"Building a new society within the shell of the old"

I started working for a living when I was 13 years old, after my mother had hysterics when I asked if it would be possible to buy me a couple of items of so I could take part in a sports club. It was made unpleasantly apparent to me, at 13, that if I wanted to do anything that cost any money--and, be it said, nobody in my family had, really any expensive tastes, habits, or goals--I was going to have to earn it myself.

I've worked ever since:

• janitor
• supermarket bag-boy
• sports-complex ID checker
• short-order cook
• drilling rig blowout-preventer mechanic
• circulation-desk librarian
• framing carpenter
• nightclub "doorman" (security)
• bookstore peon and night-manager
• guitar-studio night-manager
• freelance musician
• data-entry technician
• teaching assistant
• academic tutor
• visiting part-time lecturer
• assistant professor
• associate professor
• chair of musicology

I will never forget that I'm a worker, not an owner--even if, by now, I have the luxury that it can be by choice.

And I'm still a member of this organization, and subscribe to its tenets.

"We are building a new society within the shell of the old."

Quick hit: good peasant food -- black bean dip

Crazy-busy day, too busy for a proper "In the trenches" post. Hoping to get caught-up over the long weekend.

In the meantime, here's a quick hit, "good peasant food" post. A young friend asked for the recipe for my black bean dip. Don't remember where I got this, but I feel confident that there's a lot of Lanford Monroe (rest her soul) in this one:

Dr Coyote's Black Bean Dip (or refritos)

Ingredients:

• Canned or dried black beans (if dried, which are cheaper and tastier, cook with either pressure cooker or by soaking overnight and then boiling in lots of water for at least 1 hour)
• Whole garlic
• Onions
• Cumin (fresh is best: buy as bulk seed in Indian market in town, then toast in a dry frying pan and grind with mortar-and-pestle or in a small food-processor)
• Whole lemons
• Olive oil

Chop the onions (about 1 medium onion per can of beans) or "chop" in a food processor (you can reserve the water in which the beans were canned or cooked).

"Smack" the cloves of garlic (about 1-2 per can) : press under the flat side of a knife blade to get the dried skin off, then squeeze/crush the clove under the knife blade to release the juices. Dice very fine by hand, or whirl in the food processor.

Saute chopped onions and garlic together in the olive oil in a good-sized pot: you want them to brown, but not burn (6-7 minutes at least).

While the onions & garlic cook, puree the cooked beans: you want them to be more-or-less like a thick paste.

When the onions/garlic have browned, reduce the heat and add the ground cumin, stirring to thoroughly mix. Let these simmer for 3-4 minutes, to release the full flavor of the cumin.

Add the cooked and pureed beans to the onions/garlic, stirring to mix; reduce heat to low (and watch out that the bean-paste doesn't scorch onto the bottom of the pan).

Add the juice of the squeezed lemons (about one lemon per can). Err on the side of "more lemon juice than you think). Continue to cook over low heat with lid on the pan.

I like to add a favorite hot-sauce at this stage, to taste. You can also use jalapenos (chop them and cook into the onions) or red chili powder.

NB: if the mixture is too thick, add a few tablespoons of the reserved bean-water back and stir to thin the consistency of the dip. If it is too thin, remove the lid and raise the heat *just a bit* until the dip cooks down and thickens.

That's about it! Serve with good-quality corn chips, fresh quartered tomatoes (a favorite), avocado slices, and/or warmed tortillas. A good quality Mexican beer (my own preference is for Bohemia) goes well.

Good peasant food.

Thank you, Lanford. We love you & we miss you.

"Ya damned kids! Get off my lawn!"

Cal Thomas enters Grandpa Simpson territory:

Here is the way I believe it works at liberal universities. Some professors require their students to repeat back to them on test papers and in theses what the professors believe. Unless students hate Republicans, revile George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan, renounce God, support abortion and gay rights, they can sometimes expect a lower, even a failing grade.

Okay, Cal. Ohhhhh-kaaaayyyyyyy. It's time for your nap now.

n
h/t BarbinMD

In the "no sh*t, Sherlock" department...

Teachers raise their games when the quality of their colleagues improves, according to a new study offering some of the first evidence to document a “spillover effect” in teaching.

Really, genius? You just figure that out? That maybe rewarding excellent teachers might make everybody a better teacher?

Of course excellent colleagues make for overall improvement. Of course performance suffers when morale does.

Only corporate thinkers would believe that team members are replaceable irrespective their quality. Quality is expensive--but skimping on (or failing to reward) quality is more expensive.

Sheesh.

Day 04 (Round IV) "In the trenches": TR edition

Our method, staffing, assignments, and weekly schedules have evolved a lot, 'round here, over the nine years I've had the gig.

