May Music

Let me give you a hint, a kernel of advice, if you ever decide to do anything as inadvisable as write a daily blog. The first months will be easy, the next months will find you praising yourself for “professionally” practicing your craft. In the end, you’ll spend large amounts of time groping for material, and feel that you’re simply writing the same thing over and over again.

Short version—it gets stale.

Anything does, you know, if you do it repetitively. Musicians know that one—you love, you absolutely love the Dvorak Concerto, that first week you’re finally allowed to play it (it’s pretty mean…). You’ve been listening to recordings of it for years. Flash forward five months or—to put it better—150 hours of practicing the damn thing later. You dread the hour you have to spend on it—you’d rather play scales.

The other thing is that you cannot, you really cannot be in a rage all the time, because look—aren’t the lives of your readers hard enough? Are they turning to you for a rant, a diatribe, every morning? Nah—you can get away with a bit of it, but a steady diet is a turn-off.

What do you do then, after a week of raging at the National Rifle Association and agribusiness? Especially when North Korea is hovering to send missiles into South Korea, when Puerto Rico is about to be downgraded to junk bond status, when a jewelry store across the street from you is intermittently blaring its alarm into your apartment, your ears, and especially your sleep? Oh, and the owner of the store, which is closed, is in the United States, and the only thing you can do is talk to the employees of another jewelry—this one open—owned by the same guy. The employees there assure you they’ll try—never an assuring word—to get in touch with him.

I’ll tell you what you do. You tell yourself—this is the best part of being old—that you’ve seen a lot, been through a lot. There was the day your mother died virtually in your arms. There was that morning when your lost your job—that was OK—as well as your connection to 500 people who were friends / students / functionally your children (not OK). The day, years ago, that you sent off your lover to Puerto Rico, where he had to live and where you couldn’t, and walked through the longest terminal in O’Hare with the stupid, dentist office music welling behind you, and you thought the credits would start rolling. The movie, the life, was over.

Then you go to YouTube and try to figure out—if there were a piece of music that was absolutely quintessential, what would it be? You’re thinking this way because you’ve just heard the end of a work by Schumann, and were struck immediately by another work by Schumann, the first song of Frauenliebe und -leben.

That makes you remember the first time you were introduced to lieder, which—don’t get thrown off here—is nothing more than the word in German for song. You were eighteen, alone, living away from home for the first time. You didn’t know what you would make of your life, and worried what life would make of you. Because it felt, you know, that it was more likely that life would shape or misshape you; you weren’t the kind to go out, grasp circumstances, sculpt the world to your liking.

Let me turn around here and get back into the first person….

So there I was that day, in Boston, with my aching shoulders—practice an instrument for five hours a day and the smallest tension leads to knotted muscles—and my tired ears listening to the radio. I had come to study cello with the best—or so he said—cello teacher in America, a man with a method that had become a sort of cellist production line. You got on and four years later were bumped off, ready to spend the next forty years playing the standard orchestral repertoire—maybe a hundred pieces in all. It was already clear—I was falling out of line.

And then, someone was singing—an opera singer, I thought. And I didn’t like opera—or singers at all. There’s always been an animus between instrumentalist and singers. Mention the phrase, which used to be in common use, “musicians and singers,” as in, “musicians and singers, assume your positions,” and watch the singer bristle….

Then, the singer on the radio, having been rumbling around in her low range, soared effortlessly up to a pure, shimmering note: a feather on the breath of God. And I was hooked—I had to hear that singer.

I was broke, so I sat in the cheapest seats in the theater, and heard Jessye Norman sing—yes, as you suspected—Frauenliebe und –leben. In English, A Woman’s Love and Life. It’s classic Schumann, totally melodic, at times joyful, at times melancholic. It follows the story of a woman’s love from the beginning until the end—“Now you have caused me pain for the first time,” sings the mezzo, after her husband has died.

And it’s music, I think, for a young man or woman. However much I wouldn’t go back to it, there is something wonderful about discovering life and love for the first time in your twenties. The sun has never shined before on a young man but you, the moon has never streamed its silver before on a boy and girl, holding hands, stopping to kiss in doorways, dancing in the empty streets.

There’s also, of course, music for the old—music which could only have been written by someone who had suffered and endured, seen life ebb and then flicker out, suffered mourning and resignation and finally acceptance, and a cold joy. For me, that was the greatest of the Schubert song cycles, Die Winterreise, and that was the music I turned to, as I lost my mind following losing my job following losing my mother. And it’s music that I haven’t been able to hear since. (In fact, I’ve barely heard Schubert this year.)

But Schumann, what of Schumann? In case you want to feel guilty for being seriously unproductive (or underproductive), I give you this fact—in one year alone, Schumann wrote not one but the three greatest song cycles of his career. And arguing whether Winterreise is better than Liederkreis is like arguing whether War and Peace is better than Brothers Karamazov—any decision would be subjective, and who cares? They’re masterpieces.

