Our Glorious Gobe

It’s not a jackhammer; it’s actually a tractor with a super-sized jackhammer attached. And it’s right outside my apartment, making enough noise that I cannot hear loud music played at full volume on my iPod.

The purpose? The jackhammer is drilling 6-inch diameter holes in the pavement of the street. After the street has been completely pockmarked, another tractor will come, scoop up the asphalt, and dump it into a truck. Then, the street will be remade in brick.

Why? Well, parts of San Juan have the famous iridescent blue adoquines or cobblestones. Here—have a look….

Very beautiful, very slippery when wet. So the mayor, or rather ex-mayor, decided to make all the streets in Old San Juan adoquined.

The problem? The real adoquines got their lustrous shiny blue because of slag put in the ballast of ships transporting goods to the island. Now, however, there is either no slag, or there are no ships—I’ve no idea which. And anyway, the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture, which defends greatly the patrimony of Old San Juan, would never allow anything new which looked old. Anything new has to look new—see? Otherwise a new thing could be mistaken for an old thing and that would be very, very bad.

The solution, therefore, is to pave the street with a dullish, blue-gray brick—which very quickly becomes stained with whatever fluids cars leak—and that means removing the asphalt and preparing the ground to receive the bricks.

And does anyone need the streets to be brick, you ask?

Of course not. The city doesn’t have a library, much less a zoo. There are very few parks, and those that exist tend to be vacant and disheveled. That means that the only thing a parent with a child can do in San Juan is

1.     go to the movies

2.     go to the mall

The point of this all, then, is not to beautify a city already very beautiful but to spend some federal funds, employ some people, and do something visible in a visible place.

Oh, and speaking of money—everybody wants to know: what happened to the billion dollars that were earmarked for the special communities fund, set up by the redoubtable Sila Calderón? Yes, she was our very first lady governor—evil tongues dubbed her “the governess”—and she was a tigress in championing her special communities.

Yes, these derelict communities of (usually) squatters needed all the help they could get—the roads were unpaved, water and electricity spotty, no recreation fields or basketball courts or baseball diamonds. So Sila stepped into the picture, or rather into one particularly down-at-the-heels community, Barrio Obrero, or the Workers Neighborhood. And speaking of heels, there Sila was, wearing her trademark canary yellow dress with Armani shoes to match, tittering on a plank of plywood stretched over a sea of mud; her eyes narrow with terror, her mouth clenched in a smile. Once in the house, she demonstrated the presence of water in the new kitchen sink by washing dishes—something she had never done before, since her father sold virtually all the ice cream on the island for decades; the lady is loaded. But dishes she did, as a large and very black woman—presumably the missis of the house—stood by and watched in puzzlement.

Well, I was once asked what exactly Sila built with that billion dollars, and wanting to be truthful, I responded—signs. Yes, signs that got put up next to the basketball court with no baskets or the community center with the broken out windows, and which remained there for four years, resting in glorious silence as residents of the special community strolled past with their midday beers.

So—where did the money go? Well, Sila harbors dark thoughts about her successor, a man from her own party who would go on to be hauled into Federal court for various shades of fraud. Oh, and then there was the next governor, of the opposite party—so he’s a likely suspect as well. So now the new governor—of Sila’s political ilk and so to be trusted—is gonna investigate, since the money is gone and the neighborhoods continue special, instead of ordinary.

But here’s the great part. Is La Gobe, as disrespectful tongues dubbed her, content to sit back and let the current governor conduct the investigation? Not she! She’s gonna start her own investigation—to be absolutely sure that there’s no trickery, no chicanery, no playing footsy with the truth.

Well, well—she’s a powerhouse, our Sila. And no, it’s not true that her disappearance for a month after winning the election—time lesser individuals spend thinking about their cabinet choices—was spent recovering from a facelift.

Some people naturally have their eyebrows tickling their ears….

Sort of looks Chinese, doesn’t she? And no, she doesn’t go to the same hairdresser as Ronald MacDonald….

Music, for a while

I forced myself to watch the first clip below, because if 5.2 million Americans are living it daily, shouldn’t I be able to take 13 minutes?

Yes.

30% of the veterans will have Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD, with symptoms that include persistent memories, nightmares, aggression, irritability, and inability to feel affectionate with others. Oh, but that’s just the emotional side. On the physical side, there are the night sweats, the gastrointestinal complaints, the chest pain, and so on.

