my love for you...

Some of these are new. Some are not. All of them are words. I like to eat words.

These are about how my love is like a various item of food. I hope you enjoy it.

And, if not, then I suppose you've failed. Not me, you.

My love for you is like a frozen carrot: bold, vivid, unbreakable, and full of vitamin A.

My love for you is like an apple: subtle, shiny, tender, and quick to become discolored if exposed to oxygen for too long.

My love for you is like a pumpkin: big, cumbersome, warm, hearty, and a favorite object of bat-wielding drunk teenagers.

My love for you is like a peanut: tough to crack, efficient, versatile, and occasionally highly toxic to the wrong people.

My love for you is like a banana: mushy, fragrant, easily digestible, and on the brink of extinction.

My love for you is like a papaya: exotic, robust, seedy, thin-skinned, and incapable of sitting on a shelf more than a few days.

My love for you is like high fructose corn syrup: mildly sweet, borderline addictive, and in every damned thing everywhere.

My love for you is like canned beets: easy to slice, little nutritional value, and stains everything in your house.

My love for you is like a potato: nondescript but widely varied, turns purple from iodine, and will break windows if thrown hard enough.

My love for you is like a milkshake: cold and stodgy at first, but yields with warmth, and is drunk to the full by Daniel Day Lewis.

My love for you is like a piece of bread: not the heel - no, not that one either - yeah, that one, sort of in the middle of the loaf.

My love for you is like a thin-crust pizza: smothered in greasy things under the illusion that because part of it is thin that it isn’t quite so deleterious.

My love for you is like an orange: sweet, sticky, pulpy, an inspiration for two out of five of Neruda’s poetic images, and doubles as the base for a detergent.

My love for you is like a pork chop: surrounded by fluff, robustly textured, and not at all kosher.

My love for you is like hummous: simple, basic, incredibly filling, but gets in the way of your baba ghanouj.

My love for you is like cheese: fuck patriarchy.

My love for you is like milk: nourishing, mixes well with chocolate, leaves a thin film on things, and goes bad after seven to ten days.

My love for you is like canned tuna: watery, compressed and ready to spring into action, and a favorite of feral cats.

My love for you is like a burrito: fill it with damn near everything and get away with it.

My love for you is like fried rice: peppery, tinges of color, and loaded with enough MSG to take out the 51st Manitoban Cavalry.

My love for you is like a cup of pudding: smooth, silky, can be thrown in the pantry and forgotten for weeks on end, and develops an alien skin once exposed to sunlight.

My love for you is like uncooked pasta: filled with dog hair once you spill it all over the floor.

My love for you is like avocado ice cream: trust me, buddy, it will knock you on your ass with how good it is.

My love for you is like four loko: addictive, generically fruit-flavored, and will land 82 partygoers in the ICU after two cans.

My love for you is like a raisin: small, lonely, delicately sweet, but will show up in foods you least expect and make you shriek with terror.

My love for you is like tofu: blanched, bland but takes up any flavoring you give it, soaked in its own juices, and makes a terrible pillow.

My love for you is like a watermelon: filled with boiling rage.

My love for you is like a three-layered cake: excruciating in terms of effort in creating it, the true measure of its wonder comes only when it has been completely devoured.

My love for you is like a glass of water: cool, clear, a staple of life, and easily thrown into the face of a hussy.

My love for you is like caviar: basically pointless, but schmucks place artificially high monetary values on it and fish its producers to extinction.

My love for you is like a cup of coffee: damn good coffee.

My love for you is like a bottle of imitation vanilla: overpriced, smells terrific, and tastes terrifyingly grotesque.

My love for you is like a box of crackers: square, occasionally perforated, salty, but can be covered with any variety of substances.

My love for you is like a glass of Chimay: I really enjoy beer.

My love for you is like a taco salad: someone said “let’s figure out how to combine everything we have left in the fridge and slap some salsa on it and call it ‘Mexican.’”

My love for you is like a sack of flour: ground out by massive stones and veritably useless unless combined with other things, like pestilence, fear, or loathing.

My love for you is like a cup of lentils: earthy, crunchy before cooked, and typically filled with small stones that will break your teeth.

