daily

freedom in rhode island

2012-01-27T13:26:00.003-06:00

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

2012-01-23T10:04:00.002-06:00

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

2012-01-20T10:52:00.003-06:00

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

2012-01-17T15:25:00.001-06:00

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

2012-01-13T11:44:00.002-06:00

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

2012-01-10T08:09:00.000-06:00

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

2012-01-07T09:52:00.000-06:00

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

2012-01-05T11:46:00.002-06:00

aspersions

2011-12-23T12:11:00.000-06:00

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

2011-12-20T10:56:00.000-06:00

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

2011-12-17T10:34:00.000-06:00

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

2011-12-14T10:20:00.000-06:00

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

2011-12-11T10:17:00.000-06:00

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

2011-12-08T12:46:00.003-06:00

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

2011-12-06T10:37:00.002-06:00

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?

2011-12-02T14:44:00.002-06:00

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!

2011-11-29T06:14:00.002-06:00

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

2011-11-26T13:48:00.002-06:00

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

2011-11-22T10:48:00.002-06:00

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

2011-11-19T02:21:00.003-06:00

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

2011-11-13T23:37:00.003-06:00

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

2011-11-08T00:43:00.003-06:00

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

2011-11-04T09:29:00.002-06:00

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

2011-11-02T02:15:00.003-06:00

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

2011-10-27T10:31:00.002-06:00

"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

2011-10-24T01:01:00.002-06:00

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

2011-10-17T12:59:00.002-06:00

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.

2011-10-05T21:53:00.007-06:00

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

2011-10-04T08:14:00.000-06:00

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

2011-10-01T09:09:00.000-06:00

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

2011-09-29T11:07:00.003-06:00

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

2011-09-26T11:06:00.009-06:00

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

2011-09-22T02:59:00.003-06:00

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

2011-09-19T20:28:00.003-06:00

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

2011-09-01T01:22:00.000-06:00

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

2011-08-25T22:54:00.002-06:00

"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

2011-08-23T12:45:00.005-06:00

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

new shamu show, and free barry

2011-08-11T19:35:00.001-06:00

Just got through doing the arrangements on a brand-new Shamu show for Sea World, and am getting started with the charts, to be recorded later this month.

It's their Halloween show, so you have to wait till October to see it. Meanwhile, it'll do to say I've really enjoyed putting it together. They had very definite ideas about what they wanted, but also gave me an alarming amount of latitude. They had songs they definitely wanted to include, songs they really wanted to include, songs they sort-of wanted to include, songs they felt they should include — but at the end of the day it was pretty much up to me to choose which ones to use and where they should go. (I omitted a tune that one of the producers loved, asterisked, and was pushing for; I've heard not one peep.)

On one whole segment of the show, I had near-complete artistic freedom, including the freedom to include some original music I composed just for this.

I'm celebrating a brief moment in my career where I have amazing amounts of artistic freedom. In several projects and gigs, I'm being hired by people who trust me to do what I do best. That's satisfying.

vows

2011-08-09T11:13:00.000-06:00

I was just talking with my sister-in-law Kathy about the fact that we'd both been married some time now: seven years for Catherine and me, eight for Paul and Kathy. Does it seem at all like the marriage is old and stale? Not one bit for either of us. Seven years is the legendary number for marriages going stale, and apparently that's backed up by some fact of our neurological makeup. But I must be neurologically different because I just don't feel it. It seems like we just got back from our honeymoon.

Maybe that's because of my approach toward commitments — and commitment. I was also direly warned about what a "wake-up call" having a kid would be. But I must've already been awake. Certainly it's a commitment; certainly some facts of my daily existence have changed, just as they did with marriage. But it's a joy, not a drag. This puts me in mind of a ringing paragraph by G. K. Chesterton, from his book The Defendant (here's the full text), in which he defends pulp fiction, slang, patriotism, publicity, and other unpopular things, including vows.

‎The revolt against vows has been carried in our day even to the extent of a revolt against the typical vow of marriage. It is most amusing to listen to the opponents of marriage on this subject. They appear to imagine that the ideal of constancy was a yoke mysteriously imposed on mankind by the devil, instead of being, as it is, a yoke consistently imposed by all lovers on themselves. They have invented a phrase, a phrase that is a black and white contradiction in two words — 'free-love' — as if a lover ever had been, or ever could be, free. It is the nature of love to bind itself, and the institution of marriage merely paid the average man the compliment of taking him at his word. Modern sages offer to the lover, with an ill-flavoured grin, the largest liberties and the fullest irresponsibility; but they do not respect him as the old Church respected him; they do not write his oath upon the heavens, as the record of his highest moment. They give him every liberty except the liberty to sell his liberty, which is the only one that he wants.

prayer and water

2011-08-06T14:45:00.002-06:00

Today is the umpteenth day of over a hundred-and-five here in Texas. Lots of folks are saying that they are praying for rain, and are suggesting that we all pray for rain.

Hmmm. What should my prayer be? How about this: "Dear God, I have no intention of moving away from Texas, which has had this kind of weather since before my ancestors decided to live here. So, since I've decided to live here, could You please change the weather patterns of the North American continent to suit me? Thank you." oops: "In Jesus' name, Amen."

Of course, some folks claim that it's not just weather patterns but rather God's judgment. I tend to agree insofar as gravity is God's judgment for jumping off a building. Similarly, droughts and heat are His judgment for deciding to live where there are droughts and heat.

The literature for The Response, the massive stadium festival in which Rick Perry takes the term "grandstanding" literally, mentions this weather, as well as tornados and (it hasn't been too too long) Hurricane Katrina, as further evidence of God's judgment. Again, I might agree that Katrina is God's judgment for building a city in the glorious Mississippi River delta, untouched for millenia.

If, however, I were to see such things as a sign that America is headed the wrong direction, I suppose I'd consult the Scripture — say, the book of Amos — where I could read the following call for water from a different source:

I hate, I reject your festivals, Nor do I delight in your solemn assemblies.... Instead let justice roll down like waters."

Doxology package now available

2011-08-05T09:52:00.001-06:00

I've had a few requests recently for music for my setting of the Doxology from a couple of years back.

So I finally shaped up this package: a high-quality mp3 of the song, a concise and professional lead sheet, a full sheet-music score with piano accompaniment and optional harmony for backup singers or choir, and an easy-to-read bulletin insert for congregations.

Buy it here.

guiding spirit

2011-08-02T09:51:00.000-06:00

Do you ever think about Guido of Arezzo?

Of course you do, and so do I. He's the guy who invented musical notation. Now just sit down on that fact for an afternoon: before him, people just had to memorize music, passed down from person to person. It took a lifetime to properly learn all the songs of the church year, and even then there were variations that separated region from region. Then old Guido came along and, with a simple graph — up-and-down is pitch, left-to-right is time — it all changed.

Suddenly we can look at a song that's been unsung for a thousand years and know how to sing it. We can express some of our most abstract ideas so successfully that people miles or centuries from us will hear something very much like what we intended. It's just amazing, and it didn't arise from the soil like language did. It didn't come from generations upon generations of gathered knowledge like cooking did. It came from Guido.

why you'd hate to live in mexico

2011-07-29T09:58:00.000-06:00

Here's a quote from a man who was tortured in Mexico. He's an honest cop who was arrested for corruption and questioned. It turns out that his name was included on a list of names given by another cop who'd been questioned in the same manner — a sickening spiral of law enforcement gone wrong.

"I say, 'O.K., I'll do what you want.' I was always screaming, 'Please, please don't do that t me.' But I think they don't care." He was given a denunciation, a list of names, to sign. "The worst thing to me was that I signed that paper, which I hadn't even read." ...

I just signed the paper. Whatever. This was on a Wednesday. They destroyed my mind. They destroyed my spirit. Always with tape and handfcuffs. No opportunity to defend myself. But the government, the military, believed what I'm confessing. They believed things I said yes to from torture, because I don't want to die. They are very bad persons, but they are also stupid."

They are very bad persons, but they are also stupid.

Yes, they are very bad persons, and they are also stupid.

fun with sam and jan and dick

2011-07-25T23:06:00.002-06:00

(All names and artistic details are changed.)

At a recent party, some people got into a discussion of Zero Attack, one of those shows with overarching storylines, the kind of thing you have to watch from the very first episode in order to get it. The entire series had come to a conclusion. Sam and Jan hadn't seen it; they were trying to decide whether to commit — and had very carefully kept themselves in the dark so as not to spoil anything — but were skeptical based on what they'd heard from people who had.

Some had said the whole thing was a bust. (With many such stories, with lots of plot twists and characters, it's almost impossible to pull off a satisfactory conclusion.) They felt robbed, and insisted it was a waste of time.

Others, though (including me), had said it was no bust at all. I was very satisfied by the show was pulled off, and was impressed that the storyteller had so masterfully sewn it all together. I'd spent a little while defending it and assuring Sam and Jan that it's a compelling tale well told, when Dick spoke up.

Dick said the series finale was a cop-out and a disappointment that rendered the whole story a waste. I asked for details, though keeping my language vague so as not to spoil it for Sam and Jan. It came out that Dick hadn't seen the whole story. He gave up in the second or third season, figuring that the show had lost its way and the storyteller was just making things up and marking time till they could figure out how to get out of it.

So he hadn't seen the whole series after all? Well, no; he'd seen nothing but the first seasons and then — disastrously — the last episode. That's it. Naturally he would think dimly of the series; anyone would who'd experienced it that way.

I assured him that he'd gotten the wrong impression, and that during those seemingly slow stretches the storyteller was just laying groundwork for what comes later. This is an argument I'm used to making about the tedious-seeming parts of Wagner's Ring Cycle. In both Wagner and the series, it's entirely true. You think the storyteller might have lost his way, but — nope! — much much later it turns out that the information you were getting was essential, and pays off in spades.

I said all that, and Dick poopooed it. He even mentioned one episode: "the one with the two big guys in suits." The very model, he said, of one of those meaningless episodes that does nothing for the series and gets you nowhere.

I responded, "Ahhhh. You picked the Perfect Bad Example. That episode turned out to be vital: it had tons of stuff in it that proved that they knew what they were doing from the very first moment, and details and information that gets wrapped up in later seasons."

He quite simply didn't believe it, though I was sitting there right in front of him as someone who had seen every single episode and seen how it all came together, and though he was sitting there right in front of me as someone who had quit pretty early and then only swooped in for the last few moments.

Then, as Sam and Jan were listening, Dick went on: "But I saw the end, and it doesn't get wrapped up."

Me: "Well, it doesn't all get entirely wrapped up in just the final episode. All through the last season the storylines get resolved and minor and major things are addressed."

Dick: "Uh-huh. The last episode doesn't resolve anything, though. Oh, sure, we find out Sherlock and Jezebel and the whole Robinson family are all mafia after all, except for Timmy. Sheeeesh, what a cop-out."

Me: (looks aghast at Sam and Jan, who have just had a major plot point completely ruined for them).

Thanks, Dick.

the potter rule

2011-07-19T22:24:00.005-06:00

Just saw the final Harry Potter movie today. I've arrived at a formula that describes the way the filmmakers chose to adapt these books.

