支啤酒,其中包括一个啤酒蒸的螃蟹(菜名太复杂无法记住)和一碗海鲜面粥;啤酒是科罗纳。我在这个很牛逼的越南餐馆里一个人猛吃大嚼1个小时以后,发现结帐我要付350人民币。其实餐馆越南小妹很不错,但是我鸟语太差无法与其交流,最后才发现丫居然会说中文,错过了啊!

螃蟹虽然很不错但是其实我这人并不是特别喜欢海鲜,不过那碗面粥实在很美味,下次我决定进去只点一份粥喝,看看他们会有什么反应。

检查以后我发现本顿超标了,到下个月发工资之前我必须开启方便面形态或者上街乞讨。要成为月欠一族真是太简单了!另各位美女博友如有兴趣可以来这个垃圾城市和我共进晚餐和去酒吧,不包住宿因为本人租不起房子在睡大街,如果愿意一起睡那最好了~

2009年3月21日星期六

Joshua "Stunt" Bell

有人觉得这太过形式主义因此没有意义?这是哗众取宠抑或其他?随便怎么想,反正在我看来,这是一种浪漫的人生梦想。当Joshua Bell站在地铁站口倾倒第一个音符的时候,世界旋转的中心便落到了他身上。弦断无人听?也许是有些许悲凉。但是如果你拉的是Bach,那你断然不能希望匆匆的人流能在短暂的时间里被你吸引。黄灿然在翻译里尔克的时候说过一段话,大概意思是——“里尔克是伟大的,但是就如我这般能将其诗篇译出优美译文的欣赏者,都不能每次都遇到他。所以作为一个普通的读者,您不必期望每次阅读甚至初次阅读就能遇见他,这就好比造访一位隐士,也许三五次拜访,您都只能到达他的居室却未能见其人。但是当你遇见他的那次,你便会体会到他诗篇的优美和哲理。”我并不想像这位作者这般探讨这件事件的讽刺性或者“我们究竟失去了什么。”也许Joshua Bell也只是要做一个试验,或者“It is fun.” 这都不重要。音乐是一种超越的沟通方式,如同诗歌一般,它并不是每次有效,但是它却优雅。这也许是我们人文主义最棱角清晰的剪影?让那些川行不息的人去吧,至少Picarello等几位真正见到了Joshua Bell,这难道不就够了?不管怎么说,向 Joshua Bell致敬,很遗憾,我没有机会在那。


Pearls Before Breakfast

Can one of the nation's great musicians cut through the fog of a D.C. rush hour? Let's find out.

Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, April 8, 2007; Page W10

HE EMERGED FROM THE METRO AT THE L'ENFANT PLAZA STATION AND POSITIONED HIMSELF AGAINST A WALL BESIDE A TRASH BASKET. By most measures, he was nondescript: a youngish white man in jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt and a Washington Nationals baseball cap. From a small case, he removed a violin. Placing the open case at his feet, he shrewdly threw in a few dollars and pocket change as seed money, swiveled it to face pedestrian traffic, and began to play.

It was 7:51 a.m. on Friday, January 12, the middle of the morning rush hour. In the next 43 minutes, as the violinist performed six classical pieces, 1,097 people passed by. Almost all of them were on the way to work, which meant, for almost all of them, a government job. L'Enfant Plaza is at the nucleus of federal Washington, and these were mostly mid-level bureaucrats with those indeterminate, oddly fungible titles: policy analyst, project manager, budget officer, specialist, facilitator, consultant.Each passerby had a quick choice to make, one familiar to commuters in any urban area where the occasional street performer is part of the cityscape: Do you stop and listen? Do you hurry past with a blend of guilt and irritation, aware of your cupidity but annoyed by the unbidden demand on your time and your wallet? Do you throw in a buck, just to be polite? Does your decision change if he's really bad? What if he's really good? Do you have time for beauty? Shouldn't you? What's the moral mathematics of the moment?

On that Friday in January, those private questions would be answered in an unusually public way. No one knew it, but the fiddler standing against a bare wall outside the Metro in an indoor arcade at the top of the escalators was one of the finest classical musicians in the world, playing some of the most elegant music ever written on one of the most valuable violins ever made. His performance was arranged by The Washington Post as an experiment in context, perception and priorities -- as well as an unblinking assessment of public taste: In a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?

The musician did not play popular tunes whose familiarity alone might have drawn interest. That was not the test. These were masterpieces that have endured for centuries on their brilliance alone, soaring music befitting the grandeur of cathedrals and concert halls.

The acoustics proved surprisingly kind. Though the arcade is of utilitarian design, a buffer between the Metro escalator and the outdoors, it somehow caught the sound and bounced it back round and resonant. The violin is an instrument that is said to be much like the human voice, and in this musician's masterly hands, it sobbed and laughed and sang -- ecstatic, sorrowful, importuning, adoring, flirtatious, castigating, playful, romancing, merry, triumphal, sumptuous.

So, what do you think happened?

HANG ON, WE'LL GET YOU SOME EXPERT HELP.

Leonard Slatkin, music director of the National Symphony Orchestra, was asked the same question. What did he think would occur, hypothetically, if one of the world's great violinists had performed incognito before a traveling rush-hour audience of 1,000-odd people?

"Let's assume," Slatkin said, "that he is not recognized and just taken for granted as a street musician . . . Still, I don't think that if he's really good, he's going to go unnoticed. He'd get a larger audience in Europe . . . but, okay, out of 1,000 people, my guess is there might be 35 or 40 who will recognize the quality for what it is. Maybe 75 to 100 will stop and spend some time listening."

So, a crowd would gather?

"Oh, yes."

And how much will he make?

"About $150."

Thanks, Maestro. As it happens, this is not hypothetical. It really happened.

"How'd I do?"

We'll tell you in a minute.

"Well, who was the musician?"

Joshua Bell.

"NO!!!"

A onetime child prodigy, at 39 Joshua Bell has arrived as an internationally acclaimed virtuoso. Three days before he appeared at the Metro station, Bell had filled the house at Boston's stately Symphony Hall, where merely pretty good seats went for $100. Two weeks later, at the Music Center at Strathmore, in North Bethesda, he would play to a standing-room-only audience so respectful of his artistry that they stifled their coughs until the silence between movements. But on that Friday in January, Joshua Bell was just another mendicant, competing for the attention of busy people on their way to work.

