Pedal to the Metal

Maybe it was premature of me to mention a few posts ago that I already got my mid-life crisis out of the way. Well, I haven't gone out and bought a red sports car or anything, but I did buy a guitar effects pedal. Matt, a friend from the ward, had been pressing me to come over to jam in his basement studio ever since he found out I used to play the guitar (emphasis on "used to"). Well, I thought about perhaps supplementing my modest bag of tricks with some new effects and asked the guy in the music store if he had any pedal that could make a crap guitarist sound like a good one. Turns out they haven't quite perfected the "Crap --> Chops" formula yet, but I still walked out of the store with the DigiTech RP250. It's been fun to play with. And it gives me the chance to not so much call attention to what I'm playing but rather to elicit responses like, "Hey, THAT'S a weird sound!" That works in my favor.

We had our friends Ana and Andy and their kids over for dinner on Saturday. We had a great time with them. It's rare that I can have someone over to our house for three hours and then regret that it's time for them to go. Ana had lent me some music from the Mirando do Douro region of Portugal where her family is from and Andy and I had just gotten going on the subject of world music--and the "have you ever heard?" game--when it was time to close up shop. As the saying goes, "we'll have to do this again sometime."

It Took a While ...

... but the Springville Herald finally got around to publishing the photo of the Inspirations 2008 award winners at the kids' school (see post from last month). Of course there's been a backlog of news in Springville, what with all those stories about rutabaga blight and the City Council's protracted deliberations about whether or not to remove the chewing gum from under the seats in the mayor's office. So here's the photo from the hometown newspaper (it goes without saying that spelling is a less-than-inspirational subject, at least for the paper's staff):

The ?*#@%! Quote of the Day

“I love that man better who swears a stream as long as my arm yet deals justice to his neighbors and mercifully deals his substance to the poor, than the long, smooth-faced hypocrite.”
--Joseph Smith

It is, of course, totally irrelevant to Joseph Smith's point that I work at an institution that requires everyone to be smooth-faced.

Mechanical Verse by Alex

So, Alex figured out an interesting compositional method a while back. He made me promise not to reveal it, but suffice it to say that it isn't completely random. But I think that as stream of consciousness writing it's pretty loose while still maintaining a few connective threads. Here's a recent sample. (I especially like the last few lines, beginning with "once upon..."). André Breton, consider yourself warned.

Defeat consume grouse become less evenly make exchange messages hunt snipe make one’s dwelling business rock-hard-and-abstain from good for you me ingest by Cannibals saliva atom-drop bombs machine-under stand able-dead luggage compartment puzzle out of expressive make a byway of reek of gasconade juice exude gum tree plan under-the-board microphone slum surface sphere of exert influence once upon a fourth dimensioned State Department of the Uniform Commercial Code. Oxygen clock fourth material ownership. State of nature.

Soundless devastation
Warfare
End

Spring at Last!

Spring City, that is. After the last several weeks of unpredictable weather (80 degrees one day, snow the next), we're still not bold enough to announce that spring has arrived. But we did spend the last day of "spring" break in Spring City, Utah.
Spring City is a beautiful old Mormon settlement town with a population of about a thousand and it still preserves a great deal of vernacular architecture from the 19th century. The LDS chapel is a beautiful building: it's been lovingly maintained. The town has become something of a haven for Utah artists and quite a few have moved here. If it weren't an hour's drive away from work, it would be a great place to live.

On the way home we stopped at Red Ledges up Diamond Creek Canyon. It's like a miniature version of southern Utah in our own backyard (maybe 20 minutes from our house). We had a good time climbing around and exploring (well, you might not think that if you click on the picture of Eva at left. She has a look of sheer terror on her face. Michelle, good photographer that she is, made sure she snapped the photo before helping her down!)