Anything good about the books that can be explained to a Hollywood producer in a T-shirt and blazer made it to the screen intact and shining. (The escape from Gringotts, the exhilaration of a Quidditch game.) Anything good about the books that cannot be explained to that producer will be botched, ignored, or somehow not trusted. (The actual game of Quidditch, any spell done with a wand, denouements.)

Further, and poisonously, everything that could be so explained if only it were changed a bit gets changed. (Dumbledore's brilliant escape from his own office goes from being a miracle of timing and teamwork to ZAPPO!!!!!!; the ride in the Ford Anglia goes from being an amusingly anticlimactic episode of sunburn and boredom to a rollercoaster ride; the final duel with Voldy goes from being a smart and dramatic showpiece ... to a rollercoaster ride.)

It's of course a Hollywood miracle that we managed to have a Potter series in which Robin Williams never appeared and in which Harry and Hermione never have a love scene. For that we (according to our training) should be grateful. But the thing could have been done so well. An overwhelming number of fans see the movies as ikons, pointers to and reminders of all the great stuff about the books, a way of reawakening our fondness. If I could see it that way, I'd probably be as thrilled as they are. Wanting real movies, though, and unwilling to take a paint-bath in the idea that it's asking too much for the movies to capture the spirit of the books (Lord of the Rings, anyone?), I'll have to content myself with bits and pieces, most of the third movie, and the sizable chunk of the last movie in which you can squint and see the real thing.

lord, Lord, LORD

2011-07-14T13:04:00.006-06:00

There are 3 ways of doing the word "Lord" in most Bible translations (leaving aside the beginning of sentences).

An uncapitalized lord refers to a human. Since Lord and Lady Dedlock don't make an appearance in the Bible, you're left with uses such as Sarai calling Abram her "lord."

An initially-capitalized Lord refers to God in some form, whether God the Father or God the Son.

Then there's the all-capital LORD, which is used when the original Hebrew uses the word YHWH, or "Yahweh," the not-to-be-spoken-out-loud name of the Almighty, which is often rendered into English as "Jehovah." When devout Hebrews would see the word in the text, they'd just say "Adonai" out loud, a word which roughly translates to Lord.

I'm mentioning all this because of something that regularly amuses me. A friend sent along a song that she's interested in doing in worship. I was checking it out, as I often do, on youtube, where such songs are accompanied by slides of the lyrics (often in a bad font). When it got to the place where the lyrics are "oh lord," it said "Oh LORD."

I assume this means that when the songwriters wrote the song, back in 2009, in the original Hebrew, they used the word "Yahweh."

joy spring

2011-06-29T05:00:00.001-06:00

Clifford Brown's "Joy Spring" has a natural uplift to it. It's a typical A-A-B-A form, but the second A is a half-step higher, and the B starts off a further half-step higher. It's like a little harmonic staircase that's endlessly fun to climb as you play the song and the form repeats over and over.

The band played it this last Sunday at church, for the offertory.

I'm remembering the other time I played that tune at church for an offertory: several people — naturally, I'll never know who they are — complained to the minister, who called me in for a meeting, relaying their displeasure. (And how many people went to him and expressed their pleasure at hearing this song?) He hadn't been there during that service, so I explained that the overall sound was a pleasant one, and that, after all, it was a bit of a departure from the kind of thing we'd been doing — all in the name of big-tent musical inclusiveness — and we probably wouldn't be doing offertories like that too often. It was just a bit of variety. Lots of people liked it.

After our conversation he concluded that it might have brought on some unpleasantness but it was all probably OK, and those people were just griping; he seemed especially relieved to hear that we weren't introducing a regular feature with it. Then he requisitioned the video of it so he could see and hear it all himself.

Whew!

Then there was this Sunday, when not only the congregation expressed enthusiasm, but the minister(s) made it a point to say how great it was; the pastor had, in fact, made a bit of a deal before the service about how much our jazzy sound added to the texture of worship there. A few days earlier he'd gotten in touch with me to say "The Bishop's going to be there Sunday, so — "

Yeah, I've heard sentences like that before. They always end in caution and tamping-down and preemptive inoffensiveness. This time, though, the sentence ended in " — so don't hold back! We really want you guys to do what you do."

Ahhh.

I'm proud of the worship band I'm a part of. We give an offering, joyfully and with our various personalities intact, and it creates something that can't be duplicated. It's always been, I believe, a pleasant scent to the True Audience, the Audience-of-One that we're really all playing for. It's nice though, that these days our offering is also honored by the people around us, and the people in charge.

Blessings abound.

a (not very) new despotism

2011-06-26T15:44:00.002-06:00

George Washington was always wary of tyranny. But, crucially, he looked out for it in exactly the places it was actually likely to show up in a democracy.

The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism.

Selah.

major, minor, perfect, imperfect

2011-06-23T10:33:00.002-06:00

Recently, my dad asked me a music question: Why are 4ths and 5ths called perfect and the other intervals designated as only major 2nd, 3rd, etc?

If an accomplished musician wonders, so may you. So I'm sharing the answer.

Actually, primes and octaves are also called perfect. That gives us nine (arguably) different note relationships.

Coming at the problem from an angle, let's ask, What if there were two kinds of cars, male and female? But there aren't; there's just one. There are just cars, and they're not gendered. Dogs, on the other hand, are gendered: a dog has to be either male or female, and can't be both and can't be neither.

Some intervals are cars, and some are dogs. For mathematical reasons, primes and octaves and fourths and fifths don't come in two "genders," major and minor; they just don't. Only seconds, thirds, sixths, and sevenths are major or minor. So, in the European minds of several hundred years ago, seconds and thirds and sixths and sevenths, which have to be either major or minor, and can't be both and can't be neither, seemed more like the mutable moon and the mutable earth below it. Primes and octaves and fourths and fifths, which only exist in one state and can't be major or minor, seemed more like the immutable sun and the immutable stars beyond. So one set of intervals is called "imperfect," and the other "perfect."

All this is aside from chromatic modifications: any interval, perfect or imperfect, can be an "augmented" or "diminished" interval. If you fiddle around with them on a piano, you'll see that the definitions overlap, and are only there for ease of reading. (That's my opinion; others think they're there for theoretical purity, which leads to some horribly unreadable charts.)

But, no matter whether you agree that the metaphor of perfection and imperfection is a good one, there has to be some name that reflects the very real difference between the dogs and the cars, the gendered and the ungendered.

separate and equally brazen

2011-06-20T14:43:00.000-06:00

I was just reading about the post-Reconstruction laws in the South. I'd known they had separate bathrooms for whites and blacks, separate sections of streetcars, separate water fountains; I hadn't quite known they had separate post office windows, though that doesn't seem too surprising. But I'm just reading that the separation extended to courtrooms, where they had separate Bibles to swear in whites and blacks.

Now that's cognitive dissonance.

due north

2011-06-17T11:09:00.002-06:00

As I've pointed out before, The Blue Nile is a band that doesn't play by the usual rules of music promotion. It appears that they don't mind if you don't find out about a release of theirs, even if you're a rabid fan.

While the guest appearances on Quiet City's Public Face Private Face (a project by the longtime studio drummer for the Blue Nile) don't count as a proper Blue Nile release, certainly I was surprised to find out they were out there. I'm not sure how much involvement there is from the guys in the band, but the sinewy and unusual bass line sounds like it could be a Robert Bell creation, and those odd synth textures (veering between cheesy and magnificent) could very well be Paul Joseph Moore, especially since these songs date from before he left the group. Singer Paul Buchanan is of course in stunning form.

I sat back and put this on, and enjoyed that combination of familiarity and newness and excellence that one rarely gets. (The last time was probably the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.)

Dynamic, soaring, beautiful.

the response

2011-06-14T10:46:00.000-06:00

Every follower of Christ will be, and has been, praying for this country privately, behind closed doors, as the Savior commanded in no uncertain terms. Those who pray otherwise may make whatever claim they want about their faith, but, at least on this important issue, they are no followers of Christ.

venn diagram, please

2011-06-11T10:02:00.000-06:00

I was just reading an article by Steve Coll that described a place

populated by muckraking journalists, comic novelists, cheesy reality-TV producers, real-estate hustlers, world-class squash players, and the like.

"And the like?"

taking a stand

2011-06-08T00:43:00.002-06:00

Today, Greta rose, nearly unaided, and stood, completely unaided, for at least a second or two before sitting down with a plop. That's a first, in a season of firsts. She was on the way to getting a piece of banana, a fruit she was so excited about at the time that she bellowed and yelled with pleasure and anticipation.

Thrilled that she stood alone, I tried to get her to stand again. I put the banana down on the chair and used both hands to pull her up again, helping her feet to a more advantageous position so maybe she could stand longer. Nope: she crawled over and started going for the banana.

That's exactly it, my daughter: the thing is the thing. The goal is the goal, not whatever someone else makes of your effort toward it. What mattered to her wasn't that she stood; what mattered to her was the banana. May it always be that way.

the wounded healer

2011-06-05T22:50:00.002-06:00

Here's a song that the Jazz Protagonists released before it was actually written. On our Live at Luna CD, we included a powerful performance of a piece, improvised on the spot, that had a haunting feel and cool groove and interesting structure. I fiddled around with the melody, coming up with a descending line, but that was about it.

The other week, I sat down and addressed the piece once and for all. I came up with what I think is a memorable C-minor melody that fits the song just right. We played it for an appreciative audience a few days later. Meanwhile, here's the rough demo I threw down. See what you think.

The Wounded Healer

guts

2011-05-27T11:20:00.000-06:00

King Solomon's issue wasn't wisdom. It was guts. He had the guts to make it so that the woman not willing to rip the baby apart won.

3 pics for a girl

2011-05-20T00:56:00.002-06:00

Greta has already invested in her first original paintings. We think they're just perfect for her.

CLICK ON THE PICTURE FOR MORE

northern renaissance and southern renaissance

2011-05-13T12:38:00.000-06:00

In a recent conversation about an earlier post that mentioned artists of the Northern Renaissance versus those of the Southern, a friend asked if there were any more information on this topic, or if I could do some more riffing on it.

There's a glancing reference to it on Wikipedia, but it paints with a broad brush. True, the Southern Renaissance was more influenced by Greco-Roman ideals, but its humanism wasn't as "pagan" as suggested: it was just idealist, so the human body was often depicted in its glorified form, even when depicting an earth-bound existence. Here we are, made in God's image, bound for glory, and to depict that is our duty. So think of Michelangelo, Raphael, Andrea del Sarto, with their gorgeous bodies and faces embodying a vision later carried by Versace and Armani.

As opposed to that, up north they were indeed humanist, but in a way that allowed for (and sometimes lovingly emphasized) human frailty. Here we are, east of Eden, fallen and flawed, and to depict that is our duty. So think of Brueghel, with peeing children and crooked old men, or of Rembrandt, with those lined and blotched faces.

All this is very theologically tied-in as well: Northern Protestantism has always had a reputation for being "stern," although there's plenty of good-natured Brueghelian humor in there too — witness (Scottish Presbyterian!!!) Robert Burns's "To a Louse."