When Dharmonia and I arrived in Fall 2000, I was replacing the senior Music History faculty member, and division chair. At that time, the person I was replacing was teaching the 2-semester undergraduate music history sequence, which was required in the sophomore semester, following-up (more or less) on the 2-semester freshman "Introduction to Music" course. It was a pretty darned redundant system, made more so by the facilities limitations that meant the sophomore class had to be taught in two sections, one meeting MWF 11-11:50am and the other meeting MWF 1-1:50pm--they didn't, at that time, have room in their schedule to permit Music History to teach all 100 freshmen or 100 sophomores in one larger lecture section--which you would think would be more efficient, wouldn't you?

So I took over the teaching of that undergraduate sophomore course, with two daily sessions MWF, plus a single grad course per semester: it was still a lighter load (3 courses, but only 2 preps) than many of my newly-minted colleagues elsewhere.

Over the course of the next few years, we made all manner of changes, and it's a matter of continuing appreciation for this man's class, grace, perspective, and support that so many of them were encompassed so readily and receptively. We got the undergraduate history requirements revamped so that the 4 freshman and sophomore semesters were chunked-out 1 (introductory) + 3 (Music History I: The Common-Practice Period, Music History II: The Early Period; Music History III: The Modern Period); we got the two 11am and 1pm sections collapsed into a single large-lecture section, more efficient for lecture purposes; we got the weekly schedule worked out for a MW lecture and F discussion section, so that the kiddos got the benefit of both lectures with the professor (and the professors got the challenge of ramping-up their approach to encompass those larger numbers), and the musicology grad students could get some instructor-of-record-in-the-classroom experience; we significantly ramped-up the academic standards and the skill-set we demanded of the undergrads; we improved communication and convergence with colleagues and content in Music Theory and on the studio side; we vastly expanded the digital and multi-media delivery, including especially the Web 2.0 methods that the kiddos know and respond to; hell, we even got the department renamed, and were transformed from "-orians" to "-ologists"--which was long overdue.

Now, with the other senior colleague's well-deserved retirement, and a new hire, we have a crew of 4 musicologists, each equipped to teach 1 semester in the undergrad sequence on the topic area of her/his specialization, thereby parsing-out the load of teaching 100 kids and grading 100 multi-stage research projects so that each of us only has to do it once a year. In turn, this means that each of us can teach two upper-level courses one semester and one upper-level course in the second. This means we get more diversity for the kiddos, more topic choices to maintain individual faculty members' interest and research. It means that we're moving toward an expanded interest in, and recruitment for, our Musicology graduate program.

Finally, it means, for the first time in almost ten years, that I myself actually don't have to teach on those MWF days. I'm in the "two grad seminars" semester of my rotation (will teach 1 grad and the "Modern Period" semester of the undergrad sequence in the spring), and both of those seminars meet on the TR rotation.

I have never experienced this: where I can alternate service & business days versus teaching days. Be it said: it doesn't mean any less work--I'm still there five days a week, and I still work a hell of a lot at night and on the weekends--but it does mean that the days can be laid out in much bigger chunks of discrete, uninterrupted time. If I want to, I can say "Friday is the day for my own research"--which wouldn't be a bad idea, as I have a lot of away-weekends this year, and so a travel-Friday which sacrificed my own research is better than missing and having to make-up a bunch of student meetings--and be reasonably confident that I don't even have to be on campus that day.

I have never experienced this.

It also means that, because free at least for a semester of the daily 2 to 2 1/2 hours of busy-work that the undergrad courses demand, I can give another whole day, 9am-4:30pm in the "Satellite Office" of the campus coffee shop, to getting a hell of a lot more service work done, and do it better.

And can finally teach the semester's graduate seminars (as least one of which I've taught four times before) with the range and depth I've known they deserved.

Can sit down with the administrative assistant whose grant-funding we managed to secure last spring, and, in an hour, give her a laundry list of 16 or 17 Vernacular Music Center development initiatives I've had in mind for years, and then stop thinking about them.

There is so much more still ahead of us to be accomplished. Which, for the first time, we can now just begin to act upon, with the hours, effort, focus, imagination that 9 years of revision, revamping, and re-conceiving our role have finally made possible.

This is just the beginning.

Day 03 (round IV) "In the trenches": Musicology greats

May seem incongruous to construe "great writing" with "Musicology", because the stereotype would be that of the turgid translated prose of Germanic musikwissenschaft.

But the fact of the matter is that there is great musicological writing out there. Lots of people have lots of different favorites, of course, but the following are the ones that occurred to me when a colleague recently said "Hey, my niece is hating her music history class; any suggestions I could use for an 'Amazon care package'?"

Well, that's a speciality of the house: ask a musicologist to hold forth on her/his favorites, and all you really need to do thereafter is check back after an hour or so to see if s/he has run down yet. Here are the ones I came up with off the top of my head:

• Peter Guralnick's Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm & Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom; and, really, anything that Guralnick has ever written
• David Wooldrige, From the Steeples and Mountains: A Study of Charles Ives; not particularly musicological, but highly evocative
• Philip Norman's Shout! The Beatles in Their Generation
• Scott De Veaux's Bebop
• Christopher Small's Music of the Common Tongue: Survival and Celebration in African-American Music
• Richard Crawford's America's Musical Life
• Eric von Schmidt and Jim Rooney's Baby Let Me Follow You Down: The Illustrated History of the Cambridge Folk Years
• Nick Tosche's Country: The Twisted Roots of Rock 'n' Roll
• Glenn Watkins's Pyramids at the Louvre: Music, Culture, and Collage from Stravinsky to the Postmodernists; also, his Soundings: Music in the Twentieth Century (the one I use for my own seminar), and pretty much anything Watkins has written
• Susan McClary Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality
• Ellen Rosand's Opera in Seventeenth Century Venice: The Creation of a Genre
• Ted Levin's The Hundred-Thousand Fools for God: Musical Travels in Central Asia

....and, though I blushed to say it, this guy.

