Author: Dale

Fragment #3

Posted on by Dale

A while back, I bought a CD called Nouveaux “Brandebourgeois,” i.e., New Brandenburgs. The conceit is that this musicalologist Bruce Haynes has grave-robbed J.S. Bach’s other works to piece together six more Brandenburg Concerti such as the man himself might have written if he had gotten the job in Brandenburg and become a court composer instead of a church composer.

A brave attempt, but fruitless. The more I listened, the less they worked. As a composer, I have found that themes know themselves what they’re for: a sonata, a choral work, a symphony, a fugue. It doesn’t do to try to force a song theme into a symphony, nor vice versa.

And so even when I didn’t know the original pieces, the fake concerti never took flight. All those cantata themes were just not agile enough to dance through the intricacies of the Brandenburgs.

A lesson to us all, I’m sure.

Fragment #2

Posted on by Dale

I can see how my new resolution could rapidly turn ugly.

Today’s shooting in Newtown, CT, is already prompting the usual handwringing, and I for one am sick of it. If I were President Obama, I would call the usual idiots from the NRA to the White House and tell them in no uncertain terms: “No more dead children. You write the laws to make sure that happens, or I will. Your choice.”

But I digress.

Mike Huckabee, who often plays a sane person on Fox News, took a stance on the tragedy today. It’s pretty clear, he says, that the problem is that we’ve taken God out of the schools. “We don’t have a crime problem, a gun problem or even a violence problem. What we have is a sin problem,” he intones.

Let me get this straight—and I want it noted that I deserve full credit for not using the full range of expletives and naughty words at my command—am I to understand that because this nation renders unto God/Caesar what is theirs, that God thinks it’s appropriate to send a crazy person to take a gun and kill children?

Does anyone else have a problem with this?

update: Jesus.

Fragment #1

Posted on by Dale

I haven’t been getting blog posts out of my head onto the page for a while—a long while—and so last night I decided on a plan of action:

  1. Move my WordPress app to the dock on my iPad, where it is always in front of me.
  2. Stop waiting to formulate coherent thoughts into well-crafted essays.

So here we go. Fragments.

Today we have Bobby Jindal, the up-and-coming-Republican-who-totally-does-not-look-like-Kenneth-the-Page,[1] totally solving the birth control issue. The birth control issue, you may recall, has nothing to do with women being afforded the opportunity to control their reproductive systems, but is all about the religiousy[2] freedomy stuff. Corporations should not have to violate their religiousy freedoms by offering birth control when it conflicts with their deeply held religiousy beliefs.

First of all, before we get to Jindal’s Gordian solution, I have to say that I was unaware that corporations had deeply held religious beliefs. We all know that they’re people, at least since 1886, but do corporations pray? More on that in a moment.

Jindal, in the meantime, wants to help everyone out. And it’s so easy! Just make birth control available over the counter instead of by prescription! So easy! Now corporations don’t have to violate their deepliest held religiousy beliefs and provide contraceptives to their female employees—those slutty slut sluts can simply go buy it themselves! Thereby placing a financial burden uniquely on their female employees not borne by those other employees, i.e., men!

Oh, wait.

Here’s the deal on corporations’ deeply held religiousy beliefs. It’s bull. All of it. If the owner of Job’s Christian Widgets does not believe in birth control, he does not have to buy it. She does not have to buy it. Whatever.

But he/she does have to provide it in Job’s Christian Widgets’ health insurance as a matter of health. And why is this not a violation of Mr./Mrs. Job’s own personal deeply held religiousy beliefs? Because providing health insurance (which employees are at least in part paying for) does not keep Mr./Mrs. Job from worshipping freely. At all. Ever. In any way.

Matter of conscience, you say? Bushwah. Let us presume that Mr./Mrs. Job is a good old-fashioned Southern Baptist. Leaving aside the fact that Southern Baptists didn’t give a rat’s ass about contraceptives until about 40 years ago, we can guess that he/she is still completely opposed to the consumption of alcohol, and yet there is no movement afoot to support stripping JCW’s employees of their ability to have a cold one after work. (Or the deeply religiousy Mr./Mrs. Job themselves, for that matter. The corporation, on the other hand, might have difficulty doing shots with the gang after the shift.)

