Getting ready to head back to Holland. It has been a good time away. I could use a bit more. Today is a sort of work day. I need to do my usual weekly prep of bulletin info, meet with my boss and then give rehearsal tonight.

I  have been sleeping in until 8 AM these last three days. I am planning to try to do this for three more days. I figure for someone who rises at 5 AM pretty regularly this amounts to three more hours of rest a day. This morning I was unable to still my mind and relax since I was thinking not only of what I have to do today but also of Holy Week which is not far off.

I did Greek and read in The Art of Listening by Les Back this morning. After I finish blogging I will do my daily check of email and Facebooger. Then off to Holland. Check out time is in about 50 minutes but our hostess doesn’t seem too particular about that.

Need to get moving.

I am having a good time away, spending leisurely time studying my Greek and reading and being with lovely Eileen.

I have been astounded with Les Back’s The Art of Listening. I have just spent the last hour typing notes from it into a document (I keep a “Reading Notes” subdirectory in my Google Drive, usually one doc per book).

I am mostly going to resist sharing here. I know what it’s like to go on a blog and only find reams of quotes and no real observations.

However there is a very  good story I want to share that he tells. It’s about a building in Croyden, U.K. called the Lunar House. Erected in “the age of space flight. This building is perhaps aptly named; the moon is probably a more hospitable place.”

He explains that it houses the Immigration and Nationality Directorate and is “notorious for losing passports and documents.”

“Most who have been through its doors remember the experience with disdain.”

After this set up he tells this story about missed cues and misunderstanding.

“In the summer of 2005 I was a member of a delegation who visited Lunar House as part of the London Citizens Investigation into the Immigration and Nationality Directorate. We waited in an adjacent building before meeting the senior civil servants. A young British Asian security guard checked our credentials while we waited. It was just a few weeks after the 7 July bombings in central London. i asked him if security was particularly tight. ‘We get a lot of bomb alerts but mostly it’s nothing to worry about. You see, what happens is that when people send in their immigration applications they sometimes put flowers or flower petals in with the form for good luck. In the Asian community this is quite common, it’s like putting a prayer in the envelope.’, he explained. ‘Only thing is when they arrive here the flowers have turned to dust and when we open them we think, “this could be a letter bomb.”’ Prayers are interpreted as bombs.

Les Back’s book keeps coming to mind as I learn about the Robert Durst scandal.

I doubt if you’ve missed this one. Durst was the subject of the HBO reality series, The Jinx. This past Sunday it aired a three year old confession of Durst inadvertently taped in which he says he killed the people he is suspected of killing.

There are two layers of horror in this story for me: the story of a killer and the story of its fascination for the public via reality TV.

Les Back describes two concepts that help me think about the latter.

Under the subheading, “Spectators in the Lives of Others,” Back describes several reality TV shows. He uses horrific examples of people who go into the experience with one set of expectations are “completely defeated by the form” and up doing humiliating things before the camera. Then he writes:

“Public life degenerates into little more than a contemporary version of the Victorian freak show…. reality spectaculars like Big Brother lead to a kind of moral cannibalism where the viewer is invited to nourish their moral probity by consuming images of badness, crime, vulgarity and degeneracy.” 

The second helpful concept is intrusive empericism. Speaking specifically of sociologists gathering information Bask writes:

intrusive empiricism – “claims to know and judge the very soul of its subjects. It mines their secret failings, which in turn come to define the people scrutinized in this way… This intrusive salacious curiosity is aligned with notion of moral cannibalism… These descriptions are so thick i detail that they occlude and hide what’s at stake. They are by definition fast and produced with such swiftness that each is soon lost in a torrent of others.”

 For me, it’s like he’s writing about the Durst stuff.

Irresistible TV, but Durst Film Tests Ethics, Too – NYTimes.com

Irresistible to who? It’s repugnant to me. The people involved misunderstand the moral implications of what they are doing.

Rationalizing how reality TV has sometimes has to withhold important information to make its stories fit the TV script needs, Joe Berlinger (one of the directors of Jinx) says

I spent a couple of hours yesterday morning pouring over my Pentecost Suite, comparing the organ part I think Rhonda’s working from to the Marimba part. After this exhaustive work I concluded that somehow I had given the Marimba player parts that were without mistakes. Whew. That’s what I get for working from old Finale files while listening to Rhonda the other day.

I managed to book a B and B for the next three nights in Spring Lake. This is far away enough to seem like it’s not Holland and close enough that it’s  a short drive. I’m planning to pack up and leave after church. Eileen will join me tomorrow. AirBnB (which I used to book this place) is a kind of weird thing.

My friend Rhonda and daughter Elizabeth seemed familiar with it. I went on their recommendations. Plus at $60 a night, it’s cheaper than a hotel. I’m hoping that even though we will be staying in a downstairs condo with the owners living right upstairs we will still have privacy and peace and quiet for a few days.

