Yesterday church was a bit off kilter for me.

I had scheduled “The King of Love” by Edward Bairstow. This is a hoary old anglican type choir/organ piece. I have been working on with with the choir for weeks, but rehearsal attendance has been sporadic. I had a completely different group on Sunday than in any rehearsal in the last month.

This group is used to pulling itself together at the last minute and then singing very loudly. Both things drive me a little crazy as a choir director and I have been working against it.

One woman actually left during the pregame rehearsal never to return. I though I offended her with running the pre-game rehearsal past her personal limit for practicing in the church (two choir members have complained loudly that the choir should not be rehearsing right up until time for church. Which is something we actually never do. Because if we rehearse late, we still wait a bit until starting church to give the requisite time for everyone to settle down for prayer. Even though I have said this to these people, it doesn’t seem meet their personal criteria for how it should be done.)

I found out later that she was ill.

During church I had a series of mishaps. Very small ones but still disconcerting. Little mistimings on my part which usually I can pull off pretty gracefully. But not yesterday.

I had scheduled a devilishly difficult (for me) prelude. Often my hardest pieces don’t sound hard. This was one of those. It was based on the tune the anthem was based on and was by another English pastoral composer (like Bairstow) named Henry Ley. I probably shouldn’t have scheduled it. I had a perfectly good piece by another anglican Alec Wyton based on the same tune. I just thought it would be cool to have two English pastoral pieces in the same service.

So I was practicing this one right up until the last minute. As often happens the sections I worked on went pretty well, but I managed to blow other sections. Ahem.

Then during the anthem, I missed pushing a general stop and had to increase the organ sound with the crescendo pedal. This usually works but the anthem winds down at the end and Bairstow ends with the same quiet flute solo he began. As I pushed down the crescendo pedal I thought with horror, “Omigod, now how am I going to transition back to the correct sounds?” I managed to do this. But of course it wasn’t as graceful as what I had planned.

I take pride in my ability to play organ and conduct at the same time. It’s something I was taught to do by my teacher Ray Ferguson (and he was taught to do by his teacher Helmut Walcha).

The problem I have with my present crew of singers is they don’t always watch me. So I have my hands full just trying to conduct them. When I am conducting from the console I am further away and have less of a range of possible gestures.

Everything came off okay. It usually does. But I like to work a bit beyond doing okay and actually have some musical moments.

The postlude was by William Walond. I mention it here because once again the bulletin was fucked up and my postlude (inadvertently?) omitted.

Ah well.

Today I have nothing scheduled. I think I need a bit of time off.

Eileen has been thinking a lot about recycling lately. She’s on a committee at church about how to green up. So she has been doing research and has found out quite a bit about the local trash companies policies. Policies they don’t make very clear since they have no systematic way of getting info to the public other than a few lines on a sheet they ask you to put out when you need more recycling bags and a goofy dvd they will give you.

Plastic bags have been bothering Eileen. Our local grocery store gives them out. And of course they are not recyclable.

Eileen was looking at purchasing some fancy cloth bags.

I’m pretty much the grocery guy, so I suggested that at least we could take old plastic bags and re-use them.

Meijers (our local chain) has a policy that you get five cents back for every bag you bring back.

So yesterday we were armed with a bag of bags. When we got to the check-out, I started putting old bags up on the little two prong rack they have for each bag. The sales clerk got a bit flustered and I told her I was just trying to make easier for her. I asked her if there was some way I could do that (make it easier for her). She said yes and took the bags from hand and put them beneath her counter.

Eileen and I looked at her as she began bagging with new bags.

Eileen said aren’t you going to resue the bags?

The lady assured us that she would credit us five cents for everyone.

I told her we were more interested in reusing the bags than the five cents.

She gave me the bags back (embarressed and a bit huffy) and I proceeded to open up bags. I offerred to bag the groceries myself. But with Meijers’ little set-up this is hard for customers to do. And by now the clerk had decided we were from the moon and a bit of problem and was not talking any more. Ah life in Holland.