Bell was first pitched this idea shortly before Christmas, over coffee at a sandwich shop on Capitol Hill. A New Yorker, he was in town to perform at the Library of Congress and to visit the library's vaults to examine an unusual treasure: an 18th-century violin that once belonged to the great Austrian-born virtuoso and composer Fritz Kreisler. The curators invited Bell to play it; good sound, still.

"Here's what I'm thinking," Bell confided, as he sipped his coffee. "I'm thinking that I could do a tour where I'd play Kreisler's music . . ."

He smiled.

". . . on Kreisler's violin."

It was a snazzy, sequined idea -- part inspiration and part gimmick -- and it was typical of Bell, who has unapologetically embraced showmanship even as his concert career has become more and more august. He's soloed with the finest orchestras here and abroad, but he's also appeared on "Sesame Street," done late-night talk TV and performed in feature films. That was Bell playing the soundtrack on the 1998 movie "The Red Violin." (He body-doubled, too, playing to a naked Greta Scacchi.) As composer John Corigliano accepted the Oscar for Best Original Dramatic Score, he credited Bell, who, he said, "plays like a god."

When Bell was asked if he'd be willing to don street clothes and perform at rush hour, he said:

"Uh, a stunt?"

Well, yes. A stunt. Would he think it . . . unseemly?

Bell drained his cup.

"Sounds like fun," he said.

Bell's a heartthrob. Tall and handsome, he's got a Donny Osmond-like dose of the cutes, and, onstage, cute elides into hott. When he performs, he is usually the only man under the lights who is not in white tie and tails -- he walks out to a standing O, looking like Zorro, in black pants and an untucked black dress shirt, shirttail dangling. That cute Beatles-style mop top is also a strategic asset: Because his technique is full of body -- athletic and passionate -- he's almost dancing with the instrument, and his hair flies.

He's single and straight, a fact not lost on some of his fans. In Boston, as he performed Max Bruch's dour Violin Concerto in G Minor, the very few young women in the audience nearly disappeared in the deep sea of silver heads. But seemingly every single one of them -- a distillate of the young and pretty -- coalesced at the stage door after the performance, seeking an autograph. It's like that always, with Bell.

Bell's been accepting over-the-top accolades since puberty: Interview magazine once said his playing "does nothing less than tell human beings why they bother to live." He's learned to field these things graciously, with a bashful duck of the head and a modified "pshaw."

For this incognito performance, Bell had only one condition for participating. The event had been described to him as a test of whether, in an incongruous context, ordinary people would recognize genius. His condition: "I'm not comfortable if you call this genius." "Genius" is an overused word, he said: It can be applied to some of the composers whose work he plays, but not to him. His skills are largely interpretive, he said, and to imply otherwise would be unseemly and inaccurate.

It was an interesting request, and under the circumstances, one that will be honored. The word will not again appear in this article.

It would be breaking no rules, however, to note that the term in question, particularly as applied in the field of music, refers to a congenital brilliance -- an elite, innate, preternatural ability that manifests itself early, and often in dramatic fashion.

One biographically intriguing fact about Bell is that he got his first music lessons when he was a 4-year-old in Bloomington, Ind. His parents, both psychologists, decided formal training might be a good idea after they saw that their son had strung rubber bands across his dresser drawers and was replicating classical tunes by ear, moving drawers in and out to vary the pitch.

TO GET TO THE METRO FROM HIS HOTEL, a distance of three blocks, Bell took a taxi. He's neither lame nor lazy: He did it for his violin.

Bell always performs on the same instrument, and he ruled out using another for this gig. Called the Gibson ex Huberman, it was handcrafted in 1713 by Antonio Stradivari during the Italian master's "golden period," toward the end of his career, when he had access to the finest spruce, maple and willow, and when his technique had been refined to perfection.

"Our knowledge of acoustics is still incomplete," Bell said, "but he, he just . . . knew."

Bell doesn't mention Stradivari by name. Just "he." When the violinist shows his Strad to people, he holds the instrument gingerly by its neck, resting it on a knee. "He made this to perfect thickness at all parts," Bell says, pivoting it. "If you shaved off a millimeter of wood at any point, it would totally imbalance the sound." No violins sound as wonderful as Strads from the 1710s, still.

The front of Bell's violin is in nearly perfect condition, with a deep, rich grain and luster. The back is a mess, its dark reddish finish bleeding away into a flatter, lighter shade and finally, in one section, to bare wood.

"This has never been refinished," Bell said. "That's his original varnish. People attribute aspects of the sound to the varnish. Each maker had his own secret formula." Stradivari is thought to have made his from an ingeniously balanced cocktail of honey, egg whites and gum arabic from sub-Saharan trees.

Like the instrument in "The Red Violin," this one has a past filled with mystery and malice. Twice, it was stolen from its illustrious prior owner, the Polish virtuoso Bronislaw Huberman. The first time, in 1919, it disappeared from Huberman's hotel room in Vienna but was quickly returned. The second time, nearly 20 years later, it was pinched from his dressing room in Carnegie Hall. He never got it back. It was not until 1985 that the thief -- a minor New York violinist -- made a deathbed confession to his wife, and produced the instrument.

Bell bought it a few years ago. He had to sell his own Strad and borrow much of the rest. The price tag was reported to be about $3.5 million.

All of which is a long explanation for why, in the early morning chill of a day in January, Josh Bell took a three-block cab ride to the Orange Line, and rode one stop to L'Enfant.

AS METRO STATIONS GO, L'ENFANT PLAZA IS MORE PLEBEIAN THAN MOST. Even before you arrive, it gets no respect. Metro conductors never seem to get it right: "Leh-fahn." "Layfont." "El'phant."

At the top of the escalators are a shoeshine stand and a busy kiosk that sells newspapers, lottery tickets and a wallfull of magazines with titles such as Mammazons and Girls of Barely Legal. The skin mags move, but it's that lottery ticket dispenser that stays the busiest, with customers queuing up for Daily 6 lotto and Powerball and the ultimate suckers' bait, those pamphlets that sell random number combinations purporting to be "hot." They sell briskly. There's also a quick-check machine to slide in your lotto ticket, post-drawing, to see if you've won. Beneath it is a forlorn pile of crumpled slips.

