I have been absorbed in reading Bortslap’s The Classical Revolution: Thoughts on New Music in the 21st Century. From what I can tell so far, he is attempting to redefine (define?) music as a narrow and distinct concept that involves tonality. He sheers this idea off from what he calls “sound art” or “sonic art.” The latter encompasses popular music, jazz and classical music that falls under his rubric as “modern.”

It strikes me as ironic that I am reading and trying to understand Bortslap’s narrowing of music after reading Christopher Small’s broadening of music to become a verb. Bortslap seems to see tonal music as a highly developed art of Western civilization. His ideas would necessarily reject connecting to other ideas of what humans think of as music in order to preserve an art that he feels engages listeners at a deeper and more meaningful level than “sonic art.”

I am bewildered by his ideas. I see that they have grown out of his own Dutch experience where not only have the universities perpetuated a Schönbergian linear understanding of “progress” in musical history (away from tonality) but governmental subsidies are awarded in ways that are obviously distorted by prejudices.

I read this book against the background of my own continuing attempts to understand my musicality. On the one hand I am extremely sympathetic to historical music. I do find deep meaning in Bach, Beethoven, and others. But it has always struck me as incomplete unless balanced with music that speaks more directly to my being alive now. In my case, this explodes to encompass any music I run across which intrigues and attracts.

It has occurred to me that I am shallow.

My teacher Ray Ferguson used to say that if academics found French Baroque music shallow, then he was comfortable being shallow. A little bit of wisdom at least it seems so to me.

I trace my own musical “journey” (I hate this kind of phraseology but there you are) to childhood. There was a woman in my childhood known as “Sister Elizabeth” who I suspect had a strong influence on me. The title “Sister” is not a nun reference. Instead it is the quaint form of address with which I grew up in the Church of God. The community would address each other as Sister or Brother “so and so.” I barely remember “Sister Elizabeth.” But my parents told me that she used to take me for nature walks. I think maybe she sensitized me to beauty.

Then there was my experience of music. Three times a week in church there would be singing. My parents always had a record player and a baby grand piano throughout my childhood and young adulthood. When we lived in Tennessee my baby sitter gave my parents a record of Charlie Parker. I still have it. Also there was an anthology of recordings that entered my life called “60 Years of Music” which had a ton of seminal recordings.

Not only was it influential in exposing me to great music but I suspect it also influenced me in its eclecticism. It the first time I heard a recording of Rachmaninoff’s “Prelude in C# Minor” and Paderewski’s “Minuet in G” (both played by the composers). In addition, it also had pop hits on it like “The Naughty Lady of Shady Lane” and “I’m sending you a big bouquet of roses” sung by Eddy Arnold and classic jazz recordings of Ellington and others.

As I grew up I idolized Paul Simon AND Bach, the Beatles AND Chopin. Not sure where that leaves me in the musical universe but there I am.

I wonder how much of an anachronism and eccentric I am. Bortlsap doesn’t help, heh. But “Toujour gai, Archie, there’s some life in the old gal yet.”

Recently I heard an interview of Ray Bradbury where he claimed he had never worked a day in his life because he enjoyed what he did. I relate to that, even though there have been some jobs in my past (not many) that were indeed work.

Oops…. This entry from Monday didn’t get published. So here it is.

I want to keep this brief this morning because I want to do some more reading before leaving for work. The Classical Revolution: Thoughts on New Music in the 21st Century by John Bortslap is fascinating me.

Bortslap comes from such a different place than I do despite the fact that we share an obsession with music. He redefines music in a much more limited sense. Music that doesn’t elevate and fit into his notion of canonical works is not music at all. Rather he calls it sonic art. Which seems to be a loose catch all term including popular music and contemporary composers whose work he feels is tendentious. This apparently includes most composers after Britten and Shostakovich and even some of the work of name brands like Mahler and Richard Strauss.

Anyway, in a weird way, Bortslap’s ideas are fascinating to me and I want to use some of my blogging time for more reading this morning.

Yesterday at church I had a couple of amusing bad moments.

I have been working hard at preparing the ending section of Hindemith’s first organ sonata to use as a prelude yesterday. It came off pretty well if a bit under the metronome marking. Unfortunately the day before I noticed that I hadn’t set a preset for my postlude. I accidentally put it on the same preset I had set up for the quiet ending of Hindemith. So when I hit it as I came to the ending suddenly the organ boomed out and I had to take a moment and remember what stops were supposed to be playing. Oops.

Also we sang a peppy number yesterday by Donna Peña for our sequence hymn: “Digo ‘si,’ Señor.” The congregation is supposed to echo this phrase as the choir sings verses. I played through the refrain first, then the choir sang its line then instead of people singing the refrain there was silence. Oops. I need to think that one out a bit better as participation didn’t increase that much through out the piece.

I received two books from the library inter loan service yesterday. Their contrast is striking to me.

The first of these is Peter Elsdon’s book on one of my favorite pieces of music, Keith Jarrett’s Köln concert.

I was noticing this morning that this book situates Jarrett in the Jazz category. Jazz and classical music are probably two categories of thinking about contemporary music that have lost most of their usefulness for me. It is in just these two categories that my two books seem to situate themselves.

I have long thought of Jarrett as a composer and improviser who began his career in the last gasps of a distinctly historical separated genre of Jazz (with Miles Davis) and continues to this day to make very interesting music that defies (in my mind) simplistic categorization.

In 1976, Jarrett released some astonishing music on an album called “Arbour Zena.” Dedicated to his “teachers,” it is basically a concerto for Jazz trio and orchestra. It’s beauty is compelling and has none of the clumsiness so often heard in early blends of musics.

If you’ve never head it and like music at all I recommend clicking on the YouTube video to get a taste.

 In the previous year he released the Köln concert recordings. In this he improvises for over an hour. I find this music equally astonishing.

For a taste click on this video and listen a bit.

KEITH JARRET – THE KOLN CONCERT, Part 1 by pedsarod

In glancing through Elsdon’s little book, I immediately noticed that it contains what I hoped for: a detailed musical discussion of this piece. I saw many transcriptions which led me to look more closely and discover that in 1991 Jarrett gave permission to and cooperation with Yukiko Kishinami and Kunihiko Yamashita to transcribe the entire concert. Wow. I will be investigating this further and probably purchase both it and Elsdon’s book.

