Category: Life

Oh, you know, the usual…

Begging for bucks

Posted on by Dale

Do me a favor and give me money.

Well, not me per se, but the American Cancer Society. I’m on Newnan Crossing’s Relay for Life team, and in fact, I’m being forced to be Mr. Relay. Apparently my predecessor created quite a splash with his Daisy Dukes and feather boa. Since I have no nascent urges to play out, I have made it clear to my team that I will make a splash by wearing my professional attire, i.e., my Utilikilt and a Hawaiian shirt, viz.:

Dale in his kilt, GHP 2006 This is the first time I have participated in Relay for Life, which is not to my credit. And of course the reason I’m doing it now is that I owe it to my friend Mitch Powell, who died of lung cancer last November, and to his wife Anne, who is a survivor of ovarian cancer.

The way it works (this is where you come in) is that members of each team attempt to raise money on their behalf. Go to my team webpage, and click on the Donate to a Participant link on the left.

Thank you in advance for supporting Mr. Relay.

Musings (Day 206/365)

Posted on by Dale

It only takes a lovely spring-like afternoon, a lovely meal in preparation, Mahler’s 9th Symphony, and two or three Hotel Miyako Specials, to make one feel nostalgic. Or in my case, self-satisfied.

I got a lot done on my winter break. I didn’t get everything done that I wanted to do, but a lot of what I didn’t finish is being held up by stuff I need from others: tax forms, server glitches, that kind of thing. So I’ll return to work tomorrow with not a lot undone.

Foremost of all this “stuff” I got done is the sunflower waltz passage. No, I haven’t finished orchestrating it yet, but I did get it finished. Where it petered out yesterday, it now continues with one final repetition of the rising phrase (“our traveling habits have tired us”), then, as I predicted, closes with the “topaz tortoises” phrase, followed by a breaking up of the “Ah, William” phrase to bring us down.

Still some things to smooth out, as usual, but I think I’m done with it, enough for us to play with it on Tuesday.

I’ve been struck by a phrase from Ken Robinson’s Out of Our Minds, which I’m still reading: successive approximation. It describes perfectly the way I’ve worked on the music, especially this sunflower waltz, and the way we’ve been working on the staging. People think, erroneously, that these kinds of things get “created,” that we think them up and just write them down or do them.

But of course we don’t. We put something down, anything, and look at it. What’s missing? What’s wrong? Where could it go next? Is it a dead end? We erase, we change, we nudge it one way or the other. Each step is an approximation, and the truth is that the final product is just the last of our educated guesses.

My week in NYC (Day 130/365)

Posted on by Dale

I meant to write this last week, but was caught up in decorating duty. And actually, if I’m going to be honest, this is actually being written on Sunday, since I was on decorating duty yesterday also. But today the Empress of Decorating has gone on an excursion, and I am free to get some other stuff done. For example, after I write yesterday’s post, I will work on something for today.

This is another entry in my “With My Lottery Winnings” series, something I haven’t done in a long while. But last Friday’s Times Arts section got to me. So let’s see what I would have been doing if I had been in New York last week. We’ll just go through the two sections page by page and see what’s up.

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Typefaces and today (Day 42/365)

Posted on by Dale

I love typefaces. I love typefaces. I get an email from this company, and I go all quivery with type-lust. I want to fire up InDesign and make a big poster just to use the font.

Screw Times Roman and Helvetica, and don’t even talk to me about Arial or Comic Sans. Bleagh.

Give me Cyan …
or P22 Cezanne …
or High Society …
or Young Finesse …
or Leaf or…

You get the picture. When I was in high school, my girl friend actually gave me an ITC catalog for my birthday. It’s that bad.

So it was with great anticipation that for Christmas last year I gave myself a daily calligraphy calendar. Its premise was that every weekend it would give you a new typeface, and then the week would be spent lettering words that were grouped thematically. What fun, eh wot?

