another not-so-busy phase

 well ...It was brought to my attention by a friend recently that, functionally, Wenatchee The Hatchet has been shadow-banned.

That's fine.

I was talking with my brother about this apparent turn of events and he wondered what might have caused it.  For those who have never heard of the term, to get shadow banned means you find something doesn't show up in search engine results when you do a search for it.

So if you searched "Wenatchee The Hatchet" this blog might not necessarily show up.  The profile might but not blog posts.  

It seems to have kicked in somewhere between 2021 and 2022.  Traffic nose-dived.  Which is alright.  If anything it has been a blessing to get shadow-banned at the stage of life I've been in, dealing with the deaths of a couple of people in my life.  I doubt that anything written about Mars Hill would explain the shadow ban, if shadow banned I have been.  More likely to me is the sheer dozens of pages of musical analysis with full scores.  I could speculate that music vendors who want to move units globally might prefer that the irst search engine hits didn't bring up, say, my analytical work on scores.  That's speculation and I admit it.

But having fewer readers is okay.  I blog ... rather ... I write to get my thoughts down and present ideas.  If people can't find the blog I have still gotten my thoughts down and regular readers know where to find the blog anyway.  A friend of mine from the Mars Hill years told me in the earliest days of the blog that my posts were kind of long or hard to reader.  But he cheerfully said, "I gotta hand it to you, though, you chose a great pen name!  A person remembers a pen name like Wenatchee The Hatchet."

Well, I try.  Maybe the absurd name is partly due to my being a Rumiko Takahashi fan.  I've been enjoying the Urusei Yatsura anime of late, the reboot.  The new Lum is fine.  I get the love for Fumi from the original series, I really do.  But just as Cesar Romero and Jack Nicholson and Mark Hamill and Heath Ledger all had different but plausible takes on the Clown Prince of Crime I think more than one voice actress can portray global pop culture's other green-haired agent of chaos and get the character to work.  I'd heard there was a re-make in the works.  My brother told me about a goofy article that declared Lum "the OG waifu".   Takahashi wrote Lum as a comic antagonist and didn't intend for her to become the most beloved character in Urusei Yatsura.  The rest is, as academics would say (reception) history.

I've composed a lot of music in the last ten months.  By that I mean I've been average at least a prelude and fugue for solo guitar every single month since November 2023.  I finally finished a fugue in B minor on The Lick (yes, "that" lick) and the prelude is a very loose homage to John Lee Hooker.  I've been experimenting more with ragtime-sonata fusions.  Having written a few ragtime sonatas I want to branch out and see what I can do to write ragtime-based fugues.  A ragtime take on the theme from Art of Fugue seems like a viable path to explore.

I've been tinkering with a new guitar sonata that is to be played for eight of its nine pages using bottleneck technique.  

I have been wanting to compile thoughts on Ewell's book and Borstlap's book but the reality is that composing music has been one of my passion projects in 2024 and there are all kinds of points that can be made in writing that could be better-made in writing music.  Writing ragtime sonatas is a more direct and cogent rebuttal of Theodor Adorno than "just" explaining why Adorno was wrong on theoretical and philosophical grounds.  I do not, however, consider Adorno to have been some kind of bad faith opponent of American song and dance music.  His conclusions were dubious but, dare I say this, his arguments were not.  Adorno, at least, was intellectually honest enough to say that reactionaries had more serious aesthetic objections to the problems of new music than rank and file liberals who took refuge in a saccharine form of liberal aesthetic pluralism.  

Aesthetic pluralism in ecumenical religious discussion has flourished in the last century but you'd never know it if  you weren't actually reading theological aesthetics.  I think that's been my frustration with Ewell as I consider what I agree with and disagree with his book.  I mean, he's said he's an atheist so I know to not expect him to wade into the aesthetic pluralism and polystylistic norms of black American churches.  If he is an atheist and doesn't have a serious knowledge of the Christian religion then of course he's not going to be conversant in Richard Allan and Methodist hymnody debates from the 19th century I'm very belatedly getting to.  But that African American churches have contended with the question of what styles are acceptable in church music is a given.  It's also why I can't take the Catholic integralist types like Peter Kwasniewski seriously.  I'm reminded of a grim zinger Ratzinger had about how there are Catholics in the United States who pine for a Tridentine rite that exists only in their own nostalgia-addled minds ... and that's Benedict XVI saying that!!

I'm more ACNA than PCA these days and I was sharing with someone at church lately that the PCA doesn't allow for women deacons so in a paradoxical way Mars Hill allowing women deacons meant they were more "liberal" than the PCA ... not that anyone in Seattle could've imagined that.

It's probably easier for Seattleites to imagine sea urchin ice cream. ;)

I did mention I like Takahashi's work, right.

Anyway, some scattered thoughts for the weekend.