Hey cool. I am getting some comments on this blog. Thank you to Jeremy and Ray. I have to remind myself constantly that others (indeed anyone online)  can and do occasionally read this stuff.

When I first started blogging (before the word was even in fashion… I thought of it as having my own web site), my idea was that it was an exciting way to exchange ideas and extend the conversation that I imagine already happening between books and people living and dead.

I was soon overtaken and passed by an immense wave of understanding of the web as a vehicle for commerce. Blogs are rated by hits so that they can be consider sources of wealth (note the term, Jeremy, heh). Unfortunately their worth is not necessarily the conversation and ongoing learning and exploration I envision. Silly fucking me, eh?

So when people join in the conversation it sometimes takes me by surprise, a bit like talking to an empty room and suddenly getting a response. Thank you.

I posted a link on Monday with little comment:

“Keith Jarrett keyboard genius puts on extended solo concert temper tantrum” by Richard Sheinin [link]

It seems that Jarrett couldn’t concentrate due to crowd noise and then lectured the offenders.

On the one hand, Jarrett is one of a handful of performers I truly admire. His career spans incredible Jazz, Classic and compositional accomplishments. His improvised concerts are recordings I treasure as well as his lovely compositions on the album Arbor Zena.

On the other hand, I think this kind of behavior in a performer is inexcusable.

The most plausible excuse was ignored by the author of this review. Jarrett had a complete nervous breakdown a few years ago. He is obviously a driven artist and drove himself right over a mental cliff.

I wonder how this relates to his bad behavior.

But maybe this is just the ant eye view of the giant of genius.

I see music as something that anyone can and probably would benefit from doing. It’s part of the human experience and privilege. I am thankful for people like Jarrett (and Bach and Arvo Part and many others) who extend the vistas of what is possible.

But I meet so many people who conversationally seem to be standing on the outside of the musical experience looking hungrily in, downplaying their own abilities to connect with the music either as intelligent listener or (godforbid) performer (i.e. usually singer… “I can’t sing” always draws me out at least a little to say that most if not all humans begin life in the stance of the wondering artist: dancer, drawer, singer.

Later they largely lose touch with this part of themselves often as a result of a misunderstanding of a cruel comment or even a deliberate suppression by an adult.)

Since I am a performer who doesn’t have an convenient way (besides church) to connect easily with listeners, maybe it’s just sour grapes on the part of one vastly less talented and skilled than Jarrett, but I think he is out of line here.

I thought for a while I would be able to connect via recordings with listeners maybe even on this web site. But I learned enough about recording to understand that while technology has become economical enough to make a decent digital recording of my guitar or my voice, when I want to do more like record a piano or do a multi track mix of many trax I am probably out of my league until I gain the training and expertise. I have learned just enough about recording to realize it would absorb much of the energy I need for practicing and composing. So I have chosen to keep practicing and composing and put recording on the back burner.

Anyway.

I guess that’s the thoughts for today.

I  seem to be working again. My sketching has evolved into a full fledged little piece. Working title: “You must be the animal.” So far it seems to be sort of a musical tribute to Zappa. I worked on it several hours yesterday. Including setting up the keyboard as a midi so I could enter it into notation software.

Eileen came home and I told her I been working on my composition. She asked me if I was satisfied with it. I replied, “Not at all.” Thus it ever is. One is rarely satisfied with one’s own work. Always tweaking if not rewriting.

I also began giving thought to tunes I could do on the street as soon as it warms up. I keep thinking about the one guy’s comment to me. He said something like, Don’t play stuff I can hear anywhere, play me something I can’t hear anywhere else. I like that. It is an astute listener comment. A good musical performance is a unique one. Original material makes it more unique I guess.

I’m pretty happy with my abilities on the Electric Piano. I can split the keyboard and kick bass with left hand, play licks and accompaniment with the right hand and sing. What I’m not so happy with is the sound quality of my EP through my little amp. There are some very fine portable PAs available these days. They are prohibitively expensive however at this point.

No matter.

I was thinking once again yesterday about my belief that money is not real.

I know this is an easy thought for someone like myself living in the richest country in the world. Also enjoying the privileges of a white male with education. I can sort of skim a living off the largess of this privilege.

And if I don’t have a fancy PA, I do have most everything I want. Including time to compose and practice and perform. Ahhhhh.

The trick is not getting bogged down in the trivialities of everyday life. Especially but not only economic ones.

And of course the important things in life like living with someone I love and having a brain that still works and a body that is not completely worn out yet are still going for me.

Hey fuck the duck. Life is good.

My thoughts have been turning to my own mortality a bit recently.

Yesterday, my doctor’s office called to inform me my cholesterol is officially high (239 :T-200/H-47/L-147). Actually these numbers (like my blood pressure) hover right at the borderline between medium and high. The caller told me my doctor recommended I be more vigilant about my diet and increase exercise. I cheerfully told her that I had done that since seeing the doctor last Tuesday.

I will do everything in my power to change my life style to respond to these changes in my body. But they are just that. Changes in my body. I am aging which essentially is a process of getting closer to not being alive.

To me this means to grasp the moments left more firmly and live the time I have been given.

At the same time I have been considering adding some financial earning to my daily life. Our budget has been tightening as we insist on spending money on travel and time off and at the same time facing increasing out of pocket expenses for health concerns.

I feel a bit guilty because I know I am not using my earning potential.

Recently a friend started asking about whether I would consider teaching college again. I find this funny because it feels like I have been rejected by local colleges.

But it’s probably been long enough that I could try again.

I have a good deal of free time right now.

Time to think, practice and compose. I have been noticing that my composing has been dwindling. I think this has something to do with needing a bit of a community of listeners or colleagues or performers as an outlet for what I write.

I have been doing some sketching. And I am slowly building a small community of people interested in what I am doing. Most excitingly I think I could write for my violinist and cellist. This is what I really need. Faces to think of as I make up parts.

I continually consider writing pieces for myself to perform alone, mostly piano. In the past I have found it satisfying to write songs (I call them my bad Paul Simon songs) for myself to perform. But I haven’t written any in a while. I attribute this to the fact that the songs were basically my personal therapy spilling into my art.

I think of Zappa and his drive and genius and am inspired. I think of Mendelssohn’s use of the music of the past which he transformed into his own musical language. I think of Leech-Wilkinson’s comments about a music composition being the expanding aggregate of it’s conception and performances.

My understanding of just what music is and what is for is growing and maturing.

This is all very satisfying and has implications for my own development as a composer and performer.

I was thinking yesterday how one of my first large works (large for me that is, I seem to prefer smaller groups of performers) was the Suite for Five Instruments which aped Baroque suite conventions. Actually was even a bit of a commentary on them.

Thinking about my continual preoccupation with music of the past, this musical use of ideas fits in well with what I understand about music right now.

An example is that I began the piece with fake tuning. The harpsichord sounds the usual D minor chord that instruments tune to and the instruments appear to tune and warm up. As the cacophony of their warm up continues the harpsichord starts trilling madly and the prelude movement emerges from the tuning.

My idea in doing this is pretty obviously. The form of the “prelude” evolved as lutenists used a series of chords to warm up and set up the key for a piece that was to follow.

So here I sit in my 21st century kitchen with all this music stuff swirling in my head.

