What Causes That?

I inspect the subject of politics with a certain amount of caution, most of the time, in this space. Partly this is because the header of this blog identifies me as a lot of things, but as a politician it does not.

And, well, politics is a topic that is so full of potential land mines that I step carefully. Also, I do have perfectly wonderful friends and colleagues whose politics don’t line up with mine. Most times, we agree to disagree by talking about other things, like the latest Red Sox bullpen blowup, or the latest cool choir anthem, or something.

Nonetheless, I feel fairly safe in addressing today’s topic, as I can force it into Not Being About Politics.

Here is what the Texas senator said on “CBS This Morning” [last] Tuesday:

“I grew up listening to classic rock, and I’ll tell you sort of an odd story: My music taste changed on 9/11. And it’s very strange. I actually intellectually find this very curious. But on 9/11, I didn’t like how rock music responded. And country music collectively, the way they responded, it resonated with me. And I have to say, it just is a gut-level. I had an emotional reaction that says, ‘these are my people.’ So ever since 2001, I listen to country music. But I’m an odd country music fan, because I didn’t listen to it prior to 2001.” [http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/416114/ted-cruz-country-boy-ian-tuttle]

Tell me, Mr. Gershwin, what causes that?

I shall leave aside the faint possibility that Sen. Ted Cruz (R.-Tex.) made this statement in the effort to reassure a certain group of potential Republican presidential primary voters that he speaketh their language. Which is to say, an example of shameless pandering. Because this is Not About Politics.

I am tempted to examine briefly the idea of the crisis conversion. There is much documentation in the professional psychology community about what emotional and psychological conditions may contribute to someone’s ability to suddenly adopt one set of views or values over another, in the wake of a sudden event.

The classic religious paradigm for conversion is highly dependent on the idea of sudden conversion. … Sudden conversions are highly emotional but not necessarily rational. In these instances the convert is a passive agent being acted upon by external forces, and the conversion entails a dramatic transformation of self. Emotion dominates this dramatic, irrational transformation leading to a shift in self and belief, with behavior change to follow. For sudden converts conversion is not a back and forth drawn out process, but rather happens in one single instance and is permanent thereafter. Typically sudden conversions occur in childhood and are exceptionally emotional experiences. [Adapted from Spilka, B. et al. (2003). The psychology of religion, an empirical approach. (3 ed.). New York, NY: Guilford Pub.]

Much of the published research dealing with this topic similarly emphasizes the greater effects of emotion over those of reason, in these moments of conversion. Not that there’s anything inherently wrong with emotion; and as long as we’re not talking about making decisions about activating a nuclear arsenal, it may be safe to suggest that emotion is not necessarily the worst motivation for changing one’s mind about something.

And assuredly, the immediate aftermath (say, the first week or two) of the 9/11 terrorist attacks were an emotional and psychologically delicate time. (For those of us who heard about them but were not actually present, at least. I can only assume that witnessing them live and in person would change the conditions of this test dramatically – and almost certainly would lengthen that “aftermath” timeframe to anywhere between several months and the rest of one’s life. I can hardly speak to that point.)

But the majority of the sudden conversions that I’m personally aware of tend to be much more on the order of someone witnessing a performance of, say, the pop group “One Direction” and instantly developing a fixation on those lads. Again, I’m not dumping on those particular fans. (So for heaven’s sake, please, devoted One Direction fans, don’t go down the same road that the Absurdly Young Operatic Classical-Crossover Singing Sensation Appreciation Society did, when they got all defensive about the blog entry I wrote, nearly four years ago, that looked faintly askance at their Musical Idol. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you may wish either [a] to go look up my previous blog posts called “Children and Animals” and “Zing!” … or [b] to be just as happy that you don’t know what I’m talking about.)

But, if we adopt that generic example as the model for this examination of the Sudden Conversion, well, consider all the footage you may ever have seen of American pop-music fans reacting to the arrival in the US of the Beatles, fifty or so years ago. What do all those, um, faintly emotional fans have in common?

They’re all pretty young.

And it was okay.

They were appreciating many things about the Beatles; probably not all of them to do with musicology … or guitar-playing technique … or the fact that John and Paul had no business being as truly great musical composers as they were, considering Paul didn’t (and still doesn’t) read music much, and they were neither of them far removed from their own teenage years.