The year was 1840, sometimes called Schumann’s “year of song”; Schumann had just won a long battle to marry the love of his life, Clara Wieck. And that comes through in the music, as well as the poetry—this is a young man writing.

Or in this case singing. Because I decided that the first song of the Frauenliebe und -leben is really sort of meaningless, listened to alone; so much of it is setting up the mood, and also the structure (the theme will be heard at the end). So why not dig up Fritz Wunderlich, an amazing tenor who died at just age 35 from falling down the stairs at a guest’s cottage. He virtually owns Liederkreis.

“In the Wonderful Month of May,” it’s called, and really—that’s all you need to know….. 

Life Under the Palm Trees

Hey, guess what! There’s a new member in Puerto Rico’s Agriculture Hall of Fame and it’s none other than that benign, loveable agri-giant (it’s a word now, computer!)—Monsanto!

 “What,” you say, “what’s Monsanto doing in Puerto Rico?”

A very good question with many answers, most of them not known. What is known is that the biotech industry is very large in Puerto Rico—we have the second largest amount of land per square mile devoted to genetically modified seed production and experimentation. Who’s number one?

Hawaii.

Astute and discerning readers of this blog—and if you’re reading this, you are by definition astute and discerning—will have noted that both Hawaii and Puerto Rico are islands, separated from the continental United States by thousands of miles of sea water. Is that just coincidence?

If you say yes, then I’d really like to tell you about this bridge I happen to own…..

As you can see from the clip below, genes from genetically modified seeds have been found in plants a thousand miles from the nearest source. There’s something, you see, that all these guys with advanced degrees in genetics and bioengineering haven’t thought about. The wind blows.

Now little Puerto Rico has several other advantages that other states don’t have. The weather, for example—you’d really have to modify severely a soybean to get it to grow in Iowa in January. But in Puerto Rico? Not a problem—you can get four crops a year.

There’s also the fact that we, as citizens, are not as activist as the good folk of Wisconsin or Iowa. Most of my students had tuned out the news, and why not? Six more murders, eight more corruption schemes, inane stories about celebrities—who needs it? Just dealing with the morning tapón (the traffic jam), soothing / ignoring the crying baby, dropping off the kids, doing the next leg of the tapón, and trying to sneak by your boss so he / she doesn’t know you’ve drifted in late was enough to exhaust most of my students—and it was just 8AM. Life is hard on the island—nobody has much time for standing around in demonstrations, or probing into what’s going on on the island.

And then there are some nice incentives. We once had a pharmaceutical industry—you can thank Puerto Rico for all that lovely Valium you’ve enjoyed for years—but whoosh, that went away. So what’s next?

Well, we decided to make ourselves the capital for agricultural biotechnology, and we put in some nice little incentives to do it. Here’s what the Centro de Periodismo Investigativo had to say:

Transgenic seed companies operate freely and the government protects them. The whole structure to continue making Puerto Rico a transgenic paradise is based on Law 62 of 2009, better known as the Business Promotion and Development of Agricultural Biotechnology Law, driven by Luis Fortuño. It establishes "cutting edge" public policy for Puerto Rico to become a mecca for these companies, giving them fast-track permits, facilitating the acquisition of buildings and providing financial incentives through the Puerto Rico Industrial Development Company and the Department of Agriculture.

Well, there is a little problem. First of all, the constitution of Puerto Rico specifically states that no company can own more than 500 cuerdas (about an acre) of land. It was a measure designed to protect local farmers from giant agricultural interests—remember King Sugar? But Monsanto has 1500 cuerdas, 500 of them from the government itself. So how does Monsanto do it? The old trick—set up a subsidiary company.

OK—what’s the land being used for? Some of it is crops, and the government pays the agribusinesses a buck or two for every hour paid for field laborers. But most of it is lying vacant—its only use is to isolate the fields from contamination. And all of the land, apparently, is surrounded by tall chain link fence, with coiled barbed wire at the top. If you stop and take a picture, a cop appears from nowhere and tells you that’s prohibited.

Yeah? Even if it’s land owned by the government of Puerto Rico?

There might be another problem as well—Puerto Rico produces almost none of its food. In fact, less than 10% of the food consumed on the island is actually grown on the island. In terms of food security, we’re in terrible shape. Oh, and agriculture represents only 1% of our gross domestic product.

So here, under the tropical sun, we have another set of contradictions, paradoxes, absurdities that only García Márquez could dream up. We are luring multinationals to come down, scoop up vast parcels of land which will go unused to produce a series of crops that will not benefit us (most of the experiments, by the way, are for corn—not frequently thought a tropical crop) and that may in fact harm us. Oh, and we don’t have the land in the first place, and every time the price of oil goes up, the California head lettuce in the grocery store jumps 20 cents.