Last summer I began sketching a piece.  And then my collaboration with the performer I had in mind took a difficult turn. I put the piece aside.

Now I am back to sketching. I have been working on some fugal ideas and yesterday I did some sketches of an homage to St. Zappa.

I sure wish Zappa’s estate made his scores more available to study and perform. I would BUY some.

Same for Moondog.

Fuck the duck.

Church and usual post-church rehearsal left me drained yesterday.  I came home and read an email from a friend mentioning an assistant professorship at West Shore Community College [link to job ad on Chronicle of Higher Education site]. Google maps says it’s 1 hour and 34 minutes one way from here to there.  I do need the bucks, but I don’t see how I could continue my life style (church musician, composer, rehearsing piano, generally screwing off) and take this gig. I was surprised they advertise a Masters minimum. Most college teaching gigs want a doctorate. At least that’s my sense.

If I wanted it, I would have to hustle past the obstacles of my age (do they even interview people who are 58?), addressing the commute, and probably quitting my church gig.

The last part is the only reason I didn’t reject it out of hand last night. Heh. I’m trying not to rehearse the negative aspects of my work so suffice it to say that yesterday was pretty typical: bickering choir members, singers who came late and left early, high anxiety, and narrowly pulling off a decent performance of the anthem.

I spent sometime working on the piano part of John Adams’s Road Shows (for violin and piano) yesterday. I was inspired by watching Zappa’s music on the video Saturday. He really was a decent composer.

Eileen wasn’t feeling well. So after making sure she had the necessary chicken noodle soup and grilled cheese and apple sandwich, we settled down to listen to the debate in the House of Representatives on the Health Care Bill. Political rhetoric of this sort is always a notch or two out the reality picture, but last night the speakers definitely seemed talking at cross purposes. I do like watching the ritual procedure and the protocol. Got bored after ten and switched to a radio dramatization of Agatha Christie’s “Five Little Pigs.” Fell asleep before Poirot revealed the culprit.

Somewhere in there I finished reading “Point Omega” by Don Delillo.

Also managed to look at some articles online. Here’s the list:

1. A Historic Look at Health Care Legislation by the Associated Press [link to Boston.com article]

2. The Right to Counsel: Woman Becomes a Test Case by William Glaberson [link to NYT article]

This is a very sad article. I think it’s written as an indictment of a holes in the system. Both the defendant and the woman seem to be kind of a mess.

3. The Changing Sound of Music by Daniel Leech-Wilkinson chapter 2 [link]

I have been reading this book online for a while. I read in it yesterday while treadmilling. I have learned a lot and also garnered much food for thought. This makes me think about the questions of  where exactly is the music? It’s not just physical sound waves since we perceive the senses inside our heads.  It can’t be limited to the notes on the page or the idea the composer had because there is such variation in the way any one piece of music is realized. Interesting stuff.

4. Keith Jarret keyboard genius puts on extended solo concert temper tantrum by Richard Sheinin [link to Mercurynews.com site]

I read this before going to work yesterday. It crossed my mind while playing and conducting that Jarrett has come a long way from playing in clubs. I love this guy’s playing, but I find the description of his behavior off putting.

5. Google in China: We’re Closing Tomorrow by Rupert Neate [link to Telegraph.co.uk site]

I admire Google for standing up to China but wonder about excluding any one group of humans from a search engine….

So I’m up sipping my second cup of coffee listening to the quiet (after checking on the radio about the Health Care Bill. It looked like it was going to pass last night and it did…. speaking of….. here’s a link to a Christian Science Monitor article that talks about the practical effects of its passage: “Health care reform bill 101: How long will reform take?” by Peter Grier) also “What are the immediate effects of health bill passing?” by Julie Appleby and Kate Steadman [link to NPR article]. Thank you to Emily Hunt for posting that last one on Facebook.

So today I need to get some mental space.

If Eileen feels up to going to work I will take her food as usual in the evening. Would like to walk down to the coffee shop and sit.  Henry Idema, the associate priest at my gig, preached about how technology (devices, he called them) keep us from having real relationships. Hmmm. The only thing he said that I thought made sense about this was that compared to real interactions with others, electronic interactions pale. I think he’s probably right about that.

I do find in my life that my intensity makes this kind of exchange more comfortable for some people.

Lurking is better than nothing I guess. But for me, I still think ideas themselves are important and survive electronic transmission as well as they survive print media. Just my usual hubris-filled-opinion.

I figure if the people I manage to offend with my actions and words don’t cut themselves entirely off from me, I’m lucky. Not too worried about this. But I have started getting out more and at least sitting in the coffee shop. I did notice yesterday that there aren’t many people at church I actually engage with. This is probably not totally fair because being the introvert I am I gear up to stay calm and as clear as possible in the face of others’ anxiety and out right bad behavior always with the eye on being effective musically and constructive personally.

Hey. I don’t necessarily succeed. I just try.

Eileen and I went to see Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland yesterday. I have been coming to terms with the fact that much popular culture has been leaving me unmoved. I thought Avatar was pretty silly. I could see how beautiful the images were but they still weren’t enough to surpass the silliness of a micron thin plot which has been done many many times and the extreme paternalism that assumes that one species could not only “pass” as another but serve as its savior. Sheesh.

And of course I never did get on board with reality shows and competitions like American Idol and Dancing with Stars. After we deal with taxes (due to my outside income of performances and sundry things we always have to pay something…. this year looks to be less than many years), I am seriously considering bundling internet, cable and phone. After that I will probably be able to watch more TV. But, it makes me crazy that this stuff is so cheap in Europe and so expensive here.

Anyway, I loved Alice. I like the fact that Burton told a new story using the old story. I thought the screenplay was extremely clever. There were so many little clever things like the duplicate crowd shots of the people in the garden awaiting Alice’s acceptance of the Lord’s proposal and the White Queen good guys awaiting Alice’s decision as to whether she would be a champion or not. I half expected the Jabberwocky to have the Lord’s head or voice or something.

I loved Tweedledee and Dum.

I loved the mixture of character in the White Queen… how she holds her hands in a fey manner, mixes up a potion including some pretty noxious stuff and has a vomit reaction when she gathers Jabberwocky fluid….. she is pretty cool.

The music managed not to be too dumb. I was wondering idly during the trailers how in the world one manages to write movie music that gives the feeling of “epicness” in an age without the trope of the symphony orchestra literature. I noticed in the trailers a lot of “hair rock” sound for this effect. Elfmann still uses orchestra in places and its really not too bad.

We recently watched “Black Dahlia” I thought Mark Isham’s score was awful. But I also thought the whole movie was preposterous.  Probably endeavoring to be true to the book which was based on a real murder, the plot has no focus. It starts with a boxing match between two detectives that save the police departments budget with good PR before an election. I figured this was supposed to set up some sort of tension between these two characters who are classic movie detective partners. Hmmmm. Not so much. The plot keeps getting more and more filigreed until at the end in order to have a denouement the voice over is talking quickly as on screen action begins to get comic eliciting belly laughs from me at points.

