the blogging of cultural criticism as displacement

Sometimes I wonder if there's something to be said for blogs critical of the evils of society as a form of displacement. As a pastor I've met once put it, you can hear a lot of fat Baptist preachers complaining about the intemperence others have in the use of alcohol or sex. Perhaps this is just as indicative of a tendency to have an extravorted approach to blogging.

Not necessarily, of course, but every once in a while I come across blogs and on-line journals where enough time is spent looking out at the world and finding it wanting that I wonder what people are doing in their own lives to make their lot better, or if they can. Not that we can't all appreciate a bad review, as Anton Ego puts it in Ratatouille, because bad reviews are often easy to write and just as often fun to read. In fact the staple of criticism would not be what it is, we would not recognize the word "criticism" to even signify what, colloquially, we all understand it to mean if we all thought criticism was about liking every new restaurant in town.

But to defend the new, well, that's tough, and not half so tough as defending the old and demonstrating how the best of the new preserves what is good in the old. As a musician I know that nothing is going to replace the ability to (and inevitable need for!) committing a score to paper the old fashioned way. But this doesn't mean we can't use every technological tool at our disposal to make the job easier. The technology of making music is never necessarily the enemy of creativity, our own minds are all the enemy we ever need! Our own lack of committment to the craft of being an artist and actually working on what we think we're into is our greatest obstacle.

To some degree the reason I don't blog much now is because I have enough to do in my own life I have other things to do. It's not that I don't have an interest in blogging about Jude and non-canonical literature but personal commitments can't be ignored. But personal commitments can also be the way to forsake the artistic vocation, the thing I can use to postpone working on a project I could have finished a year ago if I had the mind to. Personal loyalties can be the facade we embrace because our heart is not really in being an artist at all. At times like this it could have been tempting in the past to listen to the radio and hear something I didn't like and think to myself that it doesn't make sense why so and so is on the radio writing that crap and getting it published. I don't listen to the radio.

Withdrawing from popular culture doesn't have to be complete and it doesn't have to signify a lack of artistic relevance. Withdrawing from an engagement of the world of the arts can be selective. If Atanas Ourkouzounov has a new CD coming out or someone plays Nikita Koshkin's guitar concerto (please, SOMEONE do it and put it on CD) then I'll get those discs. I'm still pining for Shin-ichi Fukuda's next CD of Takemitsu and I have it on fairly accurate authority the d'Amore Duo has a CD coming down the pike eventually. But as to bands on the radio, meh, whatever. An artist has to engage in the arts that will help him or her continue in his own craft and the rest can go hang. This means that I can subsist on old Stevie Wonder without having to get his latest album. It means Vespertine will suffice until two or three friends tell me I "should" get Volta or anything Bjork has done more recently.

As the Preacher puts it in Ecclesiastes, there is really nothing new under the sun so keeping up with the latest fads in the arts hardly means you're artistically relevant. Artistic and cultural relevance, in a way, is irrelevant. If there is such a thing as truth and it also is relatively unchanging and steady from generation to generation (which I, obviously, do believe) then I don't need to keep up with what the various Joneses are doing. As a fellow once told me in my college days, you have to be careful not to use your own reading as a validation for or a rationale for your writing. You can't make your own work as an artist contingent on your own consumption of cultural artifacts. I hardly ever write poetry any more but as a composer I think I've managed to learn this lesson. The artist will keep working regardless of the direction of the creative tide. I'm trusting that Aimee Mann knows what she's talking about when she says that you need to keep working on your art as though no one were ever going to listen, or is listening, because if you're actually any good eventually someone WILL listen.

Which is why, in case it hasn't been apparent, the few times I use this blog I try to focus almost entirely on what I WANT people to read or see or hear or engage. If few people join me that's just the nature of blogging.

If I were to settle into complaining about all the things that I don't like or don't interest me it would feel like a betrayal of such artistic vocation as I have. It would be like Peter turning to Jesus and pointing to the beloved disciple and saying, "What about him?" Well, so what about him? He's going to write the fourth Gospel, a few epistles, and an apocalypse. Peter gets to write a couple of epistles (or at least have his name attached to him, an excurses I will merely allude to) and be a major source of information for another gospel, according to church tradition.

Which is to say that Peter gets stuck wondering what others will do when the opportunity to follow Christ himself is freely given. I could make bitching my mistress or my artistic muse and I even know of whole genres of literature and music devoted to such things. It's too tempting already!

Seeing how Christians sometimes (no, often) engage "culture war" issues it seems as though we too often lament in others what is finally a weakness in ourselves that we would rather not confront. Sure, public schools can be lame but is it also possible Christian parents have so abdicated their own role in education they don't realize that six hours in a public school can't really compete in the end with filial bonds, regardless of what Christians like to quote from secular pundits in the past? Sometimes what Christians consider realism can be a lack of faith and I don't merely speak hypothetically on this subject, even if I'm not going to belabor the point with a personal illustration. If you've read this blog for any length of time you know I'm not prone to using personal illustrations like that very often.

Soemtimes I think secular liberals may have had a point in proposing that a lot of conservative Christians 20 years ago felt disenfranchised and that they lacked the pathways to power. I'm not sure any secular liberals are complaining about that now! But it's possible conservative Christians of the theological and cultural persuasion (as opposed to those who are merely in the former camp) still feel that they do not have the cultural weight or respect in society they ought to have. Biblically speaking, should they, ever?

It seems the answer is basically 'no'. We've done enough damage to the cause of the actual Gospel by using the good news of the culture war. I don't want revival in America so that America can be a great nation again. If the United States collapses in the next fifty years that would really suck, don't get me wrong, but faith in Christ means that if that happens I can write my own personal jeremiad about the fall of a great nation if I feel like it. Sometimes I feel as though Christians can be obsessed with coveting things they don't need and spiritualizing it by invoking something like a culture war. Did the apostles need society on their side in the culture war to transform the world? Last I heard they didn't.

It can certainly seem as though things are worse now than they were in the past but the Preacher doesn't merely warn against us buying into the idea that something that is on the radio now is new, but also warns us that nostalgia is foolish. There's no point in wishing for long-gone days that were better than what we have now because it is not from wisdom we ask where those old days were. I don't want to go back to a time when America was great because when America was great the kind of interracial marriage that brought me into the world wouldn't have happened much even where I live. The musical past I would have grown up into would not have had the richness of the musical past I can see now, and I would have died at birth, more to the point. Sometimes it seems that the single greatest challenge a Christian can face is simply to display some gratitude.

Well, withstanding my own many problems of character and circumstance I'm glad to live in the time in which I live. I don't begrudge the existence of TV or computers or things that Christians seem to think will rot the brain because none of those things rot the brain better than one's own sinful thought life. You don't have to watch South Park to have evil thoughts. You don't have to listen to secular music. You don't have to read works by atheists. All you need are the sinful desires of your own heart and the religious gloss you put on them is more damning than any use of four letter words.

It can be tempting for a guy to sit down and find fault with the rest of the world when his own life has its problems caused by his own frailty, vanity, and weakness. This is why it seems most helpful to point to what is good and beautiful in the world, as Sam puts it in those movies (never could finish the books so I'll try to accentuate the positive here). Bemoaning the loss of what is beautiful is not the same as affirming their value even as they merely seem lost. Even when the psalmist bewails the loss of any good things in society he comforts himself with this knowledge, that the greatest good can never be lost and that this is the basis of singing new songs to the Lord.

Of course the song doesn't have to be new in the sense of keeping up with the times or being in the latest style and it won't be new in terms of its theme but that, too, is not especially important. Especially for an artist living today there is quite literally nothing truly new you can contribute to the great big world of the arts that spans millenia and the entire globe. If I can find and purchase a CD of Chinese folk music in Seattle and I do it then I have access to cultural artifacts that were literally inconceivable to a person in my place in society a century ago, let alone two centuries ago.

We live in interesting times but we have fun complaining about how interesting those times are. As an old song puts it, these are the days of miracles and wonders, but Christians seem uninterested in this too much of the time. As a comic book geek I find it funny and fascinating that the technology to make an actual Doctor Octopus apparatus work in real life may be a generation away. Scientific research is finding possibilities for treating Alzheimer's disease. I just can't help but wonder if some cranky Christians getting into wars against political correctness or the culture war against traditional values are not so much bemoaning the death of a society that has been post-Christian for even longer than Francis Schaeffer said it was may really just be bemoaning their own death without realizing it.

Are we complaining that the godless culture is not letting us engage issues or are we complaining that our lives have no hope and no direction because we have not come to a point in our lives where we have become all the things we dreamed we would be? I'm in my early 30s and I think about how many people I know are married and having kids and think about the college dreams of becoming an artist or a writer or a politician or a professor or an athlete or a businessman. All these dreams we embraced in our teens and twenties can evaporate in the midst of our actual lives and we can secretly become immensely bitter without even realizing it. We can blame the flow of life for these things but in a way it seems useless because if we want to do something, even if there are obstacles in the way and prices to be paid, we live in a society in which it is possible.

But if we make our goal as, say, an artist, to write a hit single and live off those earnings for the rest of our days is the goal in that to be an artist or to get the hit single? I'd like to have it both ways, obviously, but the artist part has to come first. We live in a media culture that covers the silver bullet fired from the gun of someone who, as the culture might retroactively put it, got lucky. Or the person firing the shot had so many connections as to have a path laid out for them, in which case we can ask if that lucky shot was really all that they wanted. The number of celebrities bemoaning the price of their fame suggests it's often not what they really wanted and we non-celebs, no matter how much we persuade ourselves otherwise, can easily find ourselves coveting that which was not asked for by anyone.

Whoever loves money never has money enough, whoever loves power never has enough of it. This is why unbelievers have some justifiable fear of politically activist Christians. They understand a biblical truth much better than we usually do, and they have millenia of history to appeal to as to why they should fear what so many Christians think would be a sign of a great blessing from Jesus. It might seem like that but it might actually be a judgment from the Lord for seeking to make His kingdom of this world and not the age to come.

I think about this often because I'm an amateur composer and an amateur guitarist who would one day like my music to be performed, recorded, and published. Am I doing all this stuff because I want "success" or whatever passes for that? Sure, but if I don't love the simple process of creating things day in and day out and set aside time for it then do I deserve any success? It just seems as though if the work of being an artist is not at some fundamental level its own reward then you're just not embarking into the arts to be an artist. After half my life so far has come and gone (i.e. I've been playing guitar and making music for sixteen or seventeen years) I don't think that I'm in a place where I'm some teenager who thinks that because he picked up a guitar two months ago and has written a song that he's going to be the next big rock star who can use that celebrity as a bully pulpit to plug whatever causes seem to need winning that day.