And you know, it’s not the first time. Back in the 80’s and 90’s, when there was still a lot of chemical / pharmaceutical production on the island, parents began noticing something a bit strange. Girls as young as 2 were growing breasts. So what was causing it?

It’s been studied; it’s still not clear. Here’s what a study cited in a report by the Center for Health, Environment and Justice had to say:

“Premature breast development (thelarche) is the growth of mammary tissue in girls younger than 8 years of age without other manifestations of puberty. Puerto Rico has the highest known incidence of premature thelarche ever reported. In the last two decades since this serious public health anomaly has been observed, no explanation for this phenomenon has been found. Some organic pollutants, including pesticides and some plasticizers, can disrupt normal sexual development in wildlife, and many of these have been widely used in Puerto Rico… The phthalates that we identified have been classified as endocrine disruptors. This study suggests a possible association between plasticizers with known estrogenic and antiandrogenic activity and the cause of premature breast development in a human female population.”

My question—are we going to wait until we develop weird cancers or start frothing at the mouth before we start studies that will return answers of varying validity? Fifty countries, according to our friends at the Center for Media and Democracy right there in Madison, Wisconsin, required labeling on foods with GMO ingredient. The European Union has banned the stuff. And here’s what Carmelo Ruiz Marrero of the Puerto Rico Project on Biosafety had to say:

And 2008 saw the release of the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development report (IAASTD), a unique, unprecedented and definitive report on the state of world agriculture. It was authored by over 400 international experts, subjected to two independent peer reviews, and was the product of an inclusive and participatory process in which industry, governments and civil society participated as equal partners, with the support of UN agencies and the World Bank.

The report concluded, in a nutshell, that the model of industrial, corporate, globalized agriculture cannot continue, as it is unsustainable and is literally eating up the planet’s patrimony, and favors in its stead small-scale agroecological production that uses local resources and minimizes the use of fossil fuel-based inputs- precisely what environmentalists and organic farmers had been advocating for decades.

Puerto Rico has one of the most highly paid legislatures in the country, with advisors making colossal sums of money. How could such a bad, such a cynically evil situation occur? A kickback here and there—sure, we’ve learned to expect that. But putting a whole island’s health at risk? Why would you do that?

Open up your wallet and see….  

Wednesday Morning Rant

What’s going on here?

Susan sent me Maureen Dowd’s column, which featured one of the creators of “Will and Grace”—which apparently was a television show—as being disgusted and heartsick at the Supreme Court. He felt—didn’t we all?—that we were all in a sort of time warp; five of the justices are all back in the fifties, the rest of us have moved on.

Well, I can see that—but only out of my right eye. My left eye went cloudy, last Thursday, just in time for the Easter weekend. Of course my ophthalmologist wasn’t working, so I spent the weekend being intermittently worried—was it an infection? Cataract? Worse, was it macular degeneration, which had robbed my mother of her vision, and really of her joy in life, those last hard years?

Well, I don’t have to worry, or rather I do. It’s a cataract, and the procedure is simple. It takes ten minutes to do the surgery, 24 hours to recuperate, and no more of those hideous eye patches. Amazing, really, the innovations in eye surgery.

Wait, did I say, “I don’t have to worry,” somewhere up there? Wrong—I do. This afternoon I will spend substantial amounts of time calling an insurance company, trying to figure out how to fund this operation. “Lucky you,” you say, “lots of people don’t have insurance.”

And indeed, I am lucky. But it may be just general irritation or an inbred tendency to see the glass as half-empty, because it does occur to me—I’m somewhere in the middle of the lucky gradient. Other people with insurance simply sail in, flash the card, and the operating room doors open by magic.

I only have insurance, you see, through Raf and his former job. Since his company closed he was allowed to retire, and qualifies for the health plan. And yes, that health plan allows him to put a same sex spouse on the plan. Raf’s current employer does not. So I have an excellent insurance plan that—since the company is located in the US—nobody on the island accepts.

And I live—a bit tangentially, but still live—in the richest nation on the planet. And that nation, currently, has no national health plan, and so throws its marginalized into a terrible position. At 56, with a college education and good people skills, I can easily figure out how to manipulate the system—rigged as it probably is against me. (“It does occur to me,” I said to John grumpily yesterday, “that the insurance industry is the only business I can think of which charges its customers an enormous amount of money so it can pay people to say ‘no’ to its customers….”)

Right, so Canada and Norway and most of the developed world have figured out how to dispense health care—we have not. And in nine states I am legally married, and in 41 states plus the territories I am not. And now, we will have to wait around until June to see what will be, in all likelihood, a half victory.

And yesterday, I read an interesting statement when looking for something to blog about. “The history of farming,” an article stated, “has been inherently open-source.”

Say whaaa…?

Translation—nobody owned, until agribusiness came along, a seed. That was the whole point—you grew whatever it was and ate 80% and saved the rest for the next year and that’s how it was for millennia. Now, farmers are the pawns of the seed / fertilizer / herbicide company, and we are suffering or about to suffer a massive jolt to our health—physically, environmentally, economically.