My love for you is like a Gummi worm: amazing elasticity, psychotropic translucence, but created from Gummi Bear slave labor, destroying the surrounding countryside in the maddening hunt for the highly prized worms.

My love for you is like cold beef stew: disgusting.

Golden Bowl recollections...

I wrote this over six years ago. I have no idea if it's still funny in the least.

---

One of the more entertaining facets of Chinese take-out would be, sans debate, the fortune cookie. In this case, Little Chinatown provided me with three of their better Golden Bowl confections. I have chewed and swallowed only one -- today after my Galaxy of Faux-Prawns Fried Rice, and I decided to make a purport.

"Romance comes into your life this year in a very unusual way." Hmm. Seems innocuous enough. And ambivalent enough to pass as a commonplace fortune. And while I know these brief missives of mystery slipped into the cookie mean nothing, I shall make a list of how I expect romance to enter my life in "unusual" ways.

--At a side-show, someone gets shot out of a cannon and collides with my abdomen. I wind up with severe internal bleeding and a crushed pancreas. In the pancreas trauma ward, I meet the future love of my life, a person who lost their pancreas when, in a bizarre bowling accident, they became trapped in the frame and got reset as a 4-pin. The hollow feelings in our guts are replaced with long nighttime conversations about the various flavors of jello and the pace of the intravenous drip.
--I witness a burning building on my way to work and decide to be a hero. Instead of finding people, I find a voodoo priestess in the back room sacrificing the structure to cleanse her family's spirits. Noticing my unscrupulous entrance into her life-sized altar, she casts upon me a spell, turning me into an anteater and casting me off the the Faeroe Islands where a confused seal becomes enamored with me.
--Due to circumstances beyond my control, I get forced out of my apartment and have to live in a stairwell. This stairwell is located in a building below a bluff. One fine day, a busload of Zen nuns flies off the bluff into the stairwell. I run for my life and run into a real estate broker who, because of circumstances beyond hir control, is faced with living in the stairwell in the opposite end of the building. Various puns about staircases ensue and true love doth blossom.
--I get reincarnated as a rabbit. Let the good times roll!
--Returning to my seat at a hockey game, I notice a large, brooding man has taken my seat. I decide to fight fire with uncomfortable gestures and I sit on his lap against his protestations. He flings me headfirst into the lower rows where I end up with my head stuck in a bucket of popcorn. I wander around for a while and realize I'm on the ice. I get viciously attacked by Per Sven Østergård, a very angry Nordic man thinking I was the opposing team's mascot. After he destroys my ability to feel things below my neck, he shows remorse by introducing me to his sister, Helga Svenska Østergård, who happens to also be a very angry Nordic man. But her daughter is neither angry nor a man.
--Working at the 7-11, I get held captive by a team of bitter sea lions wearing headsets. I flee and they chase me into the desert. I trip over a rock and prepare for a nasty tumble. A giant pteradon swoops me up and attempts to devour me whole, but after a struggle it drops me through the roof of a bowling alley where I land in the kids' ball crawl. Since the ball crawl is infested with scorpions, I make a break for it, noticing the sea lions are still closing in. I jump the fence around the bowling alley and end up in the backyard of one Renee Zellweger, who pumps my guts full of lead. I wake up three days later in the pancreas trauma ward where I meet the wardmate who was involved in a serious bowling accident the night before.

Here are 100 additional Hobo Names you did not request

In Honor of John Hodgman's 700 Hobo Names, I bring you 701-800. I guess.


