Did an Employee of the Vatican Commit Crimes on US Territory?

Well, let’s start with two caveats. First, it may be that reality—subjected to the blazing light and sopping humidity of the tropics—gets a little warped. In fact, I once hesitantly breathed this theory to Harry, a native of Old San Juan.

“Of course,” he cried, and told me the following story:

A gringo comes to oversee a factory in a small mountain town. The factory is running well, but the workers tend to call in sick a day or two every week. What was wrong? Clearly, the workers were unhappy: the gringo sought to increase morale by giving them higher pay. The result? The workers now called in sick three times a week!

“They weren’t interested in money,” said Harry, “they just wanted enough for their rice and beans and a caneca (flask) of rum. So when they got paid more, they didn’t have to work as much. See?”

It makes total sense, really—it’s just a different way of thinking. And so after living here for over twenty years, and after having written well-past-exhaustively on the topic of priestly abuse, who’s to say that my own sense of reality isn’t a bit warped? 

Second caveat: being a blogger tends to lead to a sort of conspiracy mindset. You read a lot about something, and then go on to the next thing, and then—weeks or months later—the first thing crops up again. You’ve now forgotten most of what you read, which makes it easy to believe that Machiavellian forces are at work.

So now—at long last—let me tell you what I remember.

A lawyer in Minneapolis, Jeff Anderson, has been an early and rigorous fighter for justice for the victims of clerical abuse. And he has had to fight long and hard to get a few dioceses to reveal their internal records. Chicago, for example, released in January of this year a collection of over 6000 documents that exposed what was happening internally in the diocese.

That’s great, but it’s only half the story. Yes, if within the diocese’s records there are Vatican letters, you can get a glimpse of what is going on in the Vatican. But it frequently is the blandest, most opaque glimpse. So the logical thing to do would be to go to court and ask for the court to tell the Vatican to hand over its records. Especially logical since the diocese is required to report all cases of clerical abuse to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) which used to be the Holy Office, and which—more colorfully and forcefully—started out as the Inquisition.

Thus, local bishops were writing off to Ratzinger and the CDF, and guess what? God’s time is infinitely, majestically, gloriously… slow. So the bishops waited and waited, often for years at a time. In the meantime, the bishops were stuck with seriously sick priests; you can—almost—understand why they were shuffling them around to new victims in different parishes. What else could they do?

So what happened when lawyers went to court to ask the court to force the Vatican to reveal its records? Ah, cried the Vatican, but those bishops aren’t our employees! They are paid by the diocese, not the Vatican!

For this, the word jesuitry was made.

Hard shift to the southeast, specifically Arecibo, Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico—once defined by the US Supreme Court as not being the United States but pertaining to the United States (anybody up there get that? Drop me a line, if you do…)—falls within US jurisdiction.

And things have been a little strange in Arecibo. For one thing, six priests have been expelled in three years, and our local newspaper, El Nuevo Día, reports that there have been 20 cases of priestly abuse, as well as a federal lawsuit brought by one of the victims. Here’s what The New Day has to say in today’s electronic edition:

Fuentes de El Nuevo Día indicaron que agentes de ICE-HSI se acercaron al secretario interino de Justicia, César Miranda, y al fiscal general José Capó para colaborar e intercambiar información con la investigación que comenzó el gobierno estatal la semana pasada y así ellos también poder abarcar ángulos de jurisdicción federal.

“Hay mucho interés en indagar sobre los detalles de abuso sexual de menores por parte de sacerdotes y todo lo que ha salido publicado provoca que haya que actuar de inmediato”, dijo una fuente federal.

(“Sources for El Nuevo Día indicated that agents of IE-HIS approached the interim Secretary of Justice, César Miranda, and the Attorney General José Capó to collaborate and exchange information with the investigation which the state government began last week and thus to be able to also cover any angles that are of federal jurisdiction.

‘There’s a lot of interest in investigating the details of sexual abuse of minors on the part of priests, and everything that has come out publically makes it necessary to act immediately,’ said a federal source.”)

Now then, here the waters turn murky, as the runoff of politics surges into the pond.