Mr. Jindal’s brilliant solution is just one more rightwing “tails we win, heads you lose” proposals.

—

[1] Totally a GHP alumnus, Theatre 90
[2] My new word. Religiousy : Religion :: Truthiness : Truth

God and Man on the back roads

Posted on by Dale

Today, in driving up through the back highways of middle Georgia, I passed a tiny church labeled BIBLE TRUTH TABERNACLE.

There’s lots to unpack here—there’s the traditional Southern Baptist/evangelical biblical inerrancy strain, with its claim that the Bible is absolute and infallible, the inerrant Word of God.  That belief is possible only if you exclude all knowledge of church history, of Aramaic/Greek originals, of the Council of Trent, etc., etc.  Too much has changed with that collection of texts to believe that King James took dictation from Jehovah.

There’s the subset strain that regards the Bible as a rulebook, God’s rulebook: “God said it, and I believe it.”  That one goes squirrelly as soon as you’re forced to examine even just the Pentateuch alone with anything approaching an attention to detail.  (The same can be said of treating the text as history or science—it just cannot be done without a lot of crippling cognitive dissonance.)

Have said all of this, here are my thoughts on the BIBLE TRUTH TABERNACLE, admitting that it is all my fantasy and not based on direct observation.  In other words, just like the inerrantists.

The pastor/preacher of the BTT is probably also the founder. He—it’s always a he—believes not only that the Bible is TRUE, he believes that he understands that TRUTH.  He reads the text closely—indeed, he reads it cover to cover every year—and as he reads, he sees the TRUTH—he constructs the TRUTH—and he transmits the TRUTH to his flock every Sunday morning and every Wednesday night.

But here’s the rub, of course: he has no knowledge of the historicity of the text, as an object of time and a subject of change.  It is completely outside his ken how that book developed—or even that it did develop.  It’s as if he were a lab experiment in religious thought—everything he thinks he understands about his religion is practically sui generis.

I don’t even need to impute any kind of restrictive/negative social attitudes towards the leader of BTT—although I would be astounded if he were a supporter of gay marriage, for example—to posit that much of what he has perceived to be TRUE isn’t really.

My model for this is Miss Sally Clovis [name changed to protect the innocent] at Newnan High School.  Poor woman, she was a holdover from an older time, and the only reason why she was allowed in the same room as the college bound students was that Richard Smith had decamped to The Heritage School that year.

The text we were studying was the Romantic poem “The Prisoner of Chillon,” Lord Byron, about a martyred family in the 16th century.  The narrator and two of his brothers were chained to pillars in the dungeon of the Castle of Chillon on the shores of Lake Geneva, and the two brothers die while the narrator lives.  (Their imprisonment was due to something about freedom.  It was political in nature.)

But Miss Clovis told us that the poem was about family—even the title was a clue, seeing as how it had the word chillun in it.

Well.

Even at seventeen—or perhaps especially at seventeen—I knew how hysterically wrong that was.  Sally Clovis had no French, and no context of European sociopolitical thought 1790-1830, and so she interpreted what was right in front of her as best as she knew how—and went splat on the unyielding Windshield of Pedagogy.

[To be fair, I don’t think anyone but me even understood how wrong she was.  I still use her as an example (not naming names, of course) of how GHP prepares students to take charge of their own learning: when I saw that I was not going to be taught English Lit, I knew it was up to me to learn it myself.  My classmates just saw a year off.]

Anyway, that is how I envision the pastor of BTT: he reads with no context, no exegesis, no sense of history or theology.  What he sees, he filters through his own experience.  When he runs into material that is resistant to immediate literalization, I’m sure he perseveres, works on it, gnaws on it, until he sees the pattern, sees the TRUTH.  It feels good, when God reveals to him His Words, the meaning of His Minds—he rejoices in the opportunity to share the TRUTH with his church—he is blessed.

Very mock-worthy, very pitiable, indeed.  But as these ideas formed in my head, zooming up through middle Georgia, I found myself rebutting myself almost immediately: why not?  Why not the chillun version of the TRUTH?  He is merely limiting God differently than I limit god, his misunderstanding differing from mine in ways that each of us would find inexplicable.  We all name the Tao—it is unavoidable—and if his naming connects him to the Mystery, to the Void, and comforts him, why should I find it risible or distressing?

