Miss Hanley

Most people buy ipods so they can listen to music, but I have an ipod so I can avoid listening to 'music.' Most bars, coffee shops and so on where I might otherwise enjoy sitting in silence are apt to play 'music,' which I use the music on my ipod to shut out. 'Music' I regard as that which has been used by the entertainment industry to cultivate a docile mass market of teenagers too ignorant to know any better. This is a strategy that has been in place since the fifties. This 'music' is otherwise known as "Rock and Roll." Real music demands one's total attention. 'Music,' if the sixties is any indication, causes brain damage. Especially in combination with marijuana.
Being a teenager at the time of its inception I was vulnerable to the media manipulation, too. Not for long. There was something about Elvis I never really liked and I soon noticed that I was only pretending to like him to be cool. At home I discovered the local classical music station and was enraptured among others by Vivaldi's Four Seasons and Beethoven's Violin Concerto (Jascha Heifetz soloing the latter) Let's be kind: Elvis suffered by comparison. And so do the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and all the subsequent icons of faux music.
In childhood I think I must have been inoculated against its ravages by a few good teachers and by the Walt Disney recording of "Peter and the Wolf." I say inoculation because I now regard Rock and Roll as a disease, a maladaptive mutation that has the same effect on music as phyloxera had on the vineyards of France, because it destroys the beautiful work of generations of careful and conscientious workers and several inspired geniuses.
I vividly remember the Peter and the Wolf recording. The composition was pretty new then, having been written by Prokofiev in 1936 and the popular music industry was quite open to real talent then. Disney made an animated feature out of it and the recording came from that. The production drew on a It doesn't seem to be available any more, maybe because it's not considered politically correct to have little boys wandering around in forests hunting wolves with a pop gun. In those days boys were good and wolves were bad, but today it's the other way around.
The name of the teacher I am thinking of was Miss Hanley, and she taught grade four at St. Margaret's Separate School in Edmonton. It was a time when a teacher taught the same class all day, every day. Arithmetic, social studies, language, catechism, she taught them all. And music. I think it was almost a requirement for employment that a teacher could play the piano. Anyway, I can still remember the day she took the class down to the music room and started to play the piano accompaniment to Schubert's setting of "Ave Maria." Schubert's melodies and piano accompaniments are very tightly interwoven and I was dumbfounded. The piano part didn't sound anything at all like the melody of the song. It took me a little while to grasp that idea but once I did I couldn't hear it often enough.
Thank you, Miss Hanley for the gift of Franz Schubert, and thank you Walt Disney (and Prokofiev, of course) for Peter and the Wolf.

Max Roach

Max Roach died a few weeks ago. He was one of those human beings who seemed to be an elemental force of nature and it's hard to believe that such a force is quenched. Of course his music is still around, caught on tape, frozen in amber. Not all of the life of it is preserved in the electronic amber but enough so you can fill in what's missing. You all know he was a drummer in the bebop era of jazz, famous for his polyrhythmic capabilities. I made a little trip to youtube because while I have some of his recordings I had never known what he looked like. Then, running out of the small supply of his videos I started searching through the ranks of some of the famous jazz drummers of past decades. Chick Webb, Cozy Cole, Jo Jones, Dave Tough, Buddy Rich and a fantastic film of Barrett Deems. I don't even know who Barrett Deems played with but he was phenomenal. Feeling too confined by the limitations of his drum set, in this clip he migrates from the bandstand to the club floor and finds a chair to beat on. Then, just for comparison sake I took a look at some rock drummers. But there is no comparison.
There was a koto player I saw and heard at Vancouver's long defunct Classical Joint in Gastown. Japanese music is an acquired taste for westerners and I acquired it during my two year stint in Yokosuka. Takemitsu is one of the few modern composers I like. Abstraction comes naturally to zen conditioned Japanese and his music reminds me a lot of haiku. Never liked saki or sushi, never learned to use chopsticks, but I like Japanese music and poetry. Music has the advantage of not requiring knowledge of the spoken language of the composer. Listening to that koto player I realized what was unique about Japanese music. I don't know anything about scales and harmony so I have nothing to say about that, except that the 'frets' on a koto are adjustable according to the scales and harmonics the performer wants to use. What really struck me was that the rhythm of her music was implied rather than stated openly. This has the effect of releasing the musical phrase from the confinement of a strictly observed beat. This was a very emphatic impression. Haiku is like that, too. Most of the meaning of a haiku is not in the words used in the poem. The words on the page are meant to stimulate the mind so that other, deeper, meanings are sensed. In the koto song the rhythm is not stated overtly so the listener must supply his own rhythm, which may be more subtle and meaningful than even the finest musician can express. Or at least those were the thoughts I had when I came away from that lady's performance.
When thought of this way western music, even the music of the master composers seems crude. Not really. The great composers incorporated rhythm into the structure of the musical line. They knew what they were doing. And they were aware of the confinement problem, if the story is true of Wagner's putting down a famous conductor by calling him a Bavarian timebeater. Mediocre musicians pay excessive attention to timekeeping, as all good conductors know. It's the hobgoblin of little minds.
One of the reasons Negro music in America became so popular, I think, is that it found a way of keeping a strong rhythm while still leaving room for phrasing. Synchopation they call it, and it's what they mean when they say "it don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing." I think it's just as important for jazz development as the blues -inspired bending of notes. All those influences evolved together in the early twentieth century until it reached an apogee in the bebop era. But by then it had become too arty and self indulgent to speak to an ordinary audience. Myself, I like the jazz from the swing era the best, before it got too proud to play for dancing teenagers.
Still, here I am listening to Sonny Rollins' quirky take on "The last time I saw Paris" -I'm not sure who's doing the drums but it might be Max Roach- and loving it.