The second book that came for me yesterday was The Classical Revolution: Thoughts on New Music in the 21st Century by John Borstlap. It is a grumpy insular look at music from a disgruntled classical musician’s point of view. I was unhappy to read that Bortslap thinks that John Cage was not a composer and that Duchamp was not an artist. That gives you an idea of his aesthetic which largely rejects latter 20th century music that dominated the universities (Schoenberg and his ilk).

Borstlap himself like many classically trained musicians and composers (myself included) has suffered at the hands of this insular and narrow academic approach to music. Reading his struggle is interesting. At the end of the book he has section called “Some Composers.” Although I already know that Borstlap and I will disagree about much I was excited to see that I didn’t recognize one of these composers. New people to check out! Cool beans.

I have long distrusted an audiovisual approach to learning and education. Maybe it stems from watching “movies” in the classroom when I was growing up.

A movie was many times a filler for a teacher and provided them some relief from having to teach a class. Often less proficient students popped up and exhibited ability at threading the machine and running it.

And then there was the cover of darkness as the lights were turned out.

Or it may be the many documentaries and movies I have seen that seemed to distort more than inform.

Neil Postman pointed out years ago the sheer number of words available in a newscast is dwarfed by those available in stories in newspapers (still true I think when applied to written news stories online).

Despite this innate skepticism of mine, I am impressed with Diarmaid MacCulloch’s BBC 4 series “A History of Christianity.”

It is a interesting companion to his History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years which I am reading.

What I like about the documentary is its cleverness in utilizing beautifully shot scenes of historical places. The makers of this series draw the viewer in to what it’s like right now in these places and use the faces of people in them.

Happily MacCulloch makes an arresting, amusing and informative on-camera narrator. I suspect this might have something to do with the fact that he currently is Professor of the History of the Church at Oxford.

Like any good post modern film maker MacCulloch himself is part of the story.

The series shoots scenes at his childhood parish where he father was the rector. We also gently learn that the Anglican tradition is the one near his heart, that he identifies himself as a “friend of Christianity,” and is a gay man.

He doesn’t put in the film (I don’t believe) that he declined ordination due to the church’s stand on his sexuality.

I highly recommend both the series and the book. We checked the DVDs out of our local library and managed to watch all six in two weeks.

1. List of ongoing armed conflicts – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I love this. I tried to figure out all the armed conflicts in the late 90s via clippings from newspapers. I kept a little 3×5 file of them. Then came the internet and my head exploded. This list is one to turn to when trying to understand world news. Thank you to Anthony Wesley for posting it on Facebooger.

2. Tennessee: Nun Is Sentenced for Peace Protest – NYTimes.com

Still putting people in prison for speaking truth to power.

3. Obama and His Library: Go Small – NYTimes.com

I am fascinated with the history of Presidential libraries. A lot of it is tucked into this article.

I spent my morning reading/blogging time yesterday finishing the novel version of Fahrenheit 451 by Bradbury. I’m glad I took the time. I’m not 100% certain I have read the book before. Certainly I knew about it and had seen the movie. But the book is very different from the movie and play (or at least the play, since now it’s my most recent image experience of this story).

I should say the book encompasses most of what Bradbury put in his play. I have ordered a copy of the play to compare it to the book and the staging of the Aquila company I witnessed.

My reaction to the play was that it was “quaint” and dated. I think now this might have been a result of both Bradbury’s attempt at distilling some of his ideas into the play format and Aquila’s stated purpose of making classics more accessible in a theater context. Both of this seem ironic now because the book is so anti this very sort of thing, railing against digests and other stuff.

I am still pondering the heart of what Bradbury is saying in his story, but reading the book (written in 1953) I realize that it is important to think about the time it was written. Through out the book planes fly over. This was ominous in the 50s.

We were waiting for bombs to drop at all times. The background of a boiling cold war is important to the story in the book, but omitted in the play. The staging substituted an ominous take on the hound of the impersonal death that inevitably reminds a theater goer now of our stupid stupid drones that the USA is using to murder our enemies.

I will blog more on the heart of the story if I have any subsequent insights.

I often find annoying catalogs cluttering up my inbox at work. I decided to look at this at one a bit closer. I have been witness to a takeover of music acoustics by a certain mind set. I suspect this mind set comes from the recording studio. In a recording studio, it is necessary to dampen all random sounds so that the recordist can cleanly balance and record.

This dampening is the driving aesthetic of many if not most public buildings in the US right now. I remember going round and round with the architect at a church where we were renovating. Despite spending thousands of dollars on a liturgical acoustic consultant, the final room did not include his recommendations and the room was a typical American church/concert hall. That is to say sounds traveled in the room, one could hear the PA quite nicely, but it was dry (very very little reverberation).

In the early 21st century, this subtle ideal is so prevalent that musicians themselves (excluding organists and choir directors) often abhor reverberation.

Then you have the people who are in the business of selling audio and visual equipment to churches for these rooms.

In this advertising mag, Richard Walborn begins his article on acoustics emphasizing that “first we need something that really absorbs the kind of noise we are dealing with.” Noise is how he perceives the uncontrolled reverberation and echo (two different things). Ironically later in his article he addresses an area often left more reverberant, the entrance way. He calls it “the forgotten foyer.” I along with many other choir directors will drag our choir into these areas so they can experience singing in a reverberant environment. I guess these will disappear along with good singing rooms if this aesthetic continues to prevail.

Another article in this catalog/promo pamphlet addresses screens in worship. I have also watched attitudes evolve about screens. My own attitude has changed.

I want to say quickly that my grandfather was using screens in churches in the middle of the last century. He was a tinkerer and loved what we now call technology (he might have thought of them as gadgets). He had an early slide projector with huge glass slides mostly of biblical scenes.

I can remember my dad showing slides to his congregation.

So I have experienced screens in church and home my entire life.

I think using them in public spaces is tricky (and fascinating). At the end of his six program series based on his book on Christianity, Diarmaid McCulloch does his synopsis in a  city square in London surrounded by screens that reminded me of Times Square.

Cleverly on the screens were shots from the entire series flashing by as he narrated his final thoughts.

I am going to have to stop since this is getting TLDR (too long; don’t read), but I want to quickly point out that the author of this article, Jason Moore, seems to think screens are a new phenomenon in church and church leaders need to be taught that screens in church are a “canvas where we can paint powerful pictures that draw people in at a heart level.” Nice syntax as well content. Not.

I am trying desperately to adjust my schedule and pace myself better.

Eileen is adjusting nicely to having all her time be her own. It is a pleasure to see her easing in to being more herself more of the time. It does throw my own daily preoccupations into relief which is both distressing and helpful.