God knows I need it.

I messaged the owners of the place that I was bringing my electric piano. They didn’t object in any of our communications.

I’ll stop off and say hi to Mom before I leave this afternoon. Then I’m hoping to hole up in this B and B until Wednesday morning when I will return for my meeting with my boss at church and choir rehearsal. No ballet classes this week. Hope’s on Spring Break.

Juliet Schor: The New Politics of Consumption

A 1999 article footnoted in Kent Greenfield’s The Myth of Choice. Consumerism is one of five significant cultural influences in our lives that we sometimes miss. You know like goldfish don’t know they’re in water.

“In contemporary American culture, consuming is as authentic as it gets.” Juliet Schor

VIA PROJECT. ORG

This organization gives cameras to children and adolescents to “teach clinicians about the realities of their illness, experiences and needs.” I love it that the kids do the teaching with videos.

Richard Glatzer, Co-Director of ‘Still Alice,’ Dies at 63 – NYTimes.com

Died from ALS. Very brave man.

8 Things Top Practicers Do Differently | The Creativity Post

I’ve put this info up before, but this article sums it up clearly.

Terry Pratchett, Novelist, Dies at 66 – NYTimes.com

After reading his obit, it might be time to go back and read some more of his novels.

A History Lesson for the Republicans Who Wrote to Iran – NYTimes.com

Literally a little history of evolution of the presidency around negotiating treaties.

“The betrayal and perversion of knowledge is not a lesson from the past but a condition of the present.” Les Back, The Art of Listening

I often inter-library loan books on whims. Then later if I can’t recall the whim when they arrive they are like a gift from a past self. I wonder why I sought them out, but then usually when I look at them, I find them interesting in and of themselves even if I don’t remember why I inter-library loaned them.

The Art of Listening by Les Back arrived at my local library recently. I received notice that my inter library loan book was available. I picked it up yesterday. I don’t remember why I sought this book out.

Les Back is a sociologist. This book seems to be an argument for what sociology is “needed for today?” (in the words of the first sentence in the introduction).

Back’s introduction draws the reader into a world of confronting death and life in interesting and dramatic ways. He says that the origin of this book was when he was reading reader’s proofs of a previous book to his dying father.

“I didn’t want him to die among strangers so I stayed with him through the night. I took my manuscript with me and read it at his bedside.”

He reads and listens to his father’s breathing. He has an epiphany about the value and importance of his own work.

Without entirely disclosing the insight he received, he immediately launches into a discussion of Kierkegaard’s comment that thinking is like a dance with Death. It is our mortality that makes us the most honest with ourselves, Kierkegaard is in effect saying.

Later Back quotes Saul Bellow: “Death is the dark backing a mirror needs if we are to say anything.”

Back comes up for some air after this dismal stuff and observes “Clinicians and nurses who care for the terminally ill believe that hearing is the last of our senses to leave us. Hearing is our final link to the external world. In what follows, it will be argued that listening is important for this reason; it is a fundamental medium for human connection, which is often taken for granted, assumed mistakenly to be self-evident. However, I argue that the capacity to hear has been damaged and is in need of repair. This is what sociology is for, and, as a consequence, why it is a listener’s art.” p.5

Jupe the Composer update

It was fun to hear Rhonda play the organ part of my Pentecost suite yesterday morning. I enjoyed chatting with her about it. In the course of doing this I discovered that I still haven’t found the  final version of this piece in a Finale file. Since it was eleven years ago, I have changed computers too many times I guess. But I do have a copy of the printed version Rhonda and Dave are playing from. This means that I will have to take some time and use their performance version to update what files I have been using. (O my god. I just realized that the improved marimba part I did for this performance was based on an older version of this piece. I will have to hustle and re-edit the marimba part to fit the organ part. Good grief!)

Rhonda asked me for a bio for her program. This is what I emailed her.

Steve Jenkins plays piano and organ for Grace Episcopal Church in Holland, Michigan. He also conducts the choir. He improvises piano accompaniment to Ballet Classes at Hope College. His compositions and observations can be  found at www.jupiterjenkins.com.

What do you think? I wanted to use verbs to describe myself not nouns. We’ll see if Rhonda uses it.

I also tested out my easy version of “March” by Holst. Here’s a link. I am pretty happy with having the option of the easier bass line in this version. They are both on my “Free mostly original sheet music” page.

Ever since finishing Dylan Thomas’s Collected Poems, I haven’t exactly known what poetry to read in the morning. I was reading a bit in the classic Oxford Book of English Verse.

It was interesting to see which poems they included by John Donne, George Herbert and Gerard Manley Hopkins. But my interest in reading in this collection is fading.