I have heard about great artists who got screwed over by management in days of yore. Ellington got ripped off a few times. A lot of blues players were paid in booze and not money. What did these great musicians do? They kept writing their music even after they got ripped off time and again. Why? Well, because if you keep writing it doesn't matter how many times you get ripped off by someone if you can keep cranking out the music faster than they can rip you off. Ideally I don't ever want to be ripped off but it also feels like, on the flip side, there's something sad to be said about a guy defending the integrity of his work so much no one listens to it. Sometimes artistic integrity comes at the price of artistic death. Who outside the esoteric circles of classical music nerds knows who Pierre Boulez is? And, seriously, who cares? He's a great conductor but at his highest level of acclaim average joe doesn't care.

But that's obviously not what Pierre Boulez gets out of bed every morning and it isn't why any of us should, either.

Now I have let it be known here that I like Japanese cartoons. I've named a few of the ones I really like and something that has been on my mind lately is that even though a lot of Japanese cartoons are steeped in pantheism and other views I frankly don't subscribe to there is something beautiful about Japanese cartoons and the best stories I've come across in them. I sometimes feel I have learned more through Miyazaki's love of nature and willingness to see good things in people than I have from preachers on Christian radio warning about this or that over the years. It hardly means I endorse the spiritual world espoused by the film My Neighbor Totoro, and that Miyazaki has to imagine a hypothetical world in which world war 2 didn't happen speaks to severe problems in his ideas.

And yet, and yet there is a sense of wonder at the beauty of the world we live in, as broken and destructive as it so often is, that I can pick up in some of the anime I've seen that reminds me that without the help of the Holy Spirit every man, woman, and child on earth is liable to take one true observation and take it so far as to have it stop being anything like truth because it is not held in the context of the whole. The world Christ has created is both uglier and more beautiful than we can appreciate. Sometimes I feel like we Christians are all secret Ivan Karamazovs who talk about how we have no problem with God but cannot accept His world. We are grateful to God for all the things we think God should get credit for and then find things that God has included in our world that aren't what we like and then decide to not be thankful, even though Scripture says that we should be thankful in, um, everything. This isn't necessarily a call to thank God for really awful stuff like getting stabbed or raped or robbed, obviously, but a call to recognize that the world, as steeped as it is in our sin, still reflects on the goodness of Christ. We are Jewish law experts who are constantly needing the reminder of who our neighbor is.

or not ... yet

I have a few personal obligations to tend to that make blogging here less of a priority. It's not that I won't eventually write stuff here but I'm just laying low for a while. The few of you who read this can surmise that some of the projects I've been hoping to tackle are not the kind you can just jump into without some research. I wanted to eventually get to a comparison of Jude and 2 Peter to highlight the differences between the two. I think that even if we grant the commonly proposed theory of dependency of one on the other for these epistles that too much can be made of the similarities without highlighting some striking differences of literary allusions and also of rhetorical purpose.

maybe revisiting Jude here in a bit

I'll see about possibly collecting my thoughts about Jude down the line, and also see about maybe using this blog as a starting point for a project in examining how authors of biblical texts use non-canonical literature throughout the New Testament. So, yeah, it means I may dust off my Jeffrey Burton Russell books if I can find them and look at how the Gospel writers appropriate ideas that aren't technically laid out in the documents themselves. That could take quite a bit of time, actually. Then there's the Cretan poet and one of the poets, so to speak, Paul cites to the Athenians.

The greatest line I've heard in a movie in years

"Risking my life to save people I hate for reasons I don't quite understand."

It's not just the line but who says it. After 18 years there's a reason it's still one of the greatest shows ever made.

One of the things that I still appreciate about The Simpsons is that while there's always that element of satire the central character, Homer Simpson, is a macrocosm in microcosm of the best and worst aspects of Americans. It's not too far off to say that Homer Simpson has no pride whatsoever and that this is true in both the best and worst senses of the word "pride". It's something to ponder in more detail but not right now as I should get some sleep.

I can't help but post a link to this!

http://www.boarsheadtavern.com/archives/2007/08/03/2053664.html

I admit you have to be a theology geek of some sort to fully appreciate the humor but this was just too funny for me not to link to! Name-dropping Pink was just too much!

composing little things can be fun

I just finished a study for solo guitar in G sharp minor. Yep, couldn't resist. The whole thing is built around a special effect, really, a stunt. But it's a stunt that I thought was well worth trying.

There aren't that many works in G sharp minor written for solo classical guitar for the simple reason that it's a tricky key.

Duo Guitarinet

I have discovered this ensemble within the year and am very glad to have found them. Works for clarinet and guitar are relatively rare, especially in recorded music. Scores can be somewhat difficult to find. It's not so much that you can't just be an enterprising person and go order something that lists the score as for clarinet and guitar as that you don't know what you're getting into. That's the inherently speculative nature of investigating new chamber music.



Of course that's what I like to do in my spare time but I admit that even the most willing person can, on a small budget, become only so willing to cast caution to the wind and invest in just any new piece of music, whether through recordings or scores.



Which is why I am happy to have discovered this ensemble. They're worth investing time and money and your ears in. Duo Guitarinet consists of Jan Jakub Bokun on clarinet and Krysztof Pelech on guitar. They have two CDs out together and Bokun has a couple of CDs out, one of which includes more material played with Pelech. They're all worthy CDs and if you can manage to find them I commend them all.

One of there CDs is, simply enough, called Duo Guitarinet. This features a number of Piazzolla arrangements for the instruments from the Argentinian composer's flute and guitar repertoire, most famously Histoire du Tango. I kind of like it better as a piece for clarinet and guitar in some ways because ... not to offend my flute-playing friends out there, sometimes the flute sounds a bit shrill. I still think music for flute and guitar is great, though. It's a credit to Piazzolla's work that Histoire du Tango holds up very well no matter what instrument is taking the quicksilver flute parts.

One of the stand-out pieces for me is Radames Gnattali's Sonata for clarinet and guitar. I don't know if it was originaly composed for the instruments with absolute certainty but it sounds wonderfully idiomatic. In fact, if any of you reading this blog happen to know where I can find this score by all means post a comment and let me know! This piece is great!

This is the kind of duo that a guitarist writing for chamber ensemble could only hope actually exists. In fact I'll admit that I've mailed a score and parts to them not too long ago and I hope they like my piece, and like it enough to play it.

The label is Dux, by the way.

the curiosity of a personal what-if apologetic

I sometimes have heard over the years Christians talk about "What kind of person I would be if I wasn't a Christian." It can be curious and sometimes amusing to consider but on the whole the more I think about it the less useful I find it as a point for personal testimonies. Not that it has no value but as a form of apologia for where one would be now without Christ I find it to be essentially misleading.

The reason I say this is because while in some cases a Christian will describe sins that he or she no longer struggles with this is not really the "what if" formulation of the idea. Rather it is instead a witness to how Christ HAS changed a person's life, or how a person has changed as he or she has followed Christ.

Conversely, what people can often say they "would" be like if they were not Christians may more often than not be what they are, at some level, already struggling with. Evelyn Waugh may have understood this when he once replied that he'd be a bigger jerk if he wasn't a Christian. He wasn't denying being a jerk, just saying that as a Christian he had a reason, at least, to try not being a jerk. And so it goes.

Perhaps the reason personal testimonies that incorporate an apologetic of "this is what I would be like if I weren't a believer" founder because unbelievers can so clearly see that the stuff we claim we'd be apart from Christ is the stuff we already are as Christians.

I promise I will blog again

I had to write a bunch about Ratatouille because it's such an amazing movie. I HAVE seen other movies which I may blog about later.

Since I have another work-required business trip blogging will take a yet another break. I do, however, plan to blog a bit on a few CDs by Duo Guitarinet, a great clarinet and guitar duo I've just discovered in the last couple of months. Clarinet and guitar repertoire is relatively rare or at least terribly under-represented in commercially recorded music so I will try to plug for their discs. Yes, for those with immensely long memories I've yet to get to those theoretical treatises on Koshkin or the fuller review of the Tamulionis CD I mentioned when I started the blog. If some of my pending plans for a return to undergraduate academia come to fruition we may yet see something approximating a musical analysis of Koshkin or Tamulionis on this blog. Who knows? I might even manage to dig into the thematic/structural underpinnings of the Credo from Frank Martin's Mass for double choir. Of course since all this stuff is copyright protected I'm not going to actually quote scores or anything like that, just refer carefully to scores so that those of you in blogger land who already HAVE those scores can compare notes with me. All three of you!

Since I did my analysis of the dorian mode as a structural device in Dark Side of the Moon and posted that essay about counterpoint in Stevie Wonder maybe I should get around to writing about stuff in pop music again. The last pop album of any kind I picked up was Vespertine ... and American V by Johnny Cash. But lately I have been digging through other things, like I've found a guitarist who has recorded every last study composed by Fernando Sor. The three disc set is mainly of academic value, which is hardly to knock the value of the set! For all the praise heaped upon Sor by guitarists virtually no guitarist I know of (except one guy I learned about through the Delcamp discussion forums) has actually recorded ALL of Sor's studies. You'd think that even NAXOS would have underwritten such a project but this is, alas, not quite finished yet. Hard to review recordings of the studies, though, since there's no big chance you'll find the box set in the United States. I had to have it shipped to me from Europe ... which is, come to think of it, what I'm having to do with a LOT of CDs of guitar music I've gotten into lately.

self-discovery and social identity in Pixar films and the nature of art, musings on Ratatouille

Saw the newest Pixar film and, as I have liked pretty much all of them to varying degrees I liked this one. What impresses me about the film is that in the hands of any other writer and director the film would be completely different. This is a comedy that is one of the best of the genre in that you can sit back and enjoy it but it opens itself up to room for a lot of genuinely profound thought.

There are a couple of levels you can work on in interpreting a film like Ratatouille. At the surface there's the story itself of the fish out of water trying to discover his or her true identity in a society or set of societies that do not really appreciate him. This is a standard Disney trope employed to varying degrees of effectiveness. In Bird's film the story works remarkably well because we are not given a portrait that depicts the hero as a good guy without qualification. For instance, in movies like Alladin or Beauty and the Beast (not even bad exponents of the genre) we get protagonists who are misunderstood and unappreciated and bemoan their plight but Bird gives us Remy, who bemoans his plight in the same way.

Except that, as Charles Mudede in The Stranger put it so aptly (and here I betray my location, reading habits where papers go), Remy is a snob. Not just a little bit of a snob, a spectacular snob I might add. He not only looks down on the crassness of the rat-world he lives in he also insists on only partaking of the best culture humans have to offer. He is literally a snob across species!

