Rainy Weekends and Comfort Food

Just like last week­end, we went out, despite the pour­ing rain, for sev­eral errands (try­ing to locate some replace­ments for some unusual light bulbs that had burned out, a trip to the mar­ket, etc.). It doesn’t usu­ally rain like this here, or so I’m told. The water comes in driz­zles, show­ers, maybe even a cloud­burst or two, but not drench­ing, pool­ing down­pours that keep going all day and the next. It’s another bit of cli­mate change, I sup­pose. Aus­tralia is still suf­fer­ing from a hor­ren­dous drought, so we end up with our water plus theirs. I had even read or heard some­thing about the soot from fac­to­ries in China chang­ing the storm pat­terns on the Pacific ocean, which I watch the way that Papil­lon watches the waves com­ing in toward the island, look­ing for a pat­tern in the chaos. The best I can do is note that lately the cir­cu­lar whorls make their way to about Hawaii, at which point a straight line of clouds points right to us. Some­one referred to it as ‘The Pineap­ple Express’.

With these sod­den week­ends, I’ve taken to culi­nary solace. Last night, at Pam’s request, we had clas­sic French Onion Soup with melted Emmen­tal and Grueyère on top. Tonight I’m mak­ing some fresh Fusilli and Meat­balls. Tomor­row night it’s chicken with mush­rooms; 3 kinds, includ­ing some gor­geous shi­itakes I saw at the mar­ket — I guess all of this water is good for grow­ing something.

I know that this wet patch will end soon. Then I’ll switch to all of the spring foods. Bring on the aspara­gus, fid­dle­head ferns and strawberries!

A Fiery Speech from a Candidate

I know that Joe Biden is run­ning for Pres­i­dent in 2008. That means that he is look­ing for chances to make him­self stand out from the pack of Democ­rats, par­tic­u­larly all of the non-white or non-male ones. Nev­er­the­less, cyn­i­cal rea­sons aside, he made a strong state­ment from the floor of the Sen­ate today, and it was cov­ered by C-SPAN and posted on YouTube. Here’s what I saw:

I have to admit, cam­paign or not, what he says makes a lot more sense than a lot of what I’ve heard so far. I doubt he’ll get the nom­i­na­tion, but if he did, it wouldn’t be a bad thing, as far as I can tell.

Then again, angry doesn’t ‘sell’. I learned that from Howard Dean. Even if he was right all along (go check).

Music and Dance in Different Rooms

Last night, we went to the sec­ond in a series of three con­certs by the Van­cou­ver Sym­phony at the Round­house, a Com­mu­nity Cen­ter in Yale­town. It’s an appeal­ing venue, because it’s unpre­ten­tious, and clearly busy doing what com­mu­nity cen­ters do; host­ing bas­ket­ball, ping-pong, hockey and other sports, pro­vid­ing classes for arts, crafts and learn­ing an instru­ment, etc.

For these con­certs, they’ve been using one or more of the black-box the­atres (with bleach­ers) for cham­ber music up to cham­ber orches­tra con­certs. If some­one was wor­ried that clas­si­cal music con­certs were bor­ing or stuffy, these con­certs are an anti­dote for that per­cep­tion. While just on the edge of being ‘gim­micky’, both of the con­certs so far have had lots of extra-musical attrac­tions. The first one, back in Jan­u­ary, included Voices from the Gallery by Stephen Paulus, with dra­matic read­ings by an actress who spoke for var­i­ous works of art (pro­jected above). We got to hear what per­haps Bosch’s Gar­den of Earthly Delights, Christina from Wyeth’s Christina’s World, the dour look­ing farmer from Grant Wood’s Amer­i­can Gothic, and even the Mona Lisa might have to say for them­selves with some colouris­tic, if a lit­tle over­whelmed music by Paulus.

Last night’s con­cert was sim­i­larly full of non-musical ele­ments. It was actu­ally a Dance pre­sen­ta­tion as well, with the VSO col­lab­o­rat­ing with the Kokoro Dance Com­pany. The most inter­est­ing part of this com­bi­na­tion was per­haps its logis­tics: the live musi­cians per­formed in one room (again, black box with bleach­ers), while the dancers per­formed in another (same setup). If you chose to sit in the room with the dancers, the music was piped in. If you chose to be in the room with the orches­tra (as we did), the dance was pro­jected on a large screen above, as seen by 3 cam­eras, some­times super­im­pos­ing dif­fer­ent views. For one of the works, In Mem­ory by Joan Tower (a poignant and at times rest­less trib­ute to a friend who had died as well as a reac­tion to the attacks of 9/11), the dancers and musi­cians switched rooms. I found the dance ele­ment some­what inter­est­ing, but much of it seemed extra icing on a cake that didn’t need it, at least for me. Pam felt dif­fer­ently, and was more drawn to the extra visual ele­ments. I sus­pect that her opin­ion was closer to the other audi­ence members.