After doing some prep for today’s church service at church, I came home and treadmilled watching a little movie about Frank Zappa and his albums Apostrophe and Over-Nite Sensation. I felt good old self indulgent nostalgia watching tape of Zappa talk as well as his wife, fellow musicians and recordists. Particularly fun for me was seeing middle aged versions of  Ian Underwood, Ruth Underwood, and George Duke on camera. I loved it when Underwood was talking about a score and showing it to the camera. Then she picks up mallets and plays a few licks to demonstrate what she is talking about. After playing several measures, she quips, “Only three mistakes, one for each decade since I’ve played the score or the instrument.” Cool beans.

I’m not terribly happy with the Zappa heirs. Dweezle on camera was worshipful of his father. Dweezle can play pretty well as demonstrated in this film. But I’m unhappy that they keep such tight controls on Zappa’s copyrights. Technically one cannot even perform Zappa’s music without permission from the family. Also so much of his music is not published. Scores can only be rented at exorbitant prices. I believe this sort of copyright nonsense is shaping what music will be heard by people. I think it’s a shame that more people (people like me without money who like to play music) can’t hear and perform Zappa’s wonderful music.

On the other hand, I sympathize with a husband and father’s point of view of leaving your fam a way to have money to live. Zappa was nothing if not driven by his need to use his music to make money.

I also couldn’t quite understand what Billy Bob Thorton was doing in this little movie.

I was pretty surprised, however, when I put my head on my pillow and realized I had had TWO good cinema experiences in one day.  Pretty good for an aging critical curmudgeon.

I have to add that I was also surprised that a recent blog that only had words in it elicited three (Three!) comments. Of course two were from an old friend and one from the wife, but still.

So I got up and had much lower Blood Pressure readings this morning (134/80). This is down significantly from the spike at the doctor’s office this week (150/100). I apologize dear reader if you are not that interested in this, but I’m pretty sure if any one reads this online journal it is my adult children and they are probably interested.

Also I weighed in less (118) (Post post script: noooo, I mean 218! 218! thanks to lovely wife for pointing this error out) than I have weighed for months. I have been monitoring my BP & weight daily since my doctor looked at me and pursed her lips on Tuesday and said succinctly (about my BP) “This is not good.”

We live in the age of the image.
Today, no other realm of culture displays so much power
than that of the image.
Words, music, literature,
books, newspapers, rock’n roll, theatre…
nothing comes even close
to the authority of moving images, in cinema and television.

Wim Wenders, “Giving Europe a Soul” a speech he made in 2006 [link to text]

Eileen and I watched the 1984 Wim Wenders flick, “Paris, Texas” last night. It was based on a screenplay by Sam Shephard (who is a writer I admire).  I have to agree with a review I read last night (after seeing the movie) that it sort of takes an odd turn about half way through.

Also the music was done by Ry Cooder (who is also someone I admire as a composer and performer and producer — he produced the music for Wenders’ lovely Buena Vista Social Club movie).

I really was all set to like the movie.

The review attributes the movie going a bit off its tracks to Winders and others tampering with Shephard’s inability to sustain the collaboration necessary to pull off a movie script. As opposed to the sustained effort of writing a play which is what Shephard has done a lot of.

I pulled out my two volumes of his plays. I started reading one the reviewer mentions as being a bit related to the first part of the movie.

At the beginning of movie, the view pans (from an angel’s point of view apparently… get it? Wings of Desire?) across desert and prairie that is obviously in the U.S. This brings to mind Wenders love affair with America (that has gone sour since).   The camera cuts to a hawk and you get the idea the first shots were what the hawk was seeing. Then to a man in a red hat and dusty suit and tie walking alone.

He is the main character and one of two brothers that the above mentioned reviewer says fits into some of Shephard’s other plays which use brother tension, specifically “Fool for Love.” This is the play I will probably read today or tomorrow.

Anyway, I can see I’m rambling. The man is a mystery man who doesn’t respond to the people who end up rescuing him. He has a story and it is an interesting one. I guess I won’t go into it here. Watch the flick yourself if you are at all interested. I think even though it’s got some weaknesses, I like it better than most commercially made movies. But of course…..

I’m beginning to think I just don’t have what it takes to suspend my disbelief for a lot of the rubbish of popular culture. Not that I am above rubbish by any means. It’s just that I think I might no longer be the audience targeted. Just a thought.

Yesterday I played the DVD “Brand Upon the Brain” in the background as I did stuff around the house. I haven’t done this much before, but it worked with this movie. I am considering purchasing the soundtrack. One can select different narrators on the DVD for this essentially silent film.  I liked the music initially and it is growing on me with each new listening (with a different narrator… I think there are around 6 or 7 available).

Winder’s observations on image relate to Svern Birkert’s article in the new Harpers “Reading in a Digital Age.” [link to article]Images and words are something I think about quite a bit.

In a nutshell, Birkert thinks that the Internet is eroding human imagination and what he sees as the fixed form of the “novel.” He talks like a professor stuck in an idea struggling to use his mind to try to get out of his stuckness and not quite succeeding.

Right off the bat he misses the mark by contesting the idea of mind as function of the brain and body. I find the neurological mapping of consciousness exciting and not at all contradictory to my own notions of imagination and even the gestalt of ideas referred to as “soul” by religions and romantics.

Ironically his use of the novel Netherland, his own exploration of Google and commenting on the “triple decker novel” (by which he presumably means a story that is long and convoluted are resists being apprehended on a screen) contradicts his own prejudices and even the points he is seems seeking to make (like internet is killing imagination and sustained thought).

I was particularly taken with his movement from the novel’s (Netherland) paragraphs about a character’s use of Google satellite to stopping reading and checking this out for himself:

“I confess that I stopped reading after the first passage and went right upstairs to my laptop to see if it was indeed possible to get such access.”

This charms me and makes me much more sympathetic to Birkert.

To me this god like panning via Google satellite is reminiscent of Wender’s angels and hawks mentioned above.  Also a perfect metaphor for how the noisy plentiful data of the internet becomes pertinent meaning in a human way.

Recently my daughter Sarah traced every house she ever lived in via the same dealy. She posted a picture of each and walked the reader through them. [link to her blog] Very cool.

Since beginning this blog earlier this morning I have randomly ran across two sites that reinforce the idea that there is a new literacy that has evolved and is still evolving utilizing the internet.

First an online book on graph-theory-algorithms-book by David Joyner, Minh Van Nguyen, and Nathann Cohen.. [link]

Then a novel an author is writing online with comments at the end of each chapter from readers as he puts it up and they read it.

Found by Erik Rickstand [link to chapter 1]

I keep not finishing this blog. I started this morning but keep getting distracted by stuff like taking Mom to hospital for CT scan (she made it fine), lunch with her at Dennys, funeral, emptying then filling the dishwasher, and finally grocery shopping.
The doctor asked me to take my blood pressure in stores I guess to sort of double check my home unit. At meijer’s my blood pressure was just 116/77 …. yikes. I hope that’s right. It’s pretty low.

I keep thinking about the movie, Paris, Texas. I think it might be two plays/movies in one: the first part an excellent treatment of the main character’s relationship to his brother and his family, the second part an intriguing take on the communications between the brother and his ex-wife (mostly through a peep show two way mirror with some pretty cool camera work…).

I’m too tired to add pics to this…. I know it’s too wordy. If you read this far, I thank you.

Got up and emailed an old friend now living in Florida. Actually I “messaged” her on Facebook after she “confirmed” me as a “friend.” It has been very gratifying how many people I have recently reached out to on Facebook have responded.

