I try to pretend that Friday is a day off with just a little bit of work in the morning (an 8:30 Ballet class). This went a bit haywire yesterday for some reason. My day filled up so full that I was unable to get to church to practice organ or exercise. Got back from class and worked on bills (Eileen’s and mine and my Mom’s). This took a bit of time. I listened to Obama’s NSA speech as I did them. Then off to do errands while Eileen tangled with Obamacare online.

Errands took up most of the afternoon; check in with Mom, go to bank, pick up coffee beans – 2 stops yesterday, go to library, pick up prescription nose drops for me, return to drop off stuff for Mom. By the time I managed to do all this I had about forty minutes until I had to return to the college to play for auditions for Blue Lake Fine Arts Dance Camp.

Whew.

Today I have got to do some serious resting as well as rehearsing and exercising.

1. Fact Sheet on U.S. “Constitution Free Zone” | American Civil Liberties Union

thank to Elizabeth for this link…. 

she put this info up on Facebooger: [Know Your Rights: Constitution Free Zone] Border Patrol has been setting up checkpoints inland — on highways in states such as California, Texas and Arizona, and at ferry terminals in Washington State. Typically, the agents ask drivers and passengers about their citizenship. Unfortunately, our courts so far have permitted these kinds of checkpoints – legally speaking, they are “administrative” stops that are permitted only for the specific purpose of protecting the nation’s borders. They cannot become general drug-search or other law enforcement efforts.

2. Tea Party hatches quiet-but-insane plot against democracy

Hope this doesn’t happen.

3. Phones in Subway: On Elevated Lines, Hear the Future – NYTimes.com

This is a very New York kind of feature story…

4. Israel’s Efforts to Limit Use of Holocaust Terms Raise Free-Speech Questions – NYT

Limiting speech fascinates and bugs me.

My piano trio had its last rehearsal before a hiatus. Our cellist, Dawn Van Ark, is having surgery on her hand for carpel tunnel syndrome. I found myself exhausted in the rehearsal so the idea of not having an afternoon Thursday commitment for a while had its momentary attraction. However, I also find the weekly rehearsal a source of delight and replenishment. So whatchagonnado?

Thinking about connecting with information online, I have been pondering  Ethan Zuckerman’s use of the word, maxima. He defines it as a sign of what’s popular at the moment for a particular population. This can be significant when first discovering a new idea. He cites a friend’s initial discovery of Bob Marley’s music.

His friend, David Arnold, is obsessed with the music. When asked how he first ran across it, he said he was in a record store and noticed a Reggae section. He didn’t recognize the genre and was interested in knowing more about it. He noticed that Marley had many records available and figured he might be a place to start.

This Zuckerman was saying is a kind of maxima experience.

Twitter trending can point to this sort of thing. It reminded me of when I search on Spotify and see the most popular tunes by a certain artist or composer, I often click on the popular ones to get an immediate sense of what is trending.

Of course this doesn’t work mindlessly. Recently I was checking out a group called Take Six.

When I spotified them, they’re most popular tunes were all Christmas tunes.

I figure this reflects recent trending, but didn’t show tunes by this group that were interesting. So I went down through their playlist and discovered they had some wonderful arrangements of some songs I admire like “Taking it to the streets” by Michael McDonald and “Don’t Give Up” by Peter Gabriel.

Zuckerman talks about maxima in terms of his examination of serendipity. (Here’s a link to an expanded lecture he gave in 2011 called “Desperately Seeking Serendipity.” I haven’t read it entirely yet and notice that he seems to quote from Rewire  or at least touches on some of the ideas).

The notion of how one comes in contact with significant new ideas and art is a tricky one that I keep pondering. I like to see that randomness is being factored in as essential. So many times I have had random hunches pay off.

It was randomly that I picked up my first vinyl records (at KMART of all places back in the 60s!!!) of the Doors and Leonard Cohen. I remember in both cases being intrigued solely by the album covers of Strange Days by the Doors

and Leonard Cohen’s first album.

It was strictly a happy accident.

So I made it through the first “hump day” of my winter schedule: Three ballet classes, prep for choir rehearsal and then rehearsal itself. I spent from 8:30 AM to 1 PM at the Dow where ballet classes are held. During my break from 10 AM to 11, I mostly practiced piano. I have been reading further through Scarlatti sonatas having purchased Longo’s eleven volume edition from my teacher, Craig Cramer. I am on volume seven. At this point, I am enjoying the music so much I am planning to just start over and read through them again when I finish. The only drawback to this edition is that it is heavily edited with superfluous articulations and dynamics which one must ignore. But I don’t see myself purchasing Kenneth Gilbert’s superior edition. A quick google seems to indicate it is also eleven volumes but is $130 a volume making it pricey.

Anyway, during my break yesterday I read some Scarlatti and then played Words with Friends (Facebooger’s Scrabble).

I don’t think I mentioned here that Sunday I had about twelve singers at Eucharist after only rehearsing with five the previous Wednesday. Last night, I had a full complement of singers again. It’s kind of relief, because with the exception of a couple people, singers were not indicating to me their intentions of whether they were going to continue with the choir. It may seem that I’m overreacting by wondering, but my experience is that people come and go in the choir at Grace without talking to me about their reasons or intentions. I look out on Sunday mornings and see numerous people who have sung in the choir and then just disappeared and never spoke to me. I think this is weird not to say rude, but try to factor it in when I plan.

So it looks like my list of choral anthems I have been putting together for this season will not need to be altered to fit a different group. That’s nice.

I skipped my treadmilling in order to preserve energy but did do some serious prep on the choir rehearsal, checking anthem tempos with mister metronome.

This all paid off with a solid rehearsal last night.

1. When There Was a Mock Plantation in Brooklyn – NYTimes.com

Okay this is really weird. This article is about a 1895 pretend Plantation set up in New York for people to wander like Greenfield Village in Dearborn. I only found the article because I was reading in the letters column where a writer had pointed out that New York did have a history of having slaves in the colonial period. I am always interested in the history of American slavery especially in areas where  it supposed was opposed like New York and my home state Michigan.

2. A Free Society Cannot Escape All Terrorism – Conor Friedersdorf – The Atlanti

This is one of many articles I have bookmarked to read lately. Its premise interests me: that the freedoms that are so dear to us also cost us in real terms about what can and cannot be prohibited.

I have always been disastrous at selling myself. Mostly I have been disinterested. I have grasped my personal pleasures in poetry, music and learning and proceeded. But in the age of appearances, I am at best an enigma, an original which defies easy categorization.

Actually I think I share defying categorization with all humans. We are each of us unique.

