Well, I’m still feeling goofy after an evening of performing. This is part of the deal for me. I tend to have an odd emotional hangover. When I perform music of any kind I try to enter entirely into the music. This makes it exhausting, emotionally and even physically.

There were some good moments last night in our set. “So many people” came off pretty well as did the little jazz tune featuring Nate the bass player: “Splanky.”

I felt that I ended weak. I hate that. “Why did the elephant cross the road?” is quite an ordeal to perform.

Each section ends with a word that both ends a thought and begins the next one. This creates a song with very little time to catch your breath, figuratively and literally.

And the dang thing is getting too high for me to sing. I guess it’s not changing it’s my voice aging. My wife sensibly suggested putting it down a key. When I perform it on the piano this is suddenly feasible. The guitar version utilizes so many open drone keys that I would have to tune the guitar down a step.

Anyway.

The crowd was subdued last night.

They seemed attentive. Hard to tell with the lights blaring in your eyes. The quiet little Arvo Part tune once again held an audience’s attention. Never fails to amaze me.

And of course at the end of the evening I was shocked when Matt the club owner handed me enough cash to pay for the piano rental and give Nate and me fifty bucks each. Wow. I admit it. I hugged him.

When I thanked him for asking me to play, he smiled and said something like he needed to bring me in to show to the youngsters periodically. Heh.

So upward and onward.

Now if I can just figure out how to get Ebay to let pay for Eileen’s new loom.

After goofing around a bit, I think I like this set-up. Seems to be pretty clear and easy on the eyes.?

I just had a frustrating ten or fifteen minutes trying to help Eileen buy a loom on Ebay. They let me buy it, but kept telling me to pay the seller. Could NOT figure it out. There was a button in the confirmation email that said Pay Now. I clicked on it and of course it took me to a frame that said it couldn’t process that request right now.

Just like my song, I’m opening with tonight: “Deja Vu.”  In the second verse I will sing about clicking on a “song and crash,  call customer service once again.” Life imitates art.

It’s been a good day. Besides getting help cleaning up the ol web site, I had an email from a very old friend which cheered me up to no end.

I still feel like the gig will probably go well tonight. Eileen is dropping me off at 8 and coming back around 9:20 when I go on.

Since I have rented a piano and am planning to only play that tonight, set-up is much easier. I am arriving before the first act goes on so that we can putz around before he starts and then sit and listen to him.

As you can see, things look a little different here.

My daughter Elizabeth has rescued me from the doldrums of web site hell and fixed my site. This has enabled me to experiment with different looks. This is not necessarily one I like. I just wanted to see if it would work. Very cool.

I patiently deleted over 4k spam comments awaiting moderation yesterday, twenty at a time. Sheesh. I also noticed that most of them were appended to four posts, which I then deleted. Today I had 36 waiting for me instead of a thousand.

Tonight’s the gig at Lemonjellos. I am looking forward to it. It is a bit of a self-indulgence. I have rented a piano for $125 and am planning to pay my talented young bass player $50. Last time I told myself I would try to get sponsors so it wouldn’t actually cost me to play. Just didn’t get to it. Plus I find self-promotion very repulsive.  It is possible the owner will give me some money. Last time he gave us $90 which I split three ways among the other four players. We were the headliner. This time Nate and I are second on the bill and warming up for another band. If the owner gives me any money, I will apply it to the costs I am incurring. I have fantisized that one of the other musicians would use the piano and kick in some money, but I don’t think that’s going to happen.

When I played in March, the other three band members didn’t enjoy themselves for various reasons. I found that discouraging and was reluctant to use them again. I mean, I lose money and paid them all we got paid, put tons of effort into arranging the music and working with the egos of the people involved. And then the players were sort of unenthusiastic about the evening. Fuck that. I had a good time and I think it was probably as good a show as I could have put on.

One of my challenges tonight is that I am playing piano for the whole set: no instrument changes. Contrast is essential these days in this kind of a gig. Attention spans are short and we will already be challenging them with a rather long Arvo Part piece (we abbreviated it but not for time’s sake…. instead the span of the piece for the solo instrument was extreme for the double bass so we lopped off a section that went out of the range…. it’s not noticeable.)

So I have put a lot of effort into creating interesting arrangements for piano, bass and voice. I even wrote one arrangement last tuesday (Naked Boy). I do like changing my songs each time I perform them. Fuck recording. I will do one song tonight for the first time on piano, last time it was banjo, and the orginal arrangement was guitar (Candle is the name of this song). Each arrangement has stuff I like about it. Tonight on this arrangement the bass carries the melody. Nice to work with talented people.

Yesterday I had sort of a morale problem after a weird discussion with a Hope college person. Probably not appropriate to get into it here. But I think I must have thin skin. But no matter. Onward and upward.

I listened to the overture to Midsummernight’s Dream by Mendelssohn while treadmilling this morning.

Also watched the score which I recently purchased used. Much easier to understand the form watching the full score. Then I listened to Vampire Weekend. Good exercising music, I think.

Rehearsal with Nate went very well yesterday. That gig is shaping up nicely. I am even thinking again of putting my sheet music online. Silly I know when so few people read music these days. In the novel I am reading, “The Child Garden” by Geoff Ryan, everyone can read music because the skill (along with tons of other information) are implanted into their bodies via viruses. Pretty cool that Ryan came up with all this in 1995. This is a good read by the way. Anyway, I uploaded the first couple of songs this morning. So here’s links to pdfs of them: Deja Vu pdf & Naked Boy pdf.