I have been feeling like I would like to dial down my isolation a tad.

Have been regularly walking up to LemonjeLLos to read and compute.

Reassessing my almost complete lack of connection to local people. I noticed when I first moved here in ’87 that I had many fewer music contacts than when living in Detroit. My attempts to remedy this have met with mixed success.

From the first, local Holland church musicians & Hope college people had a problem with me.  These faces have changed but I seem to remain largely on the outside of these situations. No brag, just fact.

It occurred to me that it might be playful to reach out to some of these current people through Facebook.  I have been selective about whom I reached out, emphasizing as usual musicians and people interested in ideas.

As of this morning I count 22 new “friends.”  Two more people seem to be on my Facebook feed even though they don’t show up on the “friend” list. That would mean that only 4 people so far have not responded to a request for connection.  Surprising.

Since recently reading Juan Diaz’s new short story in the New Yorker, I have been working my way through his collection of short stories called “Drown.”

It is riveting stuff to me. I read the title story last night in which a young man is working through the feelings of being sexually approached by his closest friend. All of this in a context of extreme urban poverty and violence. It amazes me what Diaz does not only with a believable story but with lilting unpretentious language. This guy rocks.

Also gobbling up “Point Omega” by Delillo.

I was disappointed when I was handed this book at the library and it was so small. I loved his “Underworld” which sprawls out for hundreds of post modern pages.

But I am finding this book much much better than “Falling Man.”

more quotes:

“The door slid open and there as a stir of mild traffic at the far end of the floor, people getting on the escalator, a clerk swiping credit cards, a clerk tossing items into large sleek museum bags. Light and sound, wordless monotone, an intimation of life-beyond, world-beyond, the strange bright fact that breaths and eats out there, the thing that’s not the movies.” Delillo

“The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever. The true life takes place when we’re alone, thinking, feeling, lost in memory, dreamingly self-aware, the submicroscopic moments.” Delillo

The true life. The thing that’s not the movies. Not even reduced to words spoken or written….

So while I was sitting in the doctor’s office yesterday I read most of an essay by James Garratt called “Mendelssohn and the rise of musical historicism.” (found in Cambridge Companion to Mendelssohn).

Garratt mentions “an essential kinship” between Mendelssohn’s struggle with how music from the past played out in his own compositions and the “post-modern” point of view.

I’m not always sure what the “post-modern” point of view is. I think mostly of the use of images and ideas that are extremely tied to the preset mostly popular culture. This is how it plays out in novels by Umberto Ecco and Salmon Rushdie.

I suspect that what Garratt calls the post-modern abandonment of the historical point of view of canon (as in a set number of works of art, music and literature that are considered monumental essential contributions to humanity that must be preserved) is something that is part of my own lifelong point of view. Also I think I have developed an adult predilection to question the idea that history (specifically but not limited to artistic history) is progressive (always proceeding to get better and better and build on the past).

The lovely irony of Garratt’s position is that Mendelssohn himself is usually considered as a found historicism in music. But Garratt makes a good argument that it is just the abandonment of progressive historicism that helps clarify what Mendelssohn was doing in his own compositions beyond the kitsch that academics sometimes link to many of his works.

Garratt seems to be saying that the music of Bach and Beethoven was part of Mendelssohn’s everyday musical vocabulary as he was growing up, so that his specific use of their musical languages is natural (using what is part of one’s own understanding and experience is necessary to create music that makes sense both to the composer and the listener).

So Mendelssohn was sampling.

Heh.

Hip Hop Mendelssohn. Very nice.

My point is that Mendelssohn’s exposure to the music of the past is very like the bewildering fragmented lovely exposure one can have to musics of all ilk today. So that when one creates new music (composing or improvising), in order for it make some kind of honest sense it can draw on a universe of musical styles and aesthetics. Eclecticism gone delirious.

This brings me to the novel I began reading last night: “Point Omega” by Dom Dellillo.

It opens with a description people walking around and wondering about a real life art work, “24 Hour Psycho,” by Scottish Artist, Douglas Gordon.

I admit I was slightly disappointed that Delillo didn’t invent this work. On the other hand he is creating a lovely mirror echo of derivation by using it in his novel.

“24 Hour Psycho” is an art gallery show in which an extremely slowed down version of Hitchcock’s Psycho is played silently over 24 hours. It’s derivative not only by using Hitchcock’s movie. When I read Delillo’s description last night I was reminded of Bill Viola’s vivid video installations of people I saw several years ago at the Getty in L.A.

The images were vivid and in color and tended to move at a leisurely pace and then loop.

Delillo manages to create a loop in his opening chapter by using the voice of an unidentified person who is obsessed with Gordon’s piece and hangs around in the dark watching it and watching other people watch it. Cleverly, he sees the main characters of the book and misidentifies them as a film professor and his assistant.

They are in reality Richard Elster, a fictional conservative think tank scholar guy who contributed to the rhetoric of US war and torture and a young film maker Jim Finley who wants to make a sort of bizarre Macnamaa type documentary of Elster standing in front of a wall in a New York loft and rambling about his experience with high ranking government officials who drew him into the creation of rationale for torture and war.

So I have saved the quotes from Delillo for last so that readers can skip them.

“Film, he thought,  is solitary.”

This reminds me of Jim Morrison’s attitude toward cinema.

He was fascinated by the communal solitude of watching a flickering image in the dark.

“It takes close attention to see what is happening in front of you. It takes work, pious effort, to see what you are looking at. – Delillo

“The film had the same relationship to the orginal movie that the original movie had to real lived experience. This was the departure from the departure. The original movie was fiction, this was real.” – Delillo

This is about the Gordon “24 Hour Psycho” obviously. But actually “this” isn’t real. It’s fiction. But this sets up some lovely echoes. The piece of art actually exists while the story is made up.  And the real piece of art is itself based on a movie about a made up story. It also echoes the previous creations of Bill Viola. Which are themselves movies of real people made into art.

All of this makes sense to the creator in me. It is the stuff of our experience of life that we inevitably use in our creations. All art is in this sense sort of derivative. This is where I get into trouble with intellectual property concerned artists. The contemporary context and conversation of what is happening now and what has happened in the past is what helps create the sitz im leben for creations by living breathing people.

I don’t really see how to avoid this.

And the my experience and probably yours, dear reader, is a bewildering fragmented kaleidescope of different styles of images and sounds.

This is really not so different from Mendelssohn or even his hero Bach. I have long been able to identify different stylistic and formal mixes in the work of Bach. He moves easily from Palestrina counterpoint to a Baroque sensibility of complexity and beauty to a use of the simple language of the Gallant style that was coming into fashion in his old age. And in the same composition.

Whew.

That’s probably enough for today. “heavy business” as Zappa said in his great song: “Tuna Fish Promenade”

Chorus:
All the people in the sandwich town
think the place is great.
What if part of it’s crumbling down?
Most of them probably won’t be around.

They’ll either be dead
or moved to San Francisco

where everyone thinks they’re
heavy business.
But it’s just a tuna sandwich
from another catering service.”

by Frank Zappa

Since there are people who might possibly be concerned about me who read this blog, I thought I would give this little update on blood pressure readings today:

142/94 at home before I left for the doctor
140/100 taken by the nurse
150/100 taken by the doctor
142/96 later at Meijer’s machine
144/92 even later back at home
I looked at fancier blood pressure machines at Miejer’s and decided not to buy one yet.

