One for the Sabbath

Here's a great little talk from TED, about the journalist from Esquire magazine who attempted to follow ALL of the laws in the Bible for a year. Including the attempted stoning of an elderly adulterer, including out-talking a Jehovah's witness, including a stint as a shepherd. Enjoy!

How about a real history lesson?

Concert: young Palenstinian refugees play for elderly Holocaust survivors. Reflect.

Another good choice for Lieutenant Governor?

Apparently Shawn Graham has recommended to PM Harper that Graydon Nicholas be appointed to replace Hermenegilde Chiasson when he completes his term this summer. I had the privilege of hearing Nicholas speak at an event two years ago and he was awesome.

He obviously has a deep sense of history and culture, and a deep attachment to the landscape - he referred to the Saint John River many times as "the aboriginal highway." He also has a love for learning, and most importantly, for justice. Although it would be a fine line to walk, being Abenaki and representing Her Royal Highness Queen Elizabeth II, Queen of Canada, Nicholas seems to be a man who can tell the truth in a way that everyone can respect. A rare find, indeed.

He spoke about the numerous times the provincial government refused to deal with educating native people in the 1960's and 1970's, and how successive governments basically ignored native rights to natural resources such as forestry. He has a deep knowledge of the legal history of colonial struggles between Aboriginal and European people and giving him a wide public platform would be a breath of fresh air. Graydon Nicholas is a great role model for all New Brunswickers and I hope he gets the job.

Kypreos has a heart

This may well be the only time in my life I blog about NHL hockey, but I just watched a great program on CBC's The Fifth Estate about fighting in hockey. The debate for and against fighting has intensified since the death of a 20 year-old hockey player in Brampton last January.

I have to say, I watched a lot of hockey in the 4th and 5th grades (saw the Penguins win two Stanley Cups) but have lost interest in the game since. I think it's largely an icy version of Ultimate Fighting - the emphasis on skill and speed has declined in recent years. I think this is one of the reasons for the increasing interest in women's hockey; it's more like "the old game."

In any case, I was watching Don Cherry and others defend fighting and what stood out was former 'enforcer' Nick Kypreos' response when asked whether he would want his son to play that role on the ice. He was very upset and almost unable to speak. He obviously understands that he built his career on being a fighter, and yet he was visibly shaken when imagining that fate for his son.

It was a very similar response to war veterens who go to great lengths to describe the inhumanity and brutality of war, and who emphasize how unglamorous it actually is. I was very heartened to see someone of Kypreos' status in hockey have the bravery to stand up to bullies who insist that bashing heads makes for a better game.

The more I look around, the more people my age become parents, the more I see how being responsible for vulnerable people changes our perspective on what is right and wrong. I think creating a life and bringing it in to the world transforms people, even someone like that who used to bust heads for a living.

Kypreos' also commented that the physical part of the violence was the easy part - it was the psychological toll that was difficult to confront. I remain very concerned about the level of violence sanctioned by the NHL, the culture that surrounds it, and the lessons it teaches young people. Let's just say that if I ever have children, they will be playing pond hockey only.



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On a completely unrelated note, did you hear about the new White House Vegetable Garden? How do I get an invitation for dinner?

Why not a newspaper bailout?

The doom-and-gloom stories about newspapers just keep coming. Soon major US cities such as San Fransisco might be without a daily paper. This concerns me for a number of reasons. First, because newspapers traditionally have more in depth coverage than television "news," which is usually a bunch of cliches laid end-to-end. (with some exceptions of course, but CNN, I'm looking at you).

Secondly, newspapers are one of the last local forms of media we have. Where else are you going to fund out about a variety of things - classified ads, concerts, public notices and tenders - all in once place? The internet is great if you know where to go looking, but not everyone does.

Which brings me to the third issue, access. Poor people often don't have computers or their internet access is so slow as to make it practically useless. A newspaper is much more available, and even an illiterate person can look at the pictures and make some sense out of what is happening.

It makes me sick to see all these greedy bankers getting bailed out when newspapers employ a lot of people and are far more vital than hedge funds, investment banks and 'derivatives.'

Newspapers are experiencing what record companies went through when downloading made buying cd's unnecessary. The newspapermen have yet to unleash any creative responses to the challenge posed by online journalism - it's hard to compete with the internet, which can publish in real time.

I think this is a reflection of how fragmented we have become - a city no longer has a voice in its newspaper, which is supposed to be a collection of facts, stories and debates about the future of that place.

Carleton County seems to be behind the times in that respect. Not enough people here live online so a newspaper is still an important source of information, and a viable business. If we could create one that is entirely local, we'd be ahead of the curve.

