Tea Leaves

You can spend a lot of money on stuff with which to make tea, if you want too. There are lots of kettles available in steel and copper. There are piles of teapots for purchase in all kinds and colors. There are all sorts of noodley, fiddly tea type things that invariably end up in the bottom drawer, unused and forgotten. I have a teapot, a nice little porcelain one, clean and white. I’ve stopped using it.

Tea needs room to swim as it steeps. My teapot has a little infusion basket to hold loose-leaf tea, and it cramps the brew (brewing without the basket makes the teapot painful to clean). Also, I can’t see what’s going on in there, and I often forget to set the timer. It’s a lovely thing for serving tea, but it’s somewhat unfortunate for brewing the stuff.

I’ve been taught these things by friends of mine who have been at the art and science of tea for quite some time now. My friends brew tea in a metal bowl with a plate on it, and then pour the tea out through a little strainer into mugs. It is worth noting, I think, that as their tastes in tea have grown more cultivated, their equipment has become ever more simple.

So: I was in the local cafe, eyeing the shelf of pricey things, and they had replacement parts for various sizes of french presses on display. One of them was the tempered glass insert, straight-sided and clear, and I thought: “that would be fantastic for brewing tea! If it only had some kind of markings…”

Well.

I bought some lab glass: a half dozen one liter beakers can be had quite cheaply, and make good gifts, besides. I can only make tea in metric amounts, but that’s alright. The leaves swirl happily in there, and when covered by a saucer the beaker doesn’t lose too much heat. I can see the tea, which is useful for those times when I forget to set the timer. It’s also nice to have a touch of mad scientist littered about the kitchen.

Good tea!

Additional Resources

Lab glass is available all over the place; I had good luck with Lab Depot, Inc..

I have two kettles: a beat up ancient stainless steel kettle that I keep on the stove at home, and an electric kettle for work. The electric kettle came from Adagio Teas, and it’s worked out great; the kettle has a thermostat, so I don’t have to worry about the water being too hot.

The good folks at Upton will sell you tea as nice as you like.

We went to Ohio to visit some old friends who we knew at CMU. While there, we made two interesting food discoveries.

Mustard

First, we went to Trader Joe’s. We in Pittsburgh are as as yet deprived of this “discount” froo-froo and prepared foods vendor, so we were happy to stop in to get some frozen foods for our friends and do some browsing.

You will recall that I have complaints about the mustard available in this country. In France, Dijon mustard is strong without being vinegary and has spicy kick from the mustard seed. Recently, I’ve been on a hunt for decent mustard on this continent. I’ve tried a dozen or so different kinds. Here is a partial list:

1. Roland “Extra Fancy”
2. Fallot
3. Maille
4. Whole foods Organic Special Label Dijon
5. Delouis Fils

Without exception all of these mustards tasted like someone took a tasteless gloppy yellow emulsion and mixed it with vinegar and salt and called it mustard. Even the stuff that is allegedly made in France in the old French way is horrible. I can only imagine the people at the factories that make that stuff cackling with glee as they separate the good stuff from the tasteless yellow shit they ship to the clueless American rubes.

There is now a single exception to this rule: Trader Joe’s Dijon Mustard. It has a very strong flavor, maybe even a bit too strong, and that wonderful kick that until now had eluded all other candidates. Since this is America, Trader Joe’s will stop carrying this product tomorrow.

Wally Waffle

The next day of this trip, we made a trip to a great breakfast joint called Wally Waffle. Out in the middle of nowhere in Akron, this place has great eggs, good waffles and pancakes, and decent hash browns, ham and sausage. Therefore, it beats out every single local Pittsburgh breakfast joint that we’ve tried. Everyone who claims to make a decent breakfast in this town should go to Akron to see how it is done.

The big guy who came in from church with the light blue suit on, with matching shirt tie and shoes, also helped the experience a lot. What a great color. Highly recommended.