I’m sure I’m condescending to the man.  I’m working on that.  No, I don’t believe his understanding of the Mystery is “correct,” and I’m equally sure that his beliefs are restrictive and damaging, but how can I privilege my interpretation of his sacred text over the only way he has to approach it?  What are my alternatives other than to set up my idol next to his and pray for flames to consume him?

Discuss.

Libertà!

Posted on by Dale

There is an odd moment in Mozart’s Don Giovanni that perplexes directors and audiences alike, near the end of Act I.  The Don is giving a party, deliberately taunting his enemies, and as he welcomes them he seemingly out of nowhere cries, “Viva la libertà!”— “Hurray for Liberty!”  The others take up the cry, often coming downstage to deliver themselves of this stirring sentiment.  Trumpets and drums, which we have not heard since the Overture, make it a rousing, if confusing, moment, which vanishes as quickly as it appeared.

I was reminded of this as I tootled across the back roads of Georgia on my GHP RESA World Tour recently: my iPhone was set to play my 7500 tracks of music randomly, and that scene popped up somewhere between Statesboro and Waycross.  And that in turn reminded me of my experience at Atlanta Opera last season with their execrable production of Don Giovanni.

Costumes were fine, set was fine, the orchestra was good, and most of the singers were acceptable, although the Don himself was very shaky.  But none of them could act, and it looked as they didn’t have a director at all, because whoever directed it simply didn’t.  I am not exaggerating when I say that I could have blocked that entire three-and-a-half hour show in one rehearsal, one short rehearsal.  Everyone just came on, walked to their spot, faced downstage, and sang. It was excruciating.

Giovanni is a tough nut to crack.  Our main character is an abusive, self-gratifying, self-justifying sleazeball.  His servant Leporello is a codependent toady.  His opponents, the “good guys,” are both hapless and feckless, especially Don Ottavio, the fiancé of Donna Anna, whose father Giovanni kills in the opening scene while trying to escape from Anna’s bedroom.  Ottavio spends the entire opera dithering about who the killer is (Giovanni was masked) and whether or not it might not be maybe Don Giovanni and what he might maybe do about that if he could only be sure.  Maybe.  More about that in a moment.

I’ve never been sure how Mozart means us to take Giovanni.  He’s clearly a not-nice person, but he’s the main character, and the non-evil people are just tools in his hands (besides being simply tools like Ottavio and Masetto, the peasant lout whose fiancée Zerlina Giovanni tries to seduce.)  In the end, he is dragged to hell by the statue of the Commendatore, Donna Anna’s dead father, and it’s extremely unclear whether we’re supposed to be smug in our righteous condemnation of the brute, or overcome with admiration at our boy’s proud refusal to repent and to become “other than he is.”

So anyway, Atlanta Opera’s director failed to crack the nut, and the audience’s tolerance of the stage action got increasingly thinner until the final scene, when Don Ottavio rushes onstage, finally ready to punish the vile seducer, only to find that his dead father-in-law has beat him to it.  The audience howled with derisive laughter.

It got worse.  That climactic scene is followed by the lamest ending ever: Donna Anna & Ottavio, Leporello, Zerlina & Masetto, and Donna Elvira (Giovanni’s deluded stalker) all stand and sing what they’ll do next:

  • Let’s get married. (Ottavio)
  • Sure, but we have to wait a year. (Anna)
  • I’ll enter a convent. (Elvira, who has spent the entire opera essentially begging Giovanni to do her one more time.)
  • I guess I’ll find a new master. (Leporello)
  • We’ll go get breakfast. (Zerlina & Masetto)

Mercy.  Then there’s the rousing final sextet, where they all sing how good is rewarded and evil punished.

Sure.  Whatever.  Curtain.

As fate would have it, the next day after this performance I received an email from Atlanta Opera asking me to rate my experience.  With raised eyebrows and pursed lips, I set to it.

After a series of questions asking whether I thought it was appropriate for the Bank of America to be a corporate sponsor—sure, I said, just like a Mexican drug cartel: money is money—they asked what the most enjoyable part of the evening was for me.

