A complaint

Posted on by Dale

So I’m surfing through Huffington Post this morning, I have the morning off because of jury duty this afternoon, and come across this article on “releasing energy” in your life that’s tied up in incompleted tasks. Blah, blah, blah blah. Sure, fine.

It links to this handy-dandy “incompletion trigger list,” so that you don’t miss any of those pesky tasks and thus remain mired in your own sloth and slovenliness. Go look at it.

Heavens to Morgoth, people, I think I’ll just roll over into a fetal position now.

Or is it just me? Are the rest of you delighted to find such a tool to organize that vague cloud of lowering, unfulfilled duties?

Labyrinth, 2/8/09

Posted on by Dale

I got to work all day in the yard today, beautiful weather, lots to accomplish.

My major project, and there are no pictures because I didn’t take any when it was daylight and now I’m out by the fire, was to level out the ground in the northeastern quadrant. The ground just sort of sloped away in front of the glider/swing area down to the fence on the north edge of the property. I thought it would look better if it were level at least in the glider area, so I built a little “dam” at the 1:00 position and filled it in with dirt. It will be very lovely once the grass has grown.

Moving the dirt down from the carport area means that that area is now smooth and ready to be seeded. It also means the huge blue tarp I bought when the dirt was delivered could be moved to the back yard to be dried and folded. So that was major.

This was minor, but it was important. As I laid out the labyrinth last September, I took four clay pots and set them into the ground to hold citronella candles. Now that everything is finalized, I was able to move those pots into the actual positions of the four cardinal points of the compass.

It was actually a bit odd, I found myself resisting making the change, because, after all, isn’t this a semi-sacred space? How can you change what you’ve already put down? But I slapped myself, figuratively, to remind myself that where the pots had been placed were not the actual points of the compass. Now they are.

I also did a fair amount of cleaning up: tools put away, re-routed the extension cord to the porch by cable-tying it to the tree and up to the deck, tables rearranged, many leaves raked and put on the street, and the brick edging for the glider area reset.

Finally, I took the large terracotta pipe that I uncovered when I tilled the entire area and set it in the ground at the entrance to the bamboo area. Lichtenbergians will know the area I’m talking about and will also understand the term lingam.

Now it’s 8:30 and I’m sitting by the fire after a generous supper of hamburgers and fried accoutrements. Also several life-giving beverages. It’s just about time for dessert.

Listening

Posted on by Dale

In the Ongoing Listening Project, I am done listening to the Gesualdo Tenebrae. As promised, the harmonies are twisted and startling. The texts are unfamiliar, however, so they don’t jump out at me or stick in my head.

The other problem is that half of each piece is extended recitative/chanting. Very nicely done, but not memorable, and the motets themselves get lost. I tuned out the chant and wouldn’t even be listening by the time the motet started.

So this will go into the collection, but I don’t think I’ll be downloading it to the iTunes collection.

I moved on to a CD called Pacifica, by one Fred Frith, if that is his real name. This is a CD that Marc discovered online, decided it sounded interesting, and in what I’m sure was an act of kindness sent it to me as a gift back during one of my “Oh woe why can’t I compose” periods. Marc has always encouraged me to break free of the tyrannies of Western formal music, forgetting that I don’t play any instrument well enough to improvise. (I downloaded the iPhone app Ocarina last night, so maybe I can learn that.)

So I popped it into the CD player in the van, and I toughed it out for several days. It has not grown on me. I understand the process, but I am not engaged by the product. It’s mostly ugly. This one goes into the Lacuna Fun Tub so I can share it with Marc.

Now I’m listening to another Mercury Living Presence re-release, entitled Music for Quiet Listening. This is the one filled with mellow pieces from the middle of last century, all winners of a competition funded by a music-loving businessman who hated the serialism that was so fashionable in our schools and conservatories at the time. He put his money where his mouth was and commissioned pretty music.

I’ll report back in a few days.

