Category Archives: Arts & culture

Roremian snark, and an anecdote.

I’m reading Settling the Score: Essays on Music by Ned Rorem, the American composer. Rorem, who was brought up a Quaker, writes with equal parts snark and common sense. Amidst all the snark about musicians and composers, he comes up with some snark about religion:

Insofar as the church becomes action it dispenses with ritual. Catholics react, Quakers act. Quakers never use music and are the most social progressive of church groups. By underplaying the motionless symbol of the Trinity, Quakers emphasize the need for political movement. When they reinforce that need politically, they do so in silence.

Wow! Take that, Mother Teresa.

Then, a little later on in the same essay, Rorem offers this delightful anecdote from his childhood:

Although Quakers, our parents used to send Rosemary and me to other denominational Sunday schools from time to time. That was squelched when we came home and confectioned crucifixes. Nonetheless, on holidays our family attended Catholic or High Epsicopal services “for the pageantry.” One Christmas, arriving late at Church of the Redeemer at 56th and Blackstone, Father asked the usher: “What time did the show start?” “We don’t refer to it as a show,” was the chilly reply.

Ahh. I now have a vivid image of that usher in my imagination….

The mastiff and the curs

Guest blogger: Isaac Bickerstaff

According to family tradition, my great-great-grandfather told a story that went something like this:

A huge mastiff, a most magnificent dog, took one of his puppies with him one day on his daily walk. As they walked along Pennsylvania Avenue towards the Capitol building, smaller dogs, curs and mangy mutts, dashed towards the mastiff, baring their teeth and barking furiously. But the mastiff paid no attention to them, and just walked on.

At last the puppy couldn’t stand it any longer, and said, “Father, why do you tolerate the yapping and the impertinences of those curs? Why don’t you bark at them, and silence them?”

“Ignore them, my child,” said the great mastiff, “without the curs, there could be no mastiff.”

Now, in 2007, my correspondent in Washington informs me that there are no longer any mastiffs living openly within the District of Columbia. The last of the great mastiffs was pulled down by a pack of flea-bitten curs more than a quarter of a century ago, his throat bitten in two, and his large heart eaten by the curs.

“There are still a few lesser mastiffs left in the District,” writes my correspondent, “but they dare not walk about openly. They disguise themselves as curs, engaging in all the petty and low behavior that curs engage in — yapping at nothing, eating disgusting bits of unrecognizable food dropped on the sidewalk, mindlessly chasing squirrels, and sticking their noses in each other’s rear ends. Yet those who are in the know say they have a sure-fire way of determining which dog is truly a mastiff, and which is a cur disguised as a mastiff. The curs disguised as mastiffs loudly proclaim that they are misunderstood today, but that future historians will judge them to be mastiffs. The mastiffs disguised as curs snivel and deny that they have great hearts.”

Food fight (literally)

Wanna see a video of a chase scene, where a giant apple chases after a huge snack cake? C’mon, you know you do! OK, the video is pretty goofy, the chase climaxes in a fight scene with a few disgusting moments, and of course it’s for a good political cause. In spite of all that, it’s worth it just to see the apple roll over the hood of a car, and to see the snack cake blind the apple with a UPC scanner.

The “Farm Bill Food Battle” video.

Thanks to Carol.

Grace Paley

Mother’s Day sermons can get pretty saccharin, so this year when I was looking for readings for Mother’s Day, I turned to Grace Paley. No one could write about motherhood with less sentimentality, or with more humanity, than Grace Paley. Nobody could write about people with such a depth of humanity. I love her stories. Nothing happens in them, but they sound like real life to me. The characters are people I know, and they do things I can imagine doing myself. I can’t think of any other short story writer whom I like as much.

She died on Wednesday, at age 84. She called herself a “somewhat combative pacifist and cooperative anarchist.” If there were an afterlife (which she and I doubt very much), she would organize protests in the afterlife, just as her characters organize protests and political action in her stories….

A group of mothers from our neighborhood went downtown to the Board of Estimate Hearing and sang a song. They had contributed the facts and the tunes, but the idea for that kind of political action came from the clever head of a media man floating on the ebbtide of our lower west side culture because of the housing shortage. He was from the far middle plains and loved our well-known tribal organization. He said it was the coming thing. Oh, how he loved our old moldy pot New York.

