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In the coming year of 2017, then, I will try to focus on the goodness, but the bad will be there, and we need to work to counteract it whenever and however we can. In the meantime, HAPPY NEW YEAR!
But somehow this break hasn't felt as 'break-like' as those in the past. I'm not sure why, and it could be just the cloudiness of memory that is coloring my perception. It seems I'm living too much in the future. I'm keep imagining things next week, next month, a year and more from now. I think a lot is due to the unsettled and frightening political situation. Some is due to unfolding health issues (not mine: my mom has been having increasingly bad back pain), and some more is due to processes underway at Columbia that will take time to develop. Jill is involved in on-going local political gunk that is always developing. Generally, though (except for the local politics and my poor mom!) the things that are happening are good things, but they do cause me to think beyond the "now". And I miss just being in that "now".
All things considered, though, life is OK. I'm finally just ( - just! - ) getting over this odd long-term minor cold/throat thing. I didn't feel bad, but my voice was very Darth-like for almost two months. Doctors all said nothing serious was apparent. So here I am, writing fairly boring stuff in this blog. Oh well, it is my blog-of-record, ha!
Last weekend, we did awaken to this view out the window:
I have two things to report here, since this blog is now more reportage than deep and profound thoughts these days. The first has to do with the now-traditional "joke of the year" shared during our family gathering over the holidays. There were not too many entries this year, and certainly no media/music offerings from Yours Truly such as the Carol of the Cats or the Paranoiac's Christmas Carol, To be honest, we are almost out of Christmas carols in general to pun-ify. But the circumstances surrounding the joke I entered (and subsequently won with, as there were no other entries!) made it sort-of exceptional.
I dreamed the joke! Seriously! Several months ago, I had one of my strange and vivid dreams. In this dream, we were unveiling a new lobby for the Music Library at Columbia. For some reason, the unveiling required that we flood the new lobby, which resembled a large aquarium, with water. During the flooding process, I was putting small pieces of folded paper into small (about twelve inches long) submarine toys. I let them loose in the water. Nick Patterson, one of the music librarians, asked me what I was doing. I replied: "well, I'm writing a joke on the papers so that people who come to the reception will read them and laugh." Nick asked me what the joke was. This was it (and it's important to know that when an Apple iPhone rings with an incoming call, it also vibrates):
The second item to report is more serious, but also strangely gratifying. Because of the horribleness happening to our health-care laws in the US with Trump's impending inauguration and an out-of-control Republican Congress, I wrote a letter that I sent to a set of Republican US Senators that I hoped might listen to the huge chorus of Americans decrying what was coming to pass. I wanted to add my drop to the deluge and hopefully help change a few votes. This was the text of the letter:
Even though I'm not one of your constituents, I hope you will consider my voice, because your vote will have a huge impact on the lives of all Americans. I have to admit that this is a selfish letter. Frankly, I am frightened. Right now I have a good life. I have a terrific job (I am a professor at Columbia University), one which I have worked *hard* to secure, and my family and friends are unending sources of joy. I also suffer from a bad cancer of the immune system, multiple myeloma. I was diagnosed over ten years ago, and at the time of diagnosis I believed I only had one or two years left to live. Thanks to amazing care from my oncologist and new therapies, I'm still here. However, these therapies are hideously expensive. The retail costs of the drugs I need exceed $100k/year. Multiple myeloma is a cancer that can only be put in remission; there is no cure, and it will relapse. I have to keep taking the drugs to stay alive. Several years ago I underwent a stem-cell (bone marrow) transplant, probably approaching a half-million dollars in cost. So when I hear about things like a "cap on lifetime benefits", I realize that I'm probably already there. If our health-care devolves to inhumane policies tagged by words like 'pre-existing conditions' or the 'caps on lifetime benefits' I've already mentioned, then my family faces a choice between forgoing the care that will keep me alive or utter financial ruin. The next time I might need an additional stem-cell transplant, I will -- unbelievably in our world -- have to make that choice. And I have a good job! Please, please when you are considering your vote on a new health-care law, think about the _human_ consequences of that vote. Don't give in to ideology or the local politics of your caucus (my father was president of the Indiana State Senate for almost thirty years, so I know how power can be played). Imagine that you had to face a choice between destroying your family or dying. What would you do? Am I worth the money? I'm not the person who can answer that, but there are students I'd still like to teach, research I'd like to do, and music I'd like to make. I also have a new grandson, and I'd very much like to help him grow, to become the future we endow with our best hopes. Your vote really counts, now. Thank you. Brad Garton Professor of Music, Columbia University Director, Computer Music CenterJust for fun, I decided to post it to my Facebook account, hoping it might also do some good there in motivating others to support retaining at least a few of our health-care protections. It seems to have gone semi-'viral', with hundreds of responses to my original post and hundreds of 'shares' by other people on Facebook. Yikes! I posted it several days ago, and I'm still getting notifications of people who have responded to the post. I am overwhelmed by the nice things everyone has written. I guess I struck a nerve. Good!