But it is the reductivity with which we are sometimes prone to view each other these days that confuses me. We want to understand each other in a reality show typology or how we fit in to advertisingl understandings of gender, beauty and intelligence.

This seems to leave little room for an person like myself who attempts to lead with the lamentable idea that ability and knowledge has its own value and reward.

But I am susceptible when ignored to a bit of reflection. Hence, the dubious self obsessed nature of this blog.

More and more I find myself losing interest in those around me whose preoccupations seem so narrow and who do not communicate to me a sense of clarity or even honesty. Not that I see myself as able to be clear or even trust my own honesty. It’s just that I blunder in with attempts. This often makes it worse so I try to temper my behavior and appear as calm and unthreatening as possible.

I had to attend a church meeting last night. At the end of a day of trying to take it easy, it unfortunately jazzed up this introvert so much so that when I came home I was unable to relax and slept badly. The meeting went fine. I just am unable to stop my brain from buzzing.

Teach me to care and not to care.

This from “Ash Wednesday.” I have set these words in a little cantata I wrote long ago.

1. Rap Lyrics on Trial – NYTimes.com

it is easy to conflate these artists with their art. It becomes easier still when that art reinforces stereotypes about young men of color — who are almost exclusively the defendants in these cases — as violent, hypersexual and dangerous

2. The Flood Next Time – NYTimes.com

Archeological impact of meteors and other cool stuff on the East Coast of the USA.

3. This Is Not About Texting: A Story of Movies, Men and Violence | Criticwire

A self confessional look at why men are stupidly violent and why they probably shouldn’t have a gun in their pocket.

4. The Rumpus Review Of Inside Llewyn Davis – The Rumpus

I’m a sucker for any review that uses the ouroboros.

5. The misuse of American might, and the price it pays – latimes.com

Bacevich knocks it out of the park once again.

For the United States, victory has become a lost art

It seems that in establishing brand names the complexity has proliferated to a comical degree. When I make up my grocery list, if I want to be sure to purchase a certain product, I can’t say simply ginger salad dressing. I have to begin with the “brand.” Then add subgroupings that the manufacturer has come up with like “honey mustard” and “yogurt.” Thus several designations are necessary to remind me to get the right dressing.

I was thinking about how this ends up devaluing language in a useless way, when it occurred to me to consider the word, “brand.” “Brand” is obviously both a verb and a noun. According to the OED (unless otherwise specified, all my info in this post comes the online Oxford English Dictionary), the first usage of “brand” in English occurred c950 in a translation of John 18:3. It means a “torch.” In the passage where the word is documented as being used, Judas is carrying a “brondum” (Old English) to guide himself and the soldiers he has tipped off as they make their way to arrest Jesus in the garden where he is praying.

The etymology is complex. But basically burn, brand and boil descend from Greek words for warm (thermos) and for spring as in a boiling up of water in a spring  (phrear).

I got this info from a combined use of the free online American Heritage Dictionary (which next to the paid online OED is useless) and also consulting my hard bound copy of the same.

I ran across the other useage of the word, “brand,” in The New American Jim Crow.

Four decades ago, employers were free to discriminate explicitly on the basis of race; today employers feel free to discriminate against those who bear the prison label—i.e., those labeled criminals by the state. The result is a system of stratification based on the ‘official certification of individual character and competence’—a form of branding by the government. The New American Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander, loc 3088, p 202

So the dehumanizing practice of burning an identifying mark on a human relates to the devaluing of language in a simple marketing tool. Wow. Some things to think about.

Good nonfiction authors often muse on and define limits for words they are using. Zuckerman in Rewire ponders the origin of the word, ‘serendipity.” Since Zuckerman is thinking about how our connections both to information and to each other are working these days, it’s not hard to see why he would be thinking about this word. He even goes further and advocates “designing for serendipity.” This intrigues me and I look forward to his further discussion in the book as I read it.

The OED confirms Zuckerman’s story about this word. It was coined by Horace Walpole in 1754

He did so in a letter he wrote referring to the fairy tale, “The Three Princes of Serendip” ” the heroes of which ‘were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of’.”

If you’re like me, you think if serendipity as a “happy accident.” Zuckerman tellingly points out that it has lost some its original resonance as also containing “sagacity.”

This sage or

this one?

Anyone who has done research in a physical library knows about “serendipity.” Searching the stacks for one book often leads to other books in the same vein which can be helpful.

I was recently commenting to the local college library that accessing their journals solely through the catalog did not enable me to browse the latest titles the way I used to be able to. Lost serendipity? Who knows.

After lunch yesterday, Eileen and I went down to Holland’s main drag where an ice sculpture show was being held. First we stopped in at a little coffee shop so Eileen could return carafes and stuff she had used recently for a “Literacy Hero” meeting at the library. As we stepped into the little shop, I began to realize how disconnected I was from the situation. I felt stifled by the seriousness of the baristas several of whom I have known for years. They treated me politely but distantly obviously very busy. As I glanced around, I found the bustling group of people odd. Young and vulnerable. I had a weird interior reaction like “don’t frighten the college people, jupe!” My extreme difference from them seemed a bit comical and sad. They were so connected to each other and their devices and their ongoing lives.

I am part of the history of this little shop. I remember when it first opened. I showed up with my guitar to sing and play and encourage the situation. Now I’m sort left in the dust of my rough edged approach. They are very very slick. The barista who waited on me used a new fangled pot they are selling to specially brew the coffee of the day I had ordered. This coffee by the way was excellent. On the blackboard it said it would have tastes of pipe tobacco and apple. Not sure about parsing the tastes but I did think it was good. I checked and couldn’t find the beans for sale. The shop has reduced the number of flavors of whole beans it sells to the public. The little packages they now sell are pretty pricey. The last one I bought there was $16.

I asked the barista if they had the beans for the special coffee for sale. He solemnly told me that they should but they were out. He apologized.

Oh well, finally figuring out that this guy was not going to smile at me, I sighed as Eileen and I left the shop to sip our excellent coffee and look at the melting ice sculptures.

I admit to a bit of bigotry about my attitude toward H0lland.

I seem to detect a strong sense of entitled calvinism  here. Once a visiting musician asked me where the more liberal coffee shops were in town. I said we don’t really have any. We have one that is right wing and one that is extremely right wing . It still seems this way to me, even though I do see the local white people as well meaning though naive.

Years ago (1987) when Eileen and I moved here, I was struck by the homogenous nature of the place.

Lots and lots of white people. Now it’s not quite that homogenous by skin color, but it still sort of feels insular in the way it sees and conducts itself.

I came home and purged my feelings of being suffocated by playing Scarlatti and Haydn on my old piano.

That helped a lot.

