The Post's OnLove column talked recently to a psychologist and author espousing his theory that we have greater control over love than we often believe. I was with him that far. But the last quote from him lost me. "All I can say is there's nothing romantic about failure," he said.

I understood what he meant, the direction he sought to provide. But I couldn't have disagreed with him more. I've never found the possibility of failure anything less than romantic. Same held for our recognition of failure, our endurance of failure and our recovery from failure. I hate to fail, but I wouldn't thrive without that chance or the resultant desire.

The author's quote sat on my screen for a week before an appropriate response drifted near. In the introduction to his My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead anthology of love stories, mentioned here previously, Jeffrey Eugenides considered what love meant in the context of love stories.

When it comes to love, there are a million theories to explain it. But when it comes to love stories, things are simpler. A love story can never be about full possession. The happy marriage, the requited love, the desire that never dims — these are lucky eventualities but they aren't love stories. Love stories depend on disappointment, on unequal births and feuding families, on matrimonial boredom and at least one cold heart. Love stories, nearly without exception, give love a bad name.

We value love not because it's stronger than death but because it's weaker. Say what you want about love: death will finish it. You will not go on loving in the grave, not in any physical way that will at all resemble love as we know it on earth. The perishable nature of love is what gives love its profound importance in our lives. If it were endless, if it were on tap, love wouldn't hit us the way it does.

(For the all-panda edition, see here.)

You ready? I'm gonna start with trees and only get more real on you.

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I think I might. Or maybe… I think I might? Blogcritics? "Is this the most original book I've read this year? What's wrong with The Interrogative Mood? Nothing? Can I stop reading it? Why is this book so much fun?"

New Yorker? "Our inquisitor, by turns cantankerous and plaintive, mourns the decline of butter churns and wonders under what circumstances–impending death, perhaps–it might be acceptable to molest a candy striper. There's not a whisper of a plot, but the torrent of queries is hypnotic, and the cumulative effect is of a latter-day Scheherazade, desperately staving off the final answer."

PopMatters? "Writing a paragraph made up entirely of questions is tiring. But reading a 176-page barrage of inane, non-sequitur questions is downright exhausting. … He seems to repeatedly pat himself on the back for the randomness of his choices. The author shows a predilection for questions about viscous liquids, bird species, pet-owners, coniferous trees, handguns, velvet, milkmen, tree bark, model trains, jawbreakers, nakedness, and the elegance of foxes. If this list sounds slapdash and random, it should. Because it is."

Meet The Interrogative Mood: A Novel? and read an excerpt. In part:

Can you ride a bicycle very well? Was learning to ride one for you as a child easy or not? Have you had the pleasure of teaching a child to ride a bicycle? Are your emotions rich and various and warm, or are they small and pinched and brittle and cheap and like spit? Do you trust even yourself? Isn't it–forgive me this pop locution–hard being you? If you could trade out and be, say, Godzilla, wouldn't you jump on it, dear? Couldn't you then forgo your bad haircuts and dour wardrobe and moping ways and begin to have some fun, as Godzilla? What might we have to give you to induce you to become Godzilla and leave us alone? Shall we await your answer?

Do you ever suffer that sinus condition that effects exactly the sound of a raccoon in your head? Are you as much fascinated as I by the science and indeed art of artillery? Are you as much put off as I by the phrase "science and art," and more put off by the phrase "science and indeed art"? Who is your favorite painter?

Pretty sure this is my kind of book when it prints in paperback?

Hunted thermal shirts. Found Jockey's stretch waffle shirt.

The other curious item on the dog-eared page was this one:

Dec. 3-6 [at the Jazz Standard]: The pianist Chano Dominguez reinterprets Miles Davis's timeless 1959 album, "Kind of Blue," for a flamenco ensemble that includes the dancer Tomasito.

Kind of Blue in flamenco? Davis had put his vast talent to interpreting the latter on the former's last cut, Flamenco Sketches. Listening to the song and its later-found alternate (as I am now), Robert Palmer wrote in liner notes: "And this, it seems to me, is precisely where Kind of Blue comes into its own as a monument to sheer inspiration and creativity. Every solo seems to belong just as it is; it isn't so much theme-and-variations or a display or virtuosity as it is a kind of singing."

