Set the Piano Stool on Fire

I come across as pretty dark to a lot of my friends, but in my own mind, I'm seeking balance. I was raised in a religious tradition that insisted one was supposed to leave the world a better place than one found it. I left the religion, but the value stuck, and now I don’t think it was the religion that put that notion into my head at all, but the culture I grew up in, the same culture that generated the religion.

That looks and smells like a chicken-and-egg situation, so I’ll move on, except to say one effect of looking to make the world a better place is that you must necessarily focus on what’s wrong with the world if you’re going to fix it.

I remember a conversation I had once with my soul-mate Harriet, who died a quarter of a century ago now, in her 50s. One of those cruel events that bring you to your knees in despair and makes you seek ways of surviving the slings and arrows and tragedies life brings. We couldn't agree on a movie because she wanted comedy and I was in the mood for something heavier. “I don’t like serious movies,” she said. “If I’m going to pay for entertainment, I want entertainment that makes me laugh and feel better. I’ll take a comedy over a tragedy any day.”

I thought about that for a very long time. Why is it that I prefer movies with heavy themes, moral dilemmas, struggles to find the right way and to do the right thing? I concluded that when I saw comedy, I saw people escaping reality but when I viewed tragedy, on stage, in film or in literature, I could take comfort in the evidence it provided that people were paying attention. I was not alone. Others saw what was wrong with the world and were engaged in fixing it. People who talk of nothing but gloom and doom are not my kind of folk, but I almost prefer them to the bubbly cheerful folk who chatter on about how beautiful life is. Something in me worries they are covering up for some terrible tragedy in their lives. Some fear or insecurity they've got their head in the sand over.

I know - the Buddhists have taught me - that nothing in life is certain except change. And that means when things are good, they’re going to get bad again, and when things are bad, they’re going to get good again. From that fact, I conclude that it makes sense never to get too caught up in any particular moment. That doesn’t make me an optimist, but it doesn’t make me a pessimist either. So I can go on focusing on the ills of the world without worrying too much that I’m being unduly dark. I just need to be careful not to get trapped into thinking we’ve reached the end of the world.

When Notre Dame went up in flames in Paris, my response was to thank God for not existing.  I'd have to hate him if he did. The Saudi war in Yemen is leading to countless starving children in that country; the tyranny in Syria is leading to an endless stream of refugees. The melting glaciers, the wild fires making the sky over San Francisco a bright orange, the surrender of Republicans to greed, self-interest and a willingness to remove both health care and a woman’s right to control her own body, rather than stick with the slow but steady process of extending human rights under the U.S. Constitution… all that is reason to despair. And the pandemic, the need to stay inside my house. Because I am told I have a terminal lung disease, and I need to stay inside my house and not even go to the grocery store, I sometimes wonder where I’m going to find the strength to get out of bed in the morning.

But I find it. And I find if I don’t eat sweets late at night I sleep better and wake with an appetite and that gets me up. I also wake with a feeling of gratitude as I look at the dog who chooses to sleep with me (I leave the door open, so I know it’s a choice) taking her half of the bed out of the middle. If I believed in a god, I’d thank him/her/it for the last ten years - even if he did burn down Notre Dame - for revealing to me, by means of our two half-chihuahua half-jack Russell Terrier daughters, that I have within me a tremendous capacity for love and compassion and desire to protect and nourish.

That gratitude and a healthy appetite still get me out of bed in the morning.

All this said, I also think you can’t just do nothing and let things happen as they will. You’ve got to generate an environment in which gratitude can come naturally. Since the lock-down started, I’ve taken to listening to more music than I ever did before. I’ve always been a music lover, but it has now become as essential as food and drink. I’m grateful for the girls. I’m also grateful for YouTube and my recently acquired BOSE speakers.

And for the evidence of miracles. Which is what I think I see when I find yet another child prodigy or yet another pianist who has just recorded all the Chopin Nocturnes, or Preludes, or the complete works of Beethoven.

Let me share with you my latest discovery. I’ve watched Aleksander Malofeev grow up and get better and better with each new year. I’ve watched the Norwegian singer Aksel Rykkvin’s voice change, and marveled that he had such good training that he has not lost the ability to astound audiences, as many boy sopranos do when their voices change. And yesterday I spent the day listening to and reading up on two musical geniuses who have found each other, the American Kit Armstrong and the Austrian Alfred Brendel.