1. NSFW: #Ebony and #Ivory – The Brave New World of Online Self-Segregation | Tech

This blog post is four years old but I think it has something to say about self selecting one’s echo chamber. I cross posted this one to Facebooger. I got the reference from a footnote in Rewire by Zuckerman.

2. Ishmael Reed on the Life and Death of Amiri Baraka – Speakeasy – WSJ

Ihsmael Reed blog on the Wall Street Journal site Personal memories of Baraka.

3, The ‘I’ in Christie’s Storm – NYTimes.com

Ostensibly about the recent omnipresent Christie bridge scandal, Bruni has some interesting observation both philosophical and historical.

4. I Crashed the Wrong Shiva – NYTimes.com

Charming little story of the familiarity and distance of living with other people.

5. The Mixed Marriage – NYTimes.com

Author of a book about intimate cultural mixtures describes how she came to write it.

6. The 1890 Book I Had to Have – NYTimes.com

I love stories about books.

7. Colonial words: Everyday words whose meanings have changed since colonial times

I love articles about the history of words and phrases. Backlog, humble pie and more.

8. Dangerous Minds | Read vintage issues of ‘Synapse the Electronic Magazine’”

As far as I can tell this is the only index to these old mags. Fun articles on Zappa, Devo, Terry Riley, Brian Eno and others.

9. Nerdcore › The Wolf of Wall Street – Fucking Short Version

Stumbled across Nerdcore yesterday. It’s in mostly in German and seems to hail from Deutschland. I love this entry: ’The Wolf of Wall Street’ is the most fuck-filled non-documentary movie in the history of Hollywood. We counted 522 audible, intelligible fucks. (‘The Big Lebowski’ only had 260.)“

10. Ariel Sharon Never Changed – Bloomberg

A little different take on Sharon.

Yesterday did feel like a day of leisure and rest. I will have to pursue this kind of relaxation on days off in order to survive my winter schedule. Of course I plan to exercise and rehearse organ music daily no matter what.

I finished A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving yesterday. While reading his latest novel, In One Person, I read an interview in which he described the curious way he writes. He writes the last chapters first and then presumably backs up and writes to the ending. I found this distracting in Owen Meany because the story has a tight carefully contrived plot.

Meany is a diminutive person whose story is told by his friend the narrator, John. He is a bizarre figure of high intelligence. He speaks in a very high weird voice which Irving indicates with ALL CAPS. His voice as well as his pursuit of an ideal time in a basketball layup shot in super human times (assisted with a boost from John) all come to play in the denouement Irving has originally composed as the ending.

Knowing Irving’s technique is unhelpful in this book. It kept distracting me as the pieces of the mysterious plot fall into place.

I enjoyed the book, but liked In One Person more. In that case the denouement was gentler and I found myself drawn once again into the familiar cast of characters that Irving seems to keep rewriting.

I continue finding little nuggets in my other reading.

Like the hilarious and disturbing fact that there was a Russian 18th century peasant religious leader who misunderstood the Russian Bible translation tragically. Kondratii Selivanov misread Iskupitel’ (Redeemer) for Oskopitel’ (Castrator) when the New Testament speaks of Jesus and also mistook God’s command to the Israelites to be fruitful (in Russian, plodites’) for “castrate yourselves’ (plotite’). This has disastrous results and his male followers cut off their genitals and women’s breasts. Yikes!

This was from McCulloch’s Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years. I also learned that when Christian priests bless holding up two fingers this can symbolize the two natures of Christ. The patriarch, Nikon, tried to change this by insisting that 17th century Russian priests begin holding up three fingers to symbolize the Trinity. Didn’t work.

It also interested me when Charles Taylor quoted Matthew Arnold’s definition of “Culture” (with a capital “C” presumably).

Culture, Arnold says, is “a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world; and through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits, which we now follow staunchly and mechanically.”

As Taylor meticulously and fascinatingly makes his argument that contemporary secular humanism and religious pluralism in the West is a logical outcome of the history of Christianity, he makes this interesting point:

We live in an extraordinarily moral culture, measured against the norm of human history, in which suffering and death, through famine, flood, earthquake, pestilence or war, can awaken world-wide movements of sympathy and practical solidarity. Granted, of course, that this is made possible by modern media and modes of transportation, not to speak of surpluses. These shouldn’t blind us to the importance of the cultural-moral change. The same media and means of transport don’t awaken the same response everywhere; it is disproportionately strong in ex-Latin Christendom.

Let us grant also the distortions produced by media hype and the media-gazer’s short attention span, the way dramatic pictures produce the strongest response, often relegating even more needy cases to a zone of neglect from which only the cameras of CNN can rescue them. Nevertheless, the phenomenon is remarkable. The age of Hiroshima and Auschwitz has also produced Amnesty International and Médecins Sans Frontièrs.

 

Canceled our cable TV and land line yesterday.

We watched News Hour on the computer. We caught the tail end of the program. Obviously we could watch the whole thing online, but we just let the stream play. At the end of the program, moderator Jeffrey Brown interviews author, Kate DiCamillo, recently appointed “U.S. Ambassador for Young People’s Literature.”

What a pompous title! I was thinking about this interview this morning as I was doing my morning reading. When confronted with Brown’s thoughtful and penetrating questions, DiCamillo talked like a politician as she gingerly “framed” her answers. Whether asking her about the relative value of recommending one children’s book as more edifying than another or the impact of technology (video games, computers) upon children, Brown listened as DiCamillo danced around giving real answers to these questions and repeating her “talking points” of about the “power of story.”

PROPAGANDA AMERICAN STYLE

***********************************************************

What a sorry spectacle to my way of thinking! I suspect DiCamillo had interesting answers to Brown’s questions, but instead she pounded home her “message.” Once again, conversation around ideas is supplanted by a propaganda approach to thinking. Good grief.

Eileen has met DiCamillo. We were just talking about this program and I said to Eileen that DiCamillo seemed like an interesting person trying not to be interesting. I’m not suggesting that “story” is not important in this context. What I am saying is that the obviousness of DiCamillo’s prepared responses changed the conversation, made it less interesting to me, and needlessly limited the range of ideas in the exchange.

I guess it’s discouraging because it is the dance so many politicians and leaders make when confronted with a camera and a microphone that contributes to the blandness and hypocrisy of our public rhetoric.

Jes sayin.

So we are now Steve and Eileen are without cable and land line.

Our cable/phone/internet  bill had gradually skyrocketed to almost $200 a month (!). When I called to cancel, the operator immediately offered to lower the bill to $99 for the same services with a 12 month contract. Eileen and I talked it over and decided to only pay for what we wanted to use. Supposedly this will be around $75 a month with no contract (this is just high speed internet).