#701: Edamame Jones, the Human Soybean
#702: Timothy the Jellyfish Chiropractor
#703: Homeostasis McGillicuddy
#704: Alvin “Tijuana Nights” Spencer
#704: Flashlight Burleson, of the Burning Burlesons
#705: Nadia the Backgammon Cheater
#706: Skipper Sanders, the No-Pocketed
#707: Hush Puppy Alaijuwon
#708: Salmon Patty Douglas
#709: Esperanto Davison, the Babbler
#710: Toothpick Ramirez, the Fingerless
#711: Big Gulp
#712: Dmitri Burleson, the One-Eyed Dentist, no relation to the Burning Burlesons
#713: Deep-Sea Diving Irma of the Fish People
#714: Pressure-Valve Tcherepnin, or the Whistling Wozniak
#715: Viva Camels Horseback Tourism Service
#716: Hakim “No Trans Fat” Mendez
#717: Irish Steve, the Bearded
#718: “Pancake Fighter” Norris of Mapleton Falls
#719: Ahab, the Hooks-for-Eyes and Hooks-for-Teeth Reference Librarian
#720: Dual Exhaust Burleson, of the Burning Burlesons
#721: Gabriel Garcia Marquez
#722: Saltpeter McAdams, the Catholic Civil War Re-enactor
#723: Isabella Rosselini Cozick, or the Fake Italian
#724: Mariela Azkenazy, or The Little Bedazzler
#725: Bald Pete
#726: Hirsute Pete
#726: Mortician Pete
#727: Herbert “Adrianople” Left-Arm, or The Last Cappadocian
#728: Frank McCourt’s Eyebrows
#729: Jeff Gort, the Moderately Medium-Heighted
#730: Boxcar Nathan Burleson, the Pyromaniac
#731: Your Mother, So Named Because What Else Can You Call a 59-Year-Old Hobo from Platteville, NY
#732: The Tigress Ethan Hawke
#733: Nebuchadnezzar Gleeson, The Rapscallion Onion Cooker
#734: Santa Monica Freeway After Dark
#735: Concho “Crow’s Feet” Randall, the Shark Tester
#736: Papyrus Franz, the Banal Scrawler
#737: Boxcar Danforth, the Lackluster Scrabble Player
#738: Tetsuo
#739: Boxcar Ianuzzi, Electronics Dealer
#740: A Ladle Once Having Belonged to Henry David Thoreau’s Grist Mill Operator
#741: Tina Fey, Or Someone Who Resembles Her Greatly, But Bearded and Paunchy and Most Likely Not Tina Fey
#742: Bus-Stop Oliver Wendell Sherlock Holmes the Fourth
#743: Gooey Gooey Cocoa Beans, The Bitter
#744: Napalm Burleson, Father of the Burning Burlesons
#745: Alistair Go-Lightly McLean, the Footless Ghost
#746: Nebulous Nelly, the Hazy Actuary
#747: Jumbo Jameson, Designer of Flightless Liquor Bottle Birds
#748: Heavy Metal Delacroix , The Gumbo Queen of Kansas
#749: Ivor Darnetchka, the Three-Fingered Knitter
#750: Sullivan O’Sullivan, the Surly Jew
#751: Queen Anne Wearing Nothing But Lace
#752: “Uvula” Utley, The Silent Killer
#752: Humbert Humbert
#753: Wade Philips, the Dolt
#754: Nine-Ring Paul, the Electrician Who Once Successfully Mixed the Worlds of Sweet and Salty Breakfast Bars, As Evidence By His True Name, Oscar the Gastronome
#755: Oscar the Gastronome the Second
#756: Felipe Calderon
#757: “Jet-Pack” Travers, He of the Scalded Back
#758: Mister Blisters
#759: Eye-Teeth Frida
#760: Marvin Gleeson, the Dilettante Actuary, not to be confused with…
#761: Garvin Meason, the Actuarial Dilettante
#762: Yasmin Bleeth(e)
#763: Horatio Snowbottom Leahy, or Permafrost Pelvis
#764: Legless “Clusterbomb” Neely, Second Cousin Once Removed of Jet-Pack Travers
#765: “Normalized Relations” Weisenstein
#766: “Airport” Stevens, or The Man Who Leads At Least Three Double Lives Between Visits to His Loves at Various Airports Within Jet-Pack Distance of The Railyard
#767: “Airplane” Stevens, “Airport” Stevens’ Former Spouse
#768: Rusty Kelvin, The Frigid
#769: Busty Melvin, The Frigidaire
#770: Napalm Claxson, the Catnip Farmer
#771: “Burnt Toast” Nixon, The Naughty Ex-Girlfriend So Named for Depilating a Chihuahua Near a Toaster
#772: Harold Mouth-Eyes, the Food-Watcher
#773: Tabasco Marlin, or a Cooked Fish
#774: Renal-Failure Sanford, the Lipless
#775: Aldous “The Bulbous” Malikonious
#776: Kaneda
#777: Reena Burleson, or Spicy Curry Steve
#778: Mohawk Albritton, the Saddest Hobo Not In A Joy Division Cover Band
#779: Fauxhawk Albritton, Mother of Mohawk
#780: “Remote-Control” Randy Riles, the Living Nickel-Cadmium Battery Pack
#781: Snow-Angel Jimenez, the Rowdiest Cobbler
#782: Key-Lime Krista of the Secret Anti-Jet-Pack Hobo League, or the Baking Beauty
#783: Arista Records
#784: Kurt the Opalescent Turtle
#785: Shiny Shiny Shiny Knees, the Legless
#786: Noriko Fuji, the Displaced Shinto
#787: Birth-Sign Helman, the Birthday-less
#788: King Lear
#789: Ignatius Josephus Centurion, the Belt-Eater
#790: Ignatius Barnabus Kleptos, the Belt-Stealer
#791: Little Argonaut Boskiewicz
#792: The Ghost of Juan Williams Present
#793: Mara Liasson, The Ghost of Juan Williams' Future
#794: Little Cranky Keith, the Disappointed Father
#795: Large-Eared Ernest, the Deaf
#796: Crabcake Dawson the Kosher
#797: Hidalgo Burleson the Tarantula Masseuse, no relation to the Burning Burlesons, except through marriage to…
#798: Wanda Ford, Secret Taxidermist
#799: Jose Guiterrez Lancaster, the Third-Most-Sought-After Tennessee Ernie Ford Impersonator
#800: “Habeas Corpus” the Silent Azerbaijani, or Klaus Peck the Loudmouth

