The Great Extravagance

Looking south and north along the Hudson River from some new-to-me vista points, thanks to the new Dahon folding bike I bought last week. This is really a pretty amazing piece of engineering - below are some snapshots in the building's hallway, with the trombone gig bag in the photo to give an idea of scale, and inside the apartment. It takes perhaps 15 seconds to fold up. The ride is fine , although the wheels are only 16" - which means that going downhill means coasting, no pedaling necessary (or possible).

Postcard from Maine

Here's an early morning sky, about an hour after dawn...on my way back today. It wasn't exactly a holiday since I was remotely working on a database project for the Milarepa Tibetan Buddhist Center in Vermont and being an adult presence in the house for the 14 1/2 year old daughter of a friend while her mother was away working. Still, it was cool(er) than NYC, and there are many more trees and many fewer people. The great berry hunt (blackberries and blueberries) yielded only enough for me to eat while picking, nowhere near enough for a pie...seemed to be too late in the season for both.

Postcard from NYC

Yesterday I met a friend down at the fountain inside of the Columbus Circle traffic circle. Even though the new building there have been up for awhile, I'd never really looked at them before. They are beautiful, and against the sky spectacular. This photo was taken looking up to the west while lying down on my back on a bench...with human eyes the scope is simply amazing. Although the depth of the top of these buildings looks almost completely flat from this angle, in actuality they are not...an interesting optical illusion.

I'd heard that inside the circle all sounds of the city receed - supposedly blocked by the sound of the fountains - but this certainly wasn't the case at 11am on a summer Thursday morning. Traffic, horns, constuction bangs and crashes...there
was a symphony of cacaphonic sounds accompanied by the fountains.

and in Rhode Island

July 31, 2006

More swimming...this time in salt water, the Narragansett Bay. A older friend asked if I would come up and help get her started on computers (she's in her 70's) so I did. Her house is right on the bay, which is behind this beautifully-shaped tree.

Upstate

July 11, 2006

I have to admit that upstate New York has never held much appeal to me. However, I visited a friend's husband's cousin's house for a few days, and had a surprising experience. The area seemed gentle, positively bucolic. We feasted on sheep's cheese picked up from a farm. (I've never seen a farm so clean.) There were lots of lambs about, and a worker said we could go in a watch them closer. While there a bunch of sheep went by to be milked, and the lambs bleated, each with a distinctive voice - wish I'd had a DAT with me. Plus fresh tomatoes, and that day's corn. And several hammocks. The pond above looked more than a bit iffy - brown and mucky, with lots of leaves (remember, I grew up near the ocean) but I finally worked up the nerve to get in after my friend assured me that it was spring fed and had several exits. It felt wonderful, the water must be full of minerals.

And then there was watching a full, full orange moon rise over the meadow into the sky.


I need to get out more!

Return is the Way of the Tao

July 8, 2006


Just back from a T'ai Chi retreat, held at the Rose Mountain Retreat Center in mountains of northern New Mexico with Heloise Gold - a true master in every sense. Above is the view looking south-south-westwardly from Moon Meadow, where the early morning mediation walk ends (and where I seem to end up most evenings).

One translation I like of the Tao Te Ching is by Stephen Mitchell, and those on a Mac platform can download a widget of this translation from DailyTao.org

Underneath is me with Rick Avery - a real sweetie - and then the whole group right before we head down the mountain at the end of the week.

Happy Birthday, Anthony!

June 4, 2006


Today I played in the world premiere of Anthony Braxton's Composition #19 (1971) for 100 tubas (okay, some of us played euphonium, a tenor tuba). It was Anthony's 60th birthday, which made it a nice present after 35 years of waiting.



Dedicated to electronic music pioneer Raymond Scott, Composition #19 is an hour long piece with the forces split into four parts, unison playing on each part. Each groups plays independently, and moves spatially throughout the space in differing configuations - block, single file, individuals spin off. Slow unfolding of soft, low melodic fragments...ocassionally interspersed with lightning bolts ("sound flashes" - sforzando descending harmonic glissandi) and feather-shaped "sound sparkles" (non-pitched sounds).