I do not understand

Posted on by Dale

So today’s Composer’s Datebook talks about Ellen Zwilich’s “The Gardens” Symphony, and it sounded interesting enough for me to buy it, if I were allowing myself to by anything before June.

What I do instead these days is go to Amazon and put it on my wishlist. That way, when I finally run out of things to listen to and read and am honest about being able to buy stuff again, I haven’t lost any of my momentary interests to the flood of time.

However.

On Amazon, there is “one new or used” CD of this piece, for $68.88. It was released in 2000 and is clearly out of print. It is nowhere on the iTunes Store.

Why is this? In this day and age, there is no reason, none, not one, why a complete back catalog cannot be available on demand. It’s on CD, for heaven’s sake, it’s already digital. Just plop it on a server and serve it up!

Someone is missing the point out there.

Tango lessons

Posted on by Dale

Last night Ginny and I went up to the Take Hold dance studio/ballroom on Miami Circle (off Piedmont Avenue), where a concern called Tango Bohemia offers Argentine tango lessons. It’s a series of eight lessons for beginners.

Despite our past with dance, despite the fact that our ability to partner each other was a major attraction in those first hormonal months together, we were a bit at a loss as how to do this. Since we haven’t had an opportunity to dance with each other, I mean actually dance, in so long, we’re going to have to relearn that touch. Still, we had a great time and look forward to the next seven weeks.

I don’t know what we think we’re going to do with this skill once we’ve learned it. I mean, does Alamo Jack’s have tango nights? I’ll put in a dance patio on the upper part of the back yard where the Mercedes used to sit, overlooking the labyrinth. We can string paper lanterns for illumination, and dance with the glitter of fireflies and our love.

Labyrinth, 2/1/09

Posted on by Dale

Beautiful day outside, and actual free time. So I worked in the back yard all day, finally getting the labyrinth seeded with grass seed.

Since it’s been over a month since I finished getting all the topsoil in, I had to go back and till the entire thing with my handy little garden weasel style tiller. Sounds hard, but it wasn’t, since the dirt was two inches of loose dirt to begin with. It only took about an hour to churn up the whole thing.

Here it is partly finished. I thought this was a pretty shot:

Here’s a close-up. In the afternoon light, the chunks of dirt formed lovely patterns:

Then I had to go back and break up all the chunks with a garden rake. That also took about an hour:

Finally, I mixed my two bags of deep shade grass seed with the bag of winter rye, and proceeded to sow my seed. Finally I covered it all with straw. You will notice that although my supplier sold me too much dirt (I’m still figuring out what to do with about three wheelbarrows full), they didn’t sell me enough straw. Or maybe I don’t know how to distribute it. No matter, I will buy more tomorrow.

I also did a general cleanup of the back yard, cutting up limbs and stacking wood; moving patio furniture around; and cleaning up where the old Mercedes -Benz used to sit. (We sold it last week.) The dirt there smells awfully of gasoline.

Quick rant

Posted on by Dale

All right, people, screw bipartisanship. Working with your ideological opposites is not a Good. It’s just a nice idea. And since I cannot say it better than Jamison Foser over at Media Matters, I will simply quote him:

Sure, people want the politicians to stop bickering and get things done. But, more specifically, most people want the politicians to stop bickering and do things they want done. A single mother working two minimum-wage jobs to feed her kids might want politicians to come together in a spirit of bipartisanship — but she doesn’t want them to pass bipartisan legislation lowering the minimum wage; she wants a bipartisan bill raising the minimum wage. If she can’t have that, I suspect she’d take a party-line minimum-wage increase, even if it means a decrease in the bonhomie at Washington cocktail parties she’ll never attend.

That is all.

Doodling, 1/29/09

Posted on by Dale

Many things to do tonight, starting with this post.

In support of our explorations over at Lacuna Group, Wednesday nights if you’d like to join us, and you really really should, I dragged out the 341 poem, which, if you recall, was the first thing that emerged during the 365 project.

It’s actually not bad stuff, and so I made a decision last night to work seriously on it for a while. I may not keep everyone updated as I did back in the day, but if something good happens you’ll be the first to know. You can read all the posts about the poem as it stands now here.