I am putting want to buy valium Creative Commons Copyright permissions on them. It’s the least I can do since I am using music off the free sheet music sites online.

Reading online stuff. Article in the NYT on the way researchers have signing research that was written by pharmaceutical companies.

Senator moves to stop scientific ghost-writing by Natasha Singer. Boy there’s a shock.

Speaking of dishonesty, there was another NYR article about how the lobbiest, Bonner and Associates, wrote fake letters purportedly from charities to congresspeople. Och. More Fake Letters to Congress on Climate Change by Stephanie Strom.

From a distant comet a clue to life by Kenneth Chang says that scientists have verified that there were amino acids on comets. Very cool.

I like this guy’s attitude: There’s Radiohead and Mozart but no Pop Sluts by Bryce Hallett in the Sydney Morning News.

Speaking of Radiohead, I haven’t gotten around to downloading their new song (post Harry Patch). Here’s a link to the portal where you can get it. All very on the up and up, you know.

Last but not least, “More than 1,000 audience members play their ukeles at BBC Prom” by on Telegraph web site.

My web site is drowning in unapproved comments. 3,309 as of this morning. I used to delete them by hand and also the ones that sneak in under the radar. But I have been busy and I’m losing interest in spending time deleting them 20 at a time.

I haven’t posted since Sunday morning. The harpsichord pieces went well, I think. Even though I forgot my tuner and was too lazy to walk home and get it, the harpsichord was pretty in tune. I was surprised when a colleague complimented my improvs at the coffee hour. This person has indicated that sometimes my playing is “more about itself” than the music. I have no idea what this means. I figure that I kind of look uncouth and tent to play gospel and blues piano the way I think it should be played. But who fucking knows? Anyway quite a surprise to get a compliment from this person on improv.

I have spent many hours since Sunday working on planning my choral music and picking hymns. This has included many interesting hours poking around on the web and finding music that others have put up for use. I can’t say enough nice things about IMSLP/Petrucci online music library and Choralwiki. These sites are amazing.  One has to be discriminating but that isn’t that hard. Often the editions of music that people have done on their own on the Choralwiki exist in other editions that I can compare them to. That’s what I did with the recent Bach cantata movement I transcribed from the online Bachgesellschaft edition available at the Bach cantata site.

I also put several hours worth of work in Saturday on preparing scores for myself and my bass player for my Friday gig at LJ. This really paid off yesterday. The set list is shaping up. Nate the bass player played very well yesterday, not only reading well as I expected but also taking off from the page. I worked on a piano version of Naked Boy yesterday (3rd recent try) and it seemed to work pretty good. It was odd to hear Nathan’s Dad (who is also a local musician) compliment some of my songs (“I like that one.”). The local professional musicians who talk to me rarely comment on what I call my “bad paul simon songs.”

Anyway, I don’t have much time to tarry here this morning.  I am meeting with the children’s choir director this afternoon. Spent a good deal of time trying to find anthems for us to do together with the Chamber choir. My goal is do good music. We’ll see how well I can achieve this with combined choirs and sans artistic control.

Recently, Geoff Ryman, a sci-fi writer, twittered that he was looking for a composer to write some excerpts of an opera one of his characters supposed writes based on Dante’s Divine Comedy. I was interested but decided not to respond until I had seen the book “The Child Garden.” I walked over to the library yesterday and checked out a copy. So far it’s pretty good. But I’m not ready to contact him to find out if someone has taken him up on it. I figure I have a pretty good chance of being chosen to work on it, since he’s not paying (sooprise sooprise). He wants the excerpts to be in Italian. I have never set an Italian text (that I can remember right now), but I think I could probably do so. We’ll see. That’s all the crapola I can think of this morning.

Eileen is getting ready to attend the fiber fest at the Allegan fairground today.

I have had breakfast and am getting ready to walk to work. Playing a Pavanna and Galliard by William Byrd today on the old “harpischord.” Walked over yesterday evening and tuned it. I figure I have tuned it ten or eleven times in the last two weeks. Used it last week for the Bach cantata movement my team performed. I have really enjoyed reviving these two pieces. They have made me do some exploring of Byrd’s other pieces in the Fitwillian Virginal Book.

This morning I finished reading David Goldhill’s article in Atlantic How American Health Care Killed my Father online. Besides leading me to question my understanding of the word, “commodity,” it also pretty much convinced me that his plan for a consumer based health care system would be the best option. Of course it’s not really on the table, but this guy is really on to something.

Incidentally, his use of the word commodity helped me understand that commodity is “something for which there is demand, but which is supplied without qualitative differentiation across a market.” (wiki link)

So if you change a product to, say, improve it, it’s no longer “just” a commodity. Food for thought for steve, I guess.

I spent most of yesterday preparing scores for my gig on Friday. I’m going on at 9:20. Here’s a link to the Facebook page with info. I’m planning on performing the following pieces:

Deja Vu

Blue Rondo a la Turk by Brubeck

So many people

Moneyland

Splanky not by me (features Nate Walker on bass)

Spiegel im spiegel by Arvo Part

Naked boy

Candle burning

Empty Rooms

Frickin Trains

Why did the elephant cross the road

The metaphor of commodity and transaction seems to have permeated art, health and education just to name a few.  Like so many ways people see life, this metaphor confuses me. I am a naive. I still wonder how it is that humans can own things like trees and houses. For me, ownership is often a convenient fiction. I wonder if this is a result being raised in a fundamentalist household and consequently buying all the obvious lies of the life and teachings of Jesus.