The idea of identity and how one should either discover it or live in light of it is a theme running throughout Pixar films. For the sake of convenience I'll take Mudede's statement at face value, that the two greatest films by Pixar are Toy Story and The Incredibles. Both movies hinge upon the necessity of characters understanding what their real identity and place in the world actually is and in both movies central conflicts arise when the characters do not accept their role within society either because society will not accept them (The Incredibles) or because they cannot accept their own identity (both Woody and Buzz have this conflict in Toy Story because Woody cannot accept the possibility that his station could be challenged by another toy and because Buzz refuses to accept the reality that he is a toy). The restoration of true identity comes only through the discovery and admission of the identity the characters had all along. The Incredibles employs a similar theme by having the Parr family discover that their real identity is as supers and not simply as suburbanites.

Paraodixically one Pixar film has its central theme that we must recognize who we really are in relationship to others by means of acknowledge the previously assigned roles and that they may change; while the other film makes the case that recognizing that society's designated role is wrong is necessary. This makes sense, both artistically, and in terms of entertainment. No one would really want to see a film about superheroes who gave up using their powers and completely assimilated into society. What makes both films classics (yes, I'm confident saying that) is that both understandings of the nature of identity can be true.

Ratatouille introduces an interesting fusion of the two themes. Remy builds his understanding of himself, in the end, not on his being a rat or being a human but in a third identity, through what he does. He defines himself through his actions in a way that he believes transcends his identity as a rat or even his aspirations to assimilate into human society. Of course this is a total fantasy and in the real world we wouldn't buy food from a rat, thus (per Mudede) the reason the movie is so funny.

One of my favorite little touches is how the ghost of Gusteau is not even really a ghost, but a self-acknowledged figment of Remy's imagination. In a great little scene of discovery Remy asks Gusteau's phantom why he didn't tell Remy something. The reply? "I am a figment of your imagination. If you didn't know why would I?" Remy's hero is someone Remy knows through what we might call "constructed mediated reality". There's a cute academic euphemism and hyperbole all in one phrase right there.

But at another level Bird's film can be seen as a story about the creative process and what attitude a person should have toward art and one's vocation. And in this sense it is critical to note that Gusteau, as Remy's muse, really is a figment of his imagination. Remy never meets Gusteau (who is dead before the movie's story even begins) and only knows his hero through a book written about him and from that imagines what the man is like. Even if we set aside the explanation that Remy invents an imaginary version of his hero because he is lonely we still get an interesting depiction of how any artist interacts with the artists of the past. We are not necessarily ever interacting with our heroes so much as our construction of them. I don't interact with the likes of Bach or Ellington or Hindemith, or in a sense even interact with their music so much as with my understanding and interpretations of their works.

Remy is no different. This is why it's so funny that Gusteau's phantom says "If you didn't know how would I?" We can attempt to ascribe to old master's powers of comprehension or insight they simply never had. This is the way in which a form of self-idolization is rampant in the arts. We ascribe profundities to artists that may have simply been accidents of interpretation. This hardly makes the artists or their works the lesser for it.

Self-definition through action is a common trope in the West, and possibly literature in general. Now if Toy Story posited that Woody and Buzz denied who they were out of fear of lost station or denial about one's identity; and if The Incredibles revealed that society could suppress one's identity and one could abdicated identity in an attempt to fit in; Ratatouille introduces a third obstacle to truly understanding one's self--that one doesn't really know. As Gusteau's phantom tells Remy before vanishing for the rest of the film, Remy has never known who he was. He wasn't a rat and he wasn't human but what was he? Remy decides that he is a cook. This is the identity which finally allows himi to find a place within the society of rats and, with a few provisos, the society of humans. Being true to himself ( a notorious and over-used Disney trope) does not mean rejecting either aspect of his identity but finding, as it were, the golden mean.

Or, perhaps to put it another way, do not be overly righteous and do nor be overly wicked. Why die before your time? It is good to hold on to one without letting go of the other and the man who fears God will avoid all extremes. Toy Story and The Incredibles both offer tales of people who find themselves by avoiding extremes but that discovery is the central struggle of the film. Ratatouille presents a protagonist who goes toward both extremes in an attempt to discover his place in the world.

Now despite Remy's obvious snobbery he shows what I think is a pretty honest and insightful understanding of art, not through what he articulates but through what Bird does with Remy's story. Art involves a combination of technical and practical mastery with a philosophical understanding and a persistent passion for one's art.

How does Bird depict this? Well, that's where there's a lot of room to swim in the speeches, which are wonderfully concise. We KNOW we're getting preached at but the story itself as a film lives up to the ideals preached in the film.

Brad Bird isn't merely presuming to teach us at a didactic level what good art should be he demonstrates it through his own mastery of craft. The scenes where Remy is floating through the underground are beautifully framed close and tight, as though Remy is confined to the underworld in which rats thrive. As he climbs further up to explore where he is we get a slowly widening perspective of him as he scurries through his surroundings. When he finally reaches the roof and discovers he is in Paris we get an expansive pan across the city that has been slowly and steadily set up step by step as Remy moves higher and higher above his previous life. We are literally witnessing the expanding of Remy's conceptual world in the way Bird frames the shot, and we are literally witnessing Remy's journey from rat to human culture to discover what his future is.

Not many other directors could have made a rat's journey of perhaps forty feet upwards seem so epic. Quite a few other directors would have moved straight from the close-up reaction shot of the protagonists slack-jawed face to whatever the big reveal was. Bird doesn't do that. He builds tension and momentum by having us follow Remy, literally, with our eyes, and our perspective does not expand except as his does throughout this remarkably beautiful travelling sequence. It's also a nice touch that we are behind Remy and don't really get to see much of his reaction except through his words which does two things. The first thing this does is that it simply avoids the cinematic cliche Spielberg is so well know for by having the character face away from us, which creates distance between us and the character. But the second thing is that Bird closes that distance between us as an audience and Remy by having slowly expanding our field of view to fit Remy's gradually expanding awareness of his surroundings. We don't discover that he's really in Paris until he does.

As for the more direct statements about the nature and purpose of art, it goes without saying that Anton Ego's speeches are not meant to be taken as the words of a critic who doesn't understand what he's doing or saying. Ego is presented as one of the antagonists throughout the film but in the end we are revealed that he and Remy do not have different views at all. Remy only wants to eat the good stuff and Ego won't swallow any food he does not love. Both are snobs, naturally, but Ego reveals an aspect of Remy that Remy's cooking reveals in others.

I am, of course, talking about the simultaneously hilarious and sublime little flashback Ego has when he takes the first bite of Remy's ratatouille. It is crucial for the point of the film that the dish is a peasant dish, and that despite the daunting figure Ego cuts as a critic that Remy is willing to go with the peasant dish. It is equally telling that Ego is perfectly willing to try it, which is one of the first cues that Ego is not necessarily who we have thought him to be or who he has revealed to us.

Then we get the reaction and the flashback itself, now that the set-up is out of the way. We're presented with Ego as a child getting food cooked for him by a maid or a mother (more likely Bird's intent). Ego is shown waiting for the food impatiently but with a certain patience (we know Ego is nothing if not patient, as tough as he comes across in his opinions he is literally willing to wait all day for someone to make him food, which is (again) another clue given plainly in the film that Ego is never really the bad guy we may want to hink he is). What we get in the flashback is a summation of Ego's experience, that it's like he's a child again getting food cooked for him by his mother. The food is the best food in the world because it is the best effort of someone he loves who loves him in return. And the greatest of art in any medium is like that for us. It is what Remy reveals in having Gustaeu's ghost appear to him as a figment of imagination.

And Gustaeu's figment form reveals to Remy an observation that Remy does not recognize until very late in the story. This comment is as direct as it is also sly. Remy sees Linguini and says "He's nobody" to which the figment replies "He is not nobody. He is in the kitchen." Not everyone can be a great artist but a great artist can come from anywhere. But no great artist gets anywhere without grasping the need to work with those who may at first glance seem to be "nobody".

In fact people must trust in the good will of people who may at first glance seem to be "nobody". Both the rat and the young man strike a deal because neither by themselves have the capacity to find their place in the world with their own abilities and resources. Linguini has a parallel journey to Remy--both must discover what they are not in order to first come to terms with what they are. And Remy and Linguini must not only come to this point of discovery about themselves but also about each other, which is another level at which the story continues a progressively expanding beauty. The journey of self-discovery is not a goal unto itself but a path to discover others.

This is also a theme that Pixar's directors and writers have introduced in every film. We do not discover ourselves in isolation and the purpose of the self is not in isolation. Nor is it in community but in the synergy of discovering one's individual and collective place in the world.

And if all this seems to be a bit much to see in a cartoon that's part of the point of the film. If any director in American animation can make this point so plainly it's Bird. It is curious that cartoons have so often been considered kid stuff not because of the history of childrens' movies but also because "adult" themes are often taken more seriously even though in many cases this hardly needs to be the case.

One of the beauties of animation as a medium is that there is nothing in the frame that someone didn't put there by hand. Live action as a whole will have elements that are not literally under the complete control of the director or creative or production teams. That's not the case in animation of any kind, where every last detail is included for some purpose and must be, or else the details simply won't be there. Perhaps this is why truly great animated films may seem rarer to many than great live-action films, because a paucity of vision in live-action can be literally easier to cover up. An artist who does not have an eye for significant detail will not think to have those details drawn into the frame of an animated film.

Because of technical limitations any alert viewer (even one with a visual handicap) can tell by slight variations in the color pallete what elements of the frame are about to move even before the movement starts. And in cartoons that have lower production budgets it is a simple matter to notice in a show like Eureka Seven (which I really do enjoy, by the way) that every time Eureka manuevers her vehicle it's always the exact same bodily movements that yield different results. But animation is a curious medium where even this can be given and received with a certain amount of good will. And the terms on which this good will can be negotiated come down to the integrity of character designs and the visual coherence of the animated world.

And where Pixar and Brad Bird are concerned the beauty of their films, and particularly Ratatouille, is we can see that no expense has been spared. The water rushing throughout is a marvel to behold. The world Brad Bird reveals to us, as a cartoony as it obviously is, is far more realistic and engaging than the more figuratively cartoony world we get from Michael Bay or Sam Raimi in this year's films (now don't get me wrong, I really did enjoy Spiderman 3 but I'm also not going to put it anywhere near the level of artistry Bird is disaplaying as a film maker).

Which gets me back to the title dish and the nature of the medium. A cartoon is like the dish, in a sense any work of art is like that dish. As Ego put it so eloquently, even the most common piece of artistic junk has more thought and care put into it than the usual bad review that designates the art as junk. That is because in many senses the critics really risk nothing. They risk little more than angry letters if they write a bad review people find offensive and if they praise a movie they are praising the work of someone else.