I am planning on taking my blood pressure more often (daily?) for the next few weeks until I report back to the doctor.

Her main concern was that I could not be walking around blood pressure as high as it was in her office.

During the last 48 hours I have been trying to “friend” a bunch  of local yokels on Facebook, mostly reaching out to people whom I have something in common with. I notice that Facebook doesn’t keep track of who you request “friending” with.  Probably wise.

I count that I have recently made about 21 “friend” confirmation requests. 10 of these associated with Hope College and GVSU & daughter Sarah’s art school. Six of these confirmed me.  There is some overlap in this group with church people. 7 of the 21 are people from church. 4 of these have confirmed me. Over all of the 21, 15 people have quickly responded with a confirmation.

I am doing this because I feel like I am very poor at building social connections. This is tricky because I am really the only person who can change this. At the same time as many people have wryly observed, I insist on being myself.

So asking for confirmation as a “friend” on Facebook is kind of a fun way to sort of play with this.

Unfortunately if people do not confirm me as a contact on Facebook, it is difficult to know exactly what this means.  Sometimes it means people are not all that active so don’t even notice I have asked to connect.

I also wonder if people even know who I am locally. Eileen assures me that I sort of stand out (and I do understand her point), but at the same time I notice that people often don’t notice stuff I notice…. So who knows?

I am not necessarily desperate to increase my number of “friends” on Facebook. I am definitely interested in connecting with people who have potential for common interests like music and literature. That’s actually something I try to do in real life. With admittedly limited success.

But what the hell, archie, toujours gai toujours gai. There’s some life in the old gal yet….. as mehitabel the cat says….

Finished a biography of Mendelssohn last night. Also read Junot Diaz’s new short story (link to New Yorker story here]. Did some fairly serious piano practice yesterday afternoon. Trying to work up my part to the Mendelssohn piano trio in D minor, first movement. I also have an idea of learning another 2 movements of Messiaen’s Regards

Regards de l’Esprit de Joie & Regards de la Croix (Gaze of the joyful Spirit and Gaze of the Cross).

I couldn’t find a free recording of the second one, but since Sarah commented that she skips over the music talk but would be more interested if I had clips, so here’s a [link] to a youtube version of the first one.

During the last two paragraphs I had a doctor’s appointment. I was worried that I had gained some weight and that she would do a digital prostate exam (eeyoooooo). Instead my blood pressure was significantly elevated (100/50).

Shoot. My doctor added a mild diuretic to my daily drug regimen and asked me to monitor my blood pressure using store machines as well as my little home kit and call her in 4 weeks. If it’s still elevated she will prescribe a new stronger drug. Yuck.

I rushed over and picked up my Mom to take her to her Miracle Ear (hearing aid people) appointment. She was ten minutes late.

I have been experiencing a tad less conscious anxiety, but suspect I might be doing a bit more denial than usual. Dang.

I’m at Panera now. I rebelled and had a spinach/asparagus souffle and a latte. Probably need to think seriously about losing some more weight. Bah.

So Earl Grey has it’s distinctive flavor due to the oil from the fruit above, the Bergamot. Who knew? Yesterday I purchased some Twinings Earl Grey and came home and made a cup. I have been drinking Earl Greyer at LemonJellos this week. When I tried to purchase some to take home and make they were out. Matt told me that they can’t carry every flavor but that he would get a box for me.

Yesterday at Good to Go, I had a cuppa which had added flower flavor. Odd.

I have been reaching out to “friend” some more people on Facebook.

A musician I knew in my brief stint at Ohio Weslyan, a priest friend who found religion playing french horn touring with Jesus Christ Superstar and now lives in Montreal, a drummer I played with locally, and the organ teacher at GVSU.  They all confirmed except the organ teacher person.

I wish I had schmoozed this guy a  bit more while I taught at GVSU.

He recently gave a harpsichord demo to the AGO chapter here in Holland. I couldn’t bring myself to face the group so I missed it. It would seem he and I would have something in common, since he plays organ and harpsichord and serves a large Episcopalian parish in Grand Rapids. But maybe not.

Someone local mentioned that they thought from reading my blog that I was actually conservative. I think that actually I am pretty conservative. I definitely condone “conserving” the values of the past and knowledge of historical ideas and art. Also I’m big into the conservative notion of treating others the way you want to be treated. But maybe that’s radical these days not conservative. I think I am viewed by many here in very provincial old Holland as a radical.  Old hippies have got to be into free love and dope, you know.

It’s futile to speculate. I like me. Eileen likes me. I’m lucky I know.

I’m about half way through “Pattern Recognition” by William Gibson.

I am enjoying it. It is definitely oriented toward living in the cloud (as internetters say). Plus I like the idea of “pattern recognition” in general. It’s something that I find myself thinking about, patterns. Also the notion of “recognition” meaning realizing that what you are seeing or thinking about is something that connects with something else you already seem to feel or know.

How’s that for eloquent? Heh.

I have written a fugal theme which is not too bad. Also began an exposition (that’s the first section of it). I’m trying to write a fugue that follows the book learnin’ rules and is not deadly boring. The composer Randall Thompson published several fugues for organ that he proudly says were written as examples in his counterpoint class he was teaching. So far I haven’t found one that doesn’t sound like it…. i.e. kind of boring.

I got email that my violinist can’t make it today. This means I’ll be carrying her part myself on the organ. It’s an independent melody that is quite lovely but is a bit challenging to play along with the bass and tenor line. But I’m sure despite skipping practice yesterday it will be fine.

I read some blather about bloggers trying to prime the pump when their verbal well runs dry. Ahem. I don’t seem to have that problem very much. I realized this morning that I usually wake up with my head spinning with ideas and insights. I try to be circumspect when other humans are in the room (my wife is such a good listener…. ) but I can always blog to my heart’s content and you dear reader can read or not as you will.

This morning I was listening to the rebroadcast of On the Media about the music industry…. downloading and all of that. [link to stream of the show]…. they interviewed Amanda Palmer of the Dresden Dolls. I happen to admire this band and especially its lead singer and piano player, Palmer. She expressed some refresh takes on the music biz. In commenting on how to make money with music these days (a year ago, granted) she replied, “Everyone has to stop thinking there is an answer. The answer is, there’s an infinite number of answers.” Nice.

So I moseyed on over to her blog [link to blog], Then check to see if I was following her on Twitter (I was) and found myself reading a post from a Chicago actor riffing on the On the Media rebroadcast [link to post]. All this before I manage to drag myself from bed (I keep the netbook by the bed, sadly addicted, I know.)

But that’s not what I want to talk about this morning.

I want to talk about fugues.

If you don’t know what a fugue is, they are this amazing way to make a composition using a melody that can be combined with itself in various incarnations and manners. Fugue comes from the Latin word for “flight” and hearkens back to the idea that the melodies (subjects) seem to be chasing each other around sonically.

My first conscious memory of learning about fugues was (I think) in a 7th grade music appreciation class. I seem to remember that it was part of the health/gymn regimen, but I could be wrong.