The highest Catholic official on the island, Archbishop of San Juan Roberto González Nieves, is a strong proponent of independence and rubbed it a little too hard into people’s noses. So the statehooders had him investigated for four things, one of which was covering up abusive priests. And thus, in an investigation that lasted years, the papal nuncio—the Pope’s own ambassador and yes, a Vatican official—came to Puerto Rico, and were did he stay? Not in San Juan, but in…

…Arecibo.

The papal nuncio for the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico was Jozef Wesolowski, and where is he now? Apparently in the Vatican, where he fled—or was recalled—just before investigative news series was about to show him walking the malecón of Santo Domingo in search of something other than lovely seascapes.

Authorities in the Dominican Republic have in some accounts asked for extradition: the Vatican has no extradition policy and Wesolowski, as a diplomat, enjoys immunity. But there are reports that Wesolowski didn’t behave much better in Puerto Rico than he did in Santo Domingo. Here’s what the Dominican press said about Wesolowski in Puerto Rico:

Según los testimonios difundidos por Burgos, en su programa Código Calle, del canal 29 de Santiago, Wesolowski es acusado en Puerto Rico de encubrir a los sacerdotes pederastas.

Los fieles católicos se quejaron ante el obispo puertorriqueño monseñor Iñaqui y ante el propio Wesolowski, pero no recibieron el apoyo que esperaban.

Un seminario fue cerrado, pero todo se mantiene en silencio, y el obispo Iñaqui [Sic.] fue promovido, en lugar de ser sancionado.

(“According to witnesses’ statements broadcast by Burgos in his program Código Calle on channel 29 in Santiago, Wesolowski is accused in Puerto Rico of covering up pederast priests.

Faithful Catholics protested to Puerto Rican bishop Iñaki (former bishop of Arecibo) and in front of Wesolowski himself, but never received the support they expected.

A seminary was closed, but everything was kept silent, and the bishop Iñaqi was promoted, instead of sanctioned.”)

Remember what I said about reality being different in the sun-drench vibrant air of the tropics? We seem to have Wesolowski—a man now accused of pederasty—investigating the archbishop of San Juan for covering up…pederasty. Who’s guilty of what? I sure don’t know.

And am I wrong in thinking that…

…a Vatican official may have committed crimes in the United States? This case is unique, the case we’ve been waiting for. At long last, a US court has the right to petition the Vatican to release its records, its internal documents, its policies and directives to bishops. At last, we can throw open the doors of the Vatican and take a look inside.

Am I the only one who sees that?

A Bow to a Bow

Well, it was a revelation, and I’m happy to say it was a good one.

I had to taken my bow to my luthier—and if you don’t have a luthier, you should get one, if only because it adds total class to be able to say “my luthier.” Of course, you could be a little clearer by saying “string instrument repairman,” but in a choice between clarity and class? No contest….

Actually, his name is Rodrigo, and he’s a totally cool guy. More to the point, he’s a serious luthier, having studied at Indiana University’s Violin Making and Repair Program. So he was the person to whom I fled, several years ago, when I detected the perfect round hole, about the diameter of a pencil point. What was it? I knew too well—a termite.

“I’ll have to freeze your cello for a couple of weeks,” said Rodrigo.

He explained it all carefully. Did I listen? Of course not—I knew it had to be done, I knew he was the man to do it. But how was I going to live for the next two weeks, imagining my cello in a meat locker?

Two weeks later, I was back in his taller, or workshop (OK, how about atelier?) And while I fully expected the cello to sound as good as it had before, it didn’t.

“It sounds much, much better,” I told him.

“The concert master of the Puerto Rico Symphony Orchestra used to take his violin to New York for the least little thing,” his mother boasted, “now, he won’t let anyone but Rodrigo touch his violin….”

Mothers get to say stuff like that.

So there I was on Monday with a bow that had its hair firmly attached to the frog (yup—bows have frog: that’s the black thing under the player’s hand; it has a screw in it, so that you can tighten the hair.)  The problem? The hair had popped out at the other end of the bow (logically called the tip).