The first thing I have to do, of course, because I want this to be a thing I can work on diligently, is to give it its own Moleskine notebook. I’ve pulled out a small one from my music drawers and am in the process, as I work on other things during the evening, of painting a cover on it.

This is not exactly the waste book approach, but this is not exactly a waste book process. I can focus my “poem energies” in this one place. Or so goes my theory.

In other news, I have listened to John Adams’ Gnarly Buttons and John’s Book of Alleged Dances in the van for a couple of days now and can report on its status. (This is from the stack of CDs on my desk that I’m trying to whittle down.)

Gnarly Buttons is a little mini-concerto for clarinet and is very appealing in many ways. It has some back story to it, but I didn’t read that until I had already made my decision about the piece.

It’s rhythmically complex, almost excessively so, and scored for an extremely oddball assortment: English horn, bassoon, 2 violins, viola, cello, double bass, banjo/mandolin/guitar, and two sampler/pianos who play all kinds of weird sounds, including at one point a moo. (That’s right, a moo.) However, the orchestration is deft and never uninteresting.

There is even actual emotion in several places. On the whole, I think Gnarly Buttons is a keeper.

I’m still unsure of John’s Book of Alleged Dances, a set of 11 short bits for string quartet and prepared tape. It’s not uninteresting, but after I’ve listened to it I’ve already forgotten it. I’m thinking I will not be adding it to iTunes like Gnarly Buttons.

Next up: Tenebrae, by Don Carlo Gesualdo, actual Renaissance prince of Venosa. Gesualdo felt no compunction to follow anyone’s rules, societal or compositional, and his music is usually described as “lurid.” It is good to be the king.

Teaching and testing

Posted on by Dale

I’ve spent the past few days working with 1st graders, trying to show them atlases and dictionaries, and then at the very end of the session, sneak the internet in.

Why? Because on one standardized test or another, there is a question which asks them which would be the best place to find a picture of some animal. Would you look in an atlas, in a dictionary, or on the internet?

Whoever wrote the test item knows that dictionaries don’t have pictures. Except, of course, when you’re six years old, and the whole frickin’ dictionary is pictures.

Up and down the grade levels, our standardized tests ask similarly narrow-minded questions about reference sources that indicate that the people who wrote the test items do not know how the information society works, at least since 2000.

This has been a message for those who think that they’re getting reliable data from those standardized tests.

More good times in teaching

Posted on by Dale

Last fall I applied for and got a National Endowment for the Humanities package called Picturing America: twenty or so gorgeous prints of notable American works of art that illustrate one or more American characteristics. These are double-sided, heavily laminated, and are accompanied by a really good teacher’s guide.

I’ve been posting them on my bulletin board, with the heading I Have a Question… I post a question, and the first student who researches the correct answer gets a free book.

This week, it’s been Norman Rockwell’s “The Freedom of Speech”:

The first question is “What’s going on in this photo?” And a kid we’ll call Jimmy figured out that it was a debate. (Technically, it’s a town hall meeting, but let’s give the little Southern kid a break here.)

Then I asked, “Where does the freedom of speech come from?” And Bobby quickly found the 1st Amendment.

Finally, this afternoon I posted, “What exactly does freedom of speech mean?”

Jimmy was back in the media center, this time with his friend Huck. Huck and Jim had a pretty good idea what it meant, but they weren’t putting their finger on the crux of the issue. They found a Constitutional dictionary. They found a book called Constitution translated for kids. They even found the vertical file folder on the Constitution.

Every time, they reported what they found, but it was never the exact answer I was hoping they’d find. Finally, I asked if they had read the actual Amendment itself. They quickly pounced on a copy, and within 60 seconds Jimmy was at my desk, announcing that the freedom of speech meant that the government could not control what was acceptable speech and what was not.

Bingo.

And to make it even more wonderful, he selected as his book a Star Wars novel that Huck had been shooting for and gave it to Huck. I love my job.