Day 02 (round IV) "In the trenches": the Body, unplugged

Catching up here--we're now finishing up Day 03, but I owe the blog a Day 02 "In the trenches" post. We're on a slightly eccentric startup-schedule this time 'round: report date was a Monday, classes started on a Thursday. This means two things: (1) the huge menu of stuff to be done between report and start, which is usually spread out over a week, had to happen in 72 hours; and (2) we get an opening "week" in which each class, either on the MWF or the TR rotation, meets only once before the weekend.

This is actually not a bad thing: the kiddos mostly are not going to concentrate in that first week, so whether you have two meetings in the first week, as opposed to only one, doesn't really enhance the amount of learning you can get done. At the same time, it's not a bad thing to smack 'em in the face--especially the freshmen, and the non-music majors taking a Music Appreciation-type course for the first time ever--with the fact that this ain't high school, this is College, and a different set of criteria and expectations obtains.

This is especially important in the very large-enrollment Rock History course, taught in a Biology lecture hall to close to 500 students. Over the past few years, we've worked out a reasonably sophisticated method for delivering that course with a high level of interactivity, multi-channel presentation, academic rigor, pedagogical credibility (none of which are always the case with a cattle-call music appreciation class). But all of that sophistication works least well on the very first day of the class, before any of the newest crop of kids have had a chance to internalize the expectations and behaviors demanded by the class. On the first day of the semester--a Friday, at that--with a new crop of kids, it can be a challenge to Get Serious as quickly and completely as you want to.

Our Rock History crew has worked this out, in part, by organizing and designating roles and functions: roles for each individual team member (the Console Person and the two Bouncers, and the Lecturer), functions for all the various audio-visual components, and, most importantly, the interplay of all those things. In undergraduate music-education class, they fetishize the construction of lesson plans, at least one principle function of which is simply to keep the lecturer on track, and aware of the remarkably short windows of attention the typical 8-year-old can handle before needing to move to a different topic, activity, or presentational method.

Well, the typical 18-year-old is not all that much different: they have remarkably short attention spans, remarkably attenuated powers of concentration, and remarkably little self-discipline. Nota bene: this does not mean that they're stupid--it does mean that the nature of their experience in the modern world means they function best when the data-stream is constant, energizing, and diverse, and least well if this is not the case.

So the first day of the Rock Class is a crucial time: a time when it's essential to set the ground-rules, hit 'em with the cold-water shock of "Holy shit, they're going to expect ME to take responsibility!", make 'em take notes, insist that they respond, demonstrate critical and engaged listening, and establish the lines of authority.

This year the opening day worked very well: the General, the professor-of-record, opened the class, laid out the ground rules, procedures, and methods of assessment; then Dharmonia, the original designer, took over and smacked 'em with the range of responsibilities they'll have individually with the extensive online component, and then I took over for the opening "mini-lecture" on the Delta blues, where the chronology of the course begins. So they got three different presentational styles, each from a presenter talking about her/his expertise; they got three different variants of the "wake up, you're responsible for your own life now" rap, and they got an active dose of the interaction of onscreen, verbal, and musical demonstration presentation.

It's a room of 500, where the wireless lavalier mics are essential for the professor to be able to avoid blowing-out the voice entirely. But when I step up for the mini-lecture, which combines rapid-fire "you need to know this...now write this down...what's the answer to that?...come on, come on, people, wake up!" and live musical demonstration hammering on the National steel guitar, I don't want to use the wireless. Of course I would (would have to) if I were lecturing 3 times a week, not just because of the physical beating the voice takes, but also because as the professor you want to come across as relaxed and in command in the classroom, and having to project 200 feet back to the raked back wall just doesn't come across as relaxed.

But on that first day, when we're all working together to smack 'em awake and Get Serious, I want to use the the power of a human physical body engaging in conveying a narrative. There's something about a human body moving in the space, the sound of an unamplified LOUD voice (and guitar) beating on your tympanum, the ebb-and-flow of amplitude due to proximity, the sight and smell, the visible physical effort in the presenter's body as s/he pumps that volume out there, that cuts like a knife through the tuneout that happens to all of us, as creatures of the electronic age, when we hear the electronically-amplified voice. When the amplified voice is washing over everyone, at equal volume, regardless of any visible or variant effort, it's a little like the wonderful trombone glissando that they used in the old "Peanuts" specials to signify the blatting meaningless adult voice floating above the Kids' world the characters actually inhabited.

