The View From the Fence

Right—time to get straight down to work and settle once and for all the vexing question of the death penalty.

I’ve never particularly bought into the standard liberal line, you see, nor do I do well with the standard Puerto Rican line. Why? Because if you ask about the death penalty here on the island, you will almost certainly be told: “only God can take a life.”

Guys? Can we just call it a theocracy and stop the pretense of separation of church and state?

I felt, for most of my life, that there were some crimes so unspeakably heinous that a nice, swift execution was the best thing to do. Consider these savory characters, who come to you from Wikipedia’s article on Sister Helen Prejean:

In addition to Sonnier, the account is based on the inmate Robert Lee Willie who, with his friend Joseph Jesse Vaccaro, raped and killed 18-year-old Faith Hathaway on May 28, 1980, eight days later kidnapping a Madisonville couple from alongside the Tchefuncte River in Louisiana and driving them to Alabama. They raped the 16-year-old girl, Debbie Morris (née Cuevas), who would later become the author of her book Forgiving the Dead Man Walking[4] and then stabbed and shot her boyfriend, 20-year-old Mark Brewster, leaving him tied to a tree paralyzed from the waist down.

You’ll have guessed—Sister Helen Prejean is the author of Dead Man Walking, and very likely you’ll have seen the movie. So it won’t be news to you—as it was to me—that Sister Helen wrote Dead Man about her experiences with guys on death row. She champions the abolition of the death penalty as ardently as the pope champions priestly celibacy.

Here’s my problem—I follow all the rules (well, mostly) and as a consequence am expected to fork over 20% or so of my annual salary to the government. That money goes to support guys who haven’t followed the rules, but who have committed crimes that often have devastated the lives of innocent people. These people are rotting in prison, doing nobody any good. Oh, and they don’t even want to be there. 

I know—that’s not the way I’m supposed to think. But that 30 grand we spend annually because “only God can take a life?” I’d really like to put that money to work beefing up education, treating PTSD in our veterans, or supporting opera companies. And those guys on death row? Well, couldn’t they be doing something?

Am I arguing for the return of the chain gang?

Look, it makes more sense than what we’re doing now….

OK—let’s back this car up.

One of the things about a blogger’s life is that you have to go sifting around, looking for things to write about, and then things get tied together in ways that you don’t expect. Because I had been watching—for reasons I no longer remember—a remarkable video of an interview with Stephen Levine, who for many years worked with dying people. And one of the stories he told was of an angry, bitter woman—a woman who had driven everyone away.

It was a problem—the woman was so negative, so hostile, that the nurses had to force themselves to work with her. But it was hardly just the nurses; her own daughters were estranged from her, and wanted nothing to do with her, even though she was dying.

One daughter, however, took on the challenge: could she go and sit down at her mother’s deathbed and, with an open heart, accept her mother as she was.  Could she wish her well? Could she—if not forgive—at least move away from what Levine calls a “business model” of human relationships? You give me love and nurturing and I’ll give you love back. You hurt me and I’m outta here….

So the daughter—a Zen Buddhist, and she’d have to be—sat and let her mother into her heart, without expecting or asking or even wanting her mother to change. Which was fortunate, since on the day of the mother’s death, she looked at her child and said, “I hope you have the most miserable life ever!”

Levine’s point? The daughter had done what she did for herself, not for her mother. The daughter didn’t want to carry the anger, the bitterness around forever. And so she had endured abuse up until the very end—in order to free herself of it.

As you’ll see in the clip below, Dead Man Walking became an opera as well, and I can tell you that because, in my nightly forage for carbohydrates, I found myself eating jellybeans and watching—who else?—Joyce DiDonato.

I might as well confess it—I am electronically stalking DiDonato. How bad has the obsession become? Well, fully as bad as last year’s obsession with Martha Argerich, and to tell you how bad that was, I give you the fact that the computer has not put a red squiggle under Argerich. The computer, you see, not only knows perfectly well who she is, but is totally bored with it.

Oh—another fact. I’m so desperate for any new video of Didonato that I watched an interview of her in French. And when was the last time I spoke French? Well, let’s see, I graduated from High School in ’74….

So there I was, looking at Joyce Didonato and Jake Heggie talking about their upcoming—well, as of two years ago—Carnegie Hall recital. And you know what? I am not going to introduce the computer to Heggie, because I don’t like him.