You know. “Consider the lilies” and all that. Not to mention the story of the man who built up warehouses full of stuff whose soul would be “required of him” that night.

So Christianity obviously fucked me up from the start. Now I don’t believe in God, but I do believe in the truths I learned. I can see that not many people do.

And somewhere along the line, I developed an intrinsic love of beauty.

So I am definitely a naive in the world of creating and owning beauty and things that are worthwhile. It does cross my mind that I’m not that good at beauty (music, poetry, writing), but nevertheless I enjoy and believe in what I do. In fact it’s more than that. My connections with music and poetry are essential to who I am. I think I have found the “niche of mediocrity” Somerset Maugham mentions. Here is a bleak little poem from my youth:

Niche of mediocrity

“Hundreds, thousands of youths…. enter upon the hard calling of the arts with extravagant hopes; but for the most part they come to terms with their mediocrity and find somewhere a niche where they can escape starvation.” Somerset Maugham

To F.X.E

Fire the last lean line
Farting from the mouth
Shelling quiet and obscene.

Were we the last ones
Or the first ones to
Taste the leaving leave the tasting
Leer? Hermaphrodites
Of love licking and
Leaping into charred charmed arms
Of the skeletal
Muse, the bony dame
Drooling and quiet as a
Curse. Shall we dance shall
We lean our coiled and
Tired bodies pinning flesh on
Fantasy? The death
Is broken. Tireless
Ginless loveless caress. O
Take me slowly. Gray
Is the animal.
Dead is the frail and spent day.

Okay so maybe it’s a dopey poem. The “F.X.E” is the fictional poet of Anthony Burgess: Francis Xavier Enderby. I was twenty-six when I wrote that poem. I am reading it out of an old journal.

So my life metaphors are definitely not the economic ones that dominate the underlying assumptions of our legal code and public discussions.

For example (and these articles are what brought it to my mind):

Brad Templeton seems to understand copyright law the way I do. I have understood for years that photocopying of copyrighted material is illegal. Technically it’s illegal to make photocopies for pages turns for musicians. I do this anyway. My teachers did it. But I know it’s illegal. Similarly, when I was running a big Roman Catholic church music program and using music in the bulletins, I knew that just  because it was in the hymnal that I had permission to use, I didn’t really have the permission of the copyright holders who  were often the makers of the words and/or the music. I followed the letter of the law for a while. I remember contacting the widow of the person who wrote a famous hymn that I had seen reproduced over and over. She told me I was the first one to call her and ask for permission. This made me understand that there was the law and then there was the practice.

Anyway, here’s links to three Templeton articles that explain why you are probably breaking the law with some frequency. By the way, though I have been known to act legally, I disagree totally with the law as it stands. But that’s just naive old me who thinks that “only God can make a tree…..”

10 Big Myths about copyright explained

Linking Rights

A brief intro to copyright

I put them in that order because that’s order I looked at them. I haven’t actually read much of the last one.

And then there’s health.

Peter Steinfels has a good article on the underlying assumptions of the health care debate, at least as seen from the point of view of philosopher, Daniel Callehan:

In Debate Over Health Policy, Some Words Are Seldom Spoken

I haven’t finished reading this next article but it has me thinking about how we have commodified quality of life:

How American Health Care Killed My Father

Man, what is up with the spam on my comments? The bots are scowering my old posts and putting up more and more bogus comments. I suspect it might be related to the fact that I am using an old (hence more hackable) version of Word Press. If I could just get my shit together I would soon redesign this dam site and use something besides wordpress.

After surviving this morning’s colonoscopy, I want to put my attention toward my upcoming leetle gig at Lemonjellos (warming up for another band).

Since my friend the bass player has decided he will play with me, I have been thinking I will do “Blue Rondo a la Turk” by Brubeck at this gig. Nate (the bass player) and I performed this recently and it went well. I’m also thinking of doing a string bass version of Arvo Part’s Spiegel Im Spiegel. This would give Nate a chance to show off his bow technique and would sound pretty cool.

In my own compositions I have rewritten “Empty Rooms’ (I have actually taken away the word “empty” from the lyrics so I guess this is now “Rooms.” Heh).

This piece was conceived as a commentary on the ambiguous roles of simultaneously being a son and a father of a son. Unusually for me it was conceived as a sort of comment on all the misunderstandings and abandonments in these kind of male relationships. Since my own father died rather recently, I revised this piece, tightening it up a bit. I will probably perform it at Lemonjellos.

Also have re-arranged “Why did the elephant cross the road?” for piano and voice.

I’m hoping to get some motivation around performing at Lemonjellos soon. I haven’t played guitar in a while. Most of my musical energy has not been directed towards writing my “Bad Paul Simon” songs. I’m sure I’ll get more motivated soon. After this dang colonoscopy at least.

I also need to get going on some clever planning for my fall church choir season.

This is actually an enourmous amount of work and involves looking at lots of music and indexes and thinking about the readings for each Sunday. I probably make this task much more complicated than it needs to be. On the other hand it’s a part of the job I enjoy.