"... somewhere in sands of the desert"

No, the title of the post is not an allusion to a Yeats poem (okay, maybe it is. But what do you expect? I'm a literature professor, for heaven's sake. It's my job to make literary allusions). More to the point, Michelle took the kids yesterday out to the Little Sahara sand dunes. The area is a 100 square mile patch of fine sand left over from some 15,000 year ago, when the Sevier River fed into the now non-existent Bonneville Lake. The kids had a good time rolling around and getting dirty, which is to say that the rough little beasts (Alert! Yeats allusion!) were in their natural habitat. I, on the other hand, spent a delightful day working in the office which, sad to say, is my natural habitat.

We did get a little bit of family recreation in the evening, when we went to a BYU Cougars baseball game. Tickets were $1 each, which was a pretty tough price to beat, even though the Cougars got manhandled by TCU, 16-5. We actually made it through four long innings before our hour came round at last (ALERT! Yeats allusion!), and between the cold and an impatient five-year old, decided to slouch (Yeats!) home.

April is the Coolest Month...

... at least for poetry. Michelle has spearheaded poetry month activities at the kids' school, including training teachers, preparing lesson materials for them, and encouraging the school to get every student and staff member to memorize at least one poem by month's end. We're all memorizing poems of our own. I'm working on Yeats' "The Second Coming," which is actually bit of a cheat, since I used to have it memorized about ten years ago. I had started out memorizing Yeats' "A Prayer for My Daughter," but at 80 lines, it was too long and I was too wimpy. Then I moved on to his "The Happy Shepherd," all 57 lines of it. Ditto. So, here I am with "The Second Coming," which in addition to being a weird theosophical poem, has the virtue of being only 22 lines long. Alex is memorizing Walt Whitman's "O Captain, my Captain;" Simon memorized "Harriet Tubman" by Eloise Greenfield, and Eva has memorized "Happy Thoughts" by Robert Louis Stevenson. Not to be outdone by her progeny, Michelle is working on "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" by Wordsworth.

I had forgotten until recently that we had videotaped Alex back in 2005, reciting Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." Enjoy.

... In Which We Get "Flashed"

Alex, Simon, and Eva got free tickets to a Utah Flash game at school. In the interest of helping both the unwashed masses (you know who you are!) and future sports historians who read this post, I'll explain that the Utah Flash is Utah County's NBA Developmental League team. It's like a minor-league Utah Jazz team. The games are held at the David O. McKay arena at UVSC. The best players may get a shot at the NBA, but most will toil in obscurity for a few years before moving on to other things (the best Flash player is Morris Almond, who was drafted by the Jazz and has been called up by them and sent back down a couple of times). Eva and Michelle decided to make it a girls' night out while Simon, Alex, and I went to the game. The Flash lost, but, in the words of a great and unfortunately anonymous writer: a good time was had by all.

Ch-Ch-Changes

I'm forty years old. I went to a cholesterol screening Wednesday. Alex is in fifth grade now and we just went to his maturation / puberty presentation at school. Am I really old enough to be doing this stuff? I guess the good news is that I got my mid-life crisis out of the way in my mid-twenties. And I have five more years until I start getting regular prostate exams. Huzzah!

If Astral Projection Could be Carried Out Via Piano, This is What it Would Look Like

Perhaps this is yet another sign of my lack of musical sophistication: my favorite pianist is Glenn Gould. I know, I know: lots of aficionados think Gould is all mannerisms and quirks. But watch the following clip--Gould playing Bach's Piano Concerto #1 in D minor with Leonard Bernstein and the NBC Orchestra--and tell me that this is not sublime:

(The clip is from The Art of Piano. The video, which I highly recommend, can be purchased here.)

I don't doubt that some of Gould's eccentricities were deliberately cultivated (but not a lot of them!). But I can't think of many better examples of a performer being utterly possessed by the music. The final little flourish--Gould himself dispatching the orchestra with his left hand--is, it has to be, utterly unselfconscious. Sure, there's a sense in which all Gould's tics are on full display, and he is an easy target. But it is profoundly moving to witness such complete absorption in the music. Gould is not playing Bach, Gould IS Bach, in the way that Borges argued that anyone reading Shakespeare becomes Shakespeare.