The fans were appreciating the cut of their suits, and the cut of their hair, and about a zillion other things that didn’t have much to do with music. But also, on some very gut level that had nothing to do with what in the world is that opening “Hard Day’s Night” chord made up of?, the Beatles’ music or performances or public images spoke to them.

And so, we return to Sen. Ted Cruz, and the extent to which American country music – specifically, how its purveyors reacted musically to the 9/11 attacks (compared, reportedly, to the ways in which rock musicians did) – spoke to him.

Again presuming that this is About Music, and not instead About Anything Else.

I admit that I had to do a little research about this, since the only two specific things I had remembered about the aftermath of the attacks, musically, are Lee Greenwood’s (in my humble opinion otherwise execrable) song “God Bless the USA”, and the fact that more major- and minor-league baseball spectators have been made to sing Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America” during the seventh-inning stretch, than are made to sing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame”, since then.

As I did this research, I noted a curious thing: the various lists of original songs written about the September 11 attacks, released in 2001 (presumably within the three months afterward), seemed about evenly divided between country artists and rock artists.

The Charlie Daniels Band, with “This Ain’t No Rag, It’s a Flag”. Paul McCartney, with “Freedom”, from his “Driving Rain” album. The country band Lonestar, with “I’m Already There”, from their similarly-titled album. Neil Young, with “Let’s Roll”, from his “Are You Passionate?” album. Tori Amos, with “I Can’t See New York”, from her “Scarlet’s Walk” album. Toby Keith, with the delicately-drawn “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American)”, from his “Unleashed” album.

What did all these songs (and more besides) have in common? Seemingly, they all express sympathy for the victims, and outrage at the atrocity … and, as music very often does, they strive to comfort the afflicted.

Country and rock, each.

There are hardly any examples that I can find of music that begins to, conversely, afflict the comfortable, until well into 2003, let’s just say eighteen months later. My purpose here is not to wonder why that could be; to wonder what would bring on a gradual turn away from dogged patriotism, or at least care for the victims and their losses.

Yes, the rapper Paris released a song called “What Would You Do?” which dealt with 9/11 conspiracy theories. And a Japanese singer called Misia, in collaboration with American singer Erykah Badu, released an anti-war song called “Akai Inochi (Red Destiny)”, which spoke of how the events of 9/11 turned the “seemingly distant existence of war into the reality of now”.

Ah ha! These songs didn’t come directly after the attacks, but they came! And they were done by people other than country artists! …Is what some supporters of Sen. Cruz may be saying, if they’re doing similar research to mine.

Okay; but then, there was that controversy surrounding that pesky group of uppity women called the Dixie Chicks, and how they (as members of the country music community that Sen. Cruz admires, with such a broad brush, as being “his people”) kinda stirred up the waters a bit, bein’ all critical and anti-war ‘n’ stuff.

Harder to jam that round peg in that square hole, I think.

Now, I am loathe to assume I can read people’s minds and know what they’re thinking and feeling all the time. I would be arrogant to suggest that I know, know for a fact that Sen. Cruz is full of it when he suggests that directly after 9/11, he perceived differences in how country and rock musicians were responding to the attacks that were sufficient to generate in him a Sudden Conversion – an adjustment in his musical tastes immediate and passionate enough to rival a 13-year-old’s sudden obsession with the Backstreet Boys or the Jackson Five or the Beatles.

I might be treading Hypocrite Territory, in that case.

After all, recently (well into my fifth decade on Earth) I figured out that all those silly Marvel Studios superhero movies were pretty cool stuff. When it’s Tuesday afternoon, I get a little jazzed thinking, “hey, it’s an ‘Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’ night!” And at some point I will probably blog cheerfully about how great that little eight-episode “Agent Carter” show was. But it took me stumbling onto a cable-TV rerun of the “Iron Man” movie, followed by a similarly-located rerun of “Marvel’s The Avengers”, followed by a little research into the comic-book heritage of the Avengers’ roster – “now what’s all this about Thor, and Black Widow, and Captain-America-who-I-always-thought-was-fairly-lame? – although, yes, I perfectly well know all about the Incredible Hulk” – to get me to be a fan of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

But it took a while.

Because I’m not 13 anymore.

And neither is Sen. Cruz. And you don’t get as far into representative government as he has by doing things, making adjustments to your core beliefs, that would get you labeled as a Flip-Flopper. Stand firm in your beliefs!

