Find.A.Stillness

July 11, 1986 - Montreux

2011-11-05T12:32:00.004-04:00

Grand Rapids lipdubs its way to fame

2011-07-05T23:27:00.026-04:00

My film buff friend, Bob, calls this video, "the most amazing single shot I've ever seen." You may think you've seen this done before, but, as verse after verse of "American Pie" goes by and singer after singer picks up the tune, you begin to say to yourself, "Wow", and, then, you're just left Speachless in Grand Rapids.

The video's Director & Executive Producer, Rob Bliss says, "the Grand Rapids LipDub Video was filmed May 22 [, 2011 for $40,000] with 5,000 people, and involved a major shutdown of downtown Grand Rapids, which was filled with marching bands, parades, weddings, motorcades, bridges on fire, and helicopter take offs. It is the largest and longest LipDub video, to date.

"This video was created as an official response to the Newsweek article calling Grand Rapids a "dying city." We disagreed strongly, and wanted to create a video that encompasses the passion and energy we all feel is growing exponentially, in this great city. We felt Don McLean's "American Pie," a song about death, was in the end, triumphant and filled to the brim with life and hope."

Classical as you don't remember it

2011-07-01T22:53:00.007-04:00

Heard the George Hurd Ensemble at the Red Poppy. It's a tiny performance space in San Francisco's Mission district, but the ensemble's music was BIG. The house was packed and loudly

appreciative as long as the electronic track played along with the "band".

It's the rhythm of the electronics that takes Hurd's music out of the straight classical and makes it special. Sadly, this clip doesn't give you the full sense of the electronica. Maybe fans will grab more of this stuff to share as the ensemble becomes more widely known.

He gives life!

2011-06-30T21:25:00.002-04:00

It may be hard to imagine seeing a horror show with a bunch of people who are howling in laughter, but that's "Re-Animator:The Musical". I saw the show in March, but it refuses to die. Herbert West gives life! ...not merely the semblance of life, as he proves here in a scene that usuals gets an audible gasp from the audience.

And this is just ONE scene. Music Director Peter Adams is no longer playing every night, but even that can't kill this show. There's talk of opening another venue in Chicago, but for now it's all yours LA!

Electronic Music Marathon April 30

2011-04-09T22:31:00.002-04:00

At the BEAMS Electronic Music Marathom, Brandeis University, Saturday, April 30, sometime between approximately 7 and 8pm Mari Kimura performs three songs. Her repertoire combines the violin with signal processing, interactive computer, pre-recorded sound, and GuitarBot- a robotic guitar simulator.

Sadly it doesn't appear that the GuitarBot will be coming with her.

Artists for Peace & Justice

2011-04-09T21:31:00.004-04:00

April 12 is the official launch of "Acting Together on the World Stage," a documentary film about theater artists around the world whose artistry nurtures peace and social justice. Created by Cynthia Cohen, director of peacebuilding and the arts at Brandeis, and local filmmaker Allison Lund in partnership wtih Theater Without Borders. A reception follows the 4 pm screening. At the Shapiro Campus Center Theater, Brandeis University.Again on Thursday, April 28, 12 - 3 p.m., Shapiro Campus Center Multipurpose Room during Festival of the Arts.

Existence is playful - Alan Watts

2011-03-08T22:38:00.002-05:00

Trey Parker and Matt Stone go all Buddhist on you. Takes me back to a lot of years of listening to Alan Watts on Sunday morning radio.

Music and Life

Prickles and Goo

Re-Animator: The Musical finally opens!

2011-02-28T21:06:00.006-05:00

Re-Animator: The Musical finally opens this Friday (March 4) at LA’s Steve Allen Theater! For months rumors have predicted this hilarious staging by Stuart Gordon of his 1985 comic/horror film “Re-Animator”. It’s for real fans: I saw it in preview last week, sitting center stage just one row beyond the “Splash Zone” where blood-shy patrons ducked as they howled in laughter.

George Wendt (Dean Halsey) is the name star, but for me the story really comes to life in the hands of Jessie Merlin (mad –and headless- Dr. Hill) and Graham Skipper (uber-kook Herbert West). Then, of course, there’s the music —

Mark Nutter (composer and lyricist) has done himself proud. You’ll go home chanting “He’s dead, Dan!” and laugh yourself silly all through Dr. Hill’s amorous vocal pursual of the shackled Megan Halsey (Rachel Avery). Nutter’s songs really come to life in their full-orchestral* arrangements by Music Director: Peter Adams and the singers are mostly up to their challenge.

Fans of the film will find most of the original dialogue right there in the songs. Some critics compare the disturbance Nutter's songs engender to Tom Lehrer's acerbic wit. I heard a more profound connection to Gilbert and Sullivan farce.

*As keyboardist, Peter Adams produces all of the sound from five octaves of keys running one computer. Looks like a really simple rig to those who know no better. Musicheads watch him with one sharp eye while wiping away the laugh tears from the other.

Jessie Merlin

Graham Skipper

Rachel Avery

The trailer from the film sets out its romantic plot:

Paul Dresher -You see my problem?

2011-02-04T14:36:00.007-05:00

If you have heard this, what more could you expect from me?

Happy Christmas to all!

2010-12-24T17:22:00.000-05:00

Pat Steir: After Hokusai, After Hiroshige

2010-12-20T16:15:00.001-05:00

thru January 30, 2011
de Young Museum
San Francisco
This exhibition shows the continued influence of the Japanese print on Western artists into the late twentieth century. American painter, printmaker, and conceptual artist Pat Steir (b. 1938) was the first artist selected by Kathan Brown in 1982 to travel to Japan to make a color woodcut for Crown Point Press’s groundbreaking printmaking program in Kyoto. There she had the opportunity to work closely with artisans trained in the traditional methods of Japanese woodblock printing. In 1984 and 1985 she turned to subjects derived from famous prints by Hokusai and Hiroshige in color etchings she produced at Crown Point Press in Oakland: The Tree after Hiroshige; The Wave—From the Sea after Leonardo, Hokusai, and Courbet; and Yellow Bridge in the Rain after Van Gogh after Hiroshige.

In her appropriation and quotation of other artists, Steir participates in a practice used widely by contemporary artists. In the titles of her works, Steir openly acknowledges her debt to artists—for example, Leonardo, Hokusai, and Courbet in The Wave—and she has described her particular choices of artists and artworks as having been drawn from a sameness of look and feel. Acknowledging the influence of earlier artists on her work, she comments, “When you find an artist you identify with, it’s like finding a father or a mother.”

The Dead in their Stone Boats Know

2010-11-03T13:45:00.010-04:00

"The Truth the Dead Know"

by Anne Sexton, from All My Pretty Ones

     For my mother, born March 1902, died March 1959
     and my father, born February 1900, died June 1959

Gone, I say and walk from church,

refusing the stiff procession to the grave,

letting the dead tide alone in the hearse.

It is June. I am tired of being brave.

We drive to the Cape. I cultivate

myself where the sun gutters from the sky,

where the sea swings in like an iron gate

and we touch. In another country people die.

My darling, the wind falls in like stones

from the whitehearted water and when we touch

we enter touch entirely. No one’s alone.

Men kill for this, or for as much.

And what of the dead? They lie without shoes

in their stone boats. They are more like stone

than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse

to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.

Her Awful Rowing

2010-10-14T21:53:00.005-04:00

"Rowing"

by Anne Sexton, from The Awful Rowing Towards God

A story, a story!

(Let it go. Let it come.)

I was stamped out like a Plymouth fender

into this world.

First came the crib

with its glacial bars.

Then dolls

and the devotion to their plastic mouths.

Then there was school,

the little straight rows of chairs,

blotting my name over and over,

but undersea all the time,

a stranger whose elbows wouldn't work.

Then there was life

with its cruel houses

and people who seldom touched -

though touch is all-

but I grew,

like a pig in a trenchcoat I grew,

and then there were many strange apparitions,

the nagging rain, the sun turning into poison

and all of that, saws working through my heart,

but I grew, I grew,

and God was there like an island I had not rowed to,

still ignorant of Him, my arms and my legs worked,

and I grew, I grew,

I wore rubies and bought tomatoes

and now, in my middle age,

about nineteen in the head I'd say,

I am rowing, I am rowing

though the oarlocks stick and are rusty

and the sea blinks and rolls

like a worried eyeball,

but I am rowing, I am rowing,

though the wind pushes me back

and I know that that island will not be perfect,

it will have the flaws of life,

the absurdities of the dinner table,

but there will be a door

and I will open it

and I will get rid of the rat inside of me,

the gnawing pestilential rat.

God will take it with his two hands

and embrace it.

As the African says:

This is my tale which I have told,

if it be sweet, if it be not sweet,

take somewhere else and let some return to me.

This story ends with me still rowing.

2010-08-16T11:44:00.000-04:00

"TURF Dancers from Oakland, CA honoring Dreal's brother (the man in the white shirt is Dreal) who died on this same street corner the night before this rainy day. Dancers featured are from the TURF FEINZ crew. YAK FILMS is a company that works with dancers world wide, but which was started a few blocks away from that corner, in East Oakland, CA." - DeEMaSsIvE

Water Walk

2010-08-11T11:51:00.017-04:00

German improviser and composer of experimental and new music, Andrea Neumann performs John Cage`s Water Walk.

According her publisher, Sofa Music, Neumann has "reduced the piano to strings, resonance board and metal frame. With the help of electronics to manipulate and amplify the sounds (sometimes to make parts of the sound audible which are inaudible without amplification), she has developed numerous new playing techniques, sounds, and ways of preparing the dismantled instrument."

She performs here at the Henie Onstad Art Centre in Bærum, Norway. The museum itself is quite a striking example of Norway's Neo-Expressionist architecture. It was designed more than forty years ago by then young Norwegian architects Jon Eikvar and Sven Erik Engebretsen and named for Sonja Henie, the famed figure skater from Oslo.

Compare Cage's own amused 1960 performance of Water Walk on What's My Line? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63HoYXUeUTA&feature=related

2010-08-05T19:38:00.004-04:00

Motion graphics by Marta Topolska, Illinois Institute of Art-Chicago graduate. Poem by Gloria Sarasin. Marta has also created a brief video of work by Boston area visual artist Marlena Bocian.

The Arthur Ravenel Jr. Bridge

2010-07-22T21:11:00.005-04:00

Imagine our surprise innocently cruising down Rte. 17 in South Carolina on our first pilgrimage to the Holy City, when suddenly there before our parochial eyes rises what can only be a Boston landmark!

The Cooper River bridge connecting Charleston with Mount Pleasant uses the same cable-stayed construction as Boston’s Leonard P. Zakim Bridge across the Charles River. It was completed in 2005, two years after the Zakim. Driving across either bridge produces the same awe in the beholder; both are instantly the visual center of attention.

Proud members of the Andover Newton community

2010-06-10T15:10:00.001-04:00

On a February night in New England divinity students from around the world gathered in the student lounge on the Andover Newton Theological School campus. They enjoyed food from around the world, talked about their homelands, and shared stories and song.

Justin & Peter hit the road again

2010-06-08T22:35:00.006-04:00

It all starts again on Thursday in Lincoln Hall, Chicago. They'll come whistlin' through Boston on the 18th.
But, then, it ends all too soon a couple of days later
and it's back to Scotland — The Great War is over
in record time.

You don’t really care for music, do you?

2010-05-26T21:17:00.001-04:00

“Hallelujah” is not, as [contestant Lee]DeWyze conceived it on American Idol, a shout of praise. It is too confused to shout, too self-concerned to praise. Cohen’s song is disturbing stuff. The Buckley version always leaves me reflective and bothered, if aesthetically uplifted. “Hallelujah” manages to be a psalm, a lament, and a paean to romantic ecstasy all at once. And like Psalms, Lamentations, and Song of Songs, it manages to do so while drawing on the rich and messy personal histories of the Bible’s most notables. That’s the hard-fought lyrical production that has sustained the song, and that will—of course—make it outlast Idol.

—Patton Dodd, writing in the blog

Killing the Budda

To Touch the Stars

2010-05-04T17:21:00.002-04:00

From To Touch the Stars: A Musical Celebration of Space Exploration from Prometheus Music in partnership with the Mars Society and the National Space Society. Inspired by the BBC documentary "If We had No Moon". Music is by the New York singer/songwriter Christine Lavin; video by the Vietnamese artist Vu Trong Thu.

Nico Muhly

2010-04-29T12:34:00.007-04:00

We travel through strange hair-worlds with geometrical birds and foam-sky created by Icelandic animator, Una Lorenzen, for 'It Goes Without Saying' from the album Speaks Volumes (2007) by New York based composer, Nico Muhly. Produced by Valgeir Sigurðsson at his home studio in Reykjavík. Be sure to see it full screen, if you can.

Muhly was born in Vermont in 1981 and raised in Providence, Rhode Island. He graduated from Columbia University with a degree in English Literature. In 2004 he received a Masters in Music from the Juilliard School.

His orchestral works have been premiered by the American Symphony Orchestra, the Boston University Tanglewood Institute Orchestra, the Boston Pops, the New York Philharmonic, and the Chicago Symphony.

His film credits include scores for Joshua (2007), Best Picture nominee The Reader (2008), and the Argentine drama Felicitas, and he has worked extensively with Philip Glass as editor, keyboardist, and conductor for numerous film and stage projects.

Muhly has also lent his skills as performer, arranger, and conductor to other musicians, including Antony and the Johnsons, Sam Amidon, Björk, and Jónsi from Sigur Rós.

Many of his most frequent collaborators are colleagues at Bedroom Community, an artist-run label headed by Icelandic musician Valgeir Sigurðsson and inaugurated by the release of Speaks Volumes.

Eruption of Fimmfördurhals volcano

2010-04-21T14:05:00.004-04:00

Eyjafjallajökull - Fimmförduháls Eruption on Iceland from Marc Szeglat on Vimeo.
- Fimmförduháls Eruption on Iceland from Marc Szeglat on Vimeo.

Spotlight Floodlight

2010-03-18T12:50:00.006-04:00

Keyboardist Peter Adams has been writing, recording and performing music since grade five, but for much of that time he has stayed in the background supporting other musicians - often pretty great musicians. Now, from Intelligent Noise, comes his first fully produced personal album, "Polarized". But still modesty reigns, collegial collaboration abounds behind the scenes, and it is the mysterious doppelganger, 'Spotlight, Floodlight', who steps up to take the bows, while the phenom artist, Peter Adams, slips away back to the studio, already deeply into creating ACT II.

