“Full use of your powers along lines of excellence.” – Happiness, Greek Definition
For me, they are Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 21 in C Major (K467) and Beethoven’s 5th Symphony in C Minor. You’ll know them when you hear them, and they are just… perfect. If those two do not convince you to delve deeper into the cavernous genre of Classical music, I’m not sure what will.
Anyone disagree? Any better suggestions?
New, Awesome Music
Sarah Harmer
Sarah Harmer is a bluesy/folksy/bluegrassy/acoustic-guitar-oriented, environmentally and socially conscious, lovely, tender artist. I happened to run into her fantastic song I Am Aglow while listening to BSR one night and I’ve been following her ever since. I recently downloaded another song from her called Escarpment Blues, which has an interesting story behind it:
“Escarpment Blues tells the story of a current land-use conflict in Southern Ontario on the Niagara Escarpment, a UNESCO World Biosphere Reserve. I grew up on the escarpment on the farm where my family still lives, within a long green corridor that is prized for its fresh water resources, its endangered species habitats, its prime agricultural soils and its wetlands and forests. These lands are under serious threat from the aggregate (sand, gravel, shale) industry. The problem is that large multinationals companies want to open new quarries on top of the escarpment and extract the rock below these ecosystems, thereby removing and destroying them. So, after writing the song, I got the idea for the “I Love the Escarpment” Tour and set out in June 2005 with some of my best musical mates to hike the escarpment and make music along the way.”
She’s highly recommended.
Teddybears – Different Sound
On occasion, I hear a song in a commercial and it just sticks. Sometimes this is terrible, like the time I walked around for 4 days with “Bu-da-ba-bah-dah – I’m lovin’ it” stuck in my head. Sometimes the song is actually good and I’m intrigued, like that new Intel Core Due Processor commercial. I wanted to know who sang it and where I could get it. This used to be an idle daydream, as even googling for “music in X commercial” rarely turned up anything good. Now there’s Splendad.com, to satisfy just that desire. It can be sorted by advertiser and by artist, so I looked up Intel commercials from 2006 and boom: I got my info. The background song is Different Sound by Teddybears. It’s a slammin’ techno song. As it is techno, it’s not for everyone, but I really dig the beat and can listen to it repeatedly with no problem.
Tom Petty – Saving Grace
Tom Petty’s new single is, quite simply, the perfect rock’n roll song. You really feel that deep core of blues in there, but it’s got a rock edge. Talk about perfectly evoking an album’s title (Highway Companion). I would none-too-subtly add that it’s been conveniently placed on my Amazon wishlist, if anyone’s interested. 
Gomez – How We Operate
Gomez is one of those bands that’s been floating off in the rock/blues/country/bluegrass/acidrock wilderness for far too long. I’ve loved them since my buddy Leo gave me a copy of Liquid Skin when I was in Sydney. I’ve psyched myself up and bought every album of theirs since then, and the experience has gone downhilleverytime . There was a ton of great music in there, but it was uneven and confused and confusing. So when I heard that Gomez had finally put out a new album this year, I sort of shrugged and put it out of my mind. They weren’t dead to me; far from it. They were just not as inspirational as they had been in the past. Then a few reviews of this new album, How We Operate, passed my way and they were generally glowing. That was enough for me to acquire the album and I have not been disappointed. Gomez has come in from the wilderness and put out abadass album that tied together– intelligently–all the disparate musical strands they’d been playing with for the past few years. I’m elated and you should be, too. If you don’t already own Liquid Skin, just do yourself a favor and get it as soon as you can. Ask for it for Christmas. Whatever. But both it and How We Operate are classic must-haves.
The Killers – A Great Big Sled
A Christmas song from The Killers? I laughed too, but it’s a damned good song. I haven’t heard the new album yet, but from the singles they’ve released it very well could be as good as their first one. (The second one was classic terrible sophomore effort, in my humble opinion.) The single they just put out, A Great Big Sled, is notable not just because it’s a good song and it’s seasonal; it’s also a (Product)Red track, which means a hefty percentage of the revenue from every track goes to The Global Fund. You can read more about it here, but, suffice it to say, if you can buy (Red), buy it.