OK—be fair, I’m envious because, besides being handsome, intelligent, way-talented, and having his opera Dead Man Walking presented over 40 times in five continents—I mean, how much stuff can one have in life—he’s also a friend of Joyce DiDonato.

But here’s where I’m at: if I were the relative, the father of a murdered child, how would I react? Impossible to say—but here’s what I’d hope.

I hope—like the daughter of the bitter mother—that I’d forgive, that I’d say no to the hatred and the desire for vengeance. But on a societal level?

Damn, still haven’t figured it out….

An Excellent Guy

On an island where the seriously screwy tends to be treated, well, seriously, even this situation has 3.6 million people scratching their heads.

Simply put, James Tuller, who had been chief of the New York City Police Department Transportation Bureau and who for four months had been acting as the designated chief of the Puerto Rico Police Department turned out…

…to be cheating on his taxes.

Or maybe not—who knows? But Tuller has been married since 1996, and yet for four years he filed as a single person. So that presented a bit of a challenge, since those pesky senators in charge of approving his nomination were insisting on seeing the tax returns. So what did Tuller do?

Well, he had a couple of strategies—the first of which was to stall. And though it’s true that we tend to move a bit more slowly than those goose-stepping Germans, stalling is a tactic that only works so long.

So the next thing to do was to run up to New York and amend his tax returns. But it turned out—curious, this—that there was a little difference between what he had to pay as a single person versus a married person. Oh, and there were penalties, as well. Nevertheless, he forked over $30,000 to the State of New York. (according to one report, he took five days off work to go up to New York to settle these trifles and get the silly paperwork…)

Did that make the senators happy? By no means. Intent on picking every nit, the senators demanded that Tuller pay the IRS as well. Then they’d see about the nomination—no promises.

So that led to the next problem, which was that Tuller didn’t have the dough, despite making close to 200,000 bucks a year. He was willing, though, to agree to a payment plan. But the senators still balked at assuring him of his nomination. So on Monday night, after 121 days on the job, this excellent though somewhat forgetful public servant made the decision: he would retire his name for consideration.

This has left even members of the governor’s own party wondering what in the world went wrong.  Part of it, of course, was that there was a scramble to find a police superintendent in the first place, since Tuller’s predecessor had up and left one day, all but flipping the bird at the governor as he rode to the airport. And it came at a rather poor time, since the senate was not in session, and it was Christmas.

Ah, Christmas—which in Puerto Rico generally begins the day after Thanksgiving Day and continues until at least the end of January—Fiestas de la Calle de San Sebastián—after the octavitas. So really, it’s only been a couple of months since any of us have had time to trouble ourselves about inessentials like appointing a police chief.

Well, it’s all a little troubling, since we also don’t have a secretary of justice, since that guy got into a little trouble when he went to the police station with his friend. His friend, you see, had been drinking at a party—well, that’s what you do at parties, isn’t it? And look, you gotta get home, don’t you? Does everybody have to be so unreasonable?

Right, so everything would have been fine if only the friend hadn’t pulled out his cell phone while driving—a crime in Puerto Rico. And of course, there had to be that nosy cop, who pulled the friend over, and noted the strong smell of alcohol.

So the papers had a field day with the Secretary of Justice, who had done what any friend would do: gone to the aid of his friend to the police headquarters, to ensure that everything was handled correctly. What harm could there be in that?

So it’s all a bit dampening, especially for the governor, who had to come out in today’s print version of El Nuevo Día as saying, “entiendo, por la información pública que ha surgido….” Or, “I understand, from the public information that has surfaced…” The Gov, apparently, is a regular guy like you or me—getting his news by reading the paper on the bus to work. See?

And all this comes at a rather unsettling time, since the United States Department of Justice…wait, let those fire-breathing liberals from the ACLU tell you about it:

A report released by the ACLU in June 2012 concludes that the Puerto Rico Police Department is plagued by a culture of unrestrained abuse and impunity. The PRPD – which, with over 17,000 officers, is the second-largest police department in the U.S – is charged with policing the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico.

In July 2013, the U.S. Justice Department entered into a legally binding consent decree with the Puerto Rican government that requires sweeping reforms to end the widespread police brutality on the island.

Well, to make sure that the police department complies with the “sweeping reforms,” Tuller appointed a retired US Army colonel, Michelle Hernández de Fraley, to oversee the whole process. And good luck to her, since the US Department of Justice determined that the police practiced discrimination, especially against blacks and Dominicans, were poorly trained, and didn’t investigate cases of domestic abuse. Oh, and that they used excessive force, especially in cases of peaceful protest.