Since his 2003 move to Los Angeles, Peter has played keyboards, guitar, and vocals with great local artists - Michael Penn, Josh Groban, Greg Dulli, Five For Fighting, Lex Land, The Submarines, even while his old friends from Boston keep on callin' - Juliana Hatfield, Tracy Bonham, and Kay Hanley. And - look here! - now he's playing with some of the very British artists that influenced his early musical development - Rob Dickinson (The Catherine Wheel), Tears For Fears, and, most recently, Justin Currie (Del Amitri).

In Honor of the Bohlen-Pierce Symposium, March 7-9, Boston

2010-03-07T20:50:00.006-05:00

Rick Sacks' improvisation based on a original theme created by Peter Hannon using the Bohlen-Pierce 13-interval scale. According to others claiming (with good reason) to understand better than I, Bohlen-Pierce is an harmonic, non-octave scale. Its 13 tone steps fill the framework of the twelfth (3:1 ratio). The scale has a step size of approximately a three-quarter tone (146 cent), the middle-Eastern second degree. Help!

Zoe Keating cellist escape artist

2010-03-03T18:51:00.005-05:00

Avant-garde cellist Zoe Keating operates at the "fusion of information architecture and classical music". In this version of her composition, Escape Artist, she demonstrates her intricately layered meta-data composition style. Using her MacBook Pro, Ableton Live, SuperLooper, some 'janky Apple code', a cello and her imagination, the San Francisco based musician shapes her music into something you won't hear at Symphony Hall.

Stomp it out

2010-02-26T11:44:00.006-05:00

We Are the World All Over Again

2010-02-22T21:22:00.002-05:00

In our church young people are selling baked goods and cat sitting to raise relief funds for Haiti. Adults have answered the call of a local Haitian church to help them send rice & beans & bucks. Nine year old Robine Koerts and her classmates raised about €200 in donations for Haitian disaster relief singing 1985's We Are the World during Music Night at their Netherlands school.

Chickens in Love

2010-02-19T12:10:00.003-05:00

A whole lot of 826LA students with a whole hen house full of volunteers and The Submarines, perform Chickens in Love, a song they wrote at "Songwriting with The Submarines"— a workshop sponsored by 826LA where children learn about music and how lyrics are created by working with professional Los Angeles musicians. Two workshops were held this December. Musicians Michael (Frankel), Heather (Kissing Cousins), Sean (Nico Stai), Blake and John (The Submarines), Eli (The Monolators), Ken (Hexham Heads) and 826LA volunteers worked with 24 kids to help them create their own songs.

The kids broke out into 12 groups, each paired with a musician and/or volunteer. Each group came up with a subject and wrote a song with multiple verses and a chorus. The groups had an hour to get creative, write the lyrics, develop a melody, and then perform it for the other workshop participants.You can see/hear these songs as performed at http://www.826la.org/chickensinlove/pledge-now/. Vote for the one(s) you like best in a fund raiser for 826LA.

These 12 songs have been distributed among 12 LA based bands to cover the songs. Each artist is donating their time to create a project like no other. The artists involved are:
– Fiona Apple
– She & Him
– Cold War Kids
– Tim & Eric
– Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros
– Dum Dum Girls
– Summer Darling
– The Growlers
– Crystal Antlers
– The Happy Hollows
– The Submarines
– The Pity Party

Each artist/band is allowed to get as creative with their version as they want so long as they don’t change the lyrics. These 12 songs will appear this Spring on a Limited Edition LP and CD as well as a digital download on iTunes. All proceeds from these sales will go right back into the program that provides these kinds of opportunities for children.

Hard Times Come Again No More

2010-02-07T17:01:00.001-05:00

Once a year to our Unitarian Universalist community comes Music Sunday. The bluegrass band played Gillian Welch's heart wrenching "Orphan Girl" and the choir reached back for Stephen Foster's "Hard Times". How can an hour of hard times and a girl yearning for death's reunion be uplifting? I guess you'd have to be there. "Let the Mystery Be."

This wonderful rendition of "Hard Times" by Mavis Staples says it all for me. Buddy Miller, Steve Fishell and Matt Rollings back her up. The McGarrigle/Wainwright clan have a corner on the more traditional rendering that comes readily to mind, but our choristers gave it all they had and it was great in an arrangement by our own Bill Weber. Oh, you beautiful voices, how you break our hearts in joy.

Tracy Bonham plays "Josephine" - Live at Hotel Cafe

2010-01-28T12:22:00.000-05:00

Tracy Bonham (w/ Butch Norton on drums, David Sutton on bass and Peter Adams on keys) - "Josephine" - Live at Hotel Cafe - Los Angeles, CA - January 22, 2010. Recorded by Joshua J. Smelser

2010-01-19T22:57:00.002-05:00

The Teresa Carreño Youth Orchestra (Sinfónica Juvenil Teresa Carreño) is the national high school age youth orchestra of El Sistema, Venezuela's groundbreaking, life-changing musical education program. To put this ensemble's musicianship in context, the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela is the next step for many of these young musicians. That orchestra, containing musicians from 18 to 28 years old, has toured the world with conductor Gustavo Dudamel and has made a number of recordings on Deutsche Grammophon. The Teresa Carreño Youth Orchestra is the next level below, and will succeed the Simón Bolívar.

Their conductor in this TEDTalk is Gustavo Dudamel, himself a product of the El Sistema. Dudamel conducted the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela for several years, and recently was named the Los Angeles Philharmonic's music director. He also continues to conduct other orchestras around the world.
The orchestra's namesake, Teresa Carreño, was a legendary Venezuelan pianist after whom the main theater/concert hall complex in Caracas is also named.

The gulf between the rich and the poor in Venezuela is one of the worst in the world. Jose Antonio Abreu, an economist, musician, and reformer, founded El Sistema ("the system") in 1975 to help Venezuelan kids take part in classical music. After 30 years (and 10 political administrations), El Sistema is a nationwide organization of 102 youth orchestras, 55 children's orchestras, and 270 music centers -- and close to 250,000 young musicians.

El Sistema uses music education to help kids from impoverished circumstances achieve their full potential and learn values that favor their growth. The talented musicians have become a source of national pride. Several El Sistema students have gone on to major international careers, including Gustavo Dudamel, soon to be the music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and the bassist Edicson Ruiz, who at 17 became the youngest musician ever to join the Berlin Philharmonic.

There is a simple concept behind Abreu's work: for him an orchestra is first and foremost about togetherness, a place where children learn to listen to each other and to respect one another.

"Music has to be recognized as an ... agent of social development in the highest sense, because it transmits the highest values -- solidarity, harmony, mutual compassion. And it has the ability to unite an entire community and to express sublime feelings." —José Antonio Abreu

156 Countries Sing Together

2010-01-08T20:07:00.003-05:00

On December 7th, 2009 at 1:30pm musicians from all around the world came together and shared a song. At that moment musicians from 156 countries played "All You Need is Love" together.

Lend your own voice to http://StarbucksLoveProject.com Watch streaming video from countries around the world and then join in by singing "All You Need is Love" yourself. For each video submitted, Starbucks will make a contribution to the Global Fund to help fight AIDS in Africa. You can also help increase the Starbucks contribution to the Global Fund by submitting a drawing to the Love Gallery.

The global sing-along is part of continuing efforts to help fight AIDS in Africa. In just one year in partnership with (RED)™, Starbucks has generated money equivalent to more than 7 million days of medicine to help those living with HIV in Africa. (RED), created by Bono and Bobby Shriver, is a brand designed to engage business and consumer power in the fight against AIDS in Africa. (RED) works with the world's biggest brands to make unique RED-branded products and direct up to 50% of their gross profits to the Global Fund to invest in African AIDS programs, with a focus on the health of women and children.

Playing for Change: Peace through Music

2010-01-04T15:49:00.011-05:00

The Playing for Change band’s latest tour ended in November. The recording of this performance took place in the Nokia Theater, Los Angeles. The song, "Felangaye", is a Titi Tsira original, and tells the story of a young woman who must overcome her fears and tell a young man that she loves him.

Playing for Change is a project of Mark Johnson and Jonathan Walls. The idea is to film and record musicians from around the world sharing their music in the belief that we can all find peace through our music.

Mark Johnson, Jonathan Walls, Playing For Change Movie - Click here for another funny movie.

2010-01-01T20:01:00.009-05:00

When They Ring the Golden Bells

2009-12-30T17:40:00.007-05:00

In memory of Susan Davis Brown
this loving rendition by Natalie Merchant and Karen Peris

(click on bar)
When They Ring The Golden Bells

There's a land beyond the river
That they call the sweet forever
And we only reach that shore by faith's decree
One by one we'll gain the portals
There to dwell with the immortals
When they ring the golden bells for you and me

Don't you hear the bells now ringing
Don't you hear the angels singing
'Tis the glory hallelujah Jubilee
In that far off sweet forever,
Just beyond the shining river
When they ring the golden bells for you and me

We shall know no sin or sorrow
In that heaven of tomorrow
When our hearts shall sail beyond the silvery sea
We shall only know the blessing
Of our Father's sweet caressing
When they ring the golden bells for you and me

Don't you hear the bells now ringing
Don't you hear the angels singing
'Tis the glory hallelujah Jubilee
In that far off sweet forever
Just beyond the shining river
When they ring the golden bells for you and me

When our days shall know their number
When in death we sweetly slumber
When the King commands the spirit to be free
Nevermore with anguish laden
We shall reach that lovely Eden
When they ring the golden bells for you and me
When they ring the golden bells

Gabriel Prokofiev

2009-12-07T15:25:00.000-05:00

Not your grandad's Prokofiev. Want to hear what it sounds like? Of course you do.

<a href="http://nonclassicalrecords.bandcamp.com/album/g-prokofiev-concerto-for-turntables-orchestra-heritage-orchestra-feat-dj-yoda">INTRODUCTION 'Grime Eye' - 140bpm by Nonclassical Records</a>

Kseniya Simonova — Sand Animation

2009-10-18T16:52:00.008-04:00

This is the amazing Kseniya Simonova appearing on a Ukranian talent show (of all places). The songs appear to be very closely related to her story and are mostly Russian as far as I can tell (maybe others can be more decisive).

(1) Metallica's "Nothing Else Matters"
(played by Apocalyptica, the scandinavian Cello quartet, maybe)

(2) Sacred War (Napoleon’s Russian invasion)

Rise up, huge country,
Rise up for a mortal fight!
With the dark fascist force,
With the damned horde.

Refrain
Let noble fury
Boil up like a wave
A people's war is going on,
A sacred war!

We'll give repulse to oppressors
Of all fervent ideas,
Rapists, robbers,
Tormenters of people.

Refrain

Black wings don't dare
To fly over the homeland,
Her vast fields
The enemy doesn't dare to trample.

Refrain

To the rotten fascist scum
We'll drive a bullet into the forehead,
For the rabble of humanity
We'll knock together a solid casket!

(3) Dark Night
(translated by Alisa In WonderWords)

Dark night, only bullets
are whistling across the prairie,
Only the wind is humming along the wires,
And the stars are blinking dimly.
On this dark night I know you are not asleep, my love,
You are by the crib, wiping a tear.

How I love the depth of you sweet eyes,
How I wish I could press my lips against them.
Dark night is dividing us, my love,
And the troubled black prairie lay between us.

My faith is in you, my dear friend,
This faith has kept the bullet away on a dark night.
I am happy and calm in a mortal fight,
Since I know you will greet me with love, no matter what.

Death doesn't scare me, we faced it in the prairie before,
Here it is, hovering above me right now.
You are waiting for me, sleepless by the crib,
And that is why I know that I am safe from harm.

(4) Cranes
(Words by Rasul Gamzatov. Translation of Andrey)

It sometimes seemed to me that the soldiers,
Who didn’t return from bloody fields,
Didn’t lie down into our ground
But turned into white cranes.
And they are flying and are screaming their voices to us now
And they do it from that old time.
May be it is the reason why we often stop talking ruefully
When we look in sky.

The weary wedge of cranes is flying in sky,
It flies in the end of the day.
And there is a small interval inside this wedge
May be, it is a place for me.
May be, it will be a day and I shall fly
With the flock of cranes in the same blue sky
And I shall call everyone, whose I left in a ground,
From the sky by on the language of birds.

Mercedes Sosa

2009-10-07T19:11:00.006-04:00

Mercedes Sosa
(Tucumán, 09-July-1935 — Buenos Aires, 04-Oct-2009)

Thanks to life
Words by Violeta Parra
(translated by Ron Adams, 10/07/09)

Thanks to life, which has given me so much.
It gave me two bright eyes that, when I open them,
Can perfectly distinguish black from white
And in the distant sky with her starry backdrop,
And from within the multitudes, find the one I love.

Thanks to life, which has given me so much.
It gave me hearing that in all its wide ranging
Records night and day, the rattle of chains and canary songs,
Tyrant shouts, the roar of war, slander, misfortune’s storms,
And the tender, loving song.

Thanks to life, which has given me so much.
It gave me meaning and learning.
From them come the words I’m thinking and now confess:
"Mother," "Friend," "Brother"; and the light shining
On the road of the soul where love travels.

Thanks to life, which has given me so much.
It gave me the strength in my tired feet.
With them I have crossed cities and seas
Valleys and deserts, mountains and plains
To your house, down your street to your heart.

Thanks to life, which has given me so much.
It gave me the passion that shakes my soul
When I see the fruits of real human understanding,
When I see far beyond the bad to the good,
When I look deep into your clear eyes.

Thanks to life, which has given me so much.
It gave me so much laughter and so many tears.
With them I rescue happiness from the crush of pain—
The two materials that form my song,
And your song, that is my song too,
And everyone’s song, that is my special song.
Here’s to the life, which has given me so much.

Garden Structures to Live With

2009-09-21T11:57:00.006-04:00

Andy Adams is a New England-born carpenter living and working in the Bay Area of California. Though he has had previous careers as a Musician and Renovation Contractor his work now focuses on Garden Structures such as decks, boardwalks, planters and benches. The benches in particular allow for the easy intersection of art, design and building. He is interested in collaboration and the process and design of landscape and gardens. See more at garden structures by andrew adams.