So, it does beg the question that Mr. Gershwin posed, again: “tell me what causes that?”

But let’s only talk about it in terms of music and psychology, please. Because it is, of course, Not About Politics.

There Is A Time And Place For Everything, And This Is Not It

Hey!

It’s me.

I know. It’s been a while. About a month, in fact, since I last offered up any pearls of wisdom in this space. (Some might argue that as for the pearls, it’s been much longer than that.)

The last time I went this long between blog items, I supposed that the gap had not been caused by a lack of inspiration, or interest in writing. Plenty of subjects have jumped up in the last month and said, “write about meeeee!” But I found that most of them were worth about one Facebook status post. In this space, I average between a thousand and two thousand words per post. Maybe it’s because I look at these blog posts as surrogate newspaper columns. After all, that’s what I wanted to be when I grew up, at about age 12 … a swashbuckling newspaper columnist. Three times a week and an expanded column in the Sunday color supplement! I don’t write mere one-liners. I write substance.

Or I try.

Also, well … the Winter Olympics.

Folks who have the misfortune to be connected with me on the local Book of Face will have noted that during Olympic fortnights … I, um, don’t get out much. For every televised ice dancing twizzle, every bobsled skid, every hockey line change, every eye infection, there Must Be A Status Post!!

So it might be hypocritical to suggest that it’s best to pause and reflect before posting on this blog, if I continually join the rest of couch-bound humanity in Facebook-reacting instantly to whatever is on the teevee right this second. Don’t I repeatedly remind my students that “not everything merits an instant verbal response”? I do indeed.

But there are times when it’s probably best to pause and reflect. To hold off. To keep the knee from jerking.

A couple of nights ago on the NBC Olympic primetime telecast, there was a moment of squirm that got my attention because it took none of those exit ramps.

 

American downhill skier Bode Miller had just rocketed his way down a mountain some miles outside of Sochi, Russia … posted a possibly-medal-worthy time … and then stood watching as skier after skier, about two dozen of them in all, followed him down the hill. However many seconds it takes for two dozen skiers to ski that course, times about a thousand, is how long it probably felt to Miller, until all the results were recorded and he could be sure that indeed, he was going to be able to stand on a podium and have a bronze medal wrapped around him.

And, as is always the case when such events are televised, before he could enjoy the medal-application, he was obligated to do one more tiny thing: get interviewed.

Former US skier Christin Cooper was in the “sideline reporter” role for NBC’s ski coverage that day. There are usually very few post-event interviews that will win awards with Edward R. Murrow’s name on them. And of those few, nearly none are conducted by people who are thrust into the role of journalist by way of erstwhile athletic prowess. So Ms. Cooper had a number of factors working against her to begin with. Not her fault.

Cooper asked Miller how this, his sixth Winter Olympic medal, felt different than the others he’d won.

Cooper: “For a guy who said the medals don’t really matter, they aren’t ‘the thing,’ you’ve amassed quite a collection. What does this one mean to you in terms of all the others?”

Miller: “This was a little different. With my brother passing away, I really wanted to come back here and race the way he sends it. So this was a little different.”

Miller was referencing a difficult subject: his younger brother, Chelone, died last year after apparently suffering a seizure which may have been related to a brain injury suffered in a previous motorcycle accident.

Cooper followed up on this – as a good journalist would, whether she’d had prior knowledge of this subplot or not.

Cooper: “Bode, you’re showing so much emotion down here. What’s going through your mind?”

Sadly, this was a clunker of a follow-up question. Regardless of whether the audience had been alerted to the emotional baggage Miller was carrying (and NBC had made certain that its audience had, in spades), a proper follow-up question might have veered away from generic cliché and toward more establishment of context. Help your audience. But Cooper isn’t the only sideline reporter ever to ad-lib an interview question that failed to rise to the level of Shakespearean prose.

At her question, Miller’s composure slipped. It took a long while before he could muster a reply.

Miller: [long pause] “A lot, obviously. A long struggle coming in here. And, uh, just a tough year.”