On Friday, January 12, the people waiting in the lottery line looking for a long shot would get a lucky break -- a free, close-up ticket to a concert by one of the world's most famous musicians -- but only if they were of a mind to take note.

Bell decided to begin with "Chaconne" from Johann Sebastian Bach's Partita No. 2 in D Minor. Bell calls it "not just one of the greatest pieces of music ever written, but one of the greatest achievements of any man in history. It's a spiritually powerful piece, emotionally powerful, structurally perfect. Plus, it was written for a solo violin, so I won't be cheating with some half-assed version."

Bell didn't say it, but Bach's "Chaconne" is also considered one of the most difficult violin pieces to master. Many try; few succeed. It's exhaustingly long -- 14 minutes -- and consists entirely of a single, succinct musical progression repeated in dozens of variations to create a dauntingly complex architecture of sound. Composed around 1720, on the eve of the European Enlightenment, it is said to be a celebration of the breadth of human possibility.

If Bell's encomium to "Chaconne" seems overly effusive, consider this from the 19th-century composer Johannes Brahms, in a letter to Clara Schumann: "On one stave, for a small instrument, the man writes a whole world of the deepest thoughts and most powerful feelings. If I imagined that I could have created, even conceived the piece, I am quite certain that the excess of excitement and earth-shattering experience would have driven me out of my mind."

So, that's the piece Bell started with.

He'd clearly meant it when he promised not to cheap out this performance: He played with acrobatic enthusiasm, his body leaning into the music and arching on tiptoes at the high notes. The sound was nearly symphonic, carrying to all parts of the homely arcade as the pedestrian traffic filed past.

Three minutes went by before something happened. Sixty-three people had already passed when, finally, there was a breakthrough of sorts. A middle-age man altered his gait for a split second, turning his head to notice that there seemed to be some guy playing music. Yes, the man kept walking, but it was something.

A half-minute later, Bell got his first donation. A woman threw in a buck and scooted off. It was not until six minutes into the performance that someone actually stood against a wall, and listened.

Things never got much better. In the three-quarters of an hour that Joshua Bell played, seven people stopped what they were doing to hang around and take in the performance, at least for a minute. Twenty-seven gave money, most of them on the run -- for a total of $32 and change. That leaves the 1,070 people who hurried by, oblivious, many only three feet away, few even turning to look.

No, Mr. Slatkin, there was never a crowd, not even for a second.

It was all videotaped by a hidden camera. You can play the recording once or 15 times, and it never gets any easier to watch. Try speeding it up, and it becomes one of those herky-jerky World War I-era silent newsreels. The people scurry by in comical little hops and starts, cups of coffee in their hands, cellphones at their ears, ID tags slapping at their bellies, a grim danse macabre to indifference, inertia and the dingy, gray rush of modernity.

Even at this accelerated pace, though, the fiddler's movements remain fluid and graceful; he seems so apart from his audience -- unseen, unheard, otherworldly -- that you find yourself thinking that he's not really there. A ghost.

Only then do you see it: He is the one who is real. They are the ghosts.

IF A GREAT MUSICIAN PLAYS GREAT MUSIC BUT NO ONE HEARS . . . WAS HE REALLY ANY GOOD?

It's an old epistemological debate, older, actually, than the koan about the tree in the forest. Plato weighed in on it, and philosophers for two millennia afterward: What is beauty? Is it a measurable fact (Gottfried Leibniz), or merely an opinion (David Hume), or is it a little of each, colored by the immediate state of mind of the observer (Immanuel Kant)?

We'll go with Kant, because he's obviously right, and because he brings us pretty directly to Joshua Bell, sitting there in a hotel restaurant, picking at his breakfast, wryly trying to figure out what the hell had just happened back there at the Metro.

"At the beginning," Bell says, "I was just concentrating on playing the music. I wasn't really watching what was happening around me . . ."

Playing the violin looks all-consuming, mentally and physically, but Bell says that for him the mechanics of it are partly second nature, cemented by practice and muscle memory: It's like a juggler, he says, who can keep those balls in play while interacting with a crowd. What he's mostly thinking about as he plays, Bell says, is capturing emotion as a narrative: "When you play a violin piece, you are a storyteller, and you're telling a story."

With "Chaconne," the opening is filled with a building sense of awe. That kept him busy for a while. Eventually, though, he began to steal a sidelong glance.

"It was a strange feeling, that people were actually, ah . . ."

The word doesn't come easily.

". . . ignoring me."

Bell is laughing. It's at himself.

"At a music hall, I'll get upset if someone coughs or if someone's cellphone goes off. But here, my expectations quickly diminished. I started to appreciate any acknowledgment, even a slight glance up. I was oddly grateful when someone threw in a dollar instead of change." This is from a man whose talents can command $1,000 a minute.

Before he began, Bell hadn't known what to expect. What he does know is that, for some reason, he was nervous.

"It wasn't exactly stage fright, but there were butterflies," he says. "I was stressing a little."

Bell has played, literally, before crowned heads of Europe. Why the anxiety at the Washington Metro?

"When you play for ticket-holders," Bell explains, "you are already validated. I have no sense that I need to be accepted. I'm already accepted. Here, there was this thought: What if they don't like me? What if they resent my presence . . ."

He was, in short, art without a frame. Which, it turns out, may have a lot to do with what happened -- or, more precisely, what didn't happen -- on January 12.

MARK LEITHAUSER HAS HELD IN HIS HANDS MORE GREAT WORKS OF ART THAN ANY KING OR POPE OR MEDICI EVER DID. A senior curator at the National Gallery, he oversees the framing of the paintings. Leithauser thinks he has some idea of what happened at that Metro station.

"Let's say I took one of our more abstract masterpieces, say an Ellsworth Kelly, and removed it from its frame, marched it down the 52 steps that people walk up to get to the National Gallery, past the giant columns, and brought it into a restaurant. It's a $5 million painting. And it's one of those restaurants where there are pieces of original art for sale, by some industrious kids from the Corcoran School, and I hang that Kelly on the wall with a price tag of $150. No one is going to notice it. An art curator might look up and say: 'Hey, that looks a little like an Ellsworth Kelly. Please pass the salt.'"

Leithauser's point is that we shouldn't be too ready to label the Metro passersby unsophisticated boobs. Context matters.

