that's looking forward

I just read a fascinating thing about one of my favorite movies, the colorful and beautiful The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. I always love to hear stories about how people look ahead. One of my favorites concerns the massive oak beams in New College, Oxford. In the early twentieth century, they became infested with beetles. Folks in charge panicked because after all where are you going to find such huge oak trees in the twentieth century? Never fear: the college's Foresters had been planning for this day since the college was founded in 1379. They knew that the beams would rot eventually, so they planted a grove, with the expectation that Foresters over the centuries would protect them. Miraculously, they did.

On a somewhat lesser scale, Jacques Demy, director of Umbrellas, shot the film on Eastman negative stock. The problem is that, besides the fact that the copies sent to theaters lose their luster with use, the original stock itself fades quickly, and eventually decays completely. For a colorful film like Umbrellas, this is a disaster. The movie rests on three pillars of cinema: Catherine Deneuve's face, Michel Legrand's sparkly-sweet score, and the insanely bright colors that can make you a different person just from seeing them. Take away any one of those things, and the movie just isn't the same.

Demy must have felt the same way about his masterpiece, because he went to the trouble and expense of having color separation masters made. That is, the three colors that go to make every other color in film — yellow, cyan, and magenta — he printed separately in black on black-and-white negatives. Since black-and-white negatives don't fade, the information stays intact, and then you can go back and print number 1 in yellow, number 2 in cyan, and number 3 in magenta, then combine them on fresh full-color film.

A generation or so passed, and in the 1990s they did just that. Now, instead of seeing a faded or off-color version of the movie (as you often do with old films), you see the original, vibrant Cherbourg of Demy's imagination.

And it's worth seeing. If you've never seen it, do yourself the favor. It's simply one of the most beautiful pieces of cinema ever. It's a great technical achievement, with superb music and sound editing to go along with all that color. And it's got heart. Demy can bring French tears to any eye.

Let's be glad that he can also plan ahead. Man. I'm doubly committed now to transferring all my 90s music off DAT.

balance

translation problems

I was just reminded of a frustrating and funny experience, something that probably every traveler has encountered in some way.

I remember in China going to a restaurant we'd been to several times, and every time I'd ordered the fried rice. "Chǎo fàn." I went once without the translation page, and ordered it: "Chǎo fàn." The guy was completely gobsmacked. Couldn't understand it at all. He looked at me like I'd ordered a tin can. (I probably had.) So I said "Chǎo fàn? Chǎoo fànn? Chǎo! fàn!" over and over. At least 100 times, no exaggeration.

I drew some pictures which weren't very helpful either. (How do you draw rice?) Finally I went into the kitchen and pointed to the ingredients. He was still puzzled, as was his staff. The entire staff and much of the neighborhood were now on the case. "Chǎo fàn? Chǎao fàan? Chǎo fàn? Chǎo fàn. Chǎo fàn. Chǎo fàn!" No one could understand that I wanted chǎo fàn, a basic staple of Chinese restaurants. They couldn't hear it in what I was saying.

Finally, a light dawned on the restaurant owner's face, and he rushed back into the kitchen, bringing back a bowl of rice and an egg. He showed it to me triumphantly.

Chǎo fàn!

I naively assumed that he meant that he would fry the rice and serve it with egg in the traditional manner of fried rice. Fortunately, my naivete was rewarded, and, after 5 minutes (plus half an hour of "Chǎo fàn? Chǎao fàan? Chǎo fàn? Chǎo fàn. Chǎo fàn. Chǎo fàn!"), he brought out a beautiful platter of fried rice.

What on earth was happening? I guess you've just got to say that if some Japanese person came up to you and said, "Miruk? Meerook? MI-Ruk. Mi-doook? Meeedook?," you might never guess that they were asking for milk. That's just as close as they can get. I'm quite sure that I simply could not hear the huge difference between what I was saying and what the word actually was.

Crazy!

freedom in rhode island

I've been reading an article, headlined Atheist teen forces school to remove prayer from wall after 49 years, over at msnbc. It's worth your while reading it closely, to get the temperature of religion and politics in Rhode Island and in America in 2012.

First, the headline, which was changed by msnbc from when the article first appeared in the New York Times, where it was headlined "Student Faces Town’s Wrath in Protest Against a Prayer." It should have read "50-year-old law applies to prayer on school property." Insofar as it is a publicly posted statement of religion in a public school, it is hurting our commonwealth, and adding (in a low-buzz way) to the religious establishment that our Constitution forbids.

Cheers, by the way, for giving this wise girl the last word: "I’m defending their Constitution, too.”

Absolutely true, and on an issue that increasingly brings concern. One key here is when the prayer was posted. Here's the prayer in its entirety:

Our Heavenly Father,

Grant us each day the desire to do our best, to grow mentally and morally as well as physically, to be kind and helpful to our classmates and teachers, to be honest with ourselves as well as with others. Help us to be good sports and smile when we lose as well as when we win. Teach us the value of true friendship. Help us always to conduct ourselves so as to bring credit to Cranston High School West.

Amen

This prayer was composed by a 7th-grader, no doubt of his own volition and without any help or prodding from his parents, and posted in 1963, a year after the Supreme Court's belated decision disallowing public prayers in public schools. It's a prayer, indeed, but it's also very definitely a provocation.

The fact that this happened in Rhode Island, one of the great birthplaces of true religious freedom — founded by a Baptist — is especially dispiriting. We're really fighting this battle in the former colony of Rhode Island, whose founding statements ring out with freedom for everyone? Roger Williams, in founding it, specifically named Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and atheists — radically, radically open at the time — as people who for the first time would be able to worship freely, or worship not at all, with absolutely no price to pay for it. No special part of town you have to be in, no special thing you have to wear, no tax you have to pay, no restrictions on your life or worship in any way. It really is the birthplace of religious freedom, and has a rich history of having the government stay out of all religious matters.