I always wanted to be friends with at least a few smart, snarky, savvy media-critic types. Hipsters that bathe regularly, really. Now that Geoff and Noah (and their friends/roommates in Brooklyn, El and Tom) have their blog “MTV Reality” up and running, it seems I do. Their topic of choice is the ultimate in post-modern expressive media: the MTV reality show slate. I know pretty much nothing about any of the shows they talk about, except for an insomnia-induced acquaintance with “Rob & Big,” but as usual when you get a bunch of smart guys talking about something they’re quite familiar with you end up with some great analysis. They just started, and they’re obviously just developing their respective voices, but I take this entry by el on Rob & Big, and this entry on the new series twentyfourseven to be a sign of good things to come. (I’d bet at least a buck that Geoff wrote the latter entry, but since the posts are generallyun-bylined , it’s hard to know.)
I admit, I was was initially sort of horrified that these dudes would be wasting their talents on a vile television genre that was emblematic of the race-to-the-bottom-common-denominator that pervades the bulk of what’s available of the tube these days. But it seems that this crew’s best moments thus far capture and critique both the allure and the absurdity of the MTV-brand reality shows. Not bad work in the least.
Sidenote: Rob & Big is boring in a novel, eerie way. It’s so uneventful and dull that it seems, well, normal. I feel guilty watching it, like I’m peering in on someone’s life à la The Truman Show. This is a qualitatively different feeling from the one I used to get when I watched the old, watchable, clever, eventful seasons of The Real World. On those shows, contrived or not, things happened. They lived in unrealistically, progressively more awesome houses every year. They were rock stars and race car drivers (I loved the London season). They went on the odd trip out of their city of residence from time to time. With Rob & Big, when I watch them do things like tool around Southern California, play with their smelly dog or put up decorations, it’s just different. They’re more notable for being less notable. I’m not sure if this is a strength of the show or not, and, indeed, the only times I’ve watched it have been between perhaps 3 and 5 in the morning, so my impressions may be artificially exaggerated. Still, it’s a strange show. Go ahead. Watch it. See if it doesn’t seem just… well… weird. As Geoff et al’s blog states in its Philip K. Dick-esque tagline: ” Once upon a time, MTV challenged Reality to a fight. The line between what was Real and what was Fake began to blur. This is what happens when people stop being polite and start freaking the **** out.”
Despite the dearth of posts here, I have been generally fulfilling my self-imposed obligation to write every day and share the results with you. I just haven’t been sharing the results with you. The deal is, most of the stuff I’ve been writing has been just too long to be posted to del.icio.us, where I do, arguably, the bulk of what can be considered my blogging. (You could be forgiven for not knowing that, but now I think I’ve now hooked it up so that every day a script will automatically post my daily activity as a blog entry here on the main page along with commentary and tags.) As it was just too short to get onto del.icio.us in some way, most of it didn’t seem long enough to warrant a full blog post. As you can tell, looking downscreen or into the archives, my posts tend to be a bit long. The more I went over what I was writing, though, the thoughts got more substantial and now, I think, it’s time to publish. So there ya go.
del.icio.us
Speaking of del.icio.us, it’s bloody amazing and you need to get an account. It’s incredibly useful, portable and easy to use. It’s changing the way the web is catalogued, referenced, cross-referenced and enriched. What is it? To wit, for those not in the know:
“del.icio.us is a social bookmarking website — the primary use of del.icio.us is to store your bookmarks online, which allows you to access the same bookmarks from any computer and add bookmarks from anywhere, too. On del.icio.us, you can use tags to organize and remember your bookmarks, which is a much more flexible system than folders.” It’s bloody amazing. Sign up now.
Once you get your account up and running, add me to your network. And Amy. Once you’ve done that, and you feel cool because you’re linked up to me and my awesome sister, get the Firefox extension. It’ll save you a lot of time and, after a while, incentivizes posting your links. It’s just easy and intuitive, like most things del.icio.us and Firefox-related.
Firefox
If you’re not running Firefox or one of its family members as your primary, sole web browser in favor of any flavor of Internet Explorer, then you’re not living in this century, you’re putting yourself and your family at risk, and you’re contributing to the destabilization of global security. Just get it. Now.
Well, first, for all three of you still checking this site, I ought to mention the biggest change to it: I’m writing again. If possible, once a day till New Years. We’ll see after that.
I ought to also mention the second biggest change on the site: I bought my first domain name, brisite.org. Update your links/RSS feeds/homepages, etc if you haven’t already.