I am having some small victories this week. Right now I am sitting and listening to the wind blow in the dark early morning. When this happens a feeling of quiet composure comes over me and is quite pleasant, even a physical feeling as my body relaxes and my mind is clear.

Yesterday I resisted the notion of throwing myself into preparing all the anthems between Palm Sunday and Pentecost and stuffing the folders. It is satisfying to me when this is done, but when I reflected a bit I realized that I didn’t need all of that music in the choir’s folders for this evening’s rehearsal. Better to think what I minimally need and use my work day (today) to make sure it’s available this evening.

Eileen is meeting me with a sandwich at church after my 1 PM weekly meeting with the boss and will help me do what I need to do for this evening.

Instead yesterday I tried to be more leisurely even as I did my usual tasks of submitting the bulletin music (hymns, psalms and anthems) for a week from this Sunday.

Eileen left to go take care of a friend’s kids (a pleasure for her!). I wanted to go over and practice at church while she was gone. She informed me that the driveway was impassable. So instead I spent an hour snow blowing.

After that I took a shower and relaxed again. This is a bit out of character. Both the work and then the relaxation.

My previous pattern has been to stuff active times with all the task I can do, one right after another.

This makes for a tired old Jupe.

Better to pace myself.

So I waited until after lunch and then drove over to the church and practiced. Then Eileen and I went out for a date night at a local bar then to a play.

The play was “Fahrenheit 451” done by Aquila Theater part of Hope College’s amazing Great Performance Series.

.

Although the acting was good, this is a weird story to revive these days.

I am in complete sympathy with its romantic notions about books and loss of culture, but I found myself seeing it as a quaint backward looking romantic piece. The text even seemed pompous and a bit preachy to me. When at the end (spoiler alert) the remaining book people literally become books by memorizing them to preserve them, I later reflected they in effect became audio books.

There is a certain zero sum notion about burning books that doesn’t obtain as strongly for me as it used to. The luxury of the internet and ebooks has helped me focus on my own literacy. I do love the smell and feel of a book in my hands.

But that is not my primary pleasure. It is more about the conversation of idea and story I have buzzing in my brain as a result.

1. Spain, Land of 10 P.M. Dinners, Asks if It’s Time to Reset Clock – NYTimes.com

I remember all the restaurants being closed at about the time we were hungry in Catalonia.

2. A Picture of Detroit Ruin, Street by Forlorn Street – NYTimes.com

Counting empty buildings a first step to redoing the city where I used to live.

3.Reporting From the Web’s Underbelly – NYTimes.com

 Let go from the Washington Post, a reporter becomes an expert on cybercrime.

4. A Watchful Eye in Hospitals – NYTimes.com

To spy or not to spy, tough question.

I may have mentioned that Julie Powell, a dance teacher, had asked me to come up with a couple of pieces for her modern dance students to choreograph. She really didn’t give me much more criteria than that. She told the class I would come up with two ‘songs.” But they would devise their own “lyrics” which I took to mean that they would come up with a story line or an emotional field that would fit the music but be their own.

This conversation seemed to grow out of my interaction with some of the students around music I recently heard performed by The Eighth Blackbird.

After attending their concert I pulled out my Legeti Etudes for Piano Scores. The Eighth Blackbird had used arrangements of a few of these. I own the first volume.

I remember after I received it in the mail sitting down and looking at the first Etude. It is overwhelmingly complex. Unsurprisingly I later learned that Legeti consciously integrated gamelan

and Yoruba African rhythm understanding into his compositions.

This actually make them more comprehensible to me.

But after hearing The Eighth Blackbird play Legeti and other contemporary composers, my gut reaction was that I would like to play some of the music. It sounded very pertinent and understandable as they performed it. Hard to describe my reaction. But I am having more and more visceral reaction to music as I age.

An example is my perplexed attraction to an organ piece by Gwyneth Walker, “Sanctuary.” I bought it randomly in a sale. It went in a stack of music I wanted to read through from the sale. I can remember playing it the first time and being drawn in a bit. The more I rehearsed the more I liked it. But the quality of my attraction and the simplicity of compositional language reminded me of how I was attracted to popular music as a young man (The Beatles, The Doors, Donovan, Paul Simon).

I was talking to two students about The Eighth Blackbird performance and told them that I thought the music was “coool!” I got the feeling Julie was intrigued by an  old musician’s reaction. She said something like she should would like to learn more about what music I liked.

It was soon after that that she came up with the idea I should choose some music.

So, the first thing I showed her was a Hungarian Dance that I love by Bartok. It’s in seven.

That means each small unit of counting is different from most classical ballet. After I played it for her, she wondered aloud if the students could think in seven. I then played her a snippet of one of my favorite Bruckbeck pieces “Blue Rondo A La Turk” which is in nine (2+2+2+3 beat) but extremely comprehensible to many listeners (so I think).

She didn’t seem to think that was quite the ticket. Since I was in brainstorm mood I went back to the drawing board.

Later I was playing “Remembrance” by Gwyneth Walker at the piano one day. Eileen said, “What’s that? You should show that to your dance teacher.” I was actually playing through Walker trying to decide which piano piece to recommend.

Yesterday I showed Julie three more pieces to pick from: the Walker piano piece, “I got it bad and that ain’t good” by Ellington, and “Mister Jelly Lord” by Jelly Roll Morton.

The Ellington and Jelly Roll Morton pieces are both ones I think are excellent.

She loved the Walker (you were right Eileen), recognized the Ellington, and said the Morton had “too much character.” So I guess we’re going with the first two.

Interesting and enjoyable process for me.

I ran across a phrase in A Secular Age  by Charles Taylor which sparked a tangential though  in my brain. He was contrasting neo-Christian movements that emphasize emotion in a reaction to the complexity and disintegrating aspects of their societies. He saw them as representing passion in the face of the “cool distance of… impeccable intellectual orthodoxy.”

I have been reading scholarly articles cited in the footnotes of Guinier/Torres’ The Miner’s Canary.

I am interested to follow the ideas of Critical Legal Studies and Critical Race Theory. The latter applying “magic realism” to its thinking and both applying narrative or “story” to their analysis and subsequent understandings of law and race.

It reminds of the delight I felt when I discovered that there are musical academic types who have moved beyond the “cool” distant orthodoxy of academia. This institutionalization I experienced in my college education usually seemed to miss the point of music at least as I understood it then and now.

Now I am likely to find educated people who are writing and thinking about music much more likely to factor in the larger worlds of music: popular music, music of all cultures, the importance of “musicking” to being human.