What a terrible, terrible day.
I first noticed this sky-color memory effect when I was commuting(!) to Cincinnati from New Jersey to teach at the Conservatory of Music. I walked out of the main building one February afternoon, and there I was, back in High School again. This was about the time Daniel was born. What will our children retain from their childhood? Whatever it is, it will be theirs.
I've also been grasping at 'moments' lately. For example, I was walking along College Walk at Columbia last week, and I fell into an encompassing awareness of the sunlight refracting through the winter lights. I stopped and tried to take a picture of what I saw:
I think I've been trying to hold onto these moments is because the world now seems so utterly unreal. Every day brings new horrors from Donald Trump and his vile enablers. I feel adrift in the United States, anchored only by my sadness and my rage.
I need to recall how to translate my immanent memories into sound. I think some of the best work I've done with Terry and Gregory in PGT do this, maybe because we're all from that 1960s Midwestern fantasy. But I should do it myself so that I can remember the hope, the happy future. So much seemed possible back then.
Trump's societal template has also infected our local politics in Roosevelt, and this past Monday it became acute for me. Our town has always had a rather fractious political history, but the recent disagreement about -- of all things -- the future of our volunteer fire department has become disgraceful. And I find myself part of the disgrace.
A little bit of context: Jill serves on the Borough Council. After watching her endure a year-and-a-half of personal attacks on her integrity, her credibility, her competence and her capabilities by a particularly vocal minority of voters in town, I have not been inclined in this situation to be the thoughtful person I generally strive to be. Tolerance was not foremost in my mind as I walked down to the Borough Council meeting after dinner Monday evening.
After enduring a remarkably baseless "report" during the main Council session aimed at Jill (and my good friend Jeff Ellentuck [our Mayor] along with several other Council members), my temper was close to the boiling point. I knew I could not remain during the public portion of the Council meeting, because my emotions were surely going to cloud my better judgement. I would likely do or say something rash. I do know my limits.
Just before I left, however, a neighbor sitting next to me made a snide comment that I interpreted as impugning the decency of those who disagreed with him (i.e. me). I turned to him and said something along the lines of: "That's what makes me so angry -- your unwillingness to imagine that people who can also think may disagree with you." Yeah, I'm a true academic (and a Rortian one at that). The conversation is important. But it has to rest on a modicum of respect and... well, facts.
I then got up to leave. Fortunately my seat was near the exit, and my exchange with the neighbor was short and quiet enough that it didn't attract attention. It's also not important to go into the divisive details of our current Roosevelt political scene, but what happened next does matter. The neighbor followed me outside (bad idea!), probably shocked at the vehemence of my reply. I just wanted to leave, but he wanted to push the case a little.
What followed was about a five-minute shouting match in which my anger and frustration took control. I still stand behind everything I said (shouted), but I behaved very badly. It is indeed disgraceful when we cannot engage in civil discourse, and like I said above, I had become part of the disgrace. I wish I had just gone home to work off my anger.
This is what leads back to the America of Trump. Civil discourse does rely upon certain common agreements, like a willingness to see those with whom you disagree without prejudice or dehumanization. Trump traffics in prejudice and dehumanization. It is also critically important to rely on actual facts. Yes, actual ones! Trump and his minions have essentially established a distorted, fact-free world. In this warped reality, consensus is impossible. We are all on edge, all the time. That makes me angry.