I was able to reply truthfully that it was during the curtain call, when I had a vision: wouldn’t it be a blast if while our idiot good guys are singing their platitudes about good always winning out, we see behind them the devils from the finale climbing out of the floor and dusting themselves off; followed by the Commendatore, whose statue costume we noted looked a little ratty when we first saw it; followed by Don Giovanni himself, who pulls out a roll of bills and pays them all off.  He makes his escape while his enemies congratulate themselves on their virtue.

He is the 1%: throughout, he uses his position and his wealth to abuse everyone around him for his own pleasure, and even when they think they’ve got him cornered, he buys his way out of it.  We’ve seen it happen the entire opera, and so when he fakes his own death, we are not surprised.

Why Atlanta Opera doesn’t hire me, I’ll never know.

Anyway, back to libertà.  I hadn’t really given my epiphany a second thought since typing it into the email survey form with such grim pleasure, but when that scene played out on GA-121, it all made sense.  Giovanni, after inviting his worst enemies to a party where he intends to seduce Zerlina right in front of them, distracts them with cries of Liberty! Freedom!  And like the pitiful sheep they are, they sing right along while he moves in on the peasant girl (who never gives in, by the way).

What else are they going to do? He’s the 1%.  Suckers.

Fire pit addendum

Posted on by Dale

We’ll see if this works.

I have planted dwarf mondo grass around the fire pit.  There’s a small batch in another part of the yard that actually feels very nice underfoot, so it’s worth a shot.  Unknowns: will it grow here?  Will it spread?  Will it tolerate the foot traffic?  Will it be the dickens to keep clear of twigs and pecans?

Only time will tell.  And then we’ll pave it over with stone.

A fire pit worthy of the labyrinth

Posted on by Dale

Wednesday night I was out meditating by the fire in the labyrinth, and as I got things set up I noticed that the metal fire pit had rusted out pretty badly.  It was time to discard it and actually build the permanent one.

Those who  have been to the labyrinth in the last four or five months will have seen that I’d blocked out such a thing, literally, with blocks, and the metal fire pit was perched on top of those blocks.  So as the evening wore on and I was gazing into the fire, I came up with a plan.

I had of course done a little research on the web to see if there were an established method for this kind of thing, and I found several how-to’s.  But most of them involved digging down two or three rounds of stones and pouring a concrete base, then building the thing three or four rounds high above the ground.  They seemed excessive for what I needed.  Indeed, as I set to work Thursday night, it dawned on me that most of those instructions were for people who wanted a place for a bonfire for large groups of people to mingle around.  I needed something for a small group of people to sit around.

Anyway, as I gazed into the fire, I came up with a lovely little design that I thought might work.  Feel free to steal this.

Thursday night, in a burst of energy and inspiration, I got out and dug the first version of the hole:

That’s the basic idea.  Do you know how hard it is to dig a hole that is six inches deep and thirty inches wide in clay packed with construction debris?  It took a while.

Having dug the hole, I lined the whole thing with red lava rocks and raked it level.  (Take that, concrete-base-pourers!) The lower round of stones rests on that.

From there, I laid a complete round of a dozen stones above that.  Here’s where I had problems.  Knowing I did not have enough stones* to make two complete rounds, I went to Home Depot to buy ten more.  Alas, of course, they did not have these stones any more, so I bought ten of a different variety.  They did not match, nor were they the same size.  More of that in a minute.

I added more lava rock to the center to make it level, and I was ready to test it out.

Here it is in situ:

And from across the labyrinth:

For fire testing purposes, I went ahead and placed some of the alien stones in the upper round.

Notice the gap.  Feh.  I’m also running a line of bricks from the pit to the labyrinth.  Very crop-circle-ish, made even moreso by the fact that the pit is connected in a straight line through the center of the labyrinth to the lingam stone on the other side.  ::cue Twilight Zone theme::

The good news is that it functions brilliantly, even better than the store-bought ‘un.  The lava rocks, I think, provide airflow that creates a lovely fire throughout.

So now to Important Questions.  In watching the flames last night and wondering how the heck I was going to find four more of the old-style stones, I had a scathingly brilliant idea.  I had another, more “doh”-related, as I began to write this post.  I will share both, and we will discuss the two in comments.

Idea One: I can put the alien stones in the first row, with the gap facing the line of bricks.  The theory is that the fire would cast a stream of light out towards the center of the labyrinth.  (And by extension, to the lingam.  Of course.)

