Today’s Advent piece takes us back to early
17th Century Germany and one of my favorite composers of Christmas
music. Yes, I’m talking about the meister, Michael Praetorius. There’s
something about his works that evokes for me candlelit churches filled with the
vocal tapestries of Lutheran choirs, with a faint scent of pine and Glühwein
wafting through the space.
The words of “Nun Komm, der Heiden
Heiland” were written by Martin Luther as a chorale. It’s been translated
into English as “Savior of the Nations, Come” and is typically sung on the
first Sunday of Advent. You may know it from J.S. Bach. Praetorius made it part of his seasonal collection, Christmas
Vespers. Here’s Cleveland’s ensemble Apollo’s Fire, which specializes in
early music, giving us their take.
It may surprise you to learn that today’s
Advent carol originated in Ukraine. It was written in 1914, based on the
Ukrainian folk chant “Shedryk”, about a swallow that sings the first song of
Spring. (Way back when, the New Year began in Spring, and “Shedryk” is kinda
focused on the New Year.)
We know it as “The Carol of the Bells.”
Here is the Muppets’ version, featuring Beaker, the Swedish Chef and Oscar the
Grouch.
My friends—after nearly nine years living
in this house, I finally have a primary bathroom I can actually use. It took me
two
months of talking with multiple contractors to
understand the components and compare pricing, and 10 days of actual labor to
rip everything down to the studs, expand the shower footprint from 32”x32” to
32”x44”, move the shower fixtures to the opposite wall, build out, lay tile and
install new vanity (with top, sink and hardware), medicine cabinet, toilet and
lighting.
And I am verklempt.
We went from this:
And this floor:
Note, in particular, the embedded medicine
cabinet that indubitably dates from 1970:
I expect it’s been unusable since at least
the 90s.
To this:
Along the way, we had demo:
Note the cinderblock wall on the left.
That necessitated the crew building out the space with 2x4s to accommodate the
shower plumbing. (I moved the fixtures from the right to the left because—with the
expanded shower footprint blocked from the outside by the toilet, I did not
want to have to step into the shower to turn it on, and be hit with a blast of
cold water.) Also note the parquet flooring on the right at the back; that’s a closet
from my back bedroom, which gave me the space for the wider shower.
We had the shower walls (and dry floor,
but it’s covered up) tiled, waiting for the accent tiles:
It's a good thing I don't use the primary bedroom, because this is what it's looked like for three weeks:
After a week waiting for Home Depot to
pull its finger out, we had accent tiles, and boy, they were worth the wait:
See—here was my inspiration, from a DIY
subreddit:
The color scheme is astonishingly
butt-ugly, but I was struck by the idea of the accent tiles flowing down past
the shower hardware and filling the floor, like a waterfall. I was thinking of
something in blue, but it turns out that HGTV is not doing blues this season,
so they are not to be found.
What I did find were these beauties:
Once I had them, I wanted everything else
in the room to take a backseat. I have to say, it worked out exactly as I had
visualized it. The niche on the right echoes the flow, and it’s situated at
exactly the height I need to accommodate my Costco haircare products, pumps and
all.
Along the way, the crew discovered a crack
in the main drain pipe. That was on a Thursday and necessitated making gigantic
holes in my kitchen ceiling and down the column where the pipe flowed.
On the Saturday a master plumber showed up
and in half a day, he and his assistant replaced the “black pipe” material
(which probably also dated to 1970) with PVC.
Last week a guy drywalled, finished and
painted the kitchen with exquisite care, and you’d never know it had suffered
possibly mortal wounds.
(Oh—another long story, but there was a
thing with the main water shutoff valve early in the project. That resulted in
my kitchen faucet conking out. Eric—the mainstay of the project—tried fixing
it, but no good. As it happens, I’d intended to replace that tap—the arm was
stuck in one position and it had started not getting full flow. I showed Eric
the new one, and he spent a couple of hours on a Saturday installing it.)
I now have an all-singing-all-dancing 36”x24”
medicine cabinet, with about 32 light phases, including a night light; I’m
hoping it will do the heavy lifting for my bathroom storage needs.
I got plenty of mirrors and plenty of light.
New toilet, new vanity/hardware/sink.
Recessed light over the shower and another light over the medicine cabinet. You
could perform surgery in this theatre.
But most of all—I have a lovely shower
space, with both a rain shower head and a hand-held, which I can step into
without climbing over the edge of a bathtub. This is huge.
And it’s got me thinking about water and
things that sparkle in it. So, let’s head over to the old world for today’s
Advent music. (We're in Advent, remember?) Specifically, Spain, for “Los
peces en el río.”