Curved Redwood Bench, Construction

A Very Long Goodbye

2009-08-04T16:44:00.013-04:00

Raymond Chandler in 1940. Photograph: Ralph Crane/Getty

Raymond Chandler died March 26, 1959, so this is a big anniversary year for aficionados.*

The biggest News I have found in the blogosphere isn’t really new news: Ray Chandler appeared in a camio in Double Indemnity (the film for which he infamously co-wrote the screenplay with Billy Wilder). Larry Harnish reported this “discovery” in his Los Angeles Times blog (June 7, 2009), apparently referencing Adrian Wootton’s blog for The Guardian (June 5, 2009). Don’t rush out to discuss this with your thesis advisor. But it is a cute five second scene.

*Checkout Loren Latker’s Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles
website: http://homepage.mac.com/llatker/

Sail On, Boston! Sail on!

2009-07-18T22:25:00.002-04:00

Probably Freemont pictographs

2009-06-20T18:04:00.004-04:00

Look out Utah. We're on our way.

Waltham Art Windows June 12 & 13

2009-06-12T16:40:00.009-04:00

Check out Waltham Art Windows at this year's Riverfest this weekend. This picture by Clare Asch. I have to admit I like this reproduction better than the original, but see what you think.
http://www.walthamriverfest.org/artwindows.html
And at Lincoln Studios, 289 Moody Street,
June 6 through 29

Sansula

2009-05-18T20:56:00.003-04:00

SANSULA Dominik Eulberg musicvideo from dirk rauscher on Vimeo.

Cool

2009-04-29T13:28:00.004-04:00

Lex Land sings on Morning Becomes Eclectic

2009-04-08T18:24:00.004-04:00

Sit back and enjoy. This is Lex Land. She'll grow on ya. Don't be afraid.

Ode on a Careful Walk

2009-04-05T20:04:00.016-04:00

Pictures at an Exhibition

2009-03-27T11:28:00.035-04:00

(Russian: Картинки с выставки – Воспоминание о Викторе Гартмане, Kartinki s vystavki – Vospominaniye o Viktore Gartmane)

"Pictures at an Exhibition – A Remembrance of Viktor Hartmann"
A suite of ten piano pieces composed by Modest Mussorgsky in 1874.

Modest Mussorgsky was a member of 'The Five' (or 'The Mighty Handful'), a 19th-century group of Russian composers including Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov, Balakirev, and Cui. Together, The Five created the so-called Nationalist school of Russian music. Mussorgsky's 'Pictures at an Exhibition' was inspired by an exhibition of paintings by his deceased friend Viktor Hartmann and is a particularly striking example of The Five's efforts to create a distinctively Russian version of European style classical music. It was originally written for solo piano (the version played with much grace and power by Naoko Sugiyama on a Sunday afternoon at The First Parish in Waltham). It has inspired orchestration by Rimsky-Korsakov and, most famously, by Ravel. But the raw power of live solo piano is the way to hear it. Mussorgsky supplies the Might; the pianist has got her hands full.

The Pictures

No. 1 "Gnomus" (Latin: The Gnome)

Vladimir Stasov: "A sketch depicting a little gnome, clumsily running with crooked legs." Hartmann's sketch, now lost, is thought to represent a toy nutcracker.

This picture shows one of Hartmann's costume designs for a revival of Mikhail Glinka's opera Ruslan i Lyudmila. The evil wizard Chernomor wears a turban crowned by a bat, and bears a staff with an owl perched upon it. The opera was performed with Hartmann's designs in 1871 by the Bolshoi Theatre.

No. 2 "Il vecchio castello" (Italian: The Old Castle)

Stasov: "A medieval castle before which a troubador sings a song." This movement is thought to be based on a watercolor depiction of an Italian castle. Hartman often placed appropriate human figures in his architectural renderings to suggest scale.

No. 3 "Tuileries" (Dispute d'enfants après jeux) French: Tuileries (Dispute between Children at Play)

Stasov: "An avenue in the garden of the Tuileries, with a swarm of children and nurses." Hartmann's picture of the Jardin des Tuileries near the Louvre in Paris (France) is now lost. Figures of children quarrelling and playing in the garden were likely added by the artist (see note on No. 2 above).

No. 4 "Bydło" (Polish: Cattle)

Stasov: "A Polish cart on enormous wheels, drawn by oxen."

No. 5 "Балет невылупившихся птенцов" [Balet nevylupivshikhsya ptentsov] (Russian: Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks)

Stasov: "Hartmann's design for the décor of a picturesque scene in the ballet Trilby."
Gerald Abraham: "Trilby or The Demon of the Heath, a ballet with choreography by Petipa, music by Julius Gerber, and décor by Hartmann... produced in 1870. The fledglings were canary chicks."

No. 6 "Samuel Goldenberg und Schmuÿle" (Yiddish)

Stasov: "Two Jews: Rich and Poor"

No. 7 "Limoges, le marché" (La grande nouvelle) (French: The Market at Limoges (The Great News))

Stasov: "French women quarreling violently in the market." Limoges is a city in central France.

No. 8 "Catacombae" (Sepulcrum romanum) (Latin: The Catacombs (Roman sepulcher))

Stasov: "Hartmann represented himself examining the Paris catacombs by the light of a lantern."

No. 9 "Избушка на курьих ножках" (Баба-Яга) [Izbushka na kur'ikh nozhkakh (Baba-Yaga)] (Russian: The Hut on Hen's Legs (Baba-Yaga)

Stasov: "Hartmann's drawing depicted a clock in the form of Baba-Yaga's hut on fowl's legs. Mussorgsky added the witch's flight in a mortar."

No. 10 "Богатырские ворота" (В стольном городе во Киеве) [Bogatïrskie vorota (v stol'nom gorode vo Kieve)] (Russian: The Bogatyr Gates (in the Capital in Kiev) Commonly translated as "The Great Gate of Kiev." Bogatyrs are heroes that appear in Russian epics called bylinas. The title is also sometimes rendered "The Heroes' Gate at Kiev."

Stasov: "Hartmann's sketch was his design for city gates at Kiev in the ancient Russian massive style with a cupola shaped like a slavonic helmet." Hartmann made a sketch for a planned (but never built) monumental gate for Tsar Alexander II. This gate was to have commemorated the Tsar's narrow escape from an assassination attempt on April 4, 1866. Hartmann's design for the gate caused a sensation, and the architect himself felt it was the finest work he had yet done.

Felix Mendelssohn Bicentennial

2009-02-17T13:10:00.006-05:00

Luzern, Schweiz; watercolor by Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, July 1847

Peter Adams Trio at the Downbeat 1/30

2009-02-01T20:25:00.013-05:00

Peter Adams [keys], Billy Mohler [acoustic bass], and Aaron Sterling [drums] having way too much fun Friday night at the Downbeat Cafe in LA's Echo Park playing music from Peter's new release, Spotlight, Floodlight.

I saw my people

2009-01-20T17:49:00.018-05:00

"In so many ways, the father of us all."

— Mary Travers

As the 89-year-old civil rights champion, Pete Seeger, helped close out the ceremonies that opened this inaugural affair on Sunday, so the efforts of the 87-year-old civil rights leader, Joseph Lowery, brought the celebrations to a resounding close today. At least that’s how I experienced it.

Lowery is former pastor of the Warren Street United Methodist Church, in Mobile, Alabama and co-founder with Martin Luther King, Jr. of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. His benediction was filled with references well-known in the black community but maybe not so well-known in the white world.

“God of our weary years, God of our silent tears,
thou, who has brought us thus far along the way,
thou, who has by thy might led us into the light,
keep us forever in the path we pray,
lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met thee,
lest our hearts drunk with the wine of the world, we forget thee.
Shadowed beneath thy hand, may we forever stand
true to thee, oh God, and true to our native land.”

These are the closing lines from “Lift every voice and sing” otherwise known as the Black National Anthem. It’s writer? James Weldon Johnson, of course. [His brother, Rosamond, wrote the music.] It's #149 in the Unitarian Universalist hymnal.

“Lord, in the memory of all the saints who from their labors rest, and in the joy of a new beginning, we ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get in back, when brown can stick around ... when yellow will be mellow ... when the red man can get ahead, man; and when white will embrace what is right. Let all those who do justice and love mercy say Amen.”

The reference here is to Big Bill Broonzy’s “Black, Brown and White” blues, also known as “The Get Back Blues”.

"If you're white, you're all right.
If you're brown, stick around.
But if you're black, oh, brother --
Get back! Get Back! Get back!"

Broonzy became an influencial performer, especially prior to World War II, coming out of the Chicago blues scene. After the war, according to the blogger who introduced him to me, “he was accused of being a Communist and blacklisted, and, apart from appearing with his fellow blacklister, Pete Seeger (who performed for Obama on Sunday), did little for the rest of his life.”

Evermore

2009-01-19T10:12:00.001-05:00

A Voice in the Wilderness

2009-01-16T23:43:00.014-05:00

Somewhere a voice calls out
Just beyond hearing.
Birds twitter and rise from their roosts.
Leaves of grass flutter and flatten under foot,
As residents rush to below ground homes.
I see it all as I run, holding the pain in my side.
Too late.

Here. Is this the Holy Land where the voice was heard?
Was it a cry or was it a murmur?
Only air in motion or filling all with meaning?
I wait, sitting here beneith the tree whose leaves have heard,
Pressed against the bark, listening with ears and fingers.
Did I hear? Was it a voice of love or hope?
Why?

In the city are many sounds at all the hours.
The silence in spaces beacons loudly.
I lie in an empty moment holding tight to the memory
Of when the voice was nearer — ah, youth.
Babies cry, engines roar, lovers whisper in the dark
Just beyond hearing, but the echo lingers.
Listen.

— Oscar Handler, “A Bevy of Lies”, 1938

Here is how it is expressed in Psalm 50:1-5:

The Mighty One, G_d the Lord,
speaks and summons the earth.
From the rising of the sun to its setting
Out of Zion, the perfection of beauty,
G_d shines forth.

Out G_d comes, he does not keep silence.
Before him is a devouring fire
round about him a mighty tempest.

He calls to the heavens above
and to the earth ...
"Gather to me my faithful ones...."

Ideal Community

2009-01-15T11:13:00.003-05:00

By the time I entered sixth grade my father had begun to come into his own in the business world, and our family came to summer on some of the small lakes in Western Massachusetts near our home.

The first year we tented by one of these nearby lakes, perhaps with the thought that we could actually live there all summer long and my father commute to work. But the land was flat, and the development was new, and my father sold this land after the first year. And we began to rent a cottage well up in the Berkshire hills at a place called Big Pond.

There the woods were old and it was four miles by winding, climbing dirt road from the main highway to the northern shore of Big Pond where we stayed in a cottage owned by Orin Handler. The Handler’s and the Grimes’ were the only houses you could reach by road in this part of the lake. There had never been anyone but Handler’s and Grimes’ on this road since it was cut, but Harold Grimes was planning to sell some of his shorefront property, and we were there to consider adding our name to theirs on the small sign that marked the road.

Any old New Englander would be familiar with the cottage we stayed in there — the big porches extending off living room and dining room through creaking French doors that were usually open to the breeze off the lake, but were often closed at night as the temperature fell even in June and July.

Then, the smell of oil fired stove would permeate the air and nestle around us as close as the heat itself, and we children would be hustled off upstairs to a loft looking down on the living room fireplace, the wicker furniture, the wooden rocker you could get on and ride like some wild stallion galloping across the plains until your mother cried out in fear that you would tip over.

Overhead was nothing but painted roof. The walls were wood paneling. The windows were hinged like cabinet doors and you looked out on the long slope of front porch roof and the lake’s waters beyond.

When the thunder storms came, as they frequently did during our days on Big Pond, the rain would come in a rush across the waters at the edge of the wind that drove it to engulf our cottage and thunder down on the shingles only inches above our heads. From the second floor you could see out over the whole lake as the lightning flashed its eerie white light and its tentacles snatched at the houses out on the island in the center of the pond.

My father and I built what was called a surfboard in those days — a vague cousin to what you would see at the seashore today. For me it was a pretty much unsinkable craft that I paddled by hand and by foot along all the shoreline and eventually around the shore of that island at the center of Big Pond.

The actual building of the eight or ten houses out there was a source of considerable fascination until the transporting properties of ice debunked the fantasies. The one house which most drew my explorer’s eye stood alone on a small peninsula of rock dropped by glaciers in retreat up past Hudson’s Bay long before my time. Isolated even from other islanders, I wondered at what sort of folk might suddenly emerge from within to challenge my small intrusion into their secret lives.

Orin Handler and Harold Grimes were a kind of old time Yankee you can still find in upstate Vermont or perhaps in other recesses of the country from which they have failed to vacate. They were men my father felt at home with and in this case admired, for they were country men but of class and culture.

There were not many such men, I suspect, in my father’s world and there were certainly no others like them in mine. Their families were long off the farm — perhaps merchants or seamen from Boston or New Haven who first came here for the cool of summer and, then, stayed on in Springfield or Northampton.

I found their books shelved on the long wall by the fireplace and stacks of “Boy’s Life” magazines up under the eaves. And an image of the life they led there burnt itself in my small, growing soul. I peered through their windows and poked about in their boathouses, for they rarely actually lived there any more, and in later years I longed for their life — for the ease of their manner, the ready chair by the fire where no person was truly a stranger.

At first my wish was just to be there, to experience again a way of living they provided and which I, too, could admire and rejoice in. But, then, ambition, greed for a life I could only experience but not myself provide, took over and consumed me. And it is here in this reduced and ruined form that I now find myself, and you experience me, grappling with the spirit that seemed to direct their course, and enveloping myself in every mud puddle, sinking slowly down into the earth from which I came and which so clearly shaped their lives.

The land is neither hostile nor welcoming in and of itself. But it does seem to contain within it something of who we are at our deepest core — a connection to the spirit of the life that animates everything — not as some detached, external mechanism, but in some extremely personal, intimate form in which I recognize what I want to be — not merely who I am but the special form only we humans can attain but which requires so much of us, so much effort to draw it out and is yet so easy and common when it comes.

I speak here of soul, not as of some alien being hidden within our decaying bodies, yearning for release to another land, to a better place beyond this life. No, this is the soul of who and what we are here and now, the bath of water and blood from which we were born and which now courses through our bodies, an oddly unfamiliar presence from which so many around us are actually fleeing. It repulses their nostrils; it is too coarse a salt to set at their table. And yet to separate from it is to abandon life itself.

I speak of the soul as of something warm and wet — the wet behind the ears that experience brings — experiences of love and welcome that form the bonds between us, bonds formed not by some exterior coating, but by some inexorable fluid oozing from within each of us like sweat or mingled blood, like the warmth that comes from within the fire.