And the Supreme Court, in one sweeping decision that nobody much noticed, was the body that changed “open-sourced” agriculture to corporate agribusiness.

The Supreme Court, who last week worried that homosexuality was newer than cell phones. And yet these guys, so worried about making a “sea change” socially, had no problem completely shifting the foundations of what we put into our mouths?

I go back to wondering, at times, whether men should really be allowed. Yes, we do some things very well. Yes, I’m a guy myself. Yes, I have worked in almost all-female environments and yearned for a nice, testosterone-driven guy.

But maybe it’s time to recognize—agriculture was for millennia a female activity. The men were out there hunting; the women were in the field. And more than that, they were sharing information, swapping seeds, observing how plants grew and why. The essence of agriculture celebrates some traditionally feminine traits—cooperation, patience, nurturance.

Hunting is a guy thing, as is—let’s be honest—business. I worked in the biggest company in the world, and yes, it paid lip service to diversity. But any woman who was going to get seriously ahead was going to have to have bigger balls—sorry!—than the guys. It was about competition, winning, going for the kill.

You know, I don’t accept the Supreme Court being “behind the times.” Not being able to say the word “gay,” but always using “homosexual.” Asking how many states allowed gay marriages, and comparing being gay to cell phones.

That’s bullshit, and an insult. Dowd’s friend may be heartsick….

…I’m pissed.

A Change of Bastards

It’s a relief, almost, to take a break from wrestling with seriously bad bastards—that would be the National Rifle Association, and do they know, I wonder, that I’m after them?—to deal with another seriously bad bastard.

That would be a little company called Monsanto—which, by the way, my computer seems to know, it corrected me when I spelled it with an “a”--founded in 1901 and located in Creve Coeur, Missouri.

And you probably know that it’s an “agribusiness” and producing genetically modified seeds—indeed, it was one of the first companies to produce and market a genetically modified seed, a soybean that was created in 1983 and tested in the field in the late 80’s.

What you may not know—I didn’t—was that Monsanto started out as a chemical company, and it produced everything from plastics to DDT, Agent Orange, and PCBs.

At about the time that they discovered how to play with genes, they got rid of most of that part of the business. They are still making, however, an herbicide that they tout as “as safe as table salt.” (Or at least they did, until the New York Attorney General got after them. They settled out of court, agreed to drop the slogan in New York, and paid $250,000—small change for them—and denied wrongdoing.)

Roundup is by far the most commonly used herbicide, and its toxicity was for years thought to be low. Is it? As always, it depended on whom you asked—when I was gardening in a public park, I would avoid the garden for days or until a good rain after the city had used the stuff. Oh, and I was growing flowers, not food.

And there is evidence that the studies—funded by guess who!—may have been either poorly done or frankly fraudulent. But two things are known: the stuff is all over the place and farmers who refuse to use the herbicide are at a great disadvantage.

Now then, having created an herbicide of questionable toxicity, Monsanto cooked up a great scheme—create a seed that is resistant to Roundup! This way, the farmer sows the seed, waits around until the weeds appear, and then douses the hell out of his field with Roundup. So Monsanto wins twice, if not three or four times (depending on how often Farmer Jones sprays his field). 

Monsanto wins—but does the farmer? Do we, eating the farmer’s crop? One source reports that over 90% of the soy and canola harvested come from Roundup Ready (as the seeds are called) seeds. Since a lot of soy is used for livestock, nobody knows how high up the food chain Roundup really has gotten.

And Monsanto is not a company particularly easy to like. It tends to go after the people least likely to be disliked—those good farmers out there in the field. Such as the Canadian farmer, who the company charged had a Roundup Ready canola plant growing in his field.

“Hey,” said the farmer, “I don’t use that stuff. The pollen blew in from my neighbors field…”

And are you wondering—how can a company go after a farmer for having a plant in his field?

Because that’s no plant, that’s intellectual property. Yes, in 1980, the Supreme Court decided that the patent laws applied to manmade living organism. So now, 93% of soybeans are from Roundup Ready seeds. Oh, and guess what? The price of seed has tripled since then.

Nor is Monsanto content just to operate this scheme, it is today arguing before the Supreme Court that a farmer violated the law by first buying seeds from Monsanto and then buying seeds from a local grain elevator to plant a second crop. The farmer argued that he had already bought seed for the season, and that the second crop would be less productive, and less profitable. Monsanto said he had no right to buy Roundup Ready seed from anyone except the company.

Can it get worse?

Of course. If memory serves from reading Michael Pollan, Monsanto is now developing sterile seeds, which will have the farmers really locked in a corner. And what will happen if the genes causing the sterility in the seed are transferred to other seeds—not genetically modified? Oh, and what will happen—as it has happened—when the plants develop resistance to Roundup? Already, farmers are told to use multiple herbicides.