But when it's an unamplified voice, getting louder as the lecturer storms up the stairs toward the back-third of the room where you thought you could hide, text, gossip, or snooze, and here he comes up the stairs right toward your section, and his voice is getting louder and louder, and you can hear the rasp as the vocal cords wear out as he gets closer, and you breath a sigh of relief as he turns toward the row in the other direction, and you see the sweat sticking his shirt to his back, and then that voice suddenly blares louder as he unexpectedly swings back toward you, and you see the sweat on his temples and you can feel this big voice beating on your eardrums, and then he points at YOU and says "what do YOU think?!?"

You wake up.

It's analogous to what I learned from the great blues masters--that it was not skills, accent, or even the amount of melanin in your skin (take that, Portia!) that made the blues such a powerful, personal, and effective expressive medium. It was the intensity with which you embodied the music that made the blues "real".

When we teach, we want to get as real as we can, just as fast as we can.

That's why we do what we do.

I got your "Liberal Professor" right here...

...you cowardly, opportunistic little punks:
College Republicans To Identify Liberal Professors At UT
which list will

"...include professors who students say have let their political views interfere with the way they interact with students in the classroom." [emphasis added]

Bring it, you cowardly little punks. They tried this at my university--no doubt trying to make ass-licking points with the Chancellor, and finally had to admit that they didn't have a list: that they were only "planning" to assemble one.Put me first on your list. As Hunter Thompson said of Dick Nixon's enemies list, "what do I have to do get on it?!?"

Put me on your list. I'll challenge you to debate and/or prove my bias as impacting my classroom teaching, on public platform in the land--and no, you little finks, Fox News doesn't count.

I'll prove that the charge of bias can't stand. And then I'll prove that you're damned before the bar of history. Because that's what I do, see? I'm a scholar of history. I don't need bias: the historical record itself condemns you and your attitudes.

And you know it: that's why you try to use intimidation, rather than the facts.

Bring it, you cowardly, opportunistic punks.

15 Movies

One of those Facebook memes. I don't have any real aversion to "Crackbook", as a friend describes it, but neither do I feel much impetus toward contributing to their data-mining.

Thought this was interesting, though. Years ago, a good friend described some of the conversation-starter questions he and his wife used to use at parties in order to actually get to know a new person: my favorite was "Tell me about your most enjoyable grade-school field trip." I think this FB meme was a pretty effective one: just asking someone to name their favorite films--before they ever say much else--can really reveal a lot about that person.

Inevitably, the musicologist has to add annotations. Anyway, herewith the list:

Rules: Don't take too long to think about it. Fifteen movies you've seen that will ALWAYS stick with you. First fifteen you can recall in no more than 15 minutes.

1. To Have and Have Not
Bacall in her first movie, Bogie & Bacall falling in love onscreen, Hoagy Carmichael in his greatest movie role, the magnificent Oscar Aleman in the cafe band, and a smoother, slicker replay of the Casablanca plot wherein Bogie gets to *keep* the girl.

2. The Big Lebowski
The Coen Brothers do film noir, in LA, circa Gulf War I. some of the greatest characterizations by the Coen stable of actors including John Goodman, Steve Buscemi, Peter Storemare, Jon Polito, plus staggering one-offs by Julianne Moore, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Jeff Bridges, Jimmie Dale Gillmore, Sam Elliott, and the from-Venus genius of John Turturro. And, the most perfect writing of any movie I can think of.

3. O Brother Where Art Thou
The other most-perfectly-written movie out of the Coen Bros. As our friend the Good Doctor Masbrow said, "How could anybody not like the most perfect movie ever made?" An ode to the pre-urbanized South, not as it was, but as the music imagined it could have been. The absolutely perfect complement to Peter Guralnick's masterpiece Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm & Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom.

4. The Seven Samurai
Kurasawa is one of the greatest storytellers the movies have ever had, and he does it almost without words. You don't even need the subtitles, given the clarity, precision, and ferocity with which the actors attack the roles: Takashi Shimura as the Samurais' leader; Seiji Miyaguchi as the Iaido master who is finally vanquished only by modernity's brutal encroachment, and the animal vitality of Toshiro Mifune in his breakout role. One of the only films about war that conveys both its (occasional) inevitable necessity and at the same time its pointless loss.

5. Zatoichi the Blind Swordsman
Maybe not the greatest samurai film ever made, but my personal favorite. The archetypal blind masseur of the title role, played by Shintaro Katsu, is like a character out of Scots ballads or Noh drama--deadly, comic, and empathic all at the same time.

6. The Three Musketeers
Richard Lester's greatest ever. I've blogged about it elsewhere.

7. All the President's Men
Right up there with Wag the Dog as the greatest political thriller ever told. And we thought only *one* of them was a documentary!

8. The Wild Bunch
A dark, sad, autumnal movie: the bloodiest Western ever made 'til that time, by a dark, sad, autumnal director, Sam Peckinpah, who even in his '40s self-identified as a relic, like his characters, of a wilder past. One of the greatest movie endings--after the shootout--ever made in the West: the crazy, cosmic, world-shaking crazy-wisdom laughter that, as Fritz Leiber says, "was the Elder Gods laughing at the world they had made."

