The stand-ins left; Key and Peele arrived, having been transformed into basketball commentators who seem to have taken a truth serum (“Welcome back to another few hours and several million dollars spent on watching adult men play a simple child’s game, all while being paid more than the president!”). On form, as funny as I’d ever seen them, their faces were barely dusted with a few whitish wrinkles, yet they appeared as unmistakably Caucasian as Mitt Romney. Every now and then, Jay Martel, one of the show’s executive producers—and an occasional writer for the New Yorker—walked over to their desk to discuss some verbal tweaking. Tall, thin, tonsured, he looked like a mild-mannered Quaker, and turned out to be a descendant of ministers and missionaries. (“I’m deciding whether a donkey dick is funnier than a dog dick. My ancestors would have been horrified.”) At one point, Martel went over to discuss a line Key didn’t like: “The alleged rapist passes the big orange ball to the sweaty legal giant; the sweaty legal giant passes it to the pituitary case.” The term “pituitary case,” Key argued, had “too much math in it,” which meant, Martel explained, that too many mental steps were required to get to the laugh. On set and in the writing room, a series of terms is deployed as useful shorthand. “A clam”: an old joke. “Lateral”: an absence of escalation. “Map over”: to take the beats of a genre piece and “map” a joke over them, as in the Poitier sketch. “Dookie”: a joke that isn’t yet fully formed. In place of “pituitary case,” Martel offered “huge child-man.” Dookie completed. Key and Peele moved on to trying to amuse each other with improvised catchphrases:
“Shploifus!”
“Hamhocks!”
“Biscuit time!”
“Gudeek!”
“Ebola!”
The last was Peele’s, and Key looked at him despondently: “But they’ll probably have Ebola all figured out by 2015.” (When the scene will air.) “Cut to: urban wasteland,” Peele said, and Key picked up the joke: “Resident Evil: Whole of the Western World.” Even their off-the-cuff commentary on their genre sketches is framed as genre sketch.
So far, Key and Peele have evolved together within their happy comedy marriage, but it is still subject to all the normal pressures of a marriage (pulling in different directions, wanting different things), and many people close to them, including Zadak, have suggested that it is nearing its natural end. They have other projects under way, some together (including an as yet unnamed Judd Apatow feature) but several apart, though here the Paul-and-John analogy falls short. If and when Key and Peele separate, it will surely be more conscious uncoupling than brutal divorce. Still, there were moments on set when it felt as if they wanted something new thrown at them. Sitting behind a desk at the end of a long day, they tried to nail a short skit with the following mapped-over premise: What if public-school teachers were traded—and paid—like football players? (“Apparently, PS 431 made Ruby an offer she couldn’t refuse: 80 million dollars guaranteed over six years, with another 40 million dollars in incentives based on test scores. This salary puts her right up there with Rockridge Elementary’s Katie Hope.”) There wasn’t much math to do, and hardly any physical business, and they seemed a little bored, making a few uncharacteristic errors. Key, waiting for the cameras to reset, turned to Peele and noted the cushy situation of sports announcers: “Some people do this shit for a living, and that’s all they do. This shit is easy. Why don’t we do this shit?” Peele agreed, but then started laughing, replying in his sports-announcer voice, “Haven’t done it right so far—but still!” The cameras ready, they tried again, messed up again. I got the sense that the problem was that there weren’t enough problems.
Some people are simply best suited to a challenge, as Jay Martel reminded me when he e-mailed, a few days later, with a favorite anecdote from the show: “In our sketch about competing actors playing Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, we stacked up heightening physical bits, without really stopping to consider if they were physically possible—including asking Keegan (playing Malcolm X) to do the Worm across the stage. When we shot it, Keegan executed a perfect Worm. After the take, he stood up and said, ‘Apparently, I can do the Worm.’ He’d never even attempted it before.”
