I’m not even going to get into a debate with this person about the historical record. My concerns are rather with the framework here. This man went on a radio show and stated point blank a lie so egregious that any elementary student could win that “debate,” and he did so without any fear of being called out on it. He can say whatever he wants, and no one is going to say, “Hey, wait a second…”
My biggest fear for our nation is that this kind of lying simply breaks our citizens’ ability to remember history and apply its lessons. A lie of this size simply pegs out the WTF-o-meter in most peoples’ heads; it goes sproing and they can never again distinguish truth from BS.
Indeed, now the right-wing Wurlitzer can use this lie as a statement in their own assault on an informed citizenry: “As Senator DeMint set the record straight in 2014, the federal government had nothing to do with ending slavery, and so the big government liberals should just back off pushing for legal protections for [insert right-wing boogieman du jour here].”
And to think that the Heritage Foundation used to have a plausible claim to status in the policy world. Mercy.
OK, we’re going to pretend this piece is finished. For all that I know, it is: it’s 1:45 long, and it has a great ending. So what if the middle is crap?
I really do like the ending. It’s subtly different/improved from the original version I posted Monday, including some happy accidents. I love happy accidents. They make it sound as if I’m wildly inventive when really it was a slip of the keyboard.
Yes, it could probably use another 20-30 seconds after the surprise in the middle. For the time being, I need to follow Frank Gehry’s advice to his design teams: “Let’s let that sit there for awhile and annoy us.”
I just have to brag a little bit. As I’ve finished each recent piece from Christmas Carol, I’ve announced it on Facebook with a line from the song. In every instance, someone chimes in with one of the other lines from the song.
The last time this show was done was in 2002, and people still remember the lyrics to the songs.
I’ve been successfully avoiding any actual composition since 2011, when I finished the Cello Sonata, and re-orchestrating Christmas Carol has proven to be an even better task avoidance strategy since it’s work that has to be done but doesn’t involve actually composing. It’s a good life.
Leave it to a clown to mess it all up.
Mike Funt emailed me last week and demanded a piano piece to which he could make up some kind of clown crap because—are you ready for this?—he was inspired by this drawing at the Los Angeles Museum of Modern Art:
For reference, he sent me a couple of YouTube videos of George Gershwin playing some of his earlier ragtime pieces. Make it like that, he said. But make it yours. I want to use your music, he said, somehow forgetting that my music is pretty much unGershwinesque.
Clown.
So I thought to myself, well, it could be OK. It’s not as if it’s a handshake commission to compose a postmodern opera of the Icarus myth, is it, because that would be terrifying, what with having to submit my fraudulent work to real audiences and critics and all.
Ha.
Composing is hard, y’all, and I don’t like it. I’ve worked all weekend on this thing and it’s still only 45 seconds long. I keep abandoning stupid crap, and it keeps trying to wander off into Five Easier Pieces territory rather than stick to its ragtime roots. Part of the problem is trying to think—as I hammer out material—how Mike might use the music and therefore writing stuff that is useful. But who knows what clowns find useful? Other than seltzer bottles and red noses, I mean.
I’m already going to miss my self-imposed deadline of finishing it today—trust me, it’s not going to be finished today—and I still have “People Like Us” to re-orchestrate. Plus the NYTimes crossword puzzle. And I’m sure I should be out in the labyrinth in the downpour fixing something. And there’s physical therapy at 1:00, and then I have a meeting at the Boys & Girls Club around the corner about becoming a volunteer there, and there’s no way it’s going to be finished today unless I stop blogging and hammer out another minute of music. Perhaps I need to write the ending next and then just glue pieces together to get there.
Anyway, I’m about to take a deep breath and post what I’ve got. I used to do this all the time with music, just revealing my foibles to the world as I hack and slash my way through the thick chaos of the universe, so I’m just going to do it now and let everyone marvel at how very unGershwinesque it is.
Well, here’s a howdy-do: my partner in crime, Craig, cannot attend Burning Man after all.
I suppose I could carry on by finding new partners, but I don’t want to. For many reasons this was a kind of “Huck and Jim” trip for me to do with Craig, and so I think I’m going to postpone our 3 Old Men venture until next year. Fortunately, the tickets will be not a problem to divest myself of.
Onward. I have Gershwin ragtime rip-offshommages to write.