It started with one bitter observation, but ballooned, as it always does, into an entire night full of complaining and snarkiness. 50 items about the most common videogame clichés, attached below for your amusement. Some are funny, some are painful, and some are stupid, but each one is marked with its author, so you’ll know who to blame.

Feel free to add on to the list in the comments.

51. Don’t forget The grand list of RPG clichés.

50. Your space marine can carry 800 pounds of guns, but is unable to step over a small bump in the floor. [peterb]

49. Your night elf warrior can carry arbitrary amounts of treasure, but all other inventory must fit in a small box [psu]

48. Your uber-warrior cannot aim and walk at the same time. [psu]

47. Half-naked women on the package have nothing to do with the game [tomault]

46. Crates. Oh, God, the Crates [scottd]

45. Lava level [psu]

44. Ice level [tomault]

43. First person shooter platforming in a parallel alien dimension [psu]

42. Stupid boss battles [tomault]

41. Game controls map 86 different commands to every key in the keyboard, including function keys, and come with a confusing cardboard keymap. But in actuality, the only buttons you need to win the game are the arrow keys and the space bar. [peterb]

40. X-X-X-X-X-circle-X-X-X-X-X-X-triangle [psu]

39. “Press A to start” when the controller has a GODDAMNED “START” BUTTON. [peterb]

38. Boss impossible to beat unless you have the secret weapon hidden four levels back [tomault]

37. Your best friend and companion turns to the dark side. This means he gets cooler clothes. [peterb]

36. AI “companion” unable to path-find its way across an empty plain [jch]

35. Boobies [psu]

34. crashes with your video card driver version. [eli]

33. Hit the boss 5 times to make the actual Boss pop out of the anus of the outer boss. [psu]

32. Final Zelda Fantasy XIX: Super Sonic Mario Blaster edition [tomault]

31. “…” [psu]

30. “Mature” label means your avatar rapes and kills prostitutes. [peterb]

29. white, cyan, magenta, black. [eli]

28. Hero’s village: destroyed [scottd]

27. Amnesia. [scottd]

26. You start on a trivial mission and end saving the world from Certain Doom [tomault]

25. Long destroyed evil returns from the grave [tomault]

24. Fly, run, jump, grappling hook jump, run, fly, jump, collect a key [psu]

23. The game’s opening cutscene shows the protagonist watching a game’s opening cutscene. [peterb]

22. The Mighty McGuffin of Foobar [scottd]

21. “Help! Leon! Help!” [psu]

20. Evil master villian you killed last game returns in this one as henchman of even more evil master villian [tomault]

19. Fight, fight, fight, parry, parry, parry. [peterb]

18. Fight, fight, fight, parry, parry, parry, …, POWER MOVE [psu]

17. Magic pup-tents that heal your entire party [rlink@DEMENTIA.ORG]

16. Save die swear load die swear load die swear load YES!!! save [scottd]

15. have to enter an alebraic formula to make your function hit all of the enemy. [eli]

14. In video games, priests actually are useful, and don’t molest your children. [peterb]

13. Squad AI can break the door down, throw the flash grenade and then blow themselves to bits with friendly fire and the real grenade. [psu]

12. The first enemies you encounter are always rats. You’ll see. [peterb]

11. Fire, Earth, Water, and Air [scottd]

10. Blind, Mute, Sleep, Confuse, and Poison [rlink]

9. Meteo [rlinkG]

8. A scruffy character of dubious origin sets out on an epic journey through the empire where the choices you make will turn her towards either the way of good or the way of evil as he discovers his true destiny in the history of the world [psu]

7. A stick costs 5 gold pieces [rlink]

6. A defeated rat will drop 2 gold pieces. [peterb]

5. hit, hit, hit, hit, kill, corpose turns into money [psu]

4. Even though you may have achieved god-like powers, there are still plenty of stores that cater to your utterly superhuman needs [scottd]

3. Villagers completely oblivious to your rooting through their drawers full of underwear in search of magical potions while they stand three feet away [scottd]

2. Even the poorest shopkeeper in the smallest hamlet has the 1,000,000 gp on hand to buy that enchanted sword you found in the dungeon [tomault]

1. Successfully carrying item X from person Y to person Z will occasionally give you a sudden epiphany that instantly causes your biceps to swell by 14%. [scottd]

These are not my famous biscuits. This is a recipe I found in Peter Christian’s cookbook, named for a tavern that we used to frequent when we lived in New Hampshire. Use them for sweet or savory dishes. But don’t eat too many.