So there were two orders of business, beyond getting the bow fixed. The first was to ask about getting a baroque bow—very important, since I’m doing Bach and Beer every day. And the baroque bow is designed to do so something very important: messa di voce. It’s when a sustained note starts quietly, gradually becomes louder, and then becomes soft again. Done right, it’s ravishing.

As I knew he would, Rodrigo had the answer, with the happy news that a good baroque bow wouldn’t cost me too much—under two hundred bucks. And if my father had collected Leica cameras, can’t I collect bows?

The next order of business was to see if Rodrigo had a spare bow lurking around, waiting for the errant cellist to drift by and claim it. Well, it turns out that Rodrigo has a seriously good bow—which he would lend Yo-Yo Ma, maybe—and another bow, a French bow with German weight. Guess which one I got?

There’s a difference between what you know intellectually and what you know experientally (well, computer, if Sarah Palin can do it, why can’t I?). Because when I start playing with that bow, it was what Stanley said to Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire: “baby, we’ve had this date from the very beginning!”

“The bow is more important that the instrument,” said a cello teacher to me when I was in my teens. So why had it never occurred to me: I had a very good cello, but I had never gone from what were essentially student bows to a better bow.

And if your cello is your sound, your bow is your voice. Or perhaps your speech, since the bow was somehow, miraculously suggesting nuances that I hadn’t thought of. I swear—that bow was telling me how to play Bach.

Bach—which I was playing because I had grown tired of killing myself playing stuff like the Dvorak concerto or the Tchaikovsky Rococo Variations. They’re great pieces of music, but for the cellist? It’s a battle: one cellist against 100 musicians. I had gotten tired of working so hard, and besides, it’s strangely unusual how infrequently the Berlin Philharmonic or the London Symphony are calling me these days….

But the bow was having none of that. It wanted a robust, full sound—or maybe it was that just by using the weight of my arm, the bow produced a wonderful, warm sound.

It was, as I say, a revelation. Equally revealing was how much I didn’t know about bows, or bow makers. I knew that François Xavier Tourte (1747 – 25 April 1835) was a big name among bow makers, but I didn’t know that he’s big enough to be called, “the Stradivarius of bow makers.” (If so, my computer is less than impressed—“Tourte” gets red-squiggled, whereas “Stradivarius” sails right through….)

Not only was he a fine maker, but he was the father of the modern bow: he lengthened it, devised the little screw that tightens the tension of the hair, and also came up with a new way to make the curve of the bow. Previously, it had been carved; Tourte cooked up the idea of heating a straight stick of pernambuco, and then, on the edge of a wood table, carefully producing the curve.

For all this, he deserves to have his picture in Iguanas; here he is, in an engraving from 1818:

  

 Nor did I know that the experimentation with the bow is still going on, until I stumbled across Benoît Rolland, a Frenchman of—quite logically—the French School. Because there are, you see, at least three distinct schools of bow making: the French, German and English schools. I get this from a sentence from Rolland’s website:

A musician can sense whether a bow belongs to the French, German or British traditions.

But it occurred to me: shouldn’t there be an Italian school, since the modern violin originated in Cremona, Italy? But it appears no—the origin of the modern bow occurred later, and happened simultaneously but unconnectedly in France and England (John Dodd was the Tourte of England…).

At any rate, Rolland studied at Mirecourt, sometimes called “the Cremona of bow making” and was awarded the prestigious Maitre Archetier d’Art, which beyond sounding totally cool, has only been awarded a few times in history.

Nor is that the only thing Rolland has won—he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2012—and they don’t hand those babies out like candy. Why did he get it? Well, the quote below is drawn from his website:

Initially using marine technology, he conceived the first carbon fiber bow of concert quality. Bringing the project one step further, he invented a new generation of bows including a tension mechanism that allows the performer to adjust at will the camber of the bow. The bows embodying this invention were awarded First Prize Musicora in 1994 (also selected for Musicora Anniversary, 2004), and are distributed under the trademark Spiccato®.

Right—so I’m a bit more knowledgeable about bows and bow making. What don’t I know? How I could possibly give Rodrigo’s bow back to him.

Sorry—that’s not Rodrigo’s bow.

Not any more….