It is ironic, really, that Ego says at the end of Ratatouille that the great difficulty a critic has is to recognize and defend the new, precisely because the flashback reveals the core of great art to be something else, that which through its careful construction from the materials of technical command and personal conviction produce in us the sensation that this was made by someone we love, who loves us, and put together the very best for us, that we are a child receiving this love from a parent. In fact this irony is so funny in itself I don't feel I can even really bother elaborating on it because it is both funny and profoundly true. And beyond that definition of art I suppose there is the simpler theme that we discover who we are through who loves us and those whom we love.

appropos of nothing

I am just mulling over a sort of proverb, that a bad or sloppy argument can mar a good cause. A slipshod argument for truth isn't a lie but it damages the cause of truth. It can distort the truth. They say the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. I wonder how many of those good intentions started with some heartfelt attempt to correct what was felt to be errant behaviors or beliefs. It may not be enough merely to stand up for the truth but to do so in a way that is true, otherwise we have lost the ability to speak the truth, on behalf of the truth. This does not make us liars because theoretically a liar is not interested in presenting the truth, but we can end up seeming like liars anyway because if we don't convey the truth in a truthful way what are we really doing?

It's not as though we aren't guilty of doing this at some point. I suppose that is in some sense why it is necessary to speak the truth in love. Jesus said "You will know the truth and the truth will make you free." Does this mean that things we tell or or told that are considered the truth that do not liberate us or others to follow Christ more closely are not necessarily the truth, even if they may be factually accurate? It seems that way. If that's true, though, then we are far more guilty of being liars than we are able to imagine. I suppose it's something to think about but I'm not sure I have more to add about this beyond that. It just seems sometimes as though some of the worst teachings to afflict orthodox Christian beliefs have come about from people who thought they were offering a decent apologetic for the faith. The worst lies we tell others are ones we believe ourselves. We are not in a position to understand those lies to be what they are on our own. We must rely on others and Scripture for that.

James 5 doesn't advocate a pattern of confessing sins in private to an all-knowing God who sees all things, though that is certainly entailed in what he writes. He writes "Confess your sins to one another." If we do not confess our sins to one another and pray for each other does healing come? Somehow it seems unlikely.

well, sort of back

It's mostly been due to what would traditionally be called technical difficulties. Plus I've got more travel pending this week. It's not exactly for a lack of things to write about but I need to put things on hold again before getting back into the blogging game.

I didn't read 1-5 Enoch as I had planned. I had Richard Bauckham's nifty book on Jude and 2 Peter handle that stuff for me. This is an old commentary but it's around for good reasons. Perhaps after I'm back I can get back into my ruminations on Jude and Jude's use of non-canonical texts.

I'm back

I don't have much to blog about right now because I should be getting to sleep but we've got ourselves functioning internet again in the house. I have a few things to blog about ... but later.

Where in I just link to someone else's blog

http://www.internetmonk.com/archive/thoughts-on-acts-15-and-early-church-leadership

No surprises. His site is in my blogroll, right?

While I wait to hear some feedback from someone about the possibility of writing a sonata for tuba and guitar I can post links, eh?

nostalgia and the arts

I saw Transformers this week and it has been interesting to mull over how loyalties formed in our younger years carry over into aesthetic allegiances. For me Transformers is a reminder that my aesthetics have changed. The shift is hardly perceptible in any given year but becomes very pronounced across a decade. I have gotten to the point where I'd rather watch a bad movie in good company than watch a great movie by myself.

And Michael Bay's Transformers is not exactly a "great" movie. And certainly neither was the original animated Transformers movie from the 1989s that I honestly couldn't finish watching when I tried watching it in my early 20s. When I was a kid I really, really, really wanted to see the movie but I couldn't figure out a way to see it when I was 12 and friends who saw it said that it was disappointing. I actually WANTED Optimus Prime to die. That might make me seem like a craven jerk among 1980s kids but that's what I wanted.

See, apparently unlike a few other kids I knew Optimus Prime didn't embody the best ideals of my childhood. I thought he was too squeaky clean, too perfect. He was so indestructible in the cartoons on TV my stepdad once asked why he even needed a bodyguard since he could apparently beat the bad guys all by himself. It was a curious question that nagged me at the back of my mind for the times I watched the show. Perhaps my stepdad simply burst the bubble of suspended disbelief.

Curiously, perhaps, what I hoped the cartoon would have that it never really had was moral ambiguity. Perhaps I was an unusual 12 year old boy, or perhaps I just had no idea where my kindred spirits were, those other 12-year-old boys who wanted the Decepticons to win once in a while so that there'd be some meaning to the victory of the good guys. That was my problem with the show, I guess, why I stopped being interested in Transformers. There was no real challenge for the good guys in battling the bad guys. The bad guys had plans so hair-brained it wouldn't have taken much to beat them.

I mean, how often did Megatron say "We attack ... at sunrise!" Now for those of you who remember Optimus Prime he's the kind of guy where if he was a guy would get up at 6 in the morning, eat his Wheaties, and go run around the track for thirty minutes just to warm up and great the bright sunshine before it even showed up yet. When Optimus Prime said "I have a plan" it was basically a signal for a jump cut. We weren't going to actually HEAR him explain the plan. My brother once said that when Optimus Prime says "Even the wisest of men and machines make mistakes." you might was well through in a parenthetical "even me" to just butter the toast already.

So when I heard that this kind of self-regarding Optimus Prime who didn't need any help, might actually die in the Transformers movie I looked forward to it. Well, at least I did ten years later when I was in my twenties. The battle was really basically a draw. And after a few seasons of cartoons on TV where Megatron's fusion cannon did diddley squat I was baffled that in the movie Megatron's gun, which did nothing more than create slivers of rising smoke on Ironhide's shoulder, can suddenly kill Autobots with one blast.

Where was this new and improved fusion cannon hiding for years? Behind FCC regulations? Why was it by 2005, per the setting of the movie, that the Decepticons somehow gained the upper hand decisively, so decisively that the Autobots had to abandon Cybertron and live on a moon base? No, really! What exactly were Megatron and the Decepticons doing right for season after season that they suddenly just managed to take over Cybertron? Did all the Autobots leave? It seemed like there were three Autobots to every two Decepticons anyway, so that MIGHT have made some sense. But it all seemed so spectacularly contrived that I think even as a 12-year-old I would have found it puzzling.

I mean, in comic book geek terms this is what you'd call a spectacular ret-con. Retroactive continuity on this grand a scale goes so far as to question beg the entire TV run that preceded the movie. Now you can probably tell, if you've read this geeky rant this far, that I was the kind of kid where instead of cheering the new-found elements of realism where even heroes can die I'd be skulking about the sorry excuse to sell more toys. In fact hearing that Optimus Prime got killed and that he was replaced with Rodimus Prime just began to fill me with a curious and sort of dreadful late childhood feeling that if I had gotten what I wanted, if I had gone and actually seen the Transformers movie in theaters as a kid, that I would have felt like I was conned.

Cartoons designed to sell toys is all right, if the cartoons are decently watchable and the toys are actually fun to play with. The combination of action figure, vehicle, and robot with the premise of a backstory explaining their reasons for fighting, that was a brilliant marketing idea.
But to contend that the cartoon and the movie that followed were or are better than a Michael Bay film ... sorry, guys, I just don't quite see it. In fact I'd have to say in hindsight, in terms of what I felt at the time, and in terms of how I feel now, Transformers as a pop culture phenomenon was cool for the time but it doesn't stick with me. If it sticks for other people that's cool. I guess I offer some heartfelt sympathy to anyone who thinks Bay slagged his or her childhood pop culture high water mark. George Lucas irrevocably destroyed the mystique of the Star Wars franchise for me with those prequels ... though I confess that by my mid twenties even the appeal of Star Wars was starting to fade for me. I've got the movies, the original theatrical cuts since Lucas finally consented to make those available.

But for the inner 12-year old I had long shifted my interests back to stuff I thought I had given up, comic book characters. The Batman cartoons from the 90s impressed me. They became my talisman, sort of, for the kind of cartoon I WISH I had been able to see as a kid. So my 20s were a sort of renaissance of comic book and cartoon appreciation. I didn't just have the cartoons that were practically the only game in town. I had options. I had access to anime, to well-done superhero cartoons, superhero cartoons slightly better than the average episode of Spiderman and his Amazing Friends.

I think it was Lewis who once, so it's said, stated that there are books that are worth reading at age 7 that are even more worth reading at 70. Or something like that. Whether or not C. S. Lewis said it or wrote it somewhat immaterial to me because I think that whoever said it might not go so far as to say that 70-year old men have even more reason to watch Transformers than 7-year-old boys. For some, though, I'm sure that's true. Maybe if I live to be 70 years old I'll enjoy Transformers cartoons as much as I did when I was 11 or 12. Maybe not.

I suppose that there may be some mechanism in the brain and soul that allows us to love hearing the same music over and over again, hear the same stories over and over again. I suppose at some level that is what the function of myth might be or of history, too. If so then I'd have to say that Transformers is so light to me and far from my heart that I can go watch Michael Bay's movie and feel that it is basically at the same artistic level as the original stuff. If others feel differently that's fine, too.

But I'm afraid I have never been able to completely get on the Optimus Prime bandwagon because he seemed simultaneously too perfect and oddly remote. Even Superman has more powers of empathy, depending on what version you're reading. There's a sense in which Optmius Prime and Superman seem like different versions of the same character, with Prime being the lesser entry in terms of pop cultural significance. It's as though an American culture of kids that thought it was a little too cool and sophisticated to keep rooting for Superman after Superman 3 turned to Optimus Prime.

I guess the trouble with nostalgia in the arts is that nostalgia is not the same as history. Ecclesiastes warns us, "Don't ask yourself, 'where are the older days that were better than these?' because it is not wise to ask such questions." I know there is a temptation for us to decide that people will go from bad to worse, just as the Bible says, but the Bible also warns us against nostalgia. I guess I'm still a Didion fan because even if I do believe God's eye is on the sparrow I don't think the old days were all that glorious.

Optimus Prime and Superman

They're both red and blue, super strong, aliens from other worlds who have come to protect us. Really, Optimus Prime and Superman aren't that different in concept. They stand for the same things, they're virtually invincible and they're so perfect it can be easy to not appreciate them.

I didn't like either character much when I was growing up. I was much more a Batman and Spiderman fan. But as time has passed I have managed to appreciate the two big red and blue guys. I suppose it doesn't hurt that I saw some actually cool Superman stories. I have to give credit to Paul Dini and company for finding a way to make Superman a character I could actually care about. And retroactively I've come to a somewhat more generous view of the character Optimus Prime even as my nostalgia for the actual Transformers cartoon has virtually evaporated.