To give it a catchy phrase, we might say that the southerners were more fired-up about redemption and glory, and the northerners were more fired-up about human sin and failure.

I was amused to take a trip from Münster, Germany to Milan, Italy, and to note the differences between the domes that dominate the landscape in the old part of each town.

In Münster, the Dom (which still bears cages where they hung the Anabaptists out to dry) sits down the way from the main street and condemns its crass commercialism and tinsel glamour: "Sinners! Repent from this vanity!"

Meanwhile, in Milan, the mind-blowing Duomo (started in 1350, completed in 1965 [almost! there are still 3 incomplete statues, thus bringing immoderate pleasure to Robert Browning's ghost]) stands down the way from Milan's fashionable district and taunts it: "Mortals! God will outdazzle you any day of the week!"

godparents' day

2011-05-12T01:07:00.000-06:00

Catherine and Greta and I were sitting at one of our favorite tables at the Gristmill, looking over the green riverbanks. It was the day after Mother's Day, when we had our own celebration and gifts. We'd invited Kathy and Sean McMains to join us partway in. They showed up, we exploded into conversation, and then, at a pause, Catherine said, in that tone that makes you think something is coming, "Welllll, we invited you here, partially to enjoy dessert with us, and celebrate Mother's Day, and Barry's birthday, ... and ... we were hoping, celebrate Godparents' Day."

They said yes.

What's fun to me is the dramatic irony of it: they didn't know they'd be asked that day, but we did. From the moment they showed up, I enjoyed watching them. Sean immediately cooed over the girl; Kathy immediately picked her up and started feeding her little bites of applesauce; through the whole meal they showed a concern and care for our girl that confirmed our choice.

So. Now Greta has godparents. I don't know much about the whole tradition, not having ever had any, and not being too aware of godparents in my friends' lives. Some schoolmate might offhandedly mention their godparents: to a Baptist child's mind (at least to mine), the word had a Catholic incense to it, allure and foreignness and near-certain spiritual peril. But that was about it. Catherine's church and social circle had the tradition, though. Her godparents are heartful folks who have supported and prayed for her and been part of her life for its entirety. They've been the adults-who-aren't-your-parents that every kid needs. For me, they've been conversational companions, cigar-sharers, and affirming welcomers to their goddaughter's suitor.

As we explore what it is to be godparents to little Micah Yang (an honor bestowed on us a few months ago), we'll be all the more pleased to do it in the best of company.

take this, strunk

2011-05-10T14:55:00.002-06:00

Not all sentences bring delight, but, occasionally, a big Germanic one, with hugecompoundwords and unwieldy phrases, like you might see in massive old novels where the sentences, as my friend, a grammarian whom these topics, arcane as they are, intrigue, says, sprawl, attached, does.

mother's day

2011-05-08T06:18:00.002-06:00

We've been doing a lot of reading on childrearing in the past year or so. The consensus is that kids are resilient: if you provide them with food and shelter and safety, and are non-abusive, they're going to be who they're going to be regardless of what wonderful thing you do or what horrible mistake you make.

That's encouraging. But there's a truth beyond that. Those of us who regard scriptures as significant read words like "train up a child in the way of righteousness, and when he is old he will not depart from it;" and "in all your ways acknowledge Him, and He will make your paths straight."

The fact is that you're responsible for your own life. But the other fact is that your are given a script, good or bad, that you have to examine and then rewrite for yourself. How fortunate I am that my parents gave me such a good script. It makes my path straighter. There are mistakes I didn't have to make, good things I didn't have to be convinced of or find the hard way.

I'm grateful to my mother for the million tiny things I'm noticing and remembering about her, puzzle pieces I'm putting together every day as I raise Greta and as I watch Catherine be a mother to her. I'm grateful also for the million tiny things I'll never know about. Because the fact is that there are no tiny things.

So, to my mother and to the mother of my child, happy Mother's Day.

happy birthday kjv

2011-05-02T10:17:00.002-06:00

In a flat white box surrounded by acid-free paper, I have a single page from the first edition of the King James Bible. It was a gift from my parents (they know me well). That piece of paper turns 400 years old today.

The 1611 Bible is not just one of the great achievements of the English language; it's one of England's great gifts to the world. Building on the achievements of Wycliffe and Tyndale and Coverdale and the Great Bible, the Bishop's Bible, and the Geneva Bible, but significantly different from them at key points, the KJV still reigns supreme. It shapes our language still. Hundreds upon hundreds of translations later, we still go to King James for the 23rd Psalm and the Lord's Prayer.

It'll be worth your time to find and read Adam Nicolson's engaging book God's Secretaries. Nicolson is one of those historians who has become so familiar with the time he's studying that he can see implied statements and pull out their entire meaning for us who are so removed from Jacobean society.

Here's a passage in which he discusses the various rules by which the translators will operate. Each rule comes under close scrutiny, with miraculously revealing results.

[rule 6:] Noe marginal notes att all to be affixed, but only for ye explanation of ye Hebrew or Greeke Words, which cannot without some circumlocution soe breifly and fitly be expressed in ye Text.

There were to be no marginal notes 'att all', not even those which might conform to the ideology of the established Jacobean church. The text, as all good Protestants might require, was to be presented clean and sufficient of itself, except where the actual words of the original were so opaque that a 'circumlocution' might not explain them within the text. 'Circumlocution' did not mean then quite what it means now. Thomas Wilson in The arte of rhetorique, published in 1553 and in use throughout the sixteenth century, had described circumlocution as 'a large description either to sett forth a thyng more gorgeouslie, or else to hyde it'. The words of this translation, then, could embrace both gorgeousness and ambiguity, did not have to settle into a single doctrinal mode but could embrace different meanings, either within the text itself or in the margins. This is the heart of the new Bible as an irenicon, an organism that absorbed and integrated difference, that included ambiguity and by doing so established peace. It is the central mechanism of the translation, one of immense lexical subtlety, a deliberate carrying of multiple meanings beneath the surface of a single text. This single rule lies behind the feeling which the King James Bible has always given its readers that the words are somehow extraordinarily freighted, with a richness which few other texts have ever equalled. Again and again, the Jacobean Translators chose a word not for its clarified straightforwardness (which had been Tyndale's focus in the 1520s and '30s, and the Geneva Calvinists' in the 1550s) but for its richness, its suggestiveness, its harmonic resonances. That is the heart of the irenicon: divergence held within a singularity, James's Arcadian vision made word.

What an achievement. Today I'll get that piece of paper out, marvel that it's lasted, only slightly discolored and splotched, for four hundred years, and marvel at the mighty words it contains.

decision 2012

2011-04-29T20:55:00.004-06:00

I just hit on a theory of presidential politics.

You've heard the Taller Candidate Theory; though that has been the case for most of our history, it's not infallible. Kerry lost to Bush in 2004. The War Hero theory? busted in both directions, multiple times. The Money Theory? tough to beat, but nonetheless busted (Ross Perot, anyone?). All must bow before Brake's Law of Cuddliness.

In the television age, the cuddlier candidate has always won. Period. Nixon, you say? Take a look at George McGovern. I didn't say the winner has to be actually cuddly; I said cuddlier. So, for instance, George Bush Sr doesn't particularly fit the description either, but he had the good fortune of running against Michael Dukakis.

Right down the line, folks. If the Republicans want a victory in 2012, forget the issues: they need someone (gulp) cuddlier than Barack Obama.

paris journal 4

2011-04-22T11:40:00.000-06:00

FRIDAY, APRIL 15
Feeling much better after twenty-four hours of scrupulous rest (and Catherine's ministrations, which included Gretacare), I decided that today's museum plan should stand. Catherine had suggested that I rest today too, but I figured I'd be sorry if I didn't come along.

It was exactly what body and mind needed: the Orangerie and the Orsay, two of the coolest museums in the world. Sure, you've got the Louvre, but these two smaller museums are sheer pleasure. You can even get a double-header ticket, which is exactly what we did.

Advice: go to the Orangerie first. The Musée d'Orsay was incredibly crowded when we arrived, with a forty-five-minute line snaking fruitlessly back and forth and back and forth in front of the entrance. I couldn't stand the thought of it, and I'm afraid I insisted on tooting across the river to the Orangerie to see if the situation was better: a gamble, I know, because after all we could have simply lost time and gained nothing. However, there was no crowd at all there. We waltzed in, got the tickets, enjoyed a leisurely time there, and then returned to the Orsay, zipping straight past all the poor souls stranded in Leviathan and going in the Entrance For People Who Already Have Their Tickets. Ahhhh.

The museums themselves were, of course, everything expected. Orangerie: small, intimate, a few giant late masterworks above (those sprawling late waterlily paintings by Monet), a bunch of minor works by various Impressionist/Symbolist/Modernist artists below.

Orsay: an extensive and varied collection of Impressionist paintings, many of them instantly recognizable, and other art and sculpture and design, in a stunning train-station setting.

We strolled and gawked and conversed and kissed and strolled and gawked some more.

Then we strolled over to the Louvre to say hi to all the folks there. Over a sandwich, we enjoyed the relaxed international crowd and the beautiful weather before walking through the budding and blooming Jardin des Tuileries toward the Champs Elysees. All in all, if you're going to get your shoes completely coated with beige dust, this is the finest way in the world to do it.

SATURDAY, APRIL 16
Some of our best times for exploring the city have been in the evening. Before noon, the usual rhythm has been that we get Greta up and play with her, then maybe one of us takes her along do a little shopping around the corner and greeting the day, then she naps. Later, we get up and prepare a bit more for the day, eat some lunch, the girl naps again, ... so by the time we're ready to go out for any length of time, it's already afternoon.

Having a baby with us, then, has changed our travel schedule to some degree, and yet not really changed it much at all. It's just that, before, we were sleeping in all that time.

This evening, we strolled around Rue Daguerre, one of the most delightfully simple pleasures in Paris. Daguerre is a pedestrian street, an old narrow street that was never widened, a place alive with calm energy, where you shop and do your daily stuff and gather at the many cafes and watch the people go by shopping and doing their daily stuff. The guidebooks mention other streets like this as ones to be sure to see if you want a slice of true Paris life; this one is so untouristy it rarely gets mentioned (though Rick Steves apparently mentions it, precisely because it's so untouristy).

We sat down at one of our favorite cafes, arrayed ourselves on the front row for easy viewing and easy escape with the girl if needed, and had a coffee (an espresso served in a delectable turquoise demitasse with gently scalloped edges) and a hot chocolate (served with a mount of whipped cream and dusted with dark chocolate powder). A note: you can tell your hot chocolate is going to be good when it comes with a couple of cubes of sugar on the side. It's an indication that the drink isn't going to be too goopy-sweet.

We talked, we laughed, we cried (OK, only one of us cried, briefly, before being taken around on a quick walk). We watched, we got watched. We saw the evening into dusk and the dusk into nightfall on a pretty darn perfect Paris evening.

SUNDAY, APRIL 17
Palm Sunday! The sun is shining! The breeze is blowing! To a Texan eye, the bright bright day means heat; to a Parisian, it means the edge is taken off the cold and you can walk around without a coat on.

This was the day we'd set aside for Sacre-Coeur, that towering, beautiful hilltop masterpiece. I just learned part of its secret: it's made of travertine that constantly oozes calcite, so no matter how much pollution of various kinds hits it, it will always shine white over the city.