Nor is that the only challenge she might face, if nominated and approved. Because we have more police officers than any place I have ever seen—but the monthly pay for our cops? It’s $2,600, or slightly over 30,000 dollars annually. On the island, that’s not bad—but consider, the other news of this morning: the police hauled in nearly two tons of cocaine in an interception off the north coast of Puerto Rico. In fact, in March alone, the police have pulled in nearly three tons of cocaine.

And what does that mean?

Well, we’re awash in drugs, and with the drugs comes the money, and with the money? Corruption—which is a distinct possibility. How much honesty does a base salary of $30,000 buy you?

The sad news is that the previous chief of police was—by all accounts—a very effective guy who had the support of the force, even as he was changing it. And the one who just left?

By all accounts an excellent guy…

Look, he just cheated on his taxes….

A Farmer Weighs In

Well, he got after me, as he sometimes does. Had I been fair? Had I slammed Monsanto without giving the company a chance to defend itself? What if it were true that this technology not only was improving yields but also was capable of doing a host of other things? If, for example, Monsanto could breed a drought-resistant strain of wheat, how beneficial to humanity would that be?

It was in vain to tell him—my long dead father—that Monsanto was hardly likely to take my call. No, he was as persistent in death as he was in life, and so I did what I had always done: sighed and caved.

Right—so who would take my call? Cousin Marshall, I decided. He’s family and a farmer, so it was the work of a moment to call him.

Well, he confirmed what I suspected: yes, he uses Roundup-Ready seeds from Monsanto, which in this case come from a local seed dealer, Dairyland Seed. And yes, he’s seen an increase in his yields; in addition, he’s using much less pesticide / herbicide. Even better, what he’s using is far less toxic—before, he had been using pesticides / herbicides with a low LD 50 (a measure of toxicity, and the lower the LD 50 the more toxic); with Roundup, he doesn’t have to worry about applying near streams and killing fish.

Well, LD 50 was new to me, so I googled it, and discovered that it stood for the lethal dose (LD) of 50 percent of a given population. Right—so I looked that up and discovered that Roundup has an LD 50 of 5,600mg / kg for rats. In short, if you give 5,600 mg / kg to 100 rats, you will kill 50 of them.

Wow—the stuff you learn as a blogger!

All that led to the question: was Roundup really less toxic? The answer—par for the course—is that I don’t know. I can tell you that I went to Table 6 of the Pesticide Safety Fact Sheet; Roundup’s LD 50 seemed to be in the mid-range—there were others with an LD 50 of over 10,000 mg / kg. But what do I know about farming? There may be other factors to consider….

Marshall’s one problem with Roundup? Well, at one point he was farming with both Roundup-ready and with non-Roundup-ready seeds (in other words—regular seeds), and somehow he forgot which was which. So he applied Roundup to one of his fields, with the result…

You could tell it still hurt, so I didn’t tell him, though I was tempted, “typical Newhouse!”

In short, for Marshall, Monsanto has made his life easier. And guess what? Anything that makes a farmer’s life easier is—usually—something I’m all in favor of. Because a farmer’s life is seriously hard, and never more so than today. And so I assured him that I bore him no grudge for using genetically-modified seeds. After all, I well remember the howls I got from people who learned that I worked for Wal-Mart—who am I to talk?

Marshall was then good enough to write an email, in which he pointed out…wait, let him tell it:

Over 90% of the acreage in the Corn Belt is under cultivation using GMO’s (as I stated earlier).  The problem with that scenario is that it represents millions of square miles of a man-made monoculture.  That is not anything you will find in nature anywhere on this planet and not at any time in the past.  Earth’s systems will fight that and will eventually win the battle.  That is already occurring with weeds developing resistance at various places around the country.  As numbers of species of resistant weeds increase and areas infected with these resistant weeds expand, the efficiency of GMO’s (Roundup in this case) always yields to the environment.

Marshall went on to state, “Each GMO breakthrough is a short term solution designed to last a decade or two if the industry is lucky.”

Well—that’s definitely a cause for concern. In short, we’re skirting with disaster, hoping to outwit Mother Nature. Can we sustain that?

If I were a farmer, I might very well do as Marshall has done: join the crowd and grow GMO seeds. The problem? I’m not a farmer, but an eater. And which foods and products have GMO’s? At the moment, I have to assume that they all do—at least until I go onto a site that has a list of GMO-free foods.