There’s also the little problem of sleep—PTSD people frequently have sleep apnea and insomnia. Then we have to consider the social problems—the isolation of the victims, the effect on families and spouses, as well as children.

The disorder lasts six months—for some. For others, death is the only cure.

And it’s no little problem—14 million Americans have seen active combat. Here’s what the Rand Corporation has to say about the scope of the problem.

A release from the Rand Corporation reported that 300,000 US military personnel deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or major depression.

Another reports that one in six soldiers who’ve served in Operation Iraqi Freedom/Operation Enduring Freedom suffer from PTSD or service-related stress. Regardless, the numbers are overwhelming.

Unlike past wars, where there were front lines and safe areas, the soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq never know when or where the horrors of war will come to them. The level of mental and emotional stress is unprecedented, as is the shock of military and civilian attacks. Early evidence suggests that the psychological toll from these wars will be disproportionately high compared to physical injuries.

Other evidence points to the fact that the multiple tours of combat duty, unique to Iraq and Afghanistan, dramatically increase the percentage of soldiers coming home with PTSD or other psychological damage.

So how much is this going to cost us? Well, according to two economists, Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, the total cost will be between 4 to 6 trillion dollars. Oh, and the costs will peak in 30 or 40 years time.

The economists also point out that it isn’t just treating the mind—patients suffering from PTSD use medical services 71% to 170% more than non-PTSD vets. Why? All that stress leads to physical illness. Here’s what Bilmes has to say….

This was the experience with Vietnam veterans diagnosed with PTSD. And recent studies show that PTSD sufferers are at a higher risk for heart disease, RA, bronchitis, asthma, liver, and peripheral arterial disease. They are 200% more likely to be diagnosed with a disease within five years from returning from deployment.

Well, I got into this whole question when I came across an article using music therapy on PTSD victims. Would it work?

There’s some evidence that it might. In fact, Walter Reed hired a music therapist and created a program late last year. And music has often been cited as a healing force; doctors noticed that hospitalized soldiers improved faster when exposed to music.

But according to Oliver Sacks, it’s really only been in the last five years that had come to understand neurologically what music does. He claims—and who am I to take on Dr. Sacks—that music occupies more space in the brain than language does. And as you can see in the clip of Gabrielle Giffords and her music therapist, while Giffords cannot talk, she can sing. That’s because the part of the brain that processes music was unaffected. The amazing thing, though, is that the music is essentially teaching speech back to Giffords, and in doing so, creating a new language center in the right side of the brain, not the left, as it normally is.

So will it help the shattered veterans, as they live their hellish lives? Well, I can only tell you this—I googled “music” and “amygdala” together and came up with the words of this blogger, citing a study by Stefan Koelsch:

The amygdala, which processes emotions thought to be essential for survival, is a limbic structure. Studies have demonstrated that the amygdala responds a certain way to strong music-evoked emotions (chills). Even when chills aren't experienced, different specific changes in amygdala activity (and activity of associated structures) are observed in response to joyful versus dissonant music. Other studies have shown that certain limbic and paralimbic structures exhibit increased activity in response to videos shown with music, as compared to videos presented alone. Video/music studies have shown different neural responses depending on whether the music played was joyful or fearful.

These limbic/paralimbic structure studies provide support for Koelsch's assertion that music-evoked emotions are just as real as everyday ones, since they activate the same structures.

If that’s true, that’s amazing.

“Music for a while, shall all thy cares beguile,” begins a famous song by Henry Purcell. Wouldn’t it be interesting if it weren’t only for a while, but permanently?

The Silence of Ainola

OK—today’s problem. What was going on with Jean Sibelius?

He was born in 1865, he died in1957, he was definitely one of the major composers of the late 19^th century and early 20^th century. And his last major composition? That would be in 1926.

So why did he stop? Granted, he was in his sixties, but that’s hardly old age. Worse, instead of merely stopping, he actively destroyed his own work. Here’s his wife on the subject:

 "In the 1940s there was a great auto da fé at Ainola. My husband collected a number of the manuscripts in a laundry basket and burned them on the open fire in the dining room. Parts of the Karelia Suite were destroyed – I later saw remains of the pages which had been torn out – and many other things. I did not have the strength to be present and left the room. I therefore do not know what he threw on to the fire. But after this my husband became calmer and gradually lighter in mood."[11]

Well, here he is in 1939—he doesn’t look too sad here.