So, Kind of Blue in flamenco? A musician, from the opposite position, using his talent with the latter to interpret the former, a half-century later? I had to hear it. I looked and looked but couldn't find audio or video. I found only reviews of the Jazz Standard show, glowing ones. "This was fabulous," one wrote. All About Jazz published, in part:

In presenting his version of Kind of Blue, a concert exploration of the album everyone but me knows, Domínguez came with a quintet format I have not seen before: bass (Mario Rossy), cajón (Israel Piraña Suárez), a wailing flamenco vocal (Blas Córdoba, also on handclaps), and a handclappper (Tomasito) who also contributed bursts of percussive dance on a wooden mini-floor set at the front of the Standard's stage. So there were only two harmonic instruments and a voice, set against a rich, brittle rhythmic conversation.

There was something curious about the implied balance between one band member with all the harmonic possibilities at his fingertips and another who only smacked his palms together, but the asymmetry was a logical one. At times evoking composers as Frederic Mompou or Isaac Albéniz (at least to this impressionable listener), at times dropping into a montuno figure (Gaditanos know about Cuba), and at times sounding like a modal jazz player, Domínguez created a musical drama that overwhelmed its hyperlinks as the rhythm kept snapping.

But no recordings appeared with any links — from the Jazz Standard show or the original performance at the Barcelona Jazz Festival.

So, I went Googling in Spanish. The performance title was "El Duende de Kind of Blue." The Barcelona festival blog turned up. The blog was still running, and the New York show was an extension of the festival. Google Translate helped me find a mention of WBGO. Greater NYC's survivor jazz station had shown interest in Dominguez, the blog said.

The line led me to a recent WBGO tweet about an interview. With this interview, there was a podcast. The podcast had snippets — and the Dominguez quote that became the title of this post – and I was happy. Listen for his lyrics over the instrumental, and check out the All About Jazz piece linked above for the explanation. Heretical but daring.

… Bonus quotes from last night's note-to-note Googling …

Lorca on duende, via the great Wikipedia: "The duende, then, is a power, not a work. It is a struggle, not a thought. I have heard an old maestro of the guitar say, 'The duende is not in the throat; the duende climbs up inside you, from the soles of the feet.' Meaning this: it is not a question of ability, but of true, living style, of blood, of the most ancient culture, of spontaneous creation."

Bill Evans in the original Kind of Blue notes: "There is a Japanese visual art in which the artist is forced to be spontaneous. He must paint on a thin stretched parchment with a special brush and black water paint in such a way that an unnatural or interrupted stroke will destroy the line or break through the parchment. Erasures or changes are impossible. These artists must practice a particular discipline, that of allowing the idea to express itself in communication with their hands in such a direct way that deliberation cannot interfere."

We love our pandas in Washington. We love them so much. If the zoo held twice-daily feedings of cute toddlers to our pandas, we would buy tickets, stand in line and buy panda hats. Just like we do for Zoolights.

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Ever dog-eared a page in a magazine, then returned to find you have no idea why? Happens to me all the time. In this month's instance, the page was from the New Yorker's music listings. Split between rock and jazz listings, the page had nothing obvious leaping at my lapels. (Or, more accurately, my hoodie.) I reread it once. Nothing. Twice. Nothing. Third time? I began to guess. From the guessing, I started googling.

And found two plausible reasons. The second reason I plan to cover at greater length tomorrow afternoon. But the first reason came quick, in a question. How does an album sound after your house burns down?

JOE'S PUB
425 Lafayette St. (212-539-8777)–Butch Walker left his post fronting the chart-grazing modern-rock band Marvelous 3 to produce songs for Avril Lavigne, Simple Plan, the Donnas, and many other artists, but he hasn't lost his taste for the rock-and-roll life. In fact, he glamorized it to great effect on his 2006 album, "The Rise and Fall of Butch Walker and the Let's-Go-Out-Tonites," which is full of tales of sex and glitter. But his life hasn't just been one big party. In the fall of 2007, the house he was renting in Malibu, containing all his possessions, was destroyed in a wildfire. His 2008 solo album, "Sycamore Meadows," is named for the street where that house once stood. He's here Dec. 4-6, playing a full album each night. The first show features his 2004 release, "Letters," the second is devoted to "Rise and Fall," and the third focusses on "Sycamore." He'll also do some covers and maybe a track or two from his forthcoming LP, "I Liked You Better When You Had No Heart."

Had never heard of Butch Walker before, but digging into samples on iTunes, I like the post-fire album the best. (Figures.)