Thirdly, despite all the massively important things going on in the state, country, world and my life, I’m only really writing here as a break from working on papers that will move me closer to completing my incompletes, thus completing my degree. As such, I thought I’d do the classic blog questionnaire I found on a brown alum xanga blog. Here goes:
1. Who is the last person you held hands with?
E
2. If you were drafted into a war, would you survive?
Yes. Is this question supposed to ask if I would serve rather than survive? That’d be more interesting, not to mention more predictable.
3. Where were you 30 min ago?
The Rockefeller Library. Just like now.4. Do you drink milk out of the carton?
No. Never have. But I have been drinking more milk lately.5. Have you ever won a spelling bee?
Yup. [Insert "Glory Days" by Bruce Springsteen here.] The more interesting part is that, the year after I placed 2nd in the City of Providence, I got out on the word “only.” I spelt it “olny.” To this day I swear that everyone in the room misheard me. And, it should be noted, to this day Sean McHugh has never let me forget this event.6. Were your parents cool in high school?
Hard to tell.7. How fast can you type?
Faster than most people, I think.8. Are you afraid of the dark?
Only after I watch Predator II, with Danny Glover, not Ah-nuld. Cuz this time he’s in a city, not some remote jungle, and he’s pissed.9. Eye color?
Blue. Quite blue, I’m told.10. How old are you?
Twenty three. Or, according to the Birthday calculator: I am 23 years old. I am 285 months old. I am 1,238 weeks old. I am 8,664 days old. I am 207,958 hours old. I am 12,477,480 minutes old. I am 748,648,827 seconds old.
11. When is the last time you chose a bath over a shower?
I honestly can’t remember. Too long ago, then, I guess.12. What’s your deepest, darkest fear?
That 1000 years from now, all traces of my existence will be gone and forgotten and that I will be marked on God’s great ledger as someone who didn’t end up mattering all that much.13. Are you drinking anything right now! ?
No, but I’m jonesing for either a Red Bull or a Jack Daniel’s, depending on which direction this night is going.14. Are you single right now?
No.15. Can you hula hoop?
On a short enough timeline, absolutely. If it involves doing it for more than maybe 5 seconds, then no.16. Are you good at keeping secrets..?
Yes. Most of the time for some things, and all of the time for others.17. What do you want for Christmas?
A Nikon D50 or D80 and Aperture.18. Do you know the Muffin Man?
No.
19. Do you talk in your sleep?
I’m told I have.
20. Who wrote the book of love?
Jesus, right? Right? Isn’t it, guys? Guys? Guys. Where are you going? Ok, how ’bout Erich Segal?
21. Have you ever flown a kite?
Yes, indeed. The first time was with Katie McCullough (now happily married, I’m told) when I maybe three years old. The Elmhurst Arboretum, the little development where I grew up, had a curved center section which produced the effect of there being something like one big huge backyard for the houses across the street from me. (Google Map – it’s the L-shaped thing behind all the houses.) Katie lived in a house on that center section (it faced the Wyndham side) and we used to run around in the “big backyard” and do things like fly kites and play tag. The first kite I remember flying was a really crappy free one that you got with a Happy Meal at McDonald’s. It only worked a) in a high wind, or b) if you were running flat out. I cannot tell you how long it’s been since I thought of this.
22. Are your parents divorced?
Not from each other, but previously from people they probably never should have been with in the first place. Dad calls those marriages the “Mulligan Round.” I think that’s as good a name for it as any.23. Do you consider yourself successful?
Uh, no, not currently, but ask me in a month or so and the answer may be different.24. How many people are on your contact list on your cell?
A few hundred. Thank God I have a Treo. I don’t delete numbers. Ever. I still have Lenehan’s cell phone number from Australia, and he got back in, what, June of last year? I still have the phone number of my legendary Little League baseball coach Charlie Ashton in my cell phone. You never know. You just never know.25. Current hair color?
Uh, brown tending blondish.
26. Plans for tomorrow?
Back to the Rock. Then perhaps a little Constitutional! at Perishable Theatre.
27. When was the last time you said “I love you” and to who?
This afternoon, to my mom, as I was leaving the house.
28. How do you feel today?
Productive, which is a novel feeling.
29. Are you loved?
Definitely.
30. What color is the sky?
Looks blackish, with a hint of sickly-urban-streetlight-orange.
31. Are you a romantic?
Yes. To an embarrassing extent.