War and Peace

Sunday was cold and rainy, a foretaste of soon-to-arrive winter, but this morning is almost perfect. The sun is out, a few clouds dapple the sky, the temp is 12C/54F- what could be better for a walk into town along the water? From my place I can take the quick way along Esquimault Rd or dawdle via the Songhees walkway. I like to dawdle. It's not just that Songhees is winding that makes it slower. It's just about impossible not to stop and sit on a bench for a while and watch the harbour sights, so if I'm in a hurry it's not the way to go.
A little drama: a flock of gulls foraging right about where a twin otter was landing. I'm not sure if they all got away. What were they finding in that particular patch of water that made them so reluctant to abandon it? We humans are so wrapped up in our own daily concerns that we tend to forget about the other critters who also get caught up in their daily concerns. That means obeying the demands of the belly. For seagulls, unable to store up provisions for the future beyond the capacity of its belly, as soon as one feeding is done, the next is sought. Urgently. The needs of Safety are always in tension with the need to eat.
We humans have devised ways of storage and distribution that would require a catastrophic and global disruption over a long period of time to thwart. Hunger and deprivation are no longer technical problems, but a really inept and corrupt political structure can do more to disrupt our well-being than all but the worst natural disasters. As examples in recent history I would cite the Marxist- inspired regimes in Russia and China. Stalin's collectivization program in the Ukraine, for millennia one of the breadbaskets of the world, resulted in millions of Ukrainians dying of starvation. Mao, not to be outdone, presided over the deaths of tens of millions of his countrymen. Nowadays we can readily see what Mugabe has done to Zimbabwe. Once the breadbasket of Africa, the country is starving. It looks like Hugo Chavez has ambitions to follow these examples, starting with a campaign against the investors who finance the Venezuelan oil industry.
In our western system of private property and personal innovation, where individuals reciprocally offer up their services to others, it is possible for an individual as low down in the economic order as me to live within a five minute walk of a pleasant waterway and know that my little economic contribution is enough to provide me with comfortable shelter, good food, and security. Capitalism and free enterprise are wonderful ideas. I also am glad that I live in a political culture that tolerates divergent ways of thinking with differences decided through open debate. People forget the most important aspect of freedom of debate: I have a right to be wrong and you have a right to correct me on it. This is how we learn from each other.
We Anglo Americans have lived so long in this system that we take it for granted. We live in such peaceful and prosperous circumstances for so long that we have difficulty with the idea that some people in the world hate us and want to destroy our way of life. But if you pay attention then you will know that the Marxist inspired movements have worked tirelessly against us for nearly a century. Aided and financed by the Soviet and Maoist slave states, they have done a lot of damage. The Marxists have not gone away, they live and breed on campuses all across the continent. They are joined now by the Islamists, a much older scourge with a far deeper hatred than the Soviets had. At least some aspects of western culture were valued in Soviet Russia, and even Maoist China. They may have hated traditional religion but they cultivated many of the western inspired arts. But the Islamists hate everything about us. They hate our belief in freedom of expression. They hate our belief in equal rights before the law. Democracy to them is foolishness. Emancipation of women is lunacy to them. It hasn't been easy for westerners to learn how to live together while respecting different ways, creeds and languages but we have done it. Precariously, perhaps, and always under pressure, but we have done it. Islam proclaims itself the only possible and permissible creed. Every single human on the face of the planet must submit to that creed, either as a full-fledged member or as a lower class being with no rights to protection from the law.
Because of our inexperience with people who hate us just because they hate us and have no compunction against killing us, we have a hard time understanding that there are times when we have to defend ourselves, and that means war. That means a generation or more of young people who will not have the privilege of walking along the Songhees shore without a care in the world. There are a lot of people who refuse to believe that we are in danger. They think that if we stop fighting then we will have peace. Au contraire, mes amis. The reason we have peace now is that we have had generations of citizens willing to fight to preserve our peace.
Wake up, folks