I remember our teacher was a huge, fat white guy with a pronounced tic. Somehow he was talking to us about the Bach organ fugue in G minor (natch). I don’t think I was just learning about the idea from him, but I do remember it hitting me how cool the idea of fugue was. I also have a memory that the class, its subject and of course the teacher were basically ridiculed by most of the other students.

But since I spent most of my youth being in love with complexities of sorts, I was instantly enthralled.

I even went so far as to attempt to arrange Bach’s lovely Bb minor fugue from the first Volume of the Well Tempered Clavichord for the rock band I was playing with at the time (It was unmemorably called “Trilogy” and was a reformation of a band with a better name, in my hubris-filled opinion: “August Traine.”)

Lately I have been thinking a lot about fugue. My counterpoint teacher in undergraduate school thought that fugue was the one counterpuntal form I did not master.  Here’s how he put it in a 1984 letter he mailed me (remember letters?):

Congratulations in advance for finishing your degree. It’s about time. Did you ever look at those fugues? Did you ever write one? If you are still having trouble, I suggest you buy my counterpoint book. It won’t help you, but it will help me and all of those folks at Prentice-Hall. At least someone will be better off, and you will have a nice red book for your shelf.

I did buy the book.

And I’m pretty sure I wrote some fugues. I know I passed that section in the AAGO examination I failed twice (but that’s another story).

Anyway, recently I have re-assessed my take on fugues.  It is a great and wonderful puzzle (see the ensuing discussion of one below), but that’s not enough for me now.

I want it to be drawn to the fugue as music as well as puzzle.

That’s where Bach’s Art of Fugue comes in.

What a great melody he uses!

Yesterday I was analyzing the sixth fugue in this collection (There are 19 separate fugues in the entire work).

The sixth fugue uses the melody on the second line above. I count that he uses this melody 22 times in the course of 70 measures. And only twice in the version above.

He changes the melody in many ways including

making it twice as fast – called diminution

doing it in a mirror version (up is down) – called inversion

combining those two (diminution and inversion)

then doing this starting on other notes – transposing

and then combining all of these together.

And on top of all this cleverness, it sounds rilly rilly cool.

Just my hubris-filled opinion, you understand. But still…. rilly rilly cool.

Here’s a link to a bunch of free mp3s of this music.

(Post post script… it occurs to me that some readers might be interested in my complete tally of subjects and their forms and where they are found in Fuga 6…. so here’s a link to my notes)

It’s a rainy day in Western Michigan USA.  My violinist was ill yesterday so the trio didn’t rehearse. I spent the extra time practicing organ and meeting with my boss a bit earlier (as per her request). She seemed a bit stressed. Being a priest or a minister can be quite stressful. I tried to cut our meeting a bit short so she would have more time for herself.

I walked home from church and played through the first three Beethoven piano sonatas.

Ahhh. I told Eileen over supper last night that I imagined finding a little cell phone tree on the walk sprouted from the cell phone I lost last fall. She said I should put that in the blog. So there it is.

I read a short story called “Between Here and There” by Amy Bloom online that begins:

“I had always planned to kill my father.”

It’s a great story. Here’s the link but I had to register on the site to read the whole thing. It’s free if you register. I think this story is worth it.

I have noticed that one of the stories our society tells is about the Bad Dad.

Men ARE scum, I know. And Dads often act badly (This is certainly amusingly true in Amy Bloom’s story). But it is also a bit of stereotype. Just my hubris-filled opinion.

I changed my phrase to “hubris-filled opinion” because a dear friend pointed out that I had hubris to suggest that a writer that so many people liked wrote poorly. I won’t repeat that particular piece of hubris, but will take note that I am splashing hubris about here occasionally.

I ran across this wonderful paragraph in “Identity Anecdotes” by Meaghan Morris: [WARNING: PROSE PACKED WITH IDEAS AND WORDS FOLLOWS]

” I have always disliked the term ‘culture wars’, not because the martial image is melodramatic but because the phrase so successfully lent a fuzzy, pluralistic alibi to a hard-edged ideology war, waged over two decades or more, to attach credibility (our beliefs about other people’s beliefs) to neo-liberal ideas of the common social and economic good, thereby securing recognition value (effective ‘interpellation’) for ruthlessly limited ways of imagining the actual and the possible. Now that the dust of the culture wars has packed down into the iron-hard ground of military globalization, on which the violence of terrorism and ‘war against terror’ supports a spreading militarization of civic everyday life, it is obvious that the former rhetorically prepared for the latter; ten years before the destruction of the World Trade Center, President George Bush Snr warned Americans that ‘political extremists roam the land…setting citizens against one another on the basis of their class or race’, urging them to ‘join in common cause without having to surrender their identities’. [excerpt from a speech at the University of Michigan, May 4, 1991 in Beyond PC: Towards a Politics of Understanding [link to Google books] . As the word spread, in the blink of a cursor it became commonplace in Australia, too, to hear talk of feminist and ‘multiculturalist’ terrorists not only on campus but in government as well, and to meet passionately angry citizens, colleagues and family members for whom the term terrorist worked as an objective correlative of their feelings about seemingly endless criticism of their values and ways of life (‘of course, I don’t mean you, dear).

What a great piece of writing! I especially like “fuzzy, pluralistic alibi to a hard-edged ideology.”  I do sometimes wonder if there is an outburst of people in the USA (Morris is an Australian living and teaching in Hong Kong) who substitute “ideology” for thinking. There certainly seems to be “hard-edged” ideology afloat these days and I’m not just thinking of the militia types or the liberals.

I also like that she defines credibility as “our beliefs about other people’s beliefs.” I have had heard several different people in different contexts talking about “most people” this and that. Each time I have spoken up and gently disagreed (much to my own later chagrin… why? why? why can’t I keep me bloody trap shut? Is it a Bad Dad thing?).

I was just speculating yesterday about my own lack of credibility locally. I am thinking musically and the explanations are convoluted and probably boring, but I still winced last night when two music profs came in to the pub and greeted me as I was tucking into my third martini and visiting with my lovely wife over supper.  I think they think I’m a hack. I also think they are probably fucking right and am tired of trying to talk to other people about their beliefs about my beliefs. Fuck the duck. I am a happy hack, if nothing else. Thank you St. Beethoven.

Bloom’s comments on terrorists reminded me of a facebook friend who was really bent out of shape because a “terrorist” was being elected president. I had to respond. You know, whatever else he is, Obama is not a terrorist. Honest.

I wish I had known Bloom’s lovely phrase “Of course, I don’t mean you, dear” earlier. I think it might come in handy for me since I am such a pompous hypocrite sometimes. (Come to think of it, maybe I am the Bad Dad, heh).

Well I’m planning on doing some serious goofing off today. Maybe walking in the rain and planting myself in the coffee shop with a book or the computer. I should call my Mom and offer to drive her to a restaurant for lunch (she always buys). I try to get her out once a week and have already offered once this week, but her tummy wasn’t doing so good.

The end.

I was listening to BBC this morning. Someone was interviewing the author Amy Bloom about her new book, “Where the God of Love Hangs Out.” She referred to herself as a “dark optimist.”

I don’t know her work, but I like the phrase quite a bit. She used it in response to the interviewer pointing out that her work seemed to be a bit pre-occupied with death and tragedy.