32. Are you black?
Though some people consider me an honorary black man, which I consider a high honor, but in truth I’m undeserving of the label.33. Have you ever been suspended or expelled from school?
Nearly suspended in high school for visibly annoying the Bishop/yelling at Father Kenney. The Deal: I rather loudly criticized the Bishop during a Catholic Youth Leadership Mass. He had the gall to say that we did a lot to help the poor, the needy and the hungry, but that we should be ashamed that we haven’t done more. Us. The youth. People ineligible to vote and with no real income of which to speak were being reprimanded by a man who owned a cathedral and all its entrapments. So I starting mumbling, louder and louder, to Vuré Kpea, who was sitting next to me and getting more and more freaked out as I went on, about how he should sell every fleck of gold paint from the Cathedral to be melted down before he came here and berated some school kids. I said he should sell every pipe in the organ for scrap metal and open up the cathedral as a homeless shelter on the other six days of the week. At the very least, I said, he should seriously reevaluate the budget priorities of the Diocese. I found his whole thing offensive and disrespectful, much like the building it took place in, and continued to say so after we got back from school. Brother Michael reamed me out first, in that calm and powerful way he has but I’d never seen till right then. He didn’t care what argument I was making, he just thought it had reflected badly upon the school when their senior student leadership (me) wouldn’t shut up. He took me from feeling a righteous anger at the Bishop to that sickening sensation you get when you know you’ve screwed up in under five minutes. Per his instructions, I left his office without saying a word. Father Kenney, on the other hand, when he finally got to me, was all fire and brimstone. He threatened to have me suspended for showing such disrespect to a “Holy Man” in a “House of God.” He was livid and irrational and swore! I couldn’t believe he swore! but I plowed on and demolished every argument he gave to me. I was back in the zone. He ended up walking away saying, “Well, you’re still a little jerk and you should be suspended.” I couldn’t help but think that, despite the fact that Father Kenney is a really nice guy, if this were back in the 50′s and 60′s when it was fashionable to hit kids in school, he probably would have done it.The next day Father Kenney had calmed down. He found me in the lunch room and took me outside to the hallway (my table made ominous and hilarious sounding music as I left to follow him–apparently it was common knowledge that I had almost or would still be suspended). He very calmly said, “Brian, you had a point yesterday. I thought about it all night, and I concluded that, to a certain extent, I agree with you. I agree that the ornamentation of that building can take away from the message and mission of the church. I even agree that the phrasing of the Bishop’s speech could have been better, since I refuse to believe he actually wanted anyone to feel bad about themselves. So there’s that.” I said, “Well, thanks.” He continued, “But I think you’ll agree that you were disrespectful and reflected badly upon LaSalle in a situation in which you were an explicit envoy of the school.” I paused a second, because I had thought about that fact all night after the Brother Michael encounter. “You’re right, and I’m sorry. There was a more appropriate venue to say the things I was saying and I should have used it. I’m sorry.”
This was a valuable lesson for when we started debating the contextuality of and inherent limitations on Free Speech in one of Professor Brettschneider’s Political Theory classes. Brown Professor Alexander Miekeljohn, during testimony before Congress and in his seminal work Free Speech and its relation to Self-Government, brilliantly analyzed the nature of Free Speech along these lines. He argued in favor of the teaching of the works of Marx in universities, which Congress was considering outlawing in his day, but in a larger context argued against a view of free speech that thought that anytime someone was told to shut up that rights were being violated. In his “nutshell”, town hall example, if a citizen walks into a city council meeting while the council is discussing a parking ordinance and starts shouting about how much he pays in property tax, the council is fully within its rights and the bounds of the Constitution for telling him to or making him shut up. The council would be violating the constitution if the citizen’s grievances were never heard, but they’re perfectly right to designate a proper time and place to hear them. It is a practical necessity for the maintenance of Free Speech, but an inherent limitation upon it as well. Thus we enter the fascinating universe of “what if?” Free Speech questions, but it’s a strength of our Constitution in the first place that such habitable and rich ecosystems of legal and philosophical thought can be contained within it.
So, to answer your question, no I haven’t been suspended or expelled.
34. What are you looking forward to?
Being done with Brown.