Posting prayers that are easily recognized as prayers to Jehovah on taxpayer-funded walls, in this place of all places, is just plain wrong, and more so in light of the fact that it was very obviously done in rebellion against the laws of the land (laws that were brought about, ironically, by the influence of Rhode Island's legacy of religious freedom).

The article points out that the community is "heavily Roman Catholic." Certainly this girl and all who she stands for are in a minority there. But along with Roger Williams and his fellow Baptists, Congregationalists, Quakers, atheists, freethinkers, and Deists, she forms — pardon the phrase — a moral majority.

She has a State Representative singling her out and publicly calling her an "evil little thing" for simply asking her school to [a] obey the laws of the US, and [b] live up to Rhode Island's inspiring history. Evil little thing: does that phrase alone not symbolize all that's wrong with church-state conflation over the course of centuries? Catholics, for obvious reasons, don't have much problem with the church using state power (and taxpayer dollars) to further a religious agenda. ("In God We Trust," mentioned in the article as being on all our currency, wasn't on all our currency till the McCarthyist 1950s, and the effort was spearheaded by Catholic organizations.) But those who have been persecuted, jailed, beaten, and beheaded for the sake of religion should have taken notice, and taken this girl's side. It bears pointing out, given the language of the posted prayer, that the religionists' definition of good sportsmanship didn't include smiling when losing a court case, seeing as this girl has been threatened so strongly that she requires a police escort to school.

Jessica Ahlquist needn't have been an atheist to take this stand; leaving aside the fact that it was a court, and not a girl, that forced the school to remove the prayer, there should have been a line of conscientious Christians right along with her, with Baptists at the front.

singing gig

The other day, someone called me with a first. A jazz gig on which they wanted me to sing. They said, "Your voice will be perfect for this!"

Now, I've sung on gigs, occasionally, for over a decade. Before that, I had some formal training (classical training, which gives you the principles you can put to work in other styles). And I sing every Sunday to lead the music at Holy Trinity. But I've always thought of the singing as an extra, with my instrumental playing being the main thing.

Nice, to receive an affirmation from someone who enjoyed what they heard.

a quality observed

When you have a kid, people use certain predictable words to describe that kid. When it's a girl, you often hear "pretty" or "cute" or "precious."

Just the other day, we met a girl in her 20s who works with kids aged five and under at a program at the zoo, and she used a word to describe Greta that stands out from all the generic ones. And it's one that several others have used too — in fact it's the only non-pretty non-precious adjective that more than one person has used for Greta.

She said, "Your daughter is fearless!"

Greta was right in the middle of doing something that I think of as a normal kid thing to do: running over to say hello to a cat, climbing up into a yard and tooting around, ducking under things and tumbling over things to try to get to the cat, as the cat itself was, with increasing desperation, trying to get away. But maybe not so normal after all, if so many have zeroed in on this emerging personality characteristic. Is Greta fearless? What a mystery we all are, as we emerge into human beings.

ten years after we met

At just about this exact time on the afternoon of January 17th, 2002, I walked into a coffee shop, looked around, and settled on Catherine just as she settled on me: this must be Ellen's sister, whom she'd set me up with. She was beautiful, tall and slim, with shortish, wavy hair, and dressed with classic simplicity. She ordered tea; I got coffee. We talked for several hours, and my life was changed.

Later today, we'll check into a beautiful old bed and breakfast, and celebrate having known each other for ten years. My beautiful love! I don't want the next ten years to pass this quickly!

new words

Greta is picking up the pace, with new words coming left and right. She has added the names of her grandparents — last week, Grandma and Grandpa; this week, on the day she was to visit them, she pronounced "Nana" and "Papa," clear as day, in order, apropos of nothing, from the back seat — along with game attempts at all the cousins' names.

Yesterday, she came up with "please" and "Scott." "Please" takes its place with the month-old "thank you" and the older, unfailingly gentle and charmingly refined "no." "Scott" is the name of the homeless guy in the park.

Family relationships, good manners, genuine care for the less fortunate. I like where her vocabulary is going.

getting a laugh during fours

You know you're in front of the right jazz audience when, during a "trading fours" section (in which soloists trade four-bar phrases with the drummer in a kind of witty dialog), you can get a laugh out of this:

trust, explicit and otherwise

I just saw one character on a TV show tell another character "I trust her absolutely."

I'm so glad. Perhaps 2012 will be the year that people trust each other completely, absolutely, perfectly, imperfectly, anything other than implicitly.

I have no idea when the phrase got started. I remember being very irritated by it in the mid-1980s, when the chick Captain Kirk was romancing said she trusted Kirk implicitly.

OK. Picture a little girl walking over to the living room. There's a step down. Right as she reaches that step, she simply holds out her hand, never changing her posture or her forward gaze. She knows her Daddy is near, and that he will take her hand, and that she'll be able to get where she needs to go when he takes it. That is implicit trust. It's implied because it's not stated. It's just there in her.

When people say, "I trust you implicitly," they generally mean "I trust you completely." They, of course, can't mean that their trust is implicit, because if it were they wouldn't make it explicit.

So. I was glad to hear that character (and that character's writer) get it right. Good things are happening. Fresh winds are blowing.

baroque obama

aspersions

Years ago, I contributed to a book of Advent devotions for my church. I was telling a good friend, who went to the church but didn't know I'd contributed, that she should really pick up the book. She immediately got defensive. In the ensuing discussion, it became clear that she thought I was saying she needed to read the book of devotions because I thought she wasn't devoted enough. I, of course, merely wanted her to read my spiffy article and be impressed by it.

