The writing on the wall

I was attempting to clear out my hard drive—a task which I find exceedingly difficult because it’s kind of like your junk room: you just heave stuff in there willy-nilly until you’ve got a right mess, with the added layer of complexity that usually you only heave one thing into your junk room, but there is pretty much an infinite number of times you can save a file to your hard drive, if it’s living in different folders—and came across this photo I shot a few years ago.

The tagger decorated the wall outside my condo complex, and I wondered what statement s/he was trying to make.

About foolishness?

About fuel consumption?

About some conflation of the two?

And was the number 1 appended to distinguish it in a limited series of tags? Like lithographs by Andy Warhol?

Sadly, the condo association washed it out shortly after it appeared, so I’ll never know.

I’ll also probably never know how many copies of this I’ve saved to my hard drive.

Gratitude Monday: light over darkness

We’re in an interesting corner of the calendar, where days grow shorter and people of various traditions celebrate the triumph of light over darkness, of good over evil and of life over death.

Yesterday marked the first day of the Hindu festival of Diwali. I learned about Diwali when I moved to the Valley They Call Silicon. Since I was struggling with driving back the dark, I glommed onto it like limpets on a rock. Last night I again massed candles to drive back all manner of dark things. Not only do I like the soft light that groups of candles give off, the very act of lighting them one at a time and nursing along some of the ones at the end of their life slows me down. It calms me down.

Filling a room with candle light takes time; you can’t flip a switch and move on to the next task on your to-do list. And if you’re lighting those floating jobbers, you have to be very focused on not disturbing the water, because then it dowses the flames and you have to wipe them off and start over again.

It’s like the count-breaths-to-21 methodology of meditation: if you lose count because your monkey mind is distracted, you have to begin again from one.

There are some days I never make it into double digits.

But there’s something about knowing how happy the moving lights will make me that enables me to persevere with candles. I light them, sit back and watch; and for at least a few minutes the world around me is peaceful and full of hope. Light prevails over darkness, love conquers fear, and good triumphs over evil.

Today—the holiday you know as Halloween—is also the Celtic holiday Samhain. It marks the bringing in of the harvest and the envelopment of the world in winter darkness. And tonight is the night when the doors between the living and the dead open, and protective and cleansing bonfires are lit.

Today is also el Día de Muertos in the Mexican tradition, when the living open their lives to the dead, who are celebrated with sugar skulls, favorite foods and drink, both in the home and via picnics at cemeteries. The celebration runs through tomorrow (All Saints Day, in the Catholic Church) and Wednesday.

Because on Wednesday, Christians mark All Souls’ Day, remembering the faithful departed. Not precisely inviting their spirits back into daily life, but certainly making space for the memories and praying for their souls.

This year I have one more custom to add: the yahrzeit candle of Jewish tradition, to mark the anniversary of my BFF’s death. That happened the 18^th of October last year, so I’ve been more focused than usual on consciously filling my life with light. This consciousness includes gratitude—acknowledging the things and events, both large and small, that connect me with the world (and the spirits) around me. Walking in the light, as it were.

Like lighting many candles in a dark room, this takes time. You don’t flip a switch and fill your life with light; you light one candle at a time, and nurse the weak ones along to give their best.

So: light over darkness, good over evil, life over death, love over fear. These are the things I give thanks for at this time of year.

Gratitude Monday: what a year

I was riding Metro to work Thursday morning when I realized that precisely a year before I was getting ready for a job interview. The interview, in fact, that brought me to the District They Call Columbia.

It was also the last time I spoke with my BFF: I walked back to my hotel after the interview, kicked off those interview shoes and dialed her to report on the whole thing. How I actually enjoyed talking with the panel of seven, was psyched up by the challenge, loved being in the city in October. She was drifty because of the morphine, but nonetheless expressed her excitement, and made a joke about my one competitor for the job.

Our last laugh.

It’s been a taxing year since that day, and I’m only now starting to feel like I might be getting my head around what I need to do, how to frame my communications, where I need to be. Many rivers to cross, of course, but I can do it.

So today I’m grateful for the way things finally came together, and for the opportunities ahead.

Gratitude Monday: The scent of spring

I rambled around my NoVa neighborhood on Saturday and Sunday. It’s an old one—well, reasonably old by Virginia standards. New construction is seeping into it, but for now, at least, the balance is in favor of houses that date well back into the early part of the last century.

