The Next Island Over

Right—the point could be made: who am I to talk? After all, as a citizen of the United States, do I have the right to talk about anybody else’s mess of an immigration policy? Do we really do better?

In this case, yes. Because the supreme court of the Dominican Republic has just directed the authorities to examine birth certificates all the way back to 1929—and I seriously want to know how they chose that year—in order to find out who is of Haitian descent. Why? Because children born in the Dominican Republic of Haitian parents will no longer be considered citizens.

Both Dominican Republic and Haiti share the same island—Hispaniola—but it sort of stops there. There’s the language difference—the Haitians speak Creole, Dominicans speak Spanish. There’s the cultural difference—the Haitians had the only successful slave revolt in the Western Hemisphere, and are proud of their black heritage. The Dominicans?

Time to confess—I had thought they roughly followed our own history: Spanish up until the time of the Spanish-American War, and then independent. But no—they have a history that very much defines the animosity between them. Because seven years after the slave revolt of 1801, a group of people from Dominican Republic attempted to take over Haiti for the Spanish. In fact, the tables turned, and it was Haiti who, in 1822, took over the entire island. And when the Dominican Republic finally achieved independence in 1844, it was from Haiti, not Spain.

Then came the massacre. Haitians had been crossing the border for years, and worked in the sugar cane fields—which is a job you don’t want to have: it’s blazingly hot, and cane has spines that can cause serious injury. So the Dominicans had been happy to have someone else do the work. So what was the problem? For mostly political reasons, a scapegoat had to be found. And the Haitians, it was said, were taking jobs.

Sound familiar?

Right—so Rafael Trujillo, the dictator of Dominican Republic, decided in 1937 to send the boys over to the border and ask every dark skinned guy to say the word perejil (parsley). Easy for Spanish speakers—not so easy for Creole tongues. And the price for a badly spoken r? Well, the boys had machetes. Was it 10,000 or 25,000? We’ll never know.

The whole question of race is super charged in the Dominican Republic, so much so that Trujillo used to wear white makeup. And as a student once told me, to be rich and white in Santo Domingo is to live with absolute freedom to do as you like. Yes, you can get away with murder.

Or get away with denying about 200,000 people citizenship, which is what the supreme court decided to do. And that’s no mean thing—well, mean in the sense of small—because without citizenship, kids can’t go to school, people can’t work. So what’s the alternative? Go to Haiti, where they don’t speak the language, and where there’s no work?

I once argued that I believed in cities but not nations. Why? Well, consider this comment from an article in The Guardian:

“I am Anglo-American and my wife is Haitian. We have a daughter of five whose biological father was Haitian (died in earthquake in 2010), but whose registered father is a Dominican of Haitian descent. She has a Dominican passport, though whether she will now lose it, I don't know. I don't think the DR government is efficient enough to investigate everyone of Haitian descent to revoke their citizenship, carry out DNA testing, etc.

Our younger daughter was born in the DR and thus became a stateless person at birth. I was able to get a UK birth certificate for her and perhaps one day she will come to the UK. Thus I have a family in which four different nationalities are represented: Myself British and US, my wife Haitian, my daughter British, and my stepdaughter Dominican.”

Well, I hope that daughter manages to stay in the Dominican Republic, because if she gets sent to Haiti? According to one source, she has a 10% chance of becoming a slave.

The Caribbean is a strange region—an archipelago of islands very close and yet very far from each other. We typically know little of each other and care less. But here’s what P J Patterson, former Prime Minister of Jamaica, said:

No one can be hoodwinked as to the reason and the purpose for this kind of discriminatory legislation. Within the region we have an obligation to speak and we cannot allow such inequities to go without our strongest condemnations.”

Sadly, our “strongest condemnations” may not be enough….

When Sugar Bought Art

There’s something melancholic about it—the news that the Two Trees Management Company wants to develop the shuttered American Sugar Refining Company. And why, you ask? Well, for one thing, the name American Sugar Refining Company may mean nothing to you, but its finished product? Domino Sugar.

Well, if you’re like me, you can still see the bag in your mother’s kitchen—or kitchens, since I could locate the sugar immediately in my childhood home, were the sugar still there. Sugar tends to figure pretty strongly in the culinary life of kids.

Then there’s the fact that the sugar came from a site across the East River from Manhattan. In fact, the factory had operated from the site since the mid-nineteenth century at least—the ships had come in laden with a sugar cane slurry from the Caribbean or the Philippines or wherever, and the sugar was refined right there in Brooklyn.

Nor was it, as the Times article describes it, “refined” in anything but name. Temperatures could get up to 140 degrees. Here’s what the Times had to say about the process:

In the earliest days, much of the sugar arriving at the Havemeyer family’s refinery on the Williamsburg waterfront had been harvested by slaves. It was mixed into a dirty slurry, boiled in enormous vats and filtered through charred animal bones.