This year I thought I probably wouldn't take any photos. I mean, they do look the same each year (which is part of the charm). But this year once again I snapped them with my iPhone:
Sorry, politics infecting my prose here again. The crimes being
committed against the world by Trump AND his vile appointees are
just terrible, terrible. I do not understand how anyone can provide
any level of support for these evil idiots. It's all wrong. It's
all wrong. Poor crocuses!
I also put up some of the sessions I did with Miya Masaoka last fall, and then our most recent concert as part of the "Music from Japan" festival a few weeks ago:
I'm not sure why this is even an issue, to tell you the truth. What does it matter when/what I post? Maybe I feel I made a commitment to document thoughts and feelings so I won't get caught as short as I was when I started this blog. Or maybe it's because of a delusion that this may be interesting at some point to someone, and I don't want hugs gaps. Or perhaps (as I now realize) the fun I have going back and reading what kind of bozo I was at various times won't be filled out as much if I don't write. For whatever reason, I'll keep pushing out the text when I can.
I've said this before, but I do think about this silly blog even when I'm too lazy to sit down and type at the end of the day. For example, a few days ago I scribbled (well, 'typed sloppily') these notes down in a file:
"Bells through the leaves" -- Shih-Wei/Debussy depiction music life
It made me think about the depiction of scenes, of "Images", and similarly-motivated music that I have done in the past (here's an early one, of many). I haven't done pieces like that for awhile, or perhaps a lot of what I have done still has a foundation in a notion of environmental depiction, but it's not as apparent. In any case, I think I need to again. Maybe it's part of that 'modulation of existence' I need to do. And that explains the last two words in my scribbled-note: "music, life".
Much has been happening. I won't rehash Columbia shenanigans right now, but the world of politics is just a never-ending source of joy these days (I hope my sarcasm is coming through the text-pixels). Trump of course, but there's also our fun local political scene. We held yet another referendum in town, and we lost this one. I wrote a longish e-mail to my friend Gregory Taylor (Gregory's currently in the Netherlands) about the result:
Oh my. Last night we had another vote on a referendum about funding our local volunteer fire company and first aid squad, or whether we contract it out to surrounding entities. We were on the side of keeping it in town, because it actually turned out to be the less-expensive alternative, and for reasons I'll describe below. There was (obviously) a significant anti-volunteer-company faction in town. The referendum failed by 12 votes (six people switching). I don't recall if I told you, but a previous referendum actually tied. The opposition was fueled in large part by the fact that the current volunteer fire chief is a Trump-supporter who sports a Confederate flag on his truck. Yeah, he's an idiot, but the point we were trying to make is that the referendum concerned the future of the town, not a particular individual. However, the "debate" spiraled way out of control: Jill was routinely attacked for being a liar, on the take(!?), a racist, and basically evil. I'm not exaggerating. What was so confounding to us was that the people who were attacking us (and our friends who had supported the volunteerism) were essentially like us. We're basically all liberals, and many of the opposition were faculty, etc. But in Trump's America, apparently political discourse has to involve the utter and complete demonization of your opponents. It's just disgusting. And I thought of you and your endorsement of Jonathan Haidt's work. There was real 'classness' to the debate that made me look upon the members of my own socioeconomic strata with some degree of loathing. The volunteer squads in town are basically working-class people -- good people -- and it was through their membership in the squads that they found validation for their social existence. I also thought of Putnam's "Bowling Alone" and how our civic fabric is being destroyed. And this was one instance of that destruction. It mattered, too. The fault lines are wider than ever. Last night, the bulletin board in town, kind of the locus for 'discussion' -- postings of various letters, screeds, exhortations from both sides of the debate -- was demolished and set on fire. As our ignorant "president" would say: sad! Oh this bothers me so much! I was talking to one of my faculty colleagues this morning about it all (and Trump), and she said [she's Italian] that the legitimization of violence and the destruction of moral standards is exactly what Berlusconi achieved in Italy. Now it's 'ok' for an old man to 'date' a 13-year-old girl. Our future is looking even more dim to me today. [and that's literally dim, give Trump's EPA moves yesterday...]
