Author: Dale

Ultimate Lichtenbergian procrastination

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I cleaned up my study on Friday, really shoveled the place out.  I mostly got my desk cleaned off, but I barely touched my drafting table.  For those who have never seen my sanctum, I have a massive oak library table, 4×8, with a fake leather top, for my desk, and behind me, my old drafting table serves as my painting table.

Viz.:

The library table/desk
The drafting table

So this morning, while waiting for all the Baptists to clear the street so I could go mulch the labyrinth without disturbing their consciences—because I’m considerate like that—I thought I might at least reorganize the drafting table.

But the first thing that happened was that I picked up a painting that I have not touched in at least 18 months.  Here it is:

Click to see it embiggened.

Wow.  I like this.  I like this a lot.  It is of course one of my old Field series, one of the first, in fact.  It’s a photograph from the New York Times, of skaters in Central Park in the late 19th century with the fabulous Dakota apartment house rising in splendid isolation to the west.  My modus operandi was to paint directly over the photo and turn it into an abstraction.

It actually works, I think.  Don’t do it, Dale.  Do not clear off that drafting table.  Do not get out your gouaches and brushes and start all that up again at this point.  Don’t do it.  It has a kind of sinister energy that appeals to me. don’t do it It makes me feel as if I might have been accomplishing something all that time do not do it.

Ah well, time to mulch the labyrinth.

 

The labyrinth in autumn

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I haven’t written about the labyrinth in a while.  It’s still there, and I still get out there for meditation and work, but not as much as I’d like.

Here’s a shot from today:

The grass is going dormant, although the clover is still green.  Before tomorrow night I’ll need to get out and run the mower over it all to mulch the leaves.  Some Lichtenbergians are coming over to discuss The Ego and the Dynamic Ground, a book about transpersonal psychology.  I’ve been reading it back and forth on the train to the office, and it is utterly fascinating.  Another post, or series of posts.  All I will say at this point is that it reflects exactly my experience in the labyrinth.

There are a couple of additions to the place.  You may recall the Apollo Belvedere:

Apollo, of course, was the Greek/Roman god of the sun, but also of medicine, music, and rationality, among other things.  He stood for the creative aspect, the putting together of things, the holding together.

Opposed to all of that was Dionysus, the god of wine, libido, and dissolution.  Dionysus (and his analogs of Pan and Shiva) stood for the destructive process, the taking apart, the letting go.

It does not take a Nietsche to realize that a wise person accommodates both these forces in his life and brings them into balance and alignment.  Easy to say, not so easy to do, of course.  But I’m working on it.

Anyway, I’ve been looking for a statue for the labyrinth, but the one I really wanted (the Barberini Faun) was only available in nearly lifesized copies costing $10,000.  That much dissolution I did not need.

As an interim, I found this at Decor Encore downtown:

A charming little satyr plinth candle holder.  It’s actually double-sided, and I have it up in the bamboo in the driveway to light your path downwards.  No, that was not a metaphor.

My big find, however, is the Dancing Faun:

Isn’t he beautiful?  As much as the totally oblivious dissolution of the Barberini appealed to me, this faun (the original is from Pompeii) is in a state to which I aspire: ecstatic abandon.  The photo does not do it justice; no photo can.  The piece is meant to be seen from all angles, and it changes depending on where you stand.  (Yes, he has a tail, right above his taut runner’s buttocks.)  This angle gives a better idea of the extreme contrapposto, the Hellenistic Mannerism—if I may slam two periods together—that motivates this work.

Next to him, Apollo looks kind of soft around the edges, doesn’t he?  Balance, dear reader, balance.

A rant

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If you do not follow the antics of our right wing, as I tend to do—like watching the carcass of a wild animal day by day on the side of the road—you may be unaware of the Michigan legislature’s “Matt’s Safe School Law,” which was named after a young gay man who committed suicide after being bullied.

What’s so rotten about that, you might ask?  Michigan State Senate Republicans amended the bill to include an exception for “deeply held religious beliefs.”

Think about that for a moment.

That’s right: if the bill passes with that amendment, it will be illegal to bully a kid in school—unless Jesus told you to.