We could say to ourselves that people are too cynical and sophisticated for heroes, for characters willing and able to fight for the oppressed and all that. But it seems that's just one of the lies we tell ourselves. We haven't become too sophisticated for heroes. We haven't become too jaded for being interested in someone to save the day. We may have gotten too obsessed with the idea that our heroes need to be just like us, which was not always a very high priority.

Michael Bay's pending cinematic masterpiece

Or not!

Personally I think Michael bay was born to make this movie. I don't anticipate a movie that is going to be:

1) thought-provoking,
2) full of finely drawn characterization of dynamic and three-dimensional characters
3) grapple with the subtleties and ambiguities of acting as moral agents in an ambivalent or hostile universe
4) any basic continuity in narrative or moving parts

But you know what? I don't care. These were all shortcomings of the original cartoon. To suggest as some have that Transformers as a TV show broached on the issue of debate about preservation and stewardship of environmental resources and that the Autobots and Decepticons represent different attitudes about environmental utilization during the Reagan era as an allegory about something on the order of pantheism and dominion theology gone awry ...

Well, that's like suggesting that you are being fought over by two vampires and one vampire is the bad guy because he just wants to suck you dry and go home and the other is the good guy because he wants to suck the blood from you in measured meals and is asking for permission. They're both still blood-sucking vampires, right? I suppose one could be the "good guy" for asking permission.

I realize for some of you Transformers fans this analogy seems unfair and I don't pretend that it is. Hey, I liked the show when I was a kid, too, but it hasn't aged as gracefully as Batman and Superman cartoons from the 1990s or Pinky and the Brain. A lot of cartoons in the 1980s were made to help shill toys. That doesn't automatically count against them, really. But attempting to overlay a grander philosophical vision on a toy-line like Transformers only gets you so far.

There's probably nothing in Michael Bay's film that will be as painful and absurd to watch as some of the stuff I saw in the original animated film, let alone the stuff I didn't stick around to see when I tried watching the film at the age of 21 at the behest of a friend. I didn't even stick around for the part my brother-in-law told me about where all the robots start dancing to Wierd Al's "Dare to Be Stupid", which he described as the most poignant congruence of musical soundtrack and cinematic image he'd seen in a while. Hey, he's tougher than me, he watched the film to the end! I had to shut it off around the time Hot Rod became a central character because I was too flabbergasted by how cloying and annoying it all was. My apologies to anyone who loves the movie but it just didn't grab me.

But I have such low expcations for this Michael Bay film that if it's basically like The Rock I'll basically be happy with it. For now Hot Fuzz is still the film to beat for my experience of cinematic pleasure this year.

Duo Guitarinet

I haven't had a chance to listen to their CDs yet but I am happy to report I have a few CDs by them and their constituent members and I'm really looking forward to hearing their stuff. This is a guitar and clarinet duo (in case the silly but still pretty cool pun didn't tip you off) in Poland and I'm planning to send off the score and parts for my sonata for clarinet and guitar to them as soon as I can manage. I'm also going to see if I can find them a few things since they've been kind enough to send me CDs of theirs I haven't seen any American retailers selling their discs and it just so happens I can find CDs from an artist they'd like to hear more of but can't get from Poland. Since they have been so kind as to send me their music and want to look at mine I'm glad to help them out finding things I can find on my side of the pond.

I've been a little busy lately with some homework projects that I really should be working on but I figured I'd blog about this because in an earlier blog entry I mentioned the trouble I've had finding clarinet and guitar duos and now that I've found one I'm happy.

It is a curious but still pleasant coincidence or pattern for me that through my college years and even since then I have become friends with or had shared musical interests with people from central or eastern Europe. Some of my friends in town are of Polish descent and I have a friend in Croatia whom I don't hear from too much now but she and her husband and daughter, last I heard, were doing quite well. And I am going to make myself work on a little piece about Ourkouzounov for a local publication, which means I have a lot of listening to do to meet the local deadline. I was a journalism student, though, so I really should be able to handle it. It's not a sure thing the article will get printed but I think even just writing the article will be good for me.

In other news I have also prepared scores to send off to a viola and guitar duo and also a duo for flute and guitar. Perhaps it is the bane of composers that scores always take longer to prepare than we think they will but I've got scores and parts ready to send.

In other news, well, there's not a whole ton of other news about musical stuff that i feel like writing about. THis is pretty much it. I know Atanas Ourkouzounov worked with Shin-ichi Fukuda on a disc of Toru Takemitsu's music and some other pieces. Fukuda is FINALLY getting to recording more Takemitsu. Hooray! We only had to wait ten years. I'm trusting it will be worth the wait because Fukuda's other Takemitsu CD is incredible and Ourkouzounov's CDs are tons of fun. I'm willing to bet anything these two guitarists worked on together should be something fans of classical guitar should get as soon as it comes out on disc. I just don't know exactly when or what label but I've got the information that the recordings have been completed from a, what's the old jargon, a very reliable source. Best wishes to Mr. Fukuda and Mr. Ourkouzounov. I'll be getting the CD when I learn more of it.

Luigi Legnani

Who is this guy? A long dead Italian guitarist who I had never heard of or read about before this year thanks to a forum I visit for classical guitarists. This composer wrote 36 caprices for his Opus 20, and quite a few of them are in keys that inspire me. Like D flat, A flat, E flat, B major, F sharp major. This guy didn't chicken out when it came to the most brutal keys on the guitar! I like him already. That the music is light and airy and has absolutely nothing to do with my usually preferred composers like Shostakovich, Hindemith, Bartok, or Stravinsky is immaterial. In fact most of Legnani's stuff sounds at first listen like some kind of Haydn knock-off ... which is just fine because I love a lot of Haydn's music.

Not that I'll be PLAYING any of this music by Legnani any time soon. I'm not nearly that good in terms of chops. Anyway, here's a random discovery in the last week or so.

revised plans

Well, it turns out Bauckham did us all the favor of not only plowing through the books of Enoch but also all the variant versions of the story that may be loosely dubbed the Testament of Moses or the Assumption of Moses, the latter title being pretty inaccurate since an assumption of someone who's already dead, well, kinda hard to describe as a genuine assumption on the order of, say, Enoch or Elijah.

More to write later but for not it's enough to me that I got through the 127 pages of exegetical study with all the alternate variations of Moses' burial and the background on the Aramaic vs the Greek forms of Enoch. Maybe I don't have to read all of 1-5 Enoch myself now that I know Bauckham did it 22 years ago!

Bluebeard's Castle is awesome

Saw the semi-staging at Benaroya tonight and it's pure Bartok. I am amazed that an opera with just tw0 characters worked so well. If Pinter wrote opera ... no, Pinter isn't quite good enough to have staged such a fascinating story even if his stories can be as overwrought. It's surprisingly accessible music ... for Bartok, though the hall was anything but packed.

But I don't feel like blogging about this so much since I am about to embark on a sturdy journey through a commentary on Jude and maybe muster up the nerve to read 1-5 Enoch THIS weekend.

1-5 Enoch is on hold ... but

Richard Bauckham rocks! Picked up his commentary on Jude and 2 Peter yesterday. It will serve as a fun study for my little Jude project.

nothing quite like paper

Even though you can download all kinds of public domain works for solo guitar by composers like Sor and Giuliani and do so for free I admit that the toughest thing to do is to take that laptop screen out on the road and about town. And the thing is that for the cost of printing a fairly large piece or set of pieces the old-fashioned bound book score is still the way to go. No loose pages floating away when you open the guitar case some slightly windy Seattle afternoon. You can shelve it somewhere and come back and know exactly what it is you're looking at.

So I have broken down and bought the studies of Sor and Giuliani. The right hand studies by Giuliani are sufficiently fantastic just going studies 1-40 I figured I should have them for the road. Travelling for work trips has reminded me that it might not even be bad to have a small cheap, backpack size guitar to take on planes as carry-on.

1-5 Enoch, ow

I didn't quite realize how long this collection is. And I didn't think my digging into Jude would lead me to writings by the somewhat opaque Clement of Alexandria. Or maybe I just haven't really delved into patrology or "early Christian writings" as much as I should.

Instead I walked out to a park and waded along side the water by a retaining wall that keeps a rail line in place and hiked around in Seattle faux woods llistening to music by William Byrd, which was fun. I figured with a three-day weekend I needed ot get out o fthe house and spend a few hours in sunlight before tackling apocrypha and then I got hom eand had food and eralized I didn't feel THAT up to throwing myself into apocrypha.

Studying the historical and literary nature of Jude leads a person to read and write far more than the length of Jude itself would ever suggest. That's just the nature of researching ancient Christian literature that cites a couple of books of Jewish apocrypha.

Of course it was good for me to get out and get some fresh air and walk around.

A scintilating weekend with 1-5 Enoch

But it's probably going to be tomorrow that I try to read all this stuff. I'm committing myself to researching stuff about the epistle of Jude, which cites directly one apocryphal book (which, given ancient citation customs, means I feel obliged to eventually read the whole kit and kaboodle ascribed to Enoch). There's some debate as to whether Jude references The Assumption of Moses. Origen thought so but there's not really what we'd tend to call manuscript evidence of what the book entailed, though Clement of Alexandria seems to have a somewhat indirect reference to the content of the Testament/Assumption of Moses.

Jude's use of non-canonical literature presents a special can of worms since the citation of a non-biblical literary or historical source does not automatically canonize Hellenistic writers anymore than Jewish pseudopigrapha. But I've got a nice, long weekend here and I suppose I may be better off just going on a walk and reading stuff later.

Plus I haven't played guitar as much as I should, either, or piano. That's waht spending half the month in Los Angeles can do for you if you don't have a guitar you want to haul through Sea-Tac or LAX. I may just need to fix that later on if I'm going to do more traveling.

The Year of Magical Thinking

Yes, I know, it was published about two years ago but I took a while to get around to reading this. The subject was death and grief and since Joan Didion isn't exactly chipper at the best of times in her writing I wasn't sure I felt up to reading her book when it came out a few months after the death of my maternal grandmother.

But other than a short but striking anecdote in chapter 21 I got through without so much as getting misty-eyed. Not for nothing does Didion seem unusually remote in her personal writing. She's sort of like the oracle at Delphi, neither revealing nor concealing but merely giving a sign, and perhaps like Heraclitus notes that people who search for gold move much earth and find little.

She's the muse of the pointlessness of imposing our narrative on the world as a way for the world to make sense. Her leitmotiff in the closing chapters that no one watches the sparrows is obviously a counterpoint to the idea that "His eye is on the sparrow" as it has been lodged into our receding cultural memory by Mahalia Jackson's rendition of a famous song from the Gospel tradition in America.