Here is what you do.

1. Put 2 1/2 cups of flour in a bowl. Add a bit of salt, a little sugar (for dessert biscuits) and 1 1/2 TBL of baking powder.

2. Cut 2 sticks of butter into small cubes. Add to the flour then cut it into the flour with a pastry blender or whatever. When it’s ready, the flour mixture should have turned into little balls about the size of a small pebble. This means the flour and butter have mixed well.

3. Measure out slightly more than 1 cup of light cream, or 1 cup of millk. It’s better with cream. Add most of the cream or milk to the flour mixture. Mix with a fork. If it is too dry, add the rest. You want everything to stick together.

4. Roll the mixture out onto a floured board. Gather up the mixture and make it into a big ball. Don’t work it too much, just enough so it all holds together.

5. Roll the dough out so it is about 1/2″ thick. Cut circular biscuit pieces about 2″ in diameter out of the dough with a glass or other circular thing of the right size. Or make them as big as you want. When you run out of space, roll it all up and do it over again until you are out of dough.

Put all the biscuits on a floured and oiled half-sheet. Or use on of those new-fangled SilPat things. Bake at 400F for 10-15 minutes until the biscuits are light brown on the outside.

You should get about 12-16 biscuits. This means that each biscuit has about 1 tablespoon of butter and 1 tablespoon of cream in it. Keep that in mind while you eat them.

The lesson for today is: shooting zombies is always fun.

There I was, lost and directionless, staring at all the games that I was not playing. So on a whim I fired up Resident Evil 4 and started fooling around with the Mercenaries mini-game. I had given up on this before, because it seemed hopeless. I just could not see how to shoot enough zombies fast enough to gather the points needed to advance in the game.

But, after a few tries, I started to get into the flow of the game, and actually managed to make some progress. This taught me two things:

1. Shooting zombies is always fun.

2. The Gamecube controller makes my hands hurt.

So, discarding the last shreds of my self-respect, I shelled out for the PS2 version of the game, and I am happily playing through it again.

The upside:

1. The PS2 controller does not suck.

2. Real 16:9 for a nice big picture without zooming my TV.

3. Same tight zombie-head-blowing-up gameplay.

The downside:

1. Blockier characters.

2. Lighting effects and textures are noticably worse.

3. Some of that PS2 jaggy and shimmering “looks-like-ass” filter comes through. But not that much.

Having spent more time with the game, I think it’s actually the best shooter that I’ve played in the last year. The only one I liked better was Halo 2. Even Half-Life 2 comes up short.

Resident Evil puts together everything you need for a good shooter experience: excellent pacing, nice weapons, lots of exploding heads, and a nice long linear path without too many obstructions. The stupid bosses are a bit of a downer, but I know how to beat them now (even using only the knife), so they don’t bother me anymore.

Thank god for zombie killing. How would we ever escape our slumps without it.

It was perhaps a year ago that I tried the demo for an early version of Star Chamber. It was a promising game, a mixture of space strategy (a la Spaceward Ho!) and card play (a la Magic: The Gathering). It was clearly more of a proof-of-concept demo than a full-fledged game at the point at which I tried it, and more features were promised “soon.” I set the game aside and forgot about it for a while.

The other week, I read an announcement that Star Chamber: The Harbinger Saga had been released for the Mac. Always interested in games I can play on my laptop on long flights, I took a look. And I would like to say to the authors of Star Chamber: “You’ve come a long way, baby.”

The game is true to its original conception — space strategy game meets collectible card game — so there are no surprises there. What is surprising is the amount of polish that has gone into the presentation. And when I say “polish,” I don’t mean frills like full-motion video, or egregious 3Disms, but just in terms of a well thought out design, balanced gameplay, and consistent user interface.