Here’s what Sen. Gretchen Whitmer had to say to her colleagues:

“Your exceptions have swallowed the rule.”  Don’t you like that?

Of course, the strict wording of the amendment just means that it’s OK for someone to say, “I believe being homosexual is against God’s will.”  Only that’s not what those people say, is it?  Simple “declarations of faith” are not exactly what is being licensed here, is it?

Here’s the thing: the Republican neanderthals who came up with this clearly meant for it to protect those little Christianists amongst themselves who think it’s an infringement on their freedom to worship as they please if they can’t kick the crap out of a gay kid.  Sen. Whitmer’s emotional castigation would not even register with those people, because of course it’s OK to leave that queer a bloody pulp on the playground.  Leviticus tells us so.

As usual, of course, they haven’t thought this through.  When the Muslim kid punches out the little Christianist for drawing a sassy cartoon of Mohammad, would they be OK with that? We know what these Republicans would say about Muslims who riot over depictions of the Prophet in newspapers, but their amendment protects exactly this kind of behavior.

“But that’s different!” they would cry if confronted with the idea.

No.  No, it’s not.

Retreat, Day 2

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12:30 pm: I slept later than I would have wished, but have been productive nonetheless.

I’m slogging away at transferring the vocals, piano, and strings to the Ayr template.  Sometimes this is a piece of cake, others not so much.  It will amuse those who know the piece that “10. Blake Leads a Walk on the Milky Way” took forever.  Not only are there thousands of time signature changes, but there are embedded, invisible key changes from  C major to A minor.  If you paste in material that switches from C maj. to A min., the new piece will transpose the differences.  Not a problem: you can insert the invisible key change and tell it to transpose, and all is back to normal.  But still.

When I got to “Marmalade Man Makes a Dance To Mend Us,” I went ahead and orchestrated the whole thing, since the whole thing was flute/recorder/clarinet/bassoon, and pizzicato cello and bass.  This is the exception  however: in the “big three,” the amount of divisi I had in the strings is disheartening.  I’ll have to find a way to cover/redistribute that sound.

All of that’s in the future—O lucky me!—and I should be done by Vespers.

Oh yes, we’re having Vespers.

At the moment, however, I’m in the middle of a hot tub break.  I popped out to make a note in Ego & the Dynamic Ground on some thoughts I had in meditation.

2:45 pm: I’m done with William Blake’s Inn, at least the easy part.  I’m now going to set that aside and play in the couple hours I have remaining to me.

I could start reconstructing A Christmas Carol, but that would be boring.  There’s also Simon’s Dad, but that’s too major.  So I think I’m going to play around with some more piano pieces, tentatively called Five Easier Pieces, because I at least plan for them to be easier than the Six Fugues.

Retreat 2011

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It is probably unfortunate that the cabin we’re staying in for this year’s Lichtenbergian Retreat has wifi.

Still, it allows me to live blog, kind of, my work—and that’s a time-honored Lichtenbergian principle.  Nay, it is the very foundation of Lichtenbergianism, doing something semi-valid in order to avoid the actual work.

9:33 am: I’ve been working for about an hour, poking into the nooks and crannies of Finale 2012. It seems that I buy a new version of Finale every time I have a major thing to work on, which always slows me down while I figure out where Finale hid everything this time.  If I were a working composer, I’d go nuts having to relearn all the menus and stuff.  For example, up until now you changed the name of a staff in the staff dialog box.  But now that’s in the new Score Management window.  Feh.

At any rate, I’ve been trying to figure out the best way to set up a template for the reorchestration of William Blake’s Inn, which is my major task this weekend.  I think I’ve got it: children, SATB, piano, synth I, synth II, and string quintet.  The synths are actually made up of independent staves, since one of the new tricks Finale can do (just in time for this orchestration) is to change instruments midstream, but if you have a “piano” staff, your only choices are other double-staffed instruments like the harp.  If you have two independent staves grouped as “Synth I,” then your choices open up to all the other instruments.

So yes, the world premiere of William Blake’s Inn, if it happens now, will be with a reduced orchestra.

Why, you ask?  Not to get anybody’s hopes up, but William Blake’s Inn is being considered as the performance we will send to our sister city, Ayr, Scotland.  Next June.