This morning I read some John Donne and D. H. Lawrence, both from collections of their work I own.

But most of my time this morning was taken up with preparing to meet with Rhonda in about an hour or so. I think she wants to have me listen to some of her registration choices for my Pentecost Suite. So I spent the morning finding the final versions of this piece, listening to Finale play them for me, and saving them to my laptop for reference.

My final versions are not quite ready to post online. Not because of note differences but because I want to make the final versions more finished in their presentation.

I also decided to make a simplified version of Holst’s March I have been working on. I only have two days left to prepare this and I’m not satisfied with about the three measures I find challenging in the pedal part.

I could keep practicing this section thoroughly as I have been, but it really needs about seven more days to be secure in public.

Doing it the way it is by Sunday is a bit chancy.

I wouldn’t have a train wreck, but it might not be as clear as I want it to be if I smear a few notes in the pedal. Not good.

Last night in the dark I decided I would give  myself a break and rewrite the bass line in those measures to make them easier for this Sunday. I have already rewritten them.

I will put up the entire easier version in a pdf after I have gone to the organ and checked it out there. I will probably end up revising it further.

Again I’m quite exhausted this morning. Another long day yesterday, but Hope college is going on Spring break and I am seriously trying to figure out how to get out of Dodge for a couple of days. Eileen has been visiting her Mom a bit more while her sister Nancy is in Hawaii. This weekend she is going up to Whitehall (where her Mom lives) on Saturday and staying through Monday morning so she can take her to a doctor appointment.

I’m thinking we could meet on Monday and spend a couple of nights holed up in a hotel somewhere AWAY from Holland. The only problem is money. But I might talk myself into it if I can find a cheap place to stay.

In the meantime I have buy valium silk road finished a final version of my transcription of Holst. I put it on my “Free Mostly Original Sheet Music” page this morning. Here is a direct Link to the big version. Here’s one to a handier version which is only 4 pages long.

I’m planning to plug my friend Rhonda’s upcoming concert on Facebook today. She is preparing a performance of my “Pentecost Suite for Organ and Marimba.” For the record, the concert is on Sunday, March 22nd. Starts at 3 PM and is being performed at Rhonda’s church, Hope Reformed Church in Holland Michigan.

Getting the Whole World Online – NYTimes.com

Some amazing stats in this article.

Date of Armenia’s Birth, Given in 5th Century, Gains Credence – NYTimes.com

Genetic detective work…. wow.

Mystery Surrounds Offer to Sell Michelangelo Documents Stolen From the Vatican

Eileen and I managed to accomplish several onerous tasks yesterday. We had designated my Tuesday off as “bank day” (my coinage). We had an appointment at 11 with a investment banker. From him we learned that investing only $3,000 would end up costing us instead of making us money. Since the whole point of investing was to lower last year’s income, we decided to simply open an IRA savings account in Eileen’s name.

Which we did.

This inspired Eileen to come home and basically finish our taxes. On the way  home we stopped off at Mom’s bank to inquire whether the credit card they sent me in the mail incurred fees when it was used to debit her checking. It does not. Recently her Discover card didn’t work because she (I) was behind in paying the monthly minimum. I was pretty frustrated when this happened because the day it happened, I had received an email reminder of an upcoming minimum payment with no (!) mention of an outstanding over due amount. They just stopped the card. When I paid this, I emailed Discover that this inconvenience convinced me to consider not using my (Mom’s) Discover card. So having an alternate way to pay some of Mom’s out of pocket expenses with a card that draws on her checking is a very good thing.

While Eileen buried herself in our taxes, I had rising anxiety because we had an afternoon appointment with a tax consultant to begin work on my Mom’s taxes. Eileen finished in time to help me prepare for our meeting with Mom’s tax consultant.

By the time we had all this done, I only had energy to rehearse my latest version of my transcription of Holst’s “March” which I have been working on.  I have decided to wait and post copies of this transcription after I’m reasonably sure they are in the shape I want them.

I’ll probably do so tomorrow.

With Misattributed Constable Masterpiece, a Rare Look Into the Imprecise World of Art Identification

I love these stories. I also like Constable and decided to use his painting as my desktop background for a while.

Move Over Mao: Beloved ‘Papa Xi’ Awes China – NYTimes.com

After having read a bio of Mao and visited China a couple times I read a news story like this with interest.

I slept in late this morning (Thank God!) and then used up my usual blog time editing a final version of my organ transcription of Holst’s “March” from his “Second Suite for Military Band.” I am working on getting two final version of this piece finished, one larger score and one reduced with some repeats. I have simultaneously seriously rehearsed what I have at the organ. This is a bit tricky. My teacher, Ray Ferguson, taught me to work from reduced scores and clever page turn tricks, but made it clear that this needed to come at a certain point in the learning of the piece, namely late enough in the process that one knows the notes and early enough to get used to how one has laid it out so that one can play the whole piece without significant page turns.