Strategic view of Star Chamber

The strategic part of the game is composed of a few simple elements that mesh into a pleasantly complex whole. The object of the game is to win. You win by outright military conquest (taking over your opponent’s homeworld), cultural conquest (generating a 30 point “culture gap” over your opponent), or through political intrigue (winning 3 “power play” votes in the game’s legislature). Players can build ships or citizens by expending build points. Players can own industrial planets (which generate build points), artifact planets (which generate “culture,”), or barren planets (which do nothing). One owns a planet by having more citizens (or “influence”) there than one’s opponent.

Complicating matters is that every 6 turns there is a vote at a special location called the “Star Chamber”. Each point of influence you have there gives you one vote; winning votes at the Star Chamber can net you special ships, additional culture, or outright victory. Determining the right balance of citizens to keep on planets to generate military might versus citizens stationed on the Star Chamber to act in upcoming votes is one of the central challenges of the game.

All of these elements would make for an interesting game even without the card-playing element. But the card-playing aspect of the game improves it.

I am, to be frank, not much of a fan of collectible card games. I like looking at pretty cards, but I’m the antediluvian sort who wants to buy a game and then stop buying it. This is the same reason I’m constitutionally incompatible with multiplayer online RPGs. A lot of the effort in the new versions of Star Chamber goes into simulating the trappings of traditionally CCGs; you can buy “starter paks” of cards, or “booster paks”, and you even get to see their labels or wrappers before you “open” them. Most of this is lost on me, but I appreciate the finesse with which it was done.

Looking at pretty cards

When you buy the game you get a few sets of cards with the price of the game so you don’t have to bankrupt yourself to get started playing online. There is no required ongoing subsciption fee to play online, although Worlds Apart does try — in subtle, not at all tacky ways — to get you to buy more (for example, by sponsoring regular “sealed deck” tournaments, and so on). The game also comes with two sets of very challenging single player campaigns. The single player campaigns use their own built-in decks so if, like me, you are an antisocial hermit you can enjoy this aspect of the game without talking to another living soul.

The game itself is superbly balanced. The fear that one should have when hearing the game described is that it will not be a true strategy game, but rather the thin veneer of a strategy game wrapped around a collectible card game. Such is not the case here. It is a true hybrid. The best hand of cards in the world will not help you escape bonehead mistakes. The cards’ strongest effects seem to be to increase momentum when one is playing the strategic game correctly. You’re almost never going to win or lose a battle based on playing a card; rather, the cards typically influence by how much you win or lose the battle, which plays in to how many resources (ships, heroes, citizens) you have available to fight future battles.

I have a few minor complaints about the game. Although the UI is mostly good (especially while in the game proper), there are a few places in the pre-game setup where the navigation cues are inconsistent, and some of the naming is a bit odd (why choose “Gaming Lobbies” when the more accurate and easier to understand “Main Menu” is available?) But overall, I enjoyed the game greatly.

I purchased the Mac version on general principles, but Matrix Games and Worlds Apart graciously gave me a review license for the PC version so I could compare and contrast the two. They are for all intents and purposes identical, so you should not feel that you are getting short shrift by buying one or the other.

Star Chamber is a nice development for the strategy gamer: a game that is based on traditional mechanics, but which, through a little judicious genre-mixing, brings something new to the table.

The Star Chamber website has quite a lot of information about the game, and you can download a free demo for Macintosh or Windows. If you like space strategy games, it is definitely worth your time.

I was interested to read the article titled Perfect Pot Stickers in your most recent issue. The beginning of the article, which described the pleasures of the perfect Chinese Dumpling put into words exactly why I have spent a large part of my adulthood trying to reproduce what I used to eat as a child.

I was disappointed to find that the recipe that followed this glowing description included a chart outlining which pre-fab frozen skins were best. Let me elaborate. If you have a Chinese store in your area that will sell you decent frozen dumpling skins, that same store, in the same freezer case, will have bags and bags filled with metric tons of frozen pre-fab… wait for it…Chinese dumplings!