Ah, relationships. Meanwhile, just this very day I came across a word that perfectly describes what was happening: I was unwittingly casting aspersions on her. You and I have used that phrase and encountered it all our lives. But what if someone asked you what an aspersion is? Now you'll know: it's the sprinkling of baptismal water on the head, in substitute for immersion in a river or baptismal font. Baptists baptize by immersion; Catholics (usually) by aspersion.

My guess is that our sense of an aspersion as an attack on a person's good name comes from the same connection made by my friend. There's something about the offering of blessings to someone that can backfire: it can seem like a judgment, a statement that the person is in need of some purification. Certainly it's common for atheists and other nonbelievers to get prickly when told that an evangelical is praying for them. And not just nonbelievers: Catherine was incredulous when her pious roommate informed her she'd been praying for her for some time, convinced as she was that Catherine — Catherine! whom she lived with every day! — was lost in spiritual peril. By sprinkling the holy water of praying for her friend's salvation, she was in fact standing in judgment on her friend.

So. That's what casting aspersions is all about.

plus ça change

There's no sense in something new just for the sake of something new. Novelty itself is no reason to do something a new way. Change is good if it's a good change, but if it doesn't demonstrably improve things then it's foolish.

Ever know someone who said that? Ever said it yourself? The fact is that change for its own sake is very very valuable. The strong don't always survive, but the adaptable do: if you never build your muscles of adjustment, of embracing and living with and thriving with change, then you'll never be able to adjust when you really need it.

Your curtains are just fine. Nothing wrong with them. Your furniture arrangement works: piano over here, chairs over there. Great. But sometimes you should just get new curtains, rearrange the furniture, try a different brand of shampoo, get a new haircut, get something that's a different color than you usually get, take a different path to wherever you're going.

Novelty turns out to be a wonderful thing to chase. It keeps you young and vital and alert and in tune.

If you have to come up with some demonstrable reason for something new, some proof that it's a positive good rather than a neutral difference, then you're setting the bar way way too low. (The bar for stasis, that is, for stasis is what we should have to defend.) You and I know too many people who think every new thing is New Coke. They're just plain wrong.

slavery footprint

I have 25 slaves working for me.

That's at least according to slaveryfootprint.org, the website that asks you eleven questions about your possessions and purchases, and then calculates how much of it was done by slave labor.

Slavery is alive and well in the world. There are more slaves now than at any point in history, and you and I pay artificially low prices for things because of their labor. (It's almost impossible, for instance, that your smartphone was not touched at some point by a slave.)

Take the test and see for yourself, then see what there is to do about it.

handel's messiahs

A friend recently asked me which version of Handel's Messiah to get.

The recording conducted by Paul McCreesh in the late 90s was hyped as the "Messiah for the Millennium," and indeed it's pretty incredible. The performance is great: it's a period piece, done on authentic instruments, sounding very much like the sounds Handel himself likely heard.

If you like a more 20th-century sound, there's the massive version conducted by Bernstein in the late 50s, with the NY Philharmonic — one of my favorites, but very idiosyncratic. Overloaded orchestra, big slow rummy tempos, utterly entertaining and at times electrifying. Best "For Unto Us" in recorded audio history.

Then there's a Sir Charles Mackerras recording, with the Austrian Radio Symphony and Chorus. It's Mozart's arrangements of the Messiah: did you know he did this? great fun to listen to. It's Handel with a Viennese accent, "updated" to the style of Mozart's time. All sorts of weird/inspired changes and additions and subtractions. If you're accustomed to another version, then this one seems like a big creamy ice cream treat.

So. There you have it. Get all three. If you get one, do tell me which one!!!

people in charge who get it

It's such a pleasure to be on a project where the person in charge understands. The deal is, if you hire a chef, you can get all Meg Ryan and start specifying exactly what you want down to the detail; when the chef tells you what's cooking you can ask for changes and modifications based on how you think it's going to turn out — but that's never going to get you the best result.

It's far far better to hire a good chef and say "Knock me out." That way, the chef, who knows how to get results, will knock you out with something you might not have allowed to happen if you'd been constantly there offering over-the-shoulder advice, calling for more salt or less tarragon or how-bout-some-good-ol-chicken-breast. Sometimes the hardest thing in the world is for the person in charge to let the expert be the expert and resist ruining the recipe.

So. Recently I've been on several projects, and in several long-term settings, in which the message is "knock me out." And I'm pleased to do so, or at least knock myself out trying. Just the other day I was in commercial-music mode, saying to a client, "Here's what I've got, this gentle moment. If you'd rather have something more energetic there, just let me know, but I'd rather do this." The person waited just a beat and then said, "Barry, I've worked with you for years. I hired you because I trust your instincts completely. If this is how you think it should be, then that's how it's going to be."

Ahhhhhh. (Turned out great, by the way.)

yes, virginia, they know where you are

I was just taking a look at the famous "Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus" article from the New York Sun in 1897. And something about it struck me that had never struck me before.

Check out the original press clipping. I always find it freshly inspiring.

But does something stand out to you, now that we're in the 21st century?

Here's what stands out to me, shocking as day:

VIRGINIA O'HANLON

115 WEST NINETY-FIFTH STREET

A distinguished paper has actually published the full name and address of a little girl! An 8-year-old girl! Right there in the paper for every creep and pedophile and murderer and rapist and kidnapper to see!!!

Never mind that anyone can find out the address of anyone, of any age, using something called the White Pages. In our day, it's WhitePages.com. I say "never mind" because people never mind the facts. It's only the hysteria that counts. How could a newspaper do such a thing?