At this point, I expected Cooper to observe that the interview was probably right on the edge of over thanks to Miller’s imminent inability to find his voice. I also expected her to head for the vaguely gracious “congratulations on a terrific race” and throw it back to her two colleagues “in the booth” somewhere nearby. The cadence of the average brief post-race interview had been adhered to. Wrap it up, let the other two voices create an audio transition while the camera lingers on the racing hero for a couple of beats, cut to the final-results leaderboard graphic, and we’re home free.

None of that happened. Cooper continued. I, a veteran of numerous journalism classes and televised sporting events, froze. I had a sudden sense that this train was in danger of vacating the rails.

Cooper: “I know you wanted to be here with Chilly experiencing these Games; how much does it mean to you to come up with a great performance for him? And was it for him?”

Miller: “I mean, I don’t know it’s really for him. But I wanted to come here and uh — I don’t know, I guess make myself proud.” [pauses; wipes tears from his eyes]

Okay, so we’ve really established that this is an Up Close and Personal Emotional Moment, the kind that network teevee completely adores. We have reached inside, past the Game Face of the Olympic athlete, and discovered that the athlete is in fact a human being, and does in fact have emotions, and we have witnessed them … in brilliant high-definition. Now we can wrap this up, at a level of only six out of ten on the Uncomfortable Scale.

No we can’t, apparently.

I heard Cooper draw breath, as if to speak again; and I heard myself, reflexively, and with complete lack of self-editing, whisper toward my teevee set, as if that would help, … “Oh my good Lord, please, back off!”

Time to stop being an investigative journalist – or whatever Cooper was in great danger of becoming. Time to be a sympathetic human. This is not 60 Minutes. You are not Bethany MacLean going after the Enron “smartest guys in the room”.

Cooper: “When you’re looking up in the sky at the start, we see you there and it just looks like you’re talking to somebody. What’s going on there?”

I can’t remember the last time I heard that much “dead air” on primetime network teevee.

Miller physically could not answer the question. He sank to his knees and hung on to the fence that separated the competition area from the press. Cooper’s voice could be heard whispering “…sorry,” but it was too late. By what felt like several weeks.

 

The online Twitter universe essssploded. My Facebook timeline did likewise. In the next few hours, both Cooper’s journalistic skills and her essential character were assessed equally harshly.

And I could have leapt to the blog machine and joined in; might have cranked out a critique of her performance that would have made her ears bleed, from nine time zones away.

But it was late, and I suddenly just wanted to crawl into bed (also, the better to get up at Absurd O’Clock the next morning and watch the all-important US/Switzerland men’s curling round-robin match) (don’t judge; I’ll go another 47 months without this stuff). I opted to let it rattle around in my brain a bit and go find a transcript the next morning, so as to see if I’d heard what I thought I’d heard.

But as I closed down my computer, a thought occurred to me: there are at least two possible scenarios at work here.

One is this: Christin Cooper took whatever meager journalistic skills she may have had … and set them aside, seeing an opportunity to instead become no better than a gossip columnist, digging in on that one gap in Miller’s armor and ensuring an emotional scene that would make great headlines or great video. Lookee: I got a scoop.

Another is this: the suits in the corner offices at NBC Sports knew about Bode Miller’s brother way ahead of time. And they decided that if they could possibly find a way to bring that subplot fully into focus somehow – in any way that had more impact than any mere pre-packaged human-interest video segment – then they should do so. Great for ratings. And word was sent down to the broadcast personnel assigned to Miller’s races: “this is what we need. Get it.”

It could well be the latter scenario, since what I was watching that night was the re-broadcast of video that had aired live, earlier that day. Sochi is nine hours ahead of 30 Rockefeller Center. The producers and editors at NBC had up to nine hours to look at the raw video, make a couple of assessments, and decide what they wanted to air during primetime. And it’s possible, even likely, that somebody at NBC Sports (whose humanity license needs to be revoked) watched Cooper’s interview at least once, probably twice, maybe even thrice, and decided … “it’s perfect. Run it. As is.”

Welcome back to this week’s episode of “I Can’t Decide What’s Worse”!

The arguably hyperbolic backlash against Christin Cooper’s performance may or may not have been misdirected; but it was definitely not insignificant.  Because it came from decent human beings who instinctively felt the need to push back against a broadcasting decision which might have been placing “great teevee” higher than simple decency.

Enthusiasm, Part the Second -or- From the Soles of Your Shoes

So in this space, during the last few months, I’ve occasionally mentioned my pie-in-the-sky attempt to become a Serious Composer.