SOME NOTES ON ATTUNEMENT
The first time I heard her I didn’t hear her at all. My parents did not prepare me. (The natural thing in these situations is to blame the parents.) She was nowhere to be found on their four-foot-tall wood-veneer hi-fi. Given the variety of voices you got to hear on that contraption, her absence was a little strange. Burning Spear and the Beatles; Marley, naturally, and Chaka Khan; Bix Beiderbecke, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and James Taylor; Luther Vandross, Anita Baker, Alexander O’Neal. And Dylan, always Dylan. Yet nothing of the Canadian with the open-tuned guitar. I don’t see how she could have been unknown to them—it was her peculiar curse never really to be unknown. Though maybe they had heard her and simply misunderstood.
My parents loved music, as I love music, but you couldn’t call any of us whatever the plural of “muso” is. The Smiths owned no rare tracks, no fascinating B-sides (and no records by the Smiths). We wanted songs that made us dance, laugh or cry. The only thing that was in any way unusual about the collection was the manner in which it combined, in one crate, the taste of a young black woman and an old white man. It had at least that much eclecticism to it. However, we did not tend to listen to white women singing very often. Those particular voices were surplus to requirements, somehow, having no natural demographic within the household. A singer like Elkie Brooks (really Elaine Bookbinder—a Jewish girl, from Salford) was the closest we got, though Elkie had that telltale rasp in her throat, linking her, in the Smith mind, to Tina Turner or Della Reese. We had no Kate Bush records, or even the slightest hint of Stevie Nicks, raspy though she may be. The first time I was aware of Debbie Harry’s existence, I was in college. We had Joan Armatrading and Aretha and Billie and Ella. What did we need with white women?
It was the kind of college gathering where I kept sneaking Blackstreet and Aaliyah albums into the CD drawer, and friends kept replacing them with other things. And then there she was, suddenly: a piercing sound, a sort of wailing—a white woman, wailing, picking out notes in a non-sequence. Out of tune—or out of anything I understood at the time as “tune.” I picked up the CD cover and frowned at it: a skinny blonde with a heavy fringe, covered in blue. My good friend Tamara—a real singer, serious about music—looked over at me, confused. You don’t like Joni? I turned the CD over disdainfully, squinted at the track list. Oh, was that Joni? And very likely went on to say something facetious about white-girl music, the kind of comment I had heard, inverted, when I found myself called upon to defend black men swearing into a microphone. Another friend, Jessica, pressed me again: You don’t like Joni? She closed her eyes and sang a few lines of what I now know to be “California.” That is, she sang pleasing, not uninteresting words, but in a strange, strangulated falsetto—a kind of Kafkaesque “piping”—which I considered odd, coming out of Jess, whom I knew to have, ordinarily, a beautiful, black voice. A soul voice. You don’t like Joni? I do not like green eggs and ham. I do not like them, Sam-I-am.
Perhaps this is only a story about philistinism. A quality always easier to note in other people than to detect in yourself. Aged twenty, I listened to Joni Mitchell—a singer whom millions enjoy, who does not, after all, make an especially unusual or esoteric sound—and found her incomprehensible. Could not even really recognize her piping as “singing.” It was just noise. And, without troubling over it much, I placed her piping alongside all the interesting noises we hear in the world but choose, through habit or policy, to separate from music. What can you call that but philistinism? You don’t like Joni? My friends had pity in their eyes. The same look the faithful tend to give you as you hand them back their “literature” and close the door in their faces.
In the passenger seat of a car, on the way to a wedding. I no longer had the excuse of youth: I was now the
same age as Christ when he died. I was being driven west, toward Wales. Passing through woods and copses, a wild green landscape, heading for the steep and lofty cliffs . . . It is a very long drive to Wales. The driver, being a poet, planned a pit stop at Tintern Abbey. His passenger, more interested in finding a motorway service station, spoke frequently of her desire for a sausage roll. The mood in the car was not the brightest. And something else had been bothering me for several miles without my being quite conscious of its source, some persistent noise . . . But now I focused in on it and realized it was that bloody piping again, ranging over octaves, ignoring the natural divisions between musical bars and generally annoying the hell out of me, like a bee caught in a wing mirror. I made a plea for change to the driver, who gave me a look related to the one my friends had given me all those years earlier, though this was a stronger varietal, the driver and I being bonded to each other for life by legal contract.