Certainly, the New York City of 1897 was far far more dangerous than it is now. Then again, the New York City of 1897 had no television or movies, where there are roughly 8.6 million kidnapping/rape/murders every week, so it seems more dangerous today.

Maybe, the newspaper editors didn't allow media-fueled panic to cloud their thinking. If you were to go back in time and harangue them about it, I imagine their response would be something like, "Well, you see, 115 West Ninety-fifth Street is actually there. Any ruffian could see the building sitting there on the street, and break into it, and steal everything. Putting the address in writing doesn't really help any lawbreaker or thief, any more than refusing to put it in writing would hinder him."

Of course, that's far too reasonable a response now, and anyway, today, they'd have to be saying that in a court of law.

As recently as the 1970s, when I was a kid, our big-city newspaper did the same thing. When a citizen was mentioned in an article, that person's address was too. We thought nothing of it — because there's really not much to think of it. We do of course feel differently about privacy now, and after all there's no real value in publishing a person's address, beyond distinguishing one John Smith from another. So, I don't feel any sense of loss that this isn't now the practice. But imagining the public outcry that would happen today provides just another example of how we allow hysteria to overtake our common sense.

Anyone can find out where you live. So what? Your next-door neighbor also knows where you live, and somehow finds the self-discipline not to kidnap, rape, or murder you on a regular basis. It seems that our culture, though, sees as much need to put imaginary fears into the heart of childhood as our great-grandparents' culture did in imaginary delights.

secret messages in music

Forget the boring load of crap your youth minister dumped on you about backward messages in 80s music. Honestly: did anyone reeeally think that the most disastrous thing the members of Queen could come up with is "decide to smoke marijuana," which they then had to encode so as not to get caught?

As I said, forget that stuff. Amateur hour. It turns out that the musicians of the 80s were doing waaayyy more sophisticated stuff.

Read and be amazed.

the opposite of onomatopoeia?

A friend recently asked if there was a word for the opposite of onomatopoeia. His example was "monosyllabic." Onomatopoeia, as you recall, is the phenomenon of forming a word in resemblance to whatever it describes: slurp, fart, cock-a-doodle-doo.

But I think you could call "monosyllabic" an anechoic word, and not strictly anti-onomatopoeic.

That's because, strictly speaking, onomatopoeia doesn't just refer to words that in some way happen to resemble what's named (like the very quick word "quick.") It refers to words that are formed by imitation. So, no one formed the word "monosyllabic" to deliberately be multisyllabic to spite its meaning. It just happened that way, like "quick."

That got me to wondering whether there are words that are more than merely anechoic. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you "break wind." "Break wind" not only doesn't sound like a fart the way "fart" does; you could argue that its formation came about as a deliberate way to avoid sounding too farty.

And, by the way, the term I shall use is anechopoeia. So, there's one example. Any others?

word choice: it matters!

One of the great things about reading The New Yorker is that you get used to lucid, beautiful writing, completely free of errors in grammar, syntax, spelling, and punctuation. Naturally, when an error does appear, it's far more jolting than when one shows up in, say, Salon, which has yet to publish a single edition without a gaggle of horribly embarrassing goofs.

Here's a fun one:

The Dutch-speaking Flemings, he said, had no trouble accommodating the small, mostly wealthy Francophones in their midst.

Since he's speaking about the minority of Francophones in the town of Vilvoorde, I tend to think he means "the few." Nonetheless, I have fun picturing the situation as he describes it.

baby carriages and baggage

Greta has 3 carriages: one is a full-sized perambulator, one is a bright pink-and-orange umbrella stroller, and one is a very tiny stroller not for her to ride in but for her to push her dolls around in. She loves doing that, but, as you may imagine, she also loves actually cramming into the doll one and being pushed around.

Today she got in and I pushed her back and forth like a vacuum cleaner. She leaned over at one point and strained and strained to reach a toy on the ground, a plastic five-by-eight barn that plays synth banjo folk tunes. She carried it with her as she went back and forth.

Then she saw her Lady-bear on the ground. Technically, it's not a bear: it's Lady from Lady and the Tramp, charmingly rendered in surprisingly huggable doll form, a gift from Loretta Cormier and one of Greta's sentimental favorites. She hugged it close with the other hand while still holding the barn and being pushed back and forth in the toy stroller like a vacuum cleaner.

Then she leaned over and picked up a small shampoo bottle from the ground. She likes toting it around the house, probably because it's just the right size, kind of stubby and small, and thus (as anyone familiar with Shampoo Economics knows) much more expensive than the larger shampoo bottles at the store.

Anyway, when she picked it up she dropped the barn; in picking up the barn she dropped her Lady-bear; finally, she had all three in her hand. It was like the "I'm leaving" scene from The Jerk.

I suddenly realized that this portrait of Greta is a portrait of all of us. Can't we just be content to be rocked back and forth pleasantly in life? Certainly it's fun and satisfying, but if only we just had this thing over here. And that thing over there, and that other thing over there. But having some of those things causes us to lose track of others; having too many causes us to ill-treat all. And yet we don't let go.

Finally she got up and went over and played with a tupperware lid. May we all.

chesterton on dogma

I was just reading Chesterton's The Thing. It sounds like a horror title, and, in fact is a horror title of a kind. It's full of his sharp thinking, uncommonsense wit, and slightly clunky sentences. One stuck out for me.

When the journalist says for the thousandth time, "Living religion is not in dull and dusty dogmas, etc." we must stop him with a sort of shout and say, "There — you go wrong at the very start." If he would condescend to ask what the dogmas are, he would find out that it is precisely the dogmas that are living, that are inspiring, that are intellectually interesting. Zeal and charity and unction are admirable as flowers and fruit.

passion, live

I conceived the album Passion as a studio project. It was never intended to be done live, and the reason I chose the musical style I did with it was in part because of the features of the studio equipment I was working with.

order the CD!