At the end she finally spoke and asked us how many bags we brought so she could give us our nickel a bag. (Hey nickel bags… hmmm)…. Both Eileen and I said to forget the money which the sales clerk gladly did.

As she handed me the receipt she said “have a good day” with the perfect inflection for “drop dead.”

When we got in the car, Eileen said something about how that experience would not encourage one to recycle.

I guess not.

Listening to Words.seems to be a cross index to lectures and talks available for streaming (if not downloading) on the web.
I instantly added it to my Google RSS feeds.

Apparently the people who own the copyright to Charlie Parker’s works don’t release permission easily.

I was reading a book by an acquaintance of mine (“Interaction, Improvisation, and Interplay in Jazz” by Robert Hodson) and he was using “Now’s the Time” by Charlie Parker to further illustrate his very interesting topic of how musicians influence each other’s improvisation as they play.

This is a book for musicians and after some coherent caveats and defining, Hodson uses transcriptions to discuss specific moments in jazz ensemble playing.

However in the transcription of “Now’s the Time” the melody is only suggested by the rhythm. Most of the pitches have been left out “to respect the copyright provisions.” In his footnote, Hodson says “The reader can find complete copies” of melodies he doesn’t fully notate “In various fake books.”

I did find “Now’s the Time” in a fake book. Looking at it I quickly realized that I know the tune and that the tune primarily consists of vary simple variations of three notes. Good grief.

I will ask Rob when I get a chance to get the back story on this. But it strikes me as ludicrous that he would be forced to omit this kind of information and cumbersome for people reading his book to go find the tunes for comparison. It may be that just expects his audience to be literate enough to basically remember the tunes. The Parker piece is one I recognize and I am far from a jazz cognoscenti (or as one adjunct teacher put it to me, “a jazzer).

Then on this morning on NPR’s “Living on Earth” I half listend to a report on how patents are being taken out on basic things like an entire indigenous population’s genes (Guaymi Indians in Panama). This was the U.S. government’s claim. The U.S. government has also filed patents for human cell lines in people of Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands. Bob Carter of the CBC called this bio-piracy.

When asked for the worst examples of this kind of patenting Carter mentioned the Monsata corporation attempting to patent the genetic makeup of soybeans and Syngenta coporation doing the same to the basic flowering mechanism of all plants.

I lay in bed and thought about the romantic notions of Native Americans not owning land or game but using what was around them in ways that respected resources as gifts from outside themselves.

Also I thought of being taught as a child that the world was God’s and so was everything in it. People were just here to use it responsibly.

My religous background can be a curse sometimes but it also a gift when it keeps me idealistic.

Ultimately shutting down people’s free access to ideas will stunt humanity’s ability to become itself more deeply. Commodification of this kind of thing seems very wrong to me. But hey it’s just my opinion.

This entry and this entire web site and the materials thereto are not copyrighted by Stephen Jenkins, the don’t worry be happy guy from Holland Michigan. Reproduction in whole or part is deeply encouraged. This applies to reproducing it with your brain cells and mulling it around in your gray thinking crainum stew.

Wow! Kevin Bao’s teacher just emailed me.

Kevin Bao is an 11 year old pianist who recently performed on NPR’s From the Top music show. I was so impressed with the the piece he played (“Variations on Theme of Paganini” by Isak Berkovich) that when I couldn’t find it online, I emailed the show.
They forwarded my message to his teacher Sergei Polusmiak who emailed me that my only hope was to go to Russia or the Ukraine and look in used bookstores... Heh.

Don’t think I’ll be hitting Russia or the Ukraine soon. But it is the sort of thing I might find in a box in the back of Encore Records in Ann Arbor.

this figures:

“Carol Lam, one of eight former U.S. attorneys across the country whose dismissals have ignited a political firestorm and calls for the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, has been named outstanding attorney of the year by the San Diego County Bar Association, the organization announced Wednesday afternoon.” link to story

“Freedom of rights management” by Wendy M. Grossman

I know nothing about this person’s music. But I read the linked article and thought it was a good synopsis of a lot of the current hype around Itunes stripping DRM.