Everyone else had decided that today was a great day for Sacre-Coeur as well. The place was mobbed. I loved it. People milling around, lounging on the steep green hill, playing with kids, kissing and hugging, engaging in ten-second-mock-soccer games, eating and drinking, and enjoying the fantastically beautiful day.

Inside, the place was packed (it being Palm Sunday), but there was enough space to go in and breathe the incensed air and see the sternly uplifting Romanesque arches and dome, the sun streaming through the incense in Spielbergian shafts, the giant mosaic of Christ looking out onto you and Paris and all the world.

Sacre-Coeur sits atop Montmartre; the famous bohemian district named after it is spread out below. We walked along, looking at the street art. Greta fell fast asleep through the rumble of her stroller over centuries-old cobblestone. We had a nearly-too-strong Grand Marnier crepe. I tucked into a tiny piano bar and performed for ten or fifteen minutes, my arms and hands and brain grateful for the brief workout.

Back on level ground, we made our way through the dirty streets toward the station; the multiethnic neighborhood is a veritable souk of exotic smells; we craved it all.

MONDAY, APRIL 18
Friends-from-all-over day. Sarah Beth arrived in the morning from Nashville, where she'd gone for fittings and showers; Mary Love arrived in the evening from Zurich, to stay with her sister for a month; and in the afternoon the fashion designer Marisol Deluna took time out of her whirlwind international schedule to meet us at Les Deux Magots. We sat facing St-Germain-des-Prés and talked about the crazily looping circles of friends we have in common (she grew up in San Antonio), and about everything else under the sun. For the record, Catherine's pot of chocolate was thick as jam and tasted heavenly.

Later, Marisol gamely walked with us back to the Denfert-Rochereau district, where we said farewell to her and hello to Mary Love. An evening of wine and pasta with mushrooms (and beguiling elderflower soda) followed.

TUESDAY, APRIL 19
Mary Love and Catherine and Greta and I scooted over to the Ile to pay a visit to Sainte-Chapelle. This is the tall Gothic palace chapel whose stone walls serve entirely as a latticed framework for one of the most stunning stained glass window arrays in the world. It was built in the mid-1200s, right at the height of the art of stained glass. I'm always amused that the experts say it's all downhill from there — you know, when it comes to stained glass the 15th century is just too late! — but this chapel would be Exhibit A.

(OK, the blazing St. Vitus's in Prague is Exhibit A, but Sainte-Chapelle is Exhibit B.) The setting sun streamed through from the west-southwest, setting fire to all the reds in the windows. The place is small — maybe a tenth the size of Notre-Dame or smaller — but the effect is overwhelming. I wandered back and forth in the vertiginous heights, on the brink of tears the whole time, muttering and marveling that human beings could ever have come up with something like this.

Back at the house, Sarah Beth decided she wanted to try out that mustard-cream-sauce recipe. She and Mary Love proceeded to whip up a feast comprised of veal and pasta coated with the sauce, and a fresh salad with an altogether hotter mustard dressing. What a meal! And so very French. We dined like royalty.

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 20
A relaxing final day in this beautiful town. Mary Love again joined us, this time for the Champs-Élysées and the Arc de Triomphe. We walked all up and down, stopping in at Cartier (where Greta charmed the charmers) and Luis Vuitton, and taking in the sun and sky and gently crowded boulevard.

That evening, a final item on the Paris agenda: absinthe. We trekked to a cafe that specializes in serving it the traditional way. First, though, a satisfying meal of tortellini and butter and herbs. Then, time for the Green Fairy. Our gal brought over three cups of straight absinthe, then placed a large Art Deco samovar-like thing of water on the table, with multiple spouts. We each (except for Catherine, who cannot abide the licorice taste of it) arranged a cube of sugar on an ornate silver absinthe-sugar-cube-holder, letting the water drip from the spout over the sugar and into the absinthe, clouding it up into a beautiful jade green. When the cube is fully dissolved, you have a perfect mix. We toasted and tasted: just delicious! Light and airy and not-too-licoricey, with a warm aftertaste. If there's a danger to the stuff, it's that it is so delicious that it might whap you; we agreed that it's easy to see how someone could unwittingly wind up under the table. Nonetheless, we ably walked out and returned to our lovely bright yellow apartment, where we enjoyed one last taste of Catherine's Official Favorite Thing About Paris: Grand Marnier crepes.

· · · · ·

What a delightful, beautiful, fun, entertaining, elegant trip! Special thanks to Sarah Beth, our hostess and guide, for her hospitality, good nature, and helpful connections. It was officially our first family vacation. Greta now has a stamped-up passport and several thousand miles behind her. We have a load of memories that will stay with us a long time.

paris journal 3

2011-04-17T17:49:00.002-06:00

MONDAY, APRIL 11
After a leisurely day of sunshine and French food, we took a short stroll southeast. Most of what we'd been seeing — the churches and museums and landmarks — has been to the north of us, so I thought I'd just check the map and see where we could explore.

Sure enough, Parc Montsouris called. It's huge; it's very green; it has a gust of naturalness that comes from the Olmstead tradition — a nice contrast to the measured symmetry of other parks in Paris.

Up on the hillside, we took a seat right near a fantastic tulip garden. Gusts of wind kept blowing, bringing Greta to hilarious extremes of pleasure.

We stayed till the park closed, enjoying the wind, the setting sun, the unusual and beautiful view of the city, including some more modern (and less beautiful) buildings that were nevertheless well-placed among trees and greenery. There's still lots more to explore in this park. I hope we get to go back.

TUESDAY, APRIL 12
We explored further north today, stumbling upon some beautiful places along the way. Though we've been intentional about visiting some of the big must-see Paris attractions, the funnest part has been suddenly find ourselves in front of some gorgeous landmark that we had no idea we were going to pass. This is the virtue of just kicking around in the city rather than going by some pre-arranged tour.

Today was a perfect example. We'd enjoyed our visit to the Luxembourg Palace and Gardens, but figured that since we'd just dropped in the first time we should check the place out more thoroughly. Which we did: beautiful! Then we just kept going, this time on a more strictly northern route, figuring we'd walk to the Seine and back and meet whatever met us.

Suddenly, we were struck by a massive building. The massiveness of this place cannot be exaggerated. It was Saint-Sulpice, a church that figured into the plot of The Da Vinci Code. Standing in the plaza, enjoying the fountain, and looking on as the setting sun did its golden-glowing magic on the incredible West entrance, I couldn't help but shift Louis Kahn's words to fit the occasion: The sun never knew how great it was till it hit the side of Saint-Sulpice. Man.

Click on the picture to get a sense of what I mean by "massive": see Catherine and Greta down at the base?

We wound our way further north, stumbling on the altogether more straightforward Saint-Germain-des-Prés. My favorite view of it was of the spire peeking out from the ivied wall.

From the front, its austere beauty graces the entire area. Wheeling around, we discovered that the cafe that sits right across from it was none other than Les Deux Magots, that epicenter of the late-19th- and early-20th-century intellectual and artistic vanguard. Hemingway, Camus, Picasso, Sartre, Truffaut, Simone de Beauvoir, Jorge Luis Borges, Umberto Eco: this is where they held court.

And all on a walk to the river and back!

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 13
I'd checked to see if we could hit the Paris Opera sometime while here, but unfortunately nothing was playing there. However, the Bastille Opera just so happened to be showing a world premiere, Bruno Mantovani's Akhmatova, based on the life of the Russian poetess. Had to do it!

While it doesn't fit into the category of Eurofolly (you know, the La-Boheme-set-in-outer-space stuff), it definitely fits comfortably into the American caricature of European-style opera: not very entertaining, very little visual interest, unrelieved severity in costumes, choreo, set designs, lighting, and blocking. As for the music itself, he kept doing this one texture that sounded like the moment of climax in a Bernard Herrman score for a Hitchcock film. Cool enough, but he did this roughly four times a minute for the duration. Ach!

At intermission, we decided to invert a grand Parisian opera tradition. We left after the first act and had a beautiful dinner at a nearby cafe. A great decision. I've never, ever left an opera partway through, especially a world premiere, but man oh man. I even started getting a headache walking around afterward with the unpleasant non-drama rolling through my head. Then I noticed a fever, and some very disturbing lightheadedness. By the time we got home, I officially declared myself Sick.

I blame the opera. Bruno Mantovani, you owe me 70 Euro, plus pills.

you know who you are

2011-04-14T16:45:00.002-06:00

Melodies just come into your head unbidden, sometimes randomly, sometimes brought in by circumstance. When we were in Vienna, I hummed Strauss so vigorously and constantly that Catherine finally had to ask me to stop. Here in Paris, I've had a couple of tunes going through my head. Mainly this one:

A couple of times now, I've found myself bouncing along and humming:

Today (and I ascribe this to fever), I had this one in my head for about ten minutes before I named it:

Yaaaarrrrgh!!!! Get thee behind me, February!!!!

sunset

2011-04-12T21:12:00.000-06:00

some pictures of paris

2011-04-11T15:41:00.001-06:00

We have a growing number of pictures on facebook of our trip.

Check 'em out!

paris journal 2

2011-04-10T18:14:00.003-06:00

We've been thoroughly enjoying our temperate days here! And to think there's even more to come.

THURSDAY, APRIL 7
Thursday afternoon and evening, we tooted around the neighborhood, then handed Greta off to a babysitter while our friend (and future sister-in-law!) Sarah Beth joined us for a beautiful dinner at a French restaurant.

We dined out on the sidewalk, as the people and cars went by, and the fresh air blew. The weather here has been unstintingly sunny — not at all the April showers we'd expected. Catherine and I each had a mushroom-cheese toast, and Sarah Beth ordered a menu item whose name she didn't recognize on her French menu, but on our (thoughtfully provided) English one was translated as a sausage made of "variety meats."

The sheer disgustingness of that phrase, meaning who-knows-what in culinarily adventuresome France, was outweighed by her eagerness to try the creamy mustard sauce; she'd just perfected a recipe of her own for it and wanted to compare. Partway through, as the reality of Variety set in, we gave her one of our mushroom-cheese toasts. Errk. Couldn't bring myself to try it.

FRIDAY, APRIL 8
We got up, did some more grocery shopping, and bought ourselves a booklet of ten metro tickets. We figure we're in walking distance of several places, and won't need more than that (that's just 5 tickets for the two of us with a couple-of-hour window on each ticket).

Freshly ticketed, we hopped onto the Paris Metro and metroed over to the Eiffel Tower. Massive! For a while it was the tallest thing on earth, and even now its proportions, so elegant at a distance, swell when you're closer. We hung out for a long time in the shady park below, playing with Greta on a grassy knoll, then went up, looked all round the beautiful city, tried to spot what was where, and enjoyed the sunny day.

Along the way to and from, we also checked out some shops, most of which sold fairly cheesy souvenirs. But we're keeping our eyes open.

Back in our neighborhood, we took a light evening nap for Greta's sake, then went out and sat at a lovely relaxed cafe for some ice cream and coffee. Catherine's ice cream was made of three flavors, arranged like a beautiful flower blossom. Just delicious! Not quite Zanoni and Zanoni, but pretty dang good.