As I said yesterday, we have taken part in an experiment without being told that we were guinea pigs. And what have been the consequences? Since I had written about the possibility of GMO foods being linked to autism, I decided to check it out. Here, from the Washington Times, is a comparison of US’ versus Britain’s—which has banned GMO foods—rates of autism:

As of 2010, their article said, autism prevalence rates for 8-year-old British boys was about four cases per 1,000, and 0.8 per 1,000 for British girls. This was essentially the same as in 2004.

By contrast, autism rates for 8-year-old U.S. boys rose from a range of 8.9. to 15.8 cases per 1,000 in 2004 to an average of 18.4 cases per 1,000 in 2008. For U.S. girls, rates went from 1.5 to 3.7 cases per 1,000 in 2004 to four cases per 1,000 in 2008.

Maybe it’s true what Mom always said: you are what you eat!

Monday Morning Bastards

Well, well—Monday morning, and time to find out what all my favorite bastards are doing.

They don’t stop, you see—which is curious, because...aren’t they reading? Aren’t they paying attention? Surely this blog should put the fear of God into at least a few people….

There’s Monsanto, for example, and what, by the way, ever became of that genetically modified wheat that somehow sprang up in a farmer’s field in May of last year? Remember that? An Oregon farmer sprayed the herbicide Roundup on his field, and some wheat plants refused to die. So he sent them off to Oregon State University—which unsurprisingly is quite interested in wheat, since the state sells 700 million bucks of it mostly to Asia—and yup, it was Monsanto’s experimental wheat. And the experiment? It had ended more than a decade before.

Japan suspended purchases of wheat; the USDA guys were scrambling to try to determine how the wheat got there. Then, in a conference call, some Monsanto spokesman came up with an ingenious idea: sabotage. One of those nutty foodies, you see, had snuck into Monsanto—presumably any soul can drift in and out of their facilities, rather like a mall—and copped the wheat. Then, he had gone into a field, planted the seed, and pointed the finger at Monsanto, to tarnish the company’s reputation! Hah! Foiled that dude!

The complete inanity of the explanation was of no importance. What’s important, as anybody in corporate America knows, is that somebody says something. Anything. Whatever….

Because they know—the public forgets. We go on. We worry about North Korea until it’s time to worry about the Crimea, and then, guess what? The North Koreans detonate a nuclear missile and then we all start worrying again.

And so I googled “GMO wheat Oregon,” and was unsurprised to learn: we still don’t know, the story went cold. I did, however, discover the name of the professor who identified the wheat—Carol Mallory-Smith, professor, Weed Science.

Weed Science?

This, I have to say, greatly improves the Monday morning experience. Who knew, for example, that there is the Weed Science Society of America, or the WSSA, which takes its weeds very seriously? And I regret to inform the readers of this blog that I completely screwed up by not informing you guys about National Invasive Species Awareness Week, which was February 23-28. (Though it does seem curious—don’t most weeks have seven days? Or do invasive species move so fast….)

Right—so I have emailed Professor Mallory-Smith, to see if there’s any more information on the Oregon wheat situation; the professor, curiously, has not immediately responded. She may be out in the field; stay tuned.

What else did I find? Well, take a look at this….

And the caption for this photo?

Michael Doane, Monsanto's wheat industry affairs director, looks at growth in a wheat field in an undisclosed location in North Dakota in this undated file photo. (Reuters / Carey Gillam)

And the date of this article? January 15, 2014.

Guys? Who the hell decided to allow Monsanto to test their new GMO wheat in—of all places—a North Dakota field? And why, by the way, did The New York Times publish an opinion piece entitled “We Need G. M. O. Wheat?”

Well, I read it, which turns out to be an op-ed written by guys seriously in bed with the “biotech industry.” One of the authors, in fact, has written a book, The Frankenfood Myth: How Protest and Politics Threaten the Biotech Revolution—does that tell you the story?

According to the authors, the soybean and corn farmers made the switch to GMO seeds in the 1990’s, and they’ve been happy as Chesapeake Bay clams ever since—enjoying increased yields, using less herbicide, making more money. But those fussy foodies won’t let the biotech industry approve GMO wheat, since 15 percent of it is exported to countries that don’t want the stuff. Oh, and the authors go on to say:

The scientific consensus is that existing genetically engineered crops are as safe as the non-genetically engineered hybrid plants that are a mainstay of our diet.

Whew—what a relief!