Your recipe, which suggests making the filling and hand-filling the dumplings is basically telling your poor readers to do fully 2/3rds of the total work needed to create a tray of yummy hand-made pot stickers. But then they get none of the real benefit, because after telling them to do all this work, you then tell them to basically chuck it all and stuff their hard-won bounty into frozen skins.

If you want easy pot stickers, I have a better suggestion: just buy the frozen ones. They are zero work, and trust me when I say that you can find some that are good enough for you. My parents, who always ate the hand made ones (fully hand made), even eat the frozen ones now. They are even cheap. Buy five pounds and go nuts.

But, if you want perfect pot stickers (your magazine was unclear, on the cover it said “easy” and on the inside it said “perfect”), then read on. I have a few tips.

The key combination of factors that make for a good pot sticker are the texture of the dough and the taste and texture of the filling. The dough should be thin but substantial and just a bit chewy, but not doughy. Most of the frozen dumplings that you can buy come pretty close to this standard, but none are really as good as hand-rolled dough.

Making the dough from scratch is really not that much harder than using the frozen. It certainly is not an all-day affair once you have some practice. The dough is just flour and water, not too hard, not too soft. You divide this up and roll out each skin with a small pin. Think of it as a few dozen small pie crusts.

The second part of the picture, the filling, should be meaty, but not dense, and it should have a variety of textures and flavors in each bite. When my mom made pot stickers growing up, she would use about a pound of meat to make 50 to 60 dumplings.

Therefore, I’d suggest that using 3/4 of a pound of meat for 24 pot stickers might account for why you found your fillings to be too dense and meaty. I also noticed that you use a pretty small amount of ginger in your recipe. One and a half teaspoons is barely visible at all, and certainly will not have much impact on the flavor. I would suggest increasing the amount to three or four tablespoons for a little extra kick. A bit of sesame oil in the filling also helps the filling from becoming too bland.

Generally, you don’t need eggs in your filling if you handle the cabbage correctly. The key to making the meat lighter is to not only squeeze the liquid out of the cabbage (as you figured out, good job!) but also to put some of that liquid back into the filling itself to loosen it up a bit.

The ideal filling will have the texture of a light meatball, but with the crunch of the cabbage and scallion. In addition, the soy, scallion, sesame and ginger should mix all around in your mouth, making a dipping sauce that is any more complicated than a bit of soy and vinegar almost redundant. Still, I like hot sauce to dip them in.

One more tip: put a tiny bit of vinegar in the steaming liquid when cooking the pot stickers. It makes them nice.

Finally, the real chinese dumplings are the boiled ones. Ask anyone, the boiled ones are better.

I hope you will take my suggestions into consideration and perhaps amend your article. I have the raw material for a recipe that is pretty close to what my mom does elsewhere on this web site. Feel free to take a look.

Maybe next time you work up a piece like this, instead of all that exhausting testing you could just call up my mom and she can show you how it is done.

…and somewhere, someone is eating caponata di melanzana.

Melanzana, of course, is the beautiful Italian name for the fruit that the French call “aubergine,” and which no one in America eats because it has the revolting name “eggplant.” Caponata is a relish, of sorts, that uses eggplant to carry the flavors of the other items in the mix.

It’s easy to make (except for one annoying part), delicious, and my version is good enough that it can make complete strangers want to hold you and gently sob tears of happiness.

Here’s how to make it.