For me though, the high­light of the con­cert was the last piece on the pro­gram, a piece called Mon­day and Tues­day by Michael Torke. I knew Michael as a fel­low stu­dent back in the 80s at the East­man School of Music in Rochester, NY. It was a time in my life when I was pretty depressed (I later learned that I was prob­a­bly suf­fer­ing from Sea­sonal Affec­tive Dis­or­der, as Rochester is one of the dark­est cities in North Amer­ica), so I don’t remem­ber much from those years. He was a bright spot amongst the com­posers back then, and I even went so far as to tell him after I heard his ground-breaking Vanada (a cham­ber piece based on Nabokov’s Lolita for elec­tronic key­boards, winds and per­cus­sion) and that I thought he was ‘the future’. He went on to work as a suc­cess­ful com­poser with rel­a­tively lit­tle aca­d­e­mic work (some­thing that is almost unheard of in Clas­si­cal Music cir­cles). He wrote sev­eral com­mis­sions for bal­let music, two ora­to­rios, orches­tral and cham­ber works, and a few operas. He was first Asso­ciate Com­poser with the Royal Scot­tish Orches­tra in 1998 and has since started his own record label, Ecsta­tic Records, which is car­ried by the iTunes music store. Mon­day and Tues­day was writ­ten back in 1992, and had its first per­for­mance that year in Lon­don with the Lon­don Sin­foni­etta. It reminds me some­what of the music he was writ­ing when we were stu­dents together, and if any­thing, sounds even more strongly influ­enced by Steve Reich, who we were both fas­ci­nated with at the time.

Actu­ally, I do remem­ber Michael hand­ing me the ear­phones in his dorm room to hear Reich’s Ver­mont Coun­ter­point and me grin­ning like an idiot as I heard it for the first time. I also remem­ber him say­ing ‘It’s like heaven would sound like, isn’t it?’ I also can recall the two of us try­ing to explain to his clar­inetist girl­friend why a par­tic­u­lar har­monic pro­gres­sion in the slow move­ment of Poulenc’s Clar­inet Sonata thrilled both of us.

I’d like to hear what he’s writ­ing these days, because I found many of his orches­tral works of the late 80’s and mid 90’s (Bright Blue Music, Javelin for the 1996 Olympics) bland and dis­ap­point­ing. He’s been busy in the inter­ven­ing years, and strangely enough, the last time I heard his music played live was back in school; It’s taken over 13 years and a move to a dif­fer­ent coun­try for me to hear a con­cert with a piece by Michael Torke on it again.

Cory Doctorow Wows at SFU

Hear­ing Cory Doc­torow (the sci­ence fic­tion writer and one of the main con­trib­u­tors to the best blog on the web, Boing Boing) speak was a blast: it’s the intel­lec­tual equiv­a­lent of a roller coaster at Dis­ney­world. He’d be pleased to hear that metaphor, I sus­pect, because as he men­tioned “I have a sort of love/hate rela­tion­ship with the Dis­ney cor­po­ra­tion.” (One of his early books, Down and out in the Magic King­dom which you can get in text or audio book com­pletely for free, deals with Dis­ney in the future at some length)

His lec­ture, enti­tled “The Total­i­tar­ian Urge”, fol­lowed the themes of Con­trol and Chaos, the Inter­net and explo­sion of knowl­edge shar­ing ver­sus the con­stant attempts by those less enlight­ened who want to reach out and keep your com­puter, your thoughts, your ideas, cre­ations and col­lab­o­ra­tions under their sur­veil­lance or worse yet, arrest you for hav­ing them. It’s a rare treat when a speaker is equal parts chal­leng­ing and well informed, play­ful and schol­arly, rue­ful and insight­ful. He threw out some won­der­ful ver­bal and thought-provoking fire­works like ‘The war on abstract nouns’, that Mark Twain’s orig­i­nal philo­soph­i­cal view of the world was that of a bil­liard table before the first shot is taken, and that if we knew every­thing about that first stroke of the cue ball, we could pre­dict the future of the whole game (and how that view has even­tu­ally become less and less viable as we know more and the Inter­net enables such extra­or­di­nary degrees of non-linear shar­ing and col­lab­o­ra­tion). He spoke of how DRMs (Dig­i­tal Rights Man­age­ments schemes) and gov­ern­ment attempts at con­trol­ling the shar­ing of data is lit­er­ally a return to the Dark Ages (when Alchemists were the Sci­en­tists, but just didn’t share their findings)

I saw a lot of friends there, and am pleased to see that one of them, Ianiv Schwe­ber, has posted the audio of the talk at Now­Pub­lic, a grass-roots citizen-produced News Site. Lis­ten for yourself.