But I haven’t chronicled the process of getting those compositional attempts in front of a live human group, and of getting the stuff rehearsed and prepared. Suffice to say, it was both measured and also a little frantic.

…Wha–?

As much as one can lay out a strategy for preparing a Large Work so that everyone has plenty of time and opportunity to get comfortable with the material … life has a way of conspiring to, um, thwart. Or at least challenge.

For starters, a church choir is (oh by the way) responsible for preparing music for weekly regular worship services. And we don’t wish to prepare “baby music”, music that clearly takes no time to put together, with all the inspirational impact of a C-SPAN rerun. So that’ll cut into your Large Work prep time!

Also, a volunteer choir is full of people who have lots on their plates: work, home, kids … the list goes on. We have folks who travel on business. We have folks who succumb to the local autumn and winter virus germ bugs. Family emergencies happen. Unforeseen things come up. Rehearsals are missed (not super often, but enough) for legit reasons.

And in my case, one more wrinkle. Thanks to the tendency of public school calendars to place school music ensemble concerts on Thursday nights, that’s where I spent the last two Thursdays prior to the third Sunday in Advent … which is when we had intended to present the Large Work. This is not ideal. At least we’d seen it coming in advance and had planned for it. Also … at least our choir members didn’t elect to disown me, over it.

So I won’t say I was exactly happy that a winter weather event on the third Advent Sunday caused us to postpone the presentation till the fourth Advent Sunday … but perhaps that did serve a purpose.

You can never have too many rehearsals on a piece of music. Well, maybe you can; but with a volunteer choir, repetition is good, repetition is good, repetition is good. In fact, four years ago, we experienced a similar winter-weather postponement, except then we had to postpone our Christmas Cantata presentation till January of the new year. The Epiphany we had (joke) was that we had spent an extra month living with the piece not to learn any more notes but instead to get so comfortable with the music that when we finally did present it, five weeks later than planned, we weren’t so obsessed with the individual notes that we couldn’t make a little music. And we could really enjoy ourselves. So as we abandoned last week in favor of this week, I thought perhaps history could repeat, if we were lucky.

(On top of which, this past Thursday did not contain any school concerts. Kind of a bonus to have the choir director present for the last rehearsal. Sheeeee.)

My fine colleague, our church’s organist and music director, assured me that things had gone very well during those two aforementioned Thursday rehearsals. I thanked him and assured him that I owed him a couple of lunches at least. But still, I hadn’t been present when he and the choir had integrated the choral work with the playing of our instrumental helpers – horns, string bass, and various other congregation members and friends. So that Total Art Work was still all in my imagination.

In fact the tunes were totally assembled in only two places in my life up until this morning: in my imagination; and in the MP3 rehearsal tracks we put together for the choir. And a weird thing had happened to me in late November: I’d been driving to and fro, hither and yon, playing a CD of those rehearsal tracks … and realized with a start that I was actually bored with it.

This is not a good thing to be, if what you’re listening to is your own stuff.

Then the truth of it occurred to me: I was listening to a computerized rendering of the music, which meant that as lifelike as the individual sounds were … and my music notation software can offer fairly authentic sounds of strings and pianos and drums, and sometimes horns, and not very often voices … still, I was listening to a computer following instructions, rather than humans making music. (So the computer voices weren’t presenting the actual text; but instead, some very nearly authentic “ooh”-ing.)

And this morning was the final, clinching proof that humans will never ever be replaced in the game of making music – expressive music which features spontaneous decisions and which evokes actual emotions from audience and performers alike.

For one thing, computers can’t smile and joke and look more and more relaxed the longer the early-morning warmup and run-through progresses. Humans can. This choir did. The styles covered by the musical material (jazz, pop, rock, gospel) were perhaps more conducive to the smiles and good humor and swaying and occasional belly laughs than would the music of, say, J.S. Bach. The Mass in B Minor may suggest more strongly to a group that gravity and dignity are absolutely called for. Let’s be honest: there’s a difference between a Baroque-era work that is in triple meter, and a 1940s-style slow swing tune, in spite of the fact that they both seem to have triplets in them.

For another thing, computers don’t need conductors, so they’ll never experience ensemble members and conductors feeding off of each other’s energy and enthusiasm and, yes, moments of irreverence to produce a musical performance that is more than just the right notes.