I hope you can find the time to sit back and watch what happens with an old genius takes a young genius under his wing.

I can almost guarantee it will give you yet another reason for getting out of bed in the morning.


Watch the whole thing. It’s just over an hour and a quarter.

And tell me you don’t love to pieces a cute little guy whose response to the death of a favorite chicken is to play the Goldberg Variations.

            

Kit Armstrong

Watch the YouTube video here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIG7b_rhBTM

photo credit

John Brown

When my mother came to America in 1923 with her aunt and uncle, who had adopted her when she was a month old, they found a place to live on Riverside Avenue in Torrington, Connecticut. Four years later, when her mother was able to leave Germany, still reeling from the First World War, and join them, she moved back in with her - right next door on Riverside Avenue.

My father, too, grew up in Torrington, met and married my mother there and my passport tells the world that Torrington, Connecticut, is my birthplace.

Now if you walk from their houses up Riverside Avenue to where it crosses Migeon Avenue and becomes Norfolk Road, right by Dunkin Donuts, and keep walking another couple of miles to Hodges Hill Road and turn up University Avenue, you’ll come to John Brown Road. Or, you can also do all this in about seven minutes in a car, of course.

I realize there is probably not a human being on the planet, besides myself, for whom this walk, or seven-minute car ride, would be of any great interest. But it was only yesterday that I learned that John Brown (whose body lies ‘a-moulderin’ in the grave’), contemporary of Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglas, and first American ever to be executed for treason (for leading the raid on Harper’s Ferry, Virginia that many call the flashpoint that started the Civil War,) was born in a house on that road that now bears his name, one hundred forty years and five days before me, in Torrington, Connecticut. And my interest in Black Lives Matter and the newfound awareness that white people in America are developing about how little they know of the lives of black Americans has suddenly taken on a personal connection.

I knew, of course, that Winsted, the town where I grew up, nine miles north of Torrington, because my father was able to buy a house there in 1938 for $2800, was also the birthplace of Ralph Nader. I’ve boasted that connection all my life and brought friends there only recently to visit Nader’s Tort Museum, now the major attraction of the town. But nobody. Not my parents, not my high school history teacher, nobody ever told me that I shared a birthplace with John Brown, the abolitionist. That history was simply buried. In the spirit of the title of that wonderful book by James W. Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, I call this a lie by omission.

Much as I’d like to join the voices of folk calling for America to heal its wounds and reach out to people on the other side of the culture war divide, I’m finding it easier to resent the white backlash to the election of Barack Obama. Trump got elected, we are told, because too many white folk felt that black Americans and White progressive urban elites were leaving them in the dust as the pendulum was beginning to swing, at long last, toward greater justice and equality for the racially disenfranchised. As carefully as I’m inclined to listen to Sam Harris, and the other “Four Horsemen of Atheism,” and the arguments they present as leading clear-thinking intellectuals of the modern day, I was taken back the other day as I heard Harris declare that he couldn’t get behind the Black Lives Matter movement because they were “overdoing” it. We need to be ruthlessly objective and recognize that the movement is exaggerating the negatives and failing to see the racial progress that has taken place in recent years, Harris argues.

Yes, yes, yes, I want to say. All true. But what I think Harris underestimates is the need for a radical change in white attitudes. And changes, much as I’d like to support Harris’s endorsement of reason as “the only way,” I’m not convinced we can reach white supremacists and the folks they manipulate through fear, without appealing to our common humanity. Call it guilt, if you like, or shame, or an innate sense of fair play. A terrible historical disaster happened when the Civil War ended and the white supremacists decided the south will rise again, and even decent whites embraced the view that the slaves and their descendants might eventually find justice, but they’d do it at the pace white Americans wanted to go, with time measured not in years but in decades.

What’s happening today, thanks to the speed of change brought about by ubiquitous cell phone coverage of injustice and the power of the internet to cover news events in real time, is that we are getting to see up close what history has long covered up. And that means we can now revisit the question of just how aggressively injustice should be fought. Do we wait for the older generation of racists, fascists, Nazis to die off and a new generation without historical memory to be born? Or do we speed up the process of remembrance? Do we continue to define John Brown as a traitor and a terrorist, as we did during the backlash years from around the turn of the 20th century until the 70s, following the Civil Rights movement? Or do we replace that narrative with one in which he was on the right side of history?