Or is it? Because I had been watching a documentary about Monsanto, and something stuck in my mind. So I googled “GMO food autism” and sure enough, there’s a body of research out there—done in admittedly iffy institutions like Harvard and Massachusetts General—that suggest that there may be a link between autism and GMO foods.

Why? It appears that GMO foods cause the intestines to weaken and become inflamed. Here’s what one article had to say:

One of the earliest indications that GMOs might cause GI tract distress was a 1999 study published in the Lancet. After rats were fed experimental GMO potatoes for just 10 days, the cells of the stomach lining and intestines were significantly altered.[¹²]

When California pediatrician Michelle Perro reviewed the study in 2011 and saw the photos of the increased cellular growth and abnormal architecture, she thought to herself, “Uh oh -- we’ve got some problems.” Based on her experience treating children for 30 years, she said, “You can extrapolate that the same thing may be occurring in babies clinically. They are not digesting their food. They are malabsorbing. . . . And I’m seeing that commonly now.” Digestive issues are skyrocketing among her patients. 

Does this gastric distress lead to or cause autism? Nobody knows. What’s more interesting, though, is the research on rats fed GMO. Consider this:

Dr. Irina Ermakova, PhD, a senior researcher at the Russian Academy of Sciences, reported to the European Congress of Psychiatry in March 2006 that male rats fed GM soy exhibited anxiety and aggression, while those fed non-GMO soy did not [³]. Ermakova reported the same behavior in GM soy-fed female rats and their offspring in her study published in Ecosinform. The animals “attacked and bit each other and the worker."[⁴]

(Far more shocking, however, was that more than 50% of the offspring from the GMO-fed group died within three weeks when compared with a 10% death rate among the group fed natural soy. The GM group also had high rates of infertility and had smaller members.)

In one of his books, Michael Pollan writes of being given GMO potatoes, which he kept for a while. Then the question came up—could he make a potato salad and take it to a pot luck supper? And if so, was he morally obliged to let people know? Pollan eventually tossed the potatoes, and came to the conclusion any sane person would: even if the potatoes were safe, why take a risk?

In fact, we have all taken the risk—everyone who has eaten “normal” food for the last 20 years. And now, one in 68 kids in the US may have autism; in New Jersey, one in 28 boys has autism.

Oh, and the guys who are regulating the “biotech industry?” Unsurprisingly, they’re not even in bed with the industry, they’re in flagrante with them.

It’s a cynical as it is evil.

PS—The good professor came through!

Tropical Koan

Susan sent me an email, having read a review of a book on the depressing topic of…depression.

“Depressing,” because, according to the article—well, here’s a quote:

At any given point, 22% of the population exhibit at least one symptom of depression and the World Health Organization projects that by 2030, depression will have led to more worldwide disability and lives lost than any other affliction, including cancer, stroke, heart disease, accidents, and even war.

Well, I turned to the review, and was stopped in my initial tracks by the first sentence:

“Depression is a disorder of the ‘I,’ failing in your own eyes relative to your goals,” legendary psychologist Martin Seligman observed in his essential treatise on learned optimism.

Yeah? So who is Martin Seligman, legendary though he may be? And what the hell does he know about depression? Has he ever been trapped in a toilet stall, has he ever had a crying jag he couldn’t stop, has he ever sat at a computer and looked at the screen and felt his mind turn to mush and realize that his thinking has slowed so far down that his thoughts can’t make it up to the surface? So that email that he has to write? He can’t concentrate, he can’t focus—all he can do is sit there numbly and mutely and hope that, in some way, the governor will sign the reprieve. Because, let’s be clear—there is no chance whatsoever that anything he does will affect in any way how he is feeling. Why? Because he is not feeling.

Or is he? Because he’s been crying, sobbing, and he’s been ruminating.

Maybe you don’t know….

Ruminating is not—not where he is—pondering a problem deeply. No, ruminating is the incessant—shouldn’t it be incesssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssant?—repetition of a single thought. Today it’s “I want to die.” Yesterday it was “I can’t think.”

Sure, Styron did it better than anyone—myself included—in his book on depression Darkness Visible. But don’t think that he or I or anyone can get this one right. Why? Because, by its nature, depression defies description. It’s a black hole, where any light shone into it is lost, consumed. And when, at last, the master of the universe relents and you’re out, the very memory of it has been consumed as well.

So the legendary Martin Seligman has pronounced himself on depression—how very nice! At best, it accounts for one and only one of the many depressions. Because when I went from 10 milligrams to 20 milligrams of one drug and began to take 15 milligrams of another, guess what? I began humming to myself as I rode to work.