I saw this life coming across the lake in the fire of stars and moon. I felt it shimmering on the surface of rocks beneath the surface of the water. It welled up around my toes when they dug down into the sand at the water’s edge. It slipped across my palm on the bodies of escaping fishes.

And I experienced its remains in the Handler cottage and in the gnarled arthritic fingers of my father’s hand clutching at tools they could no longer grasp. And it came to me in recent years in the flashing old blind eyes of my wife’s Aunt Charlotte as she searched out the form of her visitors, not by sight of course, but by a feeling that reaches out and holds you.

In those summers by the water my eyes, too, stretched out to embrace the life around me and I was in no way alone, though I may have seen no single person up close in a day or a week of exploring. Through all the angst and anguish of my worst teenage years I experienced there the same at-homeness in my element that my father and I understood in the presence of the Grimes and Handler men.

Not when skulking down paths after dark through woods where only the infinitesimal difference between trodden grasses and wild reveals direction; not even in the company of the most alien of god’s creatures (teenage girl) did I loose that sense of oneness of self and land — an experience never known down in my flat-land school or home, and that was to desert me so completely in the years of work and suburban life to follow, until I came here to live on my island in the Charles where the abandoned rocks, small birds, and marshes surround me as they did in the Berkshire hills, and the surface of still waters mirrors the golden trees of fall and me.

The Glory of the Day

2009-01-04T18:14:00.002-05:00

It is a beautiful poem, but it is sad. It may be frightening. Worse yet, it is idealistic ... even naive ... romantic. It knows nothing of scarce resources which must be guarded… or pillaged when they belong to others. It is generous. The poet’s heart is not mired in discontent. He is not at odds, does not feel displaced from his rightful spot. He is not ashamed that he loves.

His name is James Weldon Johnson — the author of “Lift Every Voice and Sing”. He is Black. I was surprised to discover that. So, apparently, was he. His voice is possessed of such a special intelligence, his mind so focused in a place I could only identify as my own, that it seems incredible that this mind should be that of a man of a different race. And, yet, of course, he is a very Black writer. His themes, the occasions for many of his works, come directly from the Black community. They are expressed in plainly human terms. His heart and words are plainly human —

The glory of the day was in her face,
The beauty of the night was in her eyes.
And over all her loveliness, the grace
Of morning blushing in the early skies.

She is, of course, his much beloved wife. “When I met her, “ he says in his Autobiography of an Ex-colored Man, “When I met her, the surprise which I had felt at the first sound of her voice was heightened; she was almost tall and quite slender, with lustrous yellow hair and eyes so blue as to appear almost black. She was as white as a lily, and she was dressed in white.” And for the first time he had to face squarely the fact that he, on the other hand, was not. He says, “ ...I became again the bashful boy of fourteen, and my courage failed me. ...I don’t know what she said to me or what I said to her. I can remember that I tried to be clever, and experienced a growing conviction that I was making myself appear more and more idiotic. I am certain, too, that in spite of my ... complexion, I was red as a beet.”

The glory of the day was in her face,
The beauty of the night was in her eyes.
And over all her loveliness, the grace
Of morning blushing in the early skies.

And in her voice, the calling of the dove;
Like music of a sweet melodious part.
And in her smile, the breaking light of love;
And all the gentle virtues in her heart.

This is just so romantic. I was going to say, ‘it is just so male.’ I have never heard a woman speak this way. (Perhaps I just haven’t read enough in the Romance Novels vineyard.) I know there are women who feel that they have suffered from this seeming excessive identification of Virtue with Womanhood and, yet, its absence can be the cause of a desperate suffering.

“Gentle virtues ... sweet melodious part … calling … smiling ... in her heart.” Am I just old, just out of touch, that I weep for the absence of such tenderness in this life? Must we all be athletic go-getters, quick to fight, quick to scorn? Some kind of Super Adults who never need, never long — always the Meeters capable to the demands of the day? — always the Providers to others’ needs?

Here is the whole poem as Johnson wrote it. I’ll read it once and then I’m gone —

The glory of the day was in her face,
The beauty of the night was in her eyes.
And over all her loveliness, the grace
Of morning blushing in the early skies.

And in her voice, the calling of the dove;
Like music of a sweet melodious part.
And in her smile, the breaking light of love;
And all the gentle virtues in her heart.

And now the glorious day, the beauteous night,
The birds that signal to their mates at dawn,
To my dull ears, to my tear-blinded sight
Are one with all the dead, since she is gone.

Big Pond

2009-01-03T17:48:00.007-05:00

It is about 9 am and I am setting out on what has become a daily trip around the shore of what is known as Big Pond in the town of Otis, somewhere deep in the Berkshire hills of Western Massachusetts. My mother knows only that I go out exploring on the surfboard that my father and I built . (Well, let’s be honest here. I picked out the design; he built it, with me standing along side fetching tools as needed. As an adult, I actually built another one of these surfboards in the same basement of our family home, but without my father’s supervision. He was much too capable a craftsman to be able to tolerate my amateur fumbling efforts. Let it be noted that my board floated as well as his and was never known to crack-up on a rocky shore.)

This was a rather large and cumbersome 1940’s style board; nothing like the sleek designs of the ‘80’s. But I could lie across it, and, with wetted goggles securely in place, view the rocky bottom of Big Pond in immense detail, square foot by square foot.

I began these artistic inquiries around the beachfront near the summer cottage that my father also built, but each day I move further and further afield, slowly circumnavigating The Known World. I say these ware “artistic explorations” because all I really care about are color and shape and what the academically trained painter calls architecture. Truly, I knew nothing of minerals or of the slippage of tectonic plates or of glaciers creeping back and forth.

I move out past the Spencer’s house on the point, a wonderful old musky, dark abode of the elderly, and, thence, into the uncharted territory beyond, paddling eventually to the largest spring source of this incredibly cold and deep summer home I love. And, then, I press on further still, working my way around the blockade of rocks rising up, suddenly, to just beneath the surface of the water — a death trap for motorboats. This is totally forbidden territory. And, then, in a surprising turn of bravery, I head straight out toward the center of the pond, where an island of perhaps a dozen houses beacons.

Roaring deathtraps drawing skiers or bearing fishermen cross my path; an occasional sunfish, too, sails swiftly past before disembarking its young passenger in a burst of unbidden energy. (I will not speak of this adventure in my home, now or in the future.)

I peer into the boathouses and the front yards of the island people, and note the manufacturers and horsepower of their docked motorcraft. I view the faded green and white stripes of their wooden lawn chairs, and wonder at how they mow their lawns so neatly. It seems odd to my gentle mind that in this idyllic playground, so far from city formalities, mown lawns yet exert their tyranny.

Some of the inhabitants are curious about my origins and I am drawn inevitably into fraternization with them. I continue on even to the dark back side of the island, and, then, to a littler isle just off its coast, where there is evidence of wood fire and beer drinking.

Back home my mother has not really noticed my absence. She and my younger sister are busy with the things domestic women seem to find endlessly fascinating — sewing and cleaning and discoursing on the minutia of their lives. They might smile condescendingly but without comprehension at the magnitude of my adventures. They might be alarmed.

The Hunt for Jack Rabbit

2008-12-03T15:21:00.008-05:00

This is a story of great excitement, with joy and power thrown in for good measure. But it is also a story of death and fear. So that, almost inevitably, you must know that this is a story of the Divine. My world feels full of such sacredness, and I have had no experience more full of the divine presence than that of which this story speaks.

When I stood by the bed where my father lay, his body ravaged by the cancer that killed him many years ago, we spoke of the giant tree outside his window and of the divine power it seemed to embody looking over him, embracing him in his final hours. This is our experience of the woods.

The Hunt (for jack rabbits)

When I was twelve, my father took me hunting. Two of his buddies from work came with us. And, of course, there were the dogs — three dogs, three men, three shotguns, and me (out from behind my books).

I was familiar with the innards of the 30/06. My fathered cared for his religiously and I had often seen it on the kitchen table spread out in pieces, moist with oil. I knew also how, no matter how gently you might squeeze its trigger, it would still try to knock you to the ground with one giant kick in the shoulder. But my father’s men were big men and their guns obeyed them.

Their dogs were more precious than new born children. Harley Pentford Wellington III, commonly know as ‘Flash’, was a Beagle, and his line was the best of hunters. He was owned by my father, but he lived with me.

Always after supper we lay sprawled out on the diningroom floor in the embrace of the cool hard oak. Flash, the trained hunter, dreaming of the hunt, back there, lying between my legs. But he was not the best hunting dog we ever had. That honor belonged to Peanuts, who was dead — hit by a car, when I was six. Flash knew he was The Best in my heart, though I did love Peanuts, a lot. And I know my father missed him.

It was August and I was covered in bug spray and sweat and the dogs were jumping at their leashes. The men were full of stories, shotguns cradled in the crooks of their arms, cigarettes dangling from their lips. There were two fried egg sandwiches in my pockets — by six in the morning you are already hungry in the woods.

The trees, if they may be called that, were scrub oak; the brush was nearly as high. The burnt edges of scattered limbs testified to the fire that had downed them in days gone by. We grew silent amongst them; dog noses searched the ground. An unheard order required their release, and they charged off before us, racing down trails to destinies we could not follow. Old holes sprang up to view around us where fox or gopher once had lived. The sandy earth crunched beneath us. Leaves rattled in the breeze, when it came, bringing life from distant elsewheres and, then, moving on.

When the dogs began their frantic ritual of yips and darting here and there, they spoke a language no one could mistake. And hunter eyes scanned the brush for other signs of the life we knew, now, must linger here. The men were as keenly into the habits of our prey as were the dogs, and they worked as a single team in harness.

The oldest among the dogs took charge — shaking off the lesser scents, turning away from false trails now grown cold. This was no junior high lark. Matters of life and death were in our hands and in our senses.

And, then, suddenly, they were off! Tiny yips became great howls of excitement. Dogs tore madly through the underbrush, falling over their short legs, leaping more than running, crashing down long hillsides on their bellies. And we, tall monsters, thundered after them, though every step found us falling farther and farther behind until their cries were but a distant map of progress in the chase.

After some time the trail they ran moved off to our left. “They’ve turned him,” the men agreed. We were moving in a tight little circle that emulating the larger one that rabbits run in, when they fear for their lives. Dog voices had grown faint, but, now, suddenly, they grew louder. “They’re heading back!”

The men broke for a clearing directly in the path the fleeing rabbit must surely run. This time there was no time. No Time. There would be no chance for little rabbit tricks, no doubling back, no running in purposeless circles, no distracting our trained hunters from their deadly errand.

We stood silent at the clearing’s edge. The dogs’ cries were frantic, and coming closer. “Arw, arw,... arw, awr!” They were running straight toward us! The gun leapt into my father’s hands. Someone shouted. “Blam!”

I don’t know who fired. Men were running. The jack was down. Dogs were everywhere. A hunting knife flashed in the light. A head flew into a pile of leaping dogs. They were ferocious; their ecstasy almost too great to bear.

Eventually, the day drew gray, the first rain drops rustled the leaves, and we men headed for the cars. But the dogs were still off — too far away. Owners whistled and shouted out names. But only two came back. Our Flash was still on the trail.

The other men drove off after a long embarrassed wait. Rain rattled hard on our car’s hood, but we sat in silence peering out past the rivers of water now running down our windshield. My father got out every once in awhile and whistled and shouted, but Flash never came back. “Damn. He‘s got a deer.”

And in the end we had to go home without him. “We’ll come back in the morning.” And in the morning light Flash was there, bedraggled and exhausted, lying by the roadside where we had parked. My father wrapped him roughly in a blanket and he slept in my lap all the long journey home. “You were a naughty boy,” I whispered, but he paid no mind. Instinct guided him as it guided me, and I huddled over his frail figure with my back as a shield against the fire in my father’s eyes.

Joy Rewards the Great Warrior at Grant Park Nov. 4, 2008

2008-11-05T11:30:00.008-05:00

Playing for Change

2008-10-24T22:44:00.003-04:00

Green Man Walking

2008-09-04T21:16:00.031-04:00

Come, sit here awhile
In the soft cushion by my heart.
Here find home, not rooms for fear.
Here end the flight
That drags your heart from death to death.
Here, halt in moonlight's glow
Where even heartless android workmen feel again love flow
Through ancient corridors to places long forgotten —
This is the destiny for which you have fought and sought.

I, this motherland feeding your dream;
I, this dying god hauling your relentless burden upstream,
By your scars I know you! Through your failures I claim
Your heart.... I have waited so long. Come. Do not fail me.

----

In the garden of my soul where green pastures spread fragrant delights
And lazy horses nibble in the shade of old apple trees
A thin stream glistens in afternoon's slanted rays,
A warm summer sun shimmers in its own milky blue reflections.

In cool shadows down by water's edge,
Where even the smallest pebbles are cleaned and polished,
Glacier rubbed boulders form flat sitting spots for two gangly boys
Groping with sticks in cold depths beyond their minds to grasp.

While young horses munch down rotting apple droppings
To spice their green fodder with stolen sweets,
Flat saucer stones walk the water’s surface
In quick steps propelled by expert snaps.

Their watery graves, unmarked,
Are forgotten
Before their souls may gurgle free
Or their final 'plops' be heard.

On a far sunny knoll two black hounds lounge unnoticed,
Dreaming minds lost in former hunting glories,
Rerunning chases of great merit
Without present effort or apparent future purpose.

Here fearful minds behold Lord Chaos reigning.
No intentions guide toward long-term goals.
No affirmations of gainful purpose
Beguile serious strivers into mighty efforts.

For in this soul garden romantic histories
Still command respect and gallant heroes wrestle
Their foes to submission without loosing hearts to anger
Or minds to fears they cannot master by a simple cry to god.

Lionhearts beat strong in bony breasts;
Tired hooves stumble to late life victories;
Keen senses still find home through miles of haze;
And our Good King honors loyal knights as friends.

---

A rainbow melted from the sky one day and formed a pond where two small explorers now poke their heads beneath the water’s surface along the shallow shore, and scout out small curious stones while nosy passing bluegills nibble at their toes.

In deeper waters where boys do not go except by accident or by dare, the darkness sits - it's hungry belly primed for feasting; it's shadowed claws flexed and open wide in waiting. Here divers close their eyes lest fright devour their fight to surface.

"Such a pond is no plaything for disrespectful travelers", their mother's soft voice warns them, as she rides out from stables atop flashing hooves with snorts like fire crashing through sharp underbrush to fly across meadows in a sea of hair.

"Take care", she whispers, her lips burrowed in yellow cornsilk hair. "In such depths lie great treasures, hid for good reason from prying eyes that have no care for living."