(reposted here for those who aren't affiliated with That Particular Social Network)

conundrum, or dilemma, or crisis?

I find myself now in a bit of a (large) crisis. At present time, I have sketches for about a dozen pieces. Only two have any sort of firm deadline - two that have guaranteed performances - and neither has received much attention from me lately, owing to the fact that their deadlines aren't until the early spring.

I've halted reworking gravity express (despite my claim that it's basically finished, I'm not satisfied with the form and pacing), and I'm staring down:
- violin, clarinet, piano work sketches;
- bassoon quartet sketches;
- string quartet sketches;
- two orchestral works in various states of completion (or, sketches);
- a Pierrot ensemble sketch;
- a piano/string quintet sketch;
- various wind ensemble sketches.

That's not all of them, obviously. It feels as though all this music wants to escape at once and it's all getting caught in the threshold. I'll fizzle out working on one thing and try to flit over to another; I'll lose patience on that and focus on yet something else. The cycle perpetuates. Of all the sketches, the work for which I have the clearest vision is an orchestra piece, but I can't logically justify letting that take precedence over many of the chamber works. Each of the chamber works I can easily see being an entry into some prize or contest - if I could finish them. They would also, theoretically, be easier to get performed - if I can find performers for them.

This has been a perennial problem for me. I have no problem working with multiple canvases, but when I have more than two or three set up, my world becomes disarrayed and harried pretty quickly. I'm not finding outside encouragement to write a lot of these pieces (read: been getting more rejections than usual, not having performers lined up for the pieces, etc), so that erodes my due care and focus pretty sharply and quickly. In the back of my mind, there's a "don't bother" attitude promulgated by the very same long string of prize/commission/contest rejections of late, but I know this isn't a healthy sentiment to have. I've been disappointed with my slow progress on all of my projects of late, and my dolefully tendentious brain is always caught between simply writing and stepping back and asking whether what I'm writing is imaginative enough, or challenging enough, or too banal, or too tonal, or too uninteresting.

This all leads to a bit of a devastating thought. I know I have the talent to be a composer, and perhaps a good one, but where is the focus, the determination? Where are my connections? Why is it that I know so many people - software engineers, law professors, teachers, academics - but so few performers? I feel as though I've largely exhausted my list, and I am loathe to keep pestering the same dozen people for performances of existing pieces or about asking them to perform newer or not-yet-composed works. I seem to have the mind for it, most of the time, but little else. And with my bizarre desire to get so much written - seemingly at once - the situation is just compounded...

from one

Apologies in advance. Been composing and doing other things, but here's a quick break from that. I'm known to occasionally write haphazard poems. Here is one. Yay.