So I better blog while I can. I have a colonoscopy scheduled tomorrow morning. Eek.

I have had a sigmoidoscoy but you can see it’s not as big a deal. Two doctors ago I had a guy who had purchased a cool new machine to do it with.

The music went well at church today. The Bach cantata movement was really pretty good. I played the Bach trio movement just fine. A good time was had by all.

Now I’m in to getting prepped for tomorrow. This involves a clear liquid diet all day today and flushing the system using the drugs the doctor gave me diluted in (no kidding) 128 oz of gatorade. Yummy.

I was reading one doctor’s online prep instructions for this he/she said one should chill it and serve over ice after allowing it to “breathe.” Clever.

Eileen is taking the day off tomorrow.

I of course have all kinds of fantasies that I will die on the colonoscopy table or they will find something seriously wrong with me soon with all these dang tests.

I have spent the afternoon reading online and practicing Mendelsson and John Adams. Now I’m starting to drink the gatorade.

They say that the prep is the worst part. I hope so.

The light is just breaking in Wester Michigan USA. I hear a train in the distance. I’ve been up for a while. I have treaded my mill and rinsed the bod. I need to spend some serious hours with the Bach organ trio I have scheduled for Sunday’s prelude (Andante from Sonata IV in e BWV 528 by J. S. Bach). I have never performed this one in public, so I have been working hard at it each day this week. I decided next week’s prelude will be a matching Pavanna and Galiarda by William Byrd from The Fitzwillian Virginal Book. On the harpsichord. I have the harpsichord up, tuned and running for Sunday’s Bach cantata movement performance.  This group of musicians sound pretty good. If the violinist had not missed the first of two rehearsals, I think they might have sounded a bit better, but I’m very happy with the prospects for Sunday’s performance.

Yesterday my boss and I scheduled an organ recital in Advent and a choral recital in February. She has intitated sending out a letter to all prospective choristers and instrumentalists next week. God love her. I have been toiling away on a statement about the music program at the church. I found a cool T.S. Eliot quote to preface it with:

What life have you if you have not life together?

There is no life that is not in community,

And no community not lived in praise of God.

T.S. Eliot, Choruses from The Rock

I read somewhere of a shepherd who, when asked why he made, from within fairy rings, ritual observances to the moon to protect his flocks, replied, ‘I’d be a damn’ fool if I didn’t!’ These poems, with all their crudities, doubts, and confusions, are written for the love of Man and in praise of God, and I’d be a damn’ fool if they weren’t.

Entrance Antiphon for 27^th Sunday in Ordinary Time, October 4, 2009:

O Lord, you have given everything its place in the world, and no one can make it otherwise.  For it is your creation, the heavens and the earth and the stars:  you are the Lord of all.

Esth. 13: 9, 10-11

Wow. What do you do with that? But that is the fun part actually, the challenge. Trying to redeem a pretty useless text.

My  young bass player has consented to accompany me on my August 21st gig. I am having trouble getting motivated for this. I am warming up for a band who is releasing a CD. I have contracted to rent a piano for the performance (125.00) and promised the bass player 50.00. If I get paid for the evening it will probably me no more than 60 and quite possible will be zero.

I have re-written the song “Empty Rooms.” But mostly my songs mock me right now when I sit down and rehearse them. This is not an unheard of thing. I still basically love them, but right now they are unruly and sound trite and forced. Hell maybe they are. Mendelssohn beckons.

So I spend time with him. I printed up a piano transcription of the first movement of his fourth symphony. I did this realizing that I had never done any serious analysis of Mendelssohn even though I do like some of his work. I also continue to rehearse/play through his Songs Without Words. And I am resurrecting his Prelude and Fugue in C minor on the organ for some reason.

Since the bass player and I recently had a gig together maybe I will perform “Blue Rondo A La Turk” at the Aug 21st gig. I still think it would be fun to treat it as a theme for improv in the middle instead of switching to the Brubeck/Desmond idea of a Jazz Blues chorus. We’ll see.

I am floundering right now.

I tried to start A.M.Homes novel, “Music for Torching,” recently and found it so depressing and bleak I had to quit reading it.

Returned to Neal Stephenson’s “The Diamond Age or A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer”

and a re-read of Anthony Burgess’s autobiography (vol 2): “You’ve Had Your Time.”  Science fiction and Burgess.

Definitely comfort reading for an old man.

Speaking of being old, my uncle died in his sleep at my present age (57). I have been calling this my “Richard Year.” Richard was his name. My doctor looked at my echo cardiagram and had her nurse tell me on the phone that there were “changes but this was probably due to my high blood pressure” and that I should continue on my meds. Monday I have a colonoscopy scheduled. Oy. I feel that my new doctor is probably going to find something dire wrong with me. All the more reason to carpe the diem I guess. Hence Sunday I will play a new Bach piece and maybe even do some composing today.

Last night Eileen and I walked down to our local fake pub and had a lovely meal together.

Sitting outside ignoring the street performers and the crowd at the sidewalk sales. I do think my life is good.

Os Gêmeos (the twins…. this is a link to the NYT slide show of their new mural on Houston Street… very cool stuff)

Defective by Design. Org

An anti Digital Rights Management web site.