Born in Finland, Sibelius’s father was a Swedish-speaking doctor, and Finnish was always a second language for Sibelius.  After he graduated from high school, he initially studied law, but soon switched to music. And he must have been a fair violinist—he performed the last two movements of the Mendelssohn concerto in public. And he certainly could write for the instrument, as you can hear in the performance below of his violin concerto of 1905.

Not bad, hunh? Chang definitely earned whatever her fee was that night.

In addition to the concerto, Sibelius wrote 7 symphonies, of which the second and the fifth are probably the best known. Here’s the finale of the seventh symphony, which you may be singing for the rest of the week.

Right—then there are the songs, some of which were written for Marian Anderson, the preeminent singer of her day. And below, she sings one of the most famous, Im Feld ein Mädchen singt.

Right—two warnings. The first is that the recording quality is, by our standards, poor. Anderson sounds far away, the vibrato is too wide for modern tastes, but for me at least, all that adds to the essential spooky feeling of the song.

Which you will understand—here’s an English translation of the German.

In the field a maiden sings...

Perhaps her lover is dead;

Perhaps her happiness is ended,

For her song is a sad one.

The sunset fades,

The woods become silent,

But ever, from far away,

The sorrowing song still sounds.

The last note dies.

I would like to go to her.

We would console one another,

So sadly does she sing.

The sunset fades;

The woods become silent.

A great lover of nature, Sibelius lived in the country most of his life, and was known as the Silence of Ainola, his country home. It wasn’t true that he was a recluse; he received visitors but did not leave his home. And Wikipedia shares one of the anecdotes frequently told:

[He] was returning from his customary morning walk. Exhilarated, he told his wife Aino that he had seen a flock of cranes approaching. "There they come, the birds of my youth," he exclaimed. Suddenly, one of the birds broke away from the formation and circled once above Ainola. It then rejoined the flock to continue its journey. Two days afterwards Sibelius died of a brain hemorrhage, at age 91 (on 20 September 1957), in Ainola, where he is buried in the garden. Another well-known Finnish composer, Heino Kaski, died that same day. Aino lived there for the next twelve years until she died on 8 June 1969; she is buried with her husband.

Critical opinion has varied over the years, as tastes and fads in music have changed. Tim Page of the Washington Post may have said it best.

There are two things to be said straightaway about Sibelius. First, he is terribly uneven (much of his chamber music, a lot of his songs and most of his piano music might have been churned out by a second-rate salon composer from the 19th century on an off afternoon). Second, at his very best, he is often weird.

Ouch…. 

Panic on the Plaza

“You’re shaking, Marc” said Mendoza, the nice kid who makes me tuna sandwiches (for which I pay him, of course), and then I realized, ‘yes, I am.’

Well, I covered by telling him, “too much coffee,” but I suspect he knew: that wasn’t it.

And that’s when it hit me: that’s why I flubbed all those auditions—those many, many auditions which involved hours of glorious playing at home, a wrenching ten minutes of sheer musical hell, a taxi-ride-with-tears-suppressed home.

I am a racehorse, not a plow horse. At any loud noise I startle, panic, bolt. And today, merely by going off to read names with two loved ones—something I have done for months now—I was nervous.

Yes—we’re a third of the way through the 30,000 LivesProject; today we finished Hawaii and began Illinois. And Raf’s mom, Ilia, strolled as always into the plaza, dispensing greetings, muzzling kids heads, assuring all the little girls they were “tan linda, nena.”

“Besos,” she tells me; we kiss.

I have been sitting in Plaza de Armas on a green resin chair, next to which is another green resin chair, on which artfully is draped a shirt and blue jeans. And I have been pondering my body, specifically my brain, which is firing neurons down to my adrenal glands, which is making me want to run, not fight.

Do I know that I am not in danger?

Yes.

Do I know that I am scared, shaking, dreading the moment when I will have to start reading names, approaching people, trying to engage them and—more often than not—getting no response?

No.

Does my body know?

Yes.

That’s the thing—I may rationally have known that I was under no threat, as I waited those hours for my moment to fail the audition to come. My body, however, was screaming a different story. And it’s curious—both the body and the mind play the cello. Yes, those are my fingers on the fingerboard, holding the bow—but those body parts are under the control of the mind.