Well, I do believe His eye is on the sparrow so Didion chooses to hang out in places I don't go to by profession. Still, I've never felt obligated to agree with a number of authors whose works have fascinated me. I'm hardly a pantheist but a lot of Miyazaki's films and certainly his comic book Nausica resonate with me.

Still, this is a book featuring Didion during what would have to be reckoned a more hysterical or irrational stage of her life dealing with the death of her husband of about four decades and with what she did not yet know at the time of writing would be the death of her only child. Now exactly why she and John Gregory Dunne named their daughter Quintana I don't recall and it's not a name I'd ever pick but it sure is a memorable name.

Well, I could blog about the book in more detail but I don't feel like it right now. It's late, as an old song puts it, and I also need to urinate. Blogging always gets obstructed at some point by biological imperatives and the need to pee is surely one of the more unavoidable ones.

flying is beautiful

Al Gore, I know why you succumb to mighty hypocrisy by complaining about global warming and flying around in jets.

Flying is fun.

Now, to be sure, flying coach on Alaska Airlines where I hear the same songs over and over again before the flight isn't TOTALLY cool. I don't want to hear "I Believe I Can Fly" ever again if possible but since I've got two more business trips down to L.A. later this year I'm going to hear that stupid song at least two more times. I got it in the first half-minute that the guy believes he can fly. And I can't help noticing that Elvis can't help falling in love with me just before every flight and finally made a crack about it to one of the flight attendants who smiled. She had to put up with it more often than I ever have.

Whoever that loser is or was who did a slowed-down version of that Buddy Holly song, screw you, man! You ruined a fun upbeat little song about teen love by turning it into a laconic self-congratulatory ode to ... I don't know, 70s soft rock. I'm not even a big Buddy Holly fan and I just want to break the instruments of the people who messe with that song.

But flying is still beautiful. Feeling the mild force of gravity pulling you back as the plane accelerates to take-off speed. Awesome. No, really. I wanted to be a pilot since I was maybe nine years old and never had the eyesight for it. It's weird to think about because when I was about six my parents flew me and my siblings from the Northwest to ... let's just see the breadbasket of America ... and I was terrified. I'm sure I was the most obnoxious shrieking, crying little kid the people on that plane had ever seen or heard and my parents must have told me in no uncertain terms they were embarrassed by me being so afraid. Well, a few years later and I wasn't afraid of flying anymore and relished any excuse to be on a plane.

Even stuff like turbulence on a plane is fun! I'd rather be on a plane that buckles in turbulence and thereby proves the plane is pliant and not some stick to be snapped in half than to have the plane be totally fixed and rigid and eventually be some stick that snaps in half.

So business trips can be lame but flying is cool. Even Al Gore knows that.

At least we're not seriously considering banning all night-time flights as the British (or some of the British) have proposed. Some Brits are suggesting people have fewer children so as to avoid contributing to global warming. If this sort of progressive just never has kids, never gets on a plane, and avoids using fossil fuels then how will these ideas be passed on to succeeding generations?

They won't.

I have grown tired of doom-saying from both the left and the right over the last ten years. Bill Clinton didn't institute martial law and take away all my civil liberties. When people who detest Bush 2 make the same claims I find it a little tough to believe them. Clinton was elected to a second term and is still unable to run again. I anticipate that happening with Bush 2, too. Clinton and Bush have more similarities on things like the environment and foreign policy than the haters on either side seem eager to notice. Clinton's handling of the former Yugoslavia doesn't seem to have been so different from anothe rmilitary venture that attempts to institute a new approach to government and social order in a region torn by centuries old ethnic conflicts exacerbated by the stupid foreign policies of colonialist European powers. :)

It sort of seems like the next presidential race is going to come down to people attempting to distance themselves from a war they voted for without formally declaring war (if memory serves). Congress seems like a strange branch of government sometimes, often wishing to simply not do what it is supposed to do according to the Constitution (and then finding ways to either blame other branches for not doing what they're supposed to do); or trying to get other branches to do what they should do themselves; or even have other branches overturn things they do that aren't constitutional. I'm not sure how anyone can or should run in 2008 with the position of having voted for permission to use military force but now distancing themselves from said vote. John Edwards was the only one I might have given a pass for the "I was young and dumb and that's why I voted 'yes'."

But in the end no one in Congress DESERVES a pass because if the President asks permission to use military force why didn't Congress go one further and discuss a formal declaration of war? Congress has been abdicating its constitutional role in deciding when formal sancation of military power is called for, and this for decades. What I find most annoying about Congress is that they whine about presidents doing what Congress keeps letting them do. Whenever the United States eventually falls according to whatever the Lord assigns through providence will historians look back and guess that the United States, as a political structure and social unit, dissolved slowly because Congress wasn't doing what it was constitutionally designed to do? Letting the president wage wars and the courts develop legislation the political parties didn't want to pass for fear of getting sacked at the polls? Decrying the expansion of government at election years and then keeping the status quo when it was self-serving?

I didn't really want Bush in office back in 2000. I thought both parties had demonstrated that the wealth within the party's constituents and adherents had picked the candidates rather than the candidates who might have been better. 2000 was a race between two white guys from families in the South who got their money from oil. I began to joke around some friends that a vote for Gore was a vote for war because of the Democratic track record on military interventions post World War 2 that never involved a formal declaration of war by Congress. Republicans did it, too, but not on the scale of Democrats, at least not until the last 20 years and even then not until more recently than people seem to think. Both parties are equally guilty on this overall but find it mighty convenient to blame the other party. As I've blogged earlier, Jesus was crucified by the vote of a bipartisan committee. I get tired of the Pharisees and Sadducees and temple authorities all pointing the finger at each other as though they didn't call for the death of Jesus themselves.

return to L.A., a corporate culture and my blood sugar

I can't say that this second mandatory business related training trip was that much more useful than the first but developing rapport with my mostly equally-bewildered colleagues counted for something.

I have also gotten advice from two good friends that one key to living in Los Angeles can be summed up thusly:

Don't drink the water.

More to the point, don't drink the tap water. Ever. Bottled water. I know there are environmental worries that bottled water is so Amerian and irresponsible. Los Angeles tap water sucks. You can drink glass after glass and it might never slake your thirst.

On the other hand, I'm starting to wonder if that's a sign of me having blood sugar problems rather than Los Angeles tap water being awful. It doesn't have to be a strict either/or here, though.

I didn't get nearly as much reading as I had planned on getting done over the week. The whole slowly building rapport with co-workers couldn't be ignored even by me and I have to admit I don't tend to care about mingling or building rapport with people in general in a lot of ways. But I did manage to finally read Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking. Perhaps I can blog about that later but right now I don't feel like I have a ton to blog about it. It IS 3am after all.

I suppose reading a book about death has gotten me thinking about mortality. Diabetes runs on both sides of my family and both grandmothers died of complications related to diabetes if I recall correctly.

I shouldn't be finding myself so unable to concentrate, learn, and remember things lately but that's where I'm at. My best guess is that it's a blood-sugar issue and a potentially serious one. I discovered that having beef jerky to get some protein in my system was initially successful but disastrous a couple hours after I had the food. By contrast, having yogurt helped keep me moderately alert for hours before I had any other food. So chalk that up to being a gimme that the salt content must have dehydrated me or something so that the initial protein boost benefit was decimated by salt. The more water I drink the more clearly I'm able to keep focused but it presents the problem of having to go pee that liter of water I had earlier in the day.

To me blogging is not an inherently personal enterprise or it shouldn't be because broadcasting your personal experiences shouldn't be anyone's business (except perhaps by sending emails that are not necessarily that secure). But here I am, anyway, blogging about something I normally don't like to blog about, anything particularly "personal".

Why do I find the idea of divulging personal information in a blog so distasteful? Well, I feel it's needless to explain. Still, I guess I'd have to chalk this up to the belief that the internet should be a resource for information that may interest or help people and I don't see how divulging information of a purely personal nature in something like the blogosphere usually does that. I can't say I've got better things to do with my time than read the blogs of friends or family even though it's true that I hardly ever read blogs by friends or family. It's not meant as a personal slight against them--they just have my phone number and email address already so I don't see much reason to convey personal things on a blog I could convey to them.

But since I've not been blogging because of business related travels and because I've made discoveries about my health as side effects of dealing with what I'd have to call the corporate culture's approach to food I find myself writing about this stuff even though I hadn't planned to. Some corporate cultures have some bad legacies in terms of food, at least for me. The carbos and caffeine approach of "continental breakfast" is a major pain in the ass. After seven years in this company setting with not nearly enough exercise it seems to have exacted a frustrating toll on my brain. It's reminding me the hard way that advice to avoid caloric drinks and exercise consistently is advice I should have taken from a doctor five years ago. I did, sort of, but not enough and not consistently enough. But I'm still relatively young (33) so it's not as though I don't have some time to get cracking on this.

The first business trip was awful not just because the training was mostly worthless to me but also because that first trip I felt like my brain was dead weight until MAYBE 5pm, right when the training was over. I began to discover patterns that were signs of sleep apnea but also of things that suggest my blood sugar is screwed up. This last trip has just wrapped up and I felt better this week because I began to deliberately avoid carbohydrates in favor of vegetables and protein. This has had some pretty dramatic results in my ability to remember and learn things this week ... or at least it would if the training this week wasn't just as semi-useless as the other training period before it. I have, to use an analogy, been inducted into the beauties of a phone book that has addresses and phone numbers but no names. There are also some late-breaking discoveries that have my colleagues justifiably freaking out that a vendor is planning to set up a huge project based on what the vendor understands to be the needs of the client and not on the actual needs of the client.

I could wax at a small length about how and why this has happened but I really don't want to since it's all proprietary stuff anyway and because I just got home. I didn't pick up Lawrence of Arabia, Patton, and Spiderman 2.1 last weekend to come home THIS weekend and write a whole ton about a business trip I didn't really like. Then again, this wouldn't be blogging if everything I blogged reflected on things I was carefully thinking about.

a battle of will against my old HP all-in-one printer/copier/scanner

HP sucks

I mean they really suck.

Too bad I've got one of their units. It's not that Vista has presented any problems necessarily as that HP hasn't bothered to remedy some things or I'm not aware of the remedies. I just tried printing out bus directions to a friend's house and it's taken two hours to get my machine to interface with machine. It's pretty damn annoying. Now I'm not sure I'll get to sleep in time to go to the friend's place at a semi-reasonable hour for normal people.

