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From Levittown to Black Lives Matter
We built the ground for protests when we broke ground for Levittown
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My Life in Music: Day 10
Music is the color of life I was given the task by a friend of choosing 10 songs that greatly influenced me. I will post one song per day, for 10 consecutive days. Each song draws the picture more clearly, showing what has inspired me or just given me solace. TODAY the cycle is complete. Ten things I know about me. I selected the songs to develop a story, and now we come to the part where the sun is rising on a new day. I started with music as pure color — as sound and rhythm and feeling, of seeing through my mind the world of beauty around me.…
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My Life in Music: Day 9
To uncover the pain I was given the task by a friend of choosing 10 songs that greatly influenced me. I will post one song per day, for 10 consecutive days. Each song draws the picture more clearly, showing what has inspired me or just given me solace. Today’s song seems unusually prescient, but perhaps it is simply a song that is relevant every day in our America. I built out this list much earlier to explain the songs that are important to me, and here we are and the songs are contextualized by the events of this month, this week, this day, this hour, this minute. This life. “Rose…
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My Life in Music: Day 8
To cover the soul I was given the task by a friend of choosing 10 songs that greatly influenced me. I will post one song per day, for 10 consecutive days. Each song draws the picture more clearly, showing what has inspired me or just given me solace. Today is a song whose words were written by a 16th century Spanish soldier-poet — one of the more famous of them, Garcilaso de la Vega. His poem was set to music several years ago by Z. Randall Stroop, and the resulting song is sometimes performed in concerts. The music is gentle, sometimes soaring, sometimes plaintive, but it wraps the words of…
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My Life in Music: Day 7
Awake, lyre and harp I was given the task by a friend of choosing 10 songs that greatly influenced me. I will post one song per day, for 10 consecutive days. Each song draws the picture more clearly, showing what has inspired me or just given me solace. Today is a week of music. And this is a turning point. Stay with me. I’ve come along through 50 years of living and the kids are heading off to college. Soon the house will be empty, and then the next part of life will start. I guess. We’re at the February choir concert in the community college where our youngest son…
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My Life in Music: Day 6
The spinning world stops I was given the task by a friend of choosing 10 songs that greatly influenced me. I will post one song per day, for 10 consecutive days. Each song draws the picture more clearly, showing what has inspired me or just given me solace. Today is “A Love Song,” from the group Love Song. I was a teenager in Southern California. Like teenagers everywhere, I knew everything and knew nothing. (Please. I’ve grown a little since then. I still know nothing but I’ve stopped believing I know everything — on my good days.) But I was in the moment living during what later became called the…
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My Life in Music: Day 5
The unawakened heart I was given the task by a friend of choosing 10 songs that greatly influenced me. I will post one song per day, for 10 consecutive days. Each song draws the picture more clearly, showing what has inspired me or just given me solace. Today is Sam Cooke. I heard him sing, in brief snatches, on the radio. I didn’t — and still don’t — listen to radio much. When I’m doing something, I tune out almost all noise, including music. It was the way to survive in a hectic family of six very active mischief-seeking children and parents who are doing their best simply to keep…
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My Life in Music: Day 4
Music is human connection I was given the task by a friend of choosing 10 songs that greatly influenced me. I will post one song per day, for 10 consecutive days. Each song draws the picture more clearly, showing what has inspired me or just given me solace. Today is getting into first gear. What with instrumental pieces like Bach and Holst there was the enjoyment of being in the music. But then with these songs the words also begin to become more important. Without the music and the rhythm, perhaps the creation would have been powerful still. Put them together and it becomes a new thing. This is James…
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My Life in Music: Day 3
Music can move us I was given the task by a friend of choosing 10 songs that greatly influenced me. I will post one song per day, for 10 consecutive days. Each song draws the picture more clearly, showing what has inspired me or just given me solace. “Move Over” (from “Through Children’s Eyes,” The Limelighters). I grew up in the 50s and early 60s. Before there was rock and roll, before there was an explosion of tightly produced music that you listened to, there was folk music. You sang along with folk music. The entire album was led by the Limelighters, a popular folk music trio, but behind them…
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My Life in Music: Day 2
The envelop of emotion I was given the task by a friend of choosing 10 songs that greatly influenced me. I will post one song per day, for 10 consecutive days. Each song draws the picture more clearly, showing what has inspired me or just given me solace. “Jupiter — The Planets” (Holst). Before there was Star Wars and John Williams there was Holst who wrote the themes lifted for the film. This suite of songs was about something but I could not put it into words. Listening was simply an experience. Here was music and here was emotion and it was ineffable. I don’t have the vinyl anymore, and…
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My Life in Music: Day 1
Order and Beauty, Mixed I was given the task by a friend of choosing 10 songs that greatly influenced me. I will post one song per day, for 10 consecutive days. Each song draws the picture more clearly, showing what has inspired me or just given me solace. The first day’s offering is “Bach: Brandenburg Concerto №3 in G Major (Parts 1, 2, and 3)” Wendy Carlos 1968. This is the second album of electronic music that I collected. (The first is lost in the mists of time, an album I picked up at discount store back in the 60s as well.) Classic rhythms, harmonies, structure with impossible instruments. Sorry.…
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Words of Apology
One of the most critical things I’m learning is that a conditional apology is worthless. An apology leading with an “if” is nothing at all. It is words that afford us no responsibility to understand or change, and we can offer such an “apology” with no sense of insight about the person who we are. Instead, this “apology” pushes the offense to the victim of the offense. “I wasn’t clear. You didn’t understand. You’re too sensitive. I didn’t mean that.” Love is at stake here. The meaning, the purpose, the expression. We might think we “love” people, and we might think we really mean it. (“I feel so sincere!”) But…
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With Malice Aforethought
“The McMichaels did not intend to kill Mr. Arbery that day. All they intended to do was to stop him, question him, and hold him and wait for the police to arrive.” You’ll start hearing this defense, if you haven’t already. It seems so understandable, so smooth, so compassionate. But. No. Imagine you’re going to “get out of the house.” Just go for a drive. It’s May, and it’s a beautiful day. “I’m not going bowling,” you say. “I know that bowling is bad for me. I get mad when I can’t get 300 and I mess up the place.” But you take your bowling bag with your bowling ball…
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Getting an Upgrade
Well, it’s official. I’m now an editor for the online magazine Our Human Family, which has the motto “Conversations on achieving equality.” Clay Rivers is the publisher, dreamer, and doer behind all this, and he’s produced some awesome work, not only with an online magazine but also printed full-color magazines. We’ve been chatting together for a while now, and I’ve been handing him some of my own work to publish. So it just seemed like the right time to start working with him officially. It’s a labor of love*, and the goals we are are simple and direct and honest: that we would all love one another. Take a look,…
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There Are No Dreams in Space
My latest work, “There Are No Dreams in Space,” is now available on Ripples in Space.
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When Words Fail
I was in a conversation recently where this question came up: “How do we influence people to change their minds and do things differently?” This question is dear to me because it speaks to my own conversion experience—no, not a religious conversion. My conversion was the realignment of my behaviors, connections, and beliefs with the values I already held. I’ve told my story elsewhere, but will summarize it here: I used to be solidly white-centered, and now, not so much— but given the context of living in the Pacific Northwest ten years ago, this was a radical, life-altering change. I know—as does anyone who has lived in the spaces that are…
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Jean-Paul Sartre’s Cooking Diary
In which the ennui of existence translates to a series of uninspired yet necessary meals.