STARS and time

Posted on by Dale

Last night was the 50th State STAR Student Banquet. I had spent the day as chair of the committee interviewing the eighteen region STAR Students and then having to select the “top” student and the runner-up.

As you can imagine, this is not easy. Brilliant, accomplished, articulate, self-aware, self-confident, and funny, they were all just amazing kids. However, under a system I’ve perfected over the last 20 years of doing this, we reached consensus in not too long a time, and Allen Page of Brookstone is our 2008 State STAR Student; Maylene Xie of Parkview is our runner-up. Incredible kids.

Five or six of the candidates were GHP alums, and it’s always interesting to watch their reaction when they come into the room. They’re fairly sure they’ve seen me before, and they think it might have been at GHP. I was told that I was practically the whole topic of conversation at one lunch table, and indeed as we got up from lunch, I was positively identified as “the kilt guy” and/or “the English country dance guy.” Yes, I said, otherwise known as the assistant program director.

At my lunch table, topics were more varied. GHP came up, but only because none my companions had been participants and they all agreed how incredibly left out they felt when GHPers ran into each other. I noted that at least they, the non-GHPers, were in the vast majority.

I also asked them about their worst teacher, and was regaled with truly horrific stories: the AP teachers who would run errands into town during class; the football coaches who discussed world history not once; and my favorite, the teacher who, after placing Slovakia on the coast and Slovenia next to the Czech Republic (and being queried about that by the STAR at my table), explained petulantly that yes, Czechoslovakia had split up, but then Slovakia had moved. And then refused to be corrected further, even when faced with printed research into the matter.

So here we are at the 50th anniversary of the STAR program. Twenty-five years ago, Barbara Ellen Petzen was named State STAR Student, and as a consequence, I was State STAR Teacher. Today, after the committee made our pick, I went back up to my room in the downtown Hilton to chill until the reception and the banquet. I looked out my window on the 22nd floor and saw with a shock that one block away was the Sheraton, where the banquet had been held in 1983. I could not resist. I went downstairs and walked over to the Sheraton.

As I approached, I recognized the whole layout: the circular entrance drive, the lower entrance where we loaded up the STAR Tour bus for an eight-day tour of the state (which we no longer do because of the expense and time). However, when I entered the lobby, it was as I suspected: the whole place has been renovated beyond recognition. The little bar where Ginny and I and Bobby Petzen celebrated before going our separate ways was nowhere to be seen. I didn’t even try going up to find the ballroom where Barbara was announced the top student in the state; I just walked back to the Hilton.

Tempus fugit, and that’s no lie.

Why is this?

Posted on by Dale

In Indiana — stop me if you’ve heard this one — a congressional candidate recently attended a meeting of the American National Socialist Workers Party (ANSWP), where he made a speech. The occasion was the 119th birthday of Adolf Hitler. There was a large portrait of the man, a Nazi flag, and everyone in photos of the event was wearing a swastika armband.

The candidate later defended himself on his website by describing the speech as:

my attempt to raise awareness of how the great porn dragon inspires Jews into pornography and prostitution and then, like the snake he is, turns the public against the Jews.

Well.

I’ll link to the site where I read this in a moment, but first a thought experiment: with which of the two major political parties in this nation is Mr. Zirkle affiliated?

That didn’t take long, did it? My thesis today is: why the hell didn’t it take you long? Yes, there are loonies on both sides of the spectrum, we all know that, but why is it that this particularly nasty kind of loony gravitates to this one party?

To be fair, the state party is horrified and trying desperately to disconnect themselves from Mr. Zirkle, but I think the question still stands, and I think the party needs to do some soul searching: why is it that racist, anti-worker, anti-poor, anti-women, anti-gay candidates automatically affiliate themselves with this party, and not with their rivals?

Perhaps more germane to the party bigwigs is the question: why would most citizens assume that this is the case?

I think this question needs to be asked particularly by those whose first reaction would be, well, now, that’s not necessarily the case.

Go read about it here.

45 days

Posted on by Dale

I don’t even know how to begin this post. I thought about something like, “You know why George Lichtenberg gives up on his symphony?” or something about the number of days left in the countdown, but I’m not up to being clever.

Stephen Czarkowksi, GHP’s fabulous string teacher/orchestral conductor, who requested I write this piece, will not be returning this summer, having other opportunities he should not pass up. There is no reason for me to keep working on Symphony in G major.

I’ve just been kind of numb, kind of nauseated, since this afternoon when I got Stephen’s email. This is a huge disappointment for me, needless to say, and coming on the heels of the news about the theatre losing the building, I’ve been thrown for a loop.

Oh well, easy come, easy go. I can at least get back to work on A Day in the Moonlight, I guess.

46 days: III. Allegro gracioso

Posted on by Dale

As far as I can tell, it’s finished. I mean, it needs cymbals here and there and I wish Finale would simply crash a cymbal when I click a note into the score but it won’t so there you are. And it’s still not being at all subtle or even appropriate with the dynamics. But I think it’s done.