She intelligently responded that when her friends pointed out that there was a lot of stuff like “breast cancer” and death in her work, she wanted to know where they lived where there were not things like that in their lives. Along with falling in  love and tending children, she said, these things exist in our daily lives.

On another web site I found this:

“Bloom’s years in the therapist’s chair have influenced her writing by helping to shape her characters and themes.

“I have a dark kind of optimism,” she says. “To me, a happy ending might be that everyone is still alive, or that no one is rotting away with Alzheimer’s.” [link to site]

Yep.

I might have to check out this author’s work.

Even though it is easy for me to see the dark sides of living, I seem to have a pretty unshakable belief in humanity. Yesterday someone asked me what I believed in…. what was my narrative (to use the lingo). I couldn’t think of a quick response other than I believe in what I do more than what I think.

I think I am evolving a skeptical attitude towards most believing. I have experienced this in the Christian church as more about the fears and needs of people than about any sort of sense of awareness of what is bigger than any of us.  I have rejected this idea of god and belief. But at the same time I do have a strong belief in the potentialities of people, the meaning of life lived,  and the reality of our time together as we seek to imperfectly care for each other and shake our own selfishness and myopic point of view.

Whew. Pretty serious for an early Thursday morning in the Michigan darkness sipping strong coffee.

Desmond Tutu was interviewed on NPR this morning [link to program]. The interviewer asked whether he can still believe in people’s potential for good or something like that.

As chair of his country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Tutu listened to accounts of political hatred and physical brutality that might shake anyone’s faith in humanity.

“Perhaps if one had listened only to the atrocities,” he demurs. “But we were constantly being bowled over by the extent to which people were ready and willing to forgive. But we had, obviously, the spectacular example of Nelson Mandela, who could come out of 27 years’ incarceration, so eager to be able to forgive.”

A decade and more after that faith-building experience, Tutu says his sense of his relationship to the divine is still evolving.

“I am learning to shut up more in the presence of God,” he says, laughing. One model of prayer, he acknowledges, is that “you have a kind of shopping list that you bring to God” — and even Desmond Tutu confesses that “I still do.”

But more and more for him, he says, communion with God is about “trying to grow, in just being there.”

“Like when you sit in front of a fire in winter — you are just there in front of the fire,” he says. “You don’t have to be smart or anything. The fire warms you.”

The fire warms you.

I like that quite a bit. I think I claim atheism as a reaction to the simple stuff crammed down my throat for years. I remember deciding that what many people consider to be a “Christian” was exactly what I was not. Same thing with believing in God. I know that I have a firm belief in the other. I also think that living one’s life in order to receive a reward when you die seems medieval to me. Better to live fully and humanly as possible in the present. I suspect it’s all we get. But I honestly don’t know.

Warming myself in the presence of life and other people’s goodness or wonderful ideas or music or art is still something that has meaning for me.

Yesterday was the 81st anniversary of my Dad’s birth. He put it this way:

March 9, 1929 I, Paul Alexander Jenkins was born in Oak Grove, West Carroll parish, Louisana. The third son, my birth was in the Church of God parsonage. I weighed in at a huge 12 pounds at birth. While my mother was giving birth to me, the men of the Church took my father, their Pastor, on a fishing trip to get him out from “under foot”…..

The attending physician at my birth was Dr. Dallahide who was quoted in the newspaper the next day as saying, “there is a new preacher in the Church of God parsonage, weight 12 pounds, and from the sound of his voice, he will be a good one.” That birth story would be told many times as I grew up, probably shaping my future in ways no one expected. I would later become the fourth clergyman in our family in three generations. (Now six clergy in four generations.)

from my Dad’s unpublished memoirs: “Thru Many Dangers, Toils and Snares: Chronology and Memoirs” by Paul A. Jenkins

Dad died last April and I am just beginning to calm down and miss him a little. He died from Lewy Body Dementia and lost his faculties over what was probably a period of ten or so years.

I am also re-assessing my understanding of his place in his family of origin. I used to think of him (and also my brother Mark) as classic “mantle bearers.” By that I mean a position in the system (youngest male) which seeks equilibrium by subtle edging them toward their vocation.  Often this position is also the “identified victim” of the system which bears a lot of the brunt of the pathology going on.

I’m not sure this describes my Dad.

On the same page of his memoirs his tells this story about my grandfather, his father:

A town bully began throwing his weight around. He called Dad out, swaggering through town saying, “If you see that Church of God preacher, tell him I’m gunning for him.” And he had the gun on his belt to make his point. But he did not know that the little preacher had gone to college from a Steel Worker’s career. Dad was used to confronting loud-talking tormentors. When Dad met him on the street one day, he walked right up to the threatening loudmouth and looked him straight in the eye. “Tom,” Dad called his bluff with a twinkle in his eye. “I understand you are gunning for me?” The big fellow put his arm around dad’s shoulder and said warmly, “Aw, preacher, who would tell you a thing like that?” They became close friends.

Anyway, there’s a couple of family stories. I’m planning on sticking them in here from time to time. My most regular readers seem to have the last name Jenkins and might get a kick out of them.

This morning after Eileen left for work, I walked over to church and practiced organ until it was almost time for the morning Eucharist. I am doing two pieces by Calvin Hampton this Sunday. Both are actually verbatim from the Hymnal 1982.

Hampton was a New York organist who was an early victim of the HIV-AIDS epidemic.  The two pieces we are doing are his setting of “There’s a wideness in God’s mercy” and “Let all the world in every corner sing.” The first we will do as a choral piece, the second I am playing from the hymnal as the postlude. Lovely stuff.

I also started work on William Bolcom’s setting of “What a friend we have in Jesus.”

One of the people at the St. Mary’s Guild presentation I gave Monday evening brought up this hymn. She was saying how much meaning it had for her since they sang it at her church when she was younger. She wondered why the Episcopalians didn’t use the “right tune.” She was surprised when the former organist sitting near her pointed out that the “right tune” was actually in the Hymnal 1940. I added that it was in the current African American Episcopalian Hymnal “Lift Every Voice and Sing II.”

I learned Bolcom’s organ setting of “Sometimes I feel like a motherless child” for my organ recital last year.

His pieces are difficult. But I find them rewarding. It took me months to learn that piece and it will probably take me months to learn this one as well.

After rehearsing I walked up to LemonJellos for tea and granola and a day old muffin.

I am sitting there right now. God bless wifi. A buddy named Johnny Crookedfingers spotted me and sat down and kept me company for a bit [link to his livejournal profile]. Life is good.

Did a presentation on hymnody and the three Hymnal supplements we use at church for the St. Mary’s Guild last night. I sat down in a room with about fifteen mostly elderly women and chatted and led them in hymns for a little over an hour. It seemed well received.

So it turns out that I haven’t read “Pattern Recognition” by William Gibson. Picked up the library’s copy yesterday and read the first chapter last night (after finishing Atkinson’s “Human Croquet.” Quote from Gibson:

“Mirror-world. The plugs on appliances are huge, triple-pronged, for a species of current that only powers electric chairs in America. Cars are reversed, left to right, inside; telephone handsets have different weight, a different balance; the covers of paperbacks look like Australian money.”