“It’s Joni Mitchell. What is wrong with you? Listen to it—it’s beautiful! Can’t you hear that?”
I started stabbing at the dashboard, trying to find the button that makes things stop.
“No, I can’t hear it. It’s horrible. And that bit’s just ‘Jingle Bells.’”
I hadn’t expected to get anywhere with this line, and was surprised to see my husband smile, and pause for a moment to listen intently: “Actually, that bit is ‘Jingle Bells’—I never noticed that before. It’s a song about winter . . . makes sense.”
“Switch it off—I’m begging you.”
“Tintern Abbey, next exit,” he said, closed his jaw tightly, and veered to the left.
We parked; I opened a car door on to the vast silence of a valley. I may not have had ears, but I had eyes. I wandered inside, which is outside, which is inside. I stood at the east window, feet on the green grass, eyes to the green hills, not contained by a non-building that has lost all its carved defenses. Reduced to a Gothic skeleton, the abbey is penetrated by beauty from above and below, open to precisely those elements it had once hoped to frame for pious young men, as an object for their patient contemplation. But that form of holy concentration has now been gone longer than it was ever here. It was already an ancient memory two hundred years ago, when Wordsworth came by. Thistles sprout between the stones. The rain comes in. Roofless, floorless, glassless, “green to the very door”—now Tintern is forced to accept the holiness that is everywhere in everything.
And then what? As I remember it, sun flooded the area; my husband quoted a line from one of the Lucy poems; I began humming a strange piece of music. Something had happened to me. In all the mess of memories we make each day and lose, I knew that this one would not be lost. I had Wordsworth’s sensation exactly: “That in this moment there is life and food/For future years.” Or thought I had it. Digging up the poem now, I see that I am, in some ways, telling the opposite story. What struck the author of “Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” (1798) was a memory of ecstasy: “That time is past,/And all its aching joys are now no more,/And all its dizzy raptures.” The Wye had made a deep impression on him when he’d visited five years earlier. Returning, he finds that he still loves the area, but the poem attests to his development, for now he loves it with a mellowed maturity. Gone is the wild adoration: “For nature then/(The coarser pleasures of my boyish days,/And their glad animal movements all gone by)/To me was all in all.—I cannot paint/What then I was.” To be back in Wales was to meet an earlier version of himself; he went there to listen to “the language of my former heart.” And though it’s true that the young man he recalls is in some senses a stranger, the claim that he “cannot paint” him is really a humble brag, because, of course, the poem does exactly that. It’s striking to me that this past self should at all times be loved and appreciated by Wordsworth. He understands that the callow youth was the basis of the greater man he would become. A natural progression: between the boy Wordsworth and the man, between then and now. His mind is not so much changed as deepened.
But when I think of that Joni Mitchell–hating pilgrim, standing at the east window, idly wondering whether she could persuade her beloved to stop for some kind of microwaved service-station snack somewhere between here and the church (British weddings being notorious in their late delivery of lunch), I truly cannot understand the language of my former heart. Who was that person? Petulant, hardly aware that she was humming Joni, not yet conscious of the transformation she had already undergone. How is it possible to hate something so completely and then suddenly love it so unreasonably? How does such a change occur?
This is the effect that listening to Joni Mitchell has on me these days: uncontrollable tears. An emotional overcoming, disconcertingly distant from happiness, more like joy—if joy is the recognition of an almost intolerable beauty. It’s not a very civilized emotion. I can’t listen to Joni Mitchell in a room with other people, or on an iPod, walking the streets. Too risky. I can never guarantee that I’m going to be able to get through the song without being made transparent—to anybody and everything, to the whole world. A mortifying sense of porousness. Although it’s comforting to learn that the feeling I have listening to these songs is the same feeling the artist had while creating them: “At that period of my life, I had no personal defenses. I felt like a cellophane wrapper on a pack of cigarettes.” That’s Mitchell, speaking of the fruitful years between Ginsberg at the abbey and 1971, when her classic album Blue was released.
