Someone who doesn't know anything about me except my phone number called me up and asked me to come play string quartets tonight.

There's a whole ritual to this.  You don't get to ask who the other players are -- it's like a dinner party in that way.  But there's no food.  You arrive and meet the other three.  There's some jousting:  who plays where, who knows who, who went to school where.  You try not to engage in too much of this, because, after all, it doesn't really matter.  All that matters is what happens when you sit down to play.

Usually, it sounds awful when you sit down to play for the first time, and tonight was no exception.  A quartet is four people, each of whom is Saving The Situation.  So movements are exaggerated, sounds are harsh -- it's just terrible.  You just have to get through that part.  Tonight we first read a fugue that one of the players had written "in school."  We praised him extravagantly.  That's traditional too.

Things usually get a little better as people stop being self-conscious and just play.  That happened tonight too.  We moved on from a little-known Haydn quartet to a better-known Beethoven quartet.  Sure, there were some destructive moments.  We will draw a veil across the scene, or at least across the sound of the scene.  But we made it through, together, and we ended up feeling great and as if we'd gotten away with something.  In the middle of midtown

Today was also a day for getting a NY driver's license.  There was a lot of waiting around, and a tremendous amount of jousting about credentials.  Without your original social security card, you just can't get a driver's license in this state.  The social security office here in NYC says that 75% of its transactions are people replacing lost cards.

It is usually awful to stand in line at the DMV, and today was no exception.  There was a chokepoint -- two people dealing with every single inquiry and checking every single credential.  But then (as with the quartets) the system started to work.  After the computers in the entire state went down, they came back up.  People were getting licenses right and left.  An almost tangible sense of bonhomie kicked in.  We left feeling great.

The quartet evening ended with a sense of purpose:  playing a lovely Mendelssohn movement.  All we got from the DMV was a temporary license.  Both groups (quartet and people getting licenses) disbanded and went off into midtown. 

The quartet is like the group-of-people-at-the-DMV in that they start out not knowing eachother, but end up chatting away.  But the quartet creates something (sometimes awful, to be sure) that is greater than itself.  The quartet might even be persistent, if the host manages to drag everyone back again to play.  And the quartet depends on interplay among its members to work.  The people-at-the-DMV are only following procedures and hoping to be allowed a credential that will allow them on airplanes. 

So the DMV is like a string quartet in that both have terrible, deadly moments that may, with luck, get smoothed over.  Both have people with roles that they play, and some people are more helpful than others.  But the DMV is not like a string quartet in that what it produces is the same every time -- a top-down credential, with a picture.  The quartet produces something different, something occasionally beautiful, and something ephemeral that causes us to think twice.  Some groups are more meaningful -- more metainformationally interesting -- than others.