35. Have you ever crawled through a window?
I used to forget my key at home a lot in 6th, 7th and 8th grades. Luckily, at the time, there was an emminently climable pine tree that ran up next to the roof that was outside my window. Knowing I frequently forgot my key, I at least had the presence of mind to leave one of the windows in my room open just enough to push it up and get in the house. I always felt a bit like a ninja, albeit a slightly husky, slow,
36. Ever snuck out of your house?
Yes. Via the same tree and window as #35. Much easier than trying to sneak down our hundred-year-old, creaky stairs without being noticed.
37. Have you ever eaten dog food?
No.
38. Can you handle the truth?
Yes, but I can only take it with water.
39. Do you like green eggs and ham?
Already, display-of-ignorance time. I’ve always wanted to know: are green eggs a real thing? Is that done? Is it some obscure element of like Liechtensteinian cuisine that Dr. Seuss plucked out of obscurity? Or is it just something he needed as a block around which things would rhyme? Regardless, I like eggs. I like ham if it’s Easter and my mother made it.
40. What 2 things do you almost always bring w/you to places?
Cell phone, wallet.
41. Any cool scars?
Well, there’s the one from the tiger attack on my chin. (Wink, wink, nudge, nudge to any of my Indian buddies that remembers that.) All the other ones are really uncool. Especially the most recent ones.
42. Do you like or have a crush on anyone?
Oh, god, lots of people. E knows this, thankfully, and has some crushes of her own, so it’s all good.
43. How many kids do you plan on having?
Jesus. I don’t know. Two at a minimum. But then again, to be perfectly accurate, I don’t plan on having any kids. Yet another good reason to be a guy.
45. Have you ever been in love?
Yes.
46. Do you talk to yourself?
Not out loud or anything. But there’s an Aaron Sorkin-esque inner monologue going on here. Know who does, though? This guy. All the time. You tune it out after a while.
47. Is there something you want that you can’t have?
Of course.
48. Personality, looks, or nice watermelons?
Um, I just realized this quiz was written for teenagers, most probably younger, female ones. Yeesh. But I’ve dedicated enough time to it now that I might as well finish. And, for the record, personality always wins but that doesn’t mean the other two were never in the race.
49.What are you thinking about right now?
Ukrainian economic reform and the Bush Doctrine.
50. Who did you last hug?
Murphy the wonder dog.
51. Where is your cell phone?
Dead in my bag. Taunting me with all those imagined missed calls…
52. What was the last thing you ate?
Slice of legendary LaSalle Bakery deli pizza.
53. What does your last text message say?
That my lovely cousin Leah wants me to come to Kansas after Christmas or for New Years or something. The phone is currently quite acutely dead.
54. Favorite color(s)?
Iceberg blue.
55. Last movie watched?
Sadly, Van Wilder 2: The Rise of Taj. Which was terrible, but redeemable if for only one reason.
56. What song do you currently hear?
Nothing. I forgot my headphonse.
57. What do you want?
Peace, prosperity and fulfillment for every human being on Earth.
58. Have you ever dated anyone on your top friends list?
Quite a few of them, actually, but none of the dudes.
There, now wasn’t that illuminating and refreshing? Right, well, out of the three of you who still check this site frequently despite its atrocious lack of recently updated content, thanks very much to you, the only one that made it down to the bottom of my “Quick Break” blogging that actually took me 3 separate “quick breaks” to finish. See, I’m so confident no one read all of the above that I’ve got no problem posting an egregious run-on sentence like that last one.
Now it’s back to work. Ukrainian economic reform, here I come.
See you tomorrow.
gambol |?gamb?l| verb ( -boled , -boling ; Brit. -bolled, -bolling) [ intrans. ] run or jump about playfully : the mare gamboled toward Connie.
terrapin |?ter??pin| noun 1 (also diamondback terrapin) a small edible turtle with lozenge-shaped markings on its shell, found in coastal marshes of the eastern U.S.
• Malaclemys terrapin, family Emydidae. 2 a freshwater turtle, esp. one of the smaller kinds of the Old World. Also called turtle . • Emydidae and other families, order Chelonia: several genera and species. ORIGIN early 17th cent.(denoting the diamondback terrapin): of Algonquian origin.
coruscate |?kôr??sk?t; ?kär-| verb [ intrans. ] poetic/literary (of light) flash or sparkle : the light was coruscating from the walls.
passim |?pasim| adverb (of allusions or references in a published work) to be found at various places throughout the text. ORIGIN Latin, from passus ‘scattered,’ from the verb pandere.