Thoughts on theatre, new links for writers

So, I heard people talking about plays twice today, on cbc radio. The 40th anniversary of TNB is on this year, with a big gala celebration planned for Fredericton in two weeks. I'd love to see them hit the road again; it's a shame the teevee and youtube make that so difficult financially.

This morning Walter Learning recounted a great story of being thanked by a farmer in Sussex for staging a play that "changed his life." The show? Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf? Who says farmers from Sussex don't get the big picture....

In any case, check out the new links - they're mostly Fredericton based but they have good taste in beer so I guess we'll overlook that for now. Cheers!

Re-establishing a food 'ecosystem'

Here's a great article about a city in Brazil that has eliminated hunger. Completely. Everyone now has access to quality food as a matter of course, and it's been great news for farmers too.

When we count our blessings, we should reflect on how much goes to people who don't need it, and how little it would take to nourish those in need.

me, the bowl of shreddies, fulfillment, and the middle east

So, today was "double band" day, plus 1. Thursdays are always tough - I'm staring down rehearsals at 7:30 a.m., 9:15 a.m., teaching all morning and afternoon, and then beginners after school until 5pm. At times it can be a very long day.

I overslept a bit this morning and didn't have time for breakfast and decided to take my cereal in a ziploc bag and soymilk in a little container, to eat after the 7:30 practice. In the teaching world, that would be considered a little odd, as the day arrives like a cyclone at 7:45 and never stops all day. But I was feeling weary and decided above all to meet my needs before proceeding for the day. It felt great to take 10 minutes for myself and be not running on empty all the livelong day.

Tonight (after a nap to recharge by music-addled brain) I came across this great talk by Tony Robbins, about why we do what we do. He maintains we are motivated by emotion and that our biggest need is making a contribution beyond ourselves - but that we focus so much on achievement we rarely take time to think about fulfillment.

At the end he tells about a seminar he was conducting on Sept. 11th where a confrontation occurred between a radical Jewish man and a radical Muslim man. You need to hear about what happened - watch the talk, it's 21 minutes. Plus he tells Al Gore why he lost the Supreme Court and the 2004 election.

A sort of therapist for the human soul.

Today, I wrote the first 57 bars of my part of "The Trials of Benny Swim." I wasn't sure how I felt about them, until I read this post, courtesy of my old Mount A. friend, Doug Leblanc. It's long but read it all, it's worth it.

Welcome address to freshman at Boston ConservatoryGiven by Karl Paulnack, pianist and director of music division at BostonConservatory.

"One of my parents' deepest fears, I suspect, is that society would not properly value me as a musician, that I wouldn't be appreciated. I had very good grades in high school, I was good in science and math, and they imagined that as a doctor or a research chemist or an engineer, I might be more appreciated than I would be as a musician. I still remember my mother's remark when I announced my decision to apply to music school-she said, "you're WASTING your SAT scores."

On some level, I think, my parents were not sure themselves what the value of music was, what its purpose was.And they LOVED music, they listened to classical music all the time. They just weren't really clear about its function. So let me talk about that a little bit, because we live in a society that puts music in the "arts and entertainment" section of the newspaper, and serious music, the kind your kids are about to engage in, has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with entertainment, in fact it's the opposite of entertainment. Let me talk a little bit about music, and how it works.

The first people to understand how music really works were the ancient Greeks. And this is going to fascinate you; the Greeks said that music and astronomy were two sides of the same coin. Astronomy was seen as the studyof relationships between observable, permanent, external objects, and music was seen as the study of relationships between invisible, internal, hidden objects. Music has a way of finding the big, invisible moving pieces insideour hearts and souls and helping us figure out the position of things inside us.

Let me give you some examples of how this works. One of the most profound musical compositions of all time is the Quartet for the End of Time written by French composer Olivier Messiaen in 1940. Messiaen was 31 years old when France entered the war against Nazi Germany.He was captured by the Germans in June of 1940, sent across Germany in a cattle car and imprisoned in a concentration camp.

He was fortunate to find a sympathetic prison guard who gave him paper and a place to compose. There were three other musicians in the camp, a cellist, a violinist, and a clarinetist, and Messiaen wrote his quartet with these specific players in mind. It was performed in January 1941 for four thousand prisoners and guards in the prison camp. Today it is one of the most famous masterworks in the repertoire.

Given what we have since learned about life in the concentration camps, why would anyone in his right mind waste time and energy writing or playing music? There was barely enough energy on a good day to find food and water,to avoid a beating, to stay warm, to escape torture-why would anyone bother with music? And yet-from the camps, we have poetry, we have music, we have visual art; it wasn't just this one fanatic Messiaen; many, many people created art. Why? Well, in a place where people are only focused on survival, on the bare necessities, the obvious conclusion is that art mustbe, somehow, essential for life.