Unfortunately, I don’t have the luxury of this kind of extended process since I’m playing the piece in public Sunday.

I plan to both the larger eleven page score and the smaller four page score online here when I get it done.

I’m sitting with Eileen right now in Panera. We had very good news this morning. My brother and his wife signed a deal on a house near Ann Arbor yesterday.

It’s in Gregory, Michigan. For all appearances, it is their dream home: acreage with access to woods and a stream, an old lovely house recently restored and high speed internet available. I couldn’t be happier for them. Very very very cool.

I think they will be ensconced there by May. Yay!

Another Monday with a lot on my plate. Besides the usual ballet classes, I have to prep for a presentation I am giving this evening for the St. Mary’s Guild at Grace. I haven’t thought much about this presentation. They made no specific requests. So I’m planning to mostly sing hymns from Lift Every Voice and Sing and the Hymnal 1982. In between I will talk about Gregorian Chant and teach Anglican chant.

We have been singing the psalm in worship at Grace to Anglican chant for over a year. One of the members of this guild mentioned to me that she doesn’t sing the psalm because the tune changes every week. Maybe I can help with this some tonight. We’ll see.

Tomorrow I am meeting again with the tax accountant, this time for my Mom’s taxes. I have already spent several hours prepping for this and am still woefully unprepared. I am planning to spend time on this tomorrow.

In between classes today, I plan to finish a draft of next Sunday’s postlude, my transcription of Holst’s “March” from his Second Suite for Military Band. I managed to get  all the notes into a Finale doc yesterday, print it up, and play through it at the organ. There is one note in the condensed score I doubt. When I work on it today, I want to double check that particular note (it’s in the bass) with the full score which I’m pretty sure is online.

I want to leave the house in about 45 minutes or so. I have already done dishes, made coffee, read Greek and MacCulloch this morning.

Yesterday in his homily, Christian used the Greek words: kenosis (emptying) and theosis (divinization). I misheard the first one as gnosis (knowledge).  Coincidentally I had been reading about theosis that morning in my MacCulloch. After church, I told him that gnosis meant knowledge not emptying (kenosis). I was happy that he was able to point out to me that he had been using a different word. A choir member standing nearby pointed out that as a choir director I insist on crisp “k” sounds like the one in kenosis. Ha ha.

I was surprised when Christian said that he had not studied Greek. Apparently they alternate Greek and Hebrew at the Seminary he attended and he had a year of Hebrew but no Greek.

The choir member (who is a Methodist Minister) piped  up that Greek was no longer a requirement these days.

This figures. Off to the races.

The time change has shortened the time I have available for blogging this morning.

This might be a good time to share a little story my Mom recently told me about the time she first met my Dad’s parents. It’s a well known story to me that my Dad’s mom wasn’t very happy that he had chosen my Mom for his wife. Dorothy (my Dad’s mom) expressed this disappointment directly to  Mary (my mom) when she met her. I can picture my grandmother’s mouth pursed and her saying in a slightly whiny voice, “Oooh, and we had somebody else picked out for Paul.”

So that’s one I have heard Mom tell more than once. But recently when she told it she added the face that at the breakfast table the next morning she found Ben, my Dad’s dad, sitting in front of a place with a piece of toast on it. He apparently jauntily held it out to and observed that was he “toasting” her.

Get it?

There’s the added fun that Ben (like almost all people in the “Churchagod”) was a teetotaler.

Anyway here’s a couple of links.

Ancient Mars Had an Ocean, Scientists Say – NYTimes.com

I know I mentioned this yesterday but I didn’t link it. I love this sort of thing. This morning while I cleaned the kitchen, I listened to Holst’s “The Planets” which begins with “Mars.”

‘The Events’ Uses Local Choirs for Vocals, Minus a Script – NYTimes.com

I think people in volunteer choirs are some of the most tolerant people I have known. This story reminds me of when a country singer named Laurie Morgan came to Muskegon. Somehow my little Roman Catholic choir got roped into being her back up choir for a religious number. It was a surreal experience. Also my daughters and some other kids from the church appeared with Morgan on stage as sort of human props. Weird shit.

Finished reading Collected Poems by Dylan Thomas this morning. While reading these poems, for most of them I have also read William Tindall’s elucidating comments on each poem. Lots of fun.

I don’t think I’m quite ready to leave Thomas. I want to read all of his prose as well as his letters and probably an updated bio at some point. I read the introduction to my copy of his collected letters this morning.

The scholarship is dated I’m sure, as she mentions that she has omitted letters that might embarrass living people. The book was published in 1967 and a quick google reveals more recent selections of Thomas’s letters.