And for all those years when I was failing auditions, I never really knew that.

Or did I?

Yes, I had been a psychiatric nurse; yes, I knew something about physiology. But at the core, there was something wrong with me, something bad about me, something shameful.

“You have to believe in yourself,” friends would tell me.

“You have to see it, really envision it, make it real,” they would say.

“Did you want to fail?”

Why was I sabotaging myself? What dark corner of my psyche hid the roaring beast that would spring to attack me, those auditions behind the curtain? What was wrong with me?

It was savage—enduring and cleaning up from those auditions. It would take a couple of months, before the pain would start to ebb. I could talk to no one, I who was so flawed that I had caused myself once again to fail.

“It’s OK,” I told him, that guy in his thirties and forties, that guy who lives in me, that wonderful guy. “I’m here, remember? I walked you to El Morro and showed you my door and pounded on it and taught you and protected you. And remember, I read you and laughed at you and thought, ‘shit, how did he do that?’ Remember? And I still do.”

“I know,” he told me. “Thanks for that. Thanks for being here.”

“You’re wonderful,” I told him. “It doesn’t matter about those auditions.”

“Right, so can I get the cello out?”

“We gotta call Rodrigo, the repair guy.”

“Can you do that for me?”

“Yes.”

An old lady is pushing her walker towards me; the wind blowing her chestnut hair, the smile leaping up in her face.

“Besos,” she says.

We kiss.

All three of us.  

Two Musicians, One Message

Well, I’m not immune to it. I have a dark side; I can feel envy, jealousy; the dark night of the soul occasionally visits me. So that may be why I had an absolutely negative reaction to the TED Talk that Ji-Hae Park gave today.

Park is first of all a wonderful violinist—she’s got a stunning technique and plays with terrific energy. She started off the talk by playing Vivaldi, and she nailed it. Then she spoke, and it was all over for me. She had, you see, struggled many years from depression, and then she had realized: the amazing power of music! So then she got cured, and went on to play at Carnegie Hall! Oh, and she was playing the Petrus Guarnerius of 1735, which a German foundation had lent to her.

So her message was play, play your life! Music will change your life, it had lifted her out of depression, now she is playing all the major halls, and prisons and leprosaria as well! And at the age of 28, she has decided to do a crossover album, a merge of rock and Baroque music.

I should be nicer; I should be able to have some empathy. I know something of depression myself, having been intermittently suicidal for many years; I also know something about music, having played the cello, also for many years. So why was I so antagonistic to Ji-Hae Park?

Well, we could start by saying that even in the darkest hours of my depression, music was never able to lift me out of it. Lexapro 20mg or music? Sorry, it was only the Lexapro that did it.

Actually, the cruel trick of depression is that you cannot do the things that you need to do to get better. So when I was really depressed, I couldn’t even listen to music—I was too depressed, it wouldn’t have occurred to me.

The other thing that unnerved me about Park was the difference between her orgiastic energy when playing, as opposed to her little-girl affect when speaking. Is it a cultural thing? Is it my prejudice?

And why did I feel—it was only about her? Curious, I turned to a clip of her playing Beethoven Spring Sonata. Of all compositions, it’s one that is absolutely democratic; the piano is fully the equal of the violin. But even when the piano clearly has the theme, Park never steps back, plays her supplemental stuff quietly and lets the piano shine. She’s always on top.

Last rant—why do classical musicians always get so defensive? Why do we think that by adding a drum and sweetening up the music, we can get other people to love classical music? We’re just giving the message—no, we’re not good enough.

I watched the clip below twice.

Right, then I turned to another musician, and had the opposite reaction; I was moved to tears by the story he told. And notice, please, the music Gupta chooses to play—two pieces by Bach, the most cerebral music for the violin. Right, his technique isn’t anywhere near Park’s. But I suspect his heart is bigger by far.



And I was curious, as well, about the piece Park felt was insufficiently interesting and had to be jazzed up. I knew the piece—La Follia—and I knew that many baroque composers had written variations on the tune. In fact, Wikipedia tells me, over 150 composers have used the theme, among them being such non-Baroque composers as Liszt and Rachmaninoff.

But here’s the un-rocked version.

You choose....

When the Criminals Wear Three-Piece Suits

Great news, Readers—only one in four houses in the United States is underwater!