I was tidying up my study a couple of weeks back—you can actually see the floor!—and uncovered this:
I remember it as if it were yesterday, walking through the bookstore at UGA, and coming across this beautiful, beautiful thing. IT’S A BOX OF CARDS, YOU GUYS!
It was called Indecks, and what it was was a way to organize your notes on any research topic, and I was engaged in a huge one: an honors thesis on the work of the UGA Period Dance Group. We performed social dances across five centuries, from Shakespeare’s time to the early 20th century, and none of it was written down or collated. As chief researcher (and eventual president), that project fell on me. I also needed, for reasons lost to my memory, an actual thesis/project to fill some requirement in the Honors Program. (Probably something to do with Lothar Tresp’s time in the German army during WWII.)
The white cards were your note cards:
But what are those little holes, you are asking? IT WAS MAGIC, YOU GUYS!
You could keep track of notes for up to eight papers, hundreds of sources, nearly a hundred notes per source per paper, and you didn’t have to keep them in any order!
The orange cards were where you wrote down your sources/topics:
Here are mine:
Then, as you completed a card, you would clip the hole(s) for the source on the side and for the topic around the other edges:
And HERE’S THE MAGIC, YOU GUYS:
The box came with two steel rods, which you would insert into the deck and then loosely shake. Here, I’m looking for the cards involving La Volta, a Renaissance dance, so I’ve inserted the rod into hole #15…
Et voilá!
Out fall the cards on that topic.
AREN’T YOU ALL TINGLY IN YOUR TINGLY BITS?? This was awesome. I could pull up any combination of cards/topics. Give me all your Baroque dances, hole #7. Give me all your adapted choreography for the Classical dances, holes #3 and #8. Give me all the stuff I found in Allen Dodworth’s Dancing, source hole #5.
::sigh::
Of course, the more astute among you have realized that this is a kind of primordial database, thus beginning my lifelong lust of such things. I tumbled to arrays early on in Applesoft BASIC and got good enough at using them that I was able to correct the computer instructor at GHP one summer when he was trying to use some other function to keep track of minors registration and the program kept crashing. I also programmed an overdue books/fines system that all of Coweta County used until the state automated all the media centers. When Apple Computer released FileMaker Pro, I ate it up and have used it to run everything from NCTC to Newnan Crossing to Newnan Presbyterian choir library to GHP to U.S. Senate Youth Program to Georgia Scholars. (Pro tip: if you’re ever taking over a program from me, make sure you have a copy of FMP. Otherwise, you’re borked, darlings, AND YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE.) I scorn anyone who uses a spreadsheet to keep track of such things; you people are lame-o losers. DATABASES, BITCHES!
And what did I do with all those excruciatingly typed-out cards?
Ninety pages, typed with hand-drawn images, of sixteen of the dances performed by the Period Dance Group, including manners of each period, the original choreography of each dance, and the adapted choreography:
The Compleat Period Dancer was an immediate success—all the grad students wanted copies—and it remains a major resource for me to this day.
Lower on that title page is the date of the submission: June 4, 1974. Forty years of SEXY SEXY DATABASE FUNTIMES, YOU GUYS!
Finishing our examination of Ronald Grimes’s mapping of rituals, from the second chapter of his Beginnings in ritual studies.
: Ritual sound & language :
What is the role of silence in the rite? … Do the people consider it important to talk about the rite, avoid talk about it, or to talk during it? Are there parts of the rite for which they find it difficult or impossible to articulate verbalizable meanings? … How important is language to the performance of the rite? What styles of language appear in it — incantation, poetry, narrative, rhetoric, creeds, invective, dialogue? In what tones of voice do people speak? … To what extent is the language formulaic or repetitious? … How much of the language is spontaneous, how much is planned?
I don’t have answers to any of these. I have deliberately postponed any kind of planning on language/sound until Craig and I (and others, hopefully) get on our feet, as we say in the theatre, and start to play with it. All I know is that when a participant exits the labyrinth, I must in some way connect with that person and offer one of the agones. I honestly have no clue about how this will work.
I imagine that the offer of the agon will be formulaic, but then the rest of it is going to have to be improvised.