So here’s what I going to say to him: “Rodrigo, you’d better let me buy this bow, because I really don’t want to have to steal it!”

Bad Party, Terrible Hangover

The good news?

I did not wake up this morning with a hangover.

The bad news?

The island did.

Whatever you think of the current governor, nobody can dispute that, on at least one point in the news conference yesterday, he was right: both the major parties that rule Puerto Rico got us into this mess. And that is? Yesterday, after years of waving red flags, Standard & Poor’s degraded our credit rating to junk status.

Terrible golpe al país shouts the The New Day’s headline in a special 15-page extra to today’s regular printed edition. Conscientious blogger that I am, I read all 15 pages, which told me basically what I knew, as well as some things I didn’t.

The gist of it is that for forty years, the public has allowed our political leaders to engage in politicking, instead of providing services, making fiscally responsible decisions, and running efficient governments. And how did they do that? By doing on a collective basis what many of us do on a personal level: living on credit.

There’s nothing too sexy about economics—nothing as sexy as building a great whacking (thanks, Franny!) stadium or investing a billion dollars in “special communities,” which today remain just as special as they were when the program began. (The program identified poor communities and tried to invest funds for improvements to infrastructure and social services…)

OK—so how bad is it? Some facts lifted from the special edition of today, as well as a New York Times article on the topic:

•       Our debt is almost 70 billion dollars
•       Each person—man woman and child—would have to pay $10, 635 dollars up front to clear this debt. That’s ten times the average per state
•       As a result of this decision, we’re going to have to pay about 940 million bucks, since we promised we would if our rating was sunk to junk status
•       We had been planning to go ask the market to buy bonds that would give us an additional 1 to 2 billion next month
•       Puerto Rico is the third largest issuer of municipal bonds, after California and New York
•       Many of these bonds are collected in mutual funds, which are attractive: you don’t have to pay taxes on the interest you collect on them. Therefore, a lot of mutual funds in the US hold Puerto Rico bonds. However, a lot of the bonds are held by the Puerto Rican middle and upper classes, especially retirees; some 1.5 billion dollars of Puerto Rico debt is held on the island

Now, how’s the economy doing?

•        In December of 2013, the rate of unemployment was (officially) 15.4%
•       Largest employer in Puerto Rico is…the government of Puerto Rico: 27.8% of the work force works for the government. Estimates for the average state public sector range from 10% to 15%
•       Manufacturing accounts for only 9% of the non-farming Gross National Product
•       25% of the commonwealth budget comes in federal funds
•       The population of Puerto Rico is 3.67 million: in 2013, the government estimated that 1.3 million people were working. That means that one in three Puerto Ricans is working

OK—so what was the response on the island? Well, the editorial in The New Day called for…unity. Now is not the time, it said, for finger pointing. The governor, as well, said that now is the time for all Puerto Ricans to come together and figure out what to do with this mess.

Though there were some who couldn’t resist, of course. The governor himself couldn’t resist suggesting that his government, though young, had acted like adults, but that it was time for the local Supreme Court to “put on the toga of adulthood.” Why the jab? Because the Supreme Court had put the reform of the teacher retirement system on hold until the lawsuit brought by the unions had been resolved.

And the President of the Senate came out and said that the current government had been firm and financially responsible; nowhere else in the states had a government acted as Puerto Rico had to correct their problems. Puerto Rico didn’t deserve this betrayal.

The teachers, too, pointed out that since we got degraded to junk status, it was clearly proof that a reform of the retirement system wasn’t needed in the first place.

Yes, you say, but beyond calls for unity—however successfully heeded—what does the government propose to do?

It would be premature, said the governor—donning the mantle of a serious and wise leader—to discuss any specific measure until they had been carefully and thoroughly scrutinized and examined in order to assure that the measures taken will have the maximal impact on the economy while minimizing any adverse effects on the private lives of the people of Puerto Rico, who working together, hand in hand, making ties that extend beyond petty politicking, can go forward confidently towards a better future.

All right—I made that up. That’s what I would have said. The governor doesn’t know what he’s gonna do—so he fell back on rhetoric.