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Five Best PDF Readers from Lifehacker

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The Diaries of John Quincy Adams online (you can also follow him on twitter)

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Jeff Atwood has some interesting observations about pricing low and selling at a volume on his blog.

Whew. Quite a day yesterday. My Mom called and said that the nurse where she is living said she should go into the Emergency Room due to her persistent diarrhea. Okey dokey. So this time I remembered to take my power cord to my netbook.

Mom wasn’t in pain just weak and frustrated about not being able to shake her diarrhea.

They ran tests and she wasn’t dehydrated or anemic.

The doctor introduced me to a new bug they are watching for in people these days: Clostridium difficile.

They weren’t able to test Mom for it so her internist, Dr. Fuentes, just had her put a regimen of antibiotics and sent home. This took me up until 1 PM when my first church meeting started.

Then I had meetings at church. What can I say? This part of the work drains me because I am actually an introvert thrust into situations where I have expertise and need to speak up to help the situation.

Came home and grabbed a late lunch. I decided I would drive up and see Eileen during her 4:30 lunch break and actually got caught in a half hour traffic jam in dear little old Holland.

Went and practiced organ for a couple of hours. I have stupidly scheduled a bach trio sonata for Sunday’s prelude. I can basically play it, but last Sunday I lost my concentration when the adult acolytes came over near the organ and engaged in conversation. I don’t actually blame people for not noticing what I’m doing. I feel like I should have the concentration to persist. Last Sunday I didn’t. I nailed the sections I had practiced and screwed up the easy ending. Oy,

And that piece was much easier than the Bach I have scheduled for this Sunday.

Today I have to tune the harpsichord, then meet with my Boss and the children’s choir director for coffee and conversation. Also drive up north of town and give a piano lesson. Back to the church to witness a Bach cantata movement rehearsal (I’m not playing on it, just have organized parishioners).  Then possibly take my Mom to a church directory photo shoot if she’s feeling up to it.

What happened to being a bum?

Yesterday, I linked in this article on Facebook and complained about it. Artist Arturo Di Modica is suing Random House for using a photograph of his famous piece of art, the Bull that sits (sat?) in front of the NY Stock Exchange. I flippantly and typically a bit incoherently commented

Why do makers think think they own stuff? If you want to “own” it, don’t look for audiences.

A couple of my maker friends too umbrage and rightly so. Here is my response:

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Dave and Cheryl,

In response to your comments, I thought I would try to summarize some of what I think about this stuff of copyrights, arts and music. (FB allows longer responses on these “notes.”).

My understanding of the area of copyrighted versus free information and objects seems to be concerned with two areas:

1. the pie and 2. the gift

The pie: Objects are of course different from ideas. If I take a piece of art you or Cheryl have made, I now have possession of it, you don’t. Like a piece of pie, my possession of it usurps your and others’ ability to have it . If I pick up an idea from you, like how to do a basic glaze or shape a piece of metal, my possession of that idea does not diminish your ideas or skills. But what if I steal an idea for a piece of art or music from you? My new piece might be just different enough to not be the original but reflects your creative inspiration. That’s the rub, actually.

That’s what I meant in my equally terse comment about the original purpose of U.S. copyrights. The concept was to protect ideas long enough so that the living breathing originators of the idea would be motivated by the fact that they could be the sole owner of the rights to the idea for a limited time.

But on the other hand, in a way, time has sped up. Information (and the arts I believe) desperately want to be free. Not free of cost, but free to flow to audiences and other makers.

One thing that influences my thinking about this is that ideas and art do not exist in a vacuum. They are always built on context, history and the common conversation going on between brains. In the instance that sparked our exchange, Di Modica made the sculpture, but he did not invent the medium. Nor did he invent the idea of making a statue of an animal. Nor the idea that place is important to the piece. And on and on.

What was original about his work? I think ultimately I decide it doesn’t matter that much as long as the idea is interesting (edifying?) to him and others including myself

2. The gift

Right now we live in a time when the basic metaphor of money defines much of how people in the West see everything in life. In the case of the arts, this has helped emphasize the comodification of beauty and ideas. Also the reification of them [ Reification is “a fallacy of ambiguity, when an abstraction (abstract belief or hypothetical construct) is treated as if it were a concrete, real event, or physical entity. … from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reification_(fallacy)“]

On the other hand there are other ways to think about art including the concept of gift. I won’t elaborate more than to say that Lewis Hyde has explored this pretty thoroughly in his book (which I am a third of the way into) called “The Gift: Creativity and the Artists in the Modern World.”

So, I don’t want to steal your art or De Modica’s statue. But can I take a picture of it? Can I use it in a discussion on FB? If I write a book about another related idea (like Random House) do you own the ensuing images created by the photographer?

I really don’t know the answer to these questions. But I do think about them quite a bit. Consequently I try hard to avoid breaking copyright laws that I don’t necessarily agree with and tend to use software that is free or I have purchased.

Comments encouraged.

S

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blog p.s….. I guess I’m pretty unscrupulous about linking in pics to my blog. ah, the inconsistency!

cross posted to Facebook and also tweated

A. M. Homes’s “This Book Will Save Your Life” is a devastating critique of living in the USA disguised as a morality story. It could easily be (and apparently is –see the reviews linked below) misconstrued as the story of an L.A. day trader who sees the light (but not too clearly). He begins by experiencing a mysterious episode of physical pain in his highly insular LA canyon lavish suburb home. He wonders if this is IT. But we know it’s probably not it because when the novel begins he is staring out his window and realizing that he has been living in a “vacuum of silence–life canceled.” The pain and ER trip come later.