Kant said the same thing. He took beauty seriously: In his Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, Kant argued that one's ability to appreciate beauty is related to one's ability to make moral judgments. But there was a caveat. Paul Guyer of the University of Pennsylvania, one of America's most prominent Kantian scholars, says the 18th-century German philosopher felt that to properly appreciate beauty, the viewing conditions must be optimal.

"Optimal," Guyer said, "doesn't mean heading to work, focusing on your report to the boss, maybe your shoes don't fit right."

So, if Kant had been at the Metro watching as Joshua Bell play to a thousand unimpressed passersby?

"He would have inferred about them," Guyer said, "absolutely nothing."

And that's that.

Except it isn't. To really understand what happened, you have to rewind that video and play it back from the beginning, from the moment Bell's bow first touched the strings.

White guy, khakis, leather jacket, briefcase. Early 30s. John David Mortensen is on the final leg of his daily bus-to-Metro commute from Reston. He's heading up the escalator. It's a long ride -- 1 minute and 15 seconds if you don't walk. So, like most everyone who passes Bell this day, Mortensen gets a good earful of music before he has his first look at the musician. Like most of them, he notes that it sounds pretty good. But like very few of them, when he gets to the top, he doesn't race past as though Bell were some nuisance to be avoided. Mortensen is that first person to stop, that guy at the six-minute mark.

It's not that he has nothing else to do. He's a project manager for an international program at the Department of Energy; on this day, Mortensen has to participate in a monthly budget exercise, not the most exciting part of his job: "You review the past month's expenditures," he says, "forecast spending for the next month, if you have X dollars, where will it go, that sort of thing."

On the video, you can see Mortensen get off the escalator and look around. He locates the violinist, stops, walks away but then is drawn back. He checks the time on his cellphone -- he's three minutes early for work -- then settles against a wall to listen.

Mortensen doesn't know classical music at all; classic rock is as close as he comes. But there's something about what he's hearing that he really likes.

As it happens, he's arrived at the moment that Bell slides into the second section of "Chaconne." ("It's the point," Bell says, "where it moves from a darker, minor key into a major key. There's a religious, exalted feeling to it.") The violinist's bow begins to dance; the music becomes upbeat, playful, theatrical, big.

Mortensen doesn't know about major or minor keys: "Whatever it was," he says, "it made me feel at peace."

So, for the first time in his life, Mortensen lingers to listen to a street musician. He stays his allotted three minutes as 94 more people pass briskly by. When he leaves to help plan contingency budgets for the Department of Energy, there's another first. For the first time in his life, not quite knowing what had just happened but sensing it was special, John David Mortensen gives a street musician money.

THERE ARE SIX MOMENTS IN THE VIDEO THAT BELL FINDS PARTICULARLY PAINFUL TO RELIVE: "The awkward times," he calls them. It's what happens right after each piece ends: nothing. The music stops. The same people who hadn't noticed him playing don't notice that he has finished. No applause, no acknowledgment. So Bell just saws out a small, nervous chord -- the embarrassed musician's equivalent of, "Er, okay, moving right along . . ." -- and begins the next piece.

After "Chaconne," it is Franz Schubert's "Ave Maria," which surprised some music critics when it debuted in 1825: Schubert seldom showed religious feeling in his compositions, yet "Ave Maria" is a breathtaking work of adoration of the Virgin Mary. What was with the sudden piety? Schubert dryly answered: "I think this is due to the fact that I never forced devotion in myself and never compose hymns or prayers of that kind unless it overcomes me unawares; but then it is usually the right and true devotion." This musical prayer became among the most familiar and enduring religious pieces in history.

A couple of minutes into it, something revealing happens. A woman and her preschooler emerge from the escalator. The woman is walking briskly and, therefore, so is the child. She's got his hand.

"I had a time crunch," recalls Sheron Parker, an IT director for a federal agency. "I had an 8:30 training class, and first I had to rush Evvie off to his teacher, then rush back to work, then to the training facility in the basement."

Evvie is her son, Evan. Evan is 3.

You can see Evan clearly on the video. He's the cute black kid in the parka who keeps twisting around to look at Joshua Bell, as he is being propelled toward the door.

"There was a musician," Parker says, "and my son was intrigued. He wanted to pull over and listen, but I was rushed for time."

So Parker does what she has to do. She deftly moves her body between Evan's and Bell's, cutting off her son's line of sight. As they exit the arcade, Evan can still be seen craning to look. When Parker is told what she walked out on, she laughs.

"Evan is very smart!"

The poet Billy Collins once laughingly observed that all babies are born with a knowledge of poetry, because the lub-dub of the mother's heart is in iambic meter. Then, Collins said, life slowly starts to choke the poetry out of us. It may be true with music, too.

There was no ethnic or demographic pattern to distinguish the people who stayed to watch Bell, or the ones who gave money, from that vast majority who hurried on past, unheeding. Whites, blacks and Asians, young and old, men and women, were represented in all three groups. But the behavior of one demographic remained absolutely consistent. Every single time a child walked past, he or she tried to stop and watch. And every single time, a parent scooted the kid away.

IF THERE WAS ONE PERSON ON THAT DAY WHO WAS TOO BUSY TO PAY ATTENTION TO THE VIOLINIST, it was George Tindley. Tindley wasn't hurrying to get to work. He was at work.

The glass doors through which most people exit the L'Enfant station lead into an indoor shopping mall, from which there are exits to the street and elevators to office buildings. The first store in the mall is an Au Bon Pain, the croissant and coffee shop where Tindley, in his 40s, works in a white uniform busing the tables, restocking the salt and pepper packets, taking out the garbage. Tindley labors under the watchful eye of his bosses, and he's supposed to be hopping, and he was.

But every minute or so, as though drawn by something not entirely within his control, Tindley would walk to the very edge of the Au Bon Pain property, keeping his toes inside the line, still on the job. Then he'd lean forward, as far out into the hallway as he could, watching the fiddler on the other side of the glass doors. The foot traffic was steady, so the doors were usually open. The sound came through pretty well.

"You could tell in one second that this guy was good, that he was clearly a professional," Tindley says. He plays the guitar, loves the sound of strings, and has no respect for a certain kind of musician.

"Most people, they play music; they don't feel it," Tindley says. "Well, that man was feeling it. That man was moving. Moving into the sound."