That’s only 13 million mortgages. However, if you count the number of people who have not paid off 20% of the mortgage, the figure goes to 43.6% or 22 million homeowners. (If you don’t have sufficient equity, you can’t sell the house, so you’re essentially stuck with it….)

Look, as a group, bankers have never been easy to love. And when people make stupid decisions about money, the first group they point the finger at are bankers, who tend to make good decisions about money.

And it’s also the case the banker of years past was a different breed. He lived in the community, he knew everyone in town, he knew whose marriage was shaky, whose kid had a major illness, who didn’t have money now but had an elderly uncle who did. All of those things have financial implications. Sure, he answered first to his shareholders—what company doesn’t—but he also answered to his community. And he could be proud: the bank grew the town, funded the businesses that paid the workers who went out and bought food and clothes and a house and a car.

Somehow, that world drifted away. Twenty years ago, I lobbied the bank hard—at one point I was calling Luis, the guy in charge of our putative mortgage, three times a day—to get the mortgage. Luis, punctilious to a fault, wanted to see everything from income tax forms for the previous three years to several months of paystubs to a letter assuring that I was employed and had no disciplinary action taken against me.

Ten years later, I was sitting in front of my computer, blinking in wonder at an advertisement—“YOU qualify for a $700,000 mortgage with no down payment! Instant authorization guaranteed!”

And it was true. People who should NEVER have gotten a mortgage got one, and it was no problem for the bank because they were going to sell the mortgage before the first payment was due, so hey—no problem!

And let’s be clear—everybody knew about this problem. I found out about the impending doom to come while sitting in a Jacuzzi with my brother-in-law. Right—he worked as an assistant / advisor to a congressman, but that’s hardly a miniscule esoteric group.

So the world had changed and banks had merged so much that bankers had lost connection to their community, and if Citibank or JPMorgan failed the entire Western Civilization would be wiped out. Which nearly happened, and the damage, though not cataclysmic, was still huge.

Well, three years ago, Congress passed a law, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which was the most extensive reform of the financial industry since the Great Depression. Dodd-Frank put tighter controls and regulations—all serious and sensible things designed to combat a reoccurrence of the whole mess. And guess what? The New York Times this morning revealed that the banks are back in Washington, and virtually writing legislation that would roll back significant parts of Dodd / Frank.

Here’s the Times on the subject:

In a sign of Wall Street’s resurgent influence in Washington, Citigroup’s recommendations were reflected in more than 70 lines of the House committee’s 85-line bill. Two crucial paragraphs, prepared by Citigroup in conjunction with other Wall Street banks, were copied nearly word for word. (Lawmakers changed two words to make them plural.)

All of this, of course, doesn’t come without a price, which the Times points out, in the paragraph below:

And as its lobbying campaign steps up, the financial industry has doubled its already considerable giving to political causes. The lawmakers who this month supported the bills championed by Wall Street received twice as much in contributions from financial institutions compared with those who opposed them, according to an analysis of campaign finance records performed by MapLight, a nonprofit group.

Of course, some high-minded congressmen had scruples; check this out:

“I won’t dispute for one second the problems of a system that demands immense amount of fund-raisers by its legislators,” said Representative Jim Himes, a third-term Democrat of Connecticut, who supported the recent industry-backed bills and leads the party’s fund-raising effort in the House. A member of the Financial Services Committee and a former banker at Goldman Sachs, he is one of the top recipients of Wall Street donations. “It’s appalling, it’s disgusting, it’s wasteful and it opens the possibility of conflicts of interest and corruption. It’s unfortunately the world we live in.”

Wow—gotta feel sorry for Himes, and what our wicked world has done to him!

Or not—since it seems other people are living in other worlds. The Internet has decided to drift off somewhere so I can’t tell you the number—but there are millions of houses in foreclosure. Oh, and does anybody remember the little scandal of 2010, when the banks were foreclosing on the wrong properties, were robosigning documents, were engaging in various forms of fraud?

Eric Holder, our Secretary of Justice, came out in March saying that some banks were too big to jail. People howled, and he stepped back; an aide told Congress recently that she “didn’t think that he (Holder) meant that.” But what is true is that not one of those guys who got us into this mess has been jailed.

The bastards are back in business. The rest of us are still stunned, still struggling to get back on our feet, still rubbing our eyes and wondering what hit us.

Oh, and the bastards own Congress…..