Idea Two: I have four more old-style stones—they’re in the bottom row.  I could just substitute the alien stones for the bottom row.

Pending discussion, here’s what I’m going to do.  This afternoon, I will reconfigure the stones to test the gap/stream of light hypothesis.  If it works well enough to be cool, we’ll go with that.  If not, then I reconfigure again and reclaim the necessary stones from the bottom.

UPDATE: After some frustrated cursing at the alien stones, which did not work in any position, I took my quest to the road, specifically to Lowe’s.  As it turns out, I must have bought the original batch from there, because there they were.  I bought more than enough to finish the job, and lo!:

The next phase: planting dwarf mondo grass around it.  When that dies, we’ll start laying down stones.

__________
*Stop it, Jobie.

A new drink

Posted on by Dale

This past weekend, on the way home from the Slotin Folk Art Festival, we treated ourselves to dinner at Flip Burgers on Howell Mill Road.  Very tasty food, but it’s the bar that concerns us here.  I had a cocktail that was a kind of hybrid margarita: tequila, Canton ginger liqueur, and… a fruit juice I cannot remember.

So this evening, having stopped by Georgia World of Beverage to pick up some blue agave silver tequila—I already had the Canton, of course—I set about finding the recipe.  It was nowhere to be found.  I found other combinations, all of which sound lovely, but tonight I had to muddle through with my own wits.

It’s very tasty, so much so that my Lovely  First Wife, who recoils at both tequila and ginger in general, liked it.

Untitled Drink

  • 1 part blue agave silver tequila
  • 1/2 part ginger liqueur
  • 1 tsp agave syrup (I didn’t really measure, so let’s say “to taste,” which gives you permission to make and consume several of these.)
  • pineapple juice

Add tequila, ginger liqueur, and agave syrup to a shaker and shake with ice.  Shake vigorously, because the agave syrup does not dissolve easily.

Pour into a glass over ice, and fill with pineapple juice.

It’s sweet, but it has that bite from the ginger and that undercurrent of the tequila.  Enjoy!

New art

Posted on by Dale

Today my Lovely First Wife and I went to the Slotin Folk Art Fest up in Norcross.  Some very nice stuff available up there!  I resisted several pieces, but if we had gone on Friday, I probably would have gone back today to buy some more stuff.

Here’s what I did buy:

They’re less than a foot tall, and at 3 for $50, such a steal!  I haven’t decided where they’re going yet.  I’d love to mount them in that little fern bank in the middle of the labyrinth, but I don’t know if they’d be visible.  Clearly, mounted on a wall they’d be excellent.

As soon as I saw them, their atavistic energy made it impossible for me not to have them.  They hark back to some of the Lichtenbergians’ founding goals, don’t they?

They’re made from manual typewriter keys.

Labyrinth update, 7/25/2012

Posted on by Dale

It is with trepidation that I arrive home from a summer at GHP—how will the labyrinth have thrived?  (Thriven?)  In 2009, the grass was largely dead.  I stayed home in 2010, so it was fine, and last summer it was OK.

But this summer’s heat had me worried.  My lovely first wife assured me that she had watered it religiously and that the grass was greener than it had any right to be, although she was concerned about the peacock fern in the center.

So yesterday when I got home, after I had unloaded the U-Haul trailer and returned it, then driven into my new driveway with the six-inch steel pipe property line marker sticking up next to it and exploding my tire (separate story), I headed back to see what the situation was.

Short version: not too bad.

The grass is green, and in fact seems to be giving the clover a run for its money.  I may try this fall to kill off the clover after all and reseed those areas.

It hasn’t been mowed, of course, but the biggest problem is the fact that last year’s bumper crop of pecans is erupting from every surface.  There are oak seedlings as well, but mowing over those kills them off.  Not so with pecans: they are just a root system with leaves for decoration.  Mow over them, and they’ll be back within a week.  Not only that, but as they grow back, the stems are just as thick as before, essentially turning into little punji sticks, so walking barefoot in the labyrinth becomes dicey.

No, I will have to get down on my hands and knees and dig up each and every one.  Not a problem.  It will give me plenty of meditative time, and labor is beautiful.