But I like my old edition at this point since I have it in my hands.

My edition seems to be a United Kingdom edition. I may have even bought it there on one of my trips.

I thought I would read all the Thomas I own before buying more of what he wrote, new bios of him and other collections of his letters (of which there are many).

I reorganized my Mom’s bills yesterday and began preparing to meet with her tax accountant next Tuesday. I decided to reorganize when I could easily lay my hands on last year’s tax returns. Now I can.

I finished up another sections of my transcription of “March” from Second Suite from Military Band by Holst yesterday. I printed up what I have done and rehearsed it yesterday. I won’t be able to play it nearly as fast as any recording I have heard recently. I have chosen to put the bass parts in the pedal (naturally) and they do move along in places.

Yesterday I decided which feet will play which note and marked this on the music. We organists call this “pedaling.”

Eileen and I have a lovely evening out last night. My friend Rhonda and her husband met us at a restaurant for dinner. Then we went to Dance 41, the annual Hope College Dance recital. They’ve been giving a winter recital for 41 years and change the title each year to reflect this.

Today  I need to keep working on prepping for Mom’s taxes and prepare for tomorrow’s church stuff.

A Little Tech Talk

I have been struggling with the online presence of the New York Times for many years. I used to subscribe to the actual paper paper when there was no way to subscribe online because it was free.

Then when a subscription that was solely online became available I switched to that.

But how they are constantly upgrading and expanding how one can access the paper. Their latest innovation is sort of an online app. The URL doesn’t change from article to article. This defeats my bookmarking certain articles so I have been opening up another access they call “Today’s Paper” in order to book mark articles  I find in the app.

Yesterday I noticed that at the bottom of each article in the app, there was a url.

I don’t know how long that has been an option, but I saved an article I wanted to save two ways: one by right clicking on the app url which gave me the option to open that specific article in a tab (thus saving a step) and the other from the “Today’s Paper” access.

This morning I looked at the urls and discovered that the one from the app is a bit cleaner.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/06/science/mars-had-an-ocean-scientists-say-pointing-to-new-data.html

vs.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/06/science/mars-had-an-ocean-scientists-say-pointing-to-new-data.html?ref=todayspaper

How bout that?

When I was in high school, I played cornet in the wind ensemble. One of the pieces we learned has stuck with me over the years: Second Suite in F Major by Gustav Holst.

I still like this piece. I like the theme of the March, the ascending five notes and have used the beginning figuration many times over the years in improvs at church.

I was making hummus yesterday and put on my Holst playlist on Spotify. It starts with “Mars” from “The Planets” which i quite like and then moves on to this suite.

We are singing the hoary old choral anthem, “God so loved the world,” by John Stainer a week from Sunday. The gospel reading is John 3:16. There are several anthems based on this text, but this year I chose this one. Choir directors like myself are not in love with this piece, but choirs enjoy learning and singing it.

When we do it, I think of choirs in the Church of God I have heard sing it. It reminds me of my Dad.

I was trying to think of a good postlude that might match this eccentric anthem.

Then I remembered the Holst Suite March. Sure enough, I had printed out a condensed score version of it I found online (link to pdf).

I took it with me when I went to church to practice organ yesterday. I played through it a couple of times and quickly decided it would be my postlude for next Sunday.

I got started on putting it in Finale yesterday.

As far as I can tell, the copyright on this is old enough (1922) that I can share this here when I get it done.

Ebooks are convenient for reading fiction. But when reading, non-fiction with many footnotes and cross-refers via page numbers, my experience is that the ebook as presently designed fails.

I recently ordered a hard copy of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years by Diarmaid MacCulloch. I have read this book in an ebook version. I was able to access footnotes in that version. But MacCulloch does a lot of cross-referring by page number in the text. My Kindle book did not have corresponding page numbers so I was unable to check these references.

I am now reading MacCulloch’s Silence: A Christian History.  I purchased a hard copy of this book to read. In reading it, I have become aware of the elegant web of MacCulloch’s scholarly thought at he cross-refers in this book not only to itself but to his larger history, Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years.

When I discovered a used paperback version of his history, I jumped at the chance to purchase it. Yesterday I spent my allotted time for reading MacCulloch going back and forth between the two books, expanding my understanding of his observations and history.

I am seriously considering re-reading the history after finishing MacCulloch’s book on silence. I think MacCulloch has an amazing mind. It is a privilege to come in contact with it via these books and others by him I have read.

I wrestle with the concept of Christianity. MacCulloch has coined a phrase in regards to his own relationship with Christianity saying that he, a man called to the priesthood of the Anglican church as his own father was but rejected because of his candor about his sexuality, is a “friend of Christianity.”