I Still Love Vermont

From The Ver­mont Guardian:

Ver­mont: 36 Towns Call for Impeach­ment Probe of President

Vot­ers in three dozen Ver­mont towns want Con­gress to begin an impeach­ment probe of Pres. George W. Bush and Vice Pres. Dick Cheney.

…

There are 251 towns in Ver­mont, but not all hold town meetings.

More than a dozen towns passed mea­sures call­ing for the imme­di­ate with­drawal of troops from Iraq, and to care for them when they were back on U.S. soil. Dover also rejected the troop mea­sure. About 20 towns had one of the items warned on their town meet­ing bal­lot, while many oth­ers took up the issue dur­ing “other busi­ness” at the end of the meeting.

.…
Here is the text of each of the two resolutions:

IMPEACHMENT RESOLUTION
Whereas George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney have:

1. delib­er­ately mis­led the nation about the threat from Iraq in order to jus­tify a war,
2. con­doned the tor­ture of pris­on­ers in vio­la­tion of the Geneva Con­ven­tion and US law,
3. approved ille­gal elec­tronic sur­veil­lance of Amer­i­can cit­i­zens with­out a war­rant, and,

Whereas these actions have under­mined our Con­sti­tu­tional sys­tem of gov­ern­ment, dam­aged the rep­u­ta­tion of Amer­ica, and threat­ened our national security,

There­fore, the vot­ers of the town of ___________________ call upon the U.S. House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives to inves­ti­gate these charges, and if the inves­ti­ga­tion sup­ports the charges, vote to impeach George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney as pro­vided in the Con­sti­tu­tion of the United States of Amer­ica. This res­o­lu­tion shall be signed by the Town Clerk and for­warded to both the Speaker and the Clerk of the US House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives, and Rep­re­sen­ta­tive John Cony­ers of the House Judi­ciary Committee.

SOLDIERS HOME NOW RESOLUTION
“Shall the vot­ers of the town of __________________ advise the Pres­i­dent, Con­gress and Vermont’s state and fed­eral office hold­ers that ___________________ and its cit­i­zens strongly sup­port the men and women serv­ing in all branches of the United States Armed Forces in Iraq and believe that the best way to sup­port them is to bring each and every one of them home now and take good care of them when they get home.“

The towns that did pass the res­o­lu­tion included Bris­tol, Burke, Calais, Crafts­bury, Dum­mer­ston, East Mont­pe­lier, Greens­boro, Guil­ford, Grafton, Hart­land, Jamaica, Jeri­cho, John­son, Marl­boro, Mid­dle­bury, Mont­gomery, Mor­ris­town, New­bury, New­fane, Peru, Plain­field, Put­ney, Rich­mond, Rochester, Rox­bury, St. Johns­bury, Spring­field, Stan­nard, Sun­der­land, Town­shend, Tun­bridge, Ver­shire, War­ren, West­min­ster, Wilm­ing­ton, and Wood­bury. Unfor­tu­nately, Wait­s­field (which neigh­bors War­ren) was not among them, but I was pleased to see that Ver­shire, where I spent some happy sum­mers when The Walden School was located there back in the 80’s, was one of the towns who did.

For those peo­ple who say that the prob­lem with impeach­ing Bush is that you end up with Cheney as Pres­i­dent, pay close atten­tion to the fact that both men are named in the res­o­lu­tion. I also like the fact that they added the part about tak­ing care of the troops when the got home. These days, with Bush and his cronies doing ‘busi­ness as usual’ with Health Care for war vet­er­ans, just as they did with the rebuild­ing of Iraq or New Orleans, which is hand­ing out favours to pri­vate con­trac­tors and then walk­ing away as it pro­ceeded to turn into a dis­as­ter, one has to spell out what should be obvi­ous respon­si­bil­i­ties, like human decency and proper oversight.

Nicely done, Ver­mont. If we weren’t in Canada, we’d be in that Town Hall, vot­ing to Impeach with you. Even as ashamed as I usu­ally am of the US these days, I can always look to Ver­mont for signs of the coun­try I used to know.