The camps were without money, without hope, without commerce, without recreation, without basic respect, but they were not without art. Art is part of survival; art is part of the human spirit, an unquenchable expression of who we are. Art is one of the ways in which we say, "I am alive, and my life has meaning."

On September 12, 2001 I was a resident of Manhattan. That morning I reached a new understanding of my art and its relationship to the world. I sat down at the piano that morning at 10 AM to practice as was my daily routine; I did it by force of habit, without thinking about it. I lifted the cover onthe keyboard, and opened my music, and put my hands on the keys and took my hands off the keys. And I sat there and thought, does this even matter?Isn't this completely irrelevant? Playing the piano right now, given what happened in this city yesterday, seems silly, absurd, irreverent,pointless. Why am I here? What place has a musician in this moment in time?Who needs a piano player right now? I was completely lost.

And then I, along with the rest of New York, went through the journey of getting through that week. I did not play the piano that day, and in fact I contemplated briefly whether I would ever want to play the piano again. Andthen I observed how we got through the day. At least in my neighborhood, we didn't shoot hoops or play Scrabble. We didn't play cards to pass the time, we didn't watch TV, we didn't shop, we most certainly did not go to the mall. The first organized activity that I saw in New York, that same day, was singing. People sang. People sang around fire houses, people sang "We Shall Overcome". Lots of people sang America the Beautiful.

The first organized public event that I remember was the Brahms Requiem, later that week, at Lincoln Center, with the New York Philharmonic. The first organized public expression of grief, our firstcommunal response to that historic event, was a concert. That was the beginning of a sense that life might go on. The US Military secured the airspace, but recovery was led by the arts, and by music in particular,that very night.

From these two experiences, I have come to understand that music is not part of "arts and entertainment" as the newspaper section would have us believe. It's not a luxury, a lavish thing that we fund from leftovers of our budgets, not a plaything or an amusement or a pass time. Music is a basic need of human survival. Music is one of the ways we make sense of our lives, one of the ways in which we express feelings when we have no words,a way for us to understand things with our hearts when we can't with our minds.

Some of you may know Samuel Barber's heartwrenchingly beautiful piece Adagio for Strings. If you don't know it by that name, then some of you may know it as the background music which accompanied the Oliver Stone movie Platoon, a film about the Vietnam War. If you know that piece of music either way, you know it has the ability to crack your heart open like a walnut; it can make you cry over sadness you didn't know you had. Music can slip beneath our conscious reality to get at what's really going on inside us the way a good therapist does.

I bet that you have never been to a wedding where there was absolutely no music. There might have been only a little music, there might have been some really bad music, but I bet you there was some music. And something very predictable happens at weddings-people get all pent up with all kinds of emotions, and then there's some musical moment where the action of the wedding stops and someone sings or plays the flute or something. And even if the music is lame, even if the quality isn't good, predictably 30 or 40 percent of the people who are going to cry at a wedding cry a couple of moments after the music starts. Why? The Greeks. Music allows us to move around those big invisible pieces of ourselves and rearrange our insides so that we can express what we feel even when we can't talk about it.

Can you imagine watching Indiana Jones or Superman or Star Wars with the dialogue but no music? What is it about the music swelling up at just the right moment in ET so that all the softies in the audience start crying at exactly the same moment? I guarantee you if you showed the movie with the music stripped out, it wouldn't happen that way. The Greeks: Music is the understanding of the relationship between invisible internal objects.I'll give you one more example, the story of the most important concert ofmy life. I must tell you I have played a little less than a thousand concerts in my life so far. I have played in places that I thought were important. I like playing in Carnegie Hall; I enjoyed playing in Paris; it made me very happy to please the critics in St. Petersburg. I have played for people I thought were important; music critics of major newspapers,foreign heads of state.

The most important concert of my entire life took place in a nursing home in Fargo, ND, about 4 years ago. I was playing with a very dear friend of mine who is a violinist. We began,as we often do, with Aaron Copland's Sonata, which was written during WorldWar II and dedicated to a young friend of Copland's, a young pilot who wasshot down during the war. Now we often talk to our audiences about the pieces we are going to play rather than providing them with written program notes. But in this case, because we began the concert with this piece, we decided to talk about the piece later in the program and to just come out and play the music without explanation.Midway through the piece, an elderly man seated in a wheelchair near the front of the concert hall began to weep.

This man, whom I later met, was clearly a soldier-even in his 70's, it was clear from his buzz-cut hair, square jaw and general demeanor that he had spent a good deal of his life in the military. I thought it a little bit odd that someone would be moved to tears by that particular movement of that particular piece, but it wasn't the first time I've heard crying in a concert and we went on withthe concert and finished the piece. When we came out to play the next piece on the program, we decided to talk about both the first and second pieces, and we described the circumstances in which the Copland was written and mentioned its dedication to a downed pilot.