“from one to zero”

There is the waiting, and the waiting,
and the waiting.
Days drag on, a mouldering fire
exhaling in slow, whiskered gasps,
unable to lift their heads, ears
of cloud sharpened by lancet winds.

I lose myself among the counted weeks,
the soft-soled march drumming
uneven, pale rhythms;
I lost count of the untold seconds

(must be tens of millions by now)

That seem to count backward from
one, to another zero, one, to
another zero.

There is the waiting, the pendulous
shadow green as copper. There is
the waiting.

(I swear this all looks familiar.)

Desiccated days with raspy voices,
coughing through acrid smoke, the
nostrils flared, caked with ash, eyes
unable to open ---
the nights wet with worry, gurgling
sobs stifled by a silence, melting
eyebrows and cheeks flushed, as
though beat counterclockwise.

Then there is the waiting.

The worlds traversed, occasionally
crossing orbits: tenuous words in
maudlin capes, a mock Saint George
with blood-drained fingers; coffee
spoons unfurled in florid bells of
porcelain’s clamor, closing up shop
for winter, trellises as hands grasping
at brittle noon haystalks and clover.

(I really don’t want to leave here.)

Words meant to suture seem
to nurture the wound back to health,
a rapier upending the papier-mache
scar tissue, a gnarled claw digging at
flimsy beer-coated armor;
a footless ghost, wizened, drifting
among the corridors and catacombs,
neither lost nor grey with discomfiture.

(From one to zero, there must be
tens of millions, tens of millions)

There is yet the waiting; it will always be there.

To see the ember fall up into
its wood, to see back into ash cascading
into solid boughs, into the conflagration
and the void of light before it;
To view a brittle brown oval of
an elm denude itself of brittleness
and drink back the tenderness with
which it clung to the spindly branch;
to watch with zeal the cinnamon strands
of pine needles scattered among the
dirt and dogshit rethread the air and touch
a piquant green, and then a wilder
green, and then disappear into the
scales completely:

There is the waiting

And there is the waiting.

something old-ish

"volant"

The dial face of the sun takes its hands and scrubs my scalp, chestnut filaments burning into hot wisps of gray, indistinguishable from a fog that tumbled out of trees one morning that stumbled and choked in the haze as it caused a luscious trainwreck, lathered in oil and rendered fat from weary travelers.

They were all fine. They stood up and shook their britches off and dusted off their shirts. Took their wallets out, from pockets they forgot they had, extra purses they packed for such an occasion, and dumped the contents out on the gravel, reclaiming only their cash and a business card for an attorney.

Without too many words other than cranky “that’s mine”s and “oh, beg pardon”s, they took their slimmed down lives and wandered into birchtree groves; shirakaba, said a foreign traveler, who then decided to make that his new name.

They all left their shoes behind, which I thought just a trifle odd.

The sun beat down on the groves as Rinzai would a pupil all too clever; I watched from a cell a mile or so up the line, a clear direct path illuminated for me, but not for me. The roof had been sold back to the monastery, you see, so I then had an obstructed view of a ceiling by looking at some haze-smitten sky, endless, terrifying.

The cycle of humidity has taken to putting dental floss impressions in my forehead. I never remembered it being such an object of topographic interest to the authorities. My eyes look like pale cinders trapped behind folds of leather; my nose pitted and getting more lopsided with each UV burst. My hearing is starting to wane. It’s getting fuzzy, so the expression goes, probably from the fibrous shellac, tangled kitten hairs, covering my pinnae.

So this room sees me sitting, looking, pausing. Over what, I couldn’t tell you. I asked to be placed here. Not precisely: I asked others about where I ought to go, where I ought to go, where I ought to go; what I ought to do, what I ought to do, what I ought to do: I ended up here.

I’m probably 135 feet up. I started at 820 millimeters, then worked my way to 831 inches. I made it as high as 167 feet or so, but those damned beavers. I should mention I reside in a well-crafted cell, with no ceiling, a plexiglass floor, and a wide window overlooking the railway. I built it myself, for the most part, with some help from some key personages. Too bad none of us know what we’re doing with a power drill.