I’m lucky; as I understand it, the serotonin reuptake inhibitor basically floods all of the brain, and all the receptors, with serotonin. And some of those relate to mood, and some relate to other things having nothing to do with mood. Which means that some people get lots of side effects and remain depressed; the lucky ones like me get relatively few, but a blessed lift in mood.

So do I come down on the side of chemicals, medicines, physiology? No, because what you do with your life changes your brain. That I learned one afternoon as I saw a group of people wearing new clothes—and really terrible ones, at that—waiting to be photographed by a clearly professional photographer.

The “models,” however, were just-as-clearly not professionals. But who were they, I wondered, as I pondered them standing around on the beach under the palm trees? And where was I?

Lolling on my back in the water, after a day of writing and playing music and taking a walk and listening to Monteverdi. I hadn’t made a dime that day, but I was happy. And the people on the beach? They were Wal-Mart employees, who had been chosen to be the models in the newspaper advertising insert.

I had worked for seven years for Wal-Mart, and for many of them I was lethally depressed. I was laid off; I went into crisis. I got out of the crisis and put myself on a schedule, a schedule I still follow. And I was at that moment splashing in the blue Caribbean waters, watching a group of prisoners from a prison I had escaped.

“Escaped,” because merely being laid off would have been “paroled” or perhaps “released.” But the prison I had escaped from wasn’t Wal-Mart—I had escaped from a brutal, decade-long battle against myself. I had willed myself to go to the brink of madness, to stand on the precipice and grant the Gods permission to push me into it.

It wasn’t a psychiatric crisis—or perhaps it was. I had been an angry, impossible steward for a man who had been given great gifts. I had raged at myself, scolded myself, belittled myself, bitten myself….

But wait—it wasn’t “myself.” Because I had had nothing to do with it—I could no more write a book or play the cello than I could scale Mount Everest. My job was to feed him and give him as much water as he needed and exercise him and put the cello into his hands and sit him at the computer and then GET THE HELL AWAY! He’ll play perfectly well on his own.

Wrong—he’ll play infinitely better. Because you know all that criticism for all those years?

Sorry—but it was shit.

The person you see occupies a middle position. I came to know a presence, which to me was the wind. And from this presence, which I call Domine, the cellist gets his talent, and the writer as well. My job is to get him in front of computers and embracing cellos.

I take him to the dentist—just as I brush his teeth. At the end of the day, I read what he’s written, or I listen to him play. ‘Where did that come from,’ I wonder. ‘He’s so good,’ I tell him. ‘Wow!’ I say.

I had made my life a koan, which, for the benefit of my red-squiggling computer, I will define, via Wikipedia:

A kōan (公案?)/ˈkoʊ.ɑːn/; Chinese: 公案; pinyin: gōng'àn; Korean: 공안 (kong'an); Vietnamese: công án) is a story, dialogue, question, or statement, which is used in Zen-practice to provoke the "great doubt", and test a student's progress in Zen practice.

What is the music of a mute cellist?

What happens when the music goes away?

Should it matter if he plays better without the instrument than with it?

None of these fanciful statements are true. I was simply holding on to a small thread of faith, which I could only grasp by observing with agonizing detail how I went about my life. I lost the ability to use a computer, and then stared at my fingers until I could connect my right first digit with an icon that was on my dock. I looked at the icon, absorbed the blue, noted that the downward slash of the small part of the “W” is superimposed over the upward slash. But am I supposed to do a double or a single click?

How many Word documents had I opened before?

And why was I doing it?

I wanted to change something so fundamental about myself that I required a reboot. “Put the detergent on the sponge,” I told him. We were doing dishes—which he generally did by wasting water, slopping water all over the floor, and not paying attention. Now, I had to tell him how to wash the dishes—first you put the soap on the sponge; then you lather, as it were, the coffee cup; then you place the cup with soap still on it on the side of the sink; proceed to the next cup.

The important thing?

There was no abuse in it. Just patient directions—completely explicit, clear, detailed. He didn’t know how to do prosaic stuff, and had been too impatient to learn. And I had berated him for decades about the stuff he really could do.

I blew it a few times; so did he. He was holding on, too, to the thread. Perhaps more than I, he had heard the wind through the palm trees, heard the fronds stir to life, appreciated the swaying green against the constant blue, felt the hand caressing his brow, smiled, looked up, and said…

…Domine.

About What We Do….