We figure we can watch TV programs we are interested in online. Last night Eileen ended the evening watching a British soap/detective show online via our Netflix subscription we have been watching: Jack Frost.

It’s dopey but it’s a dated 90s police procedural show that Eileen can stand (me too apparently). Actually I attempted to read while it was playing, but mostly dozed.

We are changing our patterns of living as we move toward Eileen’s retirement. She seems happier each day. Yesterday she not only did the grocery shopping for me, she made cookies for a party for her “literacy heroes” at the library today.

She also did all of the dishes so when I got up this morning, I didn’t do my usual routine of washing dishes while I waited for my coffee water to boil.

Things are changing!

I don’t have much on my mind this morning besides trying to get to class on time. As usual I’m not sure which studio I am assigned. But I do know the teacher (or think I do). I will easily figure it out once I get over there. As this week ends I feel that I have done the things I meant to get done. I spent Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday preparing for the first choir rehearsal of this season. I managed to get the Marimba part of my Pentecost suite ready and dropped it off to Rhonda yesterday. Last night I met Eileen at work and suggested we have a “date night,” something we haven’t done in a while. Checked on my Mom.  Practiced organ and piano. Did some reading.

So it’s been a productive week. But I admit to feeling a bit disconnected from stuff. My view of life is filtered through my own little sense of what is important (people, music, thinking,ideas). This seems out of step with so much around me.

In my dream last night, I was playing in an ensemble. The piece I think we were preparing to record was in three movements. I was rehearsing with another keyboard player, younger than me. I couldn’t figure out where we were in the score. I wasn’t even sure I had the right score. The other player kept playing and smiling at me. When I looked closely at our music, it was actually laid out in pictures like a graphic novel. Then I saw mentions of my family in the score and I knew I was looking at the wrong music. The other player treated me with disdain. I remember thinking at this point that he saw me as a incompetent old man. And indeed I was confused in the dream. I kept asking him what page we were on. He never answered.

The difference between the dream and my morning mood is that I don’t mind that much if I’m not on other people’s page or radar.

It will probably be good for me to return to the ballet classroom, a place I find that I belong and am appreciated as much as any place.

It does seem to help me to spend time where what I am doing matters for the moment to the people around me. Plus a brisk walk in the winter morning will be reviving.

The title to this post is a quote from a William Berry Sabbath poem I was reading this morning. It fits my mood as well.

I spent most of the day at church yesterday. I laid out the 13 anthems I had chosen the day before, put them in order by the needed assigned slot number. This took an hour or so. Then I took each singer’s folder, emptied it of the old stuff and then put in the new in order. Then I filed everything. Whew. Quite a bit of work but glad to get it done. I spent some time at the organ working on upcoming anthem accompaniments and preludes and postludes.

Unsurprisingly I only had five of about fifteen members show up last night. The trick with low commitment and poor attendance is to make sure that the people who do bother to show still enjoy the experience and find it rewarding. I let them go early last night after some intense rehearsal on the next two Sunday’s anthems.

It seems that many of the people I work with at church spread themselves thinner and thinner over several commitments, often right at church. Last night was also movie night at church. When I left there were still cars in the parking lot and I knew that at least one of my singers was at the movie night instead of rehearsal.

Some see this weird kind of behavior as endemic in our society right now. People say they will participate and then miss many of the events. I often ask myself how people can see themselves as part of something without bothering to show up. I have even had volunteers in the past become indignant when I suggested if they wanted to be in a certain music group they would need to show up.

I can’t help but suspect that part of this phenomenon is that people understand music and art less and less as a discipline and more and more as magic that comes to them at the punch of button. Or maybe I’m just missing something.

However, I felt good about having all that work done in preparation even though most of the choir opted out of rehearsal. The anthem for this Sunday sounded pretty good with only five singers as did the one for the next Sunday. But if this attendance continues I will probably have to adjust selections away from four part anthems and more to anthems like we will do the next two weeks which are cleverly written to sound good with a handful of singers.

1.Africans Continue to Protest in Israel – NYTimes.com

some celebrity chefs and cafe owners have come out in support of their striking workers, serving customers meals on paper plates

The fact that chefs and cafe owners do this strikes me as simultaneously condescending and supportive. No mean feat.

2. The Brain, in Exquisite Detail – NYTimes.com

I love it that the writer of this article uses a poem by Wallace Stevens as a kind of hinge of his article.

3. Remarks by President Clinton at One Strike Crime Symposium 1996 , President Clinton’s 1996 State of the Union Address as delivered , memo from clinton on One strike and you’re out to HUD secretary 1996

These links demonstrate that the incredible damage being done by “One Strike and You’re Out” laws and rules can be traced to good old Clinton. Michelle Alexander makes this point in her book The New American Jim Crow which is as disturbing as it is insightful.

The chair of the ballet department emailed me to be sure I knew that Hope was closed due to low temps and snow. It turns out that when an instructor showed me a list of classes she wanted to know if I would be willing to play for, our discussion was all the confirmation I was going to get as to my schedule this term. Good grief.

So I’m sitting in my house wondering what my schedule will be and even contemplating that they might not ask me back (hey, it could happen, I’m totally on a contractual basis having received no overt reassurance that I have an ongoing relationship with the ballet department). And the chair of the department thinks I’ve been lined up to accompany certain classes this term.

I replied to the chair’s disconcerting inquiry (she must not know that all people employed by Hope are on the email list of updates), and pointed out that I wasn’t sure what classes I playing for this term. She replied in a panic that there must have been a miscommunication and gave me the list.

So I will be doing three classes a day on Monday and Wednesday and one of Friday. That seems doable.

I cleared off Eileen’s car yesterday and started it for her. This doesn’t seem like such a big deal but we have been hit with weather here in Western Michigan so it was.

I then proceeded to snow blow the drive and the sidewalk. This was the first time I had used Eileen’s snowblower. It was so cold I had to keep coming in and warming up in order to feel my extremities.

Then I was off to put gas in the car and pick up coffee beans. I arrived at church and then the fun began. I spent the day trying to figure out what organ music to play the next two weeks and what choral anthems to use for the next few months. For some reason I couldn’t land on stuff and It was a long frustrating day. Then I discovered that I had omitted preparing this Sunday’s psalm (this is now a weekly task for me — to choose an Anglican chant and make a version of it that indicates to the congregation how to sing it).

So at the end of my day, I had to come home and do this Sunday’s psalm.

I was surprised that running the snow blower made me sore.

It was a lot of frozen snow that I had to force it through. Maybe that’s why I was sore. Or maybe I’m just old and out of shape.