The yards are old landscaping, too, which I really enjoy. Especially when I come across an abundance of flowers. No matter what kind of crappy mood I’m in, flowers on the hoof always lift my spirits.

And on both days, I experienced the joy of walking into a wall of the scent of wild roses before I actually paid attention to the shrubs.

And then there were the beautiful flowers themselves.

It’s been a while since I’ve had that kind of encounter, and I’m very grateful for being reminded that all sorts of beauty fill my life every day.

Yahrzeit

We’re a year on from the barbaric terror attack on Charlie Hebdo, and it doesn’t look to me like we’ve progressed in any respect during that time.

On 7 January 2015, masked gunmen (why the hell are they always masked, if they think they’re doing holy work?) broke into the offices of the Paris-based satirical weekly magazine. Shouting “Allahu Akbar!” they methodically went through the building, killing 11 and wounding another 11. On their way out, they murdered a policeman (a Muslim, as it happens)—a crime captured on video.

Later on, their comrades attacked a kosher grocery store, killing four more people. Eventually the two alleged perps, French-born brothers of Algerian parents, were hunted down and died in a gunfight with massive numbers of police.

There was a global response of revulsion and outcry against the attacks, but not much else, really. Not that I can see.

Except, of course, the scaled-up killing spree of November across Paris, using both bombs and automatic assault rifles to murder 130 people who were watching a football match, having a drink or a meal, listening to a rock concert, or just walking down the streets (And plenty of other attacks in various places.)

In the wake of those events, most of the civilized world backed off of end-of-year holiday celebrations and laid on heavy paramilitary actions because they were so unprepared for something on the scale of Paris. We’re talking the kinds of armed troops patrolling Paris and Brussels that you used to see in Ulster or Beirut.

There was a lot of high-level blah-blah in January and February of last year about doing something, but clearly those who push jihad didn’t get copied on the memo. Yeah, I get it—Overtaken By Events; the West is preoccupied by the whole ISIL thing, and the masses alternatively referred to as migrants, refugees and I don’t know what-all. And those are not trivial issues.

But I’m deeply disappointed that in the 21^st Century, with all our investment in intelligence technology and military systems, we still seem to lack the cojones to deal with this brand of thuggery that wants to drag us all back to the 7^th Century. And I’m disgusted that we’re marking the Charlie Hebdo anniversary with nothing perceptible to show for the 365 days that have passed.

  

Apparently nous ne sommes pas Charlie.

Cold snap

My, my, my; weather here in the District They Call Columbia has turned nippy. Quite the shock for someone who’s been living in the paradise of the Bay Area. The instant you walk out the door you know you’re not going to be able to scrump oranges and lemons off trees along your walking route.

In fact, it’s so cold your eyes tear up and you start worrying about your mascara running.

Back when I first lived in this area (back in the last century), it took me years to take precautions against the cold. I’d hare out of the house and be halfway down the block before I’d realize how bleedin’ cold it was, especially for ungloved hands. But by that, time, of course, I was half a block away and shivering.

Repeated frozen digits didn’t seem to make any kind of dent in my SoCal sensibilities, however, so I solved the problem by stuffing gloves in the pockets of every coat and jacket I owned. And although I only have two coats with me at the moment, fortunately they both have gloves in the pockets.

Yes, I did walk out of a coffee shop yesterday leaving one of the gloves on the counter, but I assure you that I almost immediately realized the error and fetched it back.

Turns out that, because I almost never needed a coat in the Valley They Call Silicon, I’ve never thought to pull the gloves out of the pockets. Thank God.

Through the academic looking glass

You will no doubt have noticed that the world of academia has pretty much gone down the rabbit hole and is currently producing wonder after wonder of weirdness. But something I find interesting is basically a tale of two famed institutions right here in California, and I can’t believe that I appear to be the first person to notice this particular disconnect.

In November, the California State Polytechnic University at Pomona (Cal Poly) revoked an honorary Doctor of Letters degree it had conferred on Bill Cosby back in 1992. The reason given was that the multiple allegations of sexual harassment brought against him are “contrary to the values” of the state university system.