Then it was “whipped, beaten, flayed, hurled into ‘grain,'” The Illustrated American magazine reported in 1894. “The process is very wild and terrible, like a caged cyclone.” Life in the refinery was so infernal that The New York Tribune declared in 1894 that a worker had only one hope of escaping “perpetual torture.”

“Not infrequently,” the newspaper said, “death comes quickly to his relief.”  

Henry Osborne Havemeyer inherited some sugar interests, and then went on to found his company in 1868, when he was just 22. The current building, built after a fire destroyed the original building, was built in 1882, and is the only factory site named as a New York City Landmark. Havemeyer went on to become an extremely rich man, know as the Sugar King, and the company was one of the original 12 companies in the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

What happened? Well, the company stumbled on, and sources for sugar shifted from cane to beet sugar to the nefarious high fructose corn syrup. And why the shift? In part, according to Wikipedia, because of tinkering with the marketplace:

A system of sugar tariffs and sugar quotas imposed in 1977 in the United States significantly increased the cost of imported sugar and U.S. producers sought cheaper sources. High-fructose corn syrup, derived from corn, is more economical because the domestic U.S. and Canadian prices of sugar are twice the global price[29] and the price of corn is kept low through government subsidies paid to growers.[30][31] High-fructose corn syrup became an attractive substitute, and is preferred over cane sugar among the vast majority of American food and beverage manufacturers. Soft drink makers such as Coca-Cola and Pepsi use sugar in other nations, but switched to high-fructose corn syrup in the United States in 1984.

Hey wait—the cost of sugar in the US is twice as much as in the rest of the world? So the government is protecting the corn farmers by paying them to grow this stuff—or at least the raw material for it—and also imposing tariffs and quotas on sugar, which may be far healthier?

In fact, a recent study at the University of Guelph in Canada has this to say:

Canadian researchers have found that high-fructose corn syrup can cause behavioral reactions in rats 'similar to those produced by drugs of abuse, such as cocaine'.

Professor Francesco Leri of the University of Guelph, who carried out the research, said it suggested there was an addictive quality to foods that contain high levels of high-fructose corn syrup which could explain, at least partly, the current global obesity epidemic.

Oh, and the same article says this:

Research from Princeton University in 2010 found that rats fed on a sugary diet became nervous and anxious when the sugar was removed. They were thrown into a state of anxiety similar to the kind of stress that people feel during withdrawal from drugs like nicotine and even morphine.

So at some point the Havemeyer family sold out, and in 2003, the refining part of the operation closed down, after a bitter, twenty-month strike, one of the longest in New York history. And then, in 2004, the whole operation closed down.

I tell you it’s bittersweet; here’s why. First, we used to produce stuff, rather than import it. Second, it’s an outrage that we are subsidizing high fructose corn syrup, which has been linked to something called metabolic syndrome: high blood sugar, diabetes, obesity, heart disease, etc.

Lastly, anyone who has been in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City will know the Havemeyer name; both Henry Osborne Havemeyer and his wife collected art like crazy, and their three children carried on as well. Here’s Wikipedia on the subject:

Although each of the children collected in their own right, Electra Havemeyer Webb collected on the grand scale of her parents and went on to found a museum to showcase her deep and diverse collections. Louisine identified some 142 works as a bequest to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and empowered her children to give the Met's curators free rein. By the time they had finished an inventory of the Havemeyer's three-story Fifth Avenue manse 1,967 works would be assimilated into the Met's holdings.

And here’s the Met itself on the collection:

A legendary assemblage, the Havemeyer collection is famous for its unparalleled groupings of works by Corot, Courbet, and Manet, its great Monets and Cézannes, and its many paintings, pastels, drawings, and bronzes by Degas. But the real depth and the encyclopedic range of this legacy are not well known, because part of it is dispersed throughout the Metropolitan and part dispersed throughout the world. Few know, for example, that the collection encompassed Rembrandts and El Grecos as well as works by other old masters. The Havemeyers were not only the premier American patrons of late nineteenth-century French painting—Mrs. Havemeyer was perhaps the first American to buy a Monet—but also pathbreaking collectors in such uncharted fields as Spanish painting, for which they created a demand and established a taste among their contemporaries.

Will our current crop of magnates do as well?

Portrait of a Cardinal, Probably Cardinal Don Fernando Niño de Guevara (1541–1609)  El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos) (Greek, Iráklion (Candia) 1540/41–1614 Toledo)

Pardon our Dust

I fear it just as much as my father did, though his fear was that people would stop doing crazy things and turn normal. Nice for them, perhaps, but what would Jack write about?

In my case, I worry that the usual bastards will give up their bastardry, but guess what? There’s absolutely no hint, today, that that’s happening.

I bring you our loveable old friends the Koch brothers, who inherited their empire from their father as well as his rabid conservatism (Papa was a founder of the John Birch Society, as well as an oilman). So the Koch brothers have significantly expanded their empire, and have moved into production of the tar sand oil of Alberta, Canada.