---

A row boat is an unwieldy thing especially when powered
By independent oarsmen. They struggled with the logistics of backward travel.
They practiced poling off undetected rocks masked by reflection's glare.
A map of underwater dangers unfolded slowly in their minds.

From the haven of their wide-bottomed craft they surveyed their dominion
And their hair grew whiter still as their skin grew dark as night.
And in that darkest hour when the sun's warmth has faded farthest from our earth
They woke together as though hearing the same voice calling.

By their rainbow pond they stood transfixed, bare toes gripping icy sand,
And they climbed into their dingy quiet as the air in breathing.
Their oars they moved in union; their strokes were strong; their aim was sure;
And they plunged beneath the surface as a single splash, now swallowed, now unnoticed.

They were absent still from their beds when she called to wake them
For their chores. Blankets and clothes were scattered about on bare wooden floor.
From the high tower window she could see the dingy floating empty
In the center of the pond and a rainbow was sucking at the water, hard.

She spread her arms to greet it and urge it to its lonely task -
To turn these waters back to heaven; to lift their burden from the earth.
But her boys sat huddled, shaking on the farthest shore.
Four black hounds paced around them. All arms and legs gripped others.

When she stood beside them, they huddled lower. With care she stooped
And encircled them with a deep velvet cloak - a cloak she had never worn herself
But saved secure in a chest long locked in a chamber beneath the tower.
For Lionhearts beat still in bony breasts and friendship is treasure beyond any price.

---

The Green Man poked in the rubble of the rainbow pond departed.
His staff was a sapling trunk - no mere branch held he in weathered hand.
Great boulders toppled to their sides; wet underbellies he lay exposed,
And he glowered down through green flashing eyes beneath great rusty eyebrows.

He cried out, "Ho!", at each new discovery. Boys crouched and watched wide eyed.
They were not afraid. At least so they said as they boldly ventured
In the giant's parting wake. He strode through the pond with majestic step
And they marched in his footsteps with their own staffs tapping.

They had seen him first at the twilight hour, surveying the muck and ruin
Of the summer pond that had been their joy and was still their hunting ground.
They peered hard into places he uncovered. They touched and smelled
The muddy bowels of the ancient creature we now call Earth.

He seemed unaware of their prying presence. Though he sometimes smiled
To an inner joke when they could not see his visage.
A great round hat shaded his ruddy features and wild red hair
Poked out beneath it like raspberry bushes from the roadside.

The excitement of their discoveries emboldened the boys each day.
They rose with the sun and roamed into the night obsessed with their new science.
She stood in the saddle and watched from the hill and waited in stony silence.
For she knew this man and she knew his plan and she sent her dogs to track him.

They crept in a crouch that only old dogs know,
And they hunted him down to his lair in a cave in the rock -
Moss covered and water dripping - back deep in the dark,
Where she now stood and glowered; hands thrust on her hips; breasts heaving.

"These boys," she hissed, "are not treasures to keep.
They live in the sunlight. They dance in the meadow.
Free they are. Free they shall remain so long as Lionhearts are still beating."
And she drew her sword as the lightning flashes.

His foot stomped ground. Rocks trembled and fell.
"Mine!", he roared, like dark wind howling, and his staff he raised
As though to strike her numb. But she stood still on silent ground.
Green eyes stared into his green orbs, and he knew her then for what she was.

His staff he lay on the ground between them and he sank to a rock
To wait. Her breathing slowed and she sheathed her sword.
Her hounds gathered behind her feet. Their teeth were bared,
But they held their ground and slowly sank to the rock to wait.

"I mean no harm." He spoke with a soft, rough sound,
Like a man who has rarely spoken and must search in his throat
For muscles forgotten to clear out a path for his words to follow.
"I love them. My sons. True sons. Not right to stop me."

His voice seared great streaks in her breast and belly
And she thought such wounds must pour out her life on this man.
Her hounds whimpered - her distress was theirs,
And they rose, all crouched to spring to their deaths if need be.

But the man made no move. Kept his hands on his knees
And leaned forward as though the better to see her. He wanted to rise
And his heart felt her pain, but he dared not reach out to touch her.
"Ah," he signed. "I have no match for such anger."

The tears in her eyes shamed her hot warrior heart
And she turned from his gaze to shield them.
He rose, now, without word and strode through the dogs
Who stepped aside as though for their master.

They walked to the pond. He stood apart in the shadows.
Yes, two boys still searched there for meaning. "My boys," he murmured,
And he turned to her eyes: "Treasures they are, but not treasures to keep."
His words burned her soul but she nodded.

---

A hole in the universe

2008-09-02T11:10:00.004-04:00

Wood engraving from 'L'atmosphere: meteorologie populaire', 1888, by French astronomer, Camille Flammarion.

Juliana Hatfield and Peter Adams on The Tonight Show (8/25)

2008-08-26T18:43:00.011-04:00

The shootings in Knoxville

2008-07-30T18:22:00.013-04:00

The shooting death of two members during a worship service at the Unitarian Universalist church in Knoxville, Tennessee has resulted in an outpouring of prayers and messages of support from around the country. Waltham Unitarian Universalists, like myself, grieve for our brothers and sisters in Knoxville.

As spiritual seekers who have taken a hard look at human social life, we can begin to understand the depth of feeling that can drive an abusive man with a history of contempt for gays and liberals, as this shooter appears to have been.

But it is still shocking to see such hatred acted out and to recognize ourselves as its victims. Our Waltham church has been plagued by only minor vandalism due to our support of gay and lesbian marriage rights. And, thankfully, here in our city we are not alone in that social stand as Unitarian Universalist churches in other parts of the country often are. It is good to feel surrounded by friends in such emotion filled circumstance.

Most news reports focus on the shotgun-wielding intruder, but I find the churchmen who confronted him more worthy of contemplation — John Bohstedt, Terry Uselton, Jamie Parkey, and, especially, Greg McKendry (deceased) who was the quickest to action.

It is certainly true, as the Knoxville News Sentinel observed, “that no place is immune to such violence”, but the heroes of compassion and bravery, like these who rise to the community's need, are the ones who will see us through to a more just and caring day.

I am told that at the public vigil held on Tuesday in support of our Knoxville parishioners the final song was so emotion packed that the crowd erupted in shouts and cheers for the young singers, applause and tears of gratitude for the community’s concern, as well as grief for the victims of such an outrage. Amen to that.

"The Visitor"

2008-07-07T21:04:00.037-04:00

I read one blogger who (with outrage eyes) saw Tom McCarthy’s film, The Visitor, as liberal propaganda about post-9/11 US mistreatment of Muslims. It would help this interpretation of the film if the words ’Muslim’ or ‘Islam’ were anywhere part of the soundtrack or if all Syrians or Senegalese could be reliably depicted as at least non-Christian.

There can be no doubt that the film’s immigrants are illegal and callously treated for no particular reason, but some presumably honest individual finding such a strong religious twist to the film ought to make us wonder about what we actually experience when we go to the movies or even when we walk outside afterwards. How much of our experience is actually happening? Is so much of what we experience being shaped by our expectations that we can never know what is real?

When I watched The Visitor at my local Landmark Theatre, I saw a story about Walter, a college professor who has lost his way, but now begins to discover in drumming new possibility for meaning in his life. This drumming is introduced to him through Tarek, the illegal Syrian immigrant he finds living in his long-abandoned NYC apartment.

Maybe we should compromise between these extreme interpretations and say that “the film’s title refers to [Walter] — a transient presence in his own life —as much as it does to Tarek, who seems at home wherever he is.” *

Walter is no where at home when the story begins. He tries to connect with the life he shared with his dead wife through learning to play the piano, as she did. But that is no more successful than finding meaning in his teaching or in writing another book. By ‘accident’ he is forced to return to the apartment he shared with her many years ago and there he finds through his visitor, Tarek, the musical connection to the feeling life that he seeks.

The Visitor storyline is far simpler than its emotional impact. Political activists will be driven toward righting our panicked Ship of State. Introspectives may be drawn to Walter’s life predicament and the powerful personal connection he finds through the music that embraces his foreign soul.

Go see this movie. I’m afraid that its impact may be lessened by seeing it alone on your little TV screen. For me the film is still about being at home — at home in your own skin; at home in the society where you live; an awkward, sometimes angry visitor.

****
We didn't talk about Tarek's mother, but we should have — a real traditionalist we think she is. The modernist, Tarek, strives to keep her in the dark about his Senegalese girlfriend. [One blogger actually refers to Tarek's girlfriend as "his wife", but nothing could be farther from what we see happening on the screen.] Fortunately, this mother is one traditionalist for whom love trumps all.

Not surprisingly we can feel Walter falling in love with this woman's solid ways. We, too, admire her as she rises above stereotype and accepts Tarek's loving embrace of "ethnic diversity".

Her name in Mouna [The Mouna Diamond weighs 112.53 carats and is of even greater color and weight than the Tiffany Diamond.] and at first it seems like this will be Red State Mouna vs. Blue State Walter. But in the end they are unified in their inability to deal with the monstrosity that our government has become.

The Visitor may be the story of Walter Vale's quest for a truly living identity, but his story takes place in the wasteland that our weak-kneed politicians seem hell-bent on creating.

* A. O. SCOTT in The New York Times film review, April 11, 2008.

Yes, We Can.

2008-06-21T14:33:00.024-04:00

Three words that will ring from coast to coast.

Three words that will place a giant period at the end
of eight years of small minded decision-making,
corrupt war-making,
& plain old incompetence.

At the Largo with Justin Currie (6/11)

2008-06-13T22:06:00.054-04:00

The new Largo is quite up-scale, but, as you fans know, Justin and Peter are very well dressed, so he fit in as well as any f---ing Scotsman could expect to. It’s a big room (280 seats) and the acoustics are great, so I was very pleased — you can both hear every word and not be jammed into your neighbor’s elbow.

Flanagan seems to have spent willingly on the new place and was eager to show everyone around. Couldn’t have been more different from The Viper Room, which is way too small and way too loud as far as I am concerned. Not a place Justin would want to play in this new solo career, though perfect for the old days, I guess.

Certainly The Viper was the right place for a rock star like Rob Dickinson [The Man from Catherine Wheel] — I don't mean to put the place down. We had a great time there squeezing into the telephone booth they call a green room and the band was great [not just because Peter was in it]. There was Peter's old friend from the Boston days, Michael Eisenstein [USA Mike of Letters to Cleo fame], on guitar — that was a very pleasant surprise. Then, there was Rob's friend, Tim Friese-Greene, on keyboards — even more of an eyebrow raiser; an awesome shocker even, since Peter and I grew-up together musically listening to Talk Talk and similar British pop bands from back in The Day.

But I digress more than usual—
For Justin's Largo show I brought along an extra handkerchief just in case it got to be too much — his songs are so heart wrenching I can barely stand to listen sometimes. Happy to say I managed to survive even though they ended the show with two incredible Del Amitri B-side classics: ‘Driving with The Brakes On’ and ‘Sleep Instead of Teardrops’.

Imagine this! After an hour and a half of the slick-tongued Scotsman plucking your heart strings, you get [back to back] a guy being driven into the long night by the girl he loves toward some place so desolate that no one where they come from would ever go there, followed immediately by this shot to the now unguarded solar plexus—

Cry, cry out your eyes forever
It won’t go away
I, I’m just a dumb observer
It’s so stupid what I say

Like everyone else will do I’m gonna lie to you
Tell you that life is cruel but someday you’re gonna wake up
With sleep instead of teardrops in your eyes

And so, nobody lives forever
The crassest of clichés
Like time, time is the greatest healer
But it’s a murderer today

Like everyone else will do I’m gonna lie to you
Tell you that life is cruel but someday you’re gonna wake up
With sleep instead of teardrops in your eyes

You know my holding you won't change anything
I can’t stop this whole charade continuing
As each consoling kiss remains on your face like a stain

So cry, cry out those tears
And let them succumb to gravity
And try, try as I might
I’ll never fill that vacancy

Like everyone else will do I’m gonna lie to you
Tell you that life is cruel but someday you’re gonna wake up
With sleep instead of teardrops in your eyes

Someday you’re gonna wake up
With sleep instead of teardrops in your eyes

By now Justin is safely at home in Glasgow. Peter is probably down on Sunset enjoying The Submarines' show at The Echo. And I am left here to reassure you that someday you're gonna wake up with sleep instead of teardrops in your eyes.

Justin Currie & Peter Adams at Joe's Pub, NYC

Justin Currie PLUS Rob Dickinson — Wow!

2008-06-05T13:45:00.022-04:00

I descend upon Los Angeles this Saturday just in time to hear [get this] Rob Dickinson [June 10 at The Viper Room] followed by Justin Currie [June 11 at Largo]! I expect Peter to be singing with both guys, but I'm really there for the duo with Justin. [If you're in LA you can always join us, you know.]

On top of this huge musical treat Peter says I'll probably have to take in a rehearsal earlier in the week because a couple of friends [Butch Norton & David Sutton] will be joining Justin and him for part of the show at Largo. Tsk. Tsk. Sure hope I can endure it.

Part of the fun will be checking out the clubs.

As we pass under the purple awning at The Viper will the ghost of River Phoenix rise from the sidewalk where he died [Halloween,1993]? How about the steam of Mick Jagger and Uma Thurman locked in embrace or the smoke from Ellen DeGeneres and Anne Heche lighting up? Oh, the nostalgia.... Maybe Bugsy Siegel will still be waving his rod around in the cloud of imagination gone wild. (Note to self: bring ear plugs...leave fantasy visions at home.)

Looking for Larry David at Club Largo will surely "Curb [my] Enthusiasm" — yeh, the club is billed as a comedy as well as music stop. But the music is really serious here (the words matter). Michael Penn, Rufus Wainwright, Jon Brion — now that's a musical tradition to live up to, isn't it? It's going to be tough leaving this place.

Race Based Politics in America

2008-05-18T18:34:00.010-04:00

A few days ago I heard an extensive up-to-date report on conditions in Kenya. Remember the rampages of destruction after the recent elections that threw-out the current government which refused to disclose the vote and so its own defeat?

Charlie Clements* spoke to us of the terror engendered by the attacks of one tribal group upon another in the weeks that followed. Kenyans who had been living together in peace for all the years of their independence, intermarrying, doing business with one another were suddenly forcibly splitting families apart, destroying one another’s homes and businesses. Hidden tribal grievances suddenly broke into the open and the true nature of peaceful, reasonable Kenya , the democratic beacon of African hope, was called into question.