This week, particularly discouraged by the incoherence of theology at my church, I told Eileen that I was more of an “acquaintance of Christianity.”

However, I confessed to my boss yesterday my interest in all this shit, shaking my head and feeling dopey as usual.

My day yesterday was exhausting physically and emotionally. Improvising for three and a half hours of ballet class can be draining, especially when I try to put as much art in my work as possible. In addition to the improvising I worked with the young dancers developing their own choreography for the two tunes I wrote. I showed the B section of the piece I have dubbed “Sweet Talk but with a dark side” to one of the two dancers who are developing a dance for it. I could tell she was moved by my piece, an extraordinary compliment.

Later I sat with my boss (and friend) as she described her anger and bewilderment of the treatment of her life partner by Hope College. Her partner who has recently come out of the closet at work had been told that she would receive tenure when she returned from her present sabbatical. This offer has been summarily withdrawn (this is probably not even legal, much less moral or fair). Plus the people who told her this also apparently made bullying and threatening comments about my boss and Grace church.

Unfortunately both my boss and I can draw a clear line from the theology of the majority of the Dutch Reformed church to these outrages.  More reasons to be an “acquaintance” of Christianity even as I spend the quiet of my morning reading MacCulloch and continue to respect and admire my boss the priest.

I’m feeling pressed this morning as usual. I have set Wednesdays as the day I try to get my church stuff up to speed. Today this means choosing a new psalm tone for Sunday because my boss decided it’s too hard as well as preparing the psalm and bulletin info for the following Sunday. I’m working on learning the new church software (RiteStuff 2.0) which may end up making some of my tasks simpler. But I’m not there yet.

Yesterday was a fruitful day for putting Eileen’s mind at rest. We spent 40 minutes with a tax accountant recommended by my Mom’s estate lawyer. She was very complimentary of Eileen’s work. I think this helped Eileen almost as much as resolving our crisis.

For what it’s worth, it turns out if you are paying for your own insurance there is a huge tax credit available, that we were not taking advantage of. This brought our taxes way down. We are electing to put some money in an IRA anyway to lower our income in an attempt to keep our subsidy for our insurance this and last year.

Of course our problem number two is that the “Marketplace” (the national organization of the Affordable Care Act) is doubling billing us for two policies. They have promised to resolve this in thirty days about thirty days ago. This will make a big difference in our finances. We are waiting to see what they come up with.

So it looks like my marimba piece is going to be performed after all. The previous player backed out so my friend Rhonda found another player. This dude rightly wants to be paid to play. It comes at a hard time for us, but we are splitting his fee with Rhonda.

I hate to see her paying out of pocket at all. If I were sitting just a tad better I would want to pay it all. I have been fighting my whole life for fair pay for musicians. I wasn’t all that happy that my piece was going to be performed gratis anyway. But I figured it was the business of Rhonda and her church.

I think Holland is a pretty hostile economic place for musicians. When I came in 87 not many church musicians were getting paid that well if at all by their church. The local funeral homes were paying $30 a funeral, an amount that had not changed for decades. When the local coffee shop began running music, he didn’t pay musicians. It’s ironic that at a time when popular music is such a money maker, musicians on the ground where I am struggle to make a living. But that’s life I guess.

Rev. Malcolm Boyd, an Author, Activist and Counterculture Rebel, Dies at 91 – NYT

Malcolm Body was a big influence on me. I know he’s kind of corny, but I read his prayers as a kid and listened to him read them on record over Charlie Byrd’s guitar improvs. I may even still have the vinyl somewhere. I definitely have his book of prayers.

Leaving and Cleaving – NYTimes.com

Leaving people alone who no longer want contact with me is something I try to do. I have a list of people that I care about that no longer return calls. It’s sad, but I’m cool with it.

8 ways Obamacare has proved its critics wrong – Vox
This is why Obamacare political malpractice must stop now

These probably strike my conservative Republican readers as biased. However I think that there is a lot of deliberate misinformation surrounding Obamacare.

Ghanaian Spinach Stew With Sweet Plantains Recipe – NYT Cooking

This recipe looks good to me.

‘Moth Orchids’ – NYTimes.com

The NYT poem of the week from its mag. I like it.

Every once in a while, I go over to the Writer’s Almanac, read the poem for the day and glance over what happened is history on this date. Yesterday I was very discouraged to discover that the little phrase that Keillor uses at the end of the show, “Be Well, Do Good Work and Keep in Touch” is actually trademarked.

I suppose I’m violating trademark by using it here, although it feels like fair use.

Speaking of fair use, at last night’s AGO meeting one member was buttering up another. The butterer was complimenting the butteree on a service he attended at the church Sunday. He saved some bulletins which he shared and suggested that we (the local AGO) keep a directory of local program and services bulletins on our website. The member being buttered up told him he would send him a PDF. I spoke up and asked if he would send one to me to share on Facebooger.