What is tar sand oil? It’s technically called bitumen, and here’s what Wikipedia has to say about it:

Bitumen is a thick, sticky form of hydrocarbon, so heavy and viscous (thick) that it will not flow unless heated or diluted with lighter hydrocarbons. At room temperature, it is much like cold molasses"

There are tar sand deposits all over Montana and North Dakota, as well as vast amounts of the stuff in Alberta. But because of the viscosity, the tar sands need to be processed before they can be refined in conventional refineries. And how does the tar sand oil get from Alberta or North Dakota to the pre-processing plant in Whiting, Indiana?

Well, there’s the famous Keystone Pipeline XL, two phases of which are completed, one is under construction, and the fourth is pending approval by the US government. But it’s important to know—however ugly most petroleum products are, the tar sands are especially toxic: here’s an excerpt from The New York Times from an article from January of this year:

The development of Alberta’s oil sands has increased levels of cancer-causing compounds in surrounding lakes well beyond natural levels, Canadian researchers reported in a study released on Monday. And they said the contamination covered a wider area than had previously been believed.

Still not convinced? Well, consider the town of Lac-Mégantic, in which a train carrying the tar sands derailed, caused a huge explosion, and killed 47 people. Oh, and here’s more information:

Underneath the remaining buildings, cleanup crews have discovered that much of Lac-Mégantic's downtown is saturated with heavy metals — lead, arsenic, copper — and that thick crude oil. Three months after the explosion, they are still pumping spilled crude oil and chemicals from underneath what used to be a gorgeous lakefront street.

OK—so the tar sand oil is being processed in Indiana—but what about the by-products of the processing? Called petroleum coke—also known as pet coke—in Indiana, only 5 days of the stuff can be stored. And according to one article:

Under the company's federal permit and consent decree with the U.S. EPA, the waste is surrounded by 40-foot walls; an enclosed conveyor and loading system is equipped with wind screens and water sprayers to keep dust down.

Since the Whiting facility is producing more pet coke than it can store, it’s shipping the stuff to a facility on the Southeast side of Chicago—a poor area of town. And guess who owns the facility, called KCBX? Right—the you-know-whos….

And guess what? The same stuff that is so toxic that it has to be enclosed over in Indiana? Here’s what Koch Chemical spokesman Paul Baltzer (and however much they’re paying him, it’s not enough) has to say:

But in letters to the Illinois EPA, the company said "it is not feasible" to cover the piles because "stockpile locations and usage patterns are constantly changing."

"KCBX puts a priority on regulatory compliance and managing operations in a manner that protects the health and safety of employees, the community, and the environment," Baltzer said in a statement.

Well, as you can see in the clip below—the skies over the Southeast side of Chicago are frequently black, and so people are keeping their kids inside. Which, if you have ever endured a Chicago summer, would be intolerable if you didn’t have air conditioning. But as it happens, many people in Chicago—especially poor and lower-middle class people, because of course that’s what these people are—don’t have air conditioning.

So a whole bunch of poor people are getting exposed to some really toxic stuff, all for the benefit of some rich guys who are getting richer by the nanosecond and who are using that money to buy state legislatures to ensure that laws are vaguely written, that environmental regulation is weakened, and that a reactionary point of view is pushed down our throats.

And guess what? It’s not the first time. Here’s what the pet coke situation looked like in Detroit, before the mayor ordered them to be removed.

And yes, the Koch brothers own that facility, too….

Justin Who?

I won’t, I absolutely won’t rant. I’ll say it again—I won’t rant because it’s Monday and besides, even if it weren’t, who needs a rant?

So I tell you with a heart bursting with charity that somebody named Justin Bieber came to town and what happened? The island went nuts. Well, the female half of the island. OK—female and young.

I know this because the New Day, our local paper, told me so. And they also stated that Bieber had requested an escort to the airport; apparently, he feared his fans, and from the clips I saw on YouTube, it’s easy to see why. To be young, female, Latin, in full rapture, and surrounded by thousands just like you—right, I’d be calling the Feds, too.

I owed it, I thought, to my readers to listen to some Bieber and so I zipped over to YouTube and listened to “One Less Lonely Girl,” which is to music as bubblegum is to food. Bieber sings fairly well, makes some mildly simian gestures and then, at the end, places a gaudy crown or tiara on the head of a teenage girl—the poor girl is almost catatonic in shock.

Right—then I headed over to Wikipedia to get the dope on Bieber, who is 19 years old and made 55 million bucks last year. Or maybe it wasn’t—but it was some ridiculous sum. Oh, and apparently he offended people by writing in the Anne Frank guestbook that Anne was a great girl, and he hoped she would have been a “belieber”—yes, computer, that’s what they call themselves—if she were around today.