So, it was a surprise to me that I found myself wanting to do the material in a live setting recently. Over the years, I've thought about all those extra CDs in storage, and thought it might be nice to trot them out and sell them somehow. But nothing happened till just tonight. This summer I talked with the owner of a well-known jazz club about the possibility of putting a group together to do the material. She sounded interested. I made some calls to some top-flight players, sent out a press release, and Boom: it's a live gig.

The San Antonio Express-News had a nice big article on it — the music writer Jim Beal gave it a huge plug in the entertainment section of the paper. And I spent a few hours writing out charts for three hours' worth of songs I'd never charted before.

Part of the challenge was to make the music sound right, to have the same heft and rich spectrum that the CD had. I actually brought the old JV-1080 unit to the gig that I'd used in the recording, using many of the same sounds and samples, tweaked here and there to suit the venue (and the year 2011).

The whole thing turned out great. The other musicians liked it. The audience liked it, and it was a packed house, with people having to be seated outside. I liked hearing this stuff that had been a solo project fleshed out by superb musicians: the bassist Jim Kalson, the pianist Anthony Bazzani, and the drummer Johnathan Alexander, all three heavy hitters. They seemed to like the style we were doing, which was enough of a departure for all of us that it felt very fresh; it was, as Jim put it, "smoothy enough" to fit into the style but still interesting and flexible and with plenty of room for group improvisation and musical conversation.

Overall, a nice commercial and artistic success. We may just do it again.

Schönberg

For some reason, when I was growing up, just about everyone spelled the composer Arnold Schönberg's name Schoenberg. There's really no reason to do that in a book or magazine. They've got all those extra letters and diacriticals. The only reason you would write Schoenberg is if you're on a typewriter, which doesn't have umlauts. But, anyway, for one reason or another, that's how it was done.

Ah! Just googled it. He changed it when he moved to America. Tryin' to fit in better. Though, if you were trying to fit in better, you might try changing the spelling of your chords.

I remember sitting in a class and hearing a professor, a Baylor professor with a strong Texas accent, referring to someone named "Shernberg." It took me until at least the next class to realize that this prof was talking about Schönberg. I became used to this in college. (In high school, no one referred to Schönberg.) Tons of people pronounced his name "Shernberg." I think the umlaut threw them off: if you were going to get a Texas person to try to pronounce the man's name correctly, albeit with a Texas accent, it would be far better to have them say something between "Shunberg" and "Shinberg."

I note in passing that no one said "Gerterdairmmerung." Only "Shernberg." (Of course, serious music majors at Baylor in the 80s didn't mention Götterdämmerung without embarrassment. Not about shameful German/Jewish stuff, though; more about greasepaint and tonality.)

Anyway. I just saw a CD that I burned with some Schönberg on it, and I'd written it the Austrian way. It suddenly occurred to me that the name meant something. And, fresh from a weekend in the Hill Country, I realized that if you wanted an English proper name equivalent, you could do a lot worse than ... Pleasanton.

holidays and consistency

Just saw a commercial for HEB. Something about a "holiday meal." I wonder how many evangelicals will get up in arms about this company, owned by a prominent evangelical, and its supposed refusal to speak the name "Christmas."

(Of course, "holiday" might very well refer to Thanksgiving as well, because this is the beginning of November. Yeeeesh.)

Nonetheless, you always hear from the war-on-Christmas crowd how horrible it is when people seemingly refuse to even speak the name of a Christian holiday, and instead just say "holidays," or — even more egregiously — "Winter Festival."

Replacing a time-honored historical name with some insipid seasonal blandness does seem like the sort of politically-correct nonsense you'd expect from the left, ripe for lambasting.

But I'm just now thinking of another Christian holiday, called by its Christian name and celebrated by Christians for centuries. All Hallow's Eve. Halloween. It's not an occult holiday; it's a Christian one. Except there's one group of people, mainly evangelicals, who flatly refuse to participate in it, as if dressing up as a pirate and getting candy from the next-door neighbor is some sort of pagan practice (as opposed to, say, putting a decorated tree in your living room or painting eggs). And the name they use instead of its Christian name?

Fall Festival.

You can't make this stuff up.

2 things in 2 days

Day One: Greta is eating some French fries. She [a] decides to dip one in salad dressing; [b] decides to then drink the remainder of the dressing. She is definitely her mother's daughter.

Day Two: Greta has her foot in a jar. Catherine helps her take it out, and then Greta immediately puts her other foot in. Gotta make it even. Definitely her father's daughter.

symmetry

In the rush to celebrate 11-11-11 (which has to leave out two digits to be meaningful), let's not forget that today is November 2nd, 2011. That's 11-02-2011. Perfect symmetry.

Unless you live in Europe.

a short sermon

"In forty days Nineveh will be overthrown."

In the past couple of weeks, I've heard two different people comment on this, the entirety of Jonah's message to the people of Nineveh. Both pointed out that this was a pretty short message for a prophet of Jehovah, and certainly devoid of any "unless you repent" nonsense.

One said that this was because Nineveh was judged from the start, and their repentance brought only reprieve (of about a hundred years, till the time of Nahum). The other simply observed that it was a very short sermon to preach, but that God used it powerfully.

In general, I agree more with number two, simply because of the vast precedent set in the rest of scripture about grace and reprieve from earthly judgment. But I also think there's something more there. After all, this is the story of a reluctant prophet: reluctant to be sent in the beginning, reluctant to take part in God's grace at the end. And, I believe, reluctant in the middle as well.

