Forget those hippie drum circles…

…I wanna hang out with Bombshell Boom Boom, which is an “anti-venue marching sound collective, stemming out of the little known grassroots marching band movement happening world wide.” I met Sean, the director of Bombshell Boom Boom, while singing in San Diego this past Sunday. Sean explained that first the participants make their own instruments, and then they go play at the San Diego Museum of Art, or, as in the video below, at Mardi Gras (sadly the Mardi Gras video is no longer online, but below is a still from the SDMA instrument-making workshop):

Can you imagine doing this in your Unitarian Universalist congregation? No? I guess you’re right. Our congregations are not exactly open to sound art, even when it’s fun and light-hearted like this. Yet sound art could fit in very nicely with an alt.worship service, or in emergent-type services that deliberately incorporate everything from spoken word performances, to installation art, to conceptual art.

You’d think that Unitarian Universalists, with their leftward-leaning theology, would embrace leftward-leaning art forms like jazz, new music, or sound art. Instead, the highest ambition of many Unitarian Universalist congregations seems to be to get a praise band, which to my mind is pretty far on the conservative side of the liturgical spectrum. The difference, I guess, is whether you want liturgical music that transcends your day-to-day world, or whether you want liturgical music that sounds just like what you hear when you shop at Trader Joe’s.

P.S. Did you notice that in the video the average age of the people in Bombshell Boom Boom is maybe a third of the average age of your typical Unitarian Universalist congregation?

More from sound artist Sean.

A slight theological difference this week

The Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Phoenix has some photos up of a civil disobedience action in Phoenix to protest Arizona SB 1070. Here’s to the brave Unitarian Universalists who are taking on the evil of Arizona SB 1070 — many of us are thinking of you, and sending you moral support from afar.

And at the same time, I have to admit that all the energy that Unitarian Universalists are pouring into the protest of Arizona SB 1070 makes me feel a little lonely. As a religious pacifist, I view the war in Afghanistan (and Iraq and Pakistan) as being of far greater moral importance than immigration reform. Yet I’m afraid my view is not shared by the majority of Unitarian Universalists; our denomination has made it clear that immigration reform is of far greater importance to us than antiwar efforts. I think maybe I need to hang out with some Quakers in the near future, and get a big dose of religious pacifism to tide me over for a while.

Summer-dry season

This afternoon, I took a break from not writing the things I’m supposed to be writing, and went out to the Baylands nature preserve for a walk.

We’re now fully into the summer-dry season. The plants all look drab: The grasses are crispy and dry; they have faded beyond golden-brown to pale golden-brown. The leaves of the trees have become dull green. Even the cattails, with their feet sunk into damp soil in the marshes, are not as green as they are in the spring.

Away from the bay, I didn’t see many animals: I saw one gopher, heard and insect or two, saw one small brown bird flitting from one bit of cover to another bit of cover. But there was plenty of activity out on the waters and mudflats of the bay. Forster’s Terns were everywhere, diving into the water and sometimes coming up with fish in their bills. Barn Swallows swooped along the edges of the salt marshes, while egrets hunted in the shallow waters near by. Hundreds of shore birds plunged their bills into the mud left behind by low tide.

No progress

This is my study leave, and I’m supposed to be working on two writing projects. But I made no progress today.

The big project I’m supposed to be working on is a series of stories for children about religion. I know the approach I want to use — an approach where I don’t try to reduce the other traditions to platitudes that fit into our own religious schema, but instead retain something of the strangeness and unfamiliarity of other religious traditions. I have primary and secondary source materials lined up. I even have something of a general outline. But I just didn’t get started today.

I’m also supposed to be revising a collection of children’s stories that I put together last year for the religious education program here at the Palo Alto church. I’m supposed to be correcting typographical errors, fixing a few factual errors, and adding a couple of stories that got left out by mistake. But I just didn’t get started today.

What I did do is this: I finished reading a book. I responded to an editor who had some questions about a short essay I wrote. I read a science fiction magazine. I worried about another article that seems to have been swallowed by another editor’s desk. I read the newspaper. I made extensive notes on proposed writing project that, although it is on the topic of a religious or spiritual practice, has only a tangential connection to my church job. I read a professional journal. I did laundry. I sat and thought. I sat and didn’t think.