That’s where I’m coming down. On the view that we have been told the wrong story. America is fighting a culture war today, between those insisting that truth matters, on the one hand, and those getting behind Donald Trump and urging we bring back the good old days of white ignorance, when we had no need to speed up the need for change, that things were working themselves out in their own good time, and black men and women could jolly well wait another generation or two and things would get better on their own. Especially if black people would stop taking drugs and committing so much of the crime and playing the victim and pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.

I have to ask myself whether my sudden awareness of John Brown is nothing more than a function of my realization that we share a birthplace, an awareness that fits the current narrative of a too-slow pace of change in American race relations? Or whether I should be grateful for the impetus to get on this bandwagon? It’s no trivial question. Even Frederick Douglas questioned John Brown’s tactics. I live now in Berkeley/Oakland, where the Black Panthers took up that question in the 60s, scaring the middle class folk of America with their argument that blacks needed guns. John Brown, according to an article in The New York Daily Herald of October 21, 1859, [cited in a Wikipedia article on John Brown], insisted that “moral suasion is hopeless” and that violence is necessary if slavery was to be eliminated in America, a claim borne out by the Civil War. Listen to his defense, reenacted here.

It’s one of those eternal dilemmas of ethics. How much cruelty and injustice do you put up with before you leave moral suasion behind and take up arms, or commit to violence. People of every generation make that decision, and we are faced with it today, as Black Lives Matter and other organizations cry “enough” over police brutality, while both peace-loving folk as well as the retrograde Trump administration supporters bring out the words “treason” and “terrorist” to describe the folks in the street, some of them violent. One side reminds us of Chamberlin and the Munich Pact, which gave the OK for Hitler to take Czechoslovakia and opened the door to the invasions of Poland and France. The other side tries to convince us any reference to Hitler and to fascism is bombastic overreach, and shows us we are fools for making the comparison.

I can't be sure that my inclination to view the folk urging us to continue to “reach across the aisle” as foolish appeasers will bear out in the long run, but that's definitely how it looks from here. The right-wing has become a truth-denying self-serving force for whom self-interest has taken precedence over a commitment to traditional American two-party democracy.

I am struck with a line attributed to Frederick Douglas, who worried initially that Brown was going too far.  Speaking of John Brown after his execution, though, Douglas said, “His zeal in the cause of my race was far greater than mine—it was as the burning sun to my taper light—mine was bounded by time, his stretched away to the boundless shores of eternity. I could live for the slave, but he could die for him."

A terrorist is a terrorist only if they are not fighting for something you take to be a life-or-death cause.

I think the time is way past due that we stopped apologizing for fighting the Civil War, that we admit we waited far too long as it was to rid the nation of slavery, and that to call John Brown a terrorist is to put yourself on the wrong side of history.

The so-called culture war now being waged in America should not be weakened by an appeal to “reach across the aisle.”  Well-intentioned as the peacemakers and compromisers may be, such timidity in the face of justice way too long delayed is not just a foolish attempt to hold back modernity. It’s a tragic failure to recognize we are at a moment when we have the opportunity to do the right thing. The founding fathers worked around the genocide of the North American Indian and wrote a Constitution which gave the white people of the southern half of the nation the right to own men and women of African origin. Why are we still arguing about further delays in fixing that?

We’re gradually getting rid of the monuments to Confederate generals. Little by little the states of Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama and Mississippi are taking - or have taken - the Dixie stars-and-bars out of their state flags. The effort to put Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill in place of Andrew Jackson has been delayed by Donald Trump and his Treasury Secretary Stephen Mnuchin. But there is hope these guys won’t be around forever. 

In schools around America, textbooks are beginning to add alongside historical American heroes such as Betsy Ross and Helen Keller (not to mention all the men) the likes of Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth, and the tales of their contribution to the elimination of slavery.

It would be really OK with me if they would also give greater recognition to the name of John Brown of Torrington, Connecticut.

Different parts of the Elephant

I love to bash the utilities companies. Mostly, I think because they are large corporations and we like to  bash large corporations these days, rather than focus on the failure of government to step up and counter their excesses. Sort of like failing to realize a controlled fire, as on a kitchen range, is a good thing, but a fire running wild is not. When I learned that the water rates had gone up 19% in the last few years, I moved EB MUD, our water company, the East Bay Municipal Utilities District, over to the "bad guys" column.