OK—we’ll start out with the comment on Facebook that Mr. Fernández made about the video:

I must admit that I have no clue what AC/DC is or was, but I do love this! And the guys are SOOOO good-looking!

Well, they start out good-looking; they later become bestial, as does the music. But I had seen the video two days before I read the comment, since I was one of nine million to view on YouTube, and Raf was one of twelve million. And my feeling?

Complete repulsion!

I think back to two classical singers, Ian Bostridge and Joyce DiDonato. Ladies first, and here’s what she’s said:

“Stop apologising, stop trying to sell our music by dumbing it down. Sell opera on the basis that it is like nothing else on the planet, not on the basis that it’s superficially cool and hip – that is so phoney.”

“Recently I performed at the Grammy awards. I felt like a fish out of water surrounded by all these rock and jazz musicians in a huge conference hall environment. But I sang the second half of Cenerentola’s rondo, and it seemed to go down very well.”

“What really moved me was an African-American girl who might have been 15. She came running up to find me afterwards and said ‘I don’t know what you call that sort of singing, but it was the most wonderful thing I have ever heard. Where can I find more of it?’ If we do our job properly, people will listen and get it. You see, great music just works.”

Spot on, Madame DiDonato! And you know, we could make a whole new generation of opera fans in a couple of weeks, if we wanted to. Because on April 5, the Metropolitan Opera is broadcasting La bohème in movie theaters across the world. Raf and I will go, Kleenex box between us, and guess what? We will be one of about six people who are not using wheelchairs, walkers, or canes. In fact, if you piled up all the implements, it would look like that scene at Lourdes—the cured having thrown away all their crutches….

We will take—if she consents, and that’s a heavy “if”—Naïa, the twelve-year old daughter of the owner of the café. Why? Well, it seems like an appropriate uncle-like thing to do. As well, is there any adolescent girl who can resist La bohème? The music is ravishing, the story is wrenching, the setting is magical. Face it, the opera is one glorious, extended working-out of every adolescent girl’s most basic fantasy.

So in one afternoon—assuming that we could get every teenage girl into the movie theaters—we could have a vigorous, passionate new generation of opera lovers, who would desert Lady Gaga and flock to Joyce DiDonato, making her a mega-superstar earning gazillions of dollars per concert. And you know what? She’ll behave herself—because she’s a nice lady from Kansas who works hard, to the point of breaking her leg in a performance at Covent Garden, and continuing the rest of the performance on crutches. She later did the performances in a wheelchair. Brace yourselves for a shock, soon-to-be-astonished Readers…

…the British love her!

And speaking of the British, what did Ian Bostridge have to say about pop music? Well, here’s a copy / paste from The Guardian, which refers to his…:

"…somewhat bizarre animus" towards pop music and his objection to the "huge social and corporate investment in continuing to believe that rock music is countercultural and on the side of the angels, while the serious music of the past is stuffy and class-bound."

Yeah? Somewhat bizarre? Bostridge, in the first place, has a PhD in History from Oxford. In the second place, he has spent years of his life perfecting an art that has been handed down scrupulously and lovingly for decades, if not centuries. In short, this guy is serious.  And guess what? He’s a second-class citizen, musically-speaking—nor is that bad enough. Because he now has to be a second-class citizen who also is a snob, and has to feel guilty about it. Oh, and look on as other performers—note the avoidance of the word “musicians”—with little talent or education are venerated as “cool.’ In short, he gets his face ground in the dirt and then has to apologize for it.

We classical musicians have a role in this, if we’re going to be honest. We need to move music out of the concert halls and back into the cafes, the bars, the street corners. We need to talk to our audiences, communicate our passion with them, all the while taking seriously what we do.

That would imply a respect for the people who hear our music. A respect, by the way, that I didn’t feel in the AC/DC clip. In fact, I was affronted:

“It was rank anti-intellectualism,” I told Naïa, the girl who may or may not be converted to opera.

“What does that mean,” asked Naïa. I forget sometimes that she’s just 12. So her tutor explained it: it’s the difference between a gourmet meal versus fast food.

That metaphor goes part of the way, but not all. And just now, I re-watched another video that has 12 million hits—The Piano Guys doing “The Cello Song.” Would I have the same reaction as I did to the AC/DC?

Yes, though to a lesser extent. I could have included it in this post, but why? Why not include a piece of music that is just as virtuosic, just as vibrant, just as beautiful—no, sorry…

…way more beautiful.