Anyway, I’m dialing it down a bit at church, choosing material for the choir that takes into account the dwindling numbers and erratic commitment of many of the singers. I don’t know if I mentioned here how stressed I was on Xmas eve. I looked at the choir and saw a combination of people that I had never seen before at one time.  I had to spend extra time teaching parts and working on balance and we started Xmas eve late. Oy.

I did eventually chose organ music by David Johnson and Andrew Clarke for this Sunday.

The prelude by Johnson is based on the opening hymn, Salzburg. The postlude by Clarke is based on the closing hymn, Deus Tuorum Militum. I like it when I can do that: connect to the immediate proximate hymns with the prelude and postlude.

I was looking at poet Michael Robbins blog yesterday. He linked in a review he has written recently of Molly Worthen’s Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelism. I wouldn’t have clicked through to read it except that his link was
The Worst Thing About Conservative Evangelicals Is That They Encourage Clowns Like Richard Dawkins to which he charming appended a comment that it was “not the title I would have given the piece.”

Anyway, about halfway through he mentions that he is reading a book I am reading, The Secular Age by Charles Taylor and then quotes from it.

Cool.

I was surprised to receive a Facebooger message from Yun Kim (pictured above) yesterday thanking me for my “beautiful write-up”in TAO (“The American Organist”)  in my review of her presentation/recital. I bewilderedly picked up a copy of TAO laying around and lo and behold there it was under the Chapter News reports. How about that? I would link it in for you but The American Guild of Organists seems to be living  in the 19th century and doesn’t make it’s stuff available online. When I see organizations doing this, I figure they are hurrying themselves into irrelevance.

If one completely restricts access these days, I figure it won’t be too long until you and your ideas wither from lack of interest since there are tons of people in line to connect while you are dithering. – Jupe

I love quoting myself. Especially when I just made up the quote.

Finally, some poetry.

I was reading Wendell Berry yesterday (thank you Mark for the beautiful collection of his poetry you gave me for Xmas!). I ran across this.

If we have become a people incapable
of thought, then the brute-thought
of mere power and mere greed
will think for us.
If we have become incapable
of denying ourselves anything,
then all that we have
will be taken from us.
If we have no compassion,
we will suffer alone, we will suffer
alone the destruction of ourselves.
These are merely the laws of this world
as known to Shakespeare, as known to Milton.
When we cease from human thought,
a low and effective cunning
stirs in the most inhuman minds.
-Wendell Berry, This Day:Collected and New Sabbath Poems, p. 273

and this

I know I am getting old and I say so,
but I don’t think of myself as an old man.
I think of myself as a young man
with unforeseen debilities. Time is neither
young or old, but simply new, always
counting, the only apocalypse. And the clouds
—no mere measure or geometry, no cubism,
can account for clouds, or satisfactorily, for bodies.
There is no science for this, or art either.
Even the old body is new—who has known it
before?—and no sooner new than gone, to be
replaced by a body yet older and again new.
The clouds are rarely absent from our sky
in this humid valley, and there is a sycamore
that I watch as, growing on the riverbank,
It forecloses the horizon, like the years
of an old man. And you, who are as old
almost, as I am, I love as I loved you
young, except that, old, I am astonished
at such a possibility, and am duly grateful.
-Wendell Berry, This Day:Collected and New Sabbath Poems, p. 267

Then for some reason (possibly still pondering yesterday’s blog ideas) I wrote these two poems.

i.
I think of you as I wipe my ass.
You were a mess, but that’s not why.
I remember sitting on your back porch
looking over the stagnant man made lake.
You bitched. You complained about people
who use too much toilet paper.
“Why can’t they use less?”

A few years later you were at my door.
Begging for some cash
to buy your pissed off wife
a birthday present.
Pissed off with good reason.
I gave you all I had,
thought it was mostly change.

ii.
I think of you when I use my french press.
“I could never do that,” you said.
“Too messy.
I know myself too well.”

Now you are gone from life.
You got angry at me
stood up and walked away.

I still think of you
and wonder how you’re doing.

I showed them to Eileen. She reminded me she “doesn’t like poetry,” but she still smiled.

Post Blog note: Eileen had to go to work today, so I have spent the last hour digging out the car. I am cold.

I have been pondering two extreme aspects of my life lately:

barriers

and connections.

I see barriers between me and other people. The first one is death.

Many people I have known are now dead. I think of the ones who were younger than me who died usually as a result of their own actions, drugs, lifestyle choices (as they say), accidents. Some of them I know are dead, others I presume are.

Then there are other people who seem to have deliberately cut me out of their lives. Very odd. But it takes to two to tango (as they also say). In some cases people have cut me off due to their anger or disapproval of me. I have watched a friend stomp out of my kitchen never to connect with me again. I have others in my past who were once very close who now will have nothing to do with me for whatever reason. My main reaction besides a touch of sorrow is “whippy skippy.”

Finally there are those who keep me at arm’s length emotionally. They are reluctant to connect with me honestly, again for whatever reason. I find these people sort of sad, but figure there’s not much I can do about it if I am invisible in their world.

Whew. I don’t mean all this to be as negative as it sounds.

I mention this stuff as a prelude to my amazing life now.

First there are the basics. I have an amazing life with my wife, Eileen. I am very lucky to live with someone who loves me and is patient with my passions.

I also have the amazing ability to continually connect with the rest of my fam beginning with my two daughters and son who are scattered around the world.

Though a lot of this is due to their good will, it is expedited by the Interwebs for sure.

This brings me to my insight that at this stage in my life I am living at a time in which humans connect to each other and knowledge in an increasingly exponential way.

If you read my blog regularly you know that I am constantly dabbling in the resources available to me online: Oxford English Dictionary, numerous academic journals, music scores.

Then there are the people connections. Facebooger and Twitter pop to mind.

This morning I ran across a  couple more via my reading of Ethan Zuckerman’s Rewire.

First, there’s Härnu,

Härnu is apparently Swedish for “here and now.”

I’m logged in right now on it. Jerome from the Netherlands and Logan from Texas have both just said hello as they logged on. It remains to be seen just what in the world this social network will mean for me. But right now I think it’s kind of cool and will follow it for a bit.

Then there’s Quora.

Wikipedia says that “Quora is a question-and-answer website where questions are created, answered, edited and organized by its community of users.”

The disconcerting thing is that it seemed to “know” who I was when I began indicating my own areas of interest.

I’m logged into it also right now. Again I’m sort of laying low as I figure out stuff. I did connect to daughter Elizabeth (and several others who seem to use this website that I already know). That’s cool.