Why was I working on this? Well, it's nice to be able to print if you misplace stuff that you printedand want to make new copies. Now that I've discovered where said misplaced printed items were I feel even dumber for not having figured out how to get my special HP beast to work as designed. I'm tired. I have a three-day weekend and for the most part my three-day weekend has not been completely muffed in the first day by HP making crap ... but it was getting close. We'll see if I'm awake enough after noon to visit as planned.

more travels to the city of angels (possibly named Asmodeus)

I have to admit I didn't enjoy Los Angeles much on the business trip last week. There were no clouds, it was too hot, and the tap water was more to die of than to die for. Still, the restaurants were pretty good. Still, $1.50 for pop from a vending machine is insane, especially since up here in the Emerald City you can find ghetto/bargain bin copies of the same soda for 25 cents a pop, literally. I mean, come on, it's all carbonated water and corn syrup, right? Except maybe Mountain Dew, the great wake-me-up that burns as it goes down your gullet.

One thing I have learned is that things have changed a lot since last I rode in an airplane. I am not making this up but fourteen years ago when I last flew from Sea-Tac they let me on the plane even though I had no driver's license and no state identification of any kind. They just let me on the plane! Now I dread the prospect of even having loose change in my pockets! I had to throw away an average sized bottle of shampoo I was foolish enough to have brought because I've never stayed in a hotel where they, you know, have those weird little bottles of shampoo and stuff. And toothpaste? I have to say Colgate must be making a killing now or something. It makes me feel simultaneously old AND naive, not that I have ever been particularly worldly wise or anything.

Being in Los Angeles for one week gave me great appreciation of the beautiful overcasts and mild, regular precipitation in this beautiful, beautiful town.

an open blog entry to Matanya Ophee, thanks for 'Repertoire Issues'

http://www.guitarandluteissues.com/defossa/repertoire.html

Here's hoping he doesn't mind that I just blatantly link to his article/lecture transcription.

I doubt we'd ever meet or get along. I've a fairly theologically and politically conservative guy with a white mom and an American Indian dad who has always grown up in the Northwestern United States so if I ever met the guy I don't know if we could have a conversation for long before one of us said something that put the other on edge. Since it's exponentially unlikely I'll ever meet the man that's fine.

But this presentation he gave, this article he published about repertoire issues in classical guitar completely changed the way I think about my instrument, the guitar, and about how I approach composing for it. I went to college and sang in choirs and I learned music from organists and conductors and only eventually did I ever study, for just two quarters, with a classical guitarist. The vast majority of my musical education came through non-guitarists and the most important books I read on music had nothing whatsoever to do with the instrument. How on earth can a guitarist get something out of George Oldroyd's The Technique and Spirit of Fugue? What about Kent Kennan's book on Baroque Counterpoint? Hindemith's Craft of Musical Composition or A Composer's World? Kennan's orchestration treatise? John Verral's monograph on counterpoint?

It would be nice to say the guitar and guitarists had a bigger role in my musical education but Ophee is right, chamber music is where you really learn stuff when you study or play. I learned more about how to approach composition singing in choirs than playing guitar. Studying English sacred choral repertoire, including the remarkable modulatory patterns in William Harris' Faire is the Heaven taught me a lot. My composition instructor was a conductor who played clarinet. But it was studying the quartets of Bartok, Hindemith, Shostakovich, Haydn, and Beethoven where I learned the most about how to put music together. I studied symphonic repertoire, string quartets, piano cycles (Messiaen's Vingt Regards, Ludus Tonalis, Beethoven's Op. 111). Now I can't play any of the stuff to save my life except the first three movements of Ludus Tonalis because as an instrumentalist I am mostly self taught as a guitarist and a pianist.

And the thing is, to me that shows that how you learn your techniques doesn't matter. It has also shown me, alas, that after a decade of studying the greatest chamber music around I am at a loss to think of chamber music for the guitar that is as cool as Bartok's 3rd quartet or Hindemith's Op. 22 quartet (THAT piece is incredible). The thing is there ARE amazing works for guitar that have it playing with other instruments and the pieces that survive long enough to get recorded more than once deserve to be recorded way more often than they are.

Castelnuovo-Tedesco's Sonatina can't be over-played, not in the way chamber music gets recorded by guitarists.
Ditto for Histoire du Tango, to a lesser degree.
Toward the Sea is wonderful.
When is someone going to record Aubert Lemeland's Duo Variations for viola and guitar again? Seriously, this is a wonderful piece and I have no idea why GSP is still able to sell it year in and year out and yet I've seen no sign of anyone recording it. It deserves to be recorded again even if I think the ending is a little weak.
Koshkin's sonata for flute and guitar is cool and it's actually been recorded twice but to my knowledge never in the United States. Someone should fix that and I don't have the chops for it.
Atanas Ourkouzounov deserves more attention State-side. Then again that could be said about a lot of really good European composers. Thanks to Colt Valenti I am going to have to take his recommendation to explore the works of Angelo Gilardino (sic?) here when I'm not travelling out of state and have some time to pick up a few more recordings and scores.

But for budgetary reasons (planning to get back to my very expensive alma mater) I probably need to do a moratorium on scores and CDs for a while even if I doubt I'll follow through.

And I've gotten sidetracked from my earlier thoughts. Ophee's article seems like it will be as true twenty years from now as it was about seven years ago when I stumbled across it. And it was probably as true the year I was born as it is now.

Anyway, this man's article inspired me to start writing as much chamber music for the guitar as I could . Whether or not it's really any good remains to be seen. I can say that I've found the email addresses of four oboe and guitar duos, two viola and guitar duos, I admit to having not bothered with flute and guitar duos much as yet because that's the one realm of chamber repertoire for guitar that is actually at risk of being over-represented. I've bought a few CDs of flute and guitar music that frankly weren't that interesting. But music for BASSOON and guitar? That's another story. I have a sonata for bassoon and guitar in c minor I still need to work on. If I weren't trying to get on-the-job training out of state and weren't having to brush up on my guitar chops for the wedding of some friends I could probably take the time I need to finish that sonata for bassoon and guitar this year.

And then there's brass instruments. There's nothing. I mean, there's just about nothing. There's a French horn and guitar duo that Volkmar was kind enough to point me toward and I've got that--too bad I don't have a French horn player around to play the piece with because then I'd have a musician I could work with for fine-tuning my still seminal sonata for horn and guitar. I know from Frank Campo's work that even trumpet and classical guitar works are possible, though I can't find Two Studies anywhere and Frank Campo's email doesn't work anymore. I don't even know if he's still alive. This, friends, is why you take aural dictation classes in college! If the composer's work is out of print and he/she isn't even alive anymore how are you going to learn how to play a wonderful piece that exists only on a recording? That's right, you have to transcribe the whole thing yourself, which may be what i have to do!

I told a fellow I know at my church I would eventually write a piece for us to play. He plays tenor trombone. As an American with the complete works of Blind Willie Johnson ... I'll just leave it at that. By now you can figure out what my funnest stunt for THAT sonata is going to be and Nadia Borislove half-way beat me to the punch already. And since this city has a symphony that premiered a great tuba concerto by Samuel Jones you can bet money I've got the study score for that concerto and will one day, I hope, compose a duo for classical guitar and tuba.

And in case it's not obvious how much this resembles the precedent of another composer's work I'm not going to spell it out if it isn't already obvious. Ophee's advice about guitar repertoire happens to coincide with some ideas proposed by a favorite composer of mine, and both together got me thinking that rather than do what all the other guitarists are doing I'd like to see what I can get done by actually not focusing on the usual solo repertoire at all but focusing just on chamber music as much possible. It's obviously one of my pet obsessions besides theology and cartoons.

And as far as that goes I have finished a sonata for clarinet and guitar and have been kind of stuck over the last year because clarinet and guitar duos are astonishingly rare in classical music. In jazz, not so rare and I have started pitching my sonata to the jazz set even though it's not exactly jazz. It's an hommage to Ellington with spots for improvisation so I hope it's close enough to jazz for the jazz set because most classical guitarists I've come across don't necessarily show me that the get what a jazz sound would work out to be. Okay, Tom Baker and Colt Valenti and Michael Niccolela are all local examples of guitarists who can play whatever style they want but that doesn't mean I have reason to think they'd be interested in playing my stuff as such. By the way, brief plug, Colt's CD is fun. Look him up and check out his stuff.

If I have a fantasy of putting out a CD it's to put out a CD of all chamber music. Half the stuff would be mine and half the stuff would be music that has inspired me to write. Then again, I don't have the chops because I've been too lazy to build up my solo technique and because I've been too busy composing. I'm starting to understand what Robert Muczynski was getting at when he said his piano teacher thought he composed too much and his composing teacher thought he practiced piano too much. You can get so bent on one you don't do as well as you could at the other and if you try to split the difference between the two all the time your learning curve is long, slow, and steep.

But when I hear what else is out there in the world of guitar repertoire I don't usually regret taking the long, slow, steep and since 1997 mostly self-taught path. My theory professor and composition professor gave me the tools to figure out my tonal sound as I go and the rest has been following the advice of my guitar teacher that I knew enough after two quarters with her to learn whatever techniques I wanted and that I should only learn techniques when I had something MUSICAL to do with them. Maybe that's why I can't play tremelo and can't play fast but feel comfortable playing a three minute piece in B flat staying close to the nut.

Something I've learned looking at chamber repertoire has me buidling an ad hoc theory for why there's so little of it for guitar compared to solo repertoire. It's not that the chamber music is exactly bad but it does seem like guitarists love to avoid the keys that come most naturally to a lot of other instruments, especially woodwinds, let alone brass (which are avoided for obvious problems of the sheer volume brass instruments produce). But why should that be? Why should there be so many string quartets in B flat major yet any time a violinist and guitarist play together all the pieces seem to stick to keys that can be comfortably executed with a maximum of open strings? It explains why no one plays Lemeland's Duo Variations, which total eight minutes in playing time and are all in D flat. If classical guitarists spent as much time mastering the ability to play in any key as they did in playing fast or flourishing stuff some of these little gems in unfriendly keys could get better represented.

But I'm just ranting beyond any organized thoughts now and I do need to get some sleep. Mr. Ophee, you might never hear my music, and if you hear my music you may not like it, we may never meet and if we do we might not get along but if you're out there and by any chance happen to come across this blog that really has nothing to do with you. Your writing has inspired me to do what a musician in Seattle told me is "filling a vacuum that doesn't exist."

The vacuum does exist because if the measure of a standard for the guitar repertoire is something that has been played to death, or something that is over-represented on CDs then the number of "standard" chamber works for oboe and guitar is pretty small and it's been more than a century since Coste wrote La Montagnard. It's possible no one has written a sonata for tenor trombone and guitar so someone should. My composition professor liked to say that before Beethoven wrote the Fifth Symphony we in the West didn't know we needed it. Well, at the risk of sounding too confident by light years, maybe the reason we don't have a standard repertoire piece for tenor trombone and guitar is because no one has written it yet. If the piece is worth playing I like to think eventually it will get played. It's at least worth trying for because that's more fun than listening to the same Bach and Albeniz transcriptions year after year, no disrespect meant to either great composer keyboard-player.