As for music/sounds, I’m not planning anything, but that could easily change as well. As I said in our Theme Camp application, we would welcome drum circles and other musicians to contribute to the ritual as they see fit. If our camp were bigger, say ten or more people, we could plan to have our own drummers in attendance. As it is, we each have our own bells/bowls/shakers we can bring with us, but how we implement them I will leave to more shamanic minds than mine. I can easily see a participant singing or playing an instrument or singing bowl or shaker while walking the path. It will be very interesting to report back what happens on the Playa as the community participates in the 3 Old Men ritual.
: Ritual action :
What kinds of actions are performed as part of the rite, for example, sitting, bowing, dancing, lighting fires (!), touching, avoiding, gazing, walking? In what order to they occur? … What are the central gestures? … What actions are not ascribed meaning? What actions are regarded as especially meaningful and therefore symbolic? What actions are regarded as efficacious rather than symbolic? What meanings, causes, or goals do participants attribute to their actions? … Which actions are repeated? What gestures mark transitions? What are the recurrent postures? What qualities of action persist—quickness, slowness, verticality, hesitance, mobility, linearity, exuberance, restraint? Are parts of the rite framed theatrically? … What parts of the body are emphasized by participants’ kinesthetic style? … How do the social and environmental contexts influence the actions? What actions are done with objects? … What actions are optional, required?
Again, a bucketload of questions, some of which we can answer, splitting our focus between the officiants and the participants.
For the Old Men, for this Old Man anyway, here are some answers:
Performance includes standing, walking, dancing/movement (during the walking), and touching. I would include the agones themselves as actions, and they are to my mind central and especially meaningful. I think from my perspective they are in fact efficacious rather than symbolic, although of course I have no control over the actual efficacy; I can only offer a gesture that I hope is effectively meaningful to the participant.
The agones are repeated, and they are themselves the transition from the journey of the labyrinth back to the world at large. They are, however, optional: the participant may decline the offer, or even choose to exit where there is no officiant.
Again, not having gotten on my feet I’m not sure of the “qualities” of these actions. In my head, I sense they should be slow, deliberate, nonthreatening, even the ‘struggle’ agon. But I will not be surprised if, out on the Playa, the Old Men choose to become exuberant at least part of the time.
Body parts. This is very important to me, since the whole impetus behind the 3 Old Men is of course our aging bodies. The skirt will emphasize our torsos, specifically our bellies, which among our current participants are not taut. I think too our arms and hands will play a large role by dint of holding the staff and engaging in the agones. Also, if we go with the nude walk through the labyrinth as our opening, then all kinds of body issues will present themselves as part of the ritual. One question that arises: do we paint just our heads and torsos, the visible parts of our bodies once we don our skirts, or do we paint our entire bodies for the trip through? That will require some discussion. (Sorry about the mental image…)
One question I have not resolved for myself is whether installing the labyrinth is part of the ritual. I think it will be for me, although once we arrive on the Playa and set to work, it may become just a bloody chore. Certainly we have no plans to take the thing down and re-erect it every day.
For our participants, the ritual action is pretty straightforward:
Approach the labyrinth.
Choose an entrance.
Enter the labyrinth.
Journey to the center.
Choose an exit.
Journey outward.
Choose whether to engage in the proffered agon, and if so, engage.
What meaning our participants assign to these actions is, as I’ve said before, anyone’s guess.
And that fact leads me to question whether what we’re doing is a ritual at all, since it is not part of an actual culture that produced it other than that of dirty hippie freaks like me and the 68,000 other Burners. Still, my experiences with my own labyrinth have convinced me that this offering to the Burning Man community will in fact be received as a meaningful experience by those who participate. In any event, I have an interesting anthropological study ahead of me.
Today is the last day you can sign up for health insurance via the Affordable Care Act exchange. Here’s the chart thrown up by Fox News:
snagged from Media Matters
Look at that! LOOK AT IT! Look at how far short “Obamacare” has fallen from its goal! IT’S A TRAIN WRECK! WE TOLD YOU SO! ARGLE-BARGLE!
Argle-bargle indeed.
Let’s pretend we studied propaganda techniques in school and take a look at this chart.
Here we’ve isolated the chart and done some examining of the units of measurement so generously provided by Fox News Corp.
There are eight divisions. I’m lazy, so I’m going to go with the 6,000,000 number since it’s even. It takes up three of the divisions, which means that each division is worth exactly 2,000,000.