…The first mother stood up… when the clerk called her name. She smiled, said excuse me, jammed past the knees of her neighbors and walked proudly down the aisle of the hearing room. Then she sang, according to some sad melody learned in her mother’s kitchen, the following lament requesting better playground facilities….

will someone please put a high fence up
around the children’s playground
they are playing a game and have only
one more year of childhood. won’t the city come…
to keep the bums and
the tramps out of the yard they are too
little now to have the old men … feeling their
knees … can’t the cardinal
keep all these creeps out

She bowed her head and stepped back modestly to allow the recitative for which all the women rose, wherever in the hearing room they happened to be. They said a lovely statement in chorus:

The junkies with smiles can be stopped by intelligent reorganization of government functions….

from Grace Paley’s story “Politics”

The best way to remember Grace Paley would be to engage in that kind of cooperative creative political action, of a combatively pacifist nature.

The Case of the Pointless Paperwork

This afternoon, I worked on organizing my office. I hate organizing my office. It’s boring. I want to be making something happen, not straightening up my desk and filing paperwork. Of course, sometimes you just have to grit your teeth and do those mundane office chores. Somewhere, the poet Gary Snyder talks about how important maintenance is — you can’t always be creating things, he says, you also have to maintain what you’ve got. So I tried to tell myself that I was doing Snyderian maintenance this afternoon, even though I think what Gary Snyder had in mind when he was talking about maintenance was more along the lines of sharpening his axe or cleaning out the barn, chores which would have been much more attractive than dealing with paperwork.

In my opinion, the greatest theorist on the subject of paperwork was the great philosopher, Perry Mason….

….Perry Mason regarded the pasteboard jacket, labeled “IMPORTANT UNANSWERED CORRESPONDENCE,” with uncordial eyes.

Della Street, his secretary, looking crisply efficient, said with her best Monday-morning air, “I’ve gone over it carefully, Chief. The letters on top are the ones you simply have to answer. I’ve cleaned out a whole bunch of the correspondence from the bottom.”

“From the bottom?” Mason asked. “How did you do that?”

“Well,” she confessed, “it’s stuff that’s been in there too long.”

Mason tilted back in his swivel chair, crossed his long legs, assumed his best lawyer manner and said, in mock cross-examination, “Now, let’s get this straight, Miss Street. Those were letters which had originally been put in the ‘IMPORTANT UNANSWERED’ file?”

“Yes.”

“And you’ve gone over that file from time to time, carefully?”

“Yes.”

“And eliminated everything which didn’t require my personal attention?”

“Yes.”

“And this Monday, September twelfth, you take out a large number of letters from the bottom of the file?”

“That’s right,” she admitted, her eyes twinkling.

“And did you answer those yourself?”

She shook her head, smiling.

“What did you do with them?” Mason asked.

“Transferred them to another file.”

“What file?”

“The ‘LAPSED’ file.”

Mason chuckled delightedly. “Now there’s an idea, Della. We simply hold things in the ‘IMPORTANT UNANSWERED’ file until a lapse of time robs them of their importance, and then we transfer them to the ‘LAPSED’ file. It eliminates correspondence, saves worry, and gets me away from office routine, which I detest….

[from The Case of the Perjured Parrot by Erle Stanley Gardner, 1939.]

In the book, Mason works on paperwork for about ten minutes before a new client walks into the office with another high-speed murder case. I should be so lucky. In my office, I plugged away all afternoon. I kept hoping that a client would walk in the door and want me to investigate a murder case. That didn’t happen, although the chair of the House and Grounds Committee did stop in for ten minutes to let me know how the various building maintenance projects were coming along.

By the end of the day, I had found lots of paperwork that had once been relevant, but was now so irrelevant that I skipped the “LAPSED” file and threw it right into the recycling bin. Such was the sad end of the case of the pointless paperwork.

Sweatshop-free dress shirts

All of a sudden, my dress shirts are wearing out. I bought these shirts six or seven years ago from Land’s End, so I automatically went back to Land’s End and looked at their Web site. The same shirt costs the same as it did six or seven eyars ago, about US$25. In fact, I remember that same shirt costing about $25 twenty years ago. According to The Inflation Calculator, “What cost $25 in 1987 would cost $44.31 in 2006.” That suggests to me that these days, these shirts are now made overseas by workers who earn just a pittance for their work.

My conscience held me back from ordering shirts from Land’s End. I did a Web search for “union made shirts.”