Wikipedia also filled me in on how Bieber got discovered. Here, for any 13-year olds reading, is how it’s done:

While searching for videos of a different singer, Scooter Braun, a former marketing executive of So So Def, clicked on one of Bieber's 2007 videos by accident. Impressed, Braun tracked down the theater Bieber was performing in, located Bieber's school, and finally contacted Mallette, who was reluctant because of Braun's Jewish religion; she remembered praying, "God, I gave him to you. You could send me a Christian man, a Christian label!... you don’t want this Jewish kid to be Justin’s man, do you?"[19] However, after praying with her church elders and receiving their encouragement, she permitted Braun to fly Bieber, then 13,[10] to Atlanta, Georgia, to record demo tapes.[19] A week after arriving, Bieber sang for R&B singer/songwriter Usher.[28]

OK—got that taken care of!

I can tell you this without the usual rant of the classical musician—who made five dollars three days ago, when a stranger overhearing me play whipped out his wallet, bless him!—because I know the story of Louis George Maurice Adolphe Roche Albert Abel Antonio Alexandre Noë Jean Lucien Daniel Eugène Joseph-le-brun Joseph-Barême Thomas Thomas Thomas-Thomas Pierre Arbon Pierre-Maurel Barthélemi Artus Alphonse Bertrand Dieudonné Emanuel Josué Vincent Luc Michel Jules-de-la-plane Jules-Bazin Julio César Jullien.

Why the 36 names? Well, he had 36 godfathers, all drawn from the Sisteron Philharmonic. So with that baggage, it was natural to go to the conservatory at Paris, at which, sadly, he didn’t excel. Instead, he engaged in “light” music, and that was enough to sink him. He fled Paris to avoid his creditors—always a good reason to be on the road—and went to London, where he formed a good orchestra.

And he was a huge success—the audiences loved him. Why? Because he was a showman; here, let someone else describe it…. 

His orchestra played at a series of summer concerts (called Concerts d’été). Later he conducted a series of winter concerts (Concerts d’hiver). Although he was a good conductor he was a great showman. He would make a big show of putting on his white gloves which were given to him on a silver plate. He used a special baton (conductor’s stick) which had jewels in it when he conducted Beethoven. He wore a white waistcoat and enormous wrist bands, and he had a huge moustache and long, black hair. He would throw himself around when conducting and finish by sinking into a velvet chair. The audience loved it, especially when he added military bands to his orchestra. He used to conduct facing the audience. He conducted concerts in the London theatres and parks (promenade concerts).

Jullien’s programmes included works by the great composers, e.g. Beethoven and Mozart, but they were always mixed with light music: dances, quadrilles, marches, etc. He often added lots of extra instruments to the great classics, e.g. when he conducted Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony he added four ophicleides, a saxophone and side drums.

Well, that detail—“he used to conduct facing the audience”—does tell it all, doesn’t it?

And one of his quadrilles, as I remember it, featured an enormous structure, which—guess what?—was set on fire. Yes, on fire. And then what happened? Of course, the firemen rushed in and put out the blaze and audiences went nuts.

Well, I can’t have made this up because there is in fact the following photo:

There is, however, absolutely nothing of Louis Antoine Jullien on YouTube, nor is there much information about him on the Internet. He died broke in Paris in 1860, but was still remembered two decades later. W. S. Gilbert mentioned him in Patience as “Jullien, the eminent musico,” in 1881.

So if, like me, you’re going about your business and saying, “who’s Justin Bieber?” when he stumbles into your path, relax. Take a deep breath. You’re not behind the times.

You’re ahead of them!

A Sacred Non-Believer (reposted)

Revisiting a post published on February 2, 2013…. Enjoy the music!
----------------------------------

Right—let me at least acknowledge the news, so that you know that I, son and brother of newspapermen, have done my job. One person is dead in Ankara, Turkey, in a terrorist suicide attempt. Protesters in Egypt have attacked the presidential palace. US army suicides are at a record high, and so, by the way, is the Dow Jones Industrial Average, at least since 2007.

And I could tell you, since I was compelled to watch it, that Muslim fundamentalists are attempting to enforce Sharia law in parts of London. Actually, it’s happening all over Europe, in neighborhoods that are heavily Muslim.

Here’s the question—does any of this make you feel better?

If the answer is no, then you really should check out the clip below. First of all for the quality of the performance—these are some skilled guys, in particular the first cellist, who looks like he’s only recently been toilet trained. But wow, what a musician!

Then there’s the piece itself, which is some of the most gentle, tranquil music Brahms ever composed. And it’s one of those pieces that you know but somehow never hear. Then, of course, you do, and you immediately say, “I’m gonna listen to that much more often!” It’s that old friend that you really love but somehow never see….

Brahms is one of those guys you love or hate—and several of my friends, including Mr. Fernández, are in the hate camp. “There’s something he does in every composition where the violins are screeching or maybe it’s the harmonic progression but it just drives me nuts,” he reports.