I should confess at this point that when I’m thinking of Joni Mitchell it’s Blue I’m thinking of, really. I can’t even claim to be writing about that superior type of muso epiphany which would at least have the good taste to settle upon one of the “minor” albums that Joni herself seems to prefer: Hejira or The Hissing of Summer Lawns. No, I’m thinking of the album pretty much every fool owns, no matter how far from music his life has taken him. And it’s not even really the content of the music that interests me here. It’s the transformation of the listening. I don’t want to confuse this phenomenon with a progressive change in taste. The sensation of progressive change is different in kind: it usually follows a conscious act of will. Like most people, I experience these progressive changes fairly regularly. By forcing myself to reread Crime and Punishment, for example, I now admire and appreciate Dostoevsky, a writer who, well into my late twenties, I was certain I disliked. During an exploratory season of science fiction, I checked Aldous Huxley out of the library, despite his hideous racial theories. And even a writer as alien to my natural sensibility as Anaïs Nin wormed her way into my sympathies last summer, during a concerted effort to read writers who’ve made sex their primary concern.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that most of my progressive changes in taste tend to have occurred in my sole area of expertise: reading novels. In this one, extremely narrow arena I can call myself more or less a “connoisseur.” Meaning that I can stoop to consider even the supposed lowliest examples of the form while simultaneously rising to admire the obscure and the esoteric—and all without feeling any great change in myself. Novels are what I know, and the novel door in my personality is always wide open. But I didn’t come to love Joni Mitchell by knowing anything more about her, or understanding what an open-tuned guitar is, or even by sitting down and forcing myself to listen and re-listen to her songs. I hated Joni Mitchell—and then I loved her. Her voice did nothing for me—until the day it undid me completely. And I wonder whether it is because I am such a perfect fool about music that the paradigm shift in my ability to listen to Joni Mitchell became possible. Maybe a certain kind of ignorance was the condition. Into the pure nothingness of my non-knowledge something sublime (an event?) beyond (beneath?) consciousness was able to occur.
I just called myself a connoisseur of novels, which stretches the definition a little: “an expert judge in matters of taste.” I have a deep interest in my two inches of ivory, but it’s a rare connoisseur who does not seek to be an expert judge of more than one f
orm. By their good taste are they known, and connoisseurs tend to like a wide area in which to exercise it. I have known many true connoisseurs, with excellent tastes that range across the humanities and the culinary arts—and they never fail to have a fatal effect on my self-esteem. When I find myself sitting at dinner next to someone who knows just as much about novels as I do but has somehow also found the mental space to adore and be knowledgeable about opera, have strong opinions about the relative rankings of Renaissance painters, an encyclopedic knowledge of the English Civil War, of French wines—I feel an anxiety that nudges beyond the envious into the existential. How did she find the time?
On the Shortness of Life, a screed by Seneca, is smart about this tension between taste and time (although Seneca sympathizes with my dinner companion, not with me). The essay takes the form of a letter of advice to his friend Paulinus, who must have made the mistake of complaining, within earshot of Seneca, about the briefness of his days. In this lengthy riposte, the philosopher informs Paulinus that “learning how to live takes a whole life,” and the sense most of us have that our lives are cruelly brief is a specious one: “It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it.” Heedless luxury, socializing, worldly advancement, fighting, whoring, drinking, and so on. If you want a life that feels long, he advises, fill it with philosophy. That way, not only do you “keep a good watch” over your own lifetime but you “annex every age” to your own: “By the toil of others we are let into the presence of things which have been brought from darkness into light.” So make friends with the “high priests of liberal studies,” no matter how distant they are from you. Zeno, Pythagoras, Democritus, Aristotle, Theophrastus: “None of these will be too busy to see you, none of these will not send his visitor away happier and more devoted to himself, none of these will allow anyone to depart empty-handed. They are at home to all mortals by night and by day.”