James Nichols's Open Salon Blog

Stud Bird

Fri, 22 Jun 2012 19:06:22 -0400

I spend much of my working life with adolescents. We're told that some of their behavior and dress (especially the part that adults like to fret about) is attributable to "hormones." I don't know otherwise. That's not my field.

However, I think of my students and the choppy seas they navigate when I hear a certain bird in my neighborhood. I don't know his name. He may even be a she. (Bird's aren't my field either.) But the song I hear conjures for me a young stud bird just entering his lovesick prime (like my students), a cocky dude, not quite sure of himself, but definitely on the make.

Here verbatim is his call:

Are ya ready? Are ya ready? Are ya ready?

I'm heeeeeere! I'm heeeeeere!

Are ya ready? Are ya ready? Are ya ready?

I'm heeeeeere! I'm heeeeeere!

(Repeat a zillion times. He does.)

Music and Le Creuset

Thu, 21 Jun 2012 15:06:18 -0400

Hey there! I hope it's earlier in June where you are than where I am. The precious days of early summer flit by.

Given the luxury of undivided time I've had my head and hands in music. How I long to see a coherent whole where now I see only facets! The problem with my guitar career is that I've been focused on where to put my fingers, along with acquiring strength and dexterity, rather than on the notes being played. Much of the literature, which abounds in chord diagrams, abets this focus. It has the virtue of allowing amateurs to quickly achieve something satisfying, but it obscures the underlying musical structure. I would urge any young guitarist to focus early on what notes he's playing. It's difficult on the guitar because of its eccentric tuning.

The musicians I've known haven't been good at explaining or teaching music theory. They remind me of an untrained person trying to teach his native language. He doesn't know what's not to understand. The books I consult make leaps that leave me behind. A good example is the one that does a decent job of explaining the musical modes, then blithely recommends that you play all the chords built on each mode in order to experience the characteristic sound of that mode. That's fine and dandy except that nowhere does it explain HOW TO BUILD THE CHORDS. I got this latter information from an Internet search. And so it goes.

I perform my playlist every day for the sheer joy of it. Tom Harrell, the jazz trumpetist, said, "When you're playing music you're healing yourself." In between I write out and illustrate the theoretical issues in tedious detail trying to find a better way to explain them to myself.

I'm not above kludges if they promise to lead to greater facility. For example, I lean heavily on ridiculous-sounding mnemonics to remember things because I find so much of what you need to know in music theory unmemorable per se. The field is rife with obscure terms and, of course, the seven letters "A" through "G." I've yet to retain and therefore find useful in practice the famous "Circle of Fifths" that all the books promote as the sine-qua-non.

On another front, I need your help. I'm in the grip of a Le Creuset fetish. Thus far I've bought or ordered a butter dish, mortar and pestle, salt pig, utensil crock, and honey pot. My fetish includes the color "Caribbean," a light blue, although the honey pot was not available in Caribbean, only in "Dijon," a yellow, of course. None of them are big-ticket items in the Le Creuset universe, only over-priced, but I don't know where it will end. Is it a case of what the French would call "snobisme"? What do you advise? :)))

I finally saw the movie "Fargo" yesterday. A Coen brothers production of 1996. Liked it tremendously. I'm a fan of theirs.

But enough about me. What about you?

Here's "exceptionalism"

Wed, 20 Jun 2012 15:06:23 -0400

"The emancipating of women and their integration on equal terms in education, the granting of civil rights to homosexuals, the removal, at least formally, of racial discrimination -- these are not a common feature of prosperous or declining empires but unique moral achievements of this one. There's no pattern in history to compare us to, because nothing like us

ever happened before."

(Adam Gopnik, "Decline, Fall, Rinse, Repeat: Is America going down?" The New Yorker, Sept. 12, 2011)

JMN, www.ethicaldative.com

The longhorn stands watch

Wed, 20 Jun 2012 15:06:21 -0400

Ivy League Poetry

Mon, 18 Jun 2012 13:06:59 -0400

http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/2012/04/ivy-league-poetry-professor-will-try-yelp-style-crowd-sourcing/

This is interesting. I'm glad you shared it. I like the idea of giving outsiders a chance to observe the goings-on in the poetry class of an expensive school. It seems to be the equivalent of auditing a course by the masses. As far as their getting the professor's own attention goes, he's using the familiar teacherly dodge: "Now, discuss among yourselves." His phrase for it is "hanging out with some intuitively smart people."

I don't put much stock in the student comment evaluation system where "the most valued and respected" rise to the top. The assumption is that some among the auditors will say something useful about poetry (because they're "intuitively" smart), and that other auditors will recognize the value of their comments and exalt them over other comments that are less insightful. I can't see anything that could possibly go wrong with this arrangement. Can you?

The best that could come of it is to stimulate outsiders to read more poetry. The worst would be to dupe them into thinking the school is giving (or selling?) them anything more substantial than a voyeur license.

JMN