The rest of the novel is a romp from improbable situation to situation. Richard (that’s his name) begins to notice that he is actually in the world. He talks to a woman crying in the produce section of the grocery store (she becomes a feminine counterpart to his awakening journey, but they don’t have sex). He mistakes the eccentric neighbor Nic on his shoreline rented-cottage in Malibu for a homeless person and gives him his jacket. Much later in the story he notices the SOS morse code flashing of the rear lights of another car. Could it be? He decides to intervene and eventually is on the evening news as the man (the Hero, the Good Samaritan) who rescued the naked woman from the trunk of a murderer/rapist (It was she doing the morse code. Thank goodness Richard noticed).

This stuff goes on and on. He reaches out to people, but actually it’s a bit late in his alloted time on earth. He is looking death in the face and watching the final re-run of a movie of his life misspent. He manages to connect a bit with his estranged son. He does some good. He seems to be listening to those he notices and weirdly reaches out to for the first time in his life.

Those include the writer Nic who lives next door and whose unpublished novel he eventually rescues from drowning (see later in this blog). Nic sums up one of the book’s ideas that hit me:

We’re all good when we want to be, otherwise we’re fucking animals. This is no VIP rooom in reality, and there is no reality in this city. You can’t Google the answers. People talk about being on the ride of your life–THIS IS YOUR LIFE… Whatever it is you need to know, you already know.

Homes has a finely tuned ear to the culture of LA and the good old USA. She even sees it situated in a context of history. In the interview linked above she says,

“I read culture, how we live, what we do, and perhaps think ahead to where we are going. I am also deeply aware of where we have been and the importance of keeping that in mind when thinking about human behavior. More and more I am interested in history, in writing which weaves history and fiction together.?

Nic once again explicitly gives some of this authorial point of view in the novel when he remarks:

“We live in a time when no one wants to remember. We pretend we are where it starts. Look at the way we live–we build houses on cliffs, on fault lines, in the path of things, and when something happens, we don’t learn history, we build it again, right on the same spot, bigger, better… Fallout accumulates. What we’ve got now is a blend of fact and fiction that we’re agreeing to call reality.”

By the end of the novel Richard is not far from where he began. His Malibu home has just been assaulted with a huge wave of water. Instead of looking out of his cliff house window, he is floating on a table with a cell phone wrapped in a condom (don’t ask) and Nic’s unpublished novel safely ensconced in a plastic bag. He is still floating, disconnected, protected by plastic and styrofoam (the table) and almost alone. But he is accompanied by a dog he befriended along the way. This is the only real relationship that seems to be in his now Good-Samaritan-type life.

Unlike the several reviews I read, (Walter Kirn’s 2006 NYT review, John Self on his blog Asylum’s review, and even the Penguin Reading Guide which includes a short interview with the author) I found the title and the book more satirical than redemptive. Richard is in a slightly better spot at the end of he book. Floating on the table he reaffirms his connection to his son who has left California without saying goodbye. The son calls him on the cell phone in the condom for a quick apology. In the course of the story Richard has actually helped many people. He has had sex again after years of abstinence. But the relationship did not turn out to be much deeper than friendship and sex. Once again the woman he makes love to is someone he has helped. She is missing a breast due to a bout with cancer. Their relationship draws her back into her sexuality but not deep relationship with Richard. Just as well, because it’s clear that at the end of the book, Richard has only so much capacity for human intimacy and connection. He goes from staring out his window, a frozen person. To floating alone with a dog. The main difference to me is that he has managed to actually have a relationship with the dog. This is more than many achieve.

Since I was a young man, I have been highly impressionable to opinions of  others in shaping my own tastes. Part of my maturing has been and continues to be sorting out my true responses from my bigotry (usually taught). So in the last decade I have attempted to be sure to carefully examine my own response to music, art, poetry and fiction; to notice when I actually like something no matter the context or history.

This led me to a re-appraisal of Mozart’s piano sonatas. I had read somewhere that his violin sonatas were superior to his piano sonatas. At some level I accepted this and can even recall parroting this to other pianists, much their horror. Some years ago, I reassessed and discovered that I love the piano sonatas AND the violin sonatas. Go figure. I could even argue with my previous self on this one with examples of beauty and ingenuity in the sonatas.

I must say that I enjoy music more and more and as I age. I find deeper and increasing satisfaction in the beauty of pieces I rehearse and perform. It’s like the music is suddenly saying something to and through me that I missed before. Some of this is hearing longer lines and having a bit more technique. But experiencing it is wonderful.

Yesterday I took a Mendelssohn CD with me on my trip to Lansing to pick up my Mom. I listened to his Fourth Symphony and the overture to Midsummer Night’s Dream. This music is music I truly enjoy and love these days. Mendelssohn is a composer I do not know well and have always thought of as sort of a secondary type guy. I have played completely through his Songs Without Words and found them not all that interesting. Last night I sat down and played through the first ten or so and discovered that the Mendelssohn who is so easy to appreciate in his scherzos is present in these smaller works as well. The melodies and harmonies seemed to jump off the page and take on new meaning to me.