Or was it? Last night a young man connected to the Kenyan girls schools that my church supports reported to us that all is well back home. The girls are in no danger. Peace prevails. All is normal. ...Oh, yes, food is now very expensive. And, yes, the high school senior we were going to send to university is no longer planning to go to a Kenyan school. She will [suddenly] be going to Uganda ... ‘because the schools are better there.’

The discussion of Race in America led by ministers of the United Church of Christ and Unitarian Universalists this Sunday morning suddenly seems, to my mind, illumined by the Kenyan experience.

Undiscussed, unaddressed racial issues suddenly erupted in our homeland, too, thanks to 24 hour TV news shows’ blatant abuse of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and the Right Wing attempt to smear Barack Obama’s quest for the presidency.

Leave aside for the moment the dirty Rovean politics and the unprincipled, incompetent so-called news people blathering on our TV screens. Consider, instead, how race divides us. Still divides us — despite all the earnest effort of the last 40 years.

Like our young Kenyan friend, we long to believe in Peaceful America, the America we love, where ethnic differences do not divide — “Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses.” [No, no, ‘Illegal Immigration’ is not about race.] And in our longing for the America of our dreams we conspire with ourselves to not notice the police profiling and racial fear that fills our mammoth prison system with young black men. [Just to name aloud one small affront to decency.] And, now, along comes disgraceful politics in our homeland, too, and what just cannot be is exposed for all to see.

See all those happy white and black faces cheering the hopeful change Obama embodies! That is our America! That is who we truly are. The hundreds of hours spent by political operatives pouring through Jeremiah Wright’s 30-plus year sermonic history just cannot represent who we are as a nation. It’s just too evil... too anti-American in values. It just cannot represent the America, blessed by G_d, and beloved in song at baseball parks all across the nation. Can it?

*Dr. Charlie Clements, head of the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, speaking at Andover Newton Theological School, upon his return from a fact-finding mission to Kenya, where he met with local, non-governmental groups in Nairobi and elsewhere.

If I Ever Loved You — Justin Currie

2008-05-08T22:01:00.021-04:00

As you can see, Peter and Justin had a great time on their tour across the country and northern Europe, but now its just about over — for awhile anyway. Hopefully they'll play around LA while they rest up. Peter has a film score to get back to, but I'm sure that won't keep him in the house if Justin wants to play. Will he be just 'too busy' when it comes time to jet off to record at London's Abbey Road Studios? [What do you think?]

I hear the title track on Justin's new release, "What is love for?", playing on my supermarket's speakers. It feels really weird trying to take in such heart felt thoughts while shopping for peanut butter and crackers.

My own fave is "If I ever loved you". I guess I could image writing something like this in response to my own sometimes strange apprehensions of life:

I try to figure what has gone
I seem to look the same
Maybe there's a tightness around my eyes

Sometimes the evening comes
I think I miss someone
And then I realise

That, if I ever loved you, shouldn't I be crying?
Shouldn't I be cracking up
And drinking all the time?
Yeah, if I ever loved you, how come I feel alright?
How come the nights are so easy
And the mornings look so bright?

When I hear Justin sing this, I don't hear him questioning his love for 'her'. He believes that he did love her. His question is about his own reactions: "Why am I not crying? Why am I not cracking up? I'm taking this loss in stride — what is going on in me?" The singer is discovering something about himself that he didn't know before the break-up and is confused about who he really is as a result. He accuses himself of not being conventional in his emotions.

No wonder the song is interesting; not just your usual pop fare.

Can the conflict in Israel/Palestine really be transformed?

2008-05-04T17:30:00.008-04:00

Today started at 9am with a discussion of the Israeli/Palestinian situation led by our friend, Rachel, who is just back from a two week visit to the area as part of an Interfaith Peace-Builders delegation.

This is not an easy way to begin the day. It’s not just that The Wall is such a reminder of Berlin and of our own Mexican paranoia. It’s that the situation looks so hopeless.

According to our news media and the implications of the Israeli wall, there appear to be two countries at war — Israel and Palestine. But, when you look at a map showing Palestinian and Israeli settlements, you are confronted by a mammoth intermixing of communities that defies boundaries — Israeli enclaves have been constructed seemingly everywhere. The Wall looks more like a resource protector than an actual political boundary — more like a dam preventing Columbia River water from ever being shared with Mexico.

I’m sure there are many explanations for how this disaster came to be. But, just this brief look, that Rachel provided us, into how people are actually living, was enough to break the heart. “What hope can there possibly be for transforming this conflict that is not just a bloodbath?”

I have been reading, rather naively, John Lederach’s The Little Book of Conflict Transformation, hoping to expand my own theories of conflict transformation based on experience dealing with what turnout to be comparatively petty church conflicts. Vicious as church politics can become we ain’t no Somalia or Ireland or South Africa. I am not a little humbled just meditating for a Sunday hour on the quest for peace in Israel/Palestine.

The fact that, even with his international experiences, Lederach can continue to hope and argue for the possibility of transformation — not merely resolution or management — of conflict like this lifts me a little out of the feeling of hopelessness I carried away from Rachel’s descriptions of life on the ground in Palestine.

Quote of the week

2008-04-14T16:31:00.016-04:00

"JOYFUL VOICES OF INSPIRATION is an enthusiastic community of singers who [sic] celebrates and shares the joy, power and message of gospel music. The group rejoices in the diversity of its membership and encourages singers of all ages, cultures and religious affiliations. The singers and the director [James Early] strive to create a family-like environment in which they support and mentor each other.

"The choir seeks to promote appreciation of gospel music as both an inspirational medium and important musical art form. Members believe that by singing together in energetic, spirited performances they can bring joy and inspiration to all present. The group strives to support and participate in charitable events through their concerts and performances."

The Attack on Jeremiah Wright & Trinity UCC

2008-03-28T16:31:00.011-04:00

All the controversy surrounding the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, senior minister at Trinity UCC in Chicago, where Barack Obama worships, got me to wondering how leaders of the United Church of Christ were dealing with this all-out media attack on the pastor of the denomination's largest congregation.

In a quick survey I find that the Rev. John Thomas, president of the United Church of Christ, offered high praise for Dr. Wright at his retirement ceremony about a month ago when right-wing critics were shouting relentlessly from the tube. And the Rev. Jane Fisler Hoffman, the northern Illinois district minister of the United Church of Christ, who also attends Trinity church, spoke out in January in strong support of the church’s ministry. I would love to find that Unitarian Universalist leaders are speaking up, but I do recognize that at stake here are deep philosophical and social issues which challenge all thoughtful Americans.

It turns out the assault on Dr. Wright and Trinity church has been going on a lot longer than you or I may have realized. The Christian Century in a substantial article profiled Trinity UCC back in May, 2007 as a church already under attack by “right-wing bloggers and TV pundits” intent on swiftboating Obama.

I listened to all of Dr. Wright’s rousing 40 minute sermon from April 2003, “Confusing God and Government”, now circulating in a seemingly endless two minute loop on YouTube. The full sermon was quite an experience for this liberal not-Christian, but, apparently, it is an apoplexy inducement for evangelicals who equate G_d and country. This seems to be exactly as it should be given the sermon’s challenge to such beliefs. Elsewhere, Dr. Wright challenges those evangelicals who equate G_d and money-making, but you’ll have to do your own research on that one — at least for now.

Jeremiah Wright is an unabashed student and follower of the black liberation theologian, Dr. James Cone. Barack Obama is not. Obama says he has heard Dr. Wright make statements with which he ‘absolutely’ does not agree. You will understand immediately what he may mean after you hear “Confusing God and Government”; their differences in attitude toward race are passionate. I’m with Obama, but I had great sympathy for Wright’s angry views. I am thrilled to see the United Church of Christ try to embrace such dramatic differences and saddened to recognize the difficultes our own denomination faces along this complex racial fault-line.

A More Perfect Union — Obama Speech

2008-03-20T18:33:00.006-04:00

Read the whole speech at The Christian Science Monitor site. Is this the "I Have a Dream" speech of our time?

When Politicians Express Concern for the Environment Mixed with Love for Ronald Reagan

2008-03-20T13:12:00.006-04:00

You’ve heard them; don’t claim you never watch Fox ‘News’. Reagan is the last anointed prophet of American conservatives. Presidential candidates have proclaimed his virtues for months. Some paused for a moment at the grave of William F. Buckley, but that moment has past.

Here in The Mail* I find Steve Nelson recalling some of that sobering stuff we like to call history: “To reduce our dependence on imported oil, in 1977 a national goal was set (with bipartisan support) to derive twenty per cent of our energy from renewable sources and conservation by the year 2000. Toward that end the Solar Energy Research Institute was established, in Colorado, along with four regional centers ... to help foster commercialization and adoption of alternative technologies and practices. When Ronald Reagan took office, he slashed the institute’s budget, ordered the four centers shut (on Christmas Eve), allowed tax incentives for renewables to lapse, and, for good measure, removed the solar panels that Carter had installed on the roof of the White House.”

How does being conservative lead to the fervent embrace of Oil at the expense of all other energy sources? Are there really any actual conservatives left in American politics?

*The New Yorker, Mar.24,2008, p. 5. Yes, the print magazine.

A Stroke of Insight

2008-03-20T10:43:00.005-04:00

This is such a remarkable talk! I hope you will take the time away from the demands of career and plans and fears acquired to listen to Jill for just a few moments. This recording is, of course, widely available on the Web, but, perhaps, finding it here will prove useful. Perhaps, even inspirational.

"A Date which Will Live in Infamy"

2008-03-19T14:56:00.009-04:00

Yes, March 19th is the day that our armed forces “suddenly and deliberately attacked” a nation with which we were “at peace and still in conversation” (the two things FDR — in his famous speech condemning the attack— found most revolting about the Japanese government’s behavior at Pearl Harbor).

This evening marks the beginning of Norooz, the Persian New Year. May we all begin sweeping out the old year’s mess along with the everyday folks in Iran, and hope that by morning the world will seem a little brighter despite the dark cloud emanating from the backsides of our leaders. We breath a little easier knowing that, at least on this fateful day, the Lord Cheney has not been pressing to expand this outrageous war across the river into Iran.

Ordinarily, I leave the recognition of anniversaries and such to Monkey Mind, but today he is preoccupied with much brighter news* of his own. So today let us mark the anniversary of The Three Trillion Dollar War, but let us also rejoice in the smaller, hopefully less nefarious events that enrich our personal lives.

*Congratulations Mr. Ford!

Leonard Cohen World Tour

2008-03-18T20:33:00.008-04:00

This summer's Leonard Cohen tour, which I was so excited about, never stops in the USA. Yes, I suppose, I could make the journey to Toronto or Montreal, but that don't seem likely, do it. [That's 200$ Canadian for seats at the Place des Arts!]

Perhaps the stock market will make a miraculous recovery and the value of our horded greenbacks will soar! Ha! Perhaps my father’s investment in Florida’s panhandle will suddenly become beachfront property thanks to melting icecaps and rising seas. More likely.

Most likely, I will hunker down in a dark room this summer with my Austin City Limits DVD of Cohen’s October 1988 concert and revel in the way things used to be. "Take this waltz, take its broken waist in your hand."

Getting Perspective

2008-03-17T09:53:00.003-04:00

"When people tell you to get your life into perspective, they usually seem to mean that there is one rational, objective way in which to view what you are doing. This will enable you to see things, they say, as they 'really are'.

But I say, 'See things in different ways. At the same time, preferably.' You need to see life at least three different ways to know where you are. Use just one and you're completely lost."

Bread & Roses

2008-03-13T19:40:00.015-04:00

The power of beauty for people in desperate circumstance was very much on Bill Schulz’s* mind when we heard him speak Thursday afternoon at Andover Newton Theological School. Recalling one of his trips to a refuge camp in Darfur he told us of a woman, living in the horror of this displacement from human circumstance, who none the less wore a treasured turquoise colored glass necklace which she referred to as herself — not simply something valuable to her, but her very self (the self still in existence despite the degradation of camp life).

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, the French impressionist painter, cautioned art purchasers to choose with care what they hung on their walls for the power of the paintings they chose would influence them each time they viewed them.

This same power of the beautiful was recognized by the 20,000 striking women textile workers during their famous 1912 confrontation with mill owners in Lawrence, Massachusetts.

The legendary banner the women carried, as part of one of their demonstrations, called for Bread & Roses, just as garment workers had in 1908 when demonstrators marched after the death of 128 women in a New York garment factory fire.

The banner and the courage of the strikers so inspired James Oppenheim, an Industrial Workers of the World union organizer at the time, that he wrote this commemorative poem, later set to music as it appears in our Unitarian Universalist hymnal:

“As we come marching, marching, in the beauty of the day,
A million darkened kitchens, a thousand mill lofts gray,
Are touched with all the radiance that a sudden sun discloses,
For the people hear us singing: Bread and Roses! Bread and Roses!”

*Dr. William F. Schulz, a past president of the Unitarian Universalist Association and former executive director of Amnesty International USA.

What Can We UUs Offer to Those Who Hunger & Thirst for G_d?

2008-03-10T16:43:00.005-04:00

Those who hunger and thirst after G_d should not allow themselves to be deflected from their yearning by our or any other church. It is G_d who answers our prayers, not an institution, not religion.

So the first thing I think we can say out of our UU experience is: “You are on the right path. It is your hunger that will feed you. Hold it close and do not let it go.”

Unitarian Universalists begin with the individual. The ultimate basis of our thought is personal experience. We start in our awareness of life — not in holy books or creeds or traditions. This is not to say that there is no help in these resources, but this is not where it begins. It begins in the heart, in the striving, in the quest, in the transcendent mystery that moves us to renewal of the spirit.

The heart is the seat of knowledge. Our science teaches us that we think with our whole bodies, not merely with our brains. Those who hunger and thirst in their pursuit of true knowledge are already on the path to G_d. We do not urge them to leave that path in order to take our predetermined, one-size-fits-all way.

We can teach that wisdom gathered from many of the world’s religious resources will lead such seekers to recognize that true knowledge does not lie in the content of what we have learned alone, but in the insights we have accumulated through experience of our actions and awareness of our personal characteristics.

For the great Muslim philosopher al-Ghazzali:
“Such knowledge is a ‘disposition deeply rooted in the soul from which actions flow naturally and easily without means of reflection or judgment.’ Such knowledge is not only what we know but what we feel. It is knowledge that is not only known but meant. The fusion of knowing, feeling, and doing integrates the outer and the inner man.” *

In the process of such integration the individual may best hope to find G_d. Unitarian Universalism does not need to invent a separate unique path to G_d. We need to actively point to the many paths already available. In doing so we may reveal the power of the diversity we embrace and provide the open path particularly suited to post-modern times.