Her website is here.

I just listend a bit. Very traditional folk/bluegrass sound. She sings.

Her article linked in “geek musician” Jonathon Coulton. I really like the set up of his website/blog. You can listen to his tunes and/or buy them directly from him. Cool beans.

Just poking around on Coulton’s site, I notice its dearth of visuals (no pics). This is a serious omission in this kind of medium.

I’m listening to him as I write this. I recognize his most popular tune: Code Monkey. You can listen here. It’s the first tune and he has a clever onsite listening plugin.

Wendy Grossman is on CDBaby which she mentions in her article. Looking at her web info, it seems that she has moved from music to journalism.

I have dealt with CDBaby and they are a fun company. They feel like a human is actually on the other side of the internet and have a sense of humor as well as allow you to listen to bits of everything you want to buy. Unfortunately not everything.
Grossman’s article mentions Itunes, Zune, and Naxos. No mention of Napster. They must be off the radar.

Fears for Gaudi masterpiece as rail tunnel approved

These pictures are from our trip to Barcelona in 2004.

The proposed bullet train tunnel would be close enough (2 meters) to pose a real danger of cracking the foundation of Sagrada Familia. If that happens, apparently it’s possible the suspended ceiling would be affected.

Group shot at the Parc Guell (also designed by Gaudi). Quasi-son-in-law Matthew, Eileen in hat, Sarah.  It’s on the mountain and is where I took the first shot of Sagrada Familia.

Like all of Gaudi’s work, Sagrada Familia is amazing. Gaudi is a bit religous for me, but I love his use of organic forms. Dave, if you’re lurking, I trace my family’s interest in Gaudi back to you. I’m sure you are the one who showed me him years ago, probably upstais in the Flint library. Heh.

I really like this turtle who is one of several animals (I seem to recall) at the base of huge columns of Sagrada Familia.

Ahem. I arrived home from college yesterday jubilant from handing in grades and found a package from Florida with music by Rene Touzet in it. It felt like a reward.

I have been playing my way through the music and am enjoying it immensely. It feels like a guiltly pleasure because I’m not sure the music is all that good. But he writes a clear piano style in Cuban rhythms that I am really enjoying playing through.

On another guilty pleasure front, I have been delving into Episcopalian liturgical matters. I ordered some pretty expensive crappy books from the Episcopalian web site. Fuck a duck. I decided to take a look at my own liturgical training stuff. I have thrown out a lot of it but not the stuff that I find the most interesting like festschrifts. I found some good stuff in my library I hadn’t actually read.

Also am reading a textbook my priest loaned me from her seminary training.

I feel sheepish doing this. But I have agreed to discuss Holy Week with my boss and it is leading me deeper into a discussion of liturgical theology with her. It makes sense. But it is an area of my life I am not consciously cultivating. Or haven’t been. I ordered two more books today: a festschrift of an Episcopalian liturgitist I like (Marion Hatchett) and an updated parish liturgy handbook by my priest’s teacher: Louis Weil.

I was able to find them used on Amazon so they weren’t as expensive as the crappy books.
I also wrote my boss a memo yesterday outlining some areas I would like to talk about this summer beginning with my meeting with her today.

This all indicates increased ownership in the church part of my job. Hence the feeling of goofiness on my part.

Also started reading Spring Snow by Mishima a few nights ago. Here’s a nice drawing of him I found on the Web.

David Mitchell commented that he thought this was a masterpiece and influenced him quite a bit along Murakami. Haven’t read any Mishima in years. Eileen has read this one. It is the first in a series of four novels.

The Web is watching the government. You can too.

Web Mashups Turn Citizens Into Washington’s Newest Watchdogs by Michael Calore Wired

Sites I linked from this article:

Maplight.org  non-partisan connecting of dots. Searches state politics by “interest group,” “legislator,” “subject,” & “bill number,” Did some searches on local legislators and got nothing. It does look interesting, though.