And I was not pleased to learn that for most of August and September, my street was going to be torn up as they laid new water mains. Huge Komatsu digging equipment have been parked on the street for some time now and every morning at 8 o'clock they start banging and clanging till you can't hear yourself think.

For some reason, though, probably because we've been holed up here in the house the past six months, I found myself welcoming the entertainment. I began watching from my bedroom window and I've discovered the excitement I felt at the age of five or six watching these heavy equipment operators do their thing. It's like watching science fiction, so far removed it is from my everyday life. And as the days go by, my respect and my admiration have risen to very high levels. These guys are good at their jobs.

So it's not the administrative decisions to charge more for water that's front and center at the moment, but the (to me) recognition of the astonishing ability these guys have to know just what to do, and when and how. EB MUD clearly consists of much more than bad guys.

Taku asked me the other day what the word was for these large earth movers. I drew a blank, because my brain now draws a blank every time you ask me for specific words. If that turns into Alzheimers, I'm hoping somebody will tell me. For now, I just go about my business, knowing the word will come to me just as soon as I focus on something else. "Steam shovels!" I shout down to Taku, five minutes later.

"That's crazy," Taku says. They don't run on steam, he shouts back up.

"I don't care," I tell him. "They're still called steam shovels," I insist.

"Maybe back in 1950," he says. "You're old."

"And you're short," I fire back, never one to want to lose a fight.

For days I watched the huge pipes they would bring in, and I wondered how they were going to be able to get them into the ground. Tragically, I missed the moment when they did, but I have been watching them dig the hole. They're about done in front of the house and are filling it back in - with dirt and cement and rolling equipment. They work till about four and then begin covering the hole till the next morning at eight when they lift the plates covering the ditch they've dug and start in again. I now look forward to the rattling of the house and the windows.

Miki and Bounce get a little uncomfortable when the house thuds, as in an earthquake, but they recover quickly.

I've snapped a bunch of photos. Here's just a sample:

new water mains being put in

the plates covering the ditch at the end of the day

view facing the house at the end of the day

plates lifted, workers back at work. Are those two pipes water coming to our house? How did they get the huge water main down there past those pipes? Clearly I missed something.

Reinforcing the sides of the ditch before filling it with dirt and cement

rolling the dirt

adding more dirt and rolling it again

adding more cement

What a wonderful time this is. There's an endless supply of great music available on YouTube - and I can't tell you how happy I am I decided to buy me some BOSE speakers to plug into my TV. 

We can't go anywhere, but the world seems to have come to my front door - or, more precisely, my bedroom window.

That doesn't change the fact that the news is still filled with evidence of political rot, of forest fires, and of the risk of disease. That's still very much there.

But when the Good Lord slaps you with a corrupt politician, he provides you with a steam shovel.

Science vs. Politics

Much as I try to avoid any mention of Donald Trump anymore, believing that he is a distraction from America's real problem, I think we have no choice but to keep up the effort to prevent him from doing even more harm.

This video aids that effort, and I hope it gets the widest possible distribution.

I believe Trump is a distraction from America's real problem, which is captured by the phrase: "reflexive individualism disconnected from the common good."

That phrase comes from an article by Ross Douthat in the Sunday Review section of last Sunday's The New York Times.

I've described it as an essential feature of American culture - the failure to distinguish between civil rights and truth. We prioritize rights over responsibilities. You never hear "I got my responsibilities!" but you often hear, "I got my rights!"

And then we think our rights to the freedoms written into the Constitution extend to opinions, thus making any one opinion as valid as any other.  What Daniel Patrick Moynihan said about opinions bears repeating as often as possible and as long as it takes to sink in: 

“You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts.”

Until we get out from under the conviction that objective truth is of no consequence, we will never fix what ails us as a nation and as a people. Trump is simply an Enabler of that folly, and not the originator of it.

But, I repeat, he does real harm as an enabler, and the politicization of the Corona pandemic is a clear example of it; he has downplayed the risks of infection because his supporters mistake the stock market as the best sign of American economic health and buy into his argument that he is good for the economy. Even if the stock market did measure the economic health of the nation, instead of the wealth of the richest among us, the willingness of the president to sacrifice the poor, the elderly and the front-line workers who can't afford to shelter in place to cater to his uninformed base is a tragic indicator of individualism gone mad.