The Cal State University system comprises 23 campuses up and down the state and has always been the working-class cousin to the University of California system. Cal State used to be where you’d go if you couldn’t afford UC, but that delta has blurred in recent times. The two Polytechnic schools (at Pomona and San Luís Obispo) are kind of the aggie-engineering arms of the system; my mom used to take us to the horse shows at Pomona, which were student-run.

Well, hard luck for Cosby that the university discovers it has values, and you can actually run afoul of them. Turns out that other academic institutions have snatched back honorary degrees from him, too.

But then, only the month before, famed UC Berkeley astronomy professor Geoffrey Marcy found his career blowing up in his face over not dissimilar charges of decades of sexually harassing students and colleagues. Marcy was outed by BuzzFeed, more than a year after complaints filed against him to the university’s Office of Prevention of Harassment and Discrimination were buried by officials. At first, he looked like he was going to get away with nothing more than a reprimand in his dossier, but eventually the storm rose to the point where he had to resign, still insisting that he hadn’t meant any harm by all those years of fondling and suggestive remarks.

Here’s the thing: before Marcy moved to Cal in 1999, he spent 15 years at San Francisco State—part of the system that yanked Cosby’s honorary degree—where he was also accused of inappropriate behavior.

So the Board of Trustees of the California State University system revokes Cosby’s imaginary doctorate for, basically, conduct unbecoming, but makes Marcy a Distinguished University Professor despite very similar behavior. Honestly—can they just show a little consistency?

And rest...

It’s the last day of 2015, a year that completely wore me out.

Perhaps it’s A Sign that the battery on my pedometer died yesterday, while I was 35,000 feet above middle America, and that when I get the new one today, I reset it to Eastern Standard Time. Because in the next few days I have to figure out how to reset a lot of things in my life: recharge my physical, mental and emotional batteries; reorient myself to the Metro D.C. area; and recalibrate my thought patterns for the new job, which is different from anything I’ve done before.

Ordinarily I’d wrap up the year in a few hundred trenchant words, but to tell you the truth, I just don’t have the bandwidth for that today. I can’t wrap up the job search, the death of friends, the decision to walk off a metaphoric cliff or any of the rest of it. Instead, I’m getting a pedometer battery, and then I’m going to Wegman’s, just to look around.

After that—I don’t even know. I just know that I’m ready to ring out the year.

California, here I go

As of 0915 today (Lord willing and Virgin America for once taking off on time), I have ceased to be a resident of California. For two months I shall reside in the District They Call Columbia, within spitting distance of Congressmorons and other lowlifes, while I explore the area and decide where I’d like to live on a more permanent basis.

During this time I’ll be living out of suitcases and bin bags. For a couple of weeks, I’ll even be without a car, until mine catches up with me. That’ll make me feel terribly urban, I can tell you. And very un-Californian.

But I can use that time to find my way on foot around the city, get my feet under the desk (when my employers find me one), and generally reorient myself.

What a slice.

"We deliver for you"--NOT

More than two weeks ago I submitted the very-hard-to-get hardcopy Change of Address form to the USPS, setting 22 December as the date they should stop delivering mail to my old place and begin forwarding it to my new one in D.C.

I cleared out the mailbox on the 23^rd, and hoped that that was the end of it. But no—I went by on the 27^th to find five new pieces of mail addressed to me, which had been newly delivered after my cut-off date. Since I’m turning over the keys to the property management company today, I found this frustrating and enraging. They basically just blew off the CoA. So I had to go online and re-submit, in the tenuous hope that at least the computer system will spark some action—like, maybe, automatically pull my mail out of the delivery queue for redirection.

They make the hardcopy form hard to get (it’s not out on their counter with other forms; you have to ask one of their rude and charmless humanoid staff for it) because they clearly want you to go online to submit the change. An online form puts the data immediately into their database and saves them the labor costs of paying someone to translate the postcard details to their system. I get that.

But here’s their business model: they charge you for the privilege of saving them the work and possible data entry error. Yes—you make life easier for them, and save them a few bob, and they hit you up for $1.05.

But get this: they say they have to do this to you, for your security:

Where in the hell does that come from? How does charging you $1.05 have anything to do with security? It’s just another money-sucking scheme. (And I’m sure they hired consultants who arrived at that bizarre price point as the “sweet spot” where people would just fork it over without bitching.)

So, what I wonder is—if you don’t have Internet access, or a credit card—what are you meant to do? I guess you’re just not supposed to get mail. And if you do, you better not be moving, because you’re totally stuffed. They obviously toss out the official-but-non-revenue-generating postcard forms and do whatever they please.