A month ago, I made a beautiful schedule of how I was going to organize my study leave so I could finish both writing projects in two short weeks. I’m usually pretty good at sticking to writing schedules. When I’m not good at sticking to a schedule, it usually means there’s something missing in the overall plan for the project, and I’m pretty sure that’s what’s going on right now. I even think I now know what the problem is. But in the mean time, I have made no progress, and I’ve already lost two days of work.

Church choir jokes

I was at a singing event yesterday and today, and one of the other singers told me a church choir joke:

Q: How many church choir directors does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: No one knows, because no one was paying attention.

In response, I inflicted this stupid choir joke on the other fellow:

Q: If you throw the accompanist and a church choir member off the top of a tall building at the same time, which one hits the ground first?
A: The accompanist, of course. The choir member has to stop on the way down and ask the choir director which way to go.

Please accept my apologies for repeating these jokes here.

And here’s a joke about bass guitarists I heard today, included here for the benefit of Jim-the-bassist:

Q: Why did the bass guitarist’s kindergarten child flunk math at school?
A: When asked to count to ten, the child replied, “One, five, one, five, one, five, one, five, one, five!”

Roadtrip: Needles to El Cajon, California

I left Needles, that “miserable place,” early in the morning. It was hot already. I drove south on U.S. 95, through the hot, dry, bleak Colorado desert. This is a two-lane paved road that I would not want to drive during a rain storm; there are no culverts (not that I saw, anyway) and the road dips down to meet every dry wash.

Bleak as it was, the desert scenery was spectacular: stark, forbidding mountains rising up out of the sand plains studded with creosote bushes. After more than an hour of driving, I began to pass side streets, and I began to see small houses here and there in the desert. A sign told me when I reached the city limits of Twentynine Palms, population nearly thirty thousand.

I stopped at the visitor’s center for Joshua Tree National Park, and walked around the Oasis of Mara. It was disappointing: no open water (the water table subsided some years ago after seismic action in the nearby Pinto Mountains), and fewer than twenty nine palm trees. But there were Gambrel’s Quail hiding under the low mesquites, and a pair of Prairie Falcons perched in one of the palms.

From Twentynine Palms, I headed south through the park. The Joshua Trees that give the park its name made me smile. They almost look as if they might start talking to you.

The cholla cactus seem to have personalities, too. Even though you know the lightest touch would be enormously painful, they look almost as if they wanted you to cuddle them.

The tall, twisted octillo with its tiny leaves, the mesquite trees, the fan palms: all these amazing plants growing in a very unpromising environment. The birds are amazing too. I stopped at Cottonwood Springs, and even though it was the hottest part of the day, the birds were cheerful because of the seeping water. But the sun was too hot for me; I wanted to stay longer, but I was getting a heat headache, and drove on.

The rest of the drive merely took me deeper and deeper in the urban and suburban sprawl that stretches along the Pacific rim of California. I’m not really ready to stop, but here I am in El Cajon, just outside of San Diego, at the end of my 3,200 mile journey.

Roadtrip: New Mexico, Arizona, and California

This morning I took a side trip to El Malpais National Monument, which lies just to the south of Grants, New Mexico. I didn’t really go to see the lava flows which give El Malpais (“the badlands”) its name; I went to walk in the high desert, take some photographs, and maybe see some birds. I managed to do all three. You’ll have to take my word for the walking, but here’s a photograph of the lava flows (they’re the dark areas down in the valley), as seen from the top of Sandstone Bluffs:

And I saw some birds, too: Black-Chinned Hummingbirds, Scott’s Orioles, Pinyon Jays, Cassin’s Kingbirds, and several other desert-dwelling birds that I had never seen before.

While I sat at the ranger station admiring the hummingbirds and orioles coming to the hummingbird feeder, I heard thunder in the distance. Not long after I started driving, it started raining. I drove through rain from Grants to Gallup. I stopped in Gallup to get lunch and gas, and while I was eating lunch there was a real downpour. I ran out to the car when the rain let up a little, and drove through streets that were several inches deep in muddy brown water. This is insane, I thought, but I was on a tight schedule, so I got on the freeway and drove slowly through the rain. Pretty soon it let up, but I drove through occasional light showers for most of the rest of the day.