Examples of this are when I discovered the online text (which is deliberately not behind an academic firewall as far as I can tell) of The Changing Sound of Music: Approaches to Studying Recorded Musical Performances by Daniel Leech-Wilkinson or the works of Christopher Small.

Both people represent a trend much different than I ran into in my college years.

I have since decided that some of this was the universities and colleges which I attended. The best musical minds I ran into tended to be in the studios of the people who taught me piano, conducting and organ. People who taught music theory, history, advanced analysis, and other core music subjects  for the most part tended to look backward rather than to raise their head and see what was happening around them in music. God forbid they could think clearly or speculate intelligently about the future.

But I suspect there were those who were thinking more clearly in US colleges and universities then. I just didn’t rub shoulders with them.

There is a corollary in music composition.

When I examine the works of composers like Gwyneth Walker and Carson Cooman, I can tell that they have been encouraged to find a musical voice that is very different from teachers and student composers I knew in school.

Integrating larger musical languages wasn’t forbidden. It just didn’t end up happening with the ease that I see in a lot of music being written now.

Musicians move much more easily between firewalls of classical and popular and folk than they used to.

Examples from the pop side are Glen Kotchke from the band Wilco

and Jonny Greenwood from Radiohead.

These composers seem at ease with moving beyond the specifically popular genre they first achieved success in.

I compare their work to the “classical” attempts of Paul McCartney and Billy Joe.

I see the older generation somehow changing gears when they try to write “classical” music instead of just writing music. They appear to go from writing excellent music to writing boring music.

1. Comcast vs. the Cord Cutters – NYTimes.com

It makes me crazy when I read how much more we here in the USA pay for internet connections.

2. Driving to the Music of Chance – NYTimes.com

This is kind of a goofy article. But I’m always interested in  what music has meaning for people.

3. Paris Review – On Art Spiegelman’s new stage show, Wordless!, Harry Backlund

Spiegelman’s new project.

Yesterday on my last day off before my schedule resumed I ended up a bit frazzled after spending a good part of the day planning choral music. I picked up books from my Mom, returned them to the library, then chose new ones for her. This is a pretty easy task. Then I went to church and finished choosing choral anthems for the rest of the year.

During all of this I experienced a low hum of self criticism and feelings of inadequacy.

I have been thinking about how difficult it is for me to trust. I do trust some people in my life. But only a few. Why is this? I watch people I admire (and even some that I trust) who automatically assume the best in others. I am more slow to do this. I don’t necessarily assume that people I don’t trust are culpable or doing things that are unethical. I just leave the jury out.

And if I can’t develop a plausible story in my own head about them, I find it hard to trust them.

Needless to say, many people do not make sense to me. Hence, I find it hard to go out on a limb and trust them.

Yesterday I was wondering if this was mental illness or imbalance or something.

I oscillate between conviction that  my intuition is something to heed and that I am a cynical naive who misunderstands the world.

My convictions grow out of experience of watching people violate each other’s trust.

I guess the trick is to not let all this stuff show on the surface when it can be damaging to others.

Murray Bowen the great family systems psychologist and teacher of Ed Friedman (whom I admire immensely) was said to have a very gruff persona in which he rarely revealed himself.

This makes me wonder if he felt vulnerable because of his knowledge of how people and their systems work. So he kept himself under good cover.

Unfortunately, self disclosure is something that is impulsive with me. Heart on the sleeve sort of thing.

When this combines with my dogmatic tone I can sound like God talking.

It is my burden to bear that people often hear disapproval of who they are as people when I am not consciously thinking that, only thinking of the content of the discussion.

In church work this has led me to feebly develop some skills in reflective listening and non anxious presence.

Unfortunately, my convictions take over too often and people find me off putting.

Probably not mental illness, but certainly not comfortable for many.

1. ‘Pawel Althamer: The Neighbors’ Is at the New Museum – NYTimes.com

I especially love to read reviews and learn about artists (musicians, dancers, whatever) that are new to me. Be sure you check out the slide show on this review if you’re interested.

2. Inequality, Dignity and Freedom – NYTimes.com

Krugman talks about the dignity of work.

On the Media’s blog roll is called [TLDR The Internet: Shorter]. I didn’t know what TLDR meant but a quick google let me know that it’s an acronym/word I should know since most of my blogs fall under its rubric.

I try to keep my word count to around 500 words or less per entry (not including the link section if I put one in) and put in pictures to help modern “readers” get a sense of what I’m writing in each section as well as to amuse myself (and hopefully some of you dear readers).

I got bogged down in the footnotes of The Miner’s Canary this morning. I noticed three articles in a row in the footnotes that I thought I might like to read. When I found the third one, I told myself I should just slow down a bit and see if I could get access to them.

The first one, “Translating Yonnondio by Precedent and Evidence: The Mashpee Indian Case” by Gerald Torres and Kathryn Milun (Duke Law Journal, 1990) led me to another online article.

Torres is coauthor of The Miner’s Canary (along with Lani Guinier).

They footnote his 1990 article when they discuss how courts of law depend on “stock stories.” They write, “Stock stories are those ways of explaining and interpreting the world that embody received understandings and meanings.”

“Yonnoondio” is an Iroquois word that Walt Whitman appropriated in “Leaves of Grass.” It is essentially an untranslatable word which Torres and Mulin put in their title intentionally to demonstrate what they are critiquing.

Here’s a link to the first article. (I’m not sure you can access it since I went through the college log on to Jstor to find it. If you are reading on a tablet you might have additional problems accessing it. I had Eileen test it and she could open the link on her smart phone [Helping me figure out that my browser wasn’t remembering my Hope logon to get access to it] but not her Kindle Fire. She reports that she could only read the first page.)

Anyway, in this article I was led to an online article you probably can look at if you wish: “Other Spaces: Utopias and Heteroutopias” by Michel Foucault (pdf).

I am still reading the first of these two articles. The second one is a translation of a speech Foucault gave. Post-modernism comes into play in the thinking and writing of  Guinier and Torres in The Miner’s Canary as well as “magic realism.”

But more on that some other time. I’m still learning about all of this  myself.

1. What’s Powering Facebook’s Reality Distortion Field? – On The Media

Blog post on “Reality distortion fields.” You’re soaking in it.

2. Pipe Organs as a Niche Market — Martin E. Marty | The University of Chicago Divinity

I put this link and the previous link up on Facebooger. I repost it here because I know I have at least one reader who doesn’t Facebook.