The last time you heard it was on 4/3/08.

Here’s III. Allegro gracioso, finished. I think you will be surprised. And hopefully pleased.

Next: IV. Lento. This time I mean business.

Day 47

Posted on by Dale

Happy Shakespeare’s birthday!

I directed the first Shakespeare in Newnan, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in 1978. I directed the last, The Taming of the Shrew, in 1999.

I say “last,” but that’s just a bitter, depressed guess: the Newnan Theatre Company has been served eviction papers from the building, they haven’t paid the rent in over a year, and the board has voted to vacate. My understanding is that they intend to go on, somehow, but I know no details.

This has disturbed me a lot more than I thought it would, and more than I think it should. I guess I have enough vanity to be disappointed that something I spent nearly 30 years of my life building should come unravelled within five years of my leaving it, and leaving it on sound footing, I might add.

We had money in the bank, full houses, and a growing subscribers list. We had a Main Stage season, the Second Season, and the children’s season, and a teen season. We performed more than 40 weekends out of the year. There simply were no more weekends in the year to squeeze in another show.

We did Shakespeare. We did musicals. We encouraged new works. We experimented with new forms and approaches. We built our costumes and sets. We designed our costumes and sets. We trained people in all the crafts of theatre. We did theatre, not put on plays.

Ah well, easy come, easy go. I may have more to say later, over at lichtenbergian.org.

A beautiful afternoon

Posted on by Dale

What a beautiful, beautiful afternoon! I hope you were able to sit in your green, cool, sun-drenched back yard as I was, and finish reading War & Peace, as I was.

What an odd, odd, enormous book. After the fall of Moscow, after (spoiler alert!) the death of Andrei and the capture of Pierre as a prisoner, the book just sort of dissolves into an essay on the necessity of historical events. Yes, we drag along with the French Armée as they try to flee Russia and are pursued by Russian partisans, and we do finally get back to Pierre and his rescue from the French, and he finally declares his love for the grieving Natasha and everyone’s going to be very happy.

But the book itself ends with Pierre leaving Natasha to go to Petersburg to settle his disgraced dead wife’s debts, and Natasha exclaiming:

“Only what’s he going to Petersburg for!” Natasha said suddenly, and hastily answered herself: “No, no it has to be so… Right, Marie? It has to be so…”

Boom. End of novel proper. There follows an 87-page epilogue, in which we catch up with Pierre/Natasha and Nicolai/Marya, but we just swoop in and out of their story while listening to Leo Tolstoy hold forth about historical imperatives. It doesn’t end so much as evaporate.

Which is probably why the thing was decried as “not a novel” when it was published. I have to agree with Count Lev that it is what it is, and more than anything what it is, is amazing. A huge undertaking (which still took him only five years of writing: did you get that, J.K. Rowling?), it sprawls on a vast canvas, and we are invited to inspect it minutely. It is cinematic in both scope and treatment. One moment we’re overlooking a battlefield and only seeing tiny wisps of smoke in the distance; the next, we’re examining the irrational thoughts of one of our characters who is caught up in the thick of the violence. He zooms, he pans, he cuts, he fades. It’s pretty astounding.

Highly highly recommended.

Question

Posted on by Dale

Here’s an I Ching kind of question:

If you get Chinese take-out, but leave the fortune cookie on your kitchen counter for a couple of weeks before eating it, does the fortune/advice apply to the day you ate Chinese or the day you ate the cookie?

50 days: Almost

Posted on by Dale

My goal this week is to finish III. Allegro gracioso, which means essentially getting it orchestrated.

This morning I got all of it done except for the last big bit, and I want to dig in and listen to what I’ve got so far before tackling it.

A week from today, the countdown will be 42 days, which is the number of days in GHP, so it’s kind of a temporal mirror thing I’ll have going on here. Now it gets scary, because the following week will be more or less lost to me: Tuesday and Wednesday nights, my regular composition nights, I’ll be in Atlanta with the STAR program, so I won’t get any work done at all on my nemesis, IV. Lento.

However, I have to say that in listening to what I’ve got (and it’s all in tatters now with all the crap I’ve inserted and left lying around), I’ve swung back into the mindset that it’s not so bad after all. May Apollo keep me in that mind.

Also, as long as we’re counting days, the last six or seven days will also be lost, because I will be in Valdosta setting up GHP. I will not be composing anything at that point. That leaves, what, about 35 actual days? Sheesh.

Am I disappointed that I won’t have a complete symphony by June 2, the day I leave for Valdosta? A bit. But I’ll be happy to have the final two movements done, and maybe I can get at least a sketch for the first done while I’m there.

The second? Slow movements have been my downfall forever. However, I did come across this sketch from previous thinking, and you know what? It’s not too bad a beginning, I think.