This summer I went a little crazy with organization. I read the excellent David Allen book “Getting Things Done,” and I went out and got lots of file folders and a label maker from Staples, managed to finagle a massive green filing cabinet out of Dad’s office (they were going to throw it away, and I really wanted one so…), and started to collect all the crap in my life that had accumulated and I didn’t want to throw away. And I went through it all, deciding how to categorize all my stuff. It’s an amazingly satisfying experience, in and of itself, and I highly recommend it to anyone.
One of the continually surprising observations from this process was how many bloody crosswords I had kept over the years. I made a label that said “Crosswords” and started throwing them in as they surfaced in the ever-smaller pile. I soon noticed that there were two varieties of crosswords that I had kept: completed puzzles that were absolute labors of love, creativity, and full use of “the attic,”* and then puzzles I’d started, never finished, but just couldn’t quite throw away. They just seemed so tantalizingly close. So I printed a few new labels: “Incomplete” and another “Crosswords” and “Complete.” (Yes, by the way, I’m a bloody geek. But where are the programs from your sister’s last four voice concerts? Mine are in my “Amy” file. So there.) I then sorted out the crosswords I’d already filed into “Complete” and “Incomplete.”
It occured to me that this was great, that I had both a spot for keeping some fine intellectual achievements, and right next to it a spot for keeping those that required ever greater intellectual achievement. If I ever had a few minutes, I could just pull from this pile and see how much my brain had evolved and (hopefully) improved. Over time, the puzzles would move from “Incomplete” to “Complete” in a steady stream of accomplished tidying up. That was the idea.
In general, though, on many of the incomplete puzzles I’d only made marginal improvements. Seems there was a good reason I didn’t finish a lot of those. A dark voice in my head started exploring the possibilities that this was it: I’d never be smarter than I am right now, I’ll never really learn all that much more than I know now, etc. etc. This theory is utter bull, and I know it, but I have to admit this part of me is there and occasionally rather vocal.
So last month, on the morning after Amy’s birthday party (Thursday, March 9th), I got a paper and started the puzzle. I was cruising, for the most part. There was that exhilirating feeling I get when I know I’m clicking, that things are running together beautifully. It’s only really comparable to that feeling I get when I’m engaged in a real good debate with a worthy competitor. I worked on the puzzle for a few minutes at a time, and just kept stuffing it back in my bag. I quickly got about 80% of it done, but the lower right-hand corner was just not working. I couldn’t get it. It was one of those major crises in confidence that pop up in crosswords, where you start doubting things that should be undoubtable: Baseball player Willy, 4 letters, you have M_ _ S. This is a certainty, but I was so freaked out by this whole region that I started to doubt even that. This is the one that really threw me for a loop though:
42 Down: Very dry. 7-letters. I had “aran” at the end, and was starting to feel sort of confident about the other clues that made it up. I couldn’t get anything across the top, though. Those first three letters, those three blank spots, soon came to be the most visible things on the whole puzzle. Every time I pulled out the piece of paper, I’d make a little more progress on the rest of the square. A minor epiphany led me to remember that there was some association between “brilliance” and the word “eclat,” which solved 11 down.
Time went on. I just couldn’t think of what word connoting dryness ended in “aran.” I don’t know about you, but I’m relatively strict about my rules for doing crosswords: I don’t google answers, I only ask very close friends and family members for help once in a while. I accept help if it’s offered, out of the blue, like the girl in my geology class that whispered in my ear “Nine across is ‘radiant’”, which actually came off as almost a pick-up line, the way she said it. Anyway, the point is that I couldn’t just do a “define: dry” google search and be done with it. That’d be cheating, and unsatisfying.
Time went on. The puzzle got put in my “incomplete” folder, but left a bad taste in my mouth that wouldn’t go away. I kept thinking about it, whenever I saw a newspaper or started another puzzle. “Very dry.”
Now here’s where I had an experience that really reinforced an underlying ideology of mine: God loves us and wants us to be happy, and, to make sure that’s so, sometimes he just helps us out. I was walking out of Wilson Hall after my PS139 class, and there was a poster on the wall for some forum that was going to look at health infrastructure or something like that in Sub-Saharan Africa. I never even look at these things, they’re always crap advertisements for summer programs at places like Harvard, Columbia and Wheaton College. The Harvard ones in particular are as arrogant and condescending as Harvard Presidents. But this time, I glanced. Just a small, unnecessary twist of the neck. And I stopped, forcing the two Asian kids behind me to reel around me and up the stairs. “SAHARAN!” I yelled out, raising my arms. The Asian kids looked back and then picked up the speed with which they were climbing the stairs.