There’s not a whole lot of substance in
this one—just the fairly banal activity of Mary washing and combing her hair, washing
her hands and laundering diapers. And the fish; the sparkly fish.
To tell you the truth, I’m a skosh vague about the connection between the
Nativity and Mary washing her hair by the river; rivers don't appear to figure
large in Nativity stories. But I’m willing to go with it. Woman's gotta do the
needful, after all. And why shouldn’t fishes be excited about the birth of the
Savior? The Good News isn't just for mammals, is it?
There’s no peg on when this was written or
by whom, but it became popular in the second half of the 20th
Century. Here we’ve got the Mexican trio Pandora singing it.
If you’ll excuse me, now, I’ll just pop
into my new bathroom to take another shower. My fifth of the day.
I am rounding the final corner on the remodel
of my primary bathroom. If all goes well, I
should be able to start using it tomorrow, or Wednesday. We’ve got vanity
light, shower doors, shower fixtures and toilet yet to install.
The project manager estimated they’d do it
in two weeks, which I took to mean 10 days of guys-on-site; today is Day 10.
(There was a week off while Home Depot faffed around with the accent tiles, so
technically it’s three weeks since they started.) What I’ve noticed in that
time is the expertise, attention to detail and amazing work ethic of everyone
who’s come in—demolition, plumbing, electrics, tiling, drywalling, installing.
They found a crack in the drain pipe on a
Thursday. By Saturday a master plumber was in the kitchen swapping out “black
pipe” with PVC. Last Wednesday a guy drywalled all the holes in the kitchen
(including ones that predated this project), and on Friday he finished off with
sanding and painting. I have a quasi-new kitchen.
Meanwhile, my primary bath is progressing
so beautifully—mostly the work of Eric, who has done everything since the demo.
He consulted me on the niche—height, width, etc. It’s tall enough to accommodate
the shampoo I buy from Costco and at a height that I can pump the bottles one
handed.
All this is by way of saying that I’ve
been doing a lot of thinking about laborers lately—in particular the people who
build and repair, who erect houses and expand roads. They are skilled and they
do hard work that I, frankly, would probably literally die before I could get
it right. I am in complete awe of their abilities and I am grateful for
everything they do. Especially knowing how vulnerable they are to exploitation, harassment and outright criminal attacks these days.
As it happens, the boy who was born in a
cow stall in Bethlehem two millennia ago was the child of a laborer—Joseph was
a carpenter, and Jesus went into the family business until it was time to take
up the other family business. The Messiah was not an accountant, a doctor or a
businessman; he was a carpenter. He was a Brown guy who built and repaired
things out of wood.
Pretty much like Eric, with the addition
of 21st Century plumbing and electrical.
So my Advent piece today honors Joseph,
who frankly doesn’t generally figure large in the Nativity narrative. (Just
like laborers today.) It’s by way of a lullaby, originating in 16th
Century mystery plays in Germany. I’m giving you Voces8 singing it.
Well, looky here—it’s Advent again, right
on schedule. That period before Christmas where Christians are meant to snuggle
into the season and prepare for the birth of Christ. It’s a long one this
year: four Sundays and four days to get our act together, to gather our
thoughts, count our blessings, assess how we’ve done during the previous months
and what we might do better in the coming year.
Oh, and maybe let in a little joy. And
hope.
You can do this whether you’re religious
or not, whether you’re Christian or not.
IMHO, it’s a good thing indeed to press
pause—especially at year’s end and when the nights are long and cold in the
Northern Hemisphere—and reflect. Reflect on whatever it is you’ve got that
needs reflecting.
And I believe that this year in
particular, it’s appropriate to consider people around the world who may find
it hard to see either joy or hope; I’m looking at Ukraine, at Israel and
Palestine, at Sudan, among others. In fact, I’m looking right here in the
United States, where Republicans are indulging in an exaltation of
authoritarianism as Democrats mostly flap their hands and send stern letters.
Where masked federal agents kitted out in the accoutrements of war are tear
gassing wine moms, pepperballing ministers in the act of prayer and ripping
anyone who looks non-white off the streets to meet Stephen Miller’s quota of detention-to-deportations.
Where the Kleptocrat layers gilded plastic gimcrackery over every vertical surface
of the White House—that portion that he hasn’t ripped down or paved over—and dreams
of a triumphal arch at the entrance to Arlington National Cemetery (it’ll be
much bigger, with much more gold, than l’Arc de Triomphe, because Macron just
really gets under that orange lizard skin).