Think about it. You do someone wrong and apologize, and the apology comes out like this: "Oh-my-goodness-I'm-so-sorry-I-can't-believe-this-happened-it-was-so-wrong-I-never-meant-to-hurt-you-please-forgive-me...." Now think about what it's like when you're not sorry at all. Say you're sorry. "Sorry."

This is exactly it, right? Jonah's delivering a message he simply doesn't want to deliver, to people he hates, and delivers the barest bones of it. And yet the people of Nineveh know somehow the pathway of repentance of mercy. In a short book with more miracles per word than most — the storm, the fish, the plant — maybe the most overlooked is the miracle that the Ninevites got the message. The whole message.

chattanooga choo-choo

I first heard "Chattanooga Choo-Choo" when I was a kid. It was after I'd heard it as the punchline to one of those over-set-up Dad jokes ("pardon me Roy, is that the cat that chewed your new shoe?"). I squinted my mental eyes and felt a rush of amazement that you could be in a different town by the time you're through reading a magazine.

I pictured an old-fashioned railway station. A little boy, straight from urchin central casting, with cap and knickerbockers; a woman stops him and asks if that's the train she wants.

It wasn't till I was an adult that I realized with a lurch that they "boy" in the song was undoubtedly a grown man with a family to feed.

depth and vision

Greta is interesting about floors. At any transition of floor surfaces she stops. In a store, she'll walk on the carpet right up to the hard floor, and stop at the edge, looking down; or she'll walk on the hard floor and stop at the edge of the carpet.

When we're on a very glossy polished floor, she'll often be walking along and then stop right where she is, hands out, legs a bit bent, in that stance of self-protective balance against vertigo, completely stranded till you go help her along. We figured out that she sees the reflections of lights in the polish and it spooks her with its sense of depth. It's like when you're taking a picture and there's a window there, and the camera focuses on what's being reflected rather than on the window.

I got a nice window myself onto Greta's thought process yesterday, when we were walking through the neighborhood. She went down the slope of a driveway to where it hit the street, and stopped, as she does. Then, she methodically turned around, knelt down, and began to send her feet out to the street surface, in exactly the same way she now descends stairsteps.

It turns out that she suspects every change in texture or color in the floor might signal a change in depth. (After attending a few classes at the School of Hard Knocks, sending her tumbling over an unexpected drop, you can't blame her.) How fascinating it would be to somehow enter her brain, her developing comprehension, to really see the world as she sees it, and not just that but perceive the world as she perceives it.

here's to the crazy one.

My favorite Apple commercial — my favorite commercial of any kind — described its founder to a T.

 Here's to the crazy ones.
   The misfits.
    The rebels.
     The troublemakers.
      The round pegs in the square holes.
The ones who see things differently.

They're not fond of rules.
   And they have no respect for the status quo.

You can praise them, disagree with them, quote them,
  disbelieve them, glorify or vilify them.
About the only thing you can't do is ignore them.
    Because they change things.

They invent.    They imagine.     They heal.

 They explore.     They create.    They inspire.
      They push the human race forward.

Maybe they have to be crazy.

How else can you stare at an empty canvas and see a work of art?
Or sit in silence and hear a song that's never been written?
Or gaze at a red planet and see a laboratory on wheels?

We make tools for these kinds of people.

While some see them as the crazy ones,
    we see genius.

Because the people who are crazy enough to think
    they can change the world

are the ones who do.

He reinvented the computer. Then he reinvented the computer again. Then he reinvented Hollywood. (Pixar has, bar none, the best record in Hollywood history.) Then he reinvented the music business. Then he reinvented the telephone business.

Honestly! What more could he have done? The fact is that Apple will not be the same, and its products will not be the same. There will probably be no more new stuff from them that matches Jobs's groundbreaking innovations. I remember well what happened when his company foolishly booted him. During his decade in the wilderness, the Macintosh began to look and act just like every other computer. Big beige boxes, not too reliable. He returned from the wilderness and suddenly the world exploded into a colorful series of is: Macs, Books, Phones, Pods, Pads.

He's a hero to anyone who believes that the conventional wisdom about creatives vs. suits is wrong. (When the music industry had very nearly destroyed itself, the only thing they could figure out to do with the internet being to sue Napster, he changed the rules and made a single internet portal that consolidated the business and remains the biggest seller of music in the world, period. As a musician who just today got a nice deposit in my account from iTunes, I'll testify that we owe him more than any music-biz hotshot.) He's certainly a hero to anyone who believes that you never have to choose between success and integrity, between business and vision.

So, while we justly mourn the loss of this man, and justly mourn for a tech future without him, the only other just thing is to celebrate that we ever had him in the first place. What a gift to humanity.

an affirmation

I just had coffee with a friend I've known since middle school. Following the 20th-century American pattern, we were friends all through school, and then rarely saw each other after graduation. Recently, though, we've picked up the thread (without Facebook, bucking the 21st-century pattern) and started hanging out again a bit.

In school, we naturally gravitated to each other: he was friendly and outgoing, had a weird sense of humor, knew how to dress, was superintelligent and didn't see any need to hide it, was a gifted musician, and loved to sit around with friends and laugh and talk philosophy and science and religion and culture. We were dear friends.

He was raised Catholic, but, like many in our crowd, began to leave religious matters aside for what he probably perceived as more challenging sets of ideas. He didn't abandon the concept of spirituality, certainly, but the claims of most religious people in his life may have begun to look absurd. In our crowd, I was one of a very few spirited participants in traditional Christianity. They, and he, respected that greatly; we had many many late-night discussions about whether or not you can know that there's a God, and whether or not there's any good reason to get from there to being, say, Baptist.