A hundred feet away, across the arcade, was the lottery line, sometimes five or six people long. They had a much better view of Bell than Tindley did, if they had just turned around. But no one did. Not in the entire 43 minutes. They just shuffled forward toward that machine spitting out numbers. Eyes on the prize.

J.T. Tillman was in that line. A computer specialist for the Department of Housing and Urban Development, he remembers every single number he played that day -- 10 of them, $2 apiece, for a total of $20. He doesn't recall what the violinist was playing, though. He says it sounded like generic classical music, the kind the ship's band was playing in "Titanic," before the iceberg.

"I didn't think nothing of it," Tillman says, "just a guy trying to make a couple of bucks." Tillman would have given him one or two, he said, but he spent all his cash on lotto.

When he is told that he stiffed one of the best musicians in the world, he laughs.

"Is he ever going to play around here again?"

"Yeah, but you're going to have to pay a lot to hear him."

"Damn."

Tillman didn't win the lottery, either.

BELL ENDS "AVE MARIA" TO ANOTHER THUNDEROUS SILENCE, plays Manuel Ponce's sentimental "Estrellita," then a piece by Jules Massenet, and then begins a Bach gavotte, a joyful, frolicsome, lyrical dance. It's got an Old World delicacy to it; you can imagine it entertaining bewigged dancers at a Versailles ball, or -- in a lute, fiddle and fife version -- the boot-kicking peasants of a Pieter Bruegel painting.

Watching the video weeks later, Bell finds himself mystified by one thing only. He understands why he's not drawing a crowd, in the rush of a morning workday. But: "I'm surprised at the number of people who don't pay attention at all, as if I'm invisible. Because, you know what? I'm makin' a lot of noise!"

He is. You don't need to know music at all to appreciate the simple fact that there's a guy there, playing a violin that's throwing out a whole bucket of sound; at times, Bell's bowing is so intricate that you seem to be hearing two instruments playing in harmony. So those head-forward, quick-stepping passersby are a remarkable phenomenon.

Bell wonders whether their inattention may be deliberate: If you don't take visible note of the musician, you don't have to feel guilty about not forking over money; you're not complicit in a rip-off.

It may be true, but no one gave that explanation. People just said they were busy, had other things on their mind. Some who were on cellphones spoke louder as they passed Bell, to compete with that infernal racket.

And then there was Calvin Myint. Myint works for the General Services Administration. He got to the top of the escalator, turned right and headed out a door to the street. A few hours later, he had no memory that there had been a musician anywhere in sight.

"Where was he, in relation to me?"

"About four feet away."

"Oh."

There's nothing wrong with Myint's hearing. He had buds in his ear. He was listening to his iPod.

For many of us, the explosion in technology has perversely limited, not expanded, our exposure to new experiences. Increasingly, we get our news from sources that think as we already do. And with iPods, we hear what we already know; we program our own playlists.

The song that Calvin Myint was listening to was "Just Like Heaven," by the British rock band The Cure. It's a terrific song, actually. The meaning is a little opaque, and the Web is filled with earnest efforts to deconstruct it. Many are far-fetched, but some are right on point: It's about a tragic emotional disconnect. A man has found the woman of his dreams but can't express the depth of his feeling for her until she's gone. It's about failing to see the beauty of what's plainly in front of your eyes.

"YES, I SAW THE VIOLINIST," Jackie Hessian says, "but nothing about him struck me as much of anything."

You couldn't tell that by watching her. Hessian was one of those people who gave Bell a long, hard look before walking on. It turns out that she wasn't noticing the music at all.

"I really didn't hear that much," she said. "I was just trying to figure out what he was doing there, how does this work for him, can he make much money, would it be better to start with some money in the case, or for it to be empty, so people feel sorry for you? I was analyzing it financially."

What do you do, Jackie?

"I'm a lawyer in labor relations with the United States Postal Service. I just negotiated a national contract."

THE BEST SEATS IN THE HOUSE WERE UPHOLSTERED. In the balcony, more or less. On that day, for $5, you'd get a lot more than just a nice shine on your shoes.

Only one person occupied one of those seats when Bell played. Terence Holmes is a consultant for the Department of Transportation, and he liked the music just fine, but it was really about a shoeshine: "My father told me never to wear a suit with your shoes not cleaned and shined."

Holmes wears suits often, so he is up in that perch a lot, and he's got a good relationship with the shoeshine lady. Holmes is a good tipper and a good talker, which is a skill that came in handy that day. The shoeshine lady was upset about something, and the music got her more upset. She complained, Holmes said, that the music was too loud, and he tried to calm her down.

Edna Souza is from Brazil. She's been shining shoes at L'Enfant Plaza for six years, and she's had her fill of street musicians there; when they play, she can't hear her customers, and that's bad for business. So she fights.

Souza points to the dividing line between the Metro property, at the top of the escalator, and the arcade, which is under control of the management company that runs the mall. Sometimes, Souza says, a musician will stand on the Metro side, sometimes on the mall side. Either way, she's got him. On her speed dial, she has phone numbers for both the mall cops and the Metro cops. The musicians seldom last long.

What about Joshua Bell?

He was too loud, too, Souza says. Then she looks down at her rag, sniffs. She hates to say anything positive about these damned musicians, but: "He was pretty good, that guy. It was the first time I didn't call the police."

Souza was surprised to learn he was a famous musician, but not that people rushed blindly by him. That, she said, was predictable. "If something like this happened in Brazil, everyone would stand around to see. Not here."

Souza nods sourly toward a spot near the top of the escalator: "Couple of years ago, a homeless guy died right there. He just lay down there and died. The police came, an ambulance came, and no one even stopped to see or slowed down to look.

"People walk up the escalator, they look straight ahead. Mind your own business, eyes forward. Everyone is stressed. Do you know what I mean?"

What is this life if, full of care,

We have no time to stand and stare.

-- from "Leisure," by W.H. Davies

Let's say Kant is right. Let's accept that we can't look at what happened on January 12 and make any judgment whatever about people's sophistication or their ability to appreciate beauty. But what about their ability to appreciate life?

We're busy. Americans have been busy, as a people, since at least 1831, when a young French sociologist named Alexis de Tocqueville visited the States and found himself impressed, bemused and slightly dismayed at the degree to which people were driven, to the exclusion of everything else, by hard work and the accumulation of wealth.