I’m actually unclear what Australian money looks like.  Pace to my English relatives, but I think “mirror world” nicely describes the experiencing of crossing the Atlantic. This probably works either way, eh?

Anyway. Atkinson’s novel or whatever you call it, “Human Croquet,” is a fantastic read.

The book swirls back and forth between a cosmic beginning, fairy tale stories, alternate futures of awful coming of age murders and deaths in contemporary England featuring the main character, Isobel Fairfax, experiencing a wide range of possible Christmas eves that all end in tragedy. I loved it.

While we were in Ann Arbor we were killing time in Border’s bookstore waiting for it to be late enough to have supper together. I plopped down near the food section thinking I would not be tempted to purchase anything. I was wrong. I ended up reading in Weinzweig wonderful book above and then buying the dang thing.

Weinzweig founded the wonderful Zimmerman’s Deli in Ann Arbor. It’s expensive but excellent. His book talks about the various qualities of olive oil, cheeese, bread, pasta, chocolate and other stuff.

His recommendations for olive oils are very expensive (the house olive oil at Zingerman’s run about $26 for a bottle). On the advise of my friend David Barber I purchased a couple of olive oils at Trader Joe’s. Zingerman insists that a good olive oil is worth the money. He describes what to look for and where they make good olive oil.

So yesterday at lunch I found myself lining up three bottles of olive oil for a taste comparison. I had an opened bottle of Carapelli brand (flavor and dipping bread style) from Meijers and two bottles of Trader Giotto’s – one cheaper and one a bit more expensive  (around $8 for 16.9 fluid ounces).

And sure enough, there was a taste difference between all three. The Meijer’s brand had an unattractive aftertaste of bitterness. The cheap Trader Giotto’s was smooth and gentle…. no big taste. The more expensive actually did have a pleasant peppery aftertaste. Wow. The difference was so pronounced that I was pretty sure I could do a blindfold test on this one.

I plan to use up all three and then spring for Zingerman’s cheapest house olive oil (ordered through the mail) and see what that’s like. Eileen returns to work today (bah), but I plan to try to keep the vacation spirit going as long as possible. I have to take my Mom to her shrink’s today. But  this is the office with wifi (woo hoo!).

After eating at the French Laundry Eileen came home in a more experimental food mood.

I was surprised yesterday when she made herself a “wrap” which contained grilled chicken, sliced apple, cream cheese and pepper jelly. Hmmm. This sounds really good, even to a vegetarian.

I continued working on Bach’s Art of Fugue and am finding some very interesting things in these fugues.

At least interesting to me. Also reading Beethoven Sonatas on the piano. I can tell that my piano technique has improved enough that this is more and more rewarding to do. Who knows? Maybe I’ll actually get some composing done this week.

We’re back from our little trip. On Saturday we stopped in Fenton and picked up my last load (hopefully) of stuff from my parent’s old house. Including our famous family camel pictured above. It was stuffed in my Subaru overnight at the motel.

My parents brought this camel back from one of their trips to Europe.  It has been designated as an specific inheritance for one of my children. (No, not you, Sarah or Elizabeth. Heh) If accepted, it will involve shipping this sucker. Not sure how that will work. In the meantime I like the thing myself and like seeing it in my shabby cluttered life.

Also picked up slides, many possibly from the same trip my parents purchased the camel. I look forward to getting these slides into a usable form.

Good to be home. I played through couple of movements of  the A major Schubert piano sonata last night. Then listened to it as Eileen tromped me at Scrabble. Got up this morning and continued analyzing Art of Fugue by Bach. In between I listened to the BBC radio dramatization of William Gibson’s “Pattern Recognition.” [link to stream]

I don’t really recognize the plot even though I was pretty sure I have read this. I follow Gibson on Twitter [link]. He recently linked in (with his stamp of approval) this article about the main character in this book:

“Cayce Pollard Units: The Ne Plus Ultra of Anti-Fashion, So Awesome You Can’t Even See Her” by Kat  [link to blog post]

Cayce Pollard, the main character in “Pattern Recognition”, has an extreme physical allergy to advertising logos. In order to not be ill she must remove all identifying brand marks from her clothes. Of course, she makes her living by using her revulsion to help corporations find the most effective branding. Very funny.

Planning to continue to vacate as much as possible this week. Eileen goes back to work tomorrow. I have to give a talk this evening to a woman’s organization at church. This should be pretty easy.

Eileen and I made a last trip to Trader Joe’s in Ann Arbor before returning home yesterday.

I was amazed that not only do they have cool groceries, many items are actually less expensive than the local Meijer’s grocery store here in Holy Old Holland Michigan. O Trader Joe, won’t you open a store in Western Michigan?

Such a relief to skip work this morning. Trying not to think about it

I have been vacating this week, hence the lack of posts.  Eileen have had some lovely time together. Visited friends in Flint who graciously put us up for a few nights.  We hit several restaurants including:

I did succumb and go to Encore Records and Dawn Treader Books as well.

So there you have it. Life is good.

Hurray! There’s wifi in the motel room.

Thank you, jesus. Eileen and I spent the night in Niles last night at a cheap hotel, got up and grabbed some breakfast and made our way to the Basilica of Notre Dame U for Gail’s funeral Eucharist.

It was a sad day, of course. But I’m very glad I got a chance to support my old  organ teacher in this time of his grief. Both he and Gail were tremendously helpful and supportive of me when I attended there years ago. I have followed the progression of  Gail’s disease and Craig’s increasing frustration and desperation via regular emails that he sent out to concerned friends and colleagues.

Being back on the campus was disconcerting to say the least. We had to park in the $2.00 parking and had a nice walk to the chapel where I spent a good deal of my teaching assistantship when I attended this place.  On the way there were many new buildings including a huge fine arts complex that houses Craig’s new fancy organ.

Notre Dame is not visibly suffering for money. Of course it has been 17 years since I attended.

The church was packed. The liturgy was a bit quirky like the Roman Catholic church tends to be these  days (and the U of ND has always been in my experience). The homilist and presider were both men I worked with as assistant to the chapel choir director. They were close friends of Gail’s.

I had many mixed emotions as I sat through this service. The strongest emotional moment for me was the postlude. The priests and the family and the body had left the building. But there were a good number of people who simply stood and sat and listened to the organist’s lovely rendition of  Bach’s beautiful and profound “Schmucke dich.” I was moved to see so many  people paying respect to Gail and this music. I guess I am a bit jaded these days and notice that so many people in our society cannot help but treat all music (including live music) as though it were emitted from speakers.

Musicians are often reduced to same status as a noisy piece of furniture.

But in this case, this was a very sacramental (outward and visible sign of something inward and less tangible) moment for me. I think Gail might have been pleased with this moment. Certainly with the music.

Eileen and I walked over to a fancy schmancy reception area and waited in line to speak to Craig. I saw a few colleagues, but mostly we were vastly outnumbered by people I didn’t recognize.

Gail was a top notch musician who gave her service to an institution that I have some real doubts about (ND, the church). I pray that in the end she thought was worth it.

So I’m settling in for some serious vegging. I brought my electric piano and a counterpoint text by a prof from Wayne State that I took counterpoint from.  Plus some reading. Hopefully I will get some r and r now.

Oh yeah. the title of this post is today’s date. Cool, huh?