9. Waking Ned Devine
A movie about friendship, conversation, and the joy of story, unfettered by mundane reality.

10. The Matchmaker
Pretty slight, and pretty trite, but the two lead characters are cute together, and it has the great David O'Hara, and Janeane's Garofalo adorable smarts, and it has a whole cast of great Irish character actors. And the version of "Carrickfergus" in the Aran Islands scene would be a show-stopper on any concert stage in the world.

11. Apocalypse Now
It's not really what Vietnam *was*, for the people who were there or who went through those years, but it certainly captures something of what it *seemed*. Matched only by Laurence Gonzalez's great rock 'n' roll novel of the same years, Jambeaux, and the masterpiece of Vietnam writing, Michael Herr's journalistic Dispatches.

12. The Last Waltz
The greatest rock 'n' roll documentary ever made (by Scorsese, of course). Robbie Robertson was a self-mythologizing egomaniac--which is practically a job requirement for a songwriter--but the songs just *work*, perfectly. The band is *perfect* (most powerful weapons: Levon Helms's voice, and Garth Hudson's transcendent keyboard work), Allen Toussaint's New Orleans-style horn charts add a layer of funky vertigo, and time after time, almost every time of the chute, the special guests--Ronnie Hawkins, Joni Mitchell, the great Paul Butterfield, Dr John the Night Tripper, and the earth-shaking Muddy Waters--lift the evening higher than seems possible.

13. Genghis Blues
A beautiful documentary about the ways a shared sense of music's beauty can cross boundaries: of distance, language, and cultural experience. Paul Pena is a wonderful character and splendid musician, though he's kind of a mess as a person. This experience, however, *has* to have enriched his too-short life.

14. Bringing out the Dead
Scorsese's most Catholic and spiritual movie, and that's including Last Tempation of Christ and Kundun (below). Nicholas Cage playing within his zone, Rosanna Arquette's bruised honesty, and a story of loss, dispair, and redemption.

15. Kundun
Scorsese gets 3 out of 15 on this list, to the Coen Bros. 2, and that's about right. The Coens are the greatest writers in 20th century American film, but I think Scorsese might have the greatest eye in the same century. That he brings this to bear on the story of His Holiness the Dalai Lama is apt, and a heartfelt gesture of respect. It is probably too late for Buddhism to save us--but this film tries.

Do the Dean

Belated "In the trenches" post coming later today, as well as a takeoff on that ubiquitous Facebook "15-Movies" meme, but wanted to get this online in a timely fashion:

My friend Dean Magraw (Twin Cities) is quite sick. He's one of my greatest and most admired musical inspirations. Please visit dothedean.com and send him a get-well message. And if I've ever given you a free lesson--*please* consider sending the value of that lesson his way.

We love him & we want him to get well.

Quick hit: humility for the day

I'll have lived a good life if I can live up to the example set by my teachers and my friends.

Day 01 (round IV) "In the trenches"

Jeebus H. Sufferin' Moses on a bicycle.

We are opening the fourth iteration of "In the trenches." Well, I'm going to try to keep up with the tradition of blogging the semester, though tonight's is going to have to be a relatively short inaugural hit.

All staff in place: 4 tenure-stream musicologists; 2 tenure-stream other faculty filling loads by teaching Music Appreciation; 3 grad students serving as Instructors-of-record for History of Rock, History of Jazz, Music in Western Civ; 3 grad students serving as Teaching Assistants to instructors-of-record; 3 undergrad students serving as student assistants in the Appreciation classes.

Break in three new instructors-of-record for Appreciation courses.

Jump-start orientation session for new teaching staff.

2 iterations ("Introduction to Research and Style Analysis" and "Music as Cultural History: The Early Period") of the undergrad sequence. Grad seminars in "Music and War," "Chamber Music Literature," "Baroque Music," "Graduate Music History Review," "Topics in Ethnomusicology," and "Music in the Twentieth Century."

100 entering freshman music majors. 525 undergrad and graduate. Thirty-five entering graduate students, with music-theory and music-history placement tests to administer on Tuesday, grade on Wednesday, so they know what/whether remedial classes are needed.

More simultaneous class meetings than there are in the building, hence requiring teaching in satellite locations in the Library.

Switch, within our division, to brand-new (hoped-to-be) online room scheduling software.

Switch cross-campus to comprehensive new billing, registration, student records system, with a very steep learning curve.

Lose one Vernacular Music Center ensemble; inaugurate another.

Wave farewell to five Musicology MM/Ph.D. students (as compared to zero in past years); welcome two new ones.

Wave farewell to six players out of the Celtic Ensemble; welcome twelve more.

Inaugurate campus set-dance student organization.

Locate new site for weekly pub session.

Attend two convocations.

First band/business meeting for Celtic Ensemble.

Play two different service gigs for various "welcome back" functions.