I decided I didn’t want to spend any money in Arizona, because of the ridiculous immigration law that the state legislature passed. While I’m sure Arizona will never notice the loss of my paltry travel dollars, I felt better knowing that I had not bought any gas or food in the state. Unfortunately, Arizona is in such tough financial shape that they have closed all the highway rest areas, so somewhere around Flagstaff where there are trees, I found a place by the side of the road where I could pee.

I arrived in Needles, California, at about 7:30. When I opened the door of the car, the air was unbelievably hot. It was so hot and dry that my eyeballs kind of hurt; and every once in a while, a gust of hot wind coming off the desert would make it feel even hotter. According to the National Weather Service, at 6:56 p.m. it was 105 degrees; and last night, the low temperature was 90 degrees.

In spite of the heat, I walked the few blocks from the motel to downtown Needles. The air was so dry, I could feel the moisture being sucked out of my mouth and nose. Not much was happening in downtown Needles; the main activity seemed to be around the BNSF (Burlington Northern Santa Fe) railroad yards, where dozens of cars and pickup trucks were parked. A few people were out walking around, a few cars passed by, but mostly the town was empty. The cartoonist Charles Schulz, who drew the “Peanuts” cartoon, lived here for a few years when he was a child, and his biographer David Michaelis writes:

By day, the sun broiled the vast playa above the town — 120 degrees in the shade of a cottonwood tree was normal for Needles in summer. Most winter nights, the translucent air turned the dry gullies into such iceboxes that he [Schulz] could hear rocks cracking in the cold. In May and September the old wooden tinderbox of a schoolhouse was frequently shut to protect the children from heatstroke. Such little rain as fell came briefly and violently, blasting flash floods out of nowhere.

Needles, [Schulz] decided, was a “miserable place.”

I bought a copy of the Needles Desert Star, “Established in 1888, serving the community of Needles for more than a century.” I learned that the city attorney has been holding training sessions on Robert’s Rules of Order for the members of the city council and various boards; this seems a good plan, and I can think of several communities that should try this sort of thing. Tribal elders gave blessings in the Mohave language to a new park project being built with America Recovery and Reinvestment Act money. And city council members held a meeting to address the sale of the local hospital. In 1983, Charles Schulz’s “Peanuts” was syndicated in its two thousandth newspaper, in Needles, California (Michaelis, p. 531), but I did not find any comic strips at all today’s edition of the Needles Desert Star.

Roadtrip: Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico

Soon after I left Elk City, Oklahoma, I saw my first sagebrush by the side of the highway. Agricultural fields increasingly gave way to grazing lands. I’m now in the West.

For the past three days, I’ve eaten at an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet each night for dinner. Each of these buffets featured some kind of melding of Chinese and American cuisine. The large buffet in Elk City featured french fries, “fried green beans” (a sort of tempura), and “hot buttered potatoes,” alongside the stir-fried vegetables and the fried spring rolls. Here in Grants, New Mexico, at the “Asian Buffet,” I could have had “jalapeno chicken (spicy)” had I wished. None of these buffets offered any kind of tofu dish.

The best meal in roadside restaurants in the middle of America is always breakfast. This morning, I ate at the Elk City Cafe. The waitresses wore t-shirts, jeans, and heavy make-up, and called me “sweetheart” — waitresses have called me “hon” before, but being called “sweetheart” was new to me. The over-easy eggs were perfectly cooked, the bacon was think and tasty, the oatmeal was not watery as it had been in Connecticut nor chunky as it had been in Pennsylvania but exactly the right consistency. The home fries were a little too greasy, but the toast was warm and buttery.

I wanted to take a long walk, to work off some of the grease I’ve eaten today, but it started raining during dinner — with thunder and flashes of lightning — and hasn’t really let up since, and now it’s getting dark. Instead of walking, I drove down the historic route of the famous Route 66 in Grants and looked at the strip:

Grants, New Mexico, looking from an abandoned gas station towards Lotaburger, during a rain storm.