I, on the other hand, absolutely love the music. Nor am I alone—Brahms was popular in his own lifetime, and died a wealthy man, though he was born in poverty. What sort of poverty? Well, his father had to play piano in dance halls, according to Wikipedia.

Which may be employing euphemisms; I always heard that it was brothels. Brahms himself acknowledged that he had a little difficulty with women, perhaps because of his father’s professional activity, perhaps because his mother was seventeen years older than his father.

Then there’s the other theory—Clara Schumann. It’s undeniable that they were devoted to each other, and Brahms spent the two years following Robert Schumann’s death bucking up Clara. He moved into an apartment in her house, and gave up pretty much everything—concerts and composition. So, our inquisitive modern mind wants to know—were they an item?

Gentle reader—there are some places you don’t go.

Or rather can’t, since both Brahms and Clara burnt their letters.

Nor was that the only thing destroyed—there’s the twenty string quartets that Brahms decided weren’t up to snuff. Legend has it that he ripped up a number of attempts at symphonies, too—he had the weight of Beethoven’s Ninth always on his back.

He was rich, but he lived simply. He took long walks, carrying candy for the children, but was grumpy at times to his friends. A story often told about the E Minor cello sonata has the cellist screaming, “I can’t HEAR myself!” Brahms, thundering away at the piano, shouts back, “you’re lucky!”

He writes a requiem that is among the most moving works of sacred music, but doesn’t, apparently, believe. It worries Dvorak, who writes in a letter, "Such a man, such a fine soul—and he believes in nothing! He believes in nothing!"  

There’s a school of belief that says that the real essence of Brahms are the little works, the small works—not the symphonies. Hearing the sextet below, I begin to think that may be right.

Music or Mystique?

It’s a curious thing—the relationship that string players have with their instruments. Yes, guitarists can rave about one “brand” of guitar, and pianists line up in favor of the Bösendorfer—which is now, by the way, owned by Yamaha—or the Steinway. But nobody seems to get as metaphysical, as enraptured, as enamored as string players with their instrument. It leads, at times, to extreme statements that are almost embarrassing. “I felt like my soul was disappearing,” said one violinist, who had his violin stolen. Another violinist takes his instrument to the luthier—the educated reader of this blog will not need to be told that that’s the repair guy; the computer, however, is another story—and gets paid this compliment. “I can tell you two are happy together,” says the luthier. And no, he hasn’t heard the two—just seen them.

Ummm?

Then there’s the widely held belief that an instrument not played “dies.” This, I can tell you, is not true. I know this because my own cello, at various points in my life, has gone untouched (in two senses, since the word for play in a musical sense is tocar or touch in Spanish) for years. In fact, I have just gotten my own luthier—everyone should have one, it adds a bit of class when speaking—to work on my cello. And the sound? Wonderful? Oh, and it had been five years.

“It’s male, I suppose?” said my luthier—OK, his name is Rodrigo, which is, come to think of it, every bit as classy as “my luthier.” Rodrigo met me and Mr. Fernández decades ago.

“Of course,” I said. And if I were on the opposite spectrum, it would be “she.”

So I’m prepared to go part of the way in this mysticism that we have with our violins, violas, celli and basses. I believe, for example, that the instrument makes or at least helps make the musician. Certainly, without having the instrument I have, I would never have created my own sound. But it’s more than that—it’s also true that some instruments let you explore easily: should I hold that note longer, elongate the appoggiatura, play the triplets more staccato? There are times the instrument is suggesting things.

What’s also true is that the instrument is my voice, and then, well, very close to my soul. So much so that when the principal cellist of the local orchestra raved about the sound of my cello, I was a little offended. ‘I created that sound, and if you played my cello, it wouldn’t sound the same. Maybe better, maybe worse. But not the same….’ That’s what I wanted to—but didn’t—tell him.

I tell you all this because I’ve just spent 50 minutes watching the video below. And for the benefit of people who actually have lives to live—I can recap for you.

There’s this mystique about Stradivarius and his instruments—1000 of them, of which 500 have been lost. They are the Himalayans of instruments, and they don’t come cheap. A “basic” Strad will set you back 1.4$ million Euros—a couple of million bucks. And yeah, that’s a lot of money for a young violinist….

Oh, and the great violins, from Stradivarius’ “gold period?” Here’s Wikipedia:

A Stradivarius made in the 1680s, or during Stradivari's 'Long Pattern' period from 1690 to 1700, could be worth hundreds of thousands to several million U.S. dollars at today's prices. The 1697 Molitor[4] Stradivarius, once rumored to have belonged to Napoleon Bonaparte (it did belong to a general in his army, Count Gabriel-Jean-Joseph Molitor), sold in 2010 at Tarisio Auctions to violinist Anne Akiko Meyers for $3,600,000, at the time a world record.[5][6]

Depending on condition, instruments made during Stradivari's "golden period" from 1700 to about 1725[7] can be worth millions of dollars. In 2011, his "Lady Blunt" violin from 1721, which is in pristine condition, was sold at Tarisio auctions for £9.8 million (it is named after Lord Byron's granddaughter Lady Anne Blunt, who owned it for 30 years). It was sold by the Nippon Music Foundation in aid of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami appeal.[8]

That’s 15 million dollars. And that should tell you something: these instruments have stopped being instruments and have become…investments.