Thunderstruck or AC/DC or whatever it is will fade into the dust; Ginastera will last as long as anyone is around to listen….

Music Awaiting a Musician

OK—there are three factors in the video, and curiously, two of the three happened at roughly the same time. So—based purely on alphabetical order—let’s start with Bach first.

‘Easier said than done,’ I think to myself as I look at the screen in front of me. How in Hell do you account for a guy who had genius matched with beaver? Because the sheer amount of what Bach produced is numbing—and guess what? Besides the two passions and the two oratorios and the Well-Tempered Clavier and the Goldberg Variations and the six Brandenburg Concerti, oh, and the don’t-forget-the-200-or-so-cantatas…

Add to this the fact that a lot of music has been lost—according to one scholar, there must have been over 100 cantatas that are unaccounted for. And here’s what Robert Newman said:

Reference is made around the time of Bach’s death to him having composed ‘many’ magnificats. There are several lost Passions. And there is the known loss of at least 15 secular cantatas, many of these written for marriages, civic functions, etc. Though it’s commonly believed these works were somehow scattered amongst Bach’s sons and later lost/destroyed there are enough clues to suggest these works may actually have survived and may one day be rediscovered. Horror stories of music being used to wrap meat, or used by house servants to light fires (as in the case of at least one stage work by Schubert) may not have been the fate of these works.

If memory serves—and it may well not—we may only have 60% of what Bach actually wrote. At any rate, Bach wrote a lot of sacred music, which he had to, being employed by various churches at different times of his life. But by a happy fact—happy at least for cellists—Bach grew tired of his position in Weimar as konzertmeister and wanted to move on. And however much he was a genius, he scored somewhat lower on the scale of emotional intelligence. Here’s Wikipedia:

In 1717, Bach eventually fell out of favour in Weimar and was, according to a translation of the court secretary's report, jailed for almost a month before being unfavourably dismissed: "On November 6, [1717], the quondam concertmaster and organist Bach was confined to the County Judge's place of detention for too stubbornly forcing the issue of his dismissal and finally on December 2 was freed from arrest with notice of his unfavourable discharge."

Somehow this fact never got mentioned in the conservatories I went to….

Right—so Bach landed on his feet and found himself in Köthen, at Prince Leopold’s household. And fortunately, Leopold was a Calvinist, which meant that music was sparingly used in services; Bach therefore had some time to write secular pieces. And it’s from this period that we get the violin sonatas, the cello suites, the orchestra suites, and—best of all—the Brandenburg concerti.

It was a period of flux, when string instruments were shifting from the viols to our modern instruments. And any cellist today knows that intuitively—one of the suites requires retuning the instrument (the A string gets tuned down to a G), and the last suite—which, dammit, is the best—goes into the stratosphere and is a demon to play. So it’s clear: whatever instrument these pieces are meant for, it’s not our modern cello.

In fact, the most recent research indicates that the suites may have been written for a cello da spalla—which, as you can see in the second clip below, was a smaller instrument that was slung abound the neck and played somewhat like a violin.

And now the action shifts considerably south, to Cremona, Italy, where Antonio Stradivari was enjoying his “golden period,” which lasted from 1700 to 1720 or so. And one of the instruments he created was a viola—an instrument slightly larger than a violin, for which there’s shamefully little music.

There are also damn few Stradivarius violas—only ten, in fact, and the other nine are in institutions and are unlikely to come up for sale. (There are, by the way, over 500 Stradivarius violins, so the fact that this viola is going for sale is major news in the rarified world of viola players. And the price—or at least the price that Sotheby’s hopes to get for it?

45 million bucks.

Is it worth it? Well, as you can hear below, it has a glorious sound. And physically, the instrument is in remarkable shape—almost as if the instrument had been delivered yesterday: no cracks, no major repairs, the varnish intact. So if you have minimally 45 million dollars to spare….

So at roughly the same time that Bach was composing his suites, Stradivarius was creating his viola—probably the greatest viola we have. Enter David Aaron Carpenter, a 28-year old violist who is…

…undeniably proficient, technically. But both the viola and the Bach seem to be products to be used for spreading the David Aaron Carpenter brand. The “musicality” seems as learned, as artificial, as forced as the gestures of old-time opera singers.

It could be envy, of course. Look, both Carpenter and the Belgian Sigiswald Kuijken have a command of their instruments that I will never have. They both must have struggled years to attain their proficiency. But why am I left thinking…

…what for?

David Aaron Carpenter plays the Macdonald Viola