At this point in my sixty two years, I feel like I am standing in a doorway and looking out onto a vast changing amazing world which is beckoning humans into better connections with each other.

Connections that could open up their heads and lives in ways unimaginable.

Hey. It could happen.

Eileen helped me do some of my church work yesterday morning. She stripped up three pages of the 3rd movement of the Marimba part to my  Pentecost Suite for Marimba and Organ. This means that she literally cut the Marimba part out of a score and taped it line at a time on a piece of paper to be photocopied. She also helped me collate and stuff the new anthem I have chosen for next Sunday. This saved me some time. I did my usual prep for Sundays while she was working on these tasks.

In the afternoon I discovered that Saturdays might not be the best choice to visit Meijer. It didn’t take me long to pick out my purchases, but the lines were amazing stretching back into the store’s clothes department.  Next time, earlier in the day or a different day.

I am feeling more rested today. Hopefully I can use the next two days to prepare for the second half of the choral season at church and also get some rest in.

1. Five myths about the cloud – The Washington Post

Many of the people that I envision possibly reading this blog would not be surprised by many of these myths. But it is an entertaining article.

“The cloud” is just a metaphor; nothing actually happens in the sky.

2. Emergency Visits Seen Increasing With Health Law – NYTimes.com

This seems counterintuitive until one realizes that ER visits make up a small amount of overall Medical costs and that all services are experiencing an increase due to more access: When services are made affordable, people use them more. Once again the simple rhetoric fails in the face of a little examination.

it’s very important that we provide coverage for all people because if everybody’s got coverage, then they’re not going to the emergency room for treatment.” President Obama, 2009

3. Indoctrinating Religious Warriors – NYTimes.com

I like Charles Blow’s article, but I especially liked this comment in the comment section, a plea for turning down the dial of intensity in the rhetoric.

I have read and listened closely to what the other side believes, and while a goodly portion of it is generated by the echo chamber of a conservative, quasi religious PR machine, there are far, far too many extremely intelligent people who maintain right wing, faith based positions despite plentiful access to contradictory information.The polarization between sides escalates as both sides demonize the other. I find myself unable to dismiss so many genuinely committed and caring people of conservative persuasion as pathological. They are completely aware of the denigrating ways progressives speak of them, and all the insults only serve to convince them even more that we are immoral, hateful, evil people who treat others with contempt. Go read the blog Red State, and hear how “intolerant” and “elitist” we progressives are. They feel the sting of the degrading ways we speak of them and many feel hopeless of ever reconciling the division. They definitely do not feel “heard” by us, never mind respected. Can we dial back the rhetoric a bit, listen instead, and see what happens?

4. Not Getting Their Money’s Worth – NYTimes.com

Cogent arguments against the scourge of privatization.

But for all the research and recommendations, nothing much is happening in Congress or the administration, in part because the status quo is lucrative for powerful corporations and big campaign donors, and is entrenched by the revolving door between government agencies and private-sector contractors.

5. Madagascar – Election Results Released – NYTimes.com

Madagascar fascinates me. Great quote:

If Mr. Rajaonarimampianina, above, is officially declared the winner, he will be the head of state with the longest family name, at 19 letters, according to a survey by the British newspaper The Guardian. His full name is Hery Martial Rakotoarimanana Rajaonarimampianina.

6. Hoping That ‘Llewyn Davis’ Sounds Like a Best Picture – NYTimes.com

I have noticed in the trailer that the music itself is interesting. Plan to listen to the soundtrack.

I had a ton of stuff I needed to do yesterday but went into a bit of a tailspin instead. For some reason this has not been a very restful break for me. Probably mostly my own doing. Although it was Xmas at church fer chrissakes. This morning I am feeling rested and balanced. But yesterday I had to force myself to do what little tasks I could muster (like finally balancing our checkbook and paying some bills).

I spent a lot of time seeking solace in Bach. I played through all of the 15 two part inventions and the first six three part inventions. I repeated the three part inventions several times which is my wont these days when rehearsing: repetition entrenches learning for me more and more.

I just checked and Hope classes begin next Tuesday. As usual they have not contacted me about what classes they need me to be pianist for. I’m hoping to limit it to Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. That worked pretty well last semester. That way I wouldn’t have classes until Wednesday. This leaves me a couple more days to prepare for the winter choral season.

I did spend some time looking at anthems for this period.  I was able to see that it won’t be hard to come to final decisions about what to have the choir sing between now and Holy Week (this is the time period I am shooting for…. may plan more if I get the oomph going a bit better).

Part of my problem is I am still fighting a pretty persistent cold. Symptoms alternate daily, but the cough persists.

Eileen seems to be doing great, easing into a better schedule for herself. Only one more month of work and then she is retired. I think she is doing the right thing and hope her quality of life will improve.

It seems that my organ at church has been releathered. The technician called me yesterday to say he had completed the job and the organ was ready to use. I scheduled pieces that are mostly manuals (no pedal) so that I could prepare them at the piano. I was so down yesterday that I didn’t bother getting in the car and going over and rehearsing Sunday’s organ stuff on the organ.

Instead I drove to the library and looked for books.

I wanted to find Neil Gaiman’s Fortunately, the milk. 

The online card catalog said it was sitting on shelf, but I couldn’t find it. An enterprising young librarian figured out that one of the workers had taken it home and not bothered to click whatever box one needed to click to indicate that it was being reviewed by staff.

Oh well.

I did find Me and the Devil Blues: The Unreal Life of Robert Johnson by Akira Hiramoto. I have been eying this for a while at the library. It is an indulgence read for me, but what the heck.

It is a “manga” graphic novel so one has to progress from right to left in reading it. This means that the first panel to read is always the furthest right. It took me a bit to catch on. Even though the above panel seems to be the French version of this book, you can get an idea of what it’s like.

Profiles in Injustice: Why Racial Profiling Cannot Work by David A. Harris was sitting on shelf as the online catalog promised, so I checked it out even though it’s kind of dated (published in 2002).

Such Sweet Thunder: Views on Black American Music edited by Mark Baszak was waiting for me on the interlibrary loan shelf.

My copy of Rat Bohemia by Sarah Schulman arrived in the mail as well. This is one of those paperbackswap books. I read several chapters yesterday. Unsurprisingly Schulman’s prose and ideas are just as interesting in her fiction as they were in Gentrification of the Mind. Speaking of this last title, I gave it as a gift to several people I know this Christmas. So far no one has said anything to me about besides thank you. I am wondering how these people will react to a good strong dose of Queer Theory especially as applied to the AIDS plague. I think Schulman’s great otherwise I wouldn’t have chosen to give her book as a gift.

Comcast was down for several hours this morning. I sat and read. I made a list of things to look up later.