I should have been tipped off when the description on the back of the box simpered, “See if you can guess the theme for the week!” The typefaces were not very exciting, some of them required a brush and ink, not the kind of thing one wants to deal with in the bathroom first thing every morning, and some of them contained egregious errors, e.g., their attempt at an uncial font had a majuscule A and H rather than minuscule. (And you thought I couldn’t get worse.)

Not only that, but after six weeks, the typefaces repeated! What a rip-off! So I lost interest mid-February and have only desultorily pulled the looseleaf pages since then.

I was mildly curious this weekend, gazing on the umpteenth repeat of a swash style, as to what the theme would be this week, especially for today, the fifth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. And it was therefore with slackjawed stupefaction this morning that I pulled the weekend’s page and saw today’s word: Airplane.

I am not easily shocked, as most of you know, but that was a weird way to begin the morning. The rest of the week had words like propeller, pilot, that kind of thing, but damn, people, did no one think? I would hate to be their email editor this morning.

I may have to go buy ArDeco or Chato Band just to get the bad taste out of my mouth.

Almost nothing (Day 27/365)

Posted on by Dale

I almost did nothing. I cleaned up my work area, clearing the drafting table to serve as my “away from the computer” composition area. I read more of my CSS book.
In other news, I have a couple of uses for my lottery winnings:

  • Tom Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia will be opening in New York soon. That’s a three-play work covering the lives of the Russian intellectuals involved in the 1830s revolutionary work. It made no sense to me when I read it (as in, why did he write this?) and I’d like to see if it makes more sense when you see it. So that’s at least three nights in NYC I could spend money on.
  • Also in NYC, Mr. Nebojsa Kaludjerovic is the sole employee of the U.N. mission of Montenegro, which recently, and peacefully, gained its independence from Serbia. He’s the ambassador, the secretary, the bookkeeper, etc. He used to be the ambassador from the combined countries, working out of a mansion on 5th Ave. Now he works out of his apartment, using his son’s laptop to check his Gmail account. The country of Montenegro is multiethnic, multicultural, and multireligious, and yet it has remained peaceful and democratic throughout the bloody breakup of Yugoslavia. I’d like to buy the man some office supplies for his new office.
  • I’d go to Kiva.org and fund all the developing businesses there.

Head-spinningly complicated lives: a post (Day 20/365)

Posted on by Dale

I went for one of my walks this morning and sketched out an interesting B theme for the symphony, so I was going to post about that, I really was, but then the Times splashed all over its SundayStyles section a story I absolutely could not not write about. Kevin, cover your ears.

Above the fold is a huge photograph of a happy family, a happy toddler being tickled by the handsome dad, the warm-looking mother smiling into the camera on the sidelines. The headline is The Trouble When Jane Becomes Jack, and the feature is about transgendered men: women who surgically become men. The dad, Shane, used to be Sharon.

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On getting old: a post (Day 16/365)

Posted on by Dale

I’m now officially old.

I know, everyone will roll their eyes. How can I be old? I don’t look old. People younger than I look years older than I do. I don’t act old. There are people who now have tattoos who wouldn’t if it were not for my influence.

But I’m old. Yesterday, I proudly put on my rear windshield the obligatory sticker: Guilford Dad.

I could have chosen just a plain Guilford decal, or one that said Guilford College, or one that had their new oak tree logo next to the name. But with a strange feeling in my stomach, I bought the one that says what I am: Guilford Dad.

I’m not as old as the doctor from Louisville, 73, who has seven sons: the oldest is 41 and the youngest, 18, now at Guilford. This is a man who obviously does not know when to quit.

But I’m old enough to be qualified by a rear window decal: Dad. Someone who is old enough to send an ungodly amount of money to a wonderful college to educate his son. And clearly someone who is proud of his son for making it possible for him to send an ungodly amount of money to this institution.

Yes, he slacked his way through high school, preferring to come from behind for a finish that was “good enough,” and I’m worried sick that he has shortchanged himself in preparation for the tough courses ahead of him, but he’s smart, he’s funny, he’s kind, and he’s good. He’ll be okay. He’ll be better than okay. Of course, if he would email or call, I’d know right now how okay he was. See, I am old.