Which means that two things can happen to them, both risky. The first is that the bank or foundation can stick the violin in a vault. There, it’s safe, protected and—duh!—unheard. Or, the bank can lend the instrument to a young, aspiring musician, who will fall in love with the instrument, cherish it, speak to it and…

…wait for the letter from the bank asking for it back. And this is—yes—traumatic; it’s every bit as bad as losing a spouse.

Right—so the absolutely best thing would be to find the “secret” to the Stradivarius. And the legend always was—if we could just get our hands on the family Bible, there we would find it: the recipe for the varnish, in the Master’s own hand!

The varnish is one theory—and it’s been studied. But in fact, most of the Strads have lost a lot of the original varnish, and been re-varnished. Oh—and some parts of the violins have lost their varnish completely. So nix that one.

OK—the wood. Spruce and maple—and in the time of Stradivarius, the wood used would have been exceptionally hard, since it from trees growing in a miniature ice age. But wait—that was the wood everybody was using, not just Stradivarius. So that’s not the secret.

OK—is it the shape? Stradivarius standardized the form of the violin, but in fact people have been playing with it for centuries after he died. And in the clip below, one luthier made a violin with a bigger top than bottom. And guess what? It sounded terrific—the low notes more mellow, the high notes more brilliant.

Lastly, there’s another, somewhat less appealing theory. It may all be just hype—since in double blind studies, the Strad has been picked out over similar or even modern instruments only as often as—statistically—you’d expect. And in the clip below, it was a modern instrument that everyone thought was the Strad.

In fact—it may be that there’s nothing special about a Strad. Other instruments compare favorably; it’s just that everyone decided that a Strad was a benchmark. And therefore, all the greats played them—which reinforced the legend.

And technology moves on. I’m seriously thinking of investing in a carbon fiber cello, since they are impervious to heat and—especially—humidity. And guess what? If they’re good enough for Yo-Yo Ma, they’re probably good enough for me….

Have a listen!

A Demented Violin Concerto

Well, is it any good or is it—as Menuhin thought—a historical footnote, the missing link in the violin repertoire?

Yehudi Menuhin, one of the great violinists of the last century, was referring to the Schumann violin concerto, which dates from 1853—a year before Schumann gave in to syphilitic madness and jumped into the Rhine. Fearing that he would harm his wife, the pianist Clara Schumann who had long supported him creatively and financially, he asked the fisherman who rescued him to take him directly to the sanatorium. He died in 1856.

That’s part of the story. The other part? Joseph Joachim, a friend of both the Schumanns and Johannes Brahms, and the greatest violinist of his day. And so the concerto was written for Joachim, who played through it, and was less than impressed. In fact, he suspected the music was part of Schumann’s madness; allegedly, he called the work morbid. And he wrote the following words in a letter to a friend:

The piece has ‘a certain exhaustion, which attempts to wring out the last resources of spiritual energy’, though ‘certain individual passages bear witness to the deep feelings of the creative artist’.

Joachim never played the work in public, and later convinced both Brahms and Clara Schumann that the work wasn’t worthy of publication. Joachim kept the manuscript, and left it in his will to the Prussian State Library, with the instruction that it was not to be played until 1956, 100 years after the composer’s death..

OK—here the story gets seriously weird. Two grandnieces of Joachim—one improbably named Jelly D’Aranyi, the other Adila Fachiri—both violinists, decide to go to a séance in London in 1933. And guess who comes sailing through? Yup—Robert Schumann with instructions from the beyond. Yeah—“play my concerto,” or words to that effect.

First problem—where the hell was it? OK—round two, and this time Joachim comes through with the info. And so the sisters hightail it over to the archives and dig the concerto up. And they swear until their dying day that they had no idea that the piece existed.

(….stop that sniggering out there!)

The trail went cold until 1937, when the music publisher Schott sent the manuscript to Yehudi Menuhin. And he announced that he would give the world premiere in San Francisco.

You can guess what happened. Yes, Jelly stepped up and claimed right of first performance—hadn’t it been she who had been tipped off from the beyond? (You might wonder why Adila, the other sister, didn’t stake her claim—at least, I wonder…. Unfortunately, Wikipedia doesn’t say…)

It might have been interesting to see how the struggle developed—but sadly, the Germans held the copyright, and they decided it should be one of their own, Georg Kulenkampff, should premiere the work. So Menuhin gave the American premiere, and Jelly gave the London premiere—one critic said, “of this dismal fiasco, the less said the better.”