This book was mentioned in Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow. Even though it was published some years ago, I thought it sounded interesting. I just interlibrary-loaned a copy to look at.

Another Alexander book. It’s sitting on the shelf at the local library. I’ll probably go check it out later today.

Correspondances, poem by Charles Baudelaire

Charles Taylor mentioned this poem by Baudelaire  in his A Secular Age. I have a copy of the poem, but only in French. The link is to both the French and a translation.

Then I ran across this word in Taylor:

Néant

It means “nothingness.” But I waited until the interweb returned before looking it up. It is the word that Sarte uses in the original French title of Being and Nothingness =  L’Être et le néant : Essai d’ontologie phénoménologique.

This is another book in Charles Taylor footnotes. It’s sitting over at Hope College. Maybe I’ll stop over and get it, if the college library is open today.

All this adds up to me feeling very dependent on the interwebs.

Yikes. I am pretty exhausted this morning. Yesterday Eileen and I took Mark’s car to him. He had left it here Tuesday to be repaired. We drove it over and traded it for Mom’s car which he had borrowed. We had clear roads between here and Lansing despite the snow storms that hit the east side of the state.

My organ at church is still not up and running yet. I went over yesterday and there were no workers working on it. It wouldn’t start up.  I rehearsed with my piano trio before picking up Mark’s car to return to him. By the end of the evening I was pretty tired as I am now.

I was hoping to feel more rested at the end of the Xmas break before resuming my schedule. I began working on the list of choral anthems for the next season yesterday. I have a working list of pieces that takes me up to Holy Week now. I will be refining that in the next few days. That’s an important task.

I wish I wasn’t quite so exhausted as I face a resumption of my usual schedule.

1. Old Rivalries Reignited a Fuse in South Sudan – NYTimes.com

Still a mess in S. Sudan.

2. Drawn Back Into Iraq – NYTimes.com

Letter writer, Stuart Gottlieb, sees President Obama’s failure to negotiate a presence to ensure peace in Iraq as a fatal flaw in his presidency.

3. The Obamacare We Deserve – NYTimes.com

Wow. Micheal Moore CAN make sense.

4. Florida Law on Drug Tests for Welfare Is Struck Down – NYTimes.com

Compulsory testing for all on welfare, that is.

5. Old Rivalries Reignited a Fuse in South Sudan – NYTimes.com

Still about oil.

6. Consumers Start Using Coverage Under Health Law – NYTimes.com

The Republicans seem to have lost this battle. Hard to call it back once it’s going.

7. Kate DiCamillo to Be Ambassador of Young People’s Literature – NYTimes.com

Cool beans. Author to be spokesperson.

8. 2014/1975 Marvel Desktop Wallpaper Calendar | Andertoons Cartoon Blog

What goes around comes around. Recommended for Marvel fans.

I truly had a day off yesterday. Eileen said I still seemed stressed.

But I attempted to spend the day relaxing, reading and practicing. It was Schubert and Louis Couperin I played for fun. My sister-in-law, Leigh, an accomplished musician, was talking about a Schubert piano sonata movement that was the theme song for Wings.  We looked at it together while she was here. It turns out to be a sonata by Schubert I don’t know very well (A major, composed in 1828, D. 959), although my markings indicate that I have played through the entire sonata before.

So I spent the day with this sonata yesterday. I especially like the slow second movement. I alternated reading the Groves online Schubert entry and doing Words with Friends (Scrabble with people online) on Facebooger.

I also returned to my beloved Louis Couperin or “Uncle” Louie as Ray Ferguson used to call him. ”

Uncle” because his nephew. François is much better known.

I learned to play both men’s works on the harpsichord. Now my harpsichord is not working and I sorely miss the literature.

Yesterday I told myself  that Glen Gould says the piano is a perfect medium for the Baroque.

Gould concentrated on Bach the German Baroque, of course. But why not the French Baroque as well? It’s probably a rationalization to allow me some time with music I love and miss.

Last night after I took my shower, I was looking for my Kindle. I realized that I had left it in the car and opted to use the Kindle Cloud Reader.

This morning I got up and started my morning reading with the Cloud Reader as well not wanting to venture out into the cold quite yet.

I am trying to finish up some of the books on my Kindle and have been trying to read each morning from Rewire by Zuckerman, New American Jim Crow by Alexander and Christianity by McCulloch. This morning I finished a section in Zuckerman and tried to find the other two in my online cloud reader. They weren’t there. Oh, that’s right. My brother gave me copies of them so they are not Amazon legal. Shoot. Oh well, I have plenty other things to read on this cold 2014 morning.

It looks like today is a day with no scheduled events or responsibilities. Ahhhhh. I know that I have been up too close to my work and jobs lately. Today will be a welcome day off.

I stumbled onto an extraordinary mind on C Span last night. Paul Chappell is amazing.

He is a West Point grad and an Iraqi veteran who has a brilliant take on how humans relate to violence and war. He is writing a seven book series on the topic. He is lucid and informative. Bingo. On the list of books to read go his titles. From what I heard on C Span, he has insights about how the brain works, trauma, and the unnaturalness of violence and its deleterious effects not only on the victims of war, but on the perpetrators.  Mindblowing stuff.

I played a New Year’s eve party at a nursing home yesterday. I was exhausted but found it revitalizing to have contact with about twenty people in wheelchairs. They started out very quiet, but after some cajoling, thawed and became much more animated. Before the hour was up, I had shook hands with all of them and teased them about New Year’s resolutions and whether or not they could recognize the tunes I played for them.

One lady called out that she recognized every one so far. So I challenged her to identify the next one I played which was “Harlem Nocturne.”

She told met he melody was familiar but she didn’t know the name of it. When I told her, she said, “Well, no wonder.” Not sure what to make of her response.

I did play some hymns and Christmas carols. Finished up with Auld Lang Syne. One of the listeners was a man whose hands were badly twisted (arthritis?). He talked loudly for the whole hour expressing opinions and making requests. He said he used to play the piano but now can only play harmonica.

Yesterday, I looked up Bach’s cantatas for New Year’s (BWV 190, 41, 16, 171, 143,248/4, 134a). The feast in his liturgical cycle was “The Circumcision of Christ.” I listened to several of them yesterday and will probably put more on today.

1. The Lives They Lived 2013 – NYTimes.com

Annual magazine of stories about people who died the past year. Memorable for telling stories that don’t make the obits. Glimpses of extraordinary people.

2. Writers Desperately Seeking Readers – NYTimes.com

Letters on a recent article. I loved this quote from Mark Slouka:

Art is a supremely individual expression. It doesn’t ask permission; it doesn’t take an exit poll and adjust accordingly. Artists say what they know, paint what they see — they have no choice in the matter — and it’s our privilege to be brought into their world, so distinct from our own, and to be altered by that experience.