Why Talking About Terrorism Makes Even Nice, Articulate People Sound Incoherent

Former Spanish ambassador to the US, Javier Rupérez, today addressed an audience on the subject of terrorism, a topic he should know something about. He was kidnapped by ETA in 1979, and following his release enjoyed a distinguished government career, serving as ambassador in the Aznar administration and later taking up a post as the Executive Director of the Counter-Terrorism Executive Directorate in the UN.

Rupérez began by noting that it is difficult, perhaps impossible, to define terrorism and claiming that it was not essential to do so, since the UN in its recent history has essentially managed to condemn all manner of terrorist acts through a wide variety of resolutions which have been passed in response to specific terrorist events such as the kidnapping of the Israeli athletes in Munich. Much of his talk was the kind of bromide you would expect to get from any government official from any country on the topic. But it soon became clear that his argument presupposed a definition of terrorism above and beyond an uncontroversial typology of terrorist acts. While rejecting the idea of "root causes" of terrorism he at the same time claimed that he was very concerned about, for example, the sorts of things taught at madrassas and believed that they should be monitored. He's probably right about that, but his point makes no sense unless we have some kind of working definition of terrorism and are not simply concerned with discrete "terrorist acts." While it's debatable whether the kind of instruction given in radical madrassas would qualify as a "root cause" of terrorism, it almost certainly is a phenomenon that plays some kind of role in the causal chain that leads to a determinate terrorist act. So, clearly we need a more robust notion of "terrorism" if we're going to regard factors such as religious instruction as relevant to terrorist activities. No bare typology of terrorist actions will get us there.

Equally troubling was the former ambassador's refusal to acknowledge any distinction between "local" terrorism which has concrete political aims and "global" terrorism which does not aim at achievable political objectives, at least not in any ordinary sense of the term (of course you're free to disagree with me if you believe that Al Qaeda's ultimate aims are politically feasible). This line is typical of most governments, including the US. But it's the kind of distinction that can't be made unless one already has an operational definition of terrorism and employs it to distinguish between "terrorist activities" and "non-terrorist activities." His argument for considering local terrorism and global terrorism as one and the same was that local terrorism produces "ripple effects" which are global. He cited ETA as a specific case which would, were the organization to achieve its objectives, throw all of Europe into turmoil. His reasoning was that ETA defends a Marxist-Leninist ideology which has been discredited and which would be a nightmare to return to. I happen to think he's right on both counts: ETA is unequivocally Marxist-Leninist and it would be disastrous for such a government to gain a foothold anywhere in contemporary Europe. But that's exactly the kind of argument one CANNOT advance if one accepts his premise that we don't need a definition of terrorism in order to combat it. I'll pass over without comment his two allusions to what "the Basques" want to do by means of political violence, when he clearly meant to say "ETA." He caught himself before saying it a third time.

Post-Traumatic Study Abroad Disorder

Michelle and I have played host during the last two weekends to reunions of our two study abroad groups. On Saturday, March 29, we had a reunion for the fall 2007 group. We had a great turn out--something like 20 of our 26 students were there, including Jessica, our UCLA student who was able to make it up from Los Angeles.

Most of our fall 2004 students have moved on by now, and by "moved on" I mean "moved away from Provo." But we had about 8 of our 30 former students come to an open house last night, several of them bringing spouses, friends, and significant others. It was nice to get reacquainted and get brought up to date on what's going on with their lives. I also heard a few stories about study abroad adventures that... well, let's just say I'm glad I didn't hear those stories while we were actually in Spain. Did I love going to Spain with these groups? Yes. Am I in a hurry to direct another group of 25-30 students in a foreign country? Um, can I get back to you on that?

General Conference Weekend

I think in my lifetime I've run the gamut of emotions with respect to general conference weekend: when I was young I was thrilled to watch church on TV (I can't say I've outgrown that feeling); later, boredom and a feeling that I'd been swindled: "sure, I get to watch church on TV, but wait a minute: that's a total of 10 hours of church!"; later, when I lived in upstate New York, gratitude for being able to watch the satellite broadcast at the meetinghouse--I tended to treasure conference then, since it helped me to connect to a broader LDS community when in Ithaca we were somewhat isolated. Since coming to Utah my feelings have been somewhat mixed: at the epicenter of LDS culture, it's easy to fall into the trap of playing critic and connoisseur. But I really enjoyed this spring conference.