Nor does the average person know what this means: according to The New Day, even business people didn’t really understand what all this meant. The reality is that almost 90% of the students I have taught over the last 20 years have tuned out politics. And now that the crisis is here? Many people are confused.

And the worst of it? However bad the hangover, it was never a very good party anyway….   

Don't Tread on the Banner!

WHAT!

Dammit, I can’t do everything, though I’d be happy to delegate, but really! Whoever imagined that I’d have to check in on the damned national anthem now and again—or maybe even daily—just to make sure that nobody had altered the time signature?

OK—for those of you who had better things to do in your childhood than study classical music, here’s the skinny. Most music is divided into measures, and most measures have a basic pulse or beat. That’s why you tap your feet when somebody is singing. And these measures are either duple or triple—or some variant thereof. Consider a tune you know: Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star. There’s a natural stress every four notes (with the third note being slightly stressed as well). Since four is two times two, the time signature is duple.

A triple form? Think Greensleeves, which has a natural stress every six beats, with a slight stress on the fourth beat. Since six is a multiple of three, it’s a triple time signature.

And the national anthem? It is triple, not duple.

I tell you this because a friend, a professional flutist, on Facebook posted an article by Anne Midgette of The Washington Post about Renée Fleming’s performance of the national anthem at the Super Bowl. Well, I listened and was impressed, but then I usually am with Renée—she’s impossible not to like. And I think she struck a nice balance: there’s nothing worse than an opera singer pretending to be pop. First, it’s ridiculous; second, it reveals profound insecurity. You’ve spent years learning your art, and you chicken out for a sports event? Come on!

Reading the comments was revealing as they so often are. And one comment from Phillip Bush in particular caught my eye:

The real question re the arrangement, etc., is something I find surprising nobody talks about much: have you noticed that the national anthem (at least in Super Bowl versions) has been altered to 4/4 time? Fleming's version, sadly, was no exception though she did revert to 3 in the final lines (beginning with "oh say does that." Just to see if I was imagining things, I listened to all versions since 2008 and only Carrie Underwood in 2010 sang the anthem in 3 all the way through. (It should be added that Christina Aguilera's version in 2009 defies all attempts at metric--or pitch---analysis.)

Clearly a man I could call my brother! Any man who cares enough to hear seven years of our national anthem—OK, but you know what I mean—is obviously my match for neuroticism. Because I have spent most of the match scratching my head and listening to bourrées, gavottes, loures, minuets trying to figure out what dance form the damn Star-Spangled Banner is, or rather was.

Although it may not be—the Star-Spangled Banner may be based simply on a song composed in 1778 for the Anacreontic Society, a group of amateur musicians in London. And yes, the boys liked a spot of ale or beer when getting together; it might be a little unfair to categorize the national anthem as a “drinking song,” if only because most people, especially drunk, can’t sing the song.

The song is called To Anacreon in Heaven, and it turned out my hunch was right: the original song is sung considerably faster than anyone sings the national anthem today. And as a cellist who has played the Bach solo suites for forty years—wow, and shouldn’t I play them better, after all those years? Oh well….

Anyway, here’s the thing: the suites contain stylized but still recognizable dances that were common at the time. And I swear, To Anacreon in Heaven sounds like one of those dances—I can see people in their elaborate gowns and their stiff, formal gestures dancing to it. And the dotted upbeat—the “Oooh” before you land happily on “say”—that’s the tip off!

So I spent the morning with bourrées, gavottes, loures and minuets, and what did I learn?

Nothing definitive, though I can tell that the base for the Star-Spangled Banner is definitely triple, not duple. Here’s a photo of an edition of 1790:

Right—so who got the bright idea of changing the time signature of our national anthem from ¾ (essentially) to 4/4?

I’m sorry to say that it was Whitney Houston—and I would rather hear chalk scratching on the chalkboard than hear Whitney Houston. But it seemed that Houston thought the national anthem was too “waltz-like.” So Rickey Minor, Houston’s musical director, and Houston tinkered around. Here’s what Minor said:

“The original version is in 3/4 time, which is more like a waltz,” Minor explained. “What we tried to do was to put it in 4/4 meter… We wanted to give her a chance to phrase it in such a way that she would be able to take her time and really express the meaning.”