So, anyway, thanks Matanya Ophee. Maybe if I'm actually any good at this you may eventually hear a piece of mine.

Jerry Falwell is dead

I didn't care for his style and often thought his substance was problematic, even as a basically conservative Protestant evangelical type who happens to dig an Anglican's work. But it still galls me that Christopher Hitchens is doing his Hitchens thing on Slate, Slate is running the list of all the stuff Falwell said they consider stupid, racist, and whatever else; and it turns out Westboro Baptist Church ... yes THAT Westboro Baptist Church plans to picket Falwell's funeral because they say he was a liar and a false prophet.

Still ... I don't know, even if I grant that Hitchens has a great point ins aying that you can say any dumb-ass thing you want as long as you're a reverend (it's hard to avoid this point when I consider stupid things Sharpten, Jackson, and Robertson have said on different sides of the political divide) ; and even if I were to agree somehow that Westboro Baptist is right to say Falwell made prophecies that didn't come to pass; I still can't muster their enthusiasm. Hitchens is so passionately atheistic he tries doing hatchet jobs on the Salvation Army and his main complaints are that a hundred years ago there was corruption in the ranks and they were stupid-looking uniforms. He also thinks no one should use "charity" to deal with the problem of homelessness or unemployment and that society should take responsibility ... which sounds like something an English immigrant to the United States with heavy socialist leanings would say. With declining birth rates who on earth will pay the taxes needed to subsidize THAT welfare state? If we keep aborting them or forestalling their birth or saying no one should have those kids because of their net lifelong contributions to carbon emissions why not just wipe ourselves out with some genetically modified strain of polio or something? Or just put it on the open market for any freaks with a grudge?

That seems too pessimistic and absurd. How did I get to this from Falwell? Oh, right, Hitchens.
I don't get him. Considering how rabidly he opposed the FIRST Gulf War his support of the second, given that he's still more or less the atheistic liberal in many ways he was fourteen years ago, his zeal for the battle against Islamofascism given his leftist cred has puzzled me. Maybe he's just so anti-religion he's willing to abandon his leftist background so that Islamofascists can get bombed. He makes for interesting reading, though, even when he I think he's totally wrong. I don't think he's wrong about militant Islam by any stretch of the imagination but I've just seen him use some remarkably weird arguments against religion in general that I think hurt rather than help his ideas.

As for Falwell, well, I don't think people should be throwing parties because he's dead or picketing his funeral. If someone at Westboro Baptist dies I guess if everyone who has had a loved one whose funeral was picketed by WBC went and picketed that funeral of a WBC member who died ... that would be a big picket.

What happens when Westboro Baptist reaps what they've sown? It seems too nasty to contemplate, actually.

Why do Protestants suck at classical music now?

I have been thinking recently about how in the 20th century the great innovators have been Catholic or Orthodox or Anglican (which is not quite Protestant as American evangelical Protestants identify the Anglican church). So my question of late is why we Protestants are so bad at being musical innovators? Sticking to just the Judeo-Christian side of things for now:

Schoenberg was Jewish, possibly a very secularist Jew but a Jew nonetheless.
Webern was Catholic
Stravinsky was Russian Orthodox
Copland was Jewish (though not really observant)
Gershwin was Jewish (though also not particularly observant)
Benjamin Britten was Anglican (I think), though old-school Anglicans wouldn't likely like him
Messiaen was Catholic
Penderecki was Catholic
Arvo Part is Orthodox
Steve Reich is Jewish
Dave Brubeck (just to pick an unusual case) is Catholic

Of course you get the more Buddhist strain in Cage and Glass and others but I'm not counting them partly because I'm not looking at the role of Eastern Asian religion as such, and because I don't like Cage and I don't like Glass! I also don't count John Tavener as Christian because I've read enough recent interviews with him that he doesn't seem to embrace anything fundamental to any variation of Christian thought. I suppose I could count Boulez, sort of, as having a Catholic background but he's more practically an atheist and here I am interested in considering the works of composers were actually participants in the religion they identified with. Messiaen almost represents an opposite of Boulez by being a child who became attracted to Catholicism in a far more nominal family whereas Boulez rejected the religion of his parents.

What I am wondering lately is who the Protestant innovators in classical music are. Perhaps i should suggest "orthodox" Protestants, that's to say composers whom evangelicals would identify as actually being Christian in life and doctrine (which is why they would discount Britten who was not only gay but had what may have had some tendency toward pedophilia).

So what Protestant composers have made substantial contributions to classical music whom the average evangelical Protestant could look to as having done something noticable? Um, John Rutter? Last I heard anything about him or written by him he seemed to describe himself as agnostic but who knows a good market for mainstream music when he sees one. Frank Martin "might" count if he weren't dead since around the time I was born; and if it weren't for his being so obscure no one knows about him who isn't keenly interested in choral music at some level.
And none of these possible candidates is exactly cutting edge.

So it seems, to risk a generalization, that atheists and Buddhists have their moments but that a lot of far-out classical music still got written by people from within the Christian fold. It doesn't seem to suffice to say that these were all guys rebelling against a particularly old-school church because the composers who did that just disassociated with their church to some level (like Rachmaninov). Stravinsky rejoined the Russian Orthodox Church; Messiaen never left the Catholic Church; Penderecki didn't write that giant Credo setting just to solve a musical problem; and secular Jews are still Jews in terms of heritage because unlike Christians and Christendom a person can often consider themselves Jewish by heritage even if they don't believe in any kind of God, an interesting subject in its own right that I won't get to here.

It just seems to me that Protestants haven't been on the leading edge of classical music since possibly Mendelssohn and Bach. That's a while back! Ours is an era where contemporary classical music is just not very popular compared to older stuff. I see concert halls filling up with more people to hear Beethoven or Brahms than Messiaen or even Bartok. I just can't quite get my head around why Orthodox and Catholic composers, despite seeming to be more parochial in doctrine to Protestants, or just not being "real" Christians to American Protestants, seem to be more capable of producing musical geniuses in classical music.

I don't think the explanation of rebellion against tradition makes sense. Stravinsky did compose Rite of Spring as an imagining of a pagan Russia but when he returned to the Russian Orthodox Church he was serious and he didn't just stop writing music that is now classic stuff. Penderecki writing the Passion According to St. Luke in a Soviet regime wasn't exactly a wimpy gesture, was it?

It's not that Catholics and Orthodox composers have a sense of history Protestants don't. Bach is indisputably the greatest composer the Western heritage has given to us (Beethoven's still a distant second). But what was it about the Lutheranism and German regions of Bach's time that enabled Bach to be Bach? It seems history as institutional memory doesn't explain everything. Family history could explain some aspects of Bach's genius, especially since multiple generations of the Bach family had been professional musicians and Bach had access to music ranging across Western Europe. My speculative guess is that Protestantism produced incredible classical music because it had, not to put too fine a point on it, a more catholic view of the musical legacy of the West in the past than it has now. Bach could assimilate the tonal and pre-tonal harmonic languages of the old and new styles available in the Baroque era.

I think this capability of composing within multiple styles may be some kind of key to a catholic grasp of Western musical culture. Stravinsky was a stylistic chameleon, so much so that Adorno disliked that aspect of his work. Messiaen assimilated such drastically heterogenous influences as Baroque music, late Romantic works, Asian music, bird-song, and the early modernjsts. Penderecki was similar. What enabled them to assimilate such wildly disparate cultural and historical periods of music into what we can now see as unusual but finally coherent musical voices? Well, I'd like to say their faith and I'd say that's true, but it seems Protestants have faith but DON'T accomplish this in classical music very well. I wonder if the problem may be that Protestant pay lip service to the idea that in Christ there is no Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male or female. This would be a huge irony because Catholic and Orthodox churches aren't exactly as free-wheeling in practice about things like the ordination of women based on what little I know about them.

I suppose it may come down to what Chesterton wrote, that in Christianity the soldier and the pacifist both have their part and by not giving supremacy to either both are given their rightful time and place. Some Christians get this about music ... and some Christians don't. To some degree it seems that Protestant groups rose along nationalist lines. As a reaction to abuses and shortcomings in the Catholic Church's use of power and influence that's understandable but it may have, so to speak, swung too far the other way. And I guess that as the child of an inter-racial marriage I see no inherent value (personally) in being proud of one culture at the expensse of another, or really in seing any particularly huge value in either cultural legacy I got from my white and non-white ancestors. Not that I have no interest at all but to me it is not the essence of the Christian faith, which is that those distinctions we have traditionally divided over as humans don't have to be points of division in Christ.

ah, the virtues of Berkshire Record Outlet

There are some drawbacks. You REALLY have to know exactly what you're looking for if you're going to bother at all. And it's a crapshoot if you don't know what you're looking for or are just experimenting because I've gotten some snoozer CDs through them. And you have to order a minimum amount before they'll let you buy anything.

But it's worth it to have them around because if you're looking for stuff that's out-of-print or overstocked you can save an INCREDIBLE amount of money getting stuff that just slipped off the regular market. What do I mean? Well, I mean that you can (right now at least) get the COMPLETE keyboard works of William Byrd and the COMPLETE piano music of Olivier Messiaen through BRO for about $74 counting shipping and handling and tax. That's FOURTEEN CDs! Wanna know how much it would cost to get the same stuff new through Amazon.com? Try $200. Even getting the lowest prices through third-party vendors you'll pay at least $110 not counting shipping and handling, which means that the savings you get for getting the two box-sets through Berkshire are pretty incredible.

Yeah, I know, it's pretty nerdy to make a sales pitch for a website that sells cut-out, overstock, and out-of-print classical CDs on a blog. Oh well, that's what blogs are for and if no one else reads this, big deal.

Of course I don't get most of my CDs from here. Most of what I've picked up is new stuff sold either through huge vendors who need not be named or stuff I have to order directly through tiny labels or even some of the artists themselves. But as the Preacher put it, to everything there is a season and when you want to get box sets of the complete keyboard works of a great English Renaissance composer and a great avant gardist from 20th century France Berkshire Record Outlet is at least worth checking out. By the way, be willing to wait at least a month for delivery. They can deliver things much faster than that but they can't guarantee that they can deliver much faster than that. Comes with the territory of selling what they sell. By the way, their selection of Heinrich Schutz is a bit less than awe-inspiring, though they have a couple of discs that are cool.

Now that I've got so much Messiaen and Byrd I hope to listen to the stuff. THAT will take a while. Since I'm trudging through Peter Hill and Nigel Simeone's book on Messiaen (which I honestly hoped would be more of a page-turner than I had any reason to expect) I figure I can listen to a bunch of the composer's music, too.