So there’s that.  Yeah.

Two things have become painfully apparent to me: I should have brought a score to look at, and I should have brought my Cinema Display.  The size of the laptop screen is not conducive to zipping through a full orchestral score looking for the part you’re hoping to duplicate.  Oh well.

A score would have been helpful in quickly finding where time/key signature changes happen: I can copy and paste the parts from the original to the new template, but all those changes do not come with them.  With a piece like “Milky Way,” that’s a pain.  Not that I’m going to work on “Milky Way” this weekend.  Stick to the simple ones: “Wise Cow,” “Dance,” “Fire,” that kind of thing.

And actually, just stick to porting over the voices and the strings.  Even the piano parts can wait for the most part.  If I just get the voices/strings laid out in a couple of pieces, then I can start arranging the children’s chorus part, because to be brutally honest, this was never conceived as a piece for children to perform.

More later.

3:38 pm:  It’s almost hot tub time.  Since this morning, I’ve gotten seven of the fifteen pieces transferred into the new template, which seems kind of slow, but some of these are horrors of multiple time signatures.  I have to set up the new blank piece with all the time signatures and key changes ahead of copying and pasting the originals in, or it all goes whacky and it’s easier to start over from scratch.

I have been copying and pasting the piano part as well as the vocals and the strings.  I’ve standardized the solo lines, giving them a separate staff above the chorus, whereas before I think I was saving paper by having solos embedded in the chorus staves.

Above all, I’ve been resisting doing any other work, although with “Rabbit Reveals My Room” and “King of Cats Orders an Early Breakfast,” I did stick in some of Synth I’s stuff, because without it there wouldn’t be much accompaniment to go on.

Big question right now: time to do one more, or hit the hot tub?

Hermain Cain, Marxist

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It’s been a while since I’ve gone on a liberal rant, mainly because the conservatives these days are so head-slappingly idiotic that it hardly seems worthwhile to complain about them.

But even though the Republican Presidential candidate debates are particularly popcorn-worthy, an idea occurred to me this morning on the way to work that I have to share.  It concerns Herman Cain, one of the quasi-front-runners in the Republican race.

First of all: honey, please.  Does anything think this person is going to be the Republican candidate, much less the next black President of the U.S.?  Not after I get through with what I have to say.

In one of the debates—it was #143, I think, the one in Talladega—Herman Cain shared his solution to the illegal immigrant issue.  I’ll link to it so you can read for yourself, but essentially, operating on the premise that one can never be too grotesquely bloodthirsty to gross out the Republican base, he proposes an electrified fence, and if that doesn’t stop the Mescans, shoot them.

No, really.

Now you might think this would shoot Cain to the top of the polls, and if you go read the comments on the FreeRepublic, you’d be right.  But I’m here to tell you that Herman Cain is nothing but a big-government, big-spending Marxist.  How do you think that big old fence is going to get built?  Volunteer labor?  Heck no, that’s going to be one more gigantic gummint boondoggle, costing billions of tax dollars to begin with and like as not going billions over budget.  You can’t tell me that’s not Cain’s plan from the get-go.

[And no, the billions of tax dollars being spent on the fence would not be creating jobs.  Don’t be stupid.  The government can never create jobs.  It just spends money, building fences.  And highways.  And dams.  And bridges.  But jobs?  Honey, please.]

What would a real teabaggin’ Reagan Republican do?  Privatize, that’s what!

Why devote gummint soldiers to the task of shooting down illegals when you can sell off the hunting rights to the private citizens of Arizona and Texas to do it theirselves?  It’s a win-win situation, y’all: we the freedom-loving taxpayers get the income from the rentals; the border states get an economic boost in the areas of deer stands, ammo, and liquor; and the whole nation benefits from being rid of those devious Mescans who love nothing better than to swarm into our country and take those $5.00/hour jobs picking tomatoes in Alabama.

So the next time you hear someone speak admirably of Herman Cain, feel free to point out to them that the man is no better than Barack HUSSEIN Obama.  Worse: because Obama hasn’t proposed devoting nearly the amount of government money to creating jobs for Americans that Herman Cain has.