Now why is this? Some of it, I suspect, is that my piano technique has progressed to the point that I can not only play the notes of the pieces but can render them somewhat musically as I read them. I am listening a bit deeper.

Sitting in the restaurant parking lot yesterday waiting for my brother and entourage I tapped into an unsecured wireless connection and read about Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s dream online. It turns out he was 17 when he wrote the overture which is my favorite movement. This overture was intended to stand alone and was not joined by other music until 16 years or so later.

Now I think that Mendelssohn exhibited the typical prodigy genius, but I also think about the passion I experience and identify with in younger people sometimes. I think I can subjectively hear that in much of his music. After the youthfulness consideration fades what I hear and admire is a “joie de vivre” reminiscent of Mozart.

I read through the entire Wiki article on Mendelssohn this morning and found myself wondering how he fits into the Romantic canon. I have always known he was one of the conservatives (Schubert, Schumann, Brahms) but did not really know that much biographical info about him. In fact I realized this morning I have never read a book length bio of him. Thinking of changing that soon.

I also realized that besides his Midsummer Night’s Dream and Italian symphony there are really quite a few pieces by him I admire. I have played through most of his organ music and enjoy playing it. I like his Reformation Symphony and his choral work. Hmmmm. I think I will explore more of his work both as a performer and a listener.

My online reading lately seems to be about online stuff.

I’m almost through with the introduction to Jenny Ryan’s “The Virtual Campfire.”

I wonder if she really meant to write “libratory” in the sentence:

“Much of the popular discourse on computer-mediated communication, and indeed of all new media when it is first introduced, is organized by dualisms: whether emerging technologies are good or bad for “society” (particularly children); whether experiences on the Internet are “real” or “virtual;” and whether the Internet is a libratory (emphasis added) space for individuality or another mode of control and surveillance by ruling powers.”

I couldn’t find an online definition, but I like the word. It looks like a combination of library and laboratory, a good way to think about the internet, I guess.

She writes pretty clearly. And addresses concepts that float around in the mind of this old fart reading a screen. Like the private/public nature of the interent. When I post, I generally try to think of it as proclaiming in public. So I seek to be appropriate, to not write and publish anything I wouldn’t want anyone to see.

I once had a reader who threatened to “expose” my obscenity to the people in my church. When I seemed a bit unruffled, he accused me of hypocricy. Hypocrite, maybe, but I think of myself as a bit of an obscene guy anyway. Anyone who gets to know me at all (like my boss and people at my church whom my reader threatened to contact) knows this about me.

On the other hand, I want to respect the privacy of others as I share my observations and reactions to their behavior. It’s helpful to have some hip kids who read and advise if they see something out of line (Hello Elizabeth).

I have other thoughts, but I have to stop and make a fruit salad for my wife to take with her to her family reuinion. I am missing the reunion myself because I have to drive to Lansing and pick up my Mom.

Before I quite, here are a couple more links:

Why Copy and Content are the Keys to online Marketing…. I’m put off by this blogger’s typical reduction of the world to sales, but so far he/she does seem to have some insight into how online stuff works.

Hackers Extradition to U.S. More Lkely by John F. Burns …. Life imitates Art I guess. I do like John F. Burns

Also last night seemed to be the evening for finishing re-reads. I finished re-reading Asterios Polyp by David Mazzucchelli. Spoiler to follow: This book warrants re-reading because there are things he puts in that I didn’t catch the first time. Like the fact that his wife’s name is Hana (Japanese for flower I guess) and he ridicules the fact that her parents didn’t come up with a more exotic name for her. Later in the book, he is calling her Daisy. Heh. Also there are some fascinating foreshadowings, like a conversation about Asteriods and one about Astrology in which Asterios foreshadows the manner of his and Daisy’s death. Very cool.

Also finished a complete re-read of Enderby. I do love Burgess. I forgot how funny and brilliant he is. Not only does do a send-up of Joyce in the transcription of Enderby’s final TV appearance (which was never aired, Enderby was too obscene and disruptive), he eerily writes about incidents that remind one of things that happened after the book was published. Like the public murder of a pop musician and the attack of muggers by a victim on the subway. This last one is of course Enderby brandishing a sword that is sheathed in a walking stick. Very funny.

Linked in several things this morning on facebook. I guess I’ll put them here too.

Is Google Killing General Knowledge? by Brian Cathcart on www.moreintelligentlife.com

This article made me think of a conversation I had with my Medieval Music prof at Notre Dame. I had done poorly on a test because I hadn’t memorized tons of obscure facts. He asked me about it. I told him I didn’t plan to keep that kind of stuff in my head. That I would (and do) rely on reference books for that sort of thing.

Since then I have noticed that older profs seem to think that retention of empirical facts is the same thing as understanding and wisdom. Time and time again I watch educated people fail to analyze, synthesize and reason. Substituting instead quick flashes of details and small facts for reasoning.

But on the other hand, some knowledge is necessary to connect ideas and form understanding. This article (which I haven’t finished reading) addresses the concern that young and old people are too trusting of the “facts” they find on Mapquest and Google. Some funny stories in it.

I also linked in The Virtual Campfire: An Ethography of Online Social Networking by  Jenny Ryan.  This seems to be an online book length work about its topic. I think Ryan is an anthropologist.

She strongly advocates online communities. I tried Tribe and have so far not found any ACTIVE (read posted within the last month) tribes in my areas of interest.