He refused saying he didn’t want quite that much exposure. He felt that there were copyright issues (which there are of course since he probably reproduced music under copyright). The butterer chimed in and said that putting these up on the chapter’s website is more like fair use or educational use.

He’s a teacher and he probably knows better because once its online it’s in violation of copyright no matter where it is.

But I quickly acquiesced. No problemo.

After the meeting the presenter said to me that he hoped I wouldn’t put pictures up of him on Facebook. I told him I had already shared a picture. When I showed it to him, he was horrified. I told him I would take it down. Again, no problemo.

I realized that I was probably the only person in the room who uses Facebooger at all. I sort of maintain the chapter Facebook page. We have more people in that group on Facebook than we have in our chapter, since I invite all sorts of interested people to be part of it.

I see sharing of information and ideas as fundamental. I also love the way the Interwebs does this. I get a tad discouraged when I see this not being taken advantage of, but in the final analysis, I’m mostly happy to do so myself.

Take this morning for instance. Having read where Vierne dedicated his Suite Bourguignonne, a piano piece to a student of his, my curiosity was piqued. In a matter of seconds I was inspecting the entire score online.

Earlier I had been intrigued quotes from two books used by Kent Greenfield at the beginning of a chapter in his book, The Myth of Choice.

We don’t live in a world that suffers from doubt, but one that suffers from certainty, false certainties that compensate for the well of worldly anxieties and worries.

Les Back, The Art of Listening

I liked that and interlibrary loaned the book this morning.

There was a second quote.

After all, what was adult life but one moment of weakness piled on top of another? Most people just fell in line like obedient little children, doing exactly what society expected of them at any given moment, all the while pretending that they’d actually made some sort of choice.

Tom Perrotta, Little Children

I kind of liked that one too.

It’s sitting on the shelf at the local library. I will probably pick it up soon to look at.

I should probably explain today’s title since it didn’t make that much sense to Eileen when I read it to her. I find myself about equally disinterested in local Dutch Reformed civic stuff and local Dutch Reformed college stuff.

Usually you can go with one or the other, town or gown, the city or the college. In this case, I have one colleague locally (Hello again Rhonda if you’re reading) and a few sympathetic dance teachers at the college.

What I really depend on is the internet to keep the old brain cells working and the morale reasonably good.

I do wonder if the internet should just happen to crash (Heartbleed), having all this access to information will motivate me to continue seeking out answers even without the internet.

Hey. It could happen.

By the way, I did get the presenter’s sort of permission to post a “discrete” pic of him on Facebook. Now all I have to do is work up the motivation to fuck with it at all.

Another by the way, Eileen is beginning to smile a bit more after talking to her CPA brother. It does look like there’s probably a way out of our most recent crisis.

Once again a Monday morning and I don’t have much time to blog. It looks like this is going to be a week where I do a lot of pretending to be a grown up. I have to untangle some billing and insurance for my Mom’s recent stay at a local full care place. I have been getting mail, calls and bills from them. They don’t seem to have had enough insurance information even though I gave it to them at the time. I’m hoping to clear this up this week.

Also, my younger smarter brother, Mark, called yesterday with a brilliant idea about our insurance crisis. He pointed out that one can reduce last year’s income by investing in an IRA account before April 15. The tricky part will be if this reduces our income at the correct stage on our tax form thereby restoring our eligibility for a substantial subsidy (Thank you, Mark!).

I also need to get moving on my Mom’s taxes which will be more complicated this time since she sold her house last year.

Oy. It’s ironic that all this falls on my plate since I basically am a bum and do not believe in money. As Herbie my hero says, “I know mostly about lollipops.”

Did Israel Put Money Over Justice? – NYTimes.com

Interesting convoluted story of one Israeli couple that is pissed at Netanyahu.

How We Learned to Kill – NYTimes.com

The author is a marine who thinks clearly and writes well about this subject.

In his book, The Myth of Choice: Personal Responsibility in a World of Limits, Kent Greenfield describes how our choices and judgments are not nearly as controlled as we think. For example, I think the “echo chamber effect” which I try to minimize, can be seen in Greenfield’s concept, “motivated reasoning,” by which he means “scrutinizing ideas we disagree with more than those we agree with.”

That one’s pretty obvious.

We also exhibit “mental contamination”: the influence on judgment by unrelated but recent or nearby facts.

This last one is pretty funny. He quotes from a study where people are asked to guess the number of countries in Africa. But before they are asked, they spin a roulette wheel. The number that comes up influences whether they will guess a higher or lower number just because it was recently noticed.