Well, I went out, bought an anti-emetic, waited an hour, and then braved my way through Houston’s lip-synched 1991 performance; yes, I gagged but didn’t retch. 

My other reaction to Ms. Midgette’s article?

A surprising number of readers thought she was being backhanded, snide, or hypercritical. Though I agreed with the most recent comment, from RAMJ:

I just want to hear the anthem sung straight, the way we sang it in grade school. We were made to feel that it was a serious song with great meaning. There was no embellishment allowed. 

The simple notes provide ample challenge to most any voice, trained or untrained. There is beauty in their starkness. I love that only the gods can help the person that starts singing our anthem in the wrong key. 

I cringe at the current rate of embellishment and self-aggrandizement the anthem has been burdened with. I actually avoid listening, because I know it will be painful.

YES!

Finally, Kurt Vonnegut wandered into my brain, and what was it he had written about the Star-Spangled Banner? Well, here it is:

There were one quadrillion nations in the Universe, but the nation Dwayne Hoover and Kilgore Trout belonged to was the only one with a national anthem which was gibberish sprinkled with question marks. 

Of course, that wasn’t the way I remembered it. My version had it that the Star-Spangled Banner is the only national anthem that ends with a question—or rather, a constant, never-ending challenge as well as quest: does that star spangl’d banner yet wave over the free and the brave?

Your choice—just sing the damn thing in ¾!

The Cellist Destroying America!

Well, it was one of those things I came across in that surreal time between wake and sleep, when a medicine I take that knocks me off reliably forty minutes after taking it then wakens me sternly and craves sweets. It’s called mirtazapine, and if you don’t have to take it, don’t. If, however, like me, the choice is the black dog of depression or mirtazapine, then run for it. Anyway, here’s the text:

Hi, please read this letter. I am a musician who has nothing to do with this incident, but I am very interested in making sure that no harm comes to the extraordinary antique you have in your possession.

1. You need to know that without a violin case, you risk serious harm to a living piece of history. I know you threw away the case, so go buy another violin case at a music store. Today. Store the violin safely in the case.

2. Dry winter air could be very damaging to the violin. Go out today and buy a room humidifier. Run it a few hours a day in the room where you keep the violin. If the wood dries out too much, it will crack, doing terrible damage.

3. You will never sell this violin. The violin is individually known and marked. It is not like a diamond where you can have it recut before it's fenced—think of the violin more like a human being, as someone's child. It is a living piece of history, 300 years old. Benjamin Franklin was a boy of 9 when this violin was lovingly crafted in northern Italy.

There is a powerful network out there looking for stolen instruments. If you attempt to sell it, you will certainly be caught and will spend years in jail. What you have done is tantamount to kidnapping. Violinists the world over hate your guts. Not a one will give you a dime.

4. After you buy the case, your best bet is to take the violin into a local mall and set it down safely, then walk away. Leave it somewhere warm where it won't be crushed or in danger of water damage.

Do the honorable thing. Give the violin up so that it may continue making music. It is worth nothing to you, while the music that still lives inside it is priceless.

Well, as a cellist, that was all pretty interesting. Also interesting is that this appeared on Craigslist > Milwaukee > all personals > rants and raves. What was the deal, or would I go back to bed? Bed I could do, I decided; a stolen violin in Milwaukee was beyond my reach.

The next day, I checked in on what I had been reading during the night, and was interested to find that it was the Lipinski Stradivarius that was stolen in an armed robbery in a Milwaukee parking lot after a concert.

That at least is reassuring, since the possessor of the violin—Frank Almond, the concertmaster of the Milwaukee Symphony—had been attacked with a stun gun and had the violin taken from him. And that implies—at least to me—that the thieves (a man and a woman) knew very well what they wanted and what it was worth.

In the case of Strads, many of them are named after the famous people who have played them. But this Strad is particularly illustrious—it was owned by Giuseppe Tartini, an Italian baroque composer most known for his “Devil’s Trill” sonata. Why the instrument is known as the Lipinski Strad—after Karol Lipinski, a Polish violinist of the first half of the 19^th century—and not the Tartini Strad is a mystery no one can explain.