Marty was someone I contemplated doing a terminal degree with at one point in liturgy. Whew, that was close. Glad I didn’t. But he does have a good mind and it’s nice to seem him endorsing pipe organs.

3. ‘Network’ Told the Future – NYTimes.com

Once more the letters to the editor are as interesting as the article they are  responding to.

Ron Bonn of San Diego writes “I remember that we were all especially struck by Ned Beatty as a communications industry magnate, and his mad soliloquy on why great corporations like his should and would, in the near future, control the fate of America and the world. Wild and very funny satire.

What none of us understood in that moment was that we were not watching satire at all. We were seeing prophecy.”

4. When Emily Was Sold for Sex – NYTimes.com

I thought it was amazing when Kristoff describes “pulling out his laptop” and locating “Emily” on prostitution sites within minutes for the distraught parents.

5. Even a Stationery Logo Pits Palestinians Against Israel – NYTimes.com

As a Romanian once told me, “All governments are jerks.”

6. Sid Caesar, Comedian of Comedians From TV’s Early Days, Dies at 91 – NYTimes.

So you know the scene in “Blazing Saddles” where the guy punches out a horse. True story. The guy was Sid Caesar and the scene was a tribute to him from Mel Brooks. Another fun fact found reading obits.

7.

Well this is unusual. I have three honest to God days off in a row. Today is my second.

Yesterday I took the morning off and sat around and read. Met with my boss in the afternoon then practiced, went grocery shopping, then home to treadmill. Today I want to do some planning of music at church for Holy Week and beyond. But I do feel an absence of pressure that should help me relax.

I notice that I haven’t been putting up many links. So here are some.

Detainees Sentenced in Seconds in ‘Streamline’ Justice on Border – NYTimes.com

Although this is apparently legal I am mortified that my country is behaving in this way. The lawyers shake the hands of the people being tried and then immediately use hand disinfectant. It’s kept in the courtroom for that purpose. I find that a sad detail that is telling.

Holder Urges States to Lift Bans on Felons’ Voting – NYTimes.com

Attorney General Holder is doing some good work. This article points out that his proposals have little political danger for the White House. Also interesting to see Rand Paul joining in the conversation.

Moral March on Raleigh: How the Moral Mondays movement is redefining the left.

This is a bit under the radar in many news organizations. It makes me have a tiny bit of hope. I am keeping my eyes open to see if there is any change in the public discourse that reflects insights of  Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow and The Miner’s Canary: Enlisting Race, Resisting Power, Transforming Democracy by Guinier and Torres.

Interpreting Robert Frost – NYTimes.com

Letters to the editor about Frost.

Florida Man’s Fiancée Contradicts Parts of His Testimony in Killing of Teenager – NY

The legal system has gone haywire and left an odd impression in the public’s mind that it can turn gunfire on people who frighten them.

China and Taiwan Hold First Direct Talks Since ’49 – NYTimes.com

Window of opportunity before the leader of Taiwan is replaced. 1949 …. let’s see. 65 years?

Camels Had No Business in Genesis – NYTimes.com

I love it when I learn stuff like this. Oh and Jesus’s camels were okay.

Wikipedia vs. the Small Screen – NYTimes.com

If people begin to access in depth information with their phones I fear this will have a deleterious effect. But maybe I’m just an old guy stuck on his laptop, eh?

A Bluesman Looks Back, Through a Few Old Songs – NYTimes.com

I saw Johnny Winter’s brother Edgar with Rick Derringer in the 70s. Amazing people.

Judge Temporarily Bars Removal of Picasso Tapestry From Four Seasons – NYTime

Interesting to see the arrogance of planners… I hope they are able to preserve this work.

After War, a Failure of the Imagination – NYTimes.com

Good take on how we are connected to each other and need to listen.

The reason I ordered  Miner’s Canary: Enlisting Race, Resisting Power, Transforming Democracy by Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres is that I wanted to read more about critiquing “color blindness” in American political and social discussion.

I read the introduction this morning. Each author weighs in with a neat parallel wrong assumption from their past. Guinier describes her evolving discussion with her son about race. As a third grader, he peers over his mother shoulder as she writes describing an experience of having a book fan ask for her autograph on a picture. The fan exclaims, “I’m gonna hang this picture in my office. Ain’t nobody gonna mess with me then.” Guiner describes the woman as an “a middle-aged, very attractive black woman from Texas.”

Her son, Niko, leans over and tells her should omit the word, “black,” from the sentence.

This is the beginning of an evolving discussion they have over what it means to be “black.” Guinier makes the mistake of trying to shock her young son about what he will face in our society as a young black men. She calls him, “nigger,” is he is quite shocked. Later in seventh grade he doesn’t even remember the incident.

But he does remember a feeling of “wishing he was white” so he could have the same benefits as the privileged.

Guinier in her turn realizes that by using the “n” word she participates and extends the idea that race is a “concrete” concept and used in that way to “manipulate and oppress.”

She had forgotten that race and racial identity is relational not an inherent trait.

She puts a footnote in that I admire so much I”m quoting in full.

“So what does race  mean? Law Professor Angela Harris suggests that the answer depends on several questions: Compared to what? As of when? Who is asking? In what context? For what purpose? With what interests and presuppositions? Harris concludes, ‘Questions of difference and identity are always functions of a specific interlocutionary situation and the answers, matters of strategy rather than truth.’ Any ‘essential self’ Harris tells is always an invention; the evil is in ‘denying its artificiality.'”

Whew! That is clear and excellent thinking to ponder!

Her co-author, Gerald Torres, points to a similar mistake he made as a young high school student.

He and a friend he describes as a “Chinese-American student named Steve” both have white girlfriends. They share a romance about the future of colorblindness. Non-whites should marry whites not each other in order to create a “raceless society.”

Torres also brilliantly uses his naive youthful mistake to reach excellent conclusions as a basis for the book he and Guinier have written. The “raceless society” like the idea of “colorblindness” itself ignores the complexities and richness of the human experience. Racial categories “are political, not just physical. They call for a political response.”

The metaphor in the title comes from a telling source which they both use as an introductory quote and an important footnote at the beginning of the body of the text:

“In 1953 Felix Cohen wrote: ‘Like the miner’s canary, the Indian marks the shift from fresh air to poison gas in our political atmosphere, and our treatment of the Indian … marks the rise and fall in our democratic faith.” Felix S. Cohen, “The Erosion of Indian Rights, 1950-1953: A Case Study in Bureaucracy,” Yale Law Journal 348,390 (1953)

Firstly, let me apologize if you are having problems accessing my web site. My brother emailed me yesterday and said it was intermittent. I find myself that some mornings I have to wait and wait to get it to load as I am writing and editing. I find more and more that I am at the mercy of devices which no longer function in simple ways. Figuring out how to use them and then how to respond to their glitches is a weird part of being alive now.