So I walk around, living through my past, imagining a future. I reinforce this with music: on the drive home to Roosevelt yesterday I listened to the old Vindication record I did with Pat Kennedy and Geoff Pacheco back in High School. That was over 40 years ago! It still seems so close -- the warmth of summer envelopes me and I can smell the August Indiana days when we did the recording.
I can easily calculate that it was more than 40 years in my past, because today is my 60th birthday. YIKES! When did this all happen? Musically, from Vindication through Dow Jones and the Industrials (and Purdue in general), and then through my work at Princeton and Columbia, it all seems continuously close. But Lian and Daniel are grown, Jill is (semi!)retired, and here I am sixty years old.
It would almost be depressing, except the joy of Lian/Daniel/Jill, family and friends, it does help me do a fantastic future-imagining. Here's a big part of that future:
[confession: I added this entry here late. I've been good about being honest and not back-dating blog posts, but life got a bit too crazed in the last week or two. Plus we'll be delivering gifts to Daniel in June when we head over to Finland, so time is a litlte flexbile for Daniel's 23rd. Mailing items to Helsinki isn't trivial, it seems.]
I'm amazed at how much Trump-ness has infiltrated our political culture. Here's what our opposition did in Roosevelt:
Some good things have been going on, though. Jill's work on a sustainability curriculum for Rutgers has been really well-received, and a symposium she put together and coordinated was a big success. My classes were a blast this year (today was the last day), and my grad seminar was more fun than I've had in awhile. It was a lot of work, but this was the result. Note my teaching assistant Onur Yildirim with the 3-D headset sitting next to me. My oh my! We made some 'dimensional' sounds.
And of course Daniel, Lian, Itay, Shai, the rest of our clan. Think of the good things. Otherwise we're just a bunch of monkeys flinging poo at the other tribe. Believe me, there was a lot of poo flung at us over the past few months. Like I said: disgusting.
I wonder how much is due to the turbulent politics. Roosevelt isn't the sanctuary it once was. The national scene is worse then terrible. The House of Representatives finally passed their "health" "care" (yeah, deliberate quotes!) bill, and it's just awful. I don't see how anyone can support that morally bankrupt, ethically empty organization called the Republican Party. Pre-existing conditions? Oh yeah -- and the definition of them includes things like... well, birth. I'm not being silly: many congenital conditions under the Republican plan are deemed 'pre-existing'. I guess certain fetuses didn't lead a godly life in the womb.
My personal favorite, of course is the caps on annual/lifetime benefits. They're back in a big way, and I honestly don't know what Jill and I will do should this horror of a bill get through Congress.
As I wrote a few months back in this blog, I posted a letter on Facebook describing a possible future that I had sent to a set of senators and representatives, and it went a little viral. Lots of people responded positively and re-posted it. I do know that at least a few of them supported the very same political party that is working hard to visit this inhumane policy upon us. The grim future I described is almost here. I give my heartfelt thanks to those who helped this happen.
I'm only one selfish person with this. There are millions more who will suffer greatly. This is all surreal.
Now the bad -- Trump is just hideous. It gets more and more miserable, literally every single day. My ineffectual response is to make more music. I added three new "FDT" pieces:
The semester is over, but I'm still dealing with fallout from the term. I have so much to do.
The constructed, human world keeps intruding. As it should. How else do we get to this place? Most every level seems wrong. Trump and national politics are an on-going horror. Our local situation is, if anything, worse. Right now the Roosevelt Arts Project is meeting to plan events for the coming season. I'm not there, because I'm just burnt on it all. Managing the CMC is becoming more and more difficult. Jill and I can't even talk, things get so bad. There's huge areas of contemporary life I can't discuss with my sister (politics). I worry about health. I feel like I'm becoming more stupid. When did this all happen?
With a few MAJOR exceptions (and these are what keep me going), like Shai, like family, like music, when I can.
But today it will be up near 90, and then in the 90's the next few days. After that we're off to Finland(!) to visit Daniel(!!). Our good friends the Ellentucks will also be visiting in that part of the world, so we've made dinner plans in Helsinki. Plus we'll take a few days to visit Gregory Taylor and his wife Jolanda in the Netherlands during the week when Daniel will have to work.