The second thing I think we can say out of our experience is: “You are on the right path. It is your hunger that will feed you. Hold it close and do not let it go.”

In your hunger you will digest your experience, becoming one with it. In your thirst you will taste, not merely consume what life brings to you. This path of integration is the path of G_d.

The respect, that you will gain as you experience the interconnectedness of all existence, will draw you more and more deeply into what Christians sometimes call the kingdom of G_d — this place where we belong; this place where your heart’s hunger can find satisfaction; this mystery where you recognize the living G_d that exists beside and within you.

*Revivification of the Religious Sciences as quoted in Ira Lapidus, A History of Islamic Societies, p. 165.

Cooper at 2 1/2 weeks since the accident

2008-03-10T14:49:00.003-04:00

Peter & Amy Tell the UU Story

2008-03-09T13:12:00.007-04:00

We all have to start somewhere. What could be better than to be a Beginner with such good hearted souls as Peter Bowden and Amy Freedman? Amy grew-up in our Waltham church and is the minister at Channing Memorial Church in Newport, RI. Check out Peter's website especially if you are thinking about trying to organize small groups in your church.

Ice Palace

2008-03-07T15:18:00.009-05:00

"What do we offer to those who hunger for God?"

2008-03-05T14:03:00.014-05:00

I don’t usually wander very far in the blogger world, but I had to check out the popular PeaceBang site when a friend sent me a referral to her treatise on “What Depressed Me About GA”.

I had to read this, my correspondent said, because we (she, Sue & I) were standing with PB when she witnessed, at last year’s General Assembly, this really stupid spectacle of a UU man mocking an evangelical Christian who was distributing pamphlets on the street corner nearby.

It was not the first time I had had the pleasure, if you will, of witnessing this sort of arrogant behavior by one of our merry band of tolerant souls. Perhaps I should have been more shocked, but church-people-behaving-badly is pretty old news. It was old news in my childhood Methodist church. It was old in either congregation of the United Church of Christ in whose choirs I sang. That’s why we observers of the world reject the idea that the USA would be a more moral nation were it also a Christian nation. [That and the George W. experience, of course.]

I was shocked the first time I heard a UU belittle Christianity. When I first stepped into the UU world, I hoped to find a far better place than I had known before, but I learned quickly that we are pretty much like everybody else.

What remains truly shocking for me is the perception that, without a quick descent into warmed over liberal Christianity, a large percentage of UU clergy would be unable to answer PB’s question, “What do we offer to those who hunger for God?”.

PB, herself, seems drawn by this escape back to Christianity. But, if mainline Protestantism is answering her question so well, why are its churches losing membership? Why do so many people, who join evangelical churches, leave them? I can’t imagine why any capable UU minister would long to run off to the long-struggling Episcopal church down the street here in my adopted hometown, no matter how classically reassuring its wordy ritual.

Liberal Christianity seems to be struggling, just as Unitarian Universalism is, to enter the 21st century with a meaning filled understanding of G_d that relates successfully to the way-things-really-are. Thanks to the stubborn rationalism of modernists (as, I think, we may well suppose our UU mocker of Christians to be) and the blind attachment to the distant past of evangelical traditionalists on the corner significant portions of our populous are left hungering — certainly PB is right here. But, if either liberal or evangelical Christianity were working, why this hungering?

I am not arguing that contemporary Christianity is wrong. I’m just saying that it is irrelevant to the post-modern world because it doesn’t see the life that we are actually experiencing. It is stuck in scientific beliefs of the past that have led it down deadend paths. And it is further hampered by an inappropriate relationship to its traditions. But, are we, Unitarian Universalists, any more relevant as a Third Way? That’s the real question, isn’t it.

PB seems frustrated by Unitarian Universalism’s continuing failure to provide that Way. Good. But how about broadening the search for truth and meaning beyond our Christian heritage? How about bringing forward those UU clergy whose reactions are leading them to a better understanding of the life unfolding around us? Surely, so powerful a person as PeaceBang could find them were she determined in her search.

Blaming denominational leaders is a peculiar way to go, I think. If the average elected politician could lead, our world would be full of Barack Obamas. Believe in ground up leadership. Be true to our democratic experience. Be the change we are seeking.

More Recovered Memories

2008-03-04T15:36:00.008-05:00

I remember these guys as old friends. We met in 1999 and '98. They were difficult to find, but, once discovered, they demanded that I stay in touch.

Found Images

2008-03-03T20:22:00.018-05:00

By some miracle of technology or lucky intervention, these images (and several others) that I created over a decade ago are still readable thanks to my now ancient Zip Drive. I’m wondering what to make of them.

I remember spending countless hours engrossed in the minutia of each picture, fussing over details most viewers would, in all likelihood, never notice. Was I ill or enraptured? The distinction between artistry and insanity is not always that clear to me.

Leonard Cohen says that it can sometimes take years of revision before he is ready to call a song or poem satisfactory. Perhaps my pictures are like that. Will they ever be finished? Do I even want them to be finished? How can a picture ever be finished, if the artist is always changing?

Today’s me is really an emergent form of the old me; not something radically new. That makes sense, doesn’t it? So each version of any one of these pictures reflects the emergent phenomenon* that goes by the same name on each renewed driver’s license.

Even though I be Born Again down by the riverside, I am still born anew as a version of the self that used to be. Yesterday I may have been just a green plant, but today I emerge as a flower nestled in green leaves. Wow!

When the flower fades and the green leaves wither, will I still be me? Will you recognize me in the wrinkled aftermath of earlier glory or disaster?

*See Jim Sherblom's November sermon at the First Parish in Brookline, "You are an emergent phenomenon".

Quote of the week

2008-03-03T10:35:00.007-05:00

"What is the point in all this effort to be your true self, if you must always do what other people want just to please them?"

Out of the Many — One

2008-02-29T14:50:00.010-05:00

This week’s Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life survey release seems to have captured the media’s attention, perhaps because, like so much else in American life, it defies their either/or perceptions. It turns out that not only are we not a Christian nation; we can’t even be called Judeo-Christian — too many Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, et al.

It appears that the Unitarian Universalist experience of religious identity reflects the American landscape better than we might have imagined. Our identity cross-section is different in many ways, but our diversity mirrors the nation. How well are we dealing with our diversity?

Some of us are still trying to absorb the possibility that we may be classified as Protestants! Who knew? I did hear a reference to the Christian Bible during a worship service the other day. No, it was not during the Christmas Pageant Service — that was largely a Christmas-like stories from around the world sort of adventure.

In our church we hear occasional reference to Christian or Jewish scriptures, just as the preacher may call upon Buddhist or Sufi thought at other times. There are even periodic movements to have our various religious traditions celebrated more intentionally. But, mostly, our diversity seems to be taken for granted and not explored very closely. Often we seem, like Barack Obama, to be a little embarrassed by our heritage, rather than eager to celebrate it.

In any case the Big News about our many religions background is not the multiplicity but the seeming ability of parishioners to put together a more or less satisfying spiritual practice based in multiple sources.

The modernist drive to find the single truth all must believe will find no satisfaction among us. How ironic is that — given our Humanist bent for the last couple of decades!

But the post-modernist embrace of the many may help us build a sturdier religious platform as we become more accustomed to not knowing with the old, should we say arrogant(?), certitude.

The Storm Is Passing Over

2008-02-27T13:15:00.014-05:00

Two nights ago we brought our dog home from surgery — both right-side legs shattered by confrontation in the night with superior forces (automotive). The stillness is wonderful as we sit or lie in our peaceful house; together at last after our five days of forced separation.

Sometimes the soft sounds of Peter’s latest songs lull us. Sometimes the silence cradles our stillness and rocks us gently home to our stronger selves.

The nights are hardest for him, and so for us. So much can go wrong when you can only shuffle along leaning against the walls for support while your splinted and pined together limbs splay about striving for a control that never comes.

We are so dependent — he on his gods; I on mine. But the storm is passing over, as Dr. Tindley* says: “O courage, my soul, and let us journey on, for tho’ the night is dark, it won’t be very long.” We’ll pull ourselves along with hope as our guide and our soul’s resolution as standard bearer.

“By and by, when the morning comes,
When the saints of God are gathered home,
We’ll tell the story how we’ve overcome,
For we’ll understand it better by and by.”

*Charles Albert Tindley (1851-1933) composer of such other black gospel standards as Stand by Me, We’ll Understand It Better By and By, and the original version of the civil rights anthem We Shall Overcome. Tindley’s songs were the inspiration that led the great Thomas A. Dorsey to begin writing his popular blend of spiritual and hymn with blues and jazz underpinnings.

Quote of the week

2008-02-25T20:09:00.006-05:00

"It is not a matter of seeking stillness — stillness is everywhere to be found. It might help to shut-up."

Dog Down

2008-02-21T18:07:00.006-05:00

It happened as I was walking down the driveway toward the back of the house looking for our housemate to see if she would like to come out and see the lunar eclipse we had been emailing about. It was about 10:30, the night was reasonably cloudless, and the earth’s shadow was well across the moon’s surface.

And, then, there was the high-pitched cry of the dog being hit and the screech of tires and the shouts of neighbors out on the street for the moon. Teenaged boys came running from our house and a neighbor’s doorway. Adults are already encircling the dog (my dog, our dog) lying frantically in the street. “No! No! No!”

We lifted him by blanket into the back of our wagon. The gurney came out to meet us at the curb. Multiple fractures. One leg a mass of shattered bone ... another more modestly useless ... blood ... one deep gash ... other multiple abrasions also filled with crumbled asphalt and road dirt. Beautiful x-rays. Ugly messages. We went home to lick our heart wounds. Cooper remained with the tubes stuck in him and the kindly vet monitoring his breathing and heart rate; vigilant for signs of internal bleeding.

Now we wait for the surgeon’s call. Now we field the phone calls of empathy and advice we have solicited; the knocks at our door; the cards in our mail box. The remorseful concern of our neighbor who drove the car that brought our Cooper down — the single car that passed unhappily through the dark theater of our night.

How are we going to care for our buddy who, no matter what the outcome, will not walk on his own for weeks, for months? Both his injured legs are on the right side. Will he be able to even stand while his body works to heal? There are thirteen steps up to our doorway from the street. We don’t know if he will even have half of that shattered rear leg when at last he comes home to us.

As we drove home, the moon was nearly out of its once-in-a-decade eclipse. Our sun’s light glowed from its surface. The two planets and a star still accompanied it through the night sky. We turned inward — each to his or her source of strength and compassion. Now, for another night, we wait while Cooper’s bruised lungs recover their capacity before the anesthesia comes. Now, he waits, alone, with his blanket, where our love cannot warm him.

Keeping an Open Place at the Table

2008-02-20T20:23:00.006-05:00

These days, when I walk from the parking lot to the main office door at our Massachusetts church, I automatically check the rainbow flag to see if it is still flying proudly. You know the sun has been assaulting those bright colors all summer and winter. Spring winds will be especially cruel. One part or another of that rainbow flag is torn loose with such regularity that repairing its destruction has become just routine maintenance. New flag, new pole even. But still it flies.

Rather like a metaphor for life, isn’t it? The attack on gay and lesbian and bisexual life continues every day across America, and folks like us have to keep rising up to the challenge and maintaining the flag so that it may continue to fly bravely and proudly.

I feel the pride when I see the rainbow flag outside our church door, because I feel, also, the pain we had to brave in order to get to the point where we could agree to fly it, and, then, continue to shoulder our way through the consequences of our decision.

It was 1997 when we voted to make a place at our table for gay and lesbian folks. What a change that has made for our community!

As I think about the changes that face us in the future, I remember this one big change in our past.

The thing that surprises me most about our decision is how good it has been for our life together. I mean, I never really questioned whether it was the Right Thing. That has always seemed abundantly clear to me. But I hadn’t really appreciated how Good it would be; what a tremendous asset to our community all the new people would be!

I knew we were supporting good people (usually families), but I didn’t really appreciate how good, or how loving and thoughtful, talented and dedicated these new people who flocked to our church would be.

I hadn’t anticipated how alive it would feel because of their presence; how it would not just be the people here at the time of our decision that I loved, but a whole new crowd of exciting presences.

And, then, I began to notice other, apparently unrelated consequences, like: “Hey, we’re pretty good at this welcoming stuff when we put our minds to it! I’ll bet we really can welcome everyone just as our hearts tell us we want to.”

The more we welcome, the stronger we actually become. The more able we are to make a place in our life for others — even older long term members whom we haven’t felt all that much at ease with; even kids crying in the morning services and clogging up the basement classrooms.

Perhaps we don’t have to circle the wagons as we thought to protect this precious life together because others will treasure it just as much as people have in the past; maybe more so, because they haven’t known it before out there in the world of sixty hour work weeks and arrogant disregard.

Well, I am a very conservative person and I don’t want to ask you to push this one idea too far; I just wanted to outline what I think are some of the consequences of opening up our life to others.

I have gone through virtually every major change in my personal life kicking and screaming: “I want things to stay the same!” And, sometimes, I have believed that I need to hang onto even the things I hate. I can be so stubborn it takes a good smack from a 2x4 to get me to change direction. But, now, I am sad to see so much of our country hanging on to hateful ways, and wonder how to smack the whole stubborn populous up the side of the head.

The Anthem video revisited

2008-02-18T22:53:00.009-05:00

I have continued my search for more info about Caitlin Davidson and Dylan Cunningham who were responsible for the video of Leonard Cohen’s ‘The Anthem’ that I cited a couple of days ago (see below, Feb 14). As best I can figure out, they put this show together for a Filmapalooza at their high school in New Brunswick, Canada. Dylan put a re-cut version of the video to Soundgarden’s ‘Fell on Black Day” — maybe, he didn’t care for Cohen so much after all... maybe, he just wanted to prove he could do it. The original 48 Hour Filmapalooza is the oldest and largest timed film competition in the US, but I’m guessing this one was strictly Tantramar Regional High School.

In 2007, 31 US cities participated in this now international Filmapalooza project with over 17,000 participants. According to the organizers, "the competition is a race against time. On Friday evening, filmmakers draw a genre from a hat. Before the final kick off at 7 PM, a character, prop, and a line of dialogue are assigned and the filmmakers are off. They rush off to write, shoot, and edit their films. The final masterpiece is due by 7:30 PM sharp, on Sunday. Films screen at local theaters just days later. Everyone on a team must be a volunteer, and although some teams are fiercely competitive, many teams look at this as a chance to have a high-octane get-together with friends. The 48 Hour Film Project was started by Mark Ruppert and Liz Langston in Washington, DC, six years ago."