And when computers produce music that humans would consider challenging, audiences will quite rightly expect that all the notes will be correct, so long as the power doesn’t go out in the middle of the performance. There will be no suspense about this. When humans go after music that stretches them a bit, or in fact when humans present any music at all, it’s always some version of a tightrope act. The hundred, thousand, million decisions made by every individual person involved … are in fact rocket science, and then some! And computers could do what humans do … if there were enough programming time available. But humans make decisions “in the moment” that make each performance different (slightly or vastly) from any that had come before or will happen thereafter.

Computers make lousy jazz musicians.

I’ve written arrangements before, and heard them played and sung by many different ensembles at many different levels and in many different environments. I’ve written a few relatively small pieces: a couple for the high school band which I led for almost a decade, and a couple for the church choir that I’m thinking fondly of this evening. In all cases, it was exciting to hear that the ideas did work, that the pieces were coherent, and that the people seemed to like playing or singing them.

For many reasons, this morning’s presentation was all of that, but more besides. In part, yes, it was the culmination of a lot of hard work by a lot of people, and also the addition of a few instrumentalists to our musical ensemble whose presence and performance added just that little spark of something that helped us “take it to the next level” – and what a cliché that phrase has become, and yet it’s fairly accurate. But there was something else that coalesced.

The first of the eight pieces stood alone, as our worship service’s Prelude. Lots of ethereal “ooh”-ing from the choir, providing backing for a pair of soprano soloists, and the effect during the heat of battle was positively hypnotic. We got a good start.

Following a hymn, a scripture reading and the “children’s message”, the second through fifth selections comprised the block of service time during which the sermon would normally have happened. (Our senior pastor annually gives up his sermon time for some or all of our Advent Cantata presentation. For a lot of pastors this would be a really hard thing to do!) Following another hymn, the reading of congregational concerns and celebrations, movements six and seven made up the “offertory” music slot; and after a closing hymn, the final movement served as Postlude.

As has been chronicled in this space before, the third movement was a lazy swing thing that I wrote while unabashedly thinking of Raymond Chandler private eye novels, and this morning the choir seemed to not worry so much about the notes that made up the close-harmony, minor-sixth and flat-ninth Manhattan Transfer chords, but instead relaxed their hips and shoulders and Swung Out. If they’d had fedoras, they’d have tipped them rakishly to one side.

And as good a time as I had, listening to the second and fourth movements even as I conducted them … and as much as the sixth, seventh and eighth items created great effects – and the Big Finish was indeed a big finish! …

Oh, that fifth anthem.

We got finished with that piece, which can be described stylistically as slow gospel, but that doesn’t really cover it … and I leaned over to my accompanist colleague and whispered, “we could stop now. In fact, I’m not sure how we follow that.”

During Thursday night’s rehearsal, from somewhere outside my own head, I had found this stage direction for movement five: “bring the sound up from the soles of your shoes.” There’s singing the notes, and then there’s singing the notes with depth. And I had the feeling that descriptions involving vocal anatomy or deep philosophical constructs would be way too scientific or way too ephemeral to be effective in a music rehearsal. So, as is often my wont, I tossed out a weird little phrase and hoped it would be just odd enough to work.

Yeah, that one kinda worked on Thursday night.

Add firmly controlled adrenalin, add a live congregation, add the momentum of the four prior anthems, stir and serve … and that one more than kinda worked this morning.

Let’s just say that I want the recording of movement number five like very few tangible things I have wanted for quite some time. I want to find out whether I really heard and felt what I thought I heard and felt.

You are perhaps familiar with the phrase that gets used by and about pro sports teams: “leave it all out there on the field”? As in, this is the moment of truth, and who wants to look back for the rest of their lives and wonder what better results would have come if we hadn’t held anything back?

We left it all out there on the field.

Particularly with that fifth anthem, yes … but also all morning long.

Quite simply, it was a privilege and a joy to be associated with that choir this morning – regardless of whose music they were singing. All you had to do, to know that they’d held nothing back – aside from maybe listening to them do their thing – was to watch them.

Oh, yes, that’s another thing that computers will never be able to do: finish a calculation, or an operation, or a function …

… and smile that smile. The very small one that still manages to reach the eyes. The one that says: “had it all the way, and it was a kick.”