Oh the world, the world. New Jersey's primary was this past Tuesday, and it did not go well for our friends here in Roosevelt. I'm really sad what has happened to our town.
If this means almost nothing to you, that's fine. It does open up a big area I'd like to explore creatively, though. I'm also writing this as partial-excuse for not keeping this blog up-to-date. People have even noticed (Hi Mara! Hi Doug!). But now I'm working to get caught up with everything I put on hold while immersed in code-jockeying. Like writing here.
Our trip to Finland (and Estonia and the Netherlands) was really great. I put all our photos on-line here:
We also had great fun with our friends the Ellentucks, who were also visiting Finland for Sharlene's 60th birthday trip. When she was younger, she did an exchange year in Finland, and they had a Finnish au pair (Daniel remembers her) who looked after their sons almost twenty years ago. They were all able to reconnect. Plus we took a side-trip to visit Gregory Taylor and his wife Jolanda Vanderwal Taylor in the Netherlands. Jolanda is there on sabbatical from the University of Wisconsin, and Gregory can do his work almost anywhere. It was a wonderful visit. And Tallinn! Daniel took us there for a day-trip. An amazing medieval city.
Shai is growing like the proverbial weed, literally giving his mom and dad the 'runaround'. He has decided he really likes walking, and boy can that boy go! He had been having a number of ear infections, and they put in 'ear tubes' to mitigate those problems. It was a very short and routine procedure, and he came through like a champ. We'll be seeing all of them in a few weeks; I can't wait.
Another reason I haven't felt as compelled to write here as in the past is that this hasn't been the happiest of times. Health-wise Jill and I both are fine (even another reason for not being driven to blog), but things at various levels of our life -- except for the good family stuff -- have been discomfiting. I read back through the posts I have made, and my anger at the world-scene is palpable. Doug Scott (my first-ever teaching assistant, now doing high-level programming for Apple) was just visiting and commented on this. Add to this the incredible and disgusting politics of our little town, and things get submerged in even more turmoil. The last semester at the CMC was also difficult. I'm not looking forward to the work I've done there as I generally do. My belief-system of sorts is crumbling.
I have to do some kind of 'reset' and get back to a place of optimism, when the world seemed full of promise, even in the face of adversity. The summer is still richly green, the fireflies are out, and I hear the birds in the morning. The adversities now are many, though, and I am worried about our future. What can we do? What can I do?
Celebrating in Sorrento, Italy. My oh my. No-one told us life would be like this. We would not have believed them if they had.
I'm sitting, again, on our upper-back porch, listening to the sound of the water fountain I built for Jill years ago and the ambient birds and summer noises. The sun is shining green through our trees, from a backdrop of endless blue. When I was younger, I used to imagine how I could translate these perceptions into music. I would work to build sonic analogs of what I thought of as the 'essence' of an experience.
Now it seems that the experience itself is the music. The whole ineffable, indivisible thing. I believe this is what is driving my interest in VR technologies. But I'm not sure I want to give up the music-as-metaphor fun.
The second is to report a wonderful musical experience I had while in Tallinn. There is something almost magical about the city, certainly reinforced by the well-preserved medieval aspect of the place. I'm also aware of it's musical history. One of the major protests against Soviet occupation was the "Singing Revolution", still celebrated today. One of my favorite composers is also proudly Estonian, Arvo Pärt (I've written about Pärt's music here before).
Pärt's music is rooted in his profound Russian Orthodox faith, informed by the chants heard in the cathedrals. Sure enough, when we visited the Tallinn Cathedral, we walked in to hear chant filling the space. "Oh this is a bit much" I thought, imagining that they were playing a recording of chant to function is some odd religious muzak. The more I thought about it, though, it didn't make much sense. I mean, this was a real, functioning Russian Orthodox church. Why would they do something 'touristy' like playing recorded chants? I looked around, and sure enough back on one side of the apse was an 80+(!)-year-old woman, just belting out the monophony. Part of the reason I assumed it was recorded was how well it was done. It was absolutely beautiful.
When I saw her singing, the power of the music, the resonating reverberation in the cathedral, the deep role the music played in that world, was overwhelming. I stood there, immersed in the meaning of this music. Sound waves can still do marvelous things, at least to me.