Yeah, it's a struggle everywhere.
First Sunday in Advent is in fact about
hope. The prophesy of Isaiah looms large, and we open our hearts to the hope of
the redeemer’s birth—in whatever form that might take. So we’ll start out with
“O Come, O Come, Emmanuel”, which is as clear an invitation as you’re going to
get.
Floriani is a quartet of men whose common
ground seems to be having attended Thomas Aquinas College, a small liberal arts
school in Santa Paula, Calif., that teaches using the Great Books method. The
group is focused on sacred music.
May the light of the season warm and
strengthen all who struggle against darkness (literally) and those who suffer
in captivity.
Today’s earworm isn’t specifically a Thanksgiving piece,
but it is about being grateful for things around us.
Yes, I know—for millions and millions of people around the
globe, this is not, in fact, a wonderful world. Millions of Americans, in fact,
are struggling to survive, particularly in this political and economic climate.
All the more reason to seek out the good, the beautiful,
the kind, the generous.
Welp, it’s the big one for gratitude here in the United
States. A day set aside for the purpose of counting blessings and acting en
famille. (It’s also the official demarcation for The Christmas Season,
although Christmas merch has been in Costco since August, and Hallmark seems to
run its Christmas rom-coms pretty much all year round now.)
In our current political and economic situation, I can see
that it might be difficult for many people to feel gratitude—or to crawl out
from under anxiety, fear or even just crushing unease that can pervade our
lives. Never in my own lifetime have I felt the disparity between the haves and
the have-lesses and have-nots. Billionaires who nonetheless never have enough
squeezing ever more out of the middle and working classes, aided and abetted by
politicians and politicized courts. There are hundreds of thousands of my neighbors across the country who are living with food insecurity. It’s real, it’s unamerican and it’s disgusting.
So what I have to pull myself out of is continually being
pissed off at the perversion of the idea of America; anger can be good, but not
when it’s carried around like an extra 20 pounds on the butt. That’s why I make
gratitude a discipline, to remind myself that we can refuse to let the world be
unremitting horror, and that one way to start that process is to acknowledge
the good in it whenever and wherever we find it.
So—today I’m grateful for the friends who include me in
their Thanksgiving celebrations every year. I never take their invitation for
granted, but when it comes, I’m delighted. I get to make pie! I get to make cranberry
relish! I get to spend an evening with friends, eating turkey (which I would
never make for myself) and engaging in wide-ranging discussions.
I’m grateful for every protestor at every ICE facility and
activity in every city across the country. As wealthy individuals, institutions
and corporations kowtow to the Kleptocrat like bobble-head dogs on the back
decks of low-riders, it’s the soccer moms, the priests and pastors, the
neighbors of all economic stripes and the students who are peacefully locking
arms and filming our very own masked Gestapo thugs committing crimes right out
in daylight. They have been tear gassed, beaten and arrested, and they still
return to bear witness.
I’m absolutely verklempt for the protest that scores of
people pulled at a Home Depot in Monrovia, Calif.—buying $.79 ice scrapers and
immediately returning them, to tie up the store’s self-service check-out
registers for hours. They did the needful for a business that toadies to the
thugs.
While I’m talking capitalism—kudos to the millions of
people boycotting Target for caving to the anti-Woke nonsense. (Notice: I’m one
of the boycotters, but it’s not as though my $50 annual spend there is going to
be missed. Still—a lot of littles make a lot.) Target’s hurting and had to
replace its CEO after only six or seven months of the boycott.
And—more capitalism: without the workers in the fields (in-country and around the world), the ones in meat packing plants, the people who get food from its starting point to our tables, we'd be SOL. For any and every meal. Thank you to all!
Big, deep, joyous thanks to all the No Kings and other demonstrations
of force. Because that’s precisely what they are: demonstrations of the power
of what the founders called We the People. You don’t see millions of people
turning out around the country (and indeed the world) to laud the Kleptocrat
and his authoritarian machinations, but you do see the protestors. Repeatedly. And
so do those in power.
Humble gratitude to people who show everyday kindness in a
time when I cannot imagine anyone is without angst. The smiles, the nods;
patience—oh, my, what a grace that is when I encounter it. “Please” and “thank
you.” Just wow!
I give thanks for the people who looked after my sister in
her final days. She had progressed to the really ugly stage of Alzheimer’s, but
both friends and professionals cared for her with respect and love. I cannot be
more grateful for that than I am, even a year later.
The dogs I meet on my morning walks fill me with delight,
and I’m thankful I can share even a few moments with them. There’s one who
positively dances down the sidewalk; she stops me dead every time in admiration.