I went home immediately after class and broke out my “Crosswords Incomplete” folder. I wrote in “S A H”, and then put the pen down. I stared at the puzzle for a minute, checked every single square to make sure it was all done, admired my many “writing over writings” in dark black ink, then took out my “Crosswords Complete” folder. I opened it up, placed the puzzle inside, put the folders back in their spot, and closed the drawer of my filing cabinet with a resounding metallic rush. It had moved, the completed puzzle, and was now right where it should be, right where I’d dreamed about it being.
What a satisfying change of location.
Any movie based on a Philip K. Dick novel is, probably, going to be really good and really mindblowing. A Scanner Darkly looks no different (link is a direct quicktime link).
(0)MU1 is called “Introduction to Western Music,” but thus far it’s been “Introduction to Musical and Audio Concepts with Western Examples.” Most of the work that we’ve done in the first two weeks has been, basically, an extended exercise to equip us with a musical-analytical framework.
This has been a valuable experience in and of itself. It’s been a long time since I played any music intensively, and our discussions of key and mode and harmony, and particularly our refresher on musical notation bring to mind long-dormant memories of afternoons at my early piano teacher’s house. I remember how the white shades on Susan’s french doors used to blow in the wind when the front windows were open in the spring and summer. Sometimes I’d wear shorts to my lessons, and the underside of my leg would squeak on her polished piano bench. I used to practice in our living room at Arbor Drive. The first real memory of me playing the piano was when my cousin Sarah-Jane came out to visit (no idea how old I was). She brought her sheet music to practice. I remember watching her play, then get up and walk into the kitchen. I jumped on the piano bench and started to play, just looking for sounds that sounded like they should be together. After that, Mom started me with Susan.
My current music teacher is neither as tall, blond or pretty as Susan, but has an undeniable and unique appeal all his own. Professor Josephson is a 50ish, small, mildly squat, graying man with notably big ears. (Upon meeting him, one cannot help but wonder if this last notable attribute is in some way responsible for his other immediately notable one: his dazzling, passionate, deep love of music.)
Class meets Monday, Wednesday, Friday at 9AM. There is a 2.5 hour listening session on Wednesday afternoons. The typical format of the class is that we talk about musical concepts for a while, perhaps with Prof. Josephson playing notes on the Stetson Grand off to the right in our small, stadium seating classroom. Then we listen to song samples, sometimes whole, sometimes just quick sections to illustrate a point.
Discussion is not like most classes, to put it lightly. Professor Josephson is a stickler for good grammar, in both written and spoken form. (Strunck & White is a required book for the course.) He particularly detests the use of fillers like “like”, “um”, or “uh.” When he feels the need to pause to think of how to phrase something correctly, he just breathes out in a particularly throaty manner, his head arched slightly back. The look in his eye is when he does this is of mild shock, not dissimilar to a man surprised not to find he tea in its customary cupboard. He checks another cupboard of his vast stores, frowns that someone put his tea back in the wrong place, then leans his head back forward and launches into his now fully formed thought. All the while, this mildly throaty breath has been slowly given back to the world, perhaps his span spins a bit at the wrist, conjuring up the words.
He is terrible with names, the fact of which he made full-disclosure the first day. People who are not too right or not too wrong do not need names. People who respond outside of this anonymous average trigger Josephson’s realization that he does not remember their name. Hearing it, he points, repeats the name, and walks on. He tries to look like he’ll remember it now, but smiles anyway out of self-knowledge.
The lectures, such as they are, are filled to the brim with historical and personal anecdotes, interesting musical etymologies, and sardonic, semi-cynical commentary on the state of the American political system. What comes across most, though, is a powerful love of the music we study in class. There have been several times when we noticed tears in his eyes while he was discussing topics in class. The two examples most prominent in my head are when he talked about Bach and his compositional genius, and when he talked about Leontyne Price, the African-American soprano prodigy, who seems to have stolen his heart from a very young age.
It’s a great class, with enough energy, richness, and daily surprise to get me out of bed early three days a week. There’s maybe no better compliment I can give than my consistent attendance.