I feel like Monet in his garden, or Charles Ives after he quit composing. I don’t know why; their old age issues had nothing to do with sons. They just spring to mind. With any luck, I can be Monet and keep working, instead of Ives, who didn’t.

A goodbye (Day 13/265)

Posted on by Dale

Today we take Grayson to Guilford College.

This is ripping my heart out. I haven’t even allowed myself to think about what we’re doing, even though his stuff is all packed and waiting to be loaded in the van.

He’s asleep in his room. This is it, the last time he wakes up in his room. From now on, he’s a visitor; it will always be a question of when he’s leaving again.

What am I going to do? This child is my best friend, the one with whom I share the most in common, the one with whom I laugh the most. What will I do without him?

Of course it has never occurred to me to try to “keep” him. Only very foolish parents try to do that, those who have deluded themselves into believing that their children understand and reciprocate the deep attachment we have for them. And they are deluded.

So when we get to Guilford, I’m not sure how useful all the sessions on “letting go” are going to be. I know what that’s about. I just can’t stop it from hurting.

A small essay (Day 2/365)

Posted on by Dale

When you’re heading to the coast of Georgia from Newnan, you can take I-75 down to Macon and then get onto I-16. That will take you through the deadest stretches of interstate this side of the Mississippi, down to Savannah, and then you get to use I-95 down to the isles. Out of your way, but clean.

Or you can go straight there by getting onto U.S. 41 at Griffin and just staying straight on 341 all the way to Brunswick. It cuts through the state like a royal highway, and most of the time you’re alone. That is its appeal to me: no real traffic, no flocks of semi’s, no clumps of maniacs trying to go five miles per hour faster or slower than you. You’re surrounded by green, and yes, you have to slow down for the towns along the way, but to me that’s a plus.

After you squeeze through Perry you’re onto the long stretch leading to the coast. And there, in the first pecan grove, is a sign: GEORGIA’S HIGH TECH CORRIDOR.

Right, you think. On and on the road goes. It widens into four lanes, four lanes divided, more pecans, a lot more pine trees, and every now and then another sign: GEORGIA’S HIGH TECH CORRIDOR.

Only, really, it’s not. There’s nothing to indicate that this ribbon of highway is flanked by anything other than that which it’s always been flanked by: utter rurality. There aren’t even real farms anymore, just pecan groves and pine plantations, and occasionally a small town that used to serve the farmers but no longer has that purpose, nor indeed any purpose.

You check your laptop to see if, incredibly, you might be getting a wireless signal, but of course you aren’t. The endless pine trees are not wired. Perhaps they’re being raised by satellite?

Your iPod broadcasts random music to your radio that you are fairly certain, and I don’t think you’re being overly unfair to the homes you pass, that has never been heard in those homes, or even heard of: Berio, Gottschalk, Dohnányi, Adams.

You don’t dare check your cell-phone to see if you have coverage, because what would be the good in that? Knowing that you’re cut off from the outside world would only lead to feelings of uneasiness.

In fact, the only indication of any high tech in this particular corridor is a sign, hand-lettered, by a rundown shack in a nearly abandoned community. It says, “COMPUTER WORK.”

Right under that, it says, “BOILED PEANUTS.”

Where does one go from there?

The answer to life, the universe, and everything

Posted on by Dale

When I was a young person, I somehow became fascinated by symphonic music, “classical” music, if you will. Heaven knows how, because I don’t come from a family from whom I would have absorbed that kind of taste. But my father bought a stereo one year, one of those huge pieces of furniture of the early-1960s, all spiffy in its moderne design. (Looking back, I’m sure it was one of those things that he didn’t tell my mother about, sort of like most of my computers, and I’m sure it had the same chilling effect on their relationship.)

He also bought a couple of cheapo hi-fidelity LPs (if you don’t know what an LP is/was, click here), and it was from those that I began my musical journey. It was all what I would call “trash music,” the thrilling cheap stuff that we discount at our soul’s peril: von Suppé overtures, operatic marches, that kind of thing. But it was enough. I was hooked.

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