September in Victoria

On one of Victoria's patented summers it's hard not to think you have arrived in paradise. We didn't have much of a summer this year so today was much appreciated- better late than never- and if the weatherman is right it's going to stay this way for a while. Sometimes this kind of weather persists until the end of October.
And I think I must be blessed to live just over the bridge from downtown Victoria. The walk along the Songhees walkway is always full of interest with boats and planes coming and going, joggers and dogwalkers out for a stroll, the sky and the sea always changing, always the same. Theme and endless variation. This morning I stopped for a moment to size up a picture of one of the harbour markers with the tide down. Out of the corner of my eye I caught a little movement on the sidewalk. I had already spotted a mouse (shrew, vole?) scurry into the underbrush. This bit of fluff was a fledgling and at first I thought it was a sparrow or finch or one of the other varieties of small gray birds I am unable to identify, but this one had a bedraggled little crest on top of his head. I think he was a quail. We see a few families of them strutting along the railroad tracks, and somehow they have survived all the construction in our neighborhood. I always enjoy seeing these dapper characters. This little guy looked like he had gotten separated from his elders and wouldn't have survived much longer if I hadn't been there. Three or four drooling sea gulls had also spotted him. A bite sized morsel for a seagull. So I herded him into the shrubbery. See? I may be a paleocon but I've still got a heart. And I like quail a lot better than seagulls.
I often hear locals brag, "I haven't been downtown in years." I never say anything, but I'm incredulous. Are they idiots? Victoria has one of the loveliest downtowns in North America. You wanna see ugly, go to Tacoma. I remember in Vancouver I had a young couple in my cab. We were driving down Arbutus from Kerrisdale, it was a beautiful day, and the North Shore mountains were awesome. The girl was saying how beautiful it was, and then the guy chipped in. "Yeah, but what use is it?" He was from Ontario, of course.
Now that it's September the majority of tourists have gone home, leaving the artisans with slim pickings. But a few die hards are still on the Causeway and in Bastion Square taking care of their customers. Good on ye, guys and gals!

Death of the spirit

Two things I read this morning reminded me of my theme of aliveness from the other day. The first was a review of Christopher Hitchens' book "God is not Great," by another well-known atheist, Richard Dawkins. There is quite a crew of these evangelistic atheists trying to whip up a bit of religious bigotry among the anti Christian crowd. The other item is in today's First Things blog, a posting by Peter Leithart called "The Pagan West." The arguments of Hitchens and Dawkins are old and tiresome. But Leithart has noticed something interesting.
It's a well known fact that in Europe and countries of European extraction, the force of traditional Christian faith is moribund. This is especially true of the mainstream protestant denominations, as well as the 'progressive' wing of the Catholic Church where the core doctrines of Christanity have been largely abandoned. Not coincidentally, as the 'progressive' clergy abandons the core beliefs, the congregations abandon the churches. Away from Europe and the American 'blue states,'- what Dawkins calls the cerebral cortex of America, as opposed to the reptilian brain of southern and middle America- notably in Africa, Christianity is vibrant, growing, and alive.
Leithart informs us that Christianity is growing fastest in those parts of Africa where traditional African religion is still strong and suggests that this is not mere accident. "Like primal African religion, Christianity displays a strong sense of human finitude and sin, believes in a spiritual world that interacts with the human world, teaches the reality of life after death, and cultivates the sacramental sense that physical objects are carriers of spiritual power. Christianity catches on there because it gives names to the realities they already know and experience."
In other words Africans are attuned to the aliveness of existence and so the idea that a creator god animates this aliveness is only common sense. Unlike Dawkins whose seething hatred of everything religious blinds him to the beauties of both religious tradition and the aliveness of the world. This can't be too good for science, either.
Sometimes I wonder if this deadness of spirit is a product of urban living. The traditional Paganism of the Greeks and Romans lost credence among the educated as their civilization matured and was only retained as a set of rituals used to cement loyalty to the city. Our educated class has even lost this remnant of belief, and maybe this is why patriotism in Europe is pretty much a thing of the past, and only survives as a hatred of America. It's as if all the ecclesiastical architecture that crowds the European landscape is occupied by twittering mice- as the shades of the dead were imagined in Homeric Greece.