So the concertmaster had left the concert with his violin…but wait. It wasn’t—Almond, like so many others, couldn’t afford an instrument of that quality and especially that rarity. So the violin was on loan. But from whom? It isn’t stated—or rather, the violin was lent anonymously by someone who had “strong ties to Milwaukee,” but it’s almost certainly the estate of Richard Anschuetz, a pianist who bought the instrument for his wife, the Estonian violinist Evi Liivak. Here’s what one source had to say:

Mr. Anschuetz missed her dearly, and continued to do so until his death in 2008. He could not bear to be parted from her beloved violin, and treasured it to the end.

So Almond was—in a sense—lucky. The worst fear of a string player is that their instrument will be stolen by some junkie, who will abuse it and possibly destroy it. That said, I can’t imagine the agony of having my cello stolen. It would not be losing my instrument, not even losing my voice: it would be losing my soul.

Don’t think that it goes just one way—that the player makes the music. I recently rented for a week a cello in New York City. It was a cello mass produced in China, and it wasn’t bad, though it was miles behind my instrument at home. But that’s when I learned: even a bad cello can sound good. But it can sound good in only one way. A great instrument can sound good in every way.

And so an instrument teaches the player—suggests a sonority, allows a phrasing, responds and reacts. And it becomes not an instrument but a part of the body.

Which is why a surprising number of players have had their instruments stolen: their instrument is so much a part of them that they forget to watch it, or even take it out of the cab they had been riding in. Think I’m wrong? Quick—what is your left hand doing right now?

It happened to Min-Jim Kym in 2010—she was eating at a London Pret a Manger and checking her iPhone (why am I not surprised?) and then…the Strad that she had been lent was gone. And then, after three years, it turned up in the Midlands. But in a curious and horrible twist of fate, the owner of the violin decided to put the instrument up for auction. It was sold for 1.38 million pounds. Kym, one classy lady, released this statement:

 "This violin was a faithful friend for many years, and I was devastated by its loss," Min-Jin Kym said. "Its recovery is an absolute relief, and I am eager to hear the violin onstage once more. I wish its next owner all the best of luck and success."

What do cellists Lynn Harrell, Yo-Yo Ma, and the violinist Philippe Quint have in common? They all have left their instruments in taxis—and all have gotten them back. And yes, all of them were Strads.

It seems that Harrell, at least, should stick to ground transport, if possible. Why? Check out the video below…. 

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The Priest Who Couldn't Be Bought (Not Part 2)

Well, I had thought to write the second part of The Priest Who Couldn’t Be Bought, the moving tale of a Polish priest, Wojciech Gil, who along with his fellow Pole and papal nuncio, Jozef Wesolowski, took on the drug lords of a narcotic-drenched Dominican Republic. They fought nails and teeth (strange how all the expressions get turned around in Spanish)—Gil increasing the number of altar boys from eight to 180—how dare you snigger out there! No shame!—and giving them money and cell phones and, oh, even trips to his native Poland. Wow—that’s a priest!

So in part 1, I had tidily gotten Wojciech Gil through his childhood, through the seminary (actually, that took about a sentence) and then to Santo Domingo and up the road to the little town of Juncalito, where he will spend the next eight years, and will be, by all accounts, well-received and loved by the residents.

There was just a little problem…

I spent yesterday afternoon watching YouTube clips about the case. There was the deacon, who spoke admiringly about the man, who described the house where Gil lived as being open to anyone, 24 / 7, where Gil was always prepared to listen, to make a good cup of coffee—Juncalito is in the prime coffee region of the Dominican Republic—and where….

But wait…

Because there was also, on several clips, the shocking photo of women’s panties and other accouterments not commonly associated with a priest’s wardrobe. Oh, and what about the reports that Gil could be found, with friends, completely sloshed—there was always vodka, his preferred tipple, whisky and gin in the house.

There was a clip of the collective luto, or grief of mourning, of the community. And then the clip of the fifteen year-old boy who had been abused for three years. And in addition to the gifts, there were the threats as well—there was a photo in the clip showing Wesolowski’s gun on his belt. Yup—the priest was packing.