Not much has changed. Pop in a DVD of "Koyaanisqatsi," the wordless, darkly brilliant, avant-garde 1982 film about the frenetic speed of modern life. Backed by the minimalist music of Philip Glass, director Godfrey Reggio takes film clips of Americans going about their daily business, but speeds them up until they resemble assembly-line machines, robots marching lockstep to nowhere. Now look at the video from L'Enfant Plaza, in fast-forward. The Philip Glass soundtrack fits it perfectly.

"Koyaanisqatsi" is a Hopi word. It means "life out of balance."

In his 2003 book, Timeless Beauty: In the Arts and Everyday Life, British author John Lane writes about the loss of the appreciation for beauty in the modern world. The experiment at L'Enfant Plaza may be symptomatic of that, he said -- not because people didn't have the capacity to understand beauty, but because it was irrelevant to them.

"This is about having the wrong priorities," Lane said.

If we can't take the time out of our lives to stay a moment and listen to one of the best musicians on Earth play some of the best music ever written; if the surge of modern life so overpowers us that we are deaf and blind to something like that -- then what else are we missing?

That's what the Welsh poet W.H. Davies meant in 1911 when he published those two lines that begin this section. They made him famous. The thought was simple, even primitive, but somehow no one had put it quite that way before.

Of course, Davies had an advantage -- an advantage of perception. He wasn't a tradesman or a laborer or a bureaucrat or a consultant or a policy analyst or a labor lawyer or a program manager. He was a hobo.

THE CULTURAL HERO OF THE DAY ARRIVED AT L'ENFANT PLAZA PRETTY LATE, in the unprepossessing figure of one John Picarello, a smallish man with a baldish head.

Picarello hit the top of the escalator just after Bell began his final piece, a reprise of "Chaconne." In the video, you see Picarello stop dead in his tracks, locate the source of the music, and then retreat to the other end of the arcade. He takes up a position past the shoeshine stand, across from that lottery line, and he will not budge for the next nine minutes.

Like all the passersby interviewed for this article, Picarello was stopped by a reporter after he left the building, and was asked for his phone number. Like everyone, he was told only that this was to be an article about commuting. When he was called later in the day, like everyone else, he was first asked if anything unusual had happened to him on his trip into work. Of the more than 40 people contacted, Picarello was the only one who immediately mentioned the violinist.

"There was a musician playing at the top of the escalator at L'Enfant Plaza."

Haven't you seen musicians there before?

"Not like this one."

What do you mean?

"This was a superb violinist. I've never heard anyone of that caliber. He was technically proficient, with very good phrasing. He had a good fiddle, too, with a big, lush sound. I walked a distance away, to hear him. I didn't want to be intrusive on his space."

Really?

"Really. It was that kind of experience. It was a treat, just a brilliant, incredible way to start the day."

Picarello knows classical music. He is a fan of Joshua Bell but didn't recognize him; he hadn't seen a recent photo, and besides, for most of the time Picarello was pretty far away. But he knew this was not a run-of-the-mill guy out there, performing. On the video, you can see Picarello look around him now and then, almost bewildered.

"Yeah, other people just were not getting it. It just wasn't registering. That was baffling to me."

When Picarello was growing up in New York, he studied violin seriously, intending to be a concert musician. But he gave it up at 18, when he decided he'd never be good enough to make it pay. Life does that to you sometimes. Sometimes, you have to do the prudent thing. So he went into another line of work. He's a supervisor at the U.S. Postal Service. Doesn't play the violin much, anymore.

When he left, Picarello says, "I humbly threw in $5." It was humble: You can actually see that on the video. Picarello walks up, barely looking at Bell, and tosses in the money. Then, as if embarrassed, he quickly walks away from the man he once wanted to be.

Does he have regrets about how things worked out?

The postal supervisor considers this.

"No. If you love something but choose not to do it professionally, it's not a waste. Because, you know, you still have it. You have it forever."

BELL THINKS HE DID HIS BEST WORK OF THE DAY IN THOSE FINAL FEW MINUTES, in the second "Chaconne." And that also was the first time more than one person at a time was listening. As Picarello stood in the back, Janice Olu arrived and took up a position a few feet away from Bell. Olu, a public trust officer with HUD, also played the violin as a kid. She didn't know the name of the piece she was hearing, but she knew the man playing it has a gift.

Olu was on a coffee break and stayed as long as she dared. As she turned to go, she whispered to the stranger next to her, "I really don't want to leave." The stranger standing next to her happened to be working for The Washington Post.

In preparing for this event, editors at The Post Magazine discussed how to deal with likely outcomes. The most widely held assumption was that there could well be a problem with crowd control: In a demographic as sophisticated as Washington, the thinking went, several people would surely recognize Bell. Nervous "what-if" scenarios abounded. As people gathered, what if others stopped just to see what the attraction was? Word would spread through the crowd. Cameras would flash. More people flock to the scene; rush-hour pedestrian traffic backs up; tempers flare; the National Guard is called; tear gas, rubber bullets, etc.

As it happens, exactly one person recognized Bell, and she didn't arrive until near the very end. For Stacy Furukawa, a demographer at the Commerce Department, there was no doubt. She doesn't know much about classical music, but she had been in the audience three weeks earlier, at Bell's free concert at the Library of Congress. And here he was, the international virtuoso, sawing away, begging for money. She had no idea what the heck was going on, but whatever it was, she wasn't about to miss it.

Furukawa positioned herself 10 feet away from Bell, front row, center. She had a huge grin on her face. The grin, and Furukawa, remained planted in that spot until the end.

"It was the most astonishing thing I've ever seen in Washington," Furukawa says. "Joshua Bell was standing there playing at rush hour, and people were not stopping, and not even looking, and some were flipping quarters at him! Quarters! I wouldn't do that to anybody. I was thinking, Omigosh, what kind of a city do I live in that this could happen?"

When it was over, Furukawa introduced herself to Bell, and tossed in a twenty. Not counting that -- it was tainted by recognition -- the final haul for his 43 minutes of playing was $32.17. Yes, some people gave pennies.

"Actually," Bell said with a laugh, "that's not so bad, considering. That's 40 bucks an hour. I could make an okay living doing this, and I wouldn't have to pay an agent."