Sadly, since I was often a spokesman for thoughtful Christianity, my friends' picture of what a Christian looked like was undoubtedly influenced by my character — and at that point I was not necessarily a great role model. When not rigid and pedantic, I was crass and cruel. I was quite capable of fussing about my friends' smoking habits, moralizing about their drug experimentation, and on and on. It's a testament to the true openness of our little crowd that they accepted me. At any rate, he was rather firmly agnostic as I recall, and (I hope) we were worthy adversaries in our friendly discussions and explorations. At least he was that for me. (Our friendship and its religious and philosophical debates were fairly well-known: in our senior English class, the teacher cast us as the two leads in the roundtable reading of Inherit the Wind — impishly, he cast my friend as religious-right Brady and me as hardened atheist Drummond. The teacher couldn't have known that I loved Drummond and had dreamed of portraying him since about 5th grade.)

Sometime right after graduation, when he was moving away, I gave him "Mere Christianity" and a Bible. Looking back, I'm somewhere between aghast and amused that I thought my gesture would be taken as anything but self-righteous priggery.

Life happened; we moved through it; here we are, in our mid-40s, and we've reconnected. As often happens, we picked up right where we left off, brothers in so many ways. Somewhere along the way, he himself reconnected with the church. Recognizing what many supersmart 10th-graders can't, that there's much beyond our powers of intelligence, he's now a world-wise believer.

This spring he gave me a palm cross he made at Easter. I pinned it in our kitchen. I see it often and think of him and our friendship and our journey. Over coffee just now he explained his gift more thoroughly: when he made it at Easter (out of palms from the previous Palm Sunday, a tradition in his church), he was thinking of me and all I'd meant to him. He said I was an inspiration to him, and he was thankful that God had placed us in each other's orbits, and crossed our paths so fortuitously over the years.

Wow. God moves, often despite his followers, in a mysterious way.

'rest' now available

A while back, I just up and decided to record an album of music for therapy and relaxation.

I figure a lot of people are frustrated with the stultifying sameness of relaxation music. I wanted to see if I could do something better, but that still fit the genre, something that could reward your attention if you choose to tune in, but, if you just want to study or relax or concentrate, provides a calming and peaceful background.

The settings are simple: harp, piano, guitar, woodwinds, ambient textures. I tailored it to be especially good for professionals: counselors, prayer leaders, yoga instructors, massage therapists, anyone on a schedule. Here's why: the innovation of "Rest" is that each of its 6 songs is precisely 10 minutes long, so that if your session is fifty minutes, or a half-hour, or a full hour, the music itself leads you to a perfect exit point. No jarring stops and starts necessary: just program the right length and the music leads the way. And the songs' keys and tempos are all related, providing variety, continuity, and a smooth progress from each song to the next (and from the final song to the first, for those who have it on repeat).

Bonus: it calms baby Greta very effectively.

Here it is. Check it out. Hope you like it.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN AND BUY IT

the fragrance of apple

This weekend I got some new stuff for my computer, which occasioned going into the Apple Store a few times.

Almost everything in that place is perfectly calibrated. The decor combines blank modernity with fulsomeness. The gadgets are salivatingly available and fiddleable. The geniuses at the Genius Bar are so perfectly varied in gender and ethnicity they could be from the ads rather than real life. Perfectly varied in every way but one: they all hew to the same unwavering standard of hipness; each one is the cool nerd, the confident geek, the semi-popular friend who will be friendly to everyone.

I say almost everything there is perfectly calibrated. There's one aspect of the Apple Store that hits me like a heatwave every single time I enter it, and cannot possibly be intended. It's the smell. The fragrance of the store isn't a glamorous fragrance of luxury merchandise, or the clean non-fragrance fragrance of high-tech; nope, it's the unmistakeable smell of massed human flesh. Texans don't recognize the smell of the subway, but anyone who's spent time on one will immediately know it.

Why is this? Other places in the mall buzz with activity, but you don't get that sour meaty wave anywhere but this one place. Maybe it has to do with the ventilation system you need for a room full of computers and pads and pods? I just don't know. It's a mystery. Have you ever noticed it?

thaxting

When I first saw reference to thaxting, I wondered what on earth it could be.

This was last week, when I looked at a piece of sheet music. Owen Duggan, the skilled and happening director of music at Christ Episcopal — and award-winning singer-songwriter of children's music — has a show choir at San Antonio College, not having much else to do with his spare time. He asked me to do an a cappella version of the school's alma mater.

At this point, you may be wondering when I'm going to tell you how to thaxt (assuming you'd want to). Well, I'll tell you, but first, the alma mater. Now, when you're doing a college alma mater, you often use a familiar melody. Baylor uses "In the Good Old Summertime." UT uses "I've Been Workin' on the Railroad." What catchy folk tune does SAC use? Why, it's "Jupiter," from Gustav Holst's The Planets.

As I looked it over, I thought, hey, this is pretty neat. It was transformed from a heavy symphonic jovian romp (as a bassist in the orchestra, I always shouted "Hoooooh, hoh, hoh, hoh, hohhhhhhhh!" when we played it. Holst being Holst, I wasn't heard) into a solemn hymn with some interesting turns, the kind of thing we associate with Elgar and Vaughan Williams and back numbers in the Episcopal hymnbook. One doesn't immediately jump to the thought that jazz choir is the perfect setting for it, but I trusted Owen's vision and got to work, and sure enough the whole thing turned out to be a really cool arrangement. Can't wait to hear them do it.