Opensecrets.org This one has an RSS feed. I added it to my google page. On the feed it calls itself “Center for Responsive Politics.”

Follow the money.org  more non-partisan state politics. This one had a hit on my local rep, Kuipers, and showed that he had received $ 1,050.00 in donations from A,T&T.  I recently wrote to him about a state iniative that I felt was completely in favor of AT&T’s need to tier the internet. He is the chair of a state committee that considers this stuff and completely disagreed with my point of view. According to this web site, he has also received money from Comcast ($1000.00) and Telecommunications Association of Michigan (250.00). Both I suspect would support this non-consumer web iniative that would enable them to charge for services that are currently free.

And of course Wikipedia has Congressapedia which just watches congress and makes info available in an easier format (it’s already available on Government web sties).

This is interesting. I have been getting a lot of spam messages on the blog. Yesterday, I decided to moderate comments (of people the site that haven’t left comments before) and marked a bunch of the spam as spam.

This morning when I got up I thought I would change back to non-moderated comments because I find it a bit annoying myself when I try to leave a comment and it says it will await moderation.

But, I had already received spam since last night and it was awaiting moderation. Hmmm. I guess I’ll leave that on. Apologies to lurkers and new readers who try to leave a comment. I will put comments up as quickly as possible and remove the comment moderation if the spam subsides.

On March 21, 2007, an all-white jury convicted a black community activist, Reverend Edward Pinkney, of five counts of improprieties in connection with a 2005 recall election involving the City of Benton Harbor’s most powerful commissioner

see  Travesty of Justice in a Black City in Michigan

Remember the summer of 2003 when Benton Harbor exploded after a young man was killed? Pinkney helped keep the peace by walking the streets…. read it and weep.
Pinkney founded BANCO (Black Autonomy Network Community Organization).

Hooray! I’m all done with grades at GVSU. Gave the final, corrected it and did the totals and handed in final grades.

While I was sitting in the office another adjunct came in and asked me how my year went….. Uh… I told him that I liked the students but felt that the department wasn’t very collegial.

He was very friendly but told me that he had found it much different.

I told him that I thought college was bullshit and that the chairperson of the department had spoken to me twice this term and seem to think I was trying to horn my way in.

Eileen says it must be just me. And the heck with them.

Anyway, I’m done. Hooray.

“Enemy of the State: The complicated life of an idealist” by Jianying Zha New Yorker Magazine, April 23, 2007
This will undoubtedly i.d. me as an internet enemy of the people in China but I thought this article in the April 23rd New Yorker was excellent.

The author is a sister of the subject of the article. She writes a clear-eyed devastating portrait of her half-brother who is due to be released from jail next year.  He was jailed for founding the first political party to compete with the Communist party in China.

Bush, Cheney and Rove are exhibiting their usual adroit rhetorical abilities and dancing rings around the Democratic opposition with their public comments about Iraq.

They accuse the Democrats of using the war issue for politics by sending a bill for the President to sign that is loaded down with pork issues and a non-binding deadline for troop withdrawal in Iraq. Nevermind that every bill the previously Republican controlled Congress was also full of extra pork issues. And that the public support for the war is eroding.

I can’t believe the Democrats can’t seem to get hold of this issue more clearly. This Republican war has been driven by political considerations from its inception. Yet the message from Bush and Rove (who are definitely on the ropes in terms of their weakening political stance  in terms of the popularity of the war, the many corruption scandals of their administration) remains skillfully framed to win the rhetoric war.

If Bush vetos this current funding bill, I think it will come back to haunt him in future debates. On the other hand, I believe that Bush, Rove and Cheney are more clearly idealogues than the Democrats. They share the vision of their more conservative base and are able to articulate it in phrases that sound much more coherent and reasonable than most Democrats.

Pelosi’s recent comments come the closest to clearly stating the opposition to the war when she says it is an ethical issue, and for the President to try to make it a political issue is beneath the dignity of his office.