Five minutes ago, I decided I was hungry, and so I am eating a peanut butter sandwich. Since I didn’t grow the peanuts, and since the peanut butter in not organic, I am very likely eating a food made from genetically modified seed. Shouldn’t I know? Shouldn’t Skippy be required to label that?

Wanna guess my answer?

Today, Everybody Goes to Their Rooms

It was a time when if you spoke out, you suffered real consequences. There’s Phil Donahue, for example, once at the pinnacle, and the next day in the pit. The Dixie Chicks, whose remarks in London set off a furor. And now we can add Ward Churchill, a professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado.

I should have said “ex-professor,” since the university fired him on 24 July 2007.

And why did he get the sack?

For very serious reasons, say his detractors: plagiarism and academic falsification. Not so, say his supporters, he came out and said the unspeakable: the September 11^th attacks were an inevitable and natural result of our terrible foreign policy. But he went further, as you can read below in an excerpt from his essay, “Some People Push Back”:

There is simply no argument to be made that the Pentagon personnel killed on September 11 fill that bill. The building and those inside comprised military targets, pure and simple. As to those in the World Trade Center . . .

Well, really. Let's get a grip here, shall we? True enough, they were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break. They formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of America's global financial empire – the "mighty engine of profit" to which the military dimension of U.S. policy has always been enslaved – and they did so both willingly and knowingly. Recourse to "ignorance" – a derivative, after all, of the word "ignore" – counts as less than an excuse among this relatively well-educated elite. To the extent that any of them were unaware of the costs and consequences to others of what they were involved in – and in many cases excelling at – it was because of their absolute refusal to see. More likely, it was because they were too busy braying, incessantly and self-importantly, into their cell phones, arranging power lunches and stock transactions, each of which translated, conveniently out of sight, mind and smelling distance, into the starved and rotting flesh of infants. If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I'd really be interested in hearing about it.

Ouch—that’s pretty strong. And it’s certainly a good way to start a debate. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a debate that it spawned, but a firestorm. The media picked it up in January of 2005, with FOX News in particular playing it up—according to Wikipedia, Fox had twice the coverage than the other networks combined.

Is it true? Also debatable—there was a restaurant at the top of one of the towers, so that means waiters and cooks, groups not often held responsible for contributing to the American global financial empire. There must have been maintenance people, secretaries, messengers. But Churchill makes a point—there was also a CIA office in one of the tower. And even if some innocent people got killed, well, we have a term for that—collateral damage. A term, by the way, that we did not get from the Pashto, Dari, or Iraqi Arabic.

Well, the fight spread to a very good school—Hamilton College, which had invited Churchill to speak. And after a news program “invited” viewers to send email to Hamilton College, the school was flooded with 6000 of them.

Eventually the school canceled the lecture, because, in the words of its president, Joan Stewart, there were “credible threats of violence.”

Two former governors of Colorado called for Churchill’s dismissal, and the Board of Regents of the University of Colorado issued a statement “apologizing” to the American people. The Colorado Legislature issued a proclamation calling Churchill’s remarks “evil and inflammatory.”

Things really got bad when people read this, taken from “Dismantling the Politics of Comfort:”

If I defined the state as being the problem, just what happens to the state? I've never fashioned myself to be a revolutionary, but it's part and parcel of what I'm talking about. You can create through consciousness a situation of flux, perhaps, in which something better can replace it. In instability there's potential. That's about as far as I go with revolutionary consciousness. I'm actually a de-evolutionary. I do not want other people in charge of the apparatus of the state as the outcome of a socially transformative process that replicates oppression. I want the state gone: transform the situation to U.S. out of North America. U.S. off the planet. Out of existence altogether.

“Treason,” cried the governor of Colorado, and called for his dismissal.

The university did something different—pored over Churchill’s research, and found, according to them, serious faults.

There was the question of the blankets of smallpox victims that, according to Churchill, the US army cunningly distributed to the Indians in 1837 at Fort Clark. You may remember this old tale—it’s sometimes alleged to be the first instance of genocide. And the university confirmed that for six times in ten years, Churchill had, according to Wikipedia, “falsified his sources and fabricated his claims.”

Then there was the question of the remarkable similarity between his work and the work of his ex-wife, Annette Jaimes. But Churchill, unbelievably, came up with the reason—he had written the work and his wife at the time had published it, under her name. And since he had written it, well, couldn’t he use it?

There were other allegations as well. And in the end, the university committee unanimously agreed that Churchill had engaged in “serious research misconduct.”

Right—so what to do about him? Oddly, only one of the five people on the committee voted to dismiss him; two members thought the material insufficiently serious to warrant action; two other members favored temporary suspension.

Hunh?