Attend two welcome-back parties, host a third.

Three different staff/service/administrative meetings per week.

3 private lessons and 4 thesis/advising sessions per week.

Finalize 8000-word draft of review article for professional journal.

Assemble, by invitation, materials and referees for nomination to Excellence in Teaching award.

[...]

And that's just what we've already done--this week--before the end of Fall Semester 2009 Day ONE "In the trenches."

As the anonymous Confucian bureaucrat wrote, "we are cursed to live in interesting times."

However, here's the note that I sent to my staff at 3:46 this afternoon:

Dang, I am proud of you guys.

That's why we do what we do.

In the department of "Holy Sh*t"

This is the greatest--the only--"Celtic fusion" band. The greatest of them all.

Moving Hearts TV on MUZU.
Moving Hearts.

This is how, and why, and the only time when, "fusion" music works: when you have people who are stone virtuosos in both idioms. Then, and only then.

Just ask Joe Zawinul.

Fuzzy peopl 56: All dogs go to (aquatic park) heaven

Easily the coolest and funnest doggie park I've ever seen:

Boulder, CO. Of course.

What we did on our Holidays

Many years ago, Dharmonia's father, now much missed by all who knew and loved him, used to try to convince her to get a certificate to equip her to teach in the public schools. As somebody who'd been a stonemason, building chimneys and carrying concrete block his whole life, and playing bebop drums and saxophone on the weekends, the idea of a job that let you work inside, teaching music, and gave you the summer off, seemed (rightfully) to him to be an ideal solution. The fact that Dharmonia didn't go ahead and get that certificate/job is more a reflection of the realization that being a public-school music teacher--especially in the belt-tightening arts-economizing 1970s--really meant more like 10 1/2 months of work, and maybe even a part-time job in the summer months to make rent.

But, at the university level, the summer break is an incredibly, fortunate luxury. Historically, both Dharmonia and I have used it not as "vacation"--what college professor, outside the vindictive caricatures of the Robert Parkers, David Horowitz's, and Rush Limbaughs of the world, actually has that time "off"?--but for the ongoing pursuit of professional activities: concerts, workshops, conferences. I've worked for years and years to get to a place in my job where as much of my travel as possible--or all of it--could be funded by outside agencies. If I get to go to Dublin or Galway or London or Mystic or Bloomington or Suzhou on somebody else's dime, and in the pursuit of my profession(s), then my penny-pinching Presbyterian soul is happy.

The side-benefit, of course, and it's not a small one, is that it gets us out of Lubbock in the summer. This is a good place to live, and the jobs we have, in terms of colleagues, students, and duties, are just about ideal--but it's also distant from other places: geographically, politically, culturally, psychologically. It gets very very tiresome to always feel like a minority voter, and Dharmonia and I tend to alternate spasms of being fed-up, when one or the other of us is flipping out over the place's small-mindedness.

This year might be just about the first one, since we came here in Fall 2000, that the summer has played out with as wide a range of satisfying activities--on somebody else's dime--as we might like: enough so that getting ready to go back to school feels like a welcome transition, rather than donning-again the ball-and-chain.

Last day of the semester was April 28.

Exams started April 30. Gave two essay exams (which will require detailed critique in order to grade) on that day; gave another the next day.

Sat May 2 depart for Shannon, for a week serving as External Examiner for the graduating seniors in University of Limerick's BA Traditional Music program. 28 1-hour recitals over 4 days, followed by 2 days of meetings and preparing notes for Examiner's report on the program. In the evenings, grade Texas exams and post all final grades by closing date.

May 10 Dharmonia arrives Shannon with 9 seminar students in tow. 13 days travel, teaching, cooking, driving, problem-solving, touring for the capstone field trip.

May 24 dump students back aboard planes at Shannon and wave farewell; Dharmonia & I depart for three days' touring and itinerary research for future iterations of the seminar course.

May 27 put Dharmonia on a plane at Shannon; head up to Dublin.

May 28-29 give paper at Renaissance Ireland conference; realize that I'm by chance staying in the same hotel near Trinity that we stayed in 11 years before during medieval band tour. A little out of my element at a Renaissance conference but survive. Have some really nice music with John Kelly Jr at his Teacher's Club session. Visit the bullet-pocked GPO for the first time.

May 30 head back down toward the West; tangible, physical feeling of relief as I cross from Meath (Munster) into Roscommon (Connaught). Fantastic night of music with John Kelly (again), Bridget McCarthy (fiddle), and Bridie Lafferty (whistle) at Friel's in Miltown Malbay--Seamus Ennis's favorite pub. Feel privileged to sit in Seamus's seat while playing the session.

Sunday May 31 out of Shannon for Newark and home.

One week at home, finalizing paper for "Music of the Sea" symposium which I was entirely too late in starting (though I knew what I wanted to do with it, still needed to get the damned thing written).

Mon June 8: to Massachusetts for a couple of days' land-search. Sat June 13 deliver paper at Mystic CT. Play a few tunes on the deck of the Amistad--probably the first tunes played on that deck since fiddlers played for slaves being "danced." A peculiar sensation--hoping to replace some bad karma.