So for each line that the bar reaches, that’s another two million people who have signed up for health insurance on the ACA exchanges.
The second bar reaches just past the eighth line, which means that…
Hold on there, bucky, that can’t be right, can it? The second bar reaches past the eighth line, but Fox News Corp. has labeled it 7,066,000.
But if each line is worth 2,000,000…
There, I fixed that for you, Fox News Corp.
Here’s what we tell the third graders: always look to see who is giving you information and what they’re trying to sell you. Here we find that Fox News has deliberately distorted the comparison between the 6 million and 7 million columns so that it looks like “Obamacare” has fallen short of its goal by about eleventy-million. (Either that or they are incredibly incompetent. It’s the classic choice of “stupid or evil.”)
But there’s actually more lying to look at:
We see that as of last Thursday (March 27), the ACA had registered six million people, but that is short of the actual goal of seven million.
However, that’s a lie. The 7,000,000 figure was the Congressional Budget Office’s original estimate of how many people would sign up for insurance via the federal exchange. Because of the website’s bumpy start (sure, private industry contractors can always do a better job…), the CBO revised that estimate downward to 6,000,000. Again, this is not a goal, it’s an estimate.
So here’s the actual news:
Based on the CBO’s revised estimate, the Affordable Care Act goalpost of 6,000,000 people signing up for health insurance on the federal exchange was passed four days before the deadline.
Here’s what Fox News Corp. reported in its chart:
Obamacare has failed to meet its goal of 7,066,000 people by a factor of about 2.66.
Here’s the deal, O conservative acquaintances: we can differ on whether “Obamacare” is a good thing or not—personally, I think it is a waste of time: let’s go straight to single payer universal healthcare. But you cannot pretend that Fox News Corp. has done anything but lie to you with this chart. Not to me, darlings; I don’t watch that particular entertainment channel. To you.
And so what you have to ask yourself is what I would teach third graders to ask: What are they trying to sell you, and why?
Feel free to respond in comments, but we’re only discussing the particulars of this chart. Comments about the ACA and its legitimacy will be deleted. There will be no Gish Galloping here.
Continuing our examination of Ronald Grimes’s mapping of rituals, from the second chapter of his Beginnings in ritual studies.
: Ritual identity :
What ritual roles and offices are operative—teacher, master, elder, priest, shaman, diviner, healer, musician? How does the rite transform ordinary appearances and role definitions? Which roles extend beyond the ritual arena, and which are confined to it? … Who initiates, plans, and sustains the rite? Who is excluded by the rite? Who is the audience, and how does it participate? … What feelings do people have while they are performing the rite? After the rite? At what moments are mystical or other kinds of religious experience heightened? Is one expected to have such feelings or experiences? … Does the rite include meditation, possession, psychotropics, or other consciousness-altering elements? … What room is there for eccentricity, deviance, innovation, and personal experiment? … Are masks, costumes, or face paint used as ways of precipitating a transformation of identity?
Well, that’s a lot to cover, isn’t it?
As for the role of the 3 Old Men in the ritual, I have noted in one of my Burning Man notebooks the following:
What are the attributes of the officiants?
solemnity
compassion
serenity
wisdom
openness
groundedness
not anger
despair
decay
aggression
I have avoided from the beginning calling them guardians, because they’re not guarding anything. They’re there as anchors more than anything, providing a sense to the participants that there is mind behind the installation of rope and stakes. They are also there to provide a sense of closure at the end of the journey, whether or not the participant elects to engage in the proffered agon. (I think the Old Men can at least bow/nod/reverence an exiting participant—and I really need another term besides “participant.”)
So let’s just go with Elder, since that’s part of our gestalt anyway.
Transformation of appearances: this is one reason I’m leaning toward the idea of the Old Men opening the ritual by stripping from their regular clothes, painting their bodies, walking the labyrinth, then donning their skirt and staff. It makes it pretty clear that we have become the Old Men. The last question in the set addresses this as well, and I think it’s important. Just as priests and shamans and judges put on specific garments to become their role, the 3 Old Men put on theirs.
The body paint thing is problematic, of course. For one thing, it’s going to trigger associations with Butoh dance, with its visceral emotions and existential terror, and that’s not what we hope to project at all. For another thing, it’s 100° out there and we don’t have showers. Ew. This is an idea that we’re going to have to consider carefully before committing to it.