Iraq continues to be a disaster (death toll is still out of control and now we are going to build a wall in Baghdad that neither the Shiites or the Sunnis want) and still the Bush team insists on taking the rhetorical position that we are in the early stages of succeeding. I can only hope this will be their political undoing and America will move a bit more toward the center of the political spectrum.

“The Lonely Planet guide quotes the idea that some countries have a ‘mission’ attitude towards foreigners, and some have a ‘club’ attitude. ‘Mission’ countries define foreignness by behavior — act like a native, and as far as other natives are concerned, you eventually have as much right to be there as they do. ‘Club’ countries define foreignness by your lineage or passport — it will never matter what you do, how well you learn the language, how many soccer teams or famous department stores you buy — you are foreign and always will be. Japan is a classic club society. Living here, I kiss my sense of social belonging goodbye.”

David Mitchell, “Japan and my Writing”
China is also definitely a “club” experience.

I did my first edit on Wikipedia yesterday. At first I was very skeptical about the notion of a user created information source and then I thought a bit about how much misinformation I have run across in reference books. I guess in a sense all reference books are user created.

Also, Wikipedia can be a good quick source for information,  is synoptic and has links.

in my case I was consulting the article on “Ghostwritten” the book by David Mitchell I had just read. After finishing it I wasn’t quite sure that I had picked up enough of the cross references between the ten seperate sections of this book. The article on Wikipedia highlighted these references and I realized that I at least picked up most of what the author(s) of the Wikipedia article did.

At the same time (and this is the way I read most non-fiction books anyway) I realized that all of the information was not necessarily covered in the article. I decided I might still re-read the book to deepen my understanding of it.

BTW, the edit I did was a simple mis-spelling error.

So I was reading in an old Clavier magazine (not that old: April 2006) that my sister-in-law was kind enough to give me and ran across an article on Rene Touzet (I think that’s him in the back of this photo at the piano) with an accompanying little dance by the same.

I sat down at the piano and played through it and thought it was kind of neat. Very rhythmic. So I checked Touzet out a bit. It turns out he’s kind of an interesting musician. He was Cuban and played in Desi Arnaz’s band.

Not only that, but that he actually was responsible for the riff in Louie Louie. It was stolen from him from his song El Loco Cha Cha.

Now I was starting to get interested. He died in 2003. Around 1973, he moved from Hollywood to Miami to “be closer to Cuba.” Apparently as an old man he spent a great deal of time writing piano music.

After extensive googling I could only find one place to purchase his music and that was a store in Coral Gables.

I got the number from the official Rene Touzet web site.

I called the store in Coral Gables this morning. When I told the person on the phone how hard it was to find Touzet’s music, he said that he thought they might be the only source for it in the world. It seems that Touzet basically published his own music and when he died, his widow (who is still alive) brought all his music to this store so they could get rid of it.

The clerk on the phone said he had had a couple of orders in he last couple of months, one from Japan and one from some other place. I ordered some music.

It’s a gorgeous dark Michigan morning. I have the windows open and the wind is not too chilly and is making a fresh breeze in the house.

Yesterday after church, Eileen did some yard work and then set up the hammock. I sat in a lawn chair nearby and read the New York Times. Gorgeous day.

I am beginning to feel the stifling aspect of teaching college (or should I say the painful lack of collegiality?) ebbing.  I have been practicing like crazy and even entertaining some small notion of getting back to composing and recording.
“As chess players or writers or mystics know, the pursuit of insight takes you deep into the forest. Days were I’d just gaze at the steam rising from my cofee, or stains on the wall, or a locked door. Days were I’d find the next key in the steam or the stains or the lock.”

from Ghostwritten by David Mitchell

This quote is taking place in the mind of a brilliant physicist who has run away to her home on an island off Ireland (I believe). Her insights will not leave her alone.

I find it quite liberating to look at the upcoming days and realize that I will have more and more time to do the things I love.

Life is good.

I like this article about Michigan.