Sun June 14 stepfather deceases. While we are looking for his hospital room for a visit.

Not much to say about that.

June 15 back to Lubbock.

3 days home--working to finalize keynote and solo concert to be given in Indiana at end of the week.

June 18: with Dharmonia, to Bloomington, for visit and keynote/concert. We lived here twelve years, and developed friendships that will last beyond lifetimes. Dharmonia found her Dharma brothers and sisters; I found my greatest teachers. A peculiar, but this time not unwelcome, sensation, to return to as honored guest rather than abused graduate student. June 21 return to Lubbock.

June 22-25 four different MM and/or PhD defenses (all of them having to be preceded by massive and time-consuming editorial feedback to authors on their respective documents). 4 "passed with flying colors" results to the defenses--whew!

July 1 turn in outside-reader report for journal submission.

July 2-7 work like a dog on minstrelsy book manuscript--this an ongoing task every time I'm home this summer.

Wed July 8 depart for London for "Migrating Music" conference; housed in the Strand. Do a lot of walking around Convent Garden; visit the site of 84 Charing Cross Road and the British Museum. Friday 10th deliver paper--nice response. Sunday 12th return to Lubbock: glad to get out of London in the very early morning of the "Glorious [sic] Twelfth."

July 13-21: Work like a dog on the book manuscript: this the longest stretch of at-home at-the-desk time since May 1.

July 22 depart for Massachusetts again. Visit to archive for more manuscript research; land-hunting. Coping with single remaining parent's swift mental deterioration. Thanking Quan-yin for the guts and compassion of my brothers, who are bearing the brunt of the burden.

July 28 return to Lubbock. Resume work-like-a-dog on manuscript. Finally manage to get back on a functional cardio- and resistance-training regimen: about flippin' time. Also working hard on various new topics and technology-transfers for the new year.

Treasured senior students depart. New students arriving. A season of transition, of endings and new beginnings.

Aug 8 hood two PhD candidates at TTU graduation. Really proud of both. Crossing my fingers that, in the midst of an absolutely horrific job market, there'll be work for both. Writing a lot of recommendations and doing a lot of cover-letter edits.

Aug 10: resume writing heavy on the minstrelsy manuscript: within two-hoots-and-a-whistle of a rough (very rough!) but nearly-complete full first draft.

Aug 15 The General arrives.

Aug 17-and-onward: gearing up, transferring-over courses and software, getting final staff assignments, taking off the brake and rolling downhill toward the semester.

Aug 26 (looming): Day I of Fall 2009 semester.

And that's what we did on our Summer Holidays.

Ain't no damn Kindle (tm)

Giving away free books on the NYC subways.

Cain't do that with a Kindle.

Buddhist anger and ancient rage

A friend of a friend has referenced a set of actions as my "having gone all Buddhist commando." I don't think he meant it as a particularly positive or complimentary appellation, but it definitely had the salutary effect of making me think about how one conducts philosophical, political, or spiritual conversations--or actions!--in a fashion that is consistent with the Dharma.

One of the things that the sutras warn us against is what Catholicism calls "quietism"--the terminology employed to describe a state of mind which, mistakenly understood as "inner calm," is in fact more mental laziness. In Buddhist circles, it's "the mind watching the mind be calm."

It's an easy trap to fall into, especially if one is trying to find ways to be "in the world" without buying-in to the rage, spite, or egocentrism that fuels our political discourse. There is a difference between anger and rage. Anger is a response (healthy or unhealthy, appropriate or inappropriate) to a present situation: the sight of a sentient being abused, the wilful or careless destruction of the natural world, greed that serves the few and causes suffering for the many. It is appropriate to feel anger to such injustices, and to use that anger's energy to create positive change.

Rage is a response to old suffering--not to the present. Rage is inappropriate, unexpected, or un-called-for--unsuitable to the present situation. Too many of us--too many of the people currently in the news and screaming at the tops of their lungs--are not angry at present situations, but enraged at past frustration, disappointment, and, mostly, fear.

Buddhism recognizes that anger, however, is an appropriate response to some aspects of the world the way that it is. There are great wrongs in the world. There are evil and ignorant actions in the world. There are people who, knowing where the route of compassion and generosity lies, knowingly choose the path of selfishness and greed. There is thus a reason that Tibetan Buddhist cosmology recognizes the existence of "wrathful deities": manifestations of the Buddha who take on wrathful aspects "in order to lead sentient beings to enlightenment":

"In addition to destroying the passions of the mind, the purpose of gods is also to protect the faithful. The wrathful deities, who symbolize the tremendous effort it takes to vanquish negativity, especially perform this function." [Wikipedia]

It is possible to be an activist, even (sometimes) an angry activist, and a good Buddhist. In fact, MY teachers would have said that, in order to be a good Buddhist, one has a responsibility to be an active seeker of truth, compassion, and justice. It is not enough--indeed, it is irresponsible--to abrogate that responsibility. In my world, such irresponsibility most often takes the form of faculty who just "go in my studio and shut the door"--e.g., rely upon their sequestered experience and their tenured job-permanency to help them weather storms: in fact, to let others bear the brunt of those storms.