This morning I was laying in bed dozing listening to an online reading of John LeCarré’s A Murder of Quality. Suddenly I hear Microsoft’ little reboot song. I wait patiently for the computer to reboot, but of course it doesn’t. I time it. It had been shutting down for several minutes. Stalled, I thought and held down the on switch to turn it off completely, let it cool down and reboot it.

I love that to turn off devices mostly one has to hold down their on switch.

Last night Eileen was tangling with teaching her Kindle Fire to allow her to go back in a Kindle book and read an earlier volume. It kept offering to sync her devices to the furthest read point. This of course was a book at the end of multi volume Kindle book which she had read and had inspired her to read an earlier book in the series. It turns out the only way (or the way we figured out) to do this is to go to Manage Your Kindle on Amazon (via a web browser) and tell it to stop that.

I keep thinking that Kindle books and probably ebooks in general are not designed for or by readers. Which is weird. But the convenience is large and trumps the idiocy for me.

So I had two days off and I am not feeling terribly rested this morning.

Yesterday mid afternoon I was overcome with fatigue. What’s that all about? This fatigue is mental as well as physical. It might even be more mental than physical. At any rate I face a long day today and am reasonably sure I will acquit myself competently in the tasks I set for myself like ballet accompaniment and choir rehearsal.

I finished the second party of Organ 101 (link). I broke the TV cart at church preparing for this presentation. The wheel snapped off and I discovered how heavy a large screen TV cart actually is as I prevented it from toppling.

My boss suggested we just have the meeting where the cart was. I told her the wifi was insufficient and I couldn’t get a good signal. She informed me that it had been upgraded a couple of years ago. Hmmm. She was right and it worked fine. I wonder why I’m not a bit more on the communication track. Probably I’m too standoffish.

I was going to crawl up inside the organ loft and get a reed pipe and a flue pipe for show and tell for the organ committee. Then I realized that I wanted to practice and would be missing the notes for those pipes. So I delayed that until just before the meeting. Getting to the organ chamber involves climbing a ladder and getting up into a little room which can only be accessed in this manner. I have had visions of me killing myself doing this.

But obviously I did not.

I practiced Bach (this Sunday’s prelude and postlude) and Hindemith Sonata 1 for organ. I want to excerpt the Hindemith.

Usually I play the fake trio sonata in the middle as a prelude. I played through the first movement and decided it wouldn’t make too much sense in the church context because it kind of demands that the listener pay attention (Hah!). So I decided to do the  loud section as the postlude as I have done in the past, but then use the concluding section of the sonata which is quite lovely and delicate for the prelude. Hindemith makes so much sense to me musically. I wonder why I don’t see him being performed more.

I had a very relaxing day yesterday. I did a lot of reading and even some cooking.

I improvised a black bean hummus since there were no garbanzo beans in the cupboard.

Then I resurrected my old pasta machine to find that it was in bad need of cleaning. This involved  soaking overnight. But it put me in the mood and I made some home made pasta using just a knife to cut it.

I have been itching to try the NYT marinara sauce recipe I bookmarked.

It all turned out very well in my opinion.

These are pics I took with my phone and put up on Facebooger. Most comments were envious. One of my choristers, however, thought the pasta looked “funky.” I guess it does. It tasted good however.

For some reason I goofed around with Facebooger and reached out to some people from the past.  They were either prominent musician/composers I happen to admire .

Carson Cooman

Helen Kemp) or people from my time at Wayne State U.

All of these pictured have instantly reached back and allowed me to “friend” them.

This is kind of fun.

I also spent several hours working on the second part of my “Organ 101” fake power point presentation I am planning to give to my organ committee this evening.

I agonized over these few slides. I couldn’t find an illustration of a bunch of ranks that were 8′, 4′ , and 2′.

So I came up with these.

I’ll link in the whole presentation tomorrow.

I have about 17 of 20 or so slides done. It shouldn’t be too difficult to finish that off today.

I have to get my Mom to the shrink this morning at 9 AM. Come to think of it, I haven’t received a confirmation phone call. But I have turned off my land line and that might be the reason. I really should call and confirm before dragging Mom out.

I think I might have figured out something about my attraction to Gwyneth Walker’s compositions. I have concluded that they remind me a bit of  my own improvising. This is very logical to me. Walker’s bio on Grove’s web site (reproduced here) mentions her interest in folk music and “rock and roll.”

This along with the rather clinical description: “Her harmony is diatonic, often consisting of non-referential triads with some quartal harmonies” describes both my youth and part of my improv/compositional style.

Walker seems less affected by academic music than I was. It looks like she (and Carson Cooman)  have carved out a niche of accessible use of a musical language that transcends both popular and academic. I admit to being a bit envious.

At any rate, I have pretty much shaken my youthful ideas about “educated” classical music or whatever you want to call it.

I think there was a time I would be more dismissive of Walker and Cooman. But now I know myself well enough that I can clearly tell when I am attracted to a musical idea whether it is complex or simple or somewhere in between.

This is a small insight but playing through Walker’s piano music helps me understand this about myself.

For some weird reason, I ran the snow blower while waiting for Eileen to get ready for church yesterday. This is out of character but is becoming more in character as we get all the snow we have been getting. It’s almost survival to try to keep the drive clear so I can get the car out and get places.

Church went well yesterday. It usually does. I forgot to submit the title of my prelude so it wasn’t in the bulletin (just figured out that this was my bad with a quick email search… oops). It was a clever little trio by Krapf on “Let all things now living.” I improvised an interesting accompaniment to “This little light of mine” which relied on the cong carrying the tune (and harmony) while I embroidered piano riffs around them. I dropped the organ entirely on the last sing through of “We are marching in the light of God.” That was cool. I played a postlude based on this tune. I need to keep working on it in order to do it well for the upcoming local AGO members recital.

My Mom asked us to buy a meal on her recently so we went out to eat after church. I was pretty exhausted after that and sat and stared at the computer screen so long that my head hurt a little bit.

Cleared that up with several Scarlatti essercizi.

I am still playing my way through the terrible Longo edition of all of these. I also have been reading Kirkpatrick’s study of Scarlatti, adding it to my morning reading along with  To The Mountain Top: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Sacred Mission to Save America 1955-1968 by Stewart Burns. This was available as a 99 cent Kindle book so buying it was a nobrainer after reading about it in a footnote of Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow.