Oh, but here’s the other thing: that unicorn CoA postcard doesn’t come as a single piece of paper any longer. It’s buried in a packet of “moving deals”—from Lowe’s, Best Buy and I don’t know what all. And the online form has the equivalent. Once you agree to let them suck $1.05 from your credit card, here’s the “confirmation” page:

Thanks, USPS, for being a crass, incompetent, lazy-ass organization with attitudinal staff and no discernable value proposition. Because people moving any distance really appreciate the way you put obstacles in their path and add stress to their lives. You continue to set standards for underperformance and don’t-give-a-damn customer service right here in the 21^st Century.

Gratitude Monday: Friends of the year

On this final Gratitude Monday of 2015, I’m spending the day watching as everything I own (except a couple of bin bags’ worth of clothes) is loaded onto a moving truck for storage. It’ll be there for the next two months as I explore the Metro DC area and figure out where I want to live this time around.

This has been a great and terrible year, one that’s worn me out. The best part of it has been my friends, who believed in me, encouraged me, made me laugh, listened to me rant. They sent cards, they took me to performance art, they made introductions, they offered their homes and their cars.

Basically, they got me through it.

So, as I run the mop over the plastic fake hardwood floor one last time before I turn the keys over to the property management company, let me say again: I’m deeply grateful for my friends.

Sing in exultation

Ah, the Big Day at last. Let’s pull out all the stops, open our hearts and throats, and fill wherever we are with joyful sounds. What better to do it with than “Adeste Fidelis”?

I associate this one with midnight masses, the anthem that sends folks out bundling up into the cold night toward whatever their Christmas celebration entails. What is love most about it is the descant on the verse that starts out “Sing, choirs of angels.” That sucker just makes my chest tighten, whether I’m singing it or hearing it.

Here are my pals at King’s College, Cambridge, doing it for you.

Happy Christmas to us all.

Sleep in comfort, slumber deep

My, how Advent has flown past—Christmas is almost upon us. So let’s have another carol about the baby, another lullaby.

There are plenty of songs about Mary, about the shepherds, the king-magi, etc. Even one about some freaking drummer boy, which I never understood, because what the hell is some kid doing out in the middle of Judea in the middle of the night in the middle of winter (or early spring, if you’re some kind of killjoy purist) with a damn drum? Like any parents would have put up with that nonsense for a New York minute.

I like today’s because it’s from the perspective of the animals in the stable. They respond to the notion of a newborn in their midst by offering their warmth, literally. I can see their breath as they snuffle and snort around the manger in that cold night. I confess that I don’t know that much about the large animals, but having a cat next to you pushing out the KTUs (Kitty Thermal Units) at a rate of knots can make all the difference in nippy weather.

I also don’t know that much about the history of this one. “Hajej, Nynej, Jezisku” is Czech, possibly from somewhere between the 14^th and 16^th Centuries. We know it in English as “The Rocking Carol”, and it does indeed give you that quiet sense of being gently rocked. It’s very comforting musically as well as metaphorically.

I’m giving you Chanticleer’s version of it. I had the great good fortune to attend one of their Christmas concerts this week, held in the perfect venue for their voices (including their kickass countertenors)—Mission Santa Clara. I have many of their CDs, and I love how they put together a Christmas carol. Especially this one.

He come from the Glory

Today’s Christmas song is a blast from the past. Long past? No, my past. I can’t recall how the Chad Mitchell Trio came to my attention, but I remember “The Virgin Mary Had a Baby Boy” from the start.

It wasn’t on a Christmas album; I don’t even know if they made a Christmas album. But even if it’s not Christmas-specific, it’s about baby Jesus, so I say it’s in. It’s not quite a lullaby; well, maybe a Calypso lullaby. Belafonte has a version and he’s fine. But I prefer the Mitchell arrangement.

The kingdom of this world

You can’t have a Christmas season without a rendition of “Hallelujah Chorus”, can you? And you know what a sucker I am for flash mobs singing it. I’ve done entire Decembers with a different one every week.

For this year I’m going back to one of my favorites, at a Calgary shopping mall food court. There have been plenty of them in the five years since this one surprised unsuspecting mall rats, but I like this one right much. For one thing, the acoustics are better than a lot of the ones in multi-level atria. (There’s one from the Paris Opera Society from a couple of years ago. I wanted to share that, but it just doesn’t sound good enough, even though I’m sure it was a spectacular experience.)