Once artists start asking how many “likes” they’ve garnered, or listening to customer-satisfaction surveys to increase their sales, they’re no longer making art; they’re moving product.

3. Laws Deserve More Than Those Cute Names – NYTimes.com

Liptak demonstrates how reductive names for laws contribute to reductive understandings of them even by judges. Another excellent quote in this article from George Orwell:

In his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell saw where things were heading. “Political language,” he wrote, “is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

4. Haunted by a Disappearance – NYTimes.com

Jennifer Finney Boylan is an amazing writer and person. This article is worth reading just for its quality.

My sister-in-law and brother gave me This Day: New & Collected Sabbath Poems 1979-2012 by Wendell Berry for Xmas. I was reading the preface this morning and came across a sentiment with which I identify: Berry writes “I am an amateur poet, writing for the love of the work and to my own satisfaction.”

I have felt this way about music, being an amateur. When I say “amateur” I hear the etymology (which I just checked to verify on the OED) of the Latin. I don’t know my latin declensions but the OED says it is derived from amatorem which combines to love (amare) with the suffix -em (of agent).

Agent of love. I like that.

I feel like I am in love with music. Most days it can refresh me and pull me back to my true self when I sit at the piano and play Bach, Beethoven or other composers. Every time I get in the zone of composing I am revived.

Berry talks about walking “on the best of sabbath days” experiencing “a lovely freedom from expectations.” This loosening of expectation is related to the arena of doing art. Berry’s “mind becomes hospitable to unintended thoughts,” “inspiration.” Then he observers “poems come incidentally or they do  not come at all. If the Muse leaves me alone, I leave her alone.”

This is an excellent encapsulation of that moment of relationship between the creator/thinker and the next step or action one takes. It relates to “just playing” that musical performers aspire to. That is, only playing, nothing else like thinking or consciously directing one’s performing self.

“The best inspiration often came while walking. Beethoven always took a pencil and paper with him in the Vienna Woods, and Kierkegaard often came home and started scribbling again still in his hat and coat.”

When I read this sentence recently in a book review by Christopher Hart, I thought first of Brahms who walked daily to compose.

Then I thought of my own experience with receiving ideas as I walked.

Church went well yesterday. The crowd was a bit bigger than one might expect for the Sunday after Christmas. The scariest moment was probably the psalm. I think this is the first time we have sung an Anglican chant congregationally without choir support. It seemed to work. It’s kind of hard to tell when one is attempting to guide the group through the changes of a double chant.

As I launched into the postlude, the congregation predictably became much much noisier.

The secretary had neglected to put the correct postlude in the bulletin. Instead she somehow retained the postlude from Christmas Eve 2012 which gives you an idea of what template she was using for this Sunday’s bulletin. So in the bulletin it said “In Dir ist Freude” by Bach. But I played Charles Ore’s playful setting of “Go Tell It on the Mountain” which was yesterday’s sequence hymn.

It’s difficult to register this particular piece of music much above a solid forte on my organ. It calls for very high sounds in the pedal so the feet can play the melody while the hands play a sort of  two part ragtime obbligato duet over it.

So my work of preparation of this sort of tricky piece was quickly drowned out. But I didn’t mind that  much.

After I finished the piece I was relieved that another service was over and I could trudge home.

But a small delicate elderly lady from our parish ambled over to the console and said, “I want to hear that again.” I thanked her thinking it was a sort of compliment. She said, “No, I’m serious. I’d like to hear you play that again.”

I said, “I’d be glad to play it again for you.”

I was put in mind of the story my now deceased teacher, Ray Ferguson, would tell about one Easter morning at his Detroit congregational church. After his fancy postlude, a visitor came up and told him that he was disappointed that Ray had not played the famous Widor toccata. In fact, that was one of the reasons he had chosen to come to church that day. Ray sat down and played it for him.

I aspire to such graciousness and gladly replayed the little Ore piece. I played it better the second time.

And I felt weirdly satisfied to know that someone had listened to it.

This is kind of tricky. You can’t really perform just for the listeners.

That turns into a different musical game of pleasing people which can quickly destroy the musical moment. But the listener has a part to play in the whole dance of musicking. If they don’t do their part something is missing. When they do listen like the lady who requested a replay, it makes the music better somehow.

1.Beware the wrath of the church organist – musical revenge is sweet – Telegraph

I need to amend my comments yesterday about anachronistic American organists. You may recall that I was bemoaning the unrealistic bemoaning in the letters column of an old AGO mag I was reading. Last night as I was describing another article to my brother who is visiting, I realized that Eileen Guenther had provided a more playful take on mixing styles by quoting in full the article linked above  in her monthly president’s column. It talks about organists sneaking in music that is not usually considered appropriate to worship services. Hey. I bet she did that on purpose to balance the pompous discussion taking place in the letters column of the same issue. Far out, dude.

2.A Deadly Mix in Benghazi – The New York Times

The New York Times has weighed in with an investigative piece on the Benghazi tragedy where someone truly dropped the ball and we lost people needlessly. I think the article exhibits a clear even hand as far as it goes. Of course within hours the right wing press had reacted:

House Intelligence chair: Benghazi attack ‘Al Qaeda-led event’ | Fox News

This Fox news report doesn’t contain any new information that I can find. I tried to run down one of the sources called Agincourt Solutions and found it a bit mysterious. I have a tendency to double check dubious claims and find the source of them. In this case, the executive officers of this social media traffic analyzers are not mentioned on the web site. In fact, there are no names of people on the web site or where it is based out of or sponsored by as far as I could see. I managed to run down the two top people behind it. One of them is a former intelligence officer with a very low online profile (sooprise) the other has three degrees from BYU which sort of makes you think he’s probably in the reaction camp of politics, but you never know.

Times Ignores Evidence of Al Qaeda Link to Benghazi | The Weekly Standard

Unsurprisingly, The Weekly Standard is a little more coherent in their attack on the NYT article. A quick check of  this morning’s http://www.realclearpolitics.com/ reveals what looks like another reactive article. http://www.nytimes.com/ doesn’t have any defense on the top of this morning’s website (what one might think of as the cyber equivalent of “above the fold”) and a quick glance of the online version of today’s published issue shows no immediate reaction to the reaction.

Maybe this will blow over, but the right has played their usual distortional havoc with Benghazi and the NYT which is (wrongly) perceived as an inaccurate voice of journalism and only a leftist propaganda machine will probably only fan the flames with those pesky little things: facts.