The Bookworm

OK, I confess, I am a bookworm.

I've always been one. And yes, it's true that children really do read at night by flashight under the covers -or at least I did. One of my earliest memories is of "reading" one of my mother's books - I could make out just a few words on each page (probably "the" "and" and "a") but oh, what a thrill...

Although I read constantly, I rarely write about what I read. But Malcolm's Gladwell's The Tipping Point recently caught my attention. The basic premise of the book is that much about social change can be viewed through the lens of an epidemic. He writes that epidemics have three traits - contagiousness, little causes which have big effects, and that changes happen all at once, not gradually. The place where everything changes all at once is called the tipping point.

He explores the tipping point of word-of-mouth social epidemics - which he considers the most important form of human communication - using examples from the midnight ride of Paul Revere to the Hush Puppy fad in the late 1990s (who kenw?) to the company that makes Gor-Tex, to Sesame Street to the decline of crime in NYC.

I liked Paul Revere analogy the best - a piece of extrodinary news traveled a long distance in a very short period of time mobilizing an entire region to arms. What I hadn't known was there was another rider, William Dawes who who rode south and west instead of north and west with the same message. But Dawes message didn't get out, and the British forces weren't met by American revolutionaries.

Gladwell says that the reason is that Dawes didn't have the kind of social gifts that Revere had, so the news he carried didn't "tip."

He proposes three archtypes

Connectors - who know lots of people and have a gift for bringing people together

Mavens - who know a lot about particular subjects, and like to help people

Salespeople - who have the skills to persuade the unconvinced

and makes a case that since Revere was a connector type, he was able to succeed where Dawes didn't. They rode the same distance at the same time with the same news. Even though Revere only (ok, "only") rode 13 miles, the news travelled overnight as far as Worcester, because it spread like a virus - those who Revere informed in turn informed others who in turn informed others... So when the British marched toward Lexington they met resistance all along the west on the route
Revere travelled. On the other - Dawson's - so few fought the following day that historians speculated that the area was pro-British area. But it wasn't, they just hadn't gotten the news.

Anyway, that's the book recommendation for today. The writing in The Tipping Point is much better than in his more recent work, Blink!. I've followed Gladwell's for many years now - primarily in the New Yorker - and in the summer of 2003 even had some email correspondance with him when he was looking for information about the discrimation faced by many orchestral women brass players). I passed along quite a few contacts, and was happy to see that he included Abbie Conant's story as a short chapter at the very end of Blink.

This pit is the pits

"One touch of nature makes the whole world kin."
William Shakespeare



And so it was with our community garden, back when we had a community garden - an oasis drawing strangers and neighbors (sometimes these are the same) together to ooh and ahh and just plain admire. One week there was a bakesale for the garden, the next week it was gone, and since then it's been empty.

Now, a year later "they're" starting to do something with the lot. Just what, I dunno...while zoned for residential use, it's a very small lot, irregulary shaped, and on a hill. Rumor has it that it was too difficult to find a buyer when the garden was there - who would want to take on that battle? So the garden was destroyed - literally overnight - and then the property sold relatively quickly. I've heard that it will be: a condo, with parking underneath; a medical building (???); and a parking lot.

I'd often imaged buying up the lot and designing a home: three stories, with a large open bottom floor as a studio space and for rehearsals, and then living areas up above - one floor for me, and one floor for my uncle, each cut back for a large terrace. But even in my dreams I could never have displaced the garden.

Hell

Last night I went to Hell (the opera, that is, running at PS 122 through April 9th). Juliana Snapper (below)

was singing the Poet and it's worth the evening just to hear her sing one line of the libretto: about an artist's power to connect - one to another, one to many, many to one - and the courage and openness it takes to do just that ( "..."a person stands in their body...breathing..." ). I'd first met Juliana when she invited me to perform at Teknika Radica's Powering Up, Powering Down conference in San Diego in January 2004 - which is still the best conference I've attended or performed at. Kudos to that collective/collection of grad students, they pulled off what most of academia doesn't.

Spring!

Spring is a'comin...and perhaps (finally) some blog entries as well.