The Medieval Sourcebook

I'm still pretty new at this internet business and am only beginning to plumb its depths. The political blogs wherein all the latest contoversies are debated are the easiest to find. It doesn't take long to find pornography either. Every time I poke the 'next blog' box there's about a one in five chance a porn site will appear. The rest are Spanish. Sadly, I have never found a blog by that method I thought was worth revisiting.
I'm quite interested in literature, music and science but only a few of the professionally produced sites have caught my interest for more than a few reads.
But now I have The Medieval Sourcebook to turn to whenever I lose interest in the tiresome news of the present, although it's not much easier to figure out what did happen than what is happening. But at least we know the results, and it's always revelatory to me when I listen to the words of someone who was caught up in the events of his day, someone who had no way of knowing how it would all turn out, someone who was involved in the disputes, who had an interest in the results. I always marvel that nobody is interested in these stories.
Here is one, found at random while I was looking for something else. It's from a Chronicle of the Counts of Anjou written about the year 1100. Anjou is the lovely region of France on the lower reaches of the Loire River and its tributaries, an area I cycled through. Somehow or other these Counts ended up as kings of England, among other things. An anecdote of one Fulk making a pilgrimage to Jerusalem while it was still controlled by the Saracens tells how he was only allowed to visit the Holy Sepulcher if he agreed to piss on the altar. The Saracens, "Knowing him to be a man of quick temper, mocked him, and said he would never get into the tomb he wanted to see unless he were to urinate upon it and upon the holy cross. The prudent man, though unwilling, agreed to this. A ram's bladder was found, cleaned and washed and filled with the best wine and then placed between the count's thighs. Shoeless, he approached the Lord's Sepulchre and let the wine flow forth upon it..."
Still looking for Honorious of Autun I stumbled onto something I was looking for a few months ago. This is a series of letters between wealthy landowners in Roman Gaul written just before the complete collapse of Roman authority and the assumption of power by illiterate and uncultured German war chiefs. What is astonishing about the writer is that the was unaware that history as he knew it was at an end. Rome was done, but that was a concept he didn't grasp. Sidonius was the name of this Roman and he paints an idyllic picture of the countryside around Nimes and the great aquaduct where it crosses the Gardon River- known now as the Pont du Gard. I also cycled through this area- occassionally on a Roman road- and camped right next to the aquaduct for a few days while I explored the vicinity. He is visiting friends. "Their estates march together; their houses are not far apart; and the extent of the intervening ground is just too far for a walk and just too short for a ride..." So far were they from any concern over attacks that he amusedly describes being 'ambushed' by his friends waiting at all approaches for his arrival. "Into this trap we willingly fell, no unwilling prisoners; and our captors instantly made us swear to dismiss every idea of continuing on our journey until a whole week had elapsed..." He goes on to describe the amusements prepared for him, including discussions of philosophy and theology, and tells how he had his servants dig bathing holes for him into which were placed hot stones.. the better to help him recover from excessive consumption of the local wines.
In another letter he describes for his correspondent a meeting he had with a king of the Goths. What impresses me is how ordinary a thing it seems, this crashing down of an ancient civilization, how unheroic, how unremarked. Until a generation or two has come and gone and people realize what has been lost. The king is a man of parts. Not sophisticated, but plain. Not educated but intelligent. And he is a man of action, not especially interested in the effete pleasures of his Roman visitor. Sidonius, thinking himself the clever fellow, relates that in dice games, "I myself am gladly beaten by him when I have a favour to ask..." never thinking how obsequious he has become.
Strange as it may seem, this is how history happens.

Fog

The classic boats from the festival had to leave Victoria in the fog. Foggy days are romantic if you are safely ashore.

Classic Boat Show

Labour Day weekend is when the Classic Boat Show is held in Victoria. Right downtown in front of the Empress Hotel, the location is right on the main tourist route. I love old boats and I try not to miss it. I'm working on weekends now so I had to get there early. It's a lot easier to take pictures without the crowds that show up later. There are always some real beauties here. I favour the small and graceful sailboats, and there are a few absolutely lovely pocket cruisers here this year. My imagination immediately puts me in a lovely picture: a quiet cove too shallow for big boats, a glass of wine in my hand, and the blissful peace embellished by the twitter of birds and the quiet lapping of the tide against my hull. No sirens, no phone, no rock and roll or worse, all the rude noises of human activity far, far away. No such place exists, I know, except in my imagination.
Although it's nice to see these boats in the tranquility of an early morning, I rather wish I could get over here later and watch the little steamboats do their regatta.