Lastly I linked in this lovely little online picture book by Shaun Tan.

Shaun Tan rocks.

I read “Asterios Polyp” yesterday in between rehearsing, taxiing my Mom, playing in the Lawrence Park Amphitheater in Zeeland and going grocery shopping.

It’s the story of an brilliant self-centered architect, Asterios Polyps, who never saw one of his prize-winning designs realized. It begins in his apartment where he is obviously sort of vegetating and watching TV. The apartment building catches fire and he panicks and grabs three things to take with him: a cigarette lighter, a watch and a pocket knife. He inexplicably walks away from his burning building and goes on the road and takes a job as a car mechanic in a little town.

Through the use of narrative, flash backs and dreams the book unfolds.  Mazzucchelli pulls out all the stops in this engaging novel. His dialogue seems fined tune whether it’s Asterios’s car mechanic boss who not only gives him a job but takes him into his home as a boarder. Or the blathering pretentious dance choreographer who commissions Asterios’s wife to design a set for his rendition of “Orpheus in the Underworld.” Or the brilliant but arrogant observations of Asterios to his students and people at parties.

In addition to this is a shifting visual technique that fits the story being told. The car mechanic’s family and friends begin to become more cartoonish and the color scheme slips into bland pastels which seems to be related to the mundanity of what’s happening. Asterios’s wife, Hana (Japanese fo flower) sees Asterios as a cubist cartoon nightmare when he is at his worst.

Then there are the names: the town Asterios ends up at is called Apogee (defined as “the final climactic stage” at princeton.net Asterios’s name itself is very interesting. His last name, Polyp, is defined by wiki as “an abnormal growth of tissue projecting from a mucous membrane”  His first name besides being an allusion to Greek Mythology (both a river god and a king share the name) is also the name of the point on the skull where the three plates of bone come together.

So this book does what I like books to do: it lingers and keeps giving food for thought. Recommended.

I spent my treadmill time the morning reading some NYT student articles in the Education supplement. I was pleasantly surprised to find that there was evidence of passion and literacy in them.

Tamara Livshiz at at U of M describes her revelation around understanding her calling to be a doctor:

The Dog Eat Dog World of Applying to Med School

Melody Rod-Ari at U of Calif grad school looks past the dismal prospects for teaching in the humanities to understanding the importance of her field of Art History

My Irrelevant Field, the Humanities

Coranae Howard now at Columbia learns to understand her specific moment of maturing and looking her own depression in the face.

In Pursuit of Happiness

Gabino Iglesia at U of Texas has some excellent thoughts about answering his own questions about “Why he was in college”

An Awful ‘Why’ Hung Over My Head

Can’t resist an excerpt from this last one

At night, I read novels and wrote on a small desk under a picture of Bukowski taped to the wall. Then, on the afternoon of a day that had started as any other, I entered my minuscule apartment and the huge Why? was gone. Instead of that awful presence, a few answers were written on the walls with ink that only I could see. The list went more or less like this:

• Traveling increases your references, your truths, your capacity for understanding and your ability to comprehend others.

• Living alone makes you grow in ways you had never imagined and helps you get to know yourself.

• Making friends and meeting people from all over the world enriches your life, augments your emotional intelligence and makes you see how important it is to turn mere tolerance into a deep, welcoming understanding and acceptance.

• Having an education is something not even your loans can put a price on.

• Saying no to this opportunity would have been something you would have regretted the rest of your life.

I needed to read these essays this morning. This summer I have witnessed some very immature behavior from professors and college students. Dare I lump these particular people together and say they show a tendency to be incurious, withdrawn, and seem mostly concerned not about their fields but about how others perceive them.

Nevertheless this experience this summer has moved me closer to my own passion. Yesterday after finishing the postlude, I found myself in a weirdly vulnerable emotional state. Each time I perform I endeavor to give all of my heart and soul to the music I am performing. Sometimes this leaves me drained and completely overwhelmed. Yesterday was that kind of day. As the last notes of Wayne Shorter’s “Black Nile” faded I was overwhelmed. Pretty embarrassing to be surrounded by applauding parishioners only to be weeping and looking upset. Oh well. Fortunately there was a guest artist who was getting most of the attention and I could take my wrung-out self a bit out of the spotlight.

Unfortunately, I have made a bit of a resolution to be more present at the dang church coffee hour. I am a bad recruiter. But the presence of the primary musician is a tool not to be ignored. So I have decided to start counting time after the last note of the postlude and make sure I stay at least ten or fifteen minutes more instead of grabbing my stuff and fleeing as I usually do.

So I did this yesterday. I came home exhausted but had fun making lunch for my wife and myself. Cooked up some pasta and made a meat pasta dish for Eileen and a veggie one for myself. A side salad with fresh tomatoes, basil, parmesan, and olive oil. Desert was the last of the fruit platz I made recently with whipped cream and fresh blueberries on top. Life is rough.

I was supposed to meet my bass player at 1 PM to go over music for a gig tomorrow night. My bass player is a high school student who just spent the last two weeks in an intense music program at a local Michigan college. Unfortunately he slept through our appointment. He finally answered my cell phone call around 4 PM and asked if we could skip it for the day.

Another exhausting emotional Sunday for Steve. But not all bad. Good music, good food and good companionship from the woman I love. Heh.