Now where were we. Ah yes. On the sheet music, the lyrics are credited to someone I assume was a professor. Standard-issue hail-to-thee stuff for a school song. But what does it say for the composer credit? "Adapted from Holst?" "A rejiggered tune by Holst?" Nope, it just says "Gustav Holst," and under that it says:

Thaxted from "The Planets: Jupiter"

Hm. These trendy academics: what is it exactly to thaxt something? Does it refer to slightly changing something to fit a different purpose? Or would that be covered by "adapt?"

Wouldn't you like to know. Actually, if I keep putting off the revelation, you'll just look it up yourself, in which case you'll find what I found. "Thaxted" is the name of a hymn tune. The melodies of hymns often have separate names that aren't the title of the hymn itself. "Amazing Grace" isn't "Amazing Grace;" it's "New Britain." That's because hymns and melodies are often shuffled around, and it's good for the melody to have a separate identity.

Holst indeed adapted his theme from The Planets himself to fit the lyrics to "I Vow to Thee, My Country," and called the hymn tune "Thaxted," after the English town where he lived. (If the place-name were spelled more like other English place-names, it might have been "Thackstead," and I wouldn't have been as thrown-off. But then I started thinking of other names like "Brixton." Hm. Same orthographic process, probably pretty early in the game.)

So. It turns out that "thaxt" isn't a verb. Or at least wasn't until this weekend. I've made it one.

thaxt |thakst| v to omit quotation marks in such a way as to create a new, perhaps unintelligible, meaning.
n an example of that misuse.
Ex. With No Way Out, Kevin Costner began a streak of good acting. Revenge is the end.

There you have it, folks. A new name for an old phenomenon that might not have had a name. Thaxting.

sixties night

There are never enough Jazz Protagonists albums, don't ya think?

We looked through our hundreds of hours of recorded archives, found something we liked, and threw together a delicious album of music from the 1960s. Not jazz standards from the sixties, but pop tunes performed by Dionne Warwick, the Beatles, Herb Alpert, and more — all of it transformed into classic jazz in the Protagonists style.

Check out the album art.

Click on the picture above to see it full size

that kind of day

Too tired to cook? Let's order a pizza.

Barry: (tosses the phone 3 feet over to Catherine to call)

Catherine: I'm-too-tired-to-call-you-call.

Barry: But now the phone's all the way over there.

Catherine: I'd toss it back to you but I just can't make myself do it.

Pop, Rock, Country, Damnation

I was talking with a friend about a discussion he's having in a class, comparing "Bohemian Rhapsody" with "The Devil Went Down To Georgia." Some nice parallels and contrasts, yes?

For one thing, beyond the witty wordplay and drastic moral scheme, both use overdubbing to create an overwhelming sense of 'legion' in the spiritual plane: with Queen it's voices, and with the Charlie Daniels Band it's the Devil's multi-voiced stereo-riffic violin.

Both include pastiche of a different musical style — no doubt both groups relished showing off their skill in doing it, though the Charlie Daniels Band accomplishes a convincing funk groove whereas Queen goes more for the cartoon version of classical music (and neither is very authentic). Interestingly, both versions represent the music of the spiritual plane as a familiar but Not-Us style — kind of like how Disney always has the good guys speaking with "our" accent and the bad guys speaking with a foreign one. (The Arab Aladdin speaks with a middle American accent, while the Arab Jafar with a British one! — interesting, because in the 1001 Nights, of course, the whole tale takes place in China.)

Then there are the lyrical texts. Which one is more honest? Is either honest? In one, we have a truly guilt-ridden person who has just committed murder (we're led to believe he killed the man who loved and left him) and is about to commit suicide, imagining, after apostrophizing his ostensibly Catholic mother, a condemnation by comic-Dantean divine jury, helplessly being argued over ... but then winding up as Manfred, shaking his fist at the heavens and his fellow man as he takes his own life. In the other, a down-home boy with extraordinary gifts who is pictured as making a deal with the Devil and then outdoing him. It's presented as no more than a southern tall tale, but, looking at the implications seriously, is Johnny really better off than [let's say] Freddie?

Is either song taking the moral implications of this life seriously? I'd argue that both are, and both aren't, I guess. Interestingly, the cartoonish "Rhapsody" winds up with a bit more moral seriousness than the folkish "Devil," which, perhaps perilously, pictures the Devil being bested at his own game. We might, though, offer some different interpretations of "Devil": for instance, is Johnny actually a Christ figure, though a superficial one because there's no real sacrifice of self? Or, given the chorus, with its roster of invented comic-folk song references, are we saying that by sticking to what you know and being true to yourself you can indeed best the Devil ("resist him and he will flee")? On a more down-to-earth level it can certainly be read as a music-biz parable, given the state of things in the mid-70s. By representing the devil's music as an infernal form of disco, the song becomes a commentary on the politics of country music in Nashville at the time. Do you remain true to your
fiddlin' roots or do you sell out and do country-rock?

The interesting thing here is that neither country nor pop nor, really, rock 'n' roll could have produced either these songs in the fifties or even sixties. The question of "what is a song supposed to be about" keeps changing every couple of decades in pop music since the Civil War.

Is there anything a pop song shouldn't address, or can't address, simply because of the limitations of pop music? And is your answer to those questions affirmed or contradicted by the fact that both of these songs approach risky territory wearing the costume of forms that aren't quite so limited (high culture in one case and folk culture in the other)?

praise and worship styles

"Cool! I'm a musician too. What do you mainly do?"

"I'm a worship leader for a church."

"Excellent. What style: Guitars 'n' Goatees or Slacks 'n' Keys?"

greta, a year old

The other day, Catherine's sister Ellen took a bunch of great pictures of baby Greta (now just over a year old), in the courtyard of the chapel where we married. She's a talented photographer with a good eye for personality and telling detail. We're just thrilled with the results.

click on the pictures for more