I spit into some clay, let it harden. Try to build it up too quickly. Snap down young red pines and complain (forever) when they leave me with far less than the constructive result I’m seeking. The non-union crew showed up whenever it felt like it, which was part of the problem. We’d have planks and 2x4s, made out of tapioca, frozen. We’d have nails and woodscrews, made out of dried arteries and sparkplugs, respectively. We’d wrap the thing in Styrofoam coffee cups and aspirin bottles, try to balance heavy loads on Warsteiner bottles, half-broken from a contractor we never remembered meeting.

We left a debris field right under the window. Miraculously, this spindly trestle stands on its own piers, although it isn’t quite so aerodynamic as to withstand mighty blows or gusts in the shape of a cat. I look down over the pile of ragged, jagged tin cups and soap wrappers and broken clocks, ringed and flanked by tarnished silvery-gold hubcaps, and soiled once-diamond-bright knives, all at attention, Marines on parade. I pretend to know what it’s like to fall 12 storeys, survive, and do it all over again.

I only wish I could convince someone to jump with me, or four, or nine; I’d rather have someone break my fall in case I ended up in the birch grove, emptying my wallet, seeking a new realm, footless as a slug.

According to the skywatch, it’s nearly evening. Any leaping, caressing of gelatinous air, tender embrace of the soil at 25 meters per second only to splash through a mud puddle and emerge a vagrant somewhere in Newark, to be thrown into something else, fused into the gearworks of another name, will have to wait until I can see precisely where I’m going.

a small, simple rant

I am a composer and a musician. What I do is relevant and necessary for the perpetuation of culture. I bring meaning, however small, to a life that is otherwise matte, grey, and dull. I bring a set of skills and a particular knowledge into a world that pays lip-service to "creativity" and little else. I can tell you everything you ever wanted to know about the bassoon, woodwind and brass fingerings, string instrument bowing and positions, how to compose a piece of music in any medium from the ground up, anything about post-war experimental music, most things about phenomenology and aesthetic theory, and give a rundown of Western art music's history in surprising detail, from roughly 800 CE to present, in about an hour, and I can go into even greater detail for the Reformation period, the Ars Nova, the Ars Subtilior, and American, German, French, and Latin American music after 1890. Of all of these, I create works of art the best.

A few ground rules.

No, I won't write you a piece just to get "exposure" - I do have bills to pay. No, I won't perform for free for you "as a favor" - it takes time to prepare. No, I won't get a "real job" because this IS my real job: it takes time, effort, labor, skill, and patience to do what I do. I'm damn good at it, even though I'm continually learning and striving to improve.

Let's observe this differently.

Can I borrow your skills, sir, as an accountant? It will give you exposure to potential clients! Can I borrow your time and well-honed abilities as an architect to design a structurally-sound and aesthetically pleasing building for my friends? I can't pay you, but you should be lucky you get to show off your skills in public with the finished product! What about you, there? Can you, bricklayer, carpenter, and mason dwell over a blueprint for a while and build a house perfectly in front of a live audience that has seen houses built faster and better than what you may be able to do? Pay you? You should be lucky we all get to participate in your gifts!

See? See how stupid that sounds?

Beethoven got to get paid, son.

Easy Things to Consider Regarding Islamophobia

"Nimium altercando veritas amittitur." [Through too much fighting, the truth is lost.]
– Publilius Syrus

After the advance into power by the rather repulsive political party known as Sverige Demokraterna – or, rather, the Swedish “Democrats” – in Sweden over the past few weeks, a party that uses for its motto “Keep Sweden Swedish,"¹ and after the continual disgrace in American discourse known as DoBYMoH (Don’t Build Your Mosque Here) based on completely refutable and fallacious logic, I am obligated as a citizen of the world and as, hopefully, a fairly enlightened American to help provide a list and call to action to people as aggravated as I am at the pure, unabashed dichotomization of the world’s population over Islam, the victimization narrative present in especially Western discourse, and the rampant falsehoods about what Islam is and what it stands for.

Mainly, I’m just pissed off and would rather see some sanity restored to this discussion.