SATURDAY, APRIL 9
Apparently, Friday was an awfully strenuous day for the little girl, and so we took it a bit easier on Saturday, hanging out in our beautiful neighborhood, buying some delicious lemon-sugar crepes at a street stand, and causing several hundred people to coo and fuss over Greta. She of course returned the favor every time: she likes whatever she looks on, and her looks go everywhere.

The sirens of Parisian public emergency cars (as opposed to car alarms) are very French-sounding. They're two-tone. In America, we're used to police and fire and ambulance sirens that veer up and down in pitch, describing a sine wave: rrrEEErrrEEErrrEEErrrEEErrrEEErrr.... But over here the sound goes back and forth between a higher and lower pitch: dee-naa-nee-naa-nee-naa....

The funny thing is that they occur on almost every interval. Almost. There's a great old joke about a suicidal jazz musician who, at last resort, cheers himself by playing "Somewhere Over The Rainbow," only to keep forgetting the bridge; convinced he's a failure, he throws himself out the window, and his final impression before he dies is the sound of the Paris ambulance: the minor-third dee-naa-nee-naa-nee-naa that forms the memorable first notes of the bridge.

Except that's the one interval that I haven't heard at all echoing through the streets. As expected, I haven't heard anything wider than a perfect fifth, but every night we've been serenaded by echoing major seconds (sing "Happy birth-day, birth-day, birth-day"), major thirds (the typical ding-dong of a doorbell or the first notes of the Westminster church chimes), perfect fourths ("oh, I've been work-in' on" [the railroad]), perfect fifths (that open sound you get from horns at the hunt), even the tritone (burned into the memories of Gen-Xers as "Crest Gel! Crest Gel!"). And I just now heard one going by using a minor sixth (Think Love Story: "Where do I begin..."). All this and, so far, no minor third. Strange!

SUNDAY, APRIL 10
Another fulsome day! The sun shone triumphantly, confounding both Eliot and Chaucer — those drippy Brits — and possibly burning us just a little.

We decided to strike out north, toward the Île de la Cité. On our way, we passed the Luxembourg Palace and Gardens, so we jotted on over a couple of blocks, to be greeted by a capacity crowd of sunny-Sunday-enjoyers. The vision was an update of the famous Seurat: people in jeans and T-shirts and shorts and skirts, all ages and sizes, chatting and socializing and soaking up the great weather in a beautiful setting.

Further along, what ho! the Pantheon! We veered over and circled it, admiring the excellent unimpeded view of the Eiffel Tower in one direction and the massive classical structure in the other. Right by it is the church of St. Etienne du Mont, so oddly beautiful in its asymmetrical twists and turns.

And it's cool, cool, cool inside. (Maybe we were just hot, hot, hot.)

A brief rest within its gentle grandness, a rambling walk through charming little off-the-beaten-path alleyways and past charming little off-the-beaten-path cafes, and we crossed the bridge onto the isle, where we went across to Notre Dame again, this time in the late evening.

I'd hoped to get in and see how the Rose Window looked from inside: it was right around 6:30 in the evening, so the setting sun would have been beaming straight through it. (Cathedrals, as you know, always face their altars east, which means the back entrance, usually the main entrance, is dead west.) But there was a service on the way, quite well-attended. The archbishop was in the midst of what sounded like a clemently passionate sermon. Though tourists still wandered along the sides, the whole main part was blocked off. Nonetheless, quite an experience to see a working service there.

We continued on, welcomed back onto the mainland by the stunning Hotel de Ville, basically the City Hall of Paris since the 1300s. Its current manifestation sums up everything that's great about Paris. It's one of the best exteriors in the world, aproned by a generous plaza. At one end there's a carousel where we rested our feet, sipped Coke and coffee (respectively), and played with Greta on the grass.

little ease, indeed

2011-04-08T09:12:00.001-06:00

What a blast!! Let's go play there. Nothing like an inviting space for people to recreate. Welcome to the exquisitely named Little Ease park.

paris journal 1

2011-04-07T01:18:00.003-06:00

April in Paris!! You've got to do it sometime in your life, right? This year Paris called us, and we answered. Carl's fiancée Sarah Beth is very generously hosting us for most of the month. A cute little baby passport for Greta, safety arrangements for our own house, a few bags judiciously packed, and we're off.

I'm sad to say we were Those People on the plane, the ones with a loud kid who punctuated the flight with wails. Dang it! At least she never cried for more than about 10 seconds at a time. Still, I've been on the fellow-passenger side of that, so I thoroughly understood the filthy glares we received off and on. Someone came up later, though, and remarked on how quiet she was, so maybe the plane's sound drowned her out beyond a row or two.

So, we're cozily ensconced in our beautiful, cheerful apartment in the 14th Arrondissement, surrounded by a cartoonist's idea of Paris: quaint buildings along non-right-angled streets, just-budding trees, charming little cafes and bakeries everywhere, and, for those a few floors up, a perfect view of the Eiffel Tower right down the street.

We went out for a walk around 7:30, just as the evening light began to make everything glow. After a quick trip to the store for all the stuff we chose not to make luggage (diapers, formula, wipes), we walked up and down Rue Daguerre, a pedestrian street crowded with cute shops and cafes, at most of which the outside tables are arranged so as to watch the growing flow of men and women beginning, after work, to populate the evening.

Greta was absorbing all this from knee-level as we wheeled her around, seemingly fascinated by all the new sights and sounds, but occasionally twisting around to give us long eyebrow-raised forehead-wrinkled looks. Just making sure we're still there.

The streets are lined with 6-or-7-story buildings, done solidly in the 19th-century continental style, plastered and decorated with sturdy cornices and simple entablatures, topped off with angled dark-tiled attics, bright dormer windows popping out at intervals. I remembered that the dormer window was in fact invented right here. The first ones probably popped up not too far from this very spot.

As night darkened, around 9, we sat down at a bench near a busy corner to have a bit of dinner — our first semi-normal meal of the entire trip. It consisted entirely of most of a whole-grain baguette, bought fresh from one of those charming bakeries, with apricot jam and basil pesto. We relaxed, talked, fell in love all over again, and strolled back home.

Our bright yellow bedroom contains a bright blue desk and a softer blue bed, covered by the kind of puffy comfy duvet that, even now, Europe does like no one else. Right next to it is a lovely crib. After a long and disorienting couple of days, Greta slept only few hours before becoming absolutely inconsolable. The poor souls surrounding us had to listen to her caterwauling for a solid two hours. We made the conscious decision not to bring the entire empire with us — toys, stuffed animals — realizing that the girl's territory would then be entirely alien. We tested several different baby solace theories, to no avail; finally she just tired herself out and slept deeply.

What awaits us? The Louvre, the Musée d'Orsay, the Bastille Opera, Ste. Chapelle, Notre Dame, Sacré-Couer, hours of eating, drinking, relaxing, and soaking up the vibrant life of a fifteen-hundred-year-old town.

the seven-year hitch

2011-04-03T09:06:00.001-06:00

It's hard to believe that it was seven years ago today that Catherine and I pledged ourselves to each other. Only a couple of weeks into the marriage, it felt like we'd been together forever, comfortably twined in beautiful marriage of true minds. And now it's been seven years that hardly feel like two weeks. Further proof that we humans, though made to breathe air and eat food and sleep and wake without feeling weird about it, are simply not meant to live in a temporal existence.

How thrilling that, in our eternal lives, this moment is spent together. I couldn't ask for anything more.

the face of goodwill

2011-03-31T09:10:00.003-06:00

Sometimes you just don't notice things. For instance, the fact that the negative space in the FedEx logo creates a rightward-pointing arrow.

In the past few weeks, it's come out that Catherine has never noticed that the Goodwill logo's smiling face fragment is a lowercase g, the same as the smaller g that begins the wordmark down below. It's a G! It's a face! Notice it!

greta models

2011-03-29T09:12:00.002-06:00

These incredible pictures of Greta were taken by the Jazz Protagonists' official photographer, Julia Novikova.

Click on the picture to see 'em all.

freedom and religion

2011-03-27T09:12:00.000-06:00

The other day, on March 17th, the House Judiciary Committee approved House Concurrent Resolution 13 "Reaffirming 'In God We Trust' as the official motto of the United States and supporting and encouraging the public display of the national motto in all public buildings, public schools, and other government institutions."

Bleach! My immediate and cynical reaction is, what a bunch of opportunistic blowhards. But maybe I'm wrong: maybe they're sincere; maybe they really do feel that they're not betraying anything by "reaffirming" what never should have been affirmed in the first place.

The fact is that we didn't have that motto on all our currency until the McCarthyist 50s. Something that *has* been on our currency from the beginning, though, is "E Pluribus Unum." One out of many. Many people, of many beliefs, of many political stripes, of many backgrounds, of many languages, of many faiths or no faith at all. Oh, that it would somehow be so today.

I'm showing my traditional Baptist ideas here. I'm distressed that some of my fellow Baptists have so easily abandoned their true roots (proof that power corrupts). The further religion and government get from each other, the stronger each is, as evidenced by the great state of Rhode Island, founded by Baptist Roger Williams as one of the first places on planet Earth where a person truly could worship in whatever way he or she wished, or worship not at all, with complete freedom — no special districts, no special taxes or fees, certainly no beheadings or deportations, complete freedom.

When will we return to this wonderful ideal? (Of course, this wonderful ideal was never completely bought into by all Americans in the first place, so there you have it. Let's not be guilty either of romanticing or homogenizing the past, or of co-opting the Founders for our convenience.) But it's a glorious badge of honor in this country, something for us to be proud of, and with every public prayer at a Presidential inauguration, football game, or graduation ceremony, we not only disobey the Christ who very tartly ordered his followers to pray behind closed doors, "not like the hypocrites do" (and I'll add that those who follow him do indeed do the former and eschew the latter, given the logical fact that those who don't are quite simply not following Him), but we besmirch our greatest traditions as a country that affirms the freedom of every man's and woman's conscience.

hangin with jon anderson

2011-03-24T10:00:00.001-06:00

Last week I was the Chorus Master for the YOSA concert "An Acoustic Evening with Jon Anderson, the Voice of Yes." That means I rehearsed the choir and then stuck around for troubleshooting, a job that expanded as the weekend progressed. I even ended up whipping up a choral arrangement for the show. Jon sounds great as ever: that distinctive piping voice hasn't changed a bit. Further, his work ethic was impressive: he had no less than 3 two-hour-or-more rehearsals with the orchestra. He was a model of patience, hard work, and good cheer. Total professional. The concert, in the outlandish Majestic Theater, was a blast.

Here's a picture of Jon and me doing some last-minute polishing, while the superb conductor Troy Peters looks on.

click the picture to enlarge

the choices of a translator

2011-03-22T10:00:00.000-06:00

You only imagine that you have read the Bible, or Les Miserables, or Anna Karenina. In fact, you've read translations of all these things. (Unless you've read them in the original, in which case I apologize.)