I await a grateful nation’s thanks.

All those years

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I’ve been meaning to post on how much I am enjoying my job these days. “Director of the Governor’s Honors Program”–I never get tired of saying it, and those of you who have had to endure my saying it know that I can’t manage it without grinning.

I’m still petrified that I’m going to screw up in a major way, but so far my blunders have been minor and the kind that only someone a lot more anal than I would have caught. Nothing irremediable yet, so I think we’re OK.

One of the projects I’ve been working on is adding all the GHP participants ever to a master database. For the past 15 years or so, it’s easy: you just import the students from that summer’s database into the master database. (Remind me to tell you how Galen Honea and John Tibbetts II saved western civilization.  It’s true!)  But there are 35 years of students who don’t fall into that category.

My predecessors, who started the project, got a lot done, but this week I discovered I was missing about 20 years. Not a problem. Earlier, I had organized all the archival files, so it’s a piece of cake to go pull a folder and start typing in the list. It’s not that big a deal, since all we’re including is the year, the campus, the major, first name, last name, and school. The database looks up the system, and I can make it auto-enter the year, campus, and major. I also have devised it so that it will auto-fill the name and school based on what’s already in there, so I can rip through an entire year (about 600 students) in an afternoon.

From the very first year I worked on, 1976, names started jumping out at me: kids who grew up to teach at GHP (and are still teaching); kids from Newnan, etc. I’ve started seeing kids I taught. It’s neat in a maudlin, nostalgic kind of way.

Today, the full impact of my project hit me: I’m typing in 1976 through 1995. That is, essentially, from the year I started teaching to the year before I returned to GHP full time in 1996. I’m going to be seeing a lot of names in the next couple of weeks, a lot of people who have come and gone, a lot of memories of relationships that of course no longer exist for the most part.

This is a major part of growing old, of course, the bittersweet reflections on les neiges d’antan and all those beautiful times and faces that fade. Part of wisdom, I think, is the ability to look back with nostalgia but not regret. It would be very foolish to be bitter about losing the past, would it not? There are those who do, I know, but madness that way lies. You can’t reclaim it—although of course there’s always Facebook for reconnecting, which I have certainly availed myself of—so I’m thinking that kind of reaction must be pathological fear of having nothing left in you. Am I making sense?

To be sure, I had better have plenty left in me if I’m going to play at being the Director of the Governor’s Honors Program. Every day and every way taxes my ability to learn new procedures, especially the arcana of state finances. But—it’s fun. Pure, exhilarating fun. Along with the bittersweet carpal tunnel syndrome that comes from typing in 1800 kids whose lives were changed one summer.

New drink

Posted on by Dale

The Pomander

  • 1-1/2 oz. cinnamon whiskey (in this case, Fireball–thanks Marc!)
  • 1 oz. Cointreau
  • 1 thick wedge of lime
  • cloves

Squeeze the lime wedge into a martini glass and dust with cloves.   Shake the liquors with ice, strain.

It has occurred to us, the lovely first wife and myself, that for the holidays one could stud the lime wedge with an actual clove, á la an actual pomander.

It has a lovely taste, vivid, not overly sweet.  The lime juice keeps it complex.

Cello Sonata No. 1, III. Andante (Elegy)

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Okay, I think I’m done.  Notice that I did not say I think the piece is finished.

I am particularly concerned that mm. 51-56 are suspect.  I am willing to throw them out and write something more stringent.  I await your comments.

Cello Sonata No. 1 (2011)

I. Moderato | score [pdf] | mp3

II. Adagio | score [pdf] | mp3

III. Andante (Elegy) | score [pdf] | mp3

Cello sonata, mvt 3, take 8

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I’m quite pleased with some of the way it’s going at the end of today’s work, but as always I’m flummoxed by my lack of theoretical knowledge.  You wouldn’t believe how long it took me to find the harmony for one measure, and I’m still not sure of it.

Where it tapers off is where I stopped for today and headed outside to bask in the labyrinth. Again, there’s a gap, then what I intend to be the ending.  I’m sure you’re wondering how I’m going to connect it to what’s there now.  I am, also.

III. Andante (Elegy): mp3