These days, at L'Enfant Plaza, lotto ticket sales remain brisk. Musicians still show up from time to time, and they still tick off Edna Souza. Joshua Bell's latest album, "The Voice of the Violin," has received the usual critical acclaim. ("Delicate urgency." "Masterful intimacy." "Unfailingly exquisite." "A musical summit." ". . . will make your heart thump and weep at the same time.")

Bell headed off on a concert tour of European capitals. But he is back in the States this week. He has to be. On Tuesday, he will be accepting the Avery Fisher prize, recognizing the Flop of L'Enfant Plaza as the best classical musician in America.

Emily Shroder, Rachel Manteuffel, John W. Poole and Magazine Editor Tom Shroder contributed to this report. Gene Weingarten, a Magazine staff writer, can be reached at weingarten@washpost.com. He will be fielding questions and comments about this article Monday at 1 p.m.

2009年3月15日星期日

神经病

新城市最大的问题就是吸烟。第十三天没沾烟,肺部如火燎般,我用惊人的毅力找寻到了离家1小时车程的某个角落的免税店。中华,364块钱一条,终于见到了能抽得进的烟,原来五星红旗颜色如此可爱是因为它和中华烟的颜色一样。这里有座公园叫做Night Safari,据说晚上去游玩你可以看到各种动物闪闪发光的眸子,听到蝙蝠拍打翅膀的声音,我忽然想到了比丽珍的诗句:

你从黑暗中火光一闪,令我想起临潼
那里的石榴坐在枝梢浑然忘记了我们
玉一般成熟。星星般互相疏远
石榴啊,一朝年轻貌美的皇帝
田野发灰,你就感到绝望。
你从黑暗中火光一闪,砖瓦灰烬。

本来应该是这样的,潮湿的海风,打卷的长发,侧过头来借火,倚靠着吐出第一口烟。我们为什么而死?在南部的海上,有个小岛,每当傍晚航船归航,这里便被夕阳镀成金色。你的瞳膜上映着东倒西歪的醉汉、衣衫褴褛步履沉重的浪人、肌肉健硕发梢闪亮的码头工人,还有那些叫卖如咆哮的小贩,找不到妈妈而在街头哭泣的小孩,倾斜着呼啸而过的马车,火车,双层巴士,哦,还有,嘴里嘟囔着脸部赘肉抖动的饭店老板,坐在街角用眼角窥视你的居民;唱诗班、街头艺人、80年代流行曲混杂着天空飞机的轰鸣——我为我所爱的而死,自由。

——神经病。

免税店的中华只供出境携带,你在这里只能买到fucking Marlboro, Kent, Mild Seven,在所有地方你都能看到"No Smoking",他们给你在离家离公司很远的街上圈上一块地,对你说,嗟,去抽。眼角耷拉的马来老妇正坐在那里一边抽烟一边玩弄着塑料拖鞋。我在她身边蹲下,打开那张3块钱的地图,清清嗓子开始读起来。"Orchard Road,19世纪这条路上排列着肉豆蔻和胡椒种植园,只允许行人从此通过,晚上道路有时会被洪水阻断,还有凶猛的老虎出没。今天果园路上到处都是大型购物商场、五星级酒店和没有灵魂的跨国连锁店,几乎看不到从前的影子。”“草拟馬。”所谓生不逢时根本不是当你开始工作的时候房子不包分配了,而是你没有权利选择如何去死了。LV,大幅的广告,麦当娜性感撩人,坐在凳子上朝我冷笑。这里Burger King一个汉堡卖20块,我抓着汉堡走进了一家叫做Burberry的专卖店。Kate Moss和Uma Thurman一样瞳距宽阔眼神迷离。再次驻足,眼前的东西从中华烟变成打着方格的香水。穿着套裙皮肤发黑的售货员小姐在很远的地方扶了下黑框眼镜,用眼睛的下延注视着这个抓着Burger King穿着耐克T恤的——神经病。而我,还不够彻底,因为我倒退着出了店门,而是不上前说:“请问你对文化大革命有什么看法?”

其实那里衣服不贵,一件衬衫才3000块。如果我买一件穿上,街角商店背后穿着校服脸上点缀着雀斑的援交妹会不会觉得我看起来正派一点而不向我打招呼了呢?这里有家CD店,可以给我提供第三个驻足摆pose的机会。如果买不到中华而不花一分钱回去,那么如何体现我挥霍的本性呢?这里有希拉里的莫扎特小奏,但是让我瞧瞧,除了这张,我如何在卡拉扬和穆特们之中找到一张那什么——"Excuse me, can I help you, sir?"——我草,这么气派的西滴店还有女店员会来和我这个穿着耐克T恤神经病打招呼?难道唯一在古典架前流连的我,看起来和众多寻找着碧昂丝的金毛们是那么的与众不同?我转头望过去,这个令人要死的垃圾国家唯一还有那么一点好的地方就是女店员还都长得不错而且工作服是低胸。“耶斯,埃姆 卢克因 佛 阿 舒伯特 西滴。”如何摧毁人的希望真是一件非常简单的事情,你只要像赵本山那样说话就可以了,而我,就是这方面的pro。可爱的店员小姐当然不知道我在说什么,于是我还要找一张舒伯特的四重奏用一如既往的口音向她解释其实我要找一张交响曲——“信佛尼”。然后这位小姐笨拙地操作电脑向我解释,舒伯特已经没货了,你为什么不买张席琳迪翁呢,我们都喜欢她。"But who is 席琳迪翁?"这个机会我找了很久了,此时不说更待何时?然后两位小姐用马来语交谈了一分钟,告诉我,莫扎特小奏132块钱,(神经病)。

其实昨天我和J聊天,告诉他,公司里有位女同事,对我表达的强烈的不满。因为我在公司组织的例行聚会去唱KTV的时候居然把脚翘到了茶几上。J的回答很在意料之中——"that's definitely what you would do, or , it wouldn't be you."我是不是也应该坦陈地告诉那位女同事,其实我是一个——

神经病?