The weird thing is to see how much one translation can differ from another. If you're translating a German novel, after all, you can say:

"Herr Kaufmann left his house and walked down Ulmstrasse to get his favorite wurst."

or:

"Herr Kaufmann left his house and walked down Ulmstrasse to get his favorite sausage."

or:

"Mr. Kaufmann left his house and walked down Ulmstrasse to get his favorite sausage."

or:

"Mr. Kaufmann left his house and walked down Elm Street to get his favorite sausage."

or:

"Mr. Sellers left his house and walked down Elm Street to get his favorite sausage."

At some point along the way, most of us would say "that's enough translation; any more would be entering into the realm of the absurd." Furthermore, when we read a German novel, we might want to get a taste of Germanness, and so we might actually prefer street names and food names that sound exotic — though it's likely that the original author never intended for the work to sound exotic to his or her readers.

You can sometimes tell, then, what kind of translation experience you're going to have when you look at the title of a work. Is it done by a details person? A sweeping popularizer? A modernist? A conservative?

Just think of Marcel Proust's most recognizable title: Á la Recherche du Temps Perdu. You know, the one that starts with him taking a whiff of a ... biscuit? madeleine? Which? No matter: in English there are two popular titles for it: In Search of Lost Time and Remembrance of Things Past.

Chew on that one for a moment: even before you open the book, you know which translator you're getting. "In Search of Lost Time" is a direct translation of the words. You can expect a meticulous word-for-word translation. "Remembrance of Things Past," on the other hand, is a quote from the opening lines of Shakespeare's thirtieth Sonnet: "When to the sessions of sweet silent thought / I summon up remembrance of things past...." You can then expect a translation that translates ideas and images rather than just terms. "The little man in my eye" becomes "the apple of my eye," because the former term has no meaning for English speakers and the latter one is a common term. (The little man is, of course, the reflection of the beloved other, so close as to see a reflection in a pupil. "Pupil" itself comes from the Latin word for a little person, giving us, in a pun of grammar, our word for both schoolkids and the part of the eye that reflects the beloved in miniature.)

I was just reading an article by a person who mentioned the book, calling it by its "Remembrance" title, and I immediately knew more about the article's author.

iocaine logic

2011-03-19T08:33:00.004-06:00

Catherine and I were playing a card game of deceptive simplicity and maddening strategic depth. It's one of those things where you say, "Hm. She can win if she does A and I do B; but I'll win if she does C and I do D. But she knows that too, and she can guard against my one-upping her by super-one-upping me; but I know that too, and I can super-duper-one-up her. But she knows that too, and she can lowball, thus letting me win the hand but saving her power for the next hand. But I know that too, and I can lowball too. But if she figures I can lowball, she may one-up me...."

And on and on. This is what sociologist Erving Goffman called an "expression game." I usually call it iocaine logic. You recognize that term from the scene in The Princess Bride where Wallace Shawn shows his strategic power.

Man in Black: The battle of wits has begun. It ends when you decide and we both drink, and find out who is right... and who is dead.
Vizzini: But it's so simple. All I have to do is divine from what I know of you: are you the sort of man who would put the poison into his own goblet or his enemy's? Now, a clever man would put the poison into his own goblet, because he would know that only a great fool would reach for what he was given. I am not a great fool, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of you. But you must have known I was not a great fool. You would have counted on it. So I can clearly not choose the wine in front of me.
Man in Black: You've made your decision then?
Vizzini: Not remotely. Because iocaine comes from Australia, as everyone knows, and Australia is entirely peopled with criminals, and criminals are used to having people not trust them, as you are not trusted by me, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of you.
Man in Black: Truly, you have a dizzying intellect.
Vizzini: Wait til I get going! Now, where was I?
Man in Black: Australia.
Vizzini: Yes, Australia. And you must have suspected I would have known the powder's origin, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of me.
Man in Black: You're just stalling now.
Vizzini: You'd like to think that, wouldn't you? You've beaten my giant, which means you're exceptionally strong, so you could've put the poison in your own goblet, trusting on your strength to save you, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of you. But, you've also bested my Spaniard, which means you must have studied, and in studying you must have learned that man is mortal, so you would have put the poison as far from yourself as possible, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of me.
Man in Black: You're trying to trick me into giving away something. It won't work.
Vizzini: It has worked! You've given everything away! I know where the poison is!

This kind of thinking stretches into a whole episode of Friends, in which only Joey knows that Chandler and Monica are secretly dating. Joey becomes the fulcrum of an escalating expression game between the couple and the other friends. Being a comedy, the episode obeys Aristotle's rules of comedy by ending with a (symbolic) marriage: all come clean, and Chandler professes his love to Monica before all witnesses. In spy fiction, which often follows the rules of tragedy, such things are more likely to end in death. In The Princess Bride, which is a farce, Vizzini's game ends in his own death, played farcically for laughs.

Peter Ustinoff put a great expression game (and displayed both the futility of expression games and the folly of military brass who use them instead of real strategy) in his play "Romanoff and Juliet." (It was also a delightful but evaporative movie in 1961, with Ustinoff and Sandra Dee.) The unnamed general of a small country reveals to the US that the Soviets have broken their code.

Moulsworth: (beaming) We know they know our code. We only give them things we want them to know.
General: (puzzles over this twisted logic, then crosses the street to the Russian Embassy)
General: (to Soviet Ambassador Romanoff) They know you know their code.
Romanov: We have known for some time that they knew we knew our code. We have acted accordingly — by pretending to be duped.
Romanov: (returning to the US Embassy) They know you know they know you know.
Moulsworth: WHAT! Are you sure?

more more greta

2011-03-16T22:13:00.003-06:00

Just because you can't get enough, here are more pictures of the delectable Greta Brake.

click on the picture to see more

what you wish were true, what you think is true, what's true

2011-03-13T22:25:00.003-06:00

What percentage of our country's wealth should be owned by the richest 20 percent of folks? How about the poorest? The middle ones? Ask a bunch of Americans what they think the ideal distribution of wealth should be, and you'll get a pretty uniform answer. Across boundaries, from rich and poor, most folks, proving that we're an equality-minded bunch who nonetheless believe that it's fair for the rich to have more and the poor less, will draw you something like this.

Then ask them what they think the actual distribution of wealth really is, and you'll get, once again, a pretty uniform answer, proving that we have an idea that things aren't quite as we might wish, that looks like this.

Now let's take a look at what it actually is.

Note that the bottom two categories, representing forty percent of America, don't even show up on the graph. (I added a darker bar to represent how much of that top category represents the top 1 percent.)

This is all from an interesting article that goes into some depth, with graph and analysis, on the subject. I don't agree with some of their "shoulds," explicit or implicit, but the raw numbers are there for you to see and interpret.

"several," defined

2011-03-09T00:59:00.003-06:00

What's the upper limit on your definition of "several?" Is 6 too many to be "several?" 4? 9?

I asked some friends, and got a really interesting discussion about how we perceive things.

Mallory's answer: "More than a few. Which is more than a couple. And there can never be too many in a several." So, does she then think "several" could mean 20? 100? I'm not convinced.

MPD says: "1= single, 2= couple, 3= few, ?= several and ?= many... 'Several' should be no less than 4 and upwards of 6. 'Several' of anything is not overwhelming like 'many.' 7 and beyond start falling into that category." Definitely a good start.

Greg points out that "it depends on what's being counted. Several beers or several blows to the head...."

Collyn, meanwhile, weighs in with a confident definition: several is 4-6.

Daniel defines it as being more than two but fewer than many; further, he says: "I think 6 is ok to be described as 'several.' I think anything more than 10 can be loads or I GUESS many." He also points out that you can JUST SAY the number. "I had many people over" vs "I had 10 people over?" — "it’s a single-syllable even number!" Hm. Good point. Daniel also gets credit for noting that “craploads” is an actual unit of measurement south of Kansas City.

Erin, like Collyn, is concrete-minded: she places the upper limit of "several" at 9. Mike Brannon agrees that it has to single digits: less than 10.

In my mind, "a couple" is 2. You say "they're such an interesting couple!" and you don't mean that they're a threesome. Though that would be interesting. In general, you say, "I filled up my gas tank only a couple of times in January," and you mean two or maybe three-but-you-can't-quite-put-your-finger-on-it. (Also, not being able to put your finger on it is a good rule for threesomes.)

I'll also agree with MPD that "a few" is pretty much 3. I'd never say "a few" to mean two. I'd possibly say "there were only a few people at the restaurant" when there were 5, but no more than that, and I think that's mainly because in a large restaurant 5 customers seems small. I'd say "she had a few drinks" and mean three or, maybe, four. But 3 is the main number in my mind when using "few."

For "several," I'll agree with Erin and Mike that single digits are the upper limit. Maybe, maybe 10. I'd never use it to mean upwards of 10. And I personally would never use it to mean anything lower than 5 or 6. The main number in my mind for "several" is 7, possibly because they sound similar.

If you say "there are several candies left in the bag," I'll picture anywhere from 6 to (maybe) 10. I would never picture 3. That's "a few." Maybe, maybe 5. If you say "there are several people in the restaurant," or "I filled up my gas tank several times last week," I'll always picture right around 7, and possibly 9 or 10, and maybe 6 or 5.

I've heard people use "several" to mean 3 or 4, which puzzles me. Just not right, is it?

MPD agreed with others that "real life usage makes a difference. If my assistant told me, 'The store buyers ordered quite a few styles, in many colors and would like several sizes,' this would be relative to the size of the store (boutique? chain store?) and of the collection as to what 'few,' 'several,' and 'many' could mean."

Rick, scientific mind that he has, breaks it down thus: "Single (1), couple or pair or brace (2), few (3), bunch or group (5), several (7), crowd (9), dozen (12). Many seems to have no upper limit." Brace! Extra points for brace!

One interesting thing about all this is that, historically, humans don't conceptualize numbers more than about 3 or 4 too well. Even in our advanced civilization, we have methods for making large numbers fall into small chunks so we can understand them.

Just about anywhere you go in the world, among primitive peoples, their numbering system is 1, 2, many; or possibly 1, 2, 3, many. That's it. They just don't count further than about 3. There's something hardwired in the human brain that makes that happen. We have all sorts of tools for expanding that, but those tools are like the ones we use for computers, which really, as you know, only understand two numbers, 0 and 1.

Take a look at our writing systems: China has a single line for "one," two lines for "two," three lines for "three," ... and a symbol for "four" and above. Suddenly the tallying has to become a concept rather than a visual number.

Same with Arabic numerals: a single line for "one," two lines rendered in a sort of cursive for "two," three cursive lines for "three," ... and a symbol for "four" and above.

Roman numerals are a bit more advanced, but basically the same: one line for "one," two lines for "two," three lines for "three," four lines for "four," ... and a symbol for "five" and above. (The use of "IV" for "four" doesn't show up until they appear on modern clocks.)

So, there's something going on there, right? There's some information we can use about the human brain, encoded into our very thoughts about numbers.

pleonasm

2011-02-28T23:19:00.002-06:00

Paul McCartney certainly had his moments of lyrical elegance. But he wasn't at his best in "Live and Let Die." For instance, the line

But if this ever-changing world in which we live in
Makes you give in and cry

gets me every dang time I hear it. "World in which we live in?" Really? No one caught that before it went to press?