For me, that feels irresponsible. My life is one of enormous privilege, personal satisfaction, and material comfort: I'm warm, dry, fed, and protected by the upper-middle-class social safety net--and the much more potent safety net of university tenure. My response is that I have a moral responsibility to work, from this vantage, on behalf of those less privileged. I can't "go in my studio and shut the door." I have a moral--in fact, a religious--obligation to fight for justice.

There are situations of social injustice in which the appropriate response is anger.

This is a common misconception about Buddhism: that its "detachment" equates to a quietism that allows the practitioner to say "I'm just going to tend my garden and let the world go to hell." This is the quietism that led entirely too many Japanese Zen roshis to keep silent about their country's pre-WWII militarization. It is the quietism that led entirely too many American religious or educational professionals to keep silent about our country's pre-Gulf I & II militarization. It is the quietism that leads too many to say "well, this President isn't what I hoped he'd be, so fuck it! The system is fucked, so I'll just go into my studio (into my garden, up onto my mountaintop) and let it all blow over me."

I believe it is possible--indeed, a moral responsibility--to fight for a better world, especially when there is "no hope." The point of Buddhist "detachment" is not that one should "cease caring about the world." Rather, it is that one should abandon attachment to results, and instead work for a better world simply because such work is a good thing to do. Because fighting for justice is, in and of itself, better than passivity, quietism, or defeat. Absent any convictions or attachment to "victory".

When one becomes a Buddhist, in whichever of the traditions, one typically undergoes a ceremony called the "Boddhisattva vows." In this ceremony, the practitioner vows to continue to work toward her/his and all other beings' enlightenment (e.g., "to become a Bodhisattva"), but also--and very crucially--to forgo admission into paradise until all other beings likewise attain enlightenment. It's a vow that says, essentially, "I have the religious obligation to be the vehicle for all other beings' enlightenment. FIRST."

Some of the people I admire the very most in the world are both strong Buddhist or other spiritual practitioners and also strong activists. Their names are legion, and the full list far too long for a blog post, but here are a few, Buddhist and otherwise, the nature of their practice, and the depth of their political commitment:

• Gary Snyder: poet, environmental activist, Zen practitioner; has worked on behalf of demilitarization, environmental sensitivity, and better stewardship of the natural world for at least 50 years
• Thomas Merton: poet, Cistercian monk, antiwar activist; traced his own spiritual journey in a series of enormously influential and honest books and poems; explicitly opposed nuclear arms race and Vietnam at a time when no Catholics were supposed to do so
• Allen Ginsberg: poet, Buddhist practitioner, antiwar activist; faced down rioting cops in Chicago '68 at Grant Park and wrote poems to his muggers
• Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Lutheran pastor, theologian, martyred under Hitler
  
• Thich Nhat Hanh: Vietnamese Zen monk, poet, teacher, peace activist; when asked, in the '60s, "do you come from the North or the South?", replied "Neither. I come from the Center."
• Martin Luther King: Baptist minister, author, Civil Rights organizer, martyred in 1968
• Malcom X: black nationalist, Muslim, author, Civil Rights organizer, martyred in 1965
• Dorothy Day: Catholic convert, anarchist, social activist, founder of the Catholic Worker movement
• Robert Baker Aitken Roshi, founder of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship
• William Sloane Coffin: Presbyterian minister, musician, peace activist
• Helen and Scott Nearing: radicals, writers, simple-living advocates, teachers
• Mary "Mother" Jones: socialist, Wobbly, community organizer
  
• Shinryu Suzuki Roshi: Zen teacher, author, founder of San Francisco Zen Center
• Ed Brown: Zen teacher, cook, author of the books (Tassajara Bread Book, Tassajara Cookbook) which first gave me a vision of how cooking could be part of the Dharma
• Gerrard Winstanley: farmer, Quaker, religious reformer, founder of the Diggers, and author of some of the most powerful liberation poetry ever written
  
• Harriet Tubman: Christian, abolitionist, slave smuggler, suffragette
  

These are just a few of the people who have shown me personally how to be a deeply spiritual and a deeply activist person. The two are not self-contradictory: in fact, each is essential to the other.

Sometimes skillful means requires action, conflict, anger, even combat: "gentle violence," Gary Snyder said, "if it comes to restraining some impetuous crazy."

You cannot be an enlightened person (much less a Bodhisattva) if you do not seek--sometimes even fight for--peace and justice for all beings.

"...until it goes 'Click.'"

I've just got one thing to say to all those teabagging grandstanding democracy-hating gun-toting cowardly whackjobs bringing their automatic weapons to rallies and town halls. And I'll let The Jesus say it for me:

Go ahead, you fucking crybabies!

Protect your piggies

Easily the most imaginative safety-footware ad I've ever seen.

Made my day!

Bonus: Gaughan sings Si Kahn

This is why I fight.