So who was this guy? Had he been abused as a kid? What was going on in Poland, in those years when Wesolowski was growing up? Well, I knew that Gil was 38 or 39—a conscientious blogger would look that up—so he would have been born in the mid-70s. Which would have put him in his mid-teens by the time the Solidarity movement finally toppled the communist regime. What had that been like?

Then there was the interesting question—what was the power of the Catholic Church in those years? And what was the power of the church after democracy had been restored? I had a dim notion that the church ruled with a medieval hand—authoritarian and unchallenged. But was that true?

So it was time to zip over to Poland via the Internet and here’s what I found, on the first page of a Google search:

Paedophilia is caused by divorce, says Poland's top Catholic bishop as he blames parents for not bringing up children properly

•   Archbishop Jozef Michalik says child abusers are 'looking for love'

•   Claims divorce can be as harmful to children as paedophilia

•   Catholic church in Poland has been hit with paedophile priest allegations

Right—you know I had to read that one, so I did, and here’s Michalik’s tangy twist on orthodox thinking. These priests are not predators. The children, you see, come from broken homes—that’s the divorce part—and come seeking comfort and succor to a father figure—that’s the priest—and so things sometimes get out of hand. So it’s not all the priests’ fault: the children are partly to blame too—as well as those damned divorcing parents.

Well, to no one’s surprise, the archbishop came out the next day, and what he said was—hold on tightly to your seat, here—that he had been misinterpreted, his words twisted and indeed wrenched out of context. Of course he hadn’t meant that kids were responsible for the abuse, or were wantonly tempting those good men of the cloth on.

So that got me thinking. I’ve been to the Dominican Republic just once, but it was abundantly clear—it’s poor, but it is very, very Latin. The men are drinking beer and smoking and listening to bachata and trying to get into any girl’s pants, and the music is blasting everywhere, and the chickens are running around everywhere, and there is—paradoxically—a strange undercurrent of danger underneath all the seemingly loose and hot and casual enjoyment of life. The wrong look at the wrong girl? A gun will flash, blood on the floor, Mamita wailing as she grinds her face into the blood-soaked shirt of her son; she raises her head to scream at God, and her hands and face are smeared with her child’s blood.

Or this….

Pablito sees his chance, and takes the deal Julito has offered him—cut out the middle man, Carlitos. What does Carlitos do, anyway? It’s Pablito out there, making the deliveries, and everyone knows him, trusts him. And for a few weeks it’s fine, until Carlitos puts the screws on the otherrunners. And if Carlitos lets that pendejo, that bastard get away with that?! Replay Mamita on the floor, from the paragraph above.

Then there was the interesting question of the 41 or 42 year-old man who is claiming that he was sexually abused here in Puerto Rico. The archdiocese offered $25,000, the guy wanted a million bucks. So that made me think—um, fifteen years old?

Time for some political incorrectness. At age fifteen, your body is awash in testosterone—if you’re a boy—and you are thinking more or less constantly about sex. In fact, a good number of 15-year olds are having sex. And we are not living The Bells of St. Mary’s, or whatever that 1950’s film was.

At this point, a group of kids who were probably 15-years old passed me, each one of them talking loudly and profanely, wearing gangster clothes, addressing each other as cabrón—which if you don’t know what that is, good for you! So the priest abuses a six-year old? Cut his balls off. But I’m a little unsure about a 15-year old.

Especially in a Latin country, where—as Mr. Fernández insists—it is part of the cultural responsibility of the older brother to explain to the younger brother that:

 1.     all priests are gay
2.     don’t let any one of them touch you
3.     if he does, tell me, and I’ll beat the shit out of him

See?

Well, all of this had taken most of the afternoon, since I was also absolutely riveted by a clip of the archbishop of San Juan, who looked anguished and also, I felt, deeply culpable. In fact, guilty as sin. And where was the post of the day, the tidy conclusion to The Priest Who Couldn’t Be Bought?

Stay tuned, Dar Reader—but it may take a while.

You don’t write a novel in a day…..