I just heard that sung twelve times. I cringed every time.

And, for the record, that mistake is called a pleonasm.

art and inspiration

2011-02-23T21:12:00.000-06:00

From Muriel Spark's Loitering With Intent:

When people say that nothing happens in their lives I believe them. But you must understand that everything happens to an artist; time is always redeemed, nothing is lost and wonders never cease.

things i did in 10

2011-02-20T20:49:00.001-06:00

I started off doing this yearly thing on Valentine's Day several years ago: it gives me enough time to digest the previous year and see what may be worth remembering.

Check it out (and see previous years as well) at barrybrake.com/things10.html

a friend's milestone

2011-02-18T13:56:00.003-06:00

Last night right before curtain on opening night of Baylor's All-University Sing, Jason caught my eye and said, "Twenty years."

Yep, he's been arranging music for the show for twenty years now. Like many of us, he saw the show and had an I-should-be-doing-this moment. Then he went out and conquered. His first few years went in a normal way: he was one of the handful of arrangers for the show (each year there are usually between fifteen and twenty acts). Then one year he took on eleven acts, more than any arranger had ever done. Each act is a massive amount of work; the director at first wanted to limit him; Jason said, "just let me try it and you'll see." Anyone who knows Jason knows what happened next. The eleven arrangements turned out just great, and the show went on.

A Sing arranger doesn't just do music. You advise, cheerlead, rehearse, audition singers; sometimes you help pick themes and do other big-picture stuff. Jason, a gifted carpenter, now helps a number of acts build their props. On top of doing Sing, he also does mastering for Word Music: hundreds of recorded songs a year. On top of that he does audio for films. (His latest, "Paradise Recovered," is getting national attention, not least because of his exacting standards and artistic touch.) And then there's all the other stuff: he's a dedicated outdoorsman and mountaineer who has conquered over half the nations fourteeners; he's a superb craftsman, not just in music but in carpentry, having made everything from lovely tables and cabinets to lathed Cocobolo pens to a giant duck; he even combined his passions to build his own music studio — every wire and window and drop of paint and bit of fine cabinetry. He's a skilled pilot, a slightly mad maker of things that blow up, an ardent astronomer, a voracious reader, a terrific and inventive cook (and foodie), a wine enthusiast, and, I'm proud to say, a friend. He also seems to be a perfect husband, and he and his wife Erin are treasured friends to Catherine and me.

It's only fitting that in his twentieth year he also celebrates another milestone. This year, in Sing, Jason is the only arranger. All seventeen acts, every note. All up to his usual high standard, with lush orchestral sequences and (his specialty) beautiful choral writing. That's around 120 songs, roughly 5000 measures, probably 15,000 active frames. The rock rocks, the swing swings, the electronica pumps, the orchestra soars, the funk grooves. The audience is moved.

Congratulations, friend.

thanks, george shearing

2011-02-16T01:08:00.003-06:00

Growing up with my parents' record collection at hand, I had a rich source of musical input. One album close to my heart is George Shearing's Shearing On Stage, whose liner notes I pored over as I listened and listened. Later, I bought more of his stuff for my own shelf.

I found out today that he died on Valentine's Day. Fitting: so much of his music was so romantic. What a fantastic musician. His quintet lineup, with guitar and vibes, and no trumpet or sax or trombone, introduced a distinct sound to jazz. His unusual technique, limning melodies with whole chords rather than just soloing with the right hand and comping with the left, made his piano sound like a horn section.

This astounding clip says it all. Notice that he starts off his solo with the traditional solo-and-comping, then at about 2 minutes breaks into his nimble one-man-sectional sound. Man! He had heart, he had technique, and close observers will remember that when this clip was filmed very few bands, even in jazz, included both white and black players on the same stage. I guess some things are hard to explain to a blind Englishman.

His signature sound was famously imitated in the theme music to "Frasier." Here's a clip of his most famous composition, "Lullaby of Birdland."

We'll miss him.

a cultural question: drivers

2011-02-15T13:49:00.000-06:00

Is there any city or country that brags about how good its drivers are?

What does this say about us?

pajamas, quilts, and the invisible truth

2011-02-10T10:52:00.000-06:00

In a recent Dear Prudence — one of Catherine's and my favorite semi-guilty pleasures — there's a question from a woman who wonders whether it's creepy that she wants to keep her dead grandmother's pajamas and wear them. Prudence quite reasonably says it's a heartwarming thing and not creepy at all. Then there's a note from the Editor that says this:

A Note From Prudie's Editor: Here's another idea for Grandma's P.J.s—have them made into a quilt, along with some of her other clothing or belongings.

Our truest messages are often invisible, and often encoded within our very grammar. Did you notice? "Have them made." Go find yourself one of those quilters and have that person make you a quilt. The editor, quite rightly, assumes that the reader would never dream of making a quilt herself.

the national anthem vs the star-spangled banner

2011-02-07T22:43:00.002-06:00

Much has been made of Christina Aguilera's performance of "The Star-Spangled Banner" for the game the other day. But I think people may be focusing on the wrong thing.

Yes, she botched some of the lyrics. But, at least in my hearing, she did what every professional should do in a situation like that: she played it off, and played it off well. She just filled in words from another part of the song, and it was seamless. I'm not quite sure if I'd have noticed had someone not pointed it out. And, of course, Aguilera being Aguilera, she sounded magnificent. She has one of the best instruments in pop music, honed by hard work and terrific musicianship.

On the other hand, there was something troubling to me about the whole thing. First and foremost, it has always bugged me whenever one performer performs the thing rather than having the entire congregation sing it themselves. The way I see it, when everyone in the stands puts their hands over their hearts and sings, it's the National Anthem. When a superstar performer offers up a rubato version, littered with ornamentations, it's just "The Star-Spangled Banner." The point of having the National Anthem at a game is completely obviated when this happens: the whole point is the ceremony of it, and it's killed when we sacrifice yet another community activity to the American cult of the superstar.

Come to think of it, we could be spending a Sunday afternoon outside playing football ourselves.

But hey, the Super Bowl is, at its best, a great show. This leads us to the second point. Because the ceremony of an anthem has been killed by gospel-inflected soloists (or, more accurately, by our hiring of them), the other participants in the ceremony have followed suit, and the camera has caught up. So, during Aguilera's performance, we no longer see Aguilera from beginning to end. The camera cuts to the day's gladiators, who are very obviously using the Star-Spangled Banner not as a National Anthem but as a Personal Psych-Up. One by one, we see players using this time to mentally and physically prepare for the game to come. One player seems to be worshipfully gazing at the flag with a tear in his eye: the rest are already playing.

Wouldn't it be great to see one of those uprisings of popular opinion, a demand that next year we get our National Anthem back?

which ten commandments?

2011-02-04T15:55:00.003-06:00

Were you aware that different people count the Ten Commandments differently? It's always an interesting subject to explore.

"Honor thy father and mother," for instance: is that the fourth, or the fifth? If you answered fifth, you're probably a Protestant. If you answered fourth, you're probably Jewish or Catholic. (If you answered that you have no idea, then you're probably [insert name of denomination famous for their Biblical illiteracy].)

Yep, it's true. The commandments take up sixteen verses in both their iterations (Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5). How you divvy those into ten is a different matter. Jews and Catholics seem to take the view that the second iteration is the most current one (and Jews especially unite it with what comes shortly after, in chapter 6, the Sh'ma Yisrael, which begins with "Hear O Israel" and is considered a central statement of the faith). So they do it like this:

1. Worship no god but Jehovah
2. Don't take the Lord's name in vain
3. Keep the Sabbath
4. Honor your parents
5. Don't kill
6. Don't commit adultery
7. Don't steal
8. Don't bear false witness
9. Don't covet your neighbor's wife
10. Don't covet your neighbor's possessions

Protestants do it like this:

1. Worship no god but Jehovah
2. No graven images
3. Don't take the Lord's name in vain
4. Keep the Sabbath
5. Honor your parents
6. Don't kill
7. Don't commit adultery
8. Don't steal
9. Don't bear false witness
10. Don't covet

Protestants seem to take the view that the earlier iteration is the original and better one. Just about the only difference between the two is the wording of the part about coveting: in Exodus, the earlier one, it lists things you shouldn't covet in order as house, wife, servants, animals, anything else. In Deuteronomy, the later one, it's wife, house, field, servants, animals, anything else. If you take the earlier account, you can't very well separate the human possession (wife) from the other possessions and keep it in order. Therefore, you lump all the covets as one big thing, and you split the first commandment, about having no other gods, into two, with the second talking about graven images. Theoretically, you could consider all the bit about idols as part and parcel of the "no other gods" clause, but then you wouldn't have the immense satisfaction of saying the idolatrous Popish Catholics, with their stained glass windows and statues of Mary, are actually breaking one of the Ten Commandments.

Not that any of it actually matters, of course: all the bases are covered, no matter how you number them. Still, interesting questions arise. How are they displayed in a place of worship? No problem at all: you do it according to your faith's tradition. How are they displayed in a public place? Again, no problem: you do it according to the tradition of whoever's displaying them. How are they displayed publicly on government property, paid for by taxpayers, who may be Catholic, Jewish, Protestant, or something else entirely, or nothing? (Good question. For this reason among others, I like the traditional Baptist answer, and humbly suggest that we practice civil discourse with our brethren of different faiths and no faith by ... spending our hard-earned taxpayer money on something other than religious monuments.)

All this is pretty interesting to me, and it offers an explanation for a phenomenon you may have wondered about: whenever Moses is pictured holding the tablets, they often have no writing on them but simple numbers (usually, preposterously, Roman numerals). But they're almost never evenly split, 1-5 and 6-10. Instead, it's either 1-3 on the first tablet and 4-10 on the second, or 1-4 on the first and 5-10 on the second. The split, then, in both Protestant and Jewish/Catholic cases, is the split between matters of faith and matters of civil law; between rules that govern the relation of person to religion and the relation of person to person.

Catherine, who went to eight years of Catholic school and attended a Church of Christ college, reports having had several Nowwaitjustaminute! moments as she tried to reconcile two branches of the faith that expressed such different theological understandings with such similar terms. Must be like listening to two people with the same vocabulary but different dictionaries, or sitting at the same board and discovering one's playing checkers and the other's playing chess.

The whole thing makes me think Jews (of which Jesus was most definitely one) have the right idea in Deuteronomy 6: you can hardly go wrong regarding your neighbor as you regard yourself.

Protag love in the San Antonio Express-News

2011-02-03T13:07:00.003-06:00

Here ya go. A real nice write-up by the eminent Jim Beal Jr., hot off the presses. It's all in anticipation of our massive 20th Anniversary Shindig on Saturday, February 5th.

honor and life

2011-02-02T10:22:00.002-06:00

We're going through the Ten Commandments at Holy Trinity Anglican. Every Sunday a different one; this last week's was "honor thy father and mother."

The pastor, Chuck, said something arresting: in trying to define and enact "honor" (simply obey? simply love?), one thing you might do is to finally forgive your parents. Wow! It's true that some folks go through life never having forgiven their parents for all the wrongs or imperfections visited upon them (generational legacies appear earlier in the Ten, when it's mentioned that the sins of the fathers will be visited on the sons, a harsh-sounding but psychologically accurate fact of human life and society).