And I happened to find Justice Clothing, which supplies union-made clothing as “the sweatshop-free alternative.” They carry two lines of dress shirts. They carry Kenneth Gordon shirts, based in New Orleans, with a nice button-down shirt selling for US$56.25 each if you buy two or more — unfortunately there was nothing in my sleeve length. Fortunately, Justice Clothing also carry shirts by Forsyth of Canada, who make a line of tall sizes — blended fabric button-down shirts for US$40 each, and 100% cotton straight collar shirts for US$53 each (for two or more).

Just thought someone else out there might like to know.

Max Roach

By now, you’ve probably heard that Max Roach, the great jazz drummer, died on August 16. The thing that stands out for me about Roach is that he, along with drummer Kenny Clarke, moved the beat up to the cymbals. As the BBC puts it in their obituary of Roach:

Before bebop, jazz was primarily swing music played in dance halls, and drummers served to keep time for the band, Blue Note spokesman Cem Kurosman said.

Roach, along with fellow-drummer Kenny Clarke, changed that by shifting the time-keeping function to the cymbal, allowing the drums to play a more expressive and melodic role. [Link]

All of which opened up all kinds of rhythmic possibilities, moving jazz away from the strict 4/4 beat of the popular dances. Many people accused Roach and the other originators of bebop of making jazz undanceable — as if you can’t dance to 3/4 and 5/4 and polyrhythmic beats — as if moving jazz from the dance hall to the concert hall made it somehow less worthy. I like to think that Roach saw larger possibilities for jazz, just as Mozart saw there was more to a minuet than music for one kind of dancing.

What I didn’t know about Roach was how active he was in fighting for the rights of African Americans. Trymaine Lee, in a appreciation printed today in the New York Times, reports:

“It was his technique,” said Jimmy Heath, 81, a saxophonist. “And his concepts were so innovative. But he wasn’t only a drummer. The thing about Max was he was always fighting for the rights of African-American people, that we were creative, worthy people.”…

The group [jazz musicians Heath, James Moody, Jon Faddis, and Phoebe Jacobs] remembered an incident at a Miles Davis show, when Mr. Roach took to the stage with a protest sign — “something to do with Africa or black people,” Mr. Heath recalled — and sat there with the sign held high above his head. “Miles was like, ‘Man, why did you have to do that during my set?’ ” Mr. Heath recalled, laughing with Ms. Jacobs and Mr. Moody. [Link to NY Times article]

I’m also amazed at the range of musicians with whom Roach played or made recordings. Of course I knew he had played with Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, and Dizzy Gillespie. I did not know that he had played with Duke Ellington, nor did I know that he played with avant-garde composer and saxophonist Anthony Braxton, nor did I know that he had played rap music with a hip-hop group called Fab Five Freddy, nor did I know that he had performed with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Roach could play the full range of African American music — indeed, he played the full range of human music.

Selected videos of Max Roach:

Roach with Dinah Washington in “All of Me”
Roach playing Ellington’s “What Am I Here For”, with Billy Taylor and big band
Roach with Fab Five Freddy and break dancers
Roach soloing on just hi-hat

New music resource

If you’re interested in new American music (mostly contemporary classical music but some other musics as well), there’s a great online resource called “Art of the States.” The Web site, produced in collaboration with WGBH radio, has a large collection of recordings of new music available online, with composers ranging from John Adams to Evan Ziporyn. You won’t hear most of this new music on the radio, nor will you find recordings of it in your local library, so I’m finding this Web site to be a great way to explore the music without having to spend tons of money (which I don’t have) to buy CDs. (Requires RealPlayer and broadband access.)

Link to Art of the States

Me and the Dalai Lama

I usually don’t touch politics on this blog, but I do touch on questions about the nature of reality. I note with interest that in the looking-glass world of United States politics, nearly all politicians lean towards authoritarianism, conservatives seem like liberals, and the few anti-authoritarian liberals run marginalized campaigns with no hope of success. According to the Political Compass Web site, all but two of the current U.S. presidential candidates are conservatives, and even Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel are not particularly liberal or anti-authoritarian. Unreal. Link.

For the record, my political compass scores are as follows: Economic Left/Right: -9.62 (on a scale of -10/Left to 10/Right); and Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -8.31 (on a scale of -10/Libertarian to 10/Authoritarian). In other words, according to the Political Compass people, my political position is far closer to the Dalai Lama than to any of the current U.S. presidential candidates. This helps to explain why U.S. politics makes me feel as if I’ve gone through the looking glass — and no wonder I so rarely preach political sermons. On the other hand, if the Dalai Lama ever needs a running mate, I’d be up for it.