We read recently about the great campus Novartis is building for itself in Basel, Switzerland. Billions of dollars, you have to assume. in its star architect building. Hello, Frank Gehry and his friends. The early take on the architecture from the NYT's Nicolai Ouroussoff is worth your time.

But the piece left me wondering about an issue important to me. There were several lines about the hopes for the interior life of the campus:

From the very beginning he saw the design as a way to reorganize the entire social fabric of his company and foster better communication between those who develop and market his drugs. Office floors would be laid out to prompt cross-disciplinary interaction; parks and courtyards, decorated with artworks, would be conceived as places of private contemplation. Every square inch, in essence, would be designed to encourage the flow of ideas.

Later, we read:

Mr. Vasella said he had been conscious throughout of considering the buildings' effects on his staff. Full-scale reproductions of the offices were built so that employees could examine them before they were installed. A Harvard psychologist was hired to explain the effects of different colors and spatial configurations.

"We build for real people," Mr. Vasella said. "We don't build for machines. The idea is to create an ideal atmosphere, one where workers feel at ease and can communicate with each other easily. So the warmth is very important. When aesthetics intrude on other things, that is not the intention."

What's missing, though, is detail. The article goes on about the miracle facades, campus layout and control implied in the outer structures. But how exactly do the spaces help the flow of ideas? How do they change the way people work? People at the drug company work indoors, and architecture only leaves inward impressions on mood and interaction, with interaction and its momentum often driving mood. In the digital sphere, we have our own virtual architecture to create and observe.

I went Googling for details on how these new spaces might create the results Novartis sought. PR crap turned up at first — "Inspiring working environments have concrete business benefits" (two-page PDF) and a sitting-together "solution" for the biologists and the chemists (Google Translate version). But then I found a fantastic two-year thread about the campus on SkyscraperCity, with interested Basel residents and others contributing, and Google Translate again came through.

While most of the thread focused on city-planning issues, there were transcendent shots and discussions on renewable workplace design.

Like: Unusual-shape tables with holes in their middles (forcing motion), set in — even better — open spaces others pass in going elsewhere. Staff take on the choices and responsibilities of focus/intervention. An overhead model shows curving walls, quietly helpful for stirring held expectations, and — even better– no walls at the ends of desks. The lone back wall gives gaze concentration but doesn't build a bunker.

Like: Visibility into other floors. Know the work extends beyond your immediate surroundings. I think the Times newsroom redesign was regressive on many counts, but it got this progressive aspect.

Like: Gardens semi-indoors. A different choice, for sure, and good luck on the whole sunlight thing. But even if you can't put full-size trees in your atrium, consider the value of putting something more valuable than your day-to-day work at the center of your operational space.

Like: In the visitor building, you can open all the windows by hand. As long as you can keep rain out, cranking open windows is good for you. You touch the space around you, and you take responsibility for it.

More debatable? Designing a garage like a real indoor space. "Luxury suites for luxury cars," one commenter says. I'm still trying to figure if there's a usability basis — if you used industrial bathroom design on a garage, for instance, would it be easier to clean and more conducive to stay longer at work? — or it's indeed all about the luxury. Tough call.

After all, the campus isn't perfectly designed for work innovation. Gehry has admitted as much about his building. Here's the Google Translate version of a story one thread contributor found in 2007:

The moderator asked him how he had managed to succeed in convincing a company to erect a building, which has, despite its large volume, very little office space. The response of the Pritzker Prize-winning analogy was that it could afford as a pharmaceutical company Novartis to deal with the money generously. ("Its a pharmaceutical company, its not a bottom-line place.")

But when you have passages like the following one elsewhere, again machine-translated from German to English, you have to be heading in the right direction. "'Multi-Space' means that [for] employees a variety of individual, joint, open and closed work areas are available. Thus, a diverse office environment is created (which, incidentally, [has] nothing to do with former open-plan offices) for flexible working." Smart space.

I hear Jonny fought the pig, then took off its head with his bare hands.

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Whatever your politics, recent David Brooks has good lines. Go Skins.

A protocol economy tends toward inequality because some societies and subcultures have norms, attitudes and customs that increase the velocity of new recipes while other subcultures retard it. Some nations are blessed with self-reliant families, social trust and fairly enforced regulations, while others are cursed by distrust, corruption and fatalistic attitudes about the future. It is very hard to transfer the protocols of one culture onto those of another.