A few highlights: the announcement that Faustino López, our instructor for the "LDS church in Spain" course in Alcalá, had been called to serve as an Area Authority Seventy: I'll always recall the image of Bishop López and his son Samuel patiently filling containers with warm water in the meetinghouse kitchen in order to empty them, one by one, into the baptismal font, where no hot water was available for Alex's baptism; President Uchtdorf's stately presence (and welcome German accent!) conducting meetings; Elder Holland's eloquent articulation of the LDS position on continuing revelation; Elder Ballard's wise and thoughtful observations and counsel to young mothers; Elder Wirthlin's message on diversity; and, finally, President Monson's touching remarks about his ancestors and his love of his wife. His sense of comic timing is second to none--including President Hinckley--but he showed a touching vulnerability in addressing the church for the first time as president. It was quite a moving and inspiring experience to hear him.

A Little "Jumpy," A Robot, and a Strawberry-Eating Machine

Never one to be outdone by her older brothers, Eva is a one-person content provider. She loves art and, as I mentioned in an earlier post, she loves to write as well. A picture of Eva was published in the Springville Herald on April 3: it was taken during the school's Core Knowledge fair. In the photo she is learning how to use a bamboo brush.

Eva is a poetry-writing machine. On command, she will produce verse, unconstrained by the thin tethers of "reality" (and vividly illustrated to boot). I had her write some poems for me yesterday. The first of the three is entitled "Little Jumpy" (the scans aren't too good--click on the image for a better view):


Here's a literal transcription, followed by a translation:

Litl Jumpy
has muny
he stels muny
litl Jumpy loves
muny

[Little Jumpy
Has money
He steals Money
Little Jumpy loves
Money]


Up next: "I have a Robot":

I hav a robot
it gos to the
bath-rom I didint
no that in my
toelit there wus metl
in it
[I have a robot
it goes to the
bathroom I didn't
know that in my
toilet there was metal
in it]



Finally, we have "I Love Strawberries."


I Love Stroberese,

I can nevr
stop eden them
I et them
b cus I am a
mushene tha et them

[I love strawberries.
I can never
stop eating them.
I eat them
Because I am a
Machine that eats them.]


She's not kidding about that one.

Old Friends. And, by the Transitive Property, Some New Ones.

Sometimes my kids think I'm kidding when I talk about my friends. "Dad, you're too old to have friends." And the truth is I don't do much socializing these days. So it was nice to catch up with Gerry and Brent this past week (uh, no, those are not the guys pictured here). Gerry was in town for a couple of days and Brent called out of the blue. It sounds like Brent is doing well: his company was sold from Apple to another multinational that has its fingers in all sorts of pies in the publishing world. Their headquarters are in the UK and it looks like they want him to move out there: it kind of sounds like his family is pretty interested in the possibility although he is still carefully weighing his options. But we'll have to encourage Brent to think about it, at least for a while. We've never been to Britain and it would give us a great pretext to visit. And if you can't manipulate your friends into doing the things you want them to do, what's the point of having friends in the first place? (wait... maybe that's the reason my kids think I don't have any friends ...)

It had been nearly a year since I had seen Gerry. He's been keeping busy as the creator and organizer of the PLUG awards (the latest award show featured Nick Cave along with up and comers like Jose Gonzalez, with Patton Oswalt hosting and folks like SNL's Fred Armisen giving out awards). It's always fascinating to catch up with Gerry. Like me, he's long since abandoned the dream of making it big as a musician, but he's really been drawn to the business side of the music industry. I can't say that I envy his hectic pace of life and constant travel, but there's something undeniably appealing about staying closer to the world of art and music than I am. Fortunately he's coming out for a few weeks this summer with Shana and the kids. The stupid dreamer part of me thinks it would be fun to get our guitars out and record something. But, realistically, it would just be nice to hang out a little. And maybe I can persuade him to hook me up with his high-flying friends, which, by the transitive property, are now my buddies as well.