There’s something screwy here. Have we really come to the point where an academic can be found guilty of “four counts of falsifying information, two counts of fabricating information, two counts of plagiarizing the works of others, improperly reporting the results of studies, and failing to ‘comply with established standards regarding author names on publications’” and then not receive sanctions? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Churchill_academic_misconduct_investigation)

Well, the university took action, and fired Churchill in July of 2007. Churchill, of course, took the university to court, initially won and then lost on appeal. And today, the United States Supreme Court refused to hear the case.

My take? There used to be a time when professors could speak their mind, when they could say the things nobody else could, they could write what others might not. In the best schools they were championed; in the worst they were tolerated. The University of Colorado was completely off base.

Second ending. There used to be a time when professors were rigorous in respecting the work of others, in attributing that work, and in representing it fairly in their own writing. Plagiarism is stealing, and for people who value the life of the mind, it is the ultimate, unthinkable crime. Churchill was completely off base.

Ian and I

Let me tell you an unremarkable piece of news: I sent an email at 4:30 this morning.

That I can do so will raise no one’s eyebrows, nor cause anyone to question anything more than “what were you doing, for God’s sake, awake at 4:30 in the morning?”

All right, then let me tell you something that I, at least, think is astonishing. There is a successful musician in the Fernández-Newhouse family—a guy who frequently travels to Miami, the center of his musical world, to perform. And no, despite the years of practice rooms, cello lessons, conservatories, it’s not I. It’s Ian, Raf’s nephew.

Still not astonished?

Try this: he doesn’t play an instrument.

Or rather, I think we’re going to have to think of his MacBook Pro as his instrument, though I’m not sure of that as well. It may be that his real instrument is the software he uses to generate the sounds that are—to him—music.

This is the moment you stiffen, ‘here it comes,’ you think, ‘another screed against the idea of popular culture and musical relativism….’

Or perhaps you don’t think that; how should I know? Nor am I very clear what I am thinking myself. I talked to Ian about his music last night for two reasons, the first being that it’s the safest—most of his other interests would have provoked howls of protest, as well as cheers of delight, from some part of the family. Ian, you understand, is 27, has dreadlocks that make Marley look like a Wall Street lawyer, and is immersed in the counter-culture.

The second reason? Well, Ian tends not to talk about stuff he isn’t interested in, and guess what? Why should he? So right, it was gonna be music, except that these two musicians were in different worlds, different cultures, speaking different languages.

He’s an intelligent and articulate man, and I know too little both of music and of his kind of music to pass judgment on it. And I wonder, too, whether that word “judgment” doesn’t strike at the heart of it all.

I grew up, as Stegner would say, believing in history. I thought that every piece of art, of music, or that any action would exist in time, be filtered through time, and receive an imprimatur. There was a ranking of composers—who’s gonna say that Vivaldi is “better” than Bach?—and there wasn’t any relativism at all.

There were problems with it, of course. It was very Euro-centric, it was unabashedly elitist, and mistakes or omissions could occur. Bach had to wait around half a century until Mendelssohn strolled into the picture and conducted and championed him. But that was part of the process—a correction that validated the essential strength of the system.

If you think that way, then anything you do is up against daunting competition. I’m not writing this as Marc, but as Marc seen against all literature in contrasting cultures and times. Shakespeare, Saki, Stegner are reading this and snorting over my shoulder; they’re also the lens through which you’re reading this.

Such a view leads you quite naturally into practice rooms, which will lead to competitions, and which will lead you—temperament and talent allowing—onto a concert stage in a room built for one purpose only, where a rigid social system rules. Try chatting with your partner during a Beethoven Symphony or the Well Tempered Clavier.

Ian’s world is not like that. At least I don’t think it is, in the two minutes of his music that I heard, or at least experienced. For one thing, it’s woven into other things—a bar or club scene where music is just a part of what’s going on. Nor do I think Ian has the long hand of history—musical or otherwise—breathing down his neck. I suspect what he values is the overall experience of it all—the scene, the music, the people, the altered consciousness produced by I-don’t-know-what.

The clip I heard was heavily percussive, which Ian had led me to expect; he courteously referred me to another composer working in his genre whom Ian though would be more pleasing to my aged ears. So I checked out Nicholas Jaar, a young Chilean / American, who claims as a musical influence Erik Satie, very much a heavy weight, but also a composer quite often borrowed into popular culture.

OK—and the music I heard?

Look, there has to be another term, another label invented. I don’t want to dismiss what Ian is into, what Ian is doing, what Ian values.

I also don’t want to call it music. My point is that Ian’s sounds are too radically different to be seen or heard in the same way that music is heard.

I started this post by saying that I wrote an email at 4:30 this morning. What if I had said that I had written a poem? We’d see it as two entirely different things. And it occurs to me, somehow we don’t make that distinction very well in sounds / music.

I’m now at a café, which has been playing The Beatles for several minutes. Of the two, I prefer Nicholas Jaar; I’ve always thought The Beatles were the most inane group of the last fifty years, though The Monkees do have a strong claim. And I am considering the English Mystical poets, principally because I ran into the Vaughan Williams clip below.