I also ordered The Miner’s Canary: Enlisting Race, Resisting Power, Transforming Democracy by Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres from PaperbackSwap.

This also came from an Alexander footnote. However I remember when Guinier was nominated as a candidate for Assistant Attorney General.

I was very impressed with her. She didn’t get it.

1. Still Mad as Hell – NYTimes.com

Maureen Dowd’s Sunday column. I related to this quote:

If you really want to find out about anything these days you have great access to great info all over the internet, but you will find yourself alone, because no one knows what you are talking about. “

2. Other People’s Views – NYTimes.com

Another weird little article by David Brooks. Another quote,this time from the comments to the article (by Phil from Texas):

“How could there be anything wrong with listening to others, so long as you are the final arbiter? And how could there be anything right about listening to others if “listening” means you do what they say because they say so, and for no reason of your own?”

This is something I notice about how people sometimes use the phrase “listen to me.” They mean change and agree with me, not actual simply understanding what they are saying.

3. Months Later, Sniper Attack at Power Hub Still a Mystery – NYTimes.com

I either didn’t read about or forgot about the April San Francisco attack on the grid. Wow.

4. 4 Ways to Make Your Brain Work Better | Mother Jones

Sleep more, stop being an internet junkie, put a check on your multitasking and practice “mindfulness.”

5. Health, Work, Lies – NYTimes.com

Public officials continue to misrepresent in order to sway.

6. Part of the Farm Bill: Cuts to Food Stamps – NYTimes.com

The way our government works now makes me weep. Taking food from the poor and giving money to the rich. Madness.

7. The Tenure Track: Rethink the Rules? – NYTimes.com

Letters to the editor. First one from musicologist Peter Jeffery.

8. Woody Allen Speaks Out – NYTimes.com

The recent rehashing of these charges has left me scratching my head. Who knows what the deal is?

9.The Post Office Banks on the Poor – NYTimes.com

Imaginative idea: extend postal services to include cashing checks and small loans.

Finished Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow yesterday. All I can say is that this is a brilliant book. Alexander outlines the current state of US systematic repression of African Americans in convincing prose and copiously footnote references. The book ends with a challenge ahead of us: to do no less than turn the system of the USA upside down and redefine it in humanitarian terms. It doesn’t seem likely, but her conclusions seem irrefutable to me.

It boils down to what Christ and Debs insisted on.

I know this is very unpopular in the US right now. But that doesn’t diminish it’s reality.

Jes sayin.

Read the book.

Julie Powell, the ballet instructor, is challenging me to come up with some ideas. This is fun. We are talking about the class she will be teaching (and for which I will be the accompanist) the second half of the term: Sacred Dance.

She has asked me to think about music for it in terms of music that the kids might recognize from church. Very challenging but interesting. I am reading an old edition of her text.

Unfortunately she asked me what I thought so far. I had to confess that I thought it was pretty goofy. When Iris J. Stewart, the author, confronts belly dancing for the first time she weirdly wonders how she, a feminist, could relate. “What’s a nice feminist like me doing with a dance like this?”

I found this off putting. Confronted with an ancient tradition of dancing, she immediately relates it to the over eroticized and subservient view of women in advertisements in the USA.

Or at least that’s what I thought she meant.

Subsequently, as I read, I find her point of view is more personal than insightful for me.

I mentioned some of this to Julie to support my “goofy” comment.

I am reading an old edition of this book published in 2000 (interlibrary loan). I see on Amazon there is an updated version published in 2013. I am not hopeful that Stewart will address the naivety of her approach in a revision, but I guess it could happen.

Julie also has asked me to think about coming up with a couple of pieces of music for her modern dance to choreograph.

This is challenging and interesting as well. I would love to work up some Ligeti or John Adams or something cool like that, but I don’t think I have time. Plus the pieces are probably too long

I am thinking of maybe showing one of the Bartok Hungarian dances from Mikrokosmos to Julie for her reaction.

I’m also looking hard at music by Gwyneth Walker.

I keep pondering Walker’s work. So far I find her music to be intriguing in that it has a surface quality of what I think of as new age music (George Winstony).

But I am finding myself weirdly attracted to and involved with one of her organ pieces.

“Reverence” from her composition, “Sanctuary.”

This attraction inside me goes beyond the simple surface level of what Walker is writing and seems to connect to something I can’t quite pin down yet.

Walker has a bunch of music online that she has given permission for people to print up and perform (link to her catalog… for the free stuff scroll  way down). I am looking at some of the piano pieces there and hope to find a piano piece that affects me like “Reverence.”

I am luxuriously laying around and reading books and goofing off online this morning (see below) and decided I had better do my blog since there doesn’t look to be an immediate end to my morning reading.

My recent renewed interest in Ligeti (and some other contemporary composers like Gwyneth Walker, Thierry Escaich, and Gábor Lehotka) has had me also renewing my interest in Paul Hindemith.

As a young man (and a very poor pianist at that point) I used to stumble through Hindemith’s Flute Sonata with my friend Dave Barber.

Eventually I picked up copies of his piano sonatas and played through much of them and other works by him. In undergraduate school (Wayne State) I learned his first organ sonata.

This was year ago. I performed it then and have since used it in church from time to time.

Yesterday I finally pulled out all of my Hindemith organ music.  My copy of the first sonata is falling apart. I photocopied it so that I could rehearse it without further wrecking my copy. While photocopying it, I discovered the last page was torn so badly that a measure was missing. In some music, one could figure out what was missing. I don’t find that as easy with Hindemith. I panicked. Darn.

Then I glanced down at the stack and there was an old photocopy I made years ago  of the page which had the measure on it.

Cool.

As I carefully worked through it yesterday I had an odd sensation. I studied this piece with Ray Ferguson. He was very good about teaching me how to  make sense of Hindemith’s instructions which are pretty general for organ music.

In other words, either there is a bit of a tradition how to make an organ piece work on an organ (what pipes to play it with) or the composer has him/herself indicated what pipes he/she wanted the piece played with.

I once wanted to change this with a certain living composer of organ music and politely emailed him a request to do so. He emailed me back and suggested that I not do it that way and that maybe I should learn and perform another of his pieces.

This left a bad taste in my mouth and I have since not played much music by this guy.

Nevertheless it is a consideration of making sense of music.

So here were notes from my lessons with Ray scribbled into the score, many if not most in his handwriting.