(原谅我由于戒烟折磨,生活贫瘠,语言匮乏,只能摘录偶像的诗句来结束本文)

我是不是也要替唱歌的人难过一把:
莫名其妙地
移栽到此。
--饮水混浊
夜里工作
这几年不通语言
那我怎么来解释那些会唱歌的人
他们唱不唱歌?
——比丽珍《北坡有杏》

2009年2月20日星期五

Hilary Hahn plays Beethoven's Violin Concerto


仰了希拉里 哈恩的大名,却在昨天才第一次才听到她的录音,实在是因为囊中羞涩所致。如果你想听贝多芬的小协,首选自然是大卫,我的选择也是这一张。这是一张名不虚传无与伦比的录音,大卫温暖厚实包容而有力的琴音完美诠释了贝多芬这首刚柔并济的小提琴协奏曲。可以从里面听到爱慕、勇气、力量和尊严。在进入古典音乐世界之前,面对贝多芬那张蹙眉怒视的画像,我常常以为贝多芬是一个暴躁易怒的人,而当听了这首小协之后我才知道,贝多芬在为我们带来力量和勇气的同时,他也为我们带来了温柔和缠绵,正因为如此,我才能从这首小协中得到源源不断的热爱生活的理由。这是与莫扎特不同的,莫扎特是早上拉开窗帘那第一缕阳光,是幸福的诠释,是天才的跃动。这也和巴赫不同,巴赫是世界,巴赫是哲理,庞大而深邃。贝多芬总是和力量相关,哪怕如这首小协这样有柔情似水,有欢声笑语,但是还是会激动人心,没有门德尔松那种忧郁和伤逝,也不似勃拉姆斯那雄伟的气魄背后那颗敏感的心,这就是贝多芬,纯粹的美,柔而不弱,欢而不靡。所以大卫的诠释是伟大的,他并没有强调他那标志性的温暖琴音,一切溶于音乐,将我包裹起来,只有当最后一个音符演奏完了我才回过神来感觉到了他那温暖的残留。


所以当我第一次听哈恩的贝小协,惊诧是双重的。当你听了几百遍大卫版,且没有比较,你便会对完美习以为常。听完哈恩的,我忽然明白了,如果在这张近代最优秀的贝多芬小协面前,还能在好多地方胜出,那便真是不可思议了。对比哈恩,大卫在某些旋律上更加的有力,更加正统和严谨,让人更加感觉到刚柔并济。——这一切并不是在说哈恩的演绎差,别忘记了,她是个女孩子,录制唱片的时候才大约20岁,我有什么理由苛求这样一个女孩子在力量和哲理上演绎地如同大卫王?哈恩带给我了另一个贝多芬,也许没有大卫那么正统,那么完美,却绝对迷人的贝多芬。


哈恩给我的另一个惊诧又是来自我对外表的误判。看看她的照片,我会觉得这是一个大姑娘,欢跳灵动,闪烁着智慧的光芒。然而,我遇见的哈恩并非“动若脱兔”,而是“静如处子”。这是怎样的一曲贝小协啊,安静的倾诉,如桌前写作一般。女子小提琴家我听过郑京和和穆特,郑京和柔美中带着一丝不易察觉的俏皮,穆特挥洒自如却不失女子温柔本色(我很不明白为什么许多人称她为男人婆,她的温柔是那么显而易见)。但是哈恩不一样,至少这张专辑的哈恩不一样。这是一个安静而知性的女大学生,她也有同其他女孩子一样的欢笑,绝不沉闷,但是却更让人感觉到知书达理,气质高雅。国外有个评论用aristocratic来形容她,我却觉得又不尽然,她不是那种贵族式的高贵典雅,是另一种知性的风采。正是这种知性,让她不会把第一乐章处理的如大卫那样有力,她始终温和地倾倒她的感情,舒缓但不羞涩;而后她便给我带来最为奇妙的第二乐章,完全安静述说似的柔版。真的,这会让人产生一种相知的平静的爱慕。而在第三乐章回旋的欢乐中,她又告诉我她并不是那种绝对的安静,她也能微笑地起舞。于是第一次,我见到了一个没有棱角的贝多芬,一个知性而知书达理却同样对生活充满热爱的贝多芬。到底如何诠释贝多芬已经不重要,这真是和大卫相映成趣的奇妙的贝多芬小协。




说到贝多芬小协的传世之作,自然不能少了这一张。演奏者沃尔夫冈 施奈德汉在小提琴演奏家中的地位并不能和大卫相比,但是他的这张贝多芬小协却的确是绝世之作无与伦比的。如果说大卫的贝小协是宏大温暖包容,哈恩的贝小协是纯净知性智慧,施耐德汉的贝小协则是华美瑰丽浓烈。漫长的前奏烘托后,施耐德汉的第一弓给我的印象就是——亮。的确,各个小提琴家都有自己的气质,大卫演奏的虽然慢但是宏大温暖,海飞兹则是疾风落叶君临天下气势非凡。而说到华美,我的第一印象则是梅纽因。这张施耐德汉的贝小协,的确有梅纽因年轻时候那份贵公子的感觉。整个第一乐章的就能感觉到一种盛装的高贵,而施耐德汉倾注的感情也颇为奇妙:喜怒哀乐都流于表面但是却又给人超凡脱俗的感觉。自古以来,感情一旦泛滥便会庸俗,所以大多小提琴家都是含蓄地表达自己的感情,流而不露,给人一种意犹未尽的感觉。而施耐德汉,他却是在倾倒。我没有感到淋湿,而是感觉到浑身沐浴在音乐之中,心随着他的弓弦起伏。这种演奏风格,造就奇妙的第二章慢板:一般来说,过亮的弦音容易造成慢板的叙述华而不实,飘在半空没有重量。而施耐德汉却非常神奇地用他满腔的柔情融化了我,的确华丽,但是毫不虚伪;的确浮饰,但是却优雅恰到好处。音乐如人,我一直在找与人沟通的最佳办法,除了醇厚敦实,知性智慧,原来还可以华丽但不造作,高贵但是却不压迫。而第三乐章的回旋,是这种演奏风格最容易发挥的,谁不爱看贵族优雅地翩翩起舞呢?这一乐章,施耐德汉出人意料地并没有很快的速度,这也彰显了他的风度,但是用弓极为连贯,那旋律好比闪亮的丝绸,柔滑却不腻,令人无比享受。这张专辑拿到企鹅的三星带花评价加首选推荐绝对是名副其实,因为它不光演奏无可挑剔,录音品质也是完美无瑕的。