Since then, the work has met with divided opinion. Some have called it a violin concerto without the violin. And one senses what Joachim felt—it’s the work of a man whose mind is slipping. It may lack coherence, ultimately; but there are still beautiful moments.

In short, it’s a thing to hear….

    

The Morning After

It’s like a psychic hangover—for three weeks I’ve tried to tune out the noise and listen—often literally—to music instead. But it was incessant, and ultimately impossible to ignore: who, if anybody, would back down in our political game of chicken?

And what would the price be, if we went over the “fiscal cliff?” Or was it a cliff? Because some Republicans were saying that it might not be that bad a thing if all of a sudden we stopped paying on our obligations. A treasury note was supposed to be as sure as money in the bank—and then one day it wasn’t. And that wasn’t a big deal?

Still, what do I know? I know little things like speaking with a border patrol guy in the supermarket. He was working but not getting paid; I asked what he thought about the situation in Washington that had led to his lending his time to the government (he’ll get retroactive pay).

He looked hard at me, sizing me up. And it was obvious—we’re on different sides of the fence, politically.

“Children,” he said derisively. He tensed, waiting for me to rant about the Republicans.

“I’ll say,” I said. Why should I go there? He hadn’t; he had expressed a view that wasn’t an attack on an ideology.

So we had a pleasant exchange, and left cordially. Which is not the way I’m feeling today. In fact, I’m feeling battered and bruised; so much so that I tuned out the President, who was doing his best to pull everybody back on track.

And I’m thinking about my own state, which according to The New York Times is the most politically divisive state in the nation. What happened?

Well, big money moved in, for one. David Koch himself came out and said it: “We’ve spent a lot of money in Wisconsin. We’re going to spend more.” How much money? Well, 60% of the $25 million Walker raised for his recall campaign came from outside the state.

Legislation began coming in from elsewhere, instead of being crafted and drafted locally. And it often came from ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative coalition of business, lobbyists, and state legislators. And they were less bills than packages: they came with strategic talking points designed to eliminate opposition. Oh, and often a smoke screen—here’s a description from The New York Times:

Pocan described an ALEC conference in New Orleans that he attended last summer. “I remember going to a workshop and hearing a little bit about a bill they did in Florida and some other states to dismantle public education,” Pocan said. “There was a proposal to provide special-needs scholarships. Lo and behold, all of a sudden I come back to Wisconsin, and what gets introduced? A bill to do just that.”

The next day, Pocan outlined a strategy ALEC advises its members to use: “You have to introduce a 14-point platform,” he said, “so that you can make it harder for them to focus and for the press to cover 14 different planks.” He pointed to several bills introduced in the past two sessions, including one that allows more children to enroll in virtual charter schools. “It sounds good,” Pocan said. “Kids could access virtual schools for home schooling. But again,” he emphasized, the real purpose is “taking apart public schools, drip by drip.”

There were the strong-arm tactics, as the discourse broke down completely. The Times spoke of the violation of the open meetings law, and mentioned a heated debate between the Assembly minority leader and Scott Fitzgerald, the Senate majority leader. Well, it was indeed—as heated as things tend to get in Wisconsin. Take a look:

Of course the whole affair ended up in court, and a state court took the very unusual step of throwing out the law banning collective bargaining for state workers, solely on the basis of the violation of the open meetings law. Later, the 7^th Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago would overturn the ban on the ban. Meaning that Walker carried the day, and that government workers no longer have the right to bargain collectively.

So a nation sat and watched a 16-day temper tantrum, averted at the last hour, but not without a lot of damage wrought. Unnecessary damage, really—because a good fight about an important issue is one thing. But you know what? John McCain came out and said it:

“We’ve got to assure the American people that we are not going to do this again,” Mr. McCain said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Thursday. He said Republicans should “focus on the provisions of Obamacare that are not acceptable” and make sure they get “a positive agenda for the party so we can be for things rather than against things, for opening things rather than closing them.”

You learn more from your enemies than from your friends, in general, and the idea was supposed to be that the discourse sharpened the debate, and improved the product. So yes, it’s important to talk about the size of the federal government, or whether big government is the answer, or whether the economy—read jobs—is more important than the spotted snail that lives in the bottom of a tributary of a river. Oh, and nobody ever much sees the snail. Nor is the tributary navigable.

I thought about all of this yesterday, when I watched the video below—how important it was to have the fight, and to know how to fight well.

And today? Well, the one person who isn’t editorializing on the shutdown is Nicholas D. Kristof—right, so what was that about? Well, he talked about the fight to get lead removed from gasoline and paint, and the rise in intelligence levels in kids as a result of not being exposed to lead. And his bet is that the next big fight is going to be endocrine disrupting chemicals—the chemicals found in plastics and petroleum-based products. Next to me, as I read the story, was my bottle of water—which many scientists don’t allow their children to drink from. The bottling industry—hold on firmly to your chairs here—scoffs at the idea.