At the end of chapter three, Greenfield writes

Parts of our brains are highly sophisticated, but other parts are still prehistoric. Our brains make mistakes, are easily fooled, and have tendencies to make us think, react, and feel a certain way. We routinely misremember the past and make horrible predictions about the future. In the phrasing of Dan Ariely, we are ‘predictably irrational,’ with our minds playing tricks on us all the time.

What’s worse, we usually do not recognize these tendencies in ourselves, which leaves us open to manipulation.

I feel like this vindicates some of my own tendency to doubt myself as I often do, turning over possibilities in my head. Chapters 7-9 in this book are in a section entitled “What to do.” Greenfield not only is teaching how choice works, but apparently will propose strategies for more personal responsibility in the light of this brain science.

Cool.

I finished drafts of B sections of my ballet music yesterday. I spent the morning working on it. In the afternoon I had auditions and a funeral all of which went okay. Unfortunately by the time I had a chance to practice for today, I was pretty exhausted. But I did get some in.

I’m hoping you can access my music with these links. I would appreciate it if someone would let me know if they don’t work. Google has once again changed how Google drive works. It’s not entirely clear to me if I can now make permanent URLs of music as I was doing.

Anyway, click on the music to go to what I hope is a PDF of it. You will notice an absence of tempo marking, dynamics and articulations. These are my working drafts to learn and begin performing tomorrow. I will add details as I evolve them, learning to play them.

When I’m satisfied with them I will further edit them and add them to my free mostly original sheet music page.

Yesterday I found myself mulling over the people whom I currently serve as choir director. It encompasses an fascinating variety of people. I was sitting at church chatting with two of them, an ordained Methodist Minster and the woman who is studying organ with me who has a doctorate in comparative studies (of literature and opera I believe) and is fluent in German and has studied oboe.

The Methodist Minster dude was interested in learning more about the Deacon’s role in the great Liturgical masterpiece, the Exultet. I had shown him a resource book to help him (Marion Hatchett’s Commentary on the Prayer Book which is quite good).

Other people in my choir include a professor of nursing, a full time pediatrician, a physical therapist (very popular at back rubs), a retired law professor, a retired English professor, a retired symphony musician, a nurse, a retired librarian (that would be Eileen) and a woman with a doctorate in liturgy who is a priest in an offshoot Catholic church.

It’s quite a crew when I think of it. Fifteen people total, many with doctorates and wide life experiences. We even have a token young person in the Bass section.

I guess this is another area of my life where I am lucky.

As a whole, this group is very patient with me as a director and follows my instructions in my attempts to help them sound better as a choir.

The one studying organ with me left me some funny pictures on my music stand yesterday.

I posted them without comment on Facebooger because my phone wouldn’t let me put comments on them and just shot them into cyberspace. In this one, my student echoed our conversation about how organ technique actually works (one turns pipes off with active release returning them to a state of rest, this is sometimes called “playing in sympathy with the instrument.” I got the idea from Craig Cramer.) My student compared it to jumping off a diving board, the release being the upward motion of the dive itself in the air. Not bad.

My daughter Sarah “liked” these on Facebooger. I’m not sure they make much sense without any explanation. But I know Sarah and I both appreciate drawings like these.

These were stuck all over the score of my postlude for Sunday which was sitting on the organ music stand. It gave me a smile as I settled down to practice yesterday.

I have my Saturday morning free, but this afternoon I am accompanying for Joffrey Ballet auditions at 1 PM and have a funeral to play for at 4 PM.

Yesterday, Eileen began working on taxes and discovered that we made too much money last year to receive the subsidy we were getting on our health care. Bad. It looks like we owe an extra 7K to the government (over our usual tax bill).

Needless to say, she freaked. Worse, we are not sure if we should continue attempting to purchase our insurance through the Affordable Care Act. We have been having trouble with them since the beginning of this year when we signed up for a second year and ended up with two policies, twice the billing, through no fault of our own.

I’m mostly concerned that Eileen is feeling very bad about this. Inevitable, I guess, but I hope she recovers soon.

(Editorial note: I just had Eileen read this section in an effort to be appropriate and not say anything she didn’t want public.)

I composed some drafts on the B sections of my two ballet pieces (Which Witch and Sweet but Dark) yesterday. My cellist and my violinist have been having physical stuff and canceling our weekly trio rehearsal. I hadn’t heard from either one, so I arrived a bit after our scheduled time to find my cellist putting her cello away.

She stayed and we played Bach for a while. Amazing music in my opinion.

I was practicing organ when Eileen texted me upset. I jumped in the car and spent the rest of the evening with her.

I don’t actually believe in money or health insurance on any of that kind of stuff. I’m more concerned that the people I care about are okay. That we all have what we need (food, shelter) and are able to having fulfilling lives.

I still think my life is good. I hope Eileen’s comes back to being good soon.