I knew nothing about George Herbert, not even roughly his dates. And it took several readings before I got, I thought, the poem below. And I’ve listened to the Vaughan Williams piece several times and found interesting things in it.

“Hey Jude” is now playing. Silence would be preferable. I’ve just found the clip of Hey Jude on YouTube—it has 19 million hits. The Vaughan Williams has less than 2000.

The question is—at least the way I see it—will anyone be listening to Hey Jude in 2113?

The answer?

No.  

Come, my Way, my Truth, my Life;

Such a Way as gives us breath,


Such a Truth as ends all strife,

Such a Life as killeth death.

Come, my Light, my Feast, my Strength;


Such a Light as shows a Feast,


Such a Feast as mends in length,


Such a Strength as makes his guest.

Come, my Joy, my Love, my Heart;


Such a Joy as none can move,


Such a Love as none can part,


Such a Heart as joys in love.

The Might of the Mitas

Well, for reasons that should be obvious to everybody, religion seems to be moving into my weekend.

The pope, for example, is infuriating traditionalists in the Catholic Church by washing the feet of two women last Thursday. And apparently people have been requesting that for years, and it’s been strictly forbidden, because it’s a slippery slope indeed. You remember—Jesus washed the apostles feet, and the apostles were all guys, and so therefore if the pope washes anything but male feet, it’s an instant and infinitesimal leap to the ordination of women.

What? You don’t see the logic of that! Well, heavens, anybody can see that!

The pope is something of a loose canon, it seems. For the moment, he’s saying “screw it”—or the pontifical equivalent thereof—to the papal apartments. He strolled through them—I saw it on CNN—shook his head, and all but tut-tutted. (Hmm, and I was sure I was gonna get a red squiggle there….).

Even worse, after all Ratzinger did to move the church right back to the 1950’s (or was it 1550’s?) what’s the new pope doing? Taking the bus to work; wearing white shoes, not the famous Prada red; and what about that Latin Mass, so dear to Ratzinger’s heart? Apparently, the new pope couldn’t give squat.

Yes, there’s every indication that this will be a dangerous pope. He’s got the right moves, he’s playing the media and the publicity machines as well as Rostropovich did a cello. What you won’t see, though, is any budge on doctrine. He’ll be a John Paul II—all charm on the outside, cold steel within.

Well, I was musing on all this yesterday, as the procession moved down the street. Each year it gets a little bit better, or at least tarted-up.  The Roman Centurions were wearing quite rich gowns, and the whips that they were using on the cross—unlike the Philippines, we reign in the sadism, here—weren’t visibly from the adult bookstore. The only thing that marred it was the music—if the liturgy is as bad as the music, post Vatican 2, I’ll cast my vote with Ratzinger on that score.

But the real dish, the big news is that yes, Aaron is the father of Samuel Beníquez.

This is a true Puerto Rican thing—the burning question of whether Aaron, who is the Holy Spirit, the Mita (new word for you, computer!) and who is also 91 years old is the worldly father of a guy named Samuel Beníquez.

“Well, of course he is,” exclaimed Mr. Fernández, when I questioned him on the subject. “Everybody knew he was, and anyway they just came out in court with DNA testing that proved it….”

OK—here’s the deal. In 1897, in a small town west of San Juan, a child named Juanita García Peraza was born. She had a sickly youth, and so she prayed—good child of two ardent evangelicals, of course she would—to God. She made the standard deal—heal me and I’ll serve you.

God, of course, came through right on call, and Juanita began preaching in her church. And she was a whiz—or must have been—because pretty soon she was pissing off the guys. So they told her to take a hike, and she did; in 1941 she started her own church, with eleven others. In 1947, she moved her church to the business district of San Juan.

Now then—having a church is one thing, but you also have to cook up a theology to string along with it. And here, with great Puerto Rican zest, Juanita let fly with a lovely, completely ridiculous piece of nonsense for which the adjective “errant” was utterly made.

Juanita, you see, is the Holy Spirit in its third manifestation. Yes, the first manifestation was Jehovah—definitely respectable—the second was Jesus—also no slouch!—and the third was Juanita, now to be renamed “Mita!”

I hear you, you infidels, sniggering out there—suggesting that the Holy Spirit may have let things slip just a bit, by choosing a lowly girl from Hatillo, Puerto Rico, as his or her or its next residence. For shame! Have you forgotten the lowly birth of one Jesus Christ!

Oh, and one other thing. Juanita, before moving to San Juan, is praying away one day, but wait—let me copy and paste from the church’s own website. They tell it better than I ever could….

Teófilo came from a family with scant economic resources. He liked commerce and sold everything he could buy or was given to sell, in order to help his parents. His father was a sugar-cane cutter and often when he went to work in the early hours of the morning, Teófilo would take him breakfast in the fields. In the afternoons, he worked with his father in the family's corn field, where he was assigned chores since his early years. As a child, he was an exemplary student; he loved his teachers and his teachers admired him. His conduct was blameless and he was punctual and responsible.