And for another—they were the pioneers in “Hallelujah” flash mobbery. They set the tradition.

Gratitude Monday: On the sidelines

 Having popped in to Trader Joe’s last Friday to pick up enough milk to see me through the next week, let me devote today’s Gratitude Monday to expressing my relief and thanks that I have no call to go grocery shopping before Christmas.

Because the normally idiotic drivers of the Valley They Call Silicon have upped their game by an order of magnitude, and my own bandwidth has narrowed somewhat, so I don’t want to put it to the test.

Not needing to be anywhere that shoppers are likely to congregate frees me up to focus on other things, like observing and commenting, for which I am also grateful.

Con giubilante cor

Let’s stay around the same time period as yesterday’s piece, but move to the Mediterranean area for our Christmas music today.

Pietro Yon wrote “Gesu Bambino” in 1917. Imagine the drive to pull yourself figuratively out of the fourth year of a war that was strangling Italy (and France, and Germany, and Russia, and Britain…) to write a carol about angels and shepherds rejoicing over the birth of the Savior.

I like the way the melody ripples in a swirling pattern, like water bubbling down a hillside. As per usual, it’s about the baby Jesus (well—that is the title, after all), to whom it refers as “The Christmas Rose”, which is kind of pretty.

I love the refrain:

Osanna, osanna cantaro

Con giubilante cor

I tuoi pastori ed angeli

O re di luce e amor

Your shepherds and angels sang hosanna, hosanna with jubilant heart, O king of light and love.

And here are two of my favorite sopranos singing it at Carnegie Hall:

In the midst of the earth

My offering today is new to me, although it’s about a hundred years old. Technically, it’s not about Christmas, but it is sacred and how can something titled “Salvation Is Created” not be about Christmas?

The preponderance of Pavel Tchesnokov’s compositions were sacred, until he was forced by the Soviets to concentrate on secular music. He was a triple threat—composer, conductor and choirmaster (kind of like Bach). This one, published in 1913, was one of his final sacred works.

The words are pretty simple; in English it’s “Salvation is created, in the midst of the earth, O God, Our God. Alleluia.” So, yeah—pretty Christmasy, in my opinion.

Here’s a choir from Yale singing it in Russian:

Teach my feet to fly

We listened to a couple of Quebecoises yesterday, so today we’ll feature another Canadian songwriter. The first time I heard Joni Mitchell’s “River” (on a compilation CD) it absolutely stopped me in my tracks. Yes—that’s what Christmas is like, when you’re not aligned with your expectations, when you’ve screwed the pooch in a relationship, when you just can not get into the rhythm of the season—whatever that might mean to you.

I love the imagery of a river not as something that lets you sail, but something that you can skate away on. It captures the dislocation that a Northerner feels in an environment like Los Angeles. Even though that’s my native land, I understand fully the sense that it’s not quite real, more façade than substance, and how that adds to the alienation.

There are many covers of “River”, but I like Linda Ronstadt’s the best, so that’s what I’m sharing with you.

Mitten im kalten Winter

Michael Praetorius is one of my favorite composers; I don’t think I’ve ever heard anything of his that I don’t like. He makes the transition from medieval/Renaissance-sounding things to a more modern—or maybe a more universal—feel, that touches me every time. He was one of those court composers—like Bach or Handel or (sort of) Mozart, which perhaps gave him the freedom to set his hand to whatever struck his fancy. Masses, motets; experimenting in surround-sound (by placing mini-choirs in different areas of the space)—these days, in the Valley They Call Silicon, they’d dub him a paradigm-shifting, disruptive-tech, game-changing thought leader, and venture capitalists would throw money at him.

In those days he served a succession of German princes, ending at the court of Dresden.

“Es ist ein Ros entsprungen” is my all-time favorite Christmas carol. I first learned it in a German class and I still only know the words auf Deutsch. You probably know it as “Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming”. The intricate polyphony of this piece always speaks to me of voices echoing in huge, candle-lit Gothic spaces, merging together on the final note of each verse. I love it.

Here to sing it for you is the Dresdner Kreuzchor, as seems only appropriate, it being the home team for Praetorius.