Category Archives: Arts & culture

I C E

My partner, Carol, sent me an email message that’s making the rounds, which reads something as follows:

East Anglian Ambulance Service have launched a national “In case of Emergency (ICE)” campaign with the support of Falklands war hero Simon Weston and in association with Vodafone’s annual life savers award. The idea is that you store the word ” I C E ” in your mobile phone address book, and against it enter the number of the person you would want to be contacted “In Case of Emergency”. In an emergency situation ambulance and hospital staff will then be able to quickly find out who your next of kin are and be able to contact them. It’s so simple that everyone can do it. Please do. Please will you also forward this to everybody in your address book, it won’t take too many ‘forwards’ before everybody will know about this. It really could save your life. For more than one contact name ICE1, ICE2, ICE3 etc.

I did a little checking on this — is it just another urban legend? Apparently it’s for real, according to the Washington Post, as well as various urban legend Web sites.

Of course, it’s by no means foolproof. In an accident, your cell phone could be damaged, or the paramedics might not know how to operate your particular model of cell phone, and so on. (What is not true is that entering such information in your cell phone leaves you open to phone-based viruses.)

Yet it makes perfect sense to carry some sort of emergency contact information. Do I? No, I never thought of it before. But now that Carol sent me that email message, guess I’ll put that contact info in my cell phone, and maybe carry a card in my wallet, too. Hope you do the same (and get your kids to do it, too).

Finished

Andy Skurka hiked 7,700 miles across the country, finishing last Sunday.

I’ve been following his trip logs since February, when he was at the halfway point of his trip. I find it a tremendously exciting story — that someone could hike close to eight thousand miles across North America in just under a year, crossing the midwest in the middle of winter. It’s just an amazing thing to do — reads like a real pilgrimage — somehow very life-affirming.

Is that why…

Went off to Whole Foods in Wheaton tonight to do a little shopping. We got in the habit of going late in the day, because traffic is light and there aren’t any lines in the store.

Next door to Whole Foods is Borders, and needless to say it has become a ritual to go to Borders for a few minutes. It was nine o’clock, and Borders was packed. And wait-a-minute, there’s all these kids…. Then I finally notice the signs: Harry Potter book release party. Of course! –today’s the day.

It was a pretty cool scene. Lots of people in costume. Kids standing around talking about the books. Palpable excitement. What I liked best was all the high-school-aged kids who were there. They have grown up on Harry Potter, and I guess he’s still cool enough, even into high school, to wait in line for the sixth book. And yeah, there were quite a few adults there, too. Too many to be all parents, or people who just happened into the store. It was the adults who looked a little embarrassed about being there.

Why be embarrassed? The Harry Potter books are pretty good. What other book commands enough attention that people will stay up until midnight, book after book, to buy it the day it is released? Maybe I’d be waiting in line right now, except I still haven’t finished the fifth book (I’m a cheapskate, I wait for the paperback editions.)

Here’s to Harry Potter.

12 days of magic…

Though I don’t have time to experiment with online audio for the foreseeable future, while I was packing up some things for our move to Massachusetts I ran across the project that initially made me aware of what you could do with religion and audio.

A year ago, I was serving temporarily as minister of religious education at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley, California. The facilites supervisor there was a fellow named Mark Johnson, a talented musician and visual artist, who had a degree in film studies (now you know why he was working as a faciltities supervisor — no money in the arts).

Mark was a Pentecostal, I a Unitarian Universalist, and our religions overlapped in three crucial areas — the importance of Spirit, integrating religion and the arts, and trying to get kids interested in our religious heritage. So one Sunday he recorded a chidlren’s story I did in the worship service, cleaned up the sound, and added a beat and sound effects to it. We put in a minimal amount of time — it took me a few hours to prepare the story but I would have had to do that anyway, and it took Mark about an hour and a half to produce the recording — but in spite of that the results were pretty good. Check out a compressed mp3 version of “12 days of magic” here. It’s the wrong season, but hey….

We talked idly about producing other stories from the Christian tradition, trying to produce something children and youth might actually listen to. But Mark had a new baby in his life, and I moved here to Geneva, Illinois, so we never got around to it.

But wouldn’t that be cool? I mean, podcasts of sermons are fine and good, but they’re kinda boring. The UUA’s “Drive Time” recordings are well-produced and fine for church geeks like me and boring for most people. But wouldn’t it be fun to do something with a little more… pizzazz?

Just throwing the idea out there, hoping someone picks up on it.

150 years of ecstatic witness

One hundred and fifty years ago today, on July 4, 1855, Walt Whitman published his first book of poetry with just twelve poems. According to Malcolm Crowley, in his introduction to a 1959 Viking Press reprinting of the first edition, central to the book is a mystical experience Whitman had in June of 1852 or 1853, which is perhaps best summarized in this passage from the first poem (which was later revised and titled “Song of Myself”):

I believe in you my soul….the other I am must not abase itself to you,
And you must not be abased to the other.

Loafe with me on the grass….loose the stop from your throat,
Not words, not music or rhyme I want….not custom or lecture, not even the best,
Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice.

I mind how we lay in June, such a transparent summer morning;
You settled your head athwart my hips and gently turned over upon me,
And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to my barestript heart,
And reached till you felt my beard, and reached till you held my feet.

Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and joy and knowledge that pass all the art and argument of the earth;
And I know that the hand of God is the elderhand of my own;
And I know that the spirit of God is the eldest brother of my own,
And that all the men ever born are also my borthers….and the women my sisters and lovers,
And that a kelson of the creation is love;
And limitless are leaves stiff or dropping in the fields,
And brown ants in the little wells beneath them
And mossy scabs of the wormfence, and heaped stones, and elder and mullen and pokeweed.

A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child?….I do not know what it is any more than he.

No wonder Emerson felt a shock of recognition when he read Whitman’s first book. Emerson was more rticent about his private experiences, and more widely read in Eastern philosophy, but his poem “Brahma” says pretty much the same thing as Whitman: an ecstatic “all is one.”

What music do you like?

The book I’m in the middle of right now is called 20/20: 20 New Sounds of the 20th Century, by William Duckworth. It’s a book about classical music of the 20th C., including composers like Aaron Copland, John Cage, Arnold Schoenberg, Laurie Anderson, and Philip Glass. Very readable book, by the way, and it comes with a CD.

It has a great quote by Meredith Monk:

I’ve always loved medieval music. I love music through Bach and then [I] go to the twentieth century.

Me, too. I know it’s heresy, but I could easily live without Beethoven or Mozart. At one church I served, I worked with a music director who felt the same way. Sure, he played the usual Mozart-Beethoven-Brahms stuff, but he’s slip in some Gershwin, some jazz, Erik Satie, John Cage — once he played Cage’s “4′ 33”” as the prelude to a worship service. It was one of the most memorable performances of music at any church service I’ve ever been to. (If you don’t know the piece, look it up on the Web…if you know where to look, you can find the complete score and good critical commentary and in addition recordings in a variety of formats with bad commentary.)

At the other end of Meredith Monk’s timeline, Lynne McCanne played Variation 22 from Bach’s “Goldberg Variations” a couple of weeks ago here in Geneva. I was in heaven. Wouldn’t it be cool to do a series of each of the variations from the “Goldberg Variations” over the course of a church year? You could run it in parallel with a series of improvisations based on songs by the Ramones.

What kind of music would you like to hear in worship services?

A propos of nothing…

Have you ever noticed how many names of philosophers and theologians sound like someone choking or coughing?

  • Kierkegaard (someone choking on a fish bone)
  • Schleiermacher (someone coughing to clear their throat prior to speaking)
  • Hegel (one of those deep, wheezing coughs you get with bronchitis)
  • Kant (repeated, someone choking on crackers: “Kant… Kant… Kant!…”)
  • Nietzsche (sounds like a baby choking on baby food; so does “Niebuhr”)
  • Tillich (a sip of water going down the wrong way)
  • Cox (kind of like a death rattle)
  • Hartshorne (what the Robitussin people call “an unproductive cough”)

    • I could go on. But I will spare you.

Who reads the Slime, anyway?

Mr. Crankypants here, sneaking onto the blog while my stupid alter ego, Dan, is away at some inane church event.

Mr. Crankypants would like to know what’s up with the New York Times? While the Chicago Tribune gave front page coverage to the exhumation of Emmet Till on Wednesday, the New York Times (or the New York Slime as Mr. Crankypants likes to call it) buried the story deep in the first section of the paper — and put it below the fold, no less. And their coverage continues to be less than satisfactory.

What — the editors at the New York Slime think only white people read their paper? — and do the editors really think only black people care about the Emmet Till story? Don’t they realize that the Emmet Till case is one of the biggest unresolved moral narratives of our times, impacting all our lives?

Silly Mr. Crankypants. Of course they realize all that. Of course they’re not aiming their newspaper at upper middle class white people! No, no, no. It’s just that the Emmet Till story is taking place in the Midwest, near Chicago, of all godforsaken places — which means it doesn’t matter on the East Coast. Moral, schmoral — it’s the Midw–

— oops, the alter ego must be back, his key is turning in the lock — don’t want to get into an argument at the moment — gotta run —

Robert Creeley

I was saddened to learn that poet Robert Creeley died on March 30. Guardian Unlimited carried a nice online appreciation of Creeley’s life and work. Link

How often it seems that we learn more about people after they die than we knew when they were alive. I had read and admired Creeley’s poetry for years, but until I read the obituaries, I didn’t know that he grew up not far from where I grew up — he was born in Arlington, Massachusetts, and spent much of his childhood in West Acton, quite close to Concord where I grew up. And two of his influences were Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams — I spent a lot of time reading Pound in my late teens, and I still love Williams. So I suppose it’s no wonder I have enjoyed Creeley.

Maybe more than enjoyed Creeley. I’m convinced that poetry grows out of the place the poet is from. Creeley was a New Englander from his birth in 1926 until 1951 — New England was bred in his bones. His poetry flowered elsewhere: Black Mountain, New Mexico, Bolinas, New York state. Like so many other New Englanders, he had to get out of New England, travel widely, in order to write. Maybe it was the Pacific ocean, and the Mediterranean, that really allowed him to write what he wrote.

Creeley wrote in his poem Here:

What
has happened
makes
the world.

That’s what Creeley says. I’d say that you don’t have a place until you have a poet writing poems about it.

You can find some of Creeley’s poems online at the Robert Creeley home page. Link