Dogs are an unexpected and unlooked for grace.
I’m grateful for my friends—the ones down the street and
the ones across an ocean. They make me a better person, they talk me down from
the ledge, they spark laughter when I need it the most, they give me comfort.
Nature—large and small—fills me with both awe and delight.
When I’m having a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad day, a quick walk
outside mitigates even the worst things. Thank God for that.
And you know what else? Thank God for the internet. That’s
where I got the recipe for pumpkin pie (thanks, Martha!), how I learn about
legal issues (thanks, Bluesky), join communities and get reporting from
publications around the world. (Take that, WaPo!) Yes, it’s a cesspool
of misinformation and malevolence, but—just like the world—it contains powerful
good and it’s up to you do decide which roads you’re going to follow.
I give thanks to those who stand watch for us—whether they’re
wearing cammies and tactical gear or scrubs and a stethoscope; for those who
serve us—whether in a government agency or a retail store; for those who keep
the neighborhood clean by picking up the trash; and for those who deliver
packages, groceries and mail. They’re like the air we breathe—necessary for a
good life, but often overlooked until it turns bad.
And, finally, I’m grateful for the 22nd
Amendment. I hope not even this SCOTUS will find a way to abrogate that.
Last Sunday, I attended an event featuring the former host
of NPR’s “All Things Considered” talking with Anthony S. Fauci, MD. It was a
fascinating discussion, all the way from Fauci’s upbringing in an
Italian-American neighborhood in Brooklyn to his leadership of the US scientific
and medical efforts to identify, treat and prevent COVID-19 during the pandemic five years ago.
Fauci is a personable guy (as is Siegel) and I was taken by
the sense of curiosity and the commitment to service that have obviously shaped
his life. (He also spearheaded the American investigation into HIV and AIDS in
the 1980s and 1990s that eventually led to effective treatments, changing what
was at one time a death sentence to a chronic condition for sufferers.)
Since that interview, I’ve been thinking about how deeply
grateful for Fauci and men and women like him—the whole gamut, from pure researchers
who want to find out where a microorganism came from and how it interacts with
its environment; to the applied scientists who carry that further to develop
new therapies and ways to improve life; to the healthcare professionals and
public health officials who take it where the rubber meets the road.
I don’t often spend time on all of this—in the same way
that I don’t often consider how the engine in my Saab works…until it doesn’t.
But when things began to go south in January of 2020, every member of every bioscientific,
medical and public health organization did everything possible to contain,
mitigate and turn around the most devastating virus to strike the world since
1918. And in the United States, they did it despite active attempts by Republicans
at every level of government to deny, diminish and deter the efforts, while
maximizing the prospects of making both money and political hay out of it.
I’m thinking in particular the doctors, nurses and support
staff at hospitals all over the country who worked exhausting shifts, often
without proper protective gear, to treat thousands of patients at the stage
where no one really knew what was going to work. I also recall that they died
in their hundreds.
The thing is—this stuff goes on all the time: the research,
the scientific iterations (and sometimes breakthrough innovations), the medical
care. And we don’t notice it, really, until there are problems—a new drug is
too expensive to buy, surgery is unsuccessful or the insurance company denies
the claim. But today I am in grateful awe for everyone involved in these
things, because they all rely on humans who really care about making things
better.
Eighty years ago today, the International Military Tribunal
convened in the nearly destroyed city of Nuremberg. Its purpose was to hold accountable
the (surviving) leaders of Germany for the World War II horrors that went well
beyond the previously held norms of warfare. It was the first and most
groundbreaking of many war crimes trials in Europe. (Which continued for
decades; the last significant trial of a Nazi was held in 2015, when SS junior
squad leader at Auschwitz Oskar Gröning was convicted of accessory to murder in
300,000 cases; he died before serving his sentence. In 2016, SS guard at Auschwitz
Reinhold Hanning was convicted of accessory to murder; he was sentenced to five
years’ imprisonment. As of 2024, there were still cases pending.) The thinking
at Nuremberg, though, was that for crimes of such a scope as the Nazis
perpetrated, it would not suffice to nail a few low-ranking perpetrators; those
responsible for designing the criminal strategies and for giving the orders needed
to be held accountable.