I felt like he was standing next to me which was a very pleasant feeling. I admired not only his considerable music skills and knowledge but he was as gracious a man as I ever met. I use him as a yardstick for much of my own behavior and not just in music.

I miss being able to consult with Ray since he died some years ago.

[WARNING: BORING DISCUSSION OF RANDOM RESEARCH FOLLOWS, READ AT YOUR OWN RISK OF FALLING ASLEEP]

Speaking of figuring stuff out, this morning I exercised a clear example of how much research and information one can obtain sitting in the living room with the internet.

I was reading along in Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years by Dairmaid MacCulloch.

I had come to his description of the Piety movement in Germany at the time Bach was alive. Seeing Bach’s context from the perspective of the evolving Piety movement is informative. MacCulloch and his sources see Bach as struggling with the restrictions of Pietistic understandings. They see the cantatas as florid and extravagant works of art that left many listeners at the time confused.

MacCulloch simply cited “Hope, pxxx” in his footnotes.

I searched through my Kindle copy of his work (literally used the search function since people who design Kindle books have not made them easy to cross refer… the page numbers are even omitted in my MacCulloch which is kind of frustrating since he cross refers constantly by page).

Finally with a google search I determined he was citing Nicholas Hope’s German and Scandinavian Protestantism: 1700-1918.

I found this book online at Google Books and also at Oxford U.  Apparantly, there is no ebook available but one can search the google book. (When I tried to search the Oxford U version, it stopped me and asked if I had subscription or if my university subscribed to the service…. I went back to the Google book to read the relevant pages).

I thought it sounded interesting enough that I might like to hold German and Scandinavian Protestantism: 1700-1918 in my hands. Checked Amazon. Yikes, it’s expensive ($99 to $256!). Then I looked it up on Hope College’s web site.

Cool. A copy was sitting at Western Theological Center.

I thought maybe next time I was there I would look at it and this is the really cool part.

I noticed this on the page of online card catalog.

Wow. This is exactly the kind of thing I wanted to do: somehow keep it in my hand when I drop by.

I tried it and it worked.

I love the interwebs.

Yesterday I went over to Western Theological Center and listened to Rhonda play some Bach she will performing soon. She really is a fine player and it’s flattering to be asked to do this by her. Came home and grabbed some lunch then Eileen and I drove to Grand Rapids for an appointment I had with my eye doctor.

This turned out weird. First, we are temporarily without health insurance since Eileen is officially retired and we are waiting for our new insurance to kick in. This is a matter of a week I think. So when they asked me for my insurance card I had to say (sounding like a con man) I’m temporarily between insurance companies.

Then when I was ushered into the examining room, the nurse asked me why I was there. She pointed out that it was way too early for a 12 month exam. I said that I was pretty sure I hadn’t initiated the appointment.

After some back and forth, it turned out that I wasn’t really supposed to be there. Someone had probably misread the doctor’s handwriting (when going over a chart?) and scheduled the appointment. I did have an August appointment on my calendar as did the office.

They wanted to go through the exam anyway but I demurred. Next time I go, I will  at least be insured. Not sure how much our new insurance will cover for this kind of visit, but at least it would apply to our new (large) deductible.

By the time we were safely back in Holland, I was pretty tired. I tried to muster my meager aged resources and managed to drag myself over to church to practice. Sunday’s prelude is a clever little piece by Gerhard Krapf on the opening hymntune, The Ashgrove.

I admire Krapf’s work. He tends to write in a severe dissonant style.

I remember discussing him with a music store owner once.

The store owner said he thought Krapf might be “getting better” by which I took it to mean less dissonant. I thought that was odd at the time (still do) but didn’t contradict him.

Anyway, this little trio is clever and I find it a bit tricky. He uses an invertible canon both of the hymn melody and his little ritornello ideas. I do think its cool.

My postlude is based on the closing hymn, “We Are Marching.” The tune, Siyahamba, is one my congregation seems to enjoying singing. I’m thinking of doing this at an upcoming local AGO members recital.

This video seems to be the same arrangement in the Episcopal resources.

1. What Machines Can’t Do – NYTimes.com

David Brooks points out some of the attributes of people who are curious and use the internet well.

2. Where N.S.A. Kept Watch in Cold War, Artists Now Find Refuge – NYTimes.com

Print journalism on the web seems to feel like it needs a lot of videos. I know that’s how a lot of people seem to be processing information these days, but I still usually find print exposition easier to apprehend. This article is an exception. I found the accompanying video very helpful in getting a sense of the place and the art.

It’s not only Eileen who is settling in and enjoying her retirement. I am finding myself less stressed. Some of this is inevitable because I no longer have to watch someone I love suffer from working a job which was causing her frustration (not the reading to kids but the haphazard planning and odd failures to communicate around her).

Eileen now gets to spend her time doing things like messing with her looms and I also get to have her around more. This is very pleasant for me and I am finding myself subtly energized at a time when I am monitoring my own fatigue and ability to accomplish all that I set out for myself to do (church, ballet class, learning and reading).

For example, Wednesdays are really my most full day. I arrive at ballet class at 8:30 AM and am in that building until 1 PM (with an hour break). Then yesterday I had a staff meeting immediately afterwards, met briefly alone with my boss, planned choir rehearsal, and practiced organ. This took  me until about 3:30 or so. I arrived home to find Eileen nursing a cold (“Hi, I’m going back to bed.”).

Surprisingly I had enough energy to go out and snow blow the driveway. I have that snow blowing is more physical than it looks, especially when dealing with huge chunks of frozen snow at the end of the drive. This requires chopping away with a shovel and then repeatedly thrusting the blower into the fallen chunks which are dispersed.

It would be just my luck to have a heart attack and die while snow blowing instead of the more traditional cardiac arrest when snow shoveling.

Just kidding. I did the snowblowing instead of treadmilling yesterday. By 5 PM I was soaking in sweat from exertion. No need to treadmill after that.

Eileen stayed home from choir rehearsal last night, nursing her cold. I thought we had a good rehearsal.

Afterwards, a professor from Hope told us that her sister who is a survivor of cancer put up a picture of this slogan on Facebook.

I came home and shared this with Eileen.

1. The Censorship Pendulum – NYTimes.co

Interesting that the return of one kind of censorship in China can signal the ebbing of more sinister kinds.

2. Dangerous Minds | Mind Warriors: Douglas Rushkoff interviewed by Greg Barris

I watched most of this discussion last night. It’s got lots of goofiness but Rushkoff is brilliant.