This struck me, not because my parents were so gosh-durn awful (though human and flawed, they were pretty much exemplary: I can't think of a single Big Thing they got wrong), but because I was thinking about Moses' audience. In giving us these laws, I think God was speaking not only to the vast audience of humankind, but also to the Chosen People, Israel; and not only that but also to this specific group of people waiting (or not particularly waiting) at the foot of the mountain.

Think about it: the people of Israel were only moments away from being starkly divided into two groups. There were those with a future in the promised land, and there were those who were carcasses. Remember? Everyone knows the Israelites wandered in the wilderness 40 years, but not everyone recalls why. Only weeks after Mount Sinai, they sent spies into the promised land; the spies found enemies; most voted against going in; Joshua and Caleb were confident that God's promise was true; they were outvoted; boom, we're not going in. So God says to his people that everyone over 20 will in fact die in the wilderness, and people under 20 and yet to be born will be the only ones who will actually make it across the border and set up shop in that conflicted land.

His actual words here are, "But your little ones, which ye said should be a prey, them will I bring in, and they shall know the land which ye have despised. But as for you, your carcases, they shall fall in this wilderness. And your children shall wander in the wilderness forty years, and bear your whoredoms, until your carcases be wasted in the wilderness." Ouch.

Just as the people are processing this list of rules they've been given, they commit this great act of unfaithfulness, and everyone over 20 now has no hope of ever seeing the place they were escaping to. (With two conspicuous exceptions: Joshua and Caleb.) Meanwhile, there's everyone under 20. What then do you say to your parents? How do you treat them, and their peers, and your grandparents, and their peers? They just made it so that you have to be a nomad for 20 years (more than the length of your entire life up to that point). God himself has already condemned them, called them corpses. What do you call them, in your unguarded moments?

And right here, there's been a new law handed down. Along with the unsurprising rules (no other gods but Jehovah) and shoo-ins (no murder; no stealing), there's this law that comes attached to a promise. After all, the whole thing says: "Honor thy father and mother, that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee." Twisty promise there, yes? Your very longevity in the land is explicitly tied to honoring those who have just kept you out of it.

This overlooked dimension — these two words from the same Jehovah, the stark word of condemnation for an entire people except for their youngest generation (things never change!) and the stark order for that generation to honor the condemned, the double-edged message that vengeance belongs to the divine and the divine alone — this overlooked dimension could not have been invisible to those people at that time. It had resonance for them, and it has resonance for us.

augmented train whistle

2011-01-31T10:22:00.000-06:00

I just heard, for the first time in my life, a train whistle that was actually an augmented chord. Culturally, the augmented chord is the audio symbol of the train whistle: in music and movies that's how it's portrayed. But in real life, most train whistles are something else, usually major chords in various states of nearly-in-tune. And of course there's the Doppler effect, which swerves the sound of a moving thing, to help destabilize the sound. But I've never ever heard a real train that made a real augmented chord. Until just now.

Protag love, Japanese style

2011-01-29T10:22:00.002-06:00

Check out this review of the Jazz Protagonists album Blizz Blazz, on a Japanese site. It starts with, we think, a restaurant review, then has our CD reviewed in orange.

寛いだピアノ・トリオ、スウィングしてて非常に気持ち良いですね、THE JAZZ PROTAGONISTS 「BLIZZ BLAZZ」。何で買おうと思ったんだっけな、、、寺島さん絡みだったかな、よく覚えていませんが、ジャケットを見てコレは多分来るんじゃないか、と思ったのは確かです。センター奥に居るベーシストの表情が何ともヨロシイ、ソレとジャケットのレイアウト、単純にカッコいいですよね！音を感じさせるとでも言うか、少なくとも女性の裸を載せれば、どうよ？っていう、カッコ悪いレーベルのダサいジャケとは違いましたな。
音を聴いてみるとオリジナルで固めていて、しかも伝わる演奏の雰囲気はとてもリラックス、美旋律で印象付けて後は適当、というタイプじゃない、BARRY BRAKEなるピアニスト、なかなかやるね。
KUPERというのは本作のドラマー、明らかにピアニストのBRAKEとは好みが違うように感じます、BRAKEさんはもっと王道、メロディが歌い、スウィンギーな中でもスリリングな山場を意識させられます。KUPERさんは現代感覚を持ち合わせていて、８曲目ではファンキーで楽しい雰囲気を披露していますが、９曲目ではリズムだけ最初に決めるから後は自由に展開していこう的なスポンテニアスなパターン、作曲したと言うよりは３人で組み立てていった感じですね。この曲だけ何となく異質なんです。BRAKEさんの曲ではちょいと黒い感じが心地良い４曲目の小唄、テーマ、アドリヴ共に小気味良くてアーシーな５曲目が光ります。

The auto-translate results are, though hilarious, impossible to understand. Our friend Ansel, though, has just dispatched a roughly sketched translation. Thanks, Ansel!

A relaxed piano trio, swingin' and super feel-good - The Jazz Protagonists, "Blizz Blazz". Why did I decide to buy this, again... It might have been something Mr. Terajima-related, I don't really remember, but what I do know is that I felt it was probably coming with me when I looked at the cover. The bassist in the rear center's expression was quite pleasant; that, and the cover layout was simplistic, in a cool way! You could maybe say that it makes you feel the sound, or at the very least, it was different from those pathetic covers from those lame labels that are like, "Hey, whaddya say we put a naked lady on the front?"

Listening to it, it was original and solid, not to mention the atmosphere conveyed by the performance was very relaxed; melodic and impressive, and also proper, seems like that's the type he is, the pianist Barry Brake, he does a surprisingly good job.

The album's drummer, Kuper, clearly seems to have different tastes than the pianist, Brake: Mr. Brake is more classical, with a singing melody, and brings you to a swingy, thrilling climax point. Mr. Kuper possesses a more present-day feeling; in track 8 he presents a funky, fun feeling, while in track 9 he brings out the rhythm right away, then seems to ad-lib it freely with spontaneous patterns, almost as though the song was assembled by them on the fly, rather than being written. This track seemed to be the odd one out. In Mr. Brake's songs, the slightly dark-feeling, soothing poetry in track 4, the theme, and the earthy track 5 which was both improvisational and zestful, all really shine.

king pelican at the olmos pharmacy, this saturday

2011-01-26T10:22:00.000-06:00

At first blush, it may seem strange that two members of the Jazz Protagonists and two members of Two Tons of Steel would form a band together. (The band is King Pelican, which plays straight-up surf rock.) It all makes sense, though, when you realize that both bands are planted firmly in the present day while recognizing the beauty and value of a moment in the recent past, and the value of Getting It Right.

Unfortunately, Greg Norris, string bassist for the Protags and electric bassist for Pelican, is otherwise engaged this Saturday. The surf band needed a fill-in, and, as an indication of how desperate we are for bassists in SA in 2011, they asked ... me.

So, I'll be throwing down on my old main instrument this coming Saturday evening at the Olmos Pharmacy, at 8pm. Great burgers, legendary shakes (speaking of getting something right from a golden era), happening surf rock. See you there.

the first moment of gen-x

2011-01-25T10:22:00.001-06:00

I think I have uncovered the moment when Generation X became Generation X. That is, the moment when that generation began to show its colors, to take on the characteristics that later defined it. After all, it's not just a set of years in which people were born; it's a way of being.

Right around 1977, at Harmony Hills Elementary, a girl, possibly Camille Brown, having just experienced something exasperating, uttered that glottal sigh (which I'll spell "xhhhh") known to all schoolchildren to be an expression of disgust and displeasure, and said, "Xhhhh! What's your function?"

There you have it: the ironic stance, the joking-but-not-joking, the in-reference to a piece of wall-to-wall pop culture (in this case, Schoolhouse Rock's "Conjunction Junction"), re-appropriated toward one's own purposes. 17 years before the first episode of Friends, it's all there.

As I've remarked before, all the raw materials for this kind of statement were present for generations. You could have had a radio station that played The Best Of The 20s, 30s, And Today back in the forties — but you didn't. You could have had ironic allusions to The Wizard of Oz by Lucy and Ricky — but you didn't.

So, one fine day in 1977, elementary-school kids all over the country spontaneously said something not-new and entirely new, and a generation was born.

new jazz protagonists pictures

2011-01-22T10:22:00.004-06:00

We got together with our new photographer, the dynamic Julia Novikova, to take a round of pictures. She was simply a delight to work with, utterly professional, with a sparkling personality and friendly demeanor that immediately made us comfortable. She also understands how important it is for a jazz musician to look slammin' in a suit.

We like the results.

wesley music

2011-01-20T11:42:00.002-06:00

The other day I got a note from a man named Daryl Stewart, who's with an English company that sources music for funeral services. Apparently someone had asked them to supply my song "My Daddy Sang To Me" for an upcoming service. He asked if he could purchase a copy. So I ripped out a super-high-quality file and sent it to him. Today I got notice that he'd deposited a nice little sum in my paypal account.

I actually don't mind if people use my music free: after all, that very song is on youtube, available to the internet world free of charge day and night. But as a result of that free distribution, someone heard the song and it touched them. And they had the integrity and coolness to track me down and pay for it.

I feel my heart strangely warmed.

farewell to grace

2011-01-16T18:58:00.002-06:00

I just got back from playing the service at Grace Anglican Fellowship, where I've been leading music for about 4 months. I've been choosing songs and song orders, charting up charts, rehearsing the band, and leading the congregation every week for their only service, Sunday at 5pm.

What a great time it's been. This is one of the churches that broke off, fairly peacefully, with Christ Episcopal this summer. With the largest church in the diocese dividing into three smaller groups, it's been amazing to see the lack of rancor. (One also sees some of the same people off and on at all three congregations, and there appears to be a high level of we're-still-friends to it.) Even among those who have felt wounded in the process, there's a great deal of grace and positive energy.

Grace is a dynamic, spirit-filled group of people who really want to serve God well and in a new way. I've been proud to be associated with them; I've especially been proud and delighted to work with their worship team, which is embarrassingly well-stocked with good singers and players. Even though my contract with them is up, my heart continues with them in all they do.

the mystery of coffee

2011-01-10T14:24:00.003-06:00

Good coffee is such a wonderful thing. I've gotten into a pattern of making delicious lattes. Mainly because Catherine doesn't like the burned-tasting French and Italian roasts that are popular in the Starbucks era, I've recently been buying milder roasts. This is slightly silly because [a] Catherine really doesn't like coffee at all and doesn't drink it more than about once every 2 years or so, and [b] I do like those deeper roasts.

Anyway. Lattes.

I grind the beans very very finely, and then make just enough in the press to make one large mug; then add hot half-and-half to it. Absolutely beautiful.

I've often wondered how on earth it occurred to our Central American ancestors, when faced with this bush full of red berries, to: pick the berries, forget the fruit, keep the seed, burn the seed, crush it, and soak it in boiling water. Why not do that with any seed? Why do that with this one? Whatever the answer, it's lost in the mists of time, and all we're left with is one of the great gifts of the Americas to civilization.