There was a bit of “we have to learn from our mistakes in
1918” in the very notion of the proceedings. (That also contributed to the
decision three years before that nothing short of unconditional surrender by
Axis powers would end the fighting. No bargaining, no negotiating, no weaseling—all
or nothing.) There was also a good deal of, oh, differences of opinion on how
to handle the big Nazis. Stalin wanted them all shot out of hand (maybe a quick
run past a tribunal on the way to the scaffold), and Churchill was of a similar
mind. (For context, the Soviet Union suffered more than 20 million deaths—military
and civilian—between 1941 and 1945, and Britain would take nearly a decade to
crawl out from the destruction.) FDR and Truman held out for legitimate trials,
with defense attorneys and a judicial panel following legal standards. The French
nodded their heads.
One of the issues presenting itself in this very notion of
a tribunal was, in fact, what legal standards do you follow? There are
international rules of war (yes—there are!), but the Nazis blew past
them when they invaded the USSR and was fairly loose in following them in
Western Europe. The question arose: what constitutes a crime that stands out in
the mechanized destruction of that war, and what constitutes a crime for people
who kept their hands remarkably clean because of their distance and their
altitude in the organization?
Eventually the Allies settled on four charges for the head Nazis:
Conspiracy to commit crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes
against humanity
Crimes against peace (planning, initiating and executing a war of aggression)
War crimes (fairly established internationally: killing civilians, mistreating
POWs, deportation*)
Crimes against humanity (political, racial and religious persecution of
civilians; genocide)
*Oh—hey!
The conspiracy charge was where they got some of the
defendants who had been the farthest away from actual gunpowder and the slave
labor.
There was a lot of pushback in Germany—and other places—that
this would be a show trial, “victors’ justice”, sauce for the goose that the
ganders would never taste. (Basically—whataboutism writ large.) But the Allies
carried on. They laid out procedural rules, gave the defendants attorneys,
assigned prosecutors and empaneled a bench of judges from the four major
powers. They had to accommodate three systems of jurisprudence (Anglo-Saxon,
French, Russian), build out a courtroom, ensure simultaneous translation of all
activities, tend to the health of the 23 defendants present (Martin Bormann was
tried in absentia), keep the lights on and continuously negotiate the gigantic
egos of most of the participants, on both sides of the dock for nearly a year.
At the end of the trial, 19 Nazi leaders were found guilty
of one or more of the charges and 12 received death by hanging sentences. Wilhelm
Keitel demanded a firing squad as more befitting his military service, but it
was denied. Turns out if you’re sentenced for a criminal conviction, your crime
trumps any previous condition. Hermann Göring (who also demanded a firing
squad) cheated the hangman by swallowing cyanide the night before execution.
Of the defendants sentenced to prison terms, only Albert
Speer and Rudolf Hess served out their full terms (the former 20 years, the
latter life, until his suicide in 1987). Speer whined for the rest of his life.
The IMT of 1945-46 was the precursor of the International
Court of Justice at The Hague. I concede that the world’s attempts to hold the
worst criminals in the world accountable have fallen short. And I acknowledge
that one of the stumbling blocks arises from the United States being really
uneasy about applying the term “war criminal” to actions we take in our
interests. (Yes, we should have held a state funeral for irony long ago.) Dick
Cheney and George W. Bush should have been in the dock alongside Slobodan
Milošević and Radovan Karadžić, and the Kleptocrat’s ass should have been there
since his drone strikes in Yemen and Syria in his first term. Now he’s just
taking the piss, thanks to the Roberts SCOTUS’ immunity ruling.) But—like 10,000
lawyers at the bottom of the ocean—it’s a start, and we should build on it.
But here’s an interesting thing, when I searched on the
Nuremberg trial (using Duck Duck Go, because I’ve had it with Google), this was
at the top of the results.
Okay, ordinarily I’d present this vanity plate in a cluster
of them.
But this SUV had more than just the personalized license. (Which
is not immediately clear to me. Does JR have a JD, and is he the third Virginia
car owner to do so? Do JD and JR have three offspring? I do not know.) First
there was the tailgating warning.
But there was also this on one of the side windows:
Are they a coffee delivery service? Does the driver always have coffee on hand? Is the car fitted out to make coffee?
They’re telling me something, but I’ll be blowed if I know
what it is.
Okay, one of my neighbor families is preparing to move, after living in the cluster since the 70s. So, as you might imagine, there are things to be cleared out.
All kinds of things, including:
I haven’t yet had an opportunity to ask about this one.
Today’s earworm is some advice from Nina
Simone for the Democratic party. The Dems weren’t her specific target when she
wrote it in 1964—in an hour of concentrated fury. It was her response to the
murders in Mississippi of Emmett Till (lynching), Medgar Evers (shot in the
back), and the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church, in
Birmingham, Ala., that killed four Black girls.