Things you absolutely need

• Two big eggplants, or three smaller ones. Asian eggplant don’t work for this.
• Sicilian green olives. Nothing else works for this. No one knows why. Don’t use those canned black olives; even having a can in the house will set up psychic waves that might adversely affect the dish. Chop the green olives coarsely, because chopping olives finely is a pain (or, use a food processor)
• 2 small onions. Dice them.
• A few cloves of garlic. Smoosh them.
• Sugar. Set aside a tablespoon
• Some red wine vinegar. If you use balsamic, don’t use sugar. But I use red wine vinegar.
• Some celery, between 1 to 3 ribs. I find that less is more with the celery - usually use just 1 rib: you need some for flavor, but if there is too much the texture doesn’t mesh as well with the other items.
• Some form of tomatoes, for flavor. I just use a tablespoon or so of tomato paste, because I feel using tomatoes messes up the texture. If you do want to use tomatoes, use canned whole tomatoes and tear them apart with your hands when it’s time to add them. Don’t use fresh tomatoes - they won’t taste right.
• Salt, pepper.
• Lots of olive oil. If you use any other oil, you’re the Devil.
• A cast iron skillet. If you don’t own one by now, go buy one already. You need one.

Things you can add if you have them but you shouldn’t stress if you don’t have any in the house, in order of importance

• A few anchovies. If you put anchovies in your caponata, it will always taste about a hundred times better than your vegetarian neighbor’s caponata, and they’ll never understand why.
• A tablespoon or so of capers. This is where the name “caponata” comes from, but secretly you can get away without them.
• Currants, black or gold. Raisins hold too much moisture.
• Pine nuts. I never have any pignoli in the house, so I never put these in anymore.

The Annoying Part

Peel and cut the eggplant. It’s overkill to cut it any smaller than about one-inch chunks, since they’re going to shrink. Put the pieces in a colander and liberally pour some salt over them, mix, and let them sit for 20 minutes to half an hour. When that’s done (they should be profusely sweating), rinse the eggplant very well. Then reach into the colander with two hands and vigorously squeeze the excess moisture out of the eggplant.

This step, along with the anchovies, is the difference between your vegetarian neighbor’s caponata, which people just sort of politely taste, and my caponata, which results in shockingly inappropriate yet creative solicitations from dinner companions. By squeezing out the excess moisture, we’re ensuring that the eggplant are going to absorb more liquid from the other things in the skillet.

The Easy Part

While the eggplant are sweating in their salt rub, put onto medium heat about 1/4 cup of olive oil in your cast iron skillet. Add finely chopped onion, garlic, and celery, and leave them on medium heat until the onions are turning translucent. Remove to a bowl.

Once the eggplant is ready, add more oil to the skillet, and add the following things in short order: the eggplant, the anchovies, and the tomato paste. Once it’s all up to temperature, add some vinegar (not a lot). I usually prepare 1/4 cup of vinegar and add little bits as needed for moisture, and then add more at the end if it needds it. As you cook, the eggplant will start shrinking. When the eggplant has shrunk enough that you have room in the skillet, re-add your celery/onion/garlic mixture.

Now cook it until it tastes good. Maybe 15 or 20 minutes. Stir in olives, and capers and currants if you have them.

At this point you need to make judgment calls based on taste. If you used anchovies, you shouldn’t actually need any additional salt. You’ll have to mix in more vinegar, and sugar, and taste after each addition until you reach the right balance. Trust your tongue and you’ll do fine.

It’s typical that this will taste a little too crisp right out of the skillet. To be truly transcendent, you want to stick it in the refrigerator for a day or two. This will give the flavors a chance to soften and blend. Eat it with fresh bread.

Enjoy your caponata, and be sure to write me and let me know what shockingly inappropriate yet creative solicitations you get from dinner companions as a result of making it.

Firms spend millions upon millions of dollars conceiving, developing, building, marketing, and advertising their wares. They beg us to buy them. Their very existence depends on our whim and desire.

And then, when victory is at hand, and when the cash has been transferred, they show their appreciation for us by making it impossible to actually open the god forsaken package in which the item is stored. For this, someone must suffer.

I direct my wrath at the inventors of three banes of my existence, in order of the virulence of their creation.

1. That form of shrinkwrap that is absolutely smooth and tight over the CD or DVD box. So smooth and so tight that it is impossible to tear into it without damaging the box.

2. The mental midgets who seem to think it is necessary to cover every god-damned hinged surface of a box with a “security” bar code sticker. They don’t do this in Canada.