Who is the audience and how do they participate? All of Burning Man is the audience, all 68,000 of us. Such is the nature of the festival, however, that we will be one of thousands of experiences available to people, and unless we are selected as an official theme camp and given a space where we might attract attention, we will be off on one of the side streets and will host whoever stumbles across us.
How our participants respond to the ritual is anyone’s guess, since nothing about it is prescriptive. Our hope is that the experience is meditative and personally transformative. (As for psychotropics… I’m shocked—shocked—that you would suggest such a thing might be possible at Burning Man.) Our hope is that people find meaning in their walk through the labyrinth, and that engaging in the agon upon their exit gives an extra push to what they found in their journey. Our hope is that they find themselves still thinking on it as they walk away or in odd moments during the week.
What room is there for eccentricity, deviance, innovation, and personal experiment? Honey, please. You just defined Burning Man. We would be idiots to presume that we’re not going to host Burners whose Dionysian impulses make a mockery of the solemnity of our setup. And that’s OK: clowns can be priests; fools can be visionaries. I expect to see people walking the labyrinth in silence and prayer; singing and dancing; giggling and inattentive; naked; stoned and lost; smirking and cynical; hurriedly. I expect drummers and other musicians to join us. I expect people to be puzzled or put off by the offer of an agon; I expect some to accept it gratefully, with tears, with joy. I expect to be quizzed—”What is this about? How do I do it?” I expect to be ignored. I expect to have others expect me to be something more than I have offered.
And I expect to be transformed by all of it, to learn more about my identity as an Old Man.
Tomorrow: ritual sound & language, and ritual action
I have found a couple of websites that appeal to my inner process nerd. I will now share them with you.
Kanban
The first website has already had an impact on how I work: http://personalkanban.com. (Start with their PK 101 link.)
I stumbled across Kanban as a system while using Google Drive over at West Georgia. There are all kinds of add-on apps, and I found a Kanban one that really helped me get organized with the disparate projects/processes I was working on.
From there, I started looking for more info about Kanban and came across the Personal Kanban site. This approach was beautiful, and the website so helpful that I bought the author’s book, and that was even better.
I do have a ToDo app on my phone, and that’s useful, but a to-do list is just reminders. It’s not an organizational tool. Personal Kanban’s two dicta are organizational: visualize your work, and limit your work-in-progress (WIP). That’s it.
As I began to settle into my second retirement phase, I wanted to bring the Kanban approach to my work on music, the labyrinth, daily life. I don’t have a wall to put an actual Kanban board up, so I went looking for laptop versions. My criteria were simple and ironclad: it had to be dead easy to use, and it had to be instantaneously accessible.
As is so often the case, the simplest solution was DIY. I found another Mac user’s blog where he talked about using the Mac’s multiple desktops to create a Kanban board on its own desktop. He simply created a Kanban background and used Apple’s Stickies app to create actual stickies. I went one better, by tying the Stickies app to the specific desktop and then using an Fkey to trigger/open Stickies. In other words, I hit F14, and the main desktop slides over to the Kanban desktop:
Click to enlarge.
Hitting any of the other Fkey shortcuts takes me back to the regular desktop.
You see a couple of my modifications: the HOLDING and DAILY areas. Personal Kanban calls the HOLDING area the PEN, and it’s those tasks that you can’t move forward on until you get information/decisions/products from someone else.
The DAILY section helps me see if I’m staying on task for longterm projects, like revamping Christmas Carol or blogging or working on the text for the SUN TRUE FIRE oratorio.
I’ve color-coded them just to give myself a sense of those items that are going to be larger/harder to do or that have other issues in getting them done.
I’m not going to go into details, other than to say that I already understand more about what I’m willing to work on and what I keep avoiding. Read more at the PK website.
Dave Seah’s stuff
I just found this guy today, so I’m still exploring.
I’m not at all sure that I need another layer of organization, but I really like his LEARN EXPLORE BUILD SHARE mantra, and I figure having tools to go to when I’m stuck or just looking to avoid work is a good thing. His blog is also interesting reading, laying bare his working processes in dealing with creativity and productivity.
Put your favorite process/organization sites in comments!