One day, some years later, while walking through Arecibo, Teófilo saw two ladies, and one of them, Juanita García Peraza, caught his attention because of her honest bearing. It was God's will that his parents should attend the same church that she attended. When Teófilo heard her speak, his soul vibrated, and even though he was only a child at the time, he understood that the awaited Christ was the one he heard through her. He felt an inexplicable bond to her and followed her everywhere she went.

During a visit Juanita made to Don Pedro and Doña Concepción, she said to Zion: "In your prayers you offered me your son and I have come to find what you promised me." Zion and Pedro realized they were indebted to God and from there on, Teíto, as he was affectionately called, without abandoning his love for his parents, dedicated his life to the Lord's service.

Teíto was in the habit of visiting sister Juanita García Peraza. During one of his visits, as he watched her pray, he knelt silently in a corner of the living-room so as not to interrupt her. Suddenly, the Lord's Holy Spirit entered Juanita took her out and, through her, searched for the ointment (which the Holy Spirit has always used to anoint His chosen instruments). The Lord's Holy Spirit addressed Teíto and, through sister Juanita, anointed him to the Lord's Ministry. Teíto's soul filled with joy. Later, the Lord's Holy Spirit changed Teíto's name to Aarón. Shortly thereafter, Aarón and his parents were part of the group of eleven who left the Pentecostal Church with the person of Mita. Despite the Minister's call for him not to follow Mita, because he realized that Aarón had great spiritual potential within the Pentecostal movement, Aarón categorically refused to stay, because he understood that he had to heed the Lord's call before that of another man.

Bíjte? as we say down here—you see?

Well, the devil prowls everywhere, and is it a surprise that when Mita died there were some who succumbed to the wickedness of suggesting that Aaron might not be the anointed one? Well, yeah, everybody knew about the affair he had had—the one that produced Samuel. Actually, says Mr. Fernández, the rumor is that he had two more children besides Samuel.

Mr. Fernández also may not entirely believe the version of the succession put out by the church’s website. Here it is, the lovely, true and teaching story:

Mita sowed in Aarón the seeds of all those qualities that a prophet must possess: integrity, firmness of character, disposition to sacrifice, courage to face trials, wisdom and divine discernment, temperance, benigness, kindness, charity and, above all, an immense love for souls. He learned every day; he had Mita to follow as an example.

Having been chosen before birth and having been anointed to be a Minister of the Kingdom of God, when Juanita García Peraza passed away, the Lord entrusted his People to Aaron, saying: "Care for my children and I shall reward you".

In 1970, when Juanita García Peraza passed away, Aaron courageously assumed the leadership of the Mita People. Under his leadership, there has been a great expansion of Mita's Work in Puerto Rico, the United States, the Dominican Republic, Canada, Curaçao, Colombia, Venezuela, Costa Rica, Panama, El Salvador and Mexico. He has used all his energy and courage to the praise-worthy effort of taking this proclamation to far away lands. The Mita temples in Puerto Rico and abroad have been built under his leadership and supervision. He founded the Colegio Congregación Mita (Congregación Mita School), the El Paraíso Shelter and Institution, and the Office for Counseling and Social Assistance. He has faithfully fulfilled the prophesies of Mita, promoting the integral development of our People.

Wow—what a guy!

Mr. Fernández, his ear perhaps polluted by the filth the Devil has spilled into it, disputes this. So does the article in Wikipedia—perhaps a bit more balanced. What is known is that after Mita’s death, the whole church waited around three days for her to resurrect. Mita, however, chose the subtler strategy of incorporating into another body; the Holy Spirit has no need for cheap carnival tricks.

At any rate, the Mitas are as easy to spot as their church—which is a six-story affair with a temple accommodating 6000 people. The men dress in white, the women in long dresses, long hair, and utterly no make-up. Oh, and right—they don’t drink, smoke or gamble.

Well, I’m thrilled to report that the news that Aaron is after all the father of Samuel Beniquez has not dented an inch the faith of the mighty Mitas—a newspaper article states that they are more united than ever. I leave you with this last gem from the doctrine page of the website:

On Faith, the Mita Church believes the Lord's Holy Spirit is on earth, that His new name is Mita and that, through Aarón, He governs His Church and guides it through truth and justice towards salvation. The Mita Church is founded on the spiritual environment of human beings. It is the continuation of the Primitive Church of the Apostles and Prophets that performs a work of good, acts on faith and is uplifting. By this means, God extended to the human beings the opportunity to attain what their lack of faith makes inaccessible: salvation and a full life in complete communion with the Creator. Such a life knows no limits because it is guided by the Lord's Holy Spirit.

See? When you have that on your side, what’s an out-of-wedlock child or two?