Who’s right, who’s wrong? Two things—we could have spent our time on that question, rather than closing down the government. And second, how are we going to fight big industries like the lead industry, the petroleum industry, or big tobacco except through government?

If you have the answer—tell me.

I’ll try to listen….

As our Governors Fiddled

Ouch—I’ll give it to you first in Spanish, and then in English:

“Esto es de lo peor que he visto”, comentó Zamansky, quien ha visto todo tipo de casos, incluyendo el sonado caso de Bernard Madoff.

“This is the worst I’ve ever seen,” Zamansky commented, who has seen all kinds of cases, including the famous case of Bernard Madoff.

And what is Jake Zamansky, a security and investment fraud attorney, talking about? Well, the case of the Puerto Rican branch of UBS, which has been selling Puerto Rican bonds to its clients for years now.

And what’s wrong with that? Aren’t bonds supposed to be a safe investment?

It seems not—especially in the case of Puerto Rico, whose credit rating is one step above junk bond rating, and whose government is seriously broke. How seriously broke? Well, how serious is 70 billion bucks? Our pension program is 37.3 billion underfunded.

“Of course,” said my friend Tony, “that’s just a guess-timate. Because you know what? There’s no actuarial work or studies done on the plan….”

My years with Mr. Fernández have taught me about actuaries; they’re statisticians who predict how much money a plan will need based on the number of people in the plan, the age, expected life span, etc. And if you don’t have that info? You’re operating completely in the dark.

This caused the governor, last month, to scurry up to New York to tell Moody’s and the other credit rating houses that all was well on the island, and that he / they had raised taxes and had a solid, solid plan to deal with the mess.

Did they? Well, it’s true that they had raised taxes—but what had they not done? The one thing that would really bring howls: cut the size of the government.

They did, however, take on the retirement system, and high time, since one of the senators…well, let him speak for himself:

"No retirement system in the world is as broken as ours," Senate President Eduardo Bhatia said on Thursday, before the overhaul legislation was approved by both houses of the Caribbean island's legislature.

The overhaul was bitterly protested, and went to the local Supreme Court, which upheld it. So now the protests have died down, but it’s anybody’s guess when the money will run out….

Now then, into this gloomy picture—oh, and I have told you the unemployment rate is about 15% and the per capita household income is half that of the poorest state, haven’t I?—steps UBS, which is one of the three biggest brokerage houses on the island.

And because of a unique feature in the law, Puerto Rico bonds happen to be rather attractive, at least potentially. Why? Here’s Bloomberg—and who should know but they?—on the subject:

Interest on debt issued by Puerto Rican governments is typically tax-free across the U.S., and yields on some issues topped 10 percent in recent weeks amid doubt about whether investors will be repaid. The bonds’ high yields and tax-exempt status make them popular with retail investors, according to the statement.

Nice, hunh?

Not so nice, said the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Secretary William F. Gavin in the same Bloomberg article:

“Puerto Rico is currently on the verge of insolvency and many of its obligations are at or near junk rating,” according to the statement. “The risks associated with its municipal debt obligation are disproportionally high.”

‘Well,’ you are perhaps thinking, ‘let the rich suffer. I, for one, only have the shirt on my back, the roof over my head, and the rice and beans in my stomach. So, however bad the losses in the bond market may have been, it’s hardly my problem….’

Wish that were true. But first, you should know that the losses were 2.2 billion in the month of September alone. Nor is it just the wealthy affected.

In fact, here’s Zamansky again:

“He atendido por lo menos a 150 personas y escucho, esencialmente, lo mismo. Son retirados, personas que son inversionistas conservadores y que se le dijo que invirtieran todo o una gran parte de su dinero en estos fondos cerrados y en bonos de Puerto Rico”, sostuvo el abogado. “A más de la mitad de estas personas se les instó a que tomaran prestado”.

“I’ve taken care of at least 150 people and have heard, essentially, the same tyhing. They are retired, people who are conservative investors and were told to invest all or a great part of their money in these closed funds and bonds of Puerto Rico,” he stated. “And more than half of these people were told to take out a loan to do so.”

The problem? Was UBS informing these people of the risks of investing in Puerto Rico? No bond is guaranteed if the government goes broke. And the advisability of offering or urging a line of credit or a loan to investors?

The Government Will Decide Whether to Sue UBS—reads the headline in The New Day, our local paper.

In the meantime, Zamansky and other lawyers are sitting in hotels, interviewing hundreds of mostly middle class retirees, many of whom have suffered significant losses. How significant? Some people are so old that they’re in nursing homes, and now the families are having to take them out of them: there’s no money left.

The handwriting has been on the wall for a long time, of course. A few years back, a Reuter’s blog came out and said it bluntly: Puerto Rico is America’s Greece. If our folly and foolishness had hurt the rich, I might cheer. But the idea of hard-working, prudent, conservative people losing their life savings?

…heart breaking.