Maybe Cait or Dylan will write and we will find out more about their project.

Living with the land

2008-02-18T22:06:00.007-05:00

By the time I entered sixth grade my father had begun to come into his own in the business world, and our family came to summer on some of the small lakes in Western Massachusetts near our home.

The first year we tented by one of these nearby lakes, perhaps with the thought that we could actually live there all summer long and my father commute to work. But the land was flat, and the development was new, and my father sold this land after the first year. And we began to rent a cottage well up in the Berkshire hills at a place called Big Pond.

There the woods were old and it was four miles by winding, climbing dirt road from the main highway to the northern shore of Big Pond where we stayed in a cottage owned by Orin Handler. The Handler’s and the Grimes’ were the only houses you could reach by road in this part of the lake. There had never been anyone but Handler’s and Grimes’ on this road since it was cut, but Harold Grimes was planning to sell some of his shorefront property, and we were there to consider adding our name to theirs on the small sign that marked the road.

Any old New Englander would be familiar with the cottage we stayed in there — the big porches extending off living room and dining room through creaking French doors that were usually open to the breeze off the lake. The doors were closed most nights as the temperature fell even in June and July.

Then, the smell of oil fired stove would permeate the air and nestle around us as close as the heat itself, and we children would be hustled off upstairs to a loft looking down on the living room fireplace, the wicker furniture, the wooden rocker you could get on and ride like some wild stallion galloping across the plains until your mother cried out in fear that you would tip over.
Overhead was nothing but painted roof. The walls were wood paneling. The windows were hinged like cabinet doors and you looked out on the long slope of front porch roof and the lake’s waters beyond.

When the thunder storms came, as they frequently did during our days on Big Pond, the rain would come in a rush across the waters at the edge of the wind that drove it and engulf our house and thunder down on the shingles only inches above our heads. From the second floor you could see out over the whole lake as the lightning flashed its eerie white light and its tentacles snatched at the houses out on the island in the center of the pond.

My father and I built what was called a surf board in those days — a vague cousin to what you would see at the seashore today. For me it was a pretty much unsinkable craft that I paddled by hand and by foot along all the shoreline and around the shore of that island at the center of Big Pond.

The actual building of the eight or ten houses out there was a source of considerable fascination until the transporting properties of ice debunked the fantasies. The one house which most drew my explorer’s eye stood alone on a small peninsula of rock dropped by glaciers in retreat up past Hudson’s Bay long before my time. Isolated even from other islanders, I wondered at what sort of folk might suddenly emerge from within to challenge my small intrusion into their secret lives.

Orin Handler and Harold Grimes were a kind of old time Yankee you can still find in upstate Vermont or perhaps in other recesses of the country from which they have failed to be eradicated. They were men my father felt at home with and in this case admired, for they were country men but of class and culture. There were not many such men, I suspect, in my father’s world and there were certainly no others like them in mine. Their families were long off the farm — perhaps merchants or seamen from Boston or New Haven who first came here for the cool of summer and, then, stayed on in Springfield or Northampton.

I found their books shelved on the long wall by the fireplace and stacks of “Boy’s Life” magazines up under the eaves. And an image of the life they led there burnt itself in my small, expanding mind. I peered through their windows and poked about in their boathouses, for they rarely actually lived there any more, and in later years I longed for their life — for the ease of their manner, the ready chair by the fire where no person was truly a stranger.

At first my wish was just to be there, to experience again a way of living they provided and which I, too, could admire and rejoice in. But, then, a greed for a style of life I could only experience but not myself provide, took over and consumed me. And it is here in this reduced and ruined form that I now find myself, and you experience me, grappling with the spirit that seemed to direct their course, and enveloping myself in every mud puddle, sinking slowly down into the earth from which I came and which so clearly shaped their lives.

The land is neither hostile nor welcoming in and of itself. But it does seem to contain within it something of who we are at our deepest core — a connection to the spirit of the life that animates everything — not as some detached, external mechanism, but in some extremely personal, intimate form in which I recognize what I want to be — not merely who I am but the special form only we humans can attain but which requires so much of us, so much effort to draw it out and is yet so easy and common when it comes.

I speak here of the water and blood from which we were born and which now courses through our bodies, an oddly unfamiliar presence from which so many around us are actually fleeing. It repulses their nostrils; it is too coarse a salt to set at their table. And yet to separate from it is to abandon life itself. Here we are bonded by some inexorable fluid oozing from within each of us like sweat or mingled blood, like the warmth that comes from within the fire.

I saw this life coming across the lake in the fire of stars and moon and lightning flashes. I felt it shimmering on the surface of rocks beneath the surface of the water. It welled up around my toes when they dug down into the sand at the water’s edge. It slipped across my palm on the bodies of escaping fishes. And I experienced its remains in the Handler cottage and in the gnarled arthritic fingers of my father’s hand clutching at tools they could no longer grasp.

In those summers by the water my eyes, too, stretched out to embrace the life around me and I was in no way alone, though I may have seen no single person up close in a day or a week of exploring. Through all the angst and anguish of my worst teenage years I experienced there the same at-homeness in my element that my father and I understood in the presence of the Grimes and Handler men.

Not when skulking down paths after dark through woods, where only the infinitesimal difference between trodden grasses and wild reveals direction; not even in the company of the most alien of god’s creatures (teenage girl) did I loose that sense of oneness of self and land — an experience never known down in my flat-land school or home, and that was to desert me so completely in the years of work and suburban life to follow, until I came here to live on my island in the Charles where the abandoned rocks, small birds, and marshes surround me as they did in the Berkshire hills, and the surface of still waters mirrors the golden trees of fall and me.

Quote of the week

2008-02-18T14:42:00.005-05:00

"I find it appropriate, even interesting on occasion, when other people express opinions, but my own seem oddly embarrassing."

Beware! Justin Currie

2008-02-17T18:01:00.020-05:00

Be careful Justin Currie! You may be able to handle the Black Thunder* served up at Glasgow’s “Persian’s Forehead” pub, but here in the new Fortress America we look askance at any foreigner ordering any beer but Bud Lite.

When you fly into Nashville (or wherever) to begin your tour of the pubs and music spaces of America, you will not be able to see the shinny glint off our new wall along the Mexican border, but, be assured, our ever-ready border guards will be waiting to frisk you. Let us pray they do no more!

Beware! When hired guns hear your cock and bull story about being born in a van near Paisley in a “hailstorm so vicious that it took a team of panel beaters a month to separate [your] forehead from the roof”, not even your pale American keyboardist may be able to rescue you from the collective terror with which our chest thumping politicians so gleefully besmirch our beloved soil.

Above all refrain from unseemly co-mixing with other Scotsmen (notorious for their libidinous skirts and bad whiskey) or musicians (all suspect, except for country western singers, for any may be supporters of the Far Left 's coddling of God’s enemies in our innocent midst).

Not that we wish to seem unfriendly! We welcome your self-labeled “thunderously dreary dirges”. Your sonorous wailing of “What is love for?” on your just released record is well known here, albeit in a pained sort of way. My only wish is that I could hear better the finely played tones of this American keyboardist, Peter Adams, whom you attempt to drown out at your tour engagements.

Finally, should you prove able to pass our ‘fair and balanced’ border inspection — perhaps by disguising yourself in suit and tie, we rejoice at our brief opportunity to applaud your tired versions of withered hits in this your latest American tour (April 13 — April 27). G_d willing, see you at Joe’s Pub!
*A vile mix of Guinness and red wine...gag.

Justin Currie & Peter Adams at Joe's Pub, NYC

Mostly along The Charles — Waltham Winter

2008-02-15T17:06:00.012-05:00

Winter

And ready for Khidr* the green ancient, my interior
tastily decorated with empty
wine bottles, a stack of four inflated truck

innertubes with Christmas lights dangled down inside,
two bags of Portland cement
turned too hard anymore to use, two two-gallon

kerosene containers, a plastic bottle of bubble-making
juice, and a package of
hummingbird food waiting for March.

— Coleman Barks, Tentmaking, 2001

*The Green One (of Sufi and pre-Islamic lore) is an emissary of the G_d, full of the eternal liveliness and freshness of wisdom ‘drawn out of the living sources of life.’ See http://khidr.org/ Perhaps Al-Khidr is connected to the Green Knight of Arthurian lore? How does the Celtic Green Man's earthy nature parallel these visions?

Cheerios in the Knees

2008-02-15T11:27:00.008-05:00

Limitation

Unbridled freedom is really only suited to a dreamworld. It may be something that a child wants, but restraint of some sort is always applied to truly human behavior. That is to be expected, even welcomed. For it is precisely the application of restraint or limitation which makes us human (“a little lower than the angels, and crowned with glory and honor”). Limitations are the means by which we are humanized. Otherwise we are in danger of growing into pint-sized primitive gods (i.e., tyrants) — that is the great fear of Genesis One.

Limitation and self-awareness are the two things the human couple must acquire before leaving the idyllic life in the Garden at Eden. These are essential to their effective life as part of the earth. Without limitation and awareness they will be like unformed gods — loose cannons with no effective constitutional restraints.

As long as the G_d doesn't care about anything beyond himself, he doesn't have to adapt. But as soon as she wants relationship, she has to learn how to do it. Awareness and acceptance of limitation is the means.

One of the many biblical storylines misrepresented by the orthodox is this great one about how the God-Who-Seeks-Us learns to accept the limitations which are essential to relationship. The same limitations which apply to human life, the G_d accepts for himself because she too wants relationship. The G_d’s Sacrifice is the same as that required of Adam and Eve and Jesus of Nazareth.

Limitation is not the end of joyful human life; it is not something to be discarded or bemoaned. It is the essential means by which we grow and develop. There are no exceptions to this rule — it applies even to the G_d because it is a reflection of the G_d's own nature (i.e., the Way Things Are). Limitation doesn't just come from the outside; it moves out from within. (“I will write my Law in their hearts.”)

That is what makes Yahweh a great god and worthy of worship. He is not Perfect, and does not claim to be. He is in fact by nature opposed to the abstraction embedded in the notion of Perfection. He is Real, instead. Her name is “I AM”, not John Calvin or Tom Delay. I don’t know exactly how this works out in practice, but it seems to me that the essential business of religious people lies in trying to figure it out. A religion which constantly rejects the lessons of experience is always missing the point regardless of how brilliant it may be.

So, I am going to start from this possibility — creative life arises out of noting , accepting, and using limits. Growing-up is learning how to deal with them. Pushing limits is heroic and admirable, but so is learning how to live within the edges.

Change

The edges may be moving, changing — just like the rest of life. Expecting to find even a limitation the same today as it was yesterday is preposterous. That is why Laws and Creeds don’t work in the long run — they just can’t keep up with change. A religion of Absolutes is doomed in application. What is the point in maintaining a belief system which in order to withstand the test of use requires a falsified view of reality?

Our science teaches us a few things about living with uncertainty — it’s a lot easier once you give up the illusion of Absolute Truth. There is really nothing to be said about Transcendent Being for it is by definition outside the knowable world –– such life is present only in a place like the Garden or Heaven down by the river. If we go there, we are dead.

Yahweh does not wish to stay in the Garden. He won’t stay dead. That is why he is known as Immanuel —“G_d with us”. While pushing the couple out of the Garden results in travail for them, it is not in fact a punishment if you believe that life in this world is something worth having. Calling the Expulsion from the Garden punishment is to take the child’s point of view as definitive. Their trauma in the World is only a mirror of the G_d’s own experience of living; it’s not something special to humans.

Yahweh may be a sky god, but our earth is, of course, part of the sky universe. Separating Sky from Earth is a false distinction in the 21st century. A revisioning of the G_d in our life story will require special attention to this, I think. The old Earth based religions of Europe could not withstand the power of the Christian Sky-god religion and there is no point in trying to go back to a failed vision. What we need is a vision of the G_d which corresponds to the world we experience, and an interpretation of this known world that reflects our growing understanding of the G_d. In our world sky and earth are one; neither is more or less natural than the other. What would a transcendent experience be in an all natural universe?

The G_d changes and lives in a changing world. Such a god also embraces limits (“I have come to put an ax to the tree.”), because it is limits which make possible a perceivable world, and, so, a world about which it is possible to reflect and communicate.

Word & Image

Yahweh is the god of word and image. They are the means by which he describes and experiences. He uses both in his efforts to create, deal with his need for change, and explore the edges of his current limits. Language is his means of connecting, ordering, and extending relationships. (In the overpowering experience of the G_d’s Spirit at Pentecost everyone understands everyone else’s language.)

His connection with the creative word is established immediately in Genesis One. John’s Gospel story treats him from the point of view of Greek ‘Word’ images. The G_d uses the written word in his first Commandments and it is by means of the word that he stays connected to his creatures in and out of the Garden.

He uses breath (the means by which his word is delivered) to bring his clay male/female figures to life in the second Genesis creation story.

Both word and image are connected, then, by this breathing which is called the Spirit of God. The Spirit must, then, be a rhythm (among other things). The rhythm of life is the breathing of G_d.

In today’s music world rhythm-based music is proclaimed by traditionalists to be distinctly different from melody-based music. This is the false result of peculiar either/or thinking. Poetry is rhythm based melody. Suppose G_d breaths to a rock-and-roll beat as well as to the drone of Gregorian chant?

It definitely muddies the water when you start using this both/and way of combining ideas and experiences. But isn’t that the way we really experience things in this century? It is a gift to be simple in the midst of complexity, and, it seems to me, that a proper understanding of the G_d will reflect that gift. We are looking for the ‘elegant solution’. And we are seeking it, not by ruling out things, but by drawing them in.

The Anthem

2008-02-14T21:16:00.029-05:00

In their workshop, 'Soul Signals:The Spirituality of Midlife', the Revs. Martha Niebanck & Larry Peers [First Parish in Brookline] encourage new perspective on the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. The stories we write reveal the movement of our lives and suggest the particular future toward which we dream or might dare to dream thanks to the crack in everything.

"Ring the bells that still can ring.
Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack in everything.
That's how the light gets in."
— Leonard Cohen, 1993

Caitlin Davidson and Dylan Wendell Cunningham created the visuals for this video. I wonder who they are and what their story is. Why did you choose this Cohen song?