3. Finally, and with the most hatred, whoever invented blister pack. Hopefully this guy will end up in a special circle of Dante’s hell, permanently trapped in a gigantic container for a PS2 controller, without the jackhammer he needs to escape.

There.

We went to a PSO concert last weekend. This is the first show we have been to in about a year. In the past, I used my PSO experiences to show why the cultural position of Classical Music in our modern world is somewhat shaky. However, this is not the whole story.

The program last weekend did not appear to me anything special. A short string piece by Elgar, the Beethoven Second, and a concerto by Brahms for violin and cello which I had not heard before. The soloists for the concerto were Andres Cardenas, the concertmaster, and Anne Martindale Williams, the principle cellist. Both are popular players in the orchestra. I think many of their students were in the audience.

The first few bars of the Elgar snapped me to attention. It seemed to me that the string sound in Heinz Hall was a lot better than it used to be. It’s probably just that I have not been to a concert in a long time, but the arrangement of the strings on the stage did seem different. I swear they used to use higher risers. In any case, the Elgar got the night off to a good start. Nothing like a good slow movement in a string symphony to get you interested.

But the surprise of the night was the Beethoven. Since I am an arrogant and jaded asshole, I had generally convinced myself that only the later, odd-numbered Beethoven symphonies are actually interesting. It turns out that I was wrong about that. It turns out that even back in his second symphony, Beethoven was already writing music that would fit well into his Ninth. I still get a bit lost in the long and meandering slow movement, but overall I marveled even though I was sure I would not.

I have this experience once in a while going to concerts with the Orchestra. Typically it will be with pieces of music that I have heard before. The live concert brings a piece into focus better than listening at home. First, orchestras today play at an unbelievably high level of technical excellence, and this is much more clear when you see it live. This does not necessarily mean that the music is always better, but it raises your chances. Second, the live setting forces you to pay attention. This is especially the case when things are going well. If the music is grabbing your attention, don’t sit there and read the program notes and let it all pass by.

In fact, if I were writing a beginner’s guide to appreciating a concert at the PSO (which, nefariously, I suddenly am), I would advise that before you do anything else, you do the following:

1. Listen to the music in the concert once or twice on CD first. This is especially important for the larger scale works, which are really huge pieces of formal musical narrative and development. It really helps to have some idea where things are going before they get there.

2. Pay attention. Do anything to keep focused on the performance. Some people like to watch the players very carefully. Do what you need to do but don’t zone out and read the ads in the program.

3. Do not, under any circumstances, ever in your entire existence as a human being go to a concert with an uncontrollable chest cold. Really, I mean it. One of these days someone will be physically injured over a coughing fit during the slow opening section of the Bruckner Seventh. Don’t let it be you.

Happily, there were no cases of pneumonia in the audience this night, and the anticipation was high as the Brahms got started. The Beethoven had put everyone in the mood. We were not disappointed. During the slow movement, I mused about the difference between Brahms and Beethoven. Now, I know nothing about the technical details of music theory and composition. I only know what I have heard over the years. But it seems to me that Beethoven is about rhythm and harmony and development. Brahms is different. What Brahms will do is pull out a melody that makes you feel like you could just tear your own heart out of your chest, and since that melody will be the last thing you ever hear, you can die happy. That’s just what I think.

By the end of the night, the concert had given me a warm feeling of optimism. It seemed to me that the music was in the safe hands as long as these people, who could play it so well, were able to continue to do so. The concert also put me into a bit of a buying frenzy. While shopping for a recording of the Brahms concerto, I found to my chagrin that I had no CDs of the Brahms symphonies. So I went to Amazon and looked up no less than two hundred recordings of the Brahms symphonies. I don’t think there has ever been a time in the history of recorded music when so many classical recordings were so widely available for purchase. Maybe this is the strongest evidence that Classical Music is not dead yet. Someone must be buying all those records. Hopefully they were inspired to do so by a great performance by their local orchestra.