And bear in mind, if you are committed to truth as science defines it - the sum total of human knowledge to date, ever subject to change when called for by new, better information - it is entirely possible that these three scientists will turn out in the long run to be wrong about the wisdom of using face masks to fight Covid-19. But it is, at present, the best science-based informed opinion by the medical profession available to us. And since Trump has revealed on countless occasions that he will say or do anything that serves his own personal and political interests, no matter the cost to others, this is a case of science vs. corrupt politics.

I'm on the side of science.

Getting Go: The Go Doc Project - a film review

LGBT movies are feast or famine in terms of quality. There are really good gay-themed films out there. Brokeback Mountain remains my all-time favorite, but check out the British Film Institute’s suggestions for a list of twenty-nine others. I’ve complained loudly, though, of what I think is a boomerang effect. Because we have lived so long in the closet, LGBT people still provide a ready-made audience for practically anything an LGBT Tom, Dick or Mary Jane with a camera might come up with, so great is our hunger to see ourselves represented on the screen.

At least that’s how I see it. I approach every new gay film with a “show me” attitude. I’m still a sucker for young love stories, and for the usual themes of overcoming religious bigotry and self-loathing, although coming out stories done poorly (and, I repeat, most are) still get under my skin.

A 2014 film showed up on Amazon Prime recently that I had not heard of before: Getting Go: The Go Doc Project, starring Tanner Cohen and Matthew Camp, written by Cory Krueckeberg and directed by Tom Gustafson.  Cohen, Krueckeberg and Gustafson came up with the fanciful Were the World Mine in 2008 about a magic flower that turns everybody gay, so this was clearly a second team effort for them. Not one that spelled “must-see,” but one that at least suggested there might be some creativity there. Worth a look-see.

I was quite taken with it. It turned out to have more than a little creativity, a great touch of sympathy and some good acting. And a more frank and direct approach to issues most films about romance dance around far less intelligently:  where are the lines between lust and love, between infatuation and caring, between give and take in any human relationship?

The film opens with “Doc,” a Columbia undergraduate student, masturbating to an image of “Go” doing his thing as a gogo dancer.  Doc is, like many socially inept young people, a child of the social media age, the kind of person who counts “likes” from the isolation of his room rather than hanging out with actual friends, the image of a “loser.” “Go,” on the other hand, is an exhibitionist who typifies the kind of gay who considers the sex act a way of celebrating his civil rights and knows how to monetize his handsome face and chiseled body. 

The stage is set for victims at two extremes of America’s sexual hangups to meet when Doc reaches out to Go, telling him he’d like to make a film about his life, and Go, to Doc’s surprise, accepts his offer.

What follows is a gay love story for the modern day. Doc, more head than body, at least at first, thinks he has died and gone to heaven. Go, more body than head, turns out to be surprised by his own vulnerability, and we watch as the story unfolds that this head vs. body thing isn’t as simple as we might have thought.

What makes me want to classify this film as one of the more underrated gay-themed films I’ve seen in a while is the effect it has on you as you watch the relationship grow.  You don’t quite know whether you’re rooting for them to succeed as a couple, or even whether that was ever in the cards. Whether you're watching fluff and faux-philosophy or serious commentary.

I’m of the school of thought that we should all have “practice husbands,” people to teach us about sex and love and relationship we then burn out on when we are too young to pull off monogamy and selflessness successfully. People to remember fondly, if possible, in our later years when companionship and affection take their natural place in partnering with another, whether or not sexual intimacy continues.  So I was not inclined to want these kids to avoid falling in love and I felt no need to judge their behavior. They were free as fictional characters to behave anyway it suited them. I was watching this film as an old man, not a romantic young one. And far more interested in what the writer and director were up to than the actors.

What appealed to me was the fact that you could never be sure whether this was supposed to be a fictional narrative or a documentary. Go (Matthew Camp) was played by a gogo dancer in real life, and that added substance to the question. I was not even impatient with the many drawn-out kissing scenes, as critics who wished for closer editing did, but happy to just allow them to play out. I’m happy the film avoided becoming porn, which it might well have, given Camp’s political views, and considering the opening scene, but focused instead on affection. The best scene for me was of the two of them lying in bed, playing with each other’s hands.

In the end, the film demonstrates that it is indeed possible to write, direct, and act in a story about sex and love by just laying it out there and not being overly concerned with the moral of the story or other consequences. Sexuality can be beautiful, it seems to say. Don’t fuss with it. Just let it be.

available on Amazon Prime