The man in the front of the audience became so disturbed that he had to leave the auditorium. I honestly figured that we would not see him again, but he did come backstage afterwards, tears and all, to explain himself.What he told us was this: "During World War II, I was a pilot, and I was in an aerial combat situation where one of my team's planes was hit. I watched my friend bail out, and watched his parachute open, but the Japanese planes which had engaged us returned and machine gunned across the parachute cords so as to separate the parachute from the pilot, and I watched my friend drop away into the ocean, realizing that he was lost.

I have not thought about this for many years, but during that first piece of music you played, this memory returned to me so vividly that it was as though I was reliving it. I didn't understand why this was happening, why now, but then when you came out to explain that this piece of music was written to commemorate a lost pilot, it was a little more than I could handle. How does the music do that? How did it find those feelings and those memories in me?"

Remember the Greeks: music is the study of invisible relationships between internal objects. This concert in Fargo was the most important work I have ever done. For me to play for this old soldier and help him connect, somehow, with Aaron Copland, and to connect their memories of their lost friends, to help him remember and mourn his friend, this is my work. This is why music matters.What follows is part of the talk I will give to this year's freshman class when I welcome them a few days from now.

The responsibility I will charge your sons and daughters with is this:"If we were a medical school, and you were here as a med student practicing appendectomies, you'd take your work very seriously because you would imagine that some night at two AM someone is going to waltz into your emergency room and you're going to have to save their life. Well, my friends, someday at 8 PM someone is going to walk into your concert hall and bring you a mind that is confused, a heart that is overwhelmed, a soul that is weary. Whether they go out whole again will depend partly on how well you do your craft.You're not here to become an entertainer, and you don't have to sell yourself. The truth is you don't have anything to sell; being a musicianisn't about dispensing a product, like selling used Chevies.

I'm not an entertainer; I'm a lot closer to a paramedic, a firefighter, a rescue worker. You're here to become a sort of therapist for the human soul, a spiritual version of a chiropractor, physical therapist, someone who works with our insides to see if they get things to line up, to see if we cancome into harmony with ourselves and be healthy and happy and well. Frankly, ladies and gentlemen, I expect you not only to master music; Iexpect you to save the planet. If there is a future wave of wellness on this planet, of harmony, of peace, of an end to war, of mutual understanding, of equality, of fairness, I don't expect it will come from a government, a military force or a corporation.

I no longer even expect it to come from the religions of the world, which together seem to havebrought us as much war as they have peace. If there is a future of peace for humankind, if there is to be an understanding of how these invisible, internal things should fit together, I expect it will come from the artists, because that's what we do. As in the concentration camp and the evening of 9/11, the artists are the ones who might be able to help us withour internal, invisible lives."

Mapping the Recession

For those of you who miss John King's 'magic wall' -and don't pretend you don't know what I'm talking about - here's a map showing the Unemployment rates in all counties in the U.S.. Interestingly, you can also change it to reflect manufacturing centres, rural areas. Lots of fun for those of us who like to look at the big picture. Just don't expect me to appear via hologram.

And here's an excerpt from Kunstler's ever-cheery website, where he prophesies that the next major meltdowns will involve both farming and oil markets. I hadn't really thought about the link between tight capital markets and corporate farming, but here's what he says:

The net effect of the failures in banking is that a lot of people have less money than they expected they would have a year ago. This is bad enough, given our habits and practices of modern life. But what happens when farming collapses? The prospect for that is closer than most of us might realize. The way we produce our food has been organized at a scale that has ruinous consequences, not least its addiction to capital. Now that banking is in collapse, capital will be extremely scarce. Nobody in the cities reads farm news, or listens to farm reports on the radio. Guess what, though: we are entering the planting season. It will be interesting to learn how many farmers "out there" in the Cheez Doodle belt are not able to secure loans for this year's crop.

My guess is that the disorder in agriculture will be pretty severe this year, especially since some of the world's most productive places -- California, northern China, Argentina, the Australian grain belt -- are caught in extremes of drought on top of capital shortages. If the US government is going to try to make remedial policy for anything, it better start with agriculture, to promote local, smaller-scaled farming using methods that are much less dependent on oil byproducts and capital injections.

Last year, most farms in Canada lost money. So, if lending guidelines tighten, are farmers going to be able to borrow more? It makes you wonder. The other thing is, I don't think we've seen the end of layoffs yet, and I think Canada is just beginning to feel the effects. Let's just say I will be doing some hard thinking about my food supply and whether or not to fill up that vacant cold-room in the basement. Panic or not, prices are only going to rise this year.

But, before you get all depressed, here's a great video of Willie Nelson and Ray Charles singing "Seven Spanish Angels." Just because I like it.