The responsibilities of citizenship and the fluidity of nationalism are – by way of understatement – tricky and not-simple things. When a person immigrates to a new country to seek its citizenship on paper, a thorny issue erupts surrounding identity. It is easy to point to American policy and citizenship as a quintessence of this problem: an immigrant takes an oath of citizenship in order to uphold the responsibilities and enjoy the rights and privileges of being an American. But what, I ask, is an American? Is there a solid national identity to which we can point, some sort of totemic standard that dictates American-ness? In a word, no. Why so many Greek festivals? Why the allowance of Día de los Muertos celebrations within our borders? Why Oktoberfest? The cliché is that we are a nation of immigrants, and while it may seem specious, it’s true. The singularity of an American identity is its plurality, and, in essence, it’s the only thing that seems to come close being the only idyllic thing entwined with being American. What, then, are the responsibilities of citizenship within a multicultural nation? What, then, are the responsibilities of citizenship in a place like Sweden where immigrant populations are extremely small? What, then, can we say about nationhood and nationalism? If we are a nation without a nationalist identity, what rights do we have to criticize others who bring their cultures, their faiths, with them? If we have minimal cultural standards – standards that cannot necessarily be defined in universals or in government documents – on what defines citizenship and national identity, what rights do citizens have to dictate and legislate practices that exist peacefully in other parts of the world and do not interfere with, and do not dismantle, and serve to bolster, preexisting cultural frameworks? Turkey is not a Muslim nation – it is a secular state where most of its citizens are Muslim. Indonesia is a secular state. India is a secular state. Egypt is a secular state. Religious plurality is allowed and not criticized as means to destroy the fabric of national identity and it is not targeted as process through which societal downfall will occur. As arguably the most culturally diverse nation in the world, why is it we feel the pernicious need to target one faith, one culture, as the bogeyman set to unravel the American way of life when we cannot point to a solid, basic definition of what American means, outside of being able to say “I live in America?” Nationalism, in this sense, must no longer be used as something internal, as something akin to a birthright or a given. I was born in America, but I may not be American because of my views? This is ludicrous. I must conform to a certain physical and ideological ideal in order to be a Swede? Again, ludicrous, and nothing short of begging for stereotypical epithets rather than a veracious identity.

At various points in history, Judaism, Christianity, and other faiths have been oppressed and faced opposition in their development and migration. Obstacles, and even genocide, did not stop these faiths from becoming rooted, becoming established, becoming loved, accepted, and known the world over. To know that Judaism continues to thrive and flourish despite genocides, to know that Christianity flourishes despite schisms and early persecution, only ensures that Islam – and its 1.5 billion adherents – will survive. Attempts to end it, attempts to garner converts, attempts to vilify it: all will ultimately fail as a means of subverting it as a cultural and religious force. Islam has followed a geographic and cultural path no different from the first two Abrahamic faiths: it arose in the holy land, it took a few hundred years to gain traction, and it moved omnidirectionally from its center. It found a home in multiple lands, became a steering force for law and order, dictated cultural values and ethical standards, but with one exception: a fair amount of higher mathematics arose from Muslim scholars, including algorithmic procedures and Algebra. (Zooks! Maybe this is why so many dumb white people worldwide hate Muslims!) At various points, each of these religions became slightly perverted by those who took some vague or poorly-worded scriptures a little too seriously. And lo, we end up with Zionists, Fundamentalist Christians, and Wahabists.

All faiths have their perversions. Each of the Abrahamic faiths has its outlier groups of people hellbent (pardon the pun) on eradicating the Other or, at the very least, converting everyone into their “chosen” / “right” / “only” faith. Here we have a problem that exceeds logic: clearly, in the realm of belief we can have no absolutes. Perhaps absolute morality issues like murder (it should not be done) do exist, but if we are to view religious ideologies as things of rightness, as items bearing moral positive worth and value, we cannot place perfect, infallible values or glowing positive weights upon the tenets and the sum total of what the faiths preach. Aside from this unsolvable problem, we have an issue of deontology: each of the Abrahamic faiths preaches the necessity for nothing but a total conversion of all unbelievers to their respective faiths. So far as I can tell at this point, only Islam is winning at that – and I honestly chalk this up to the fact that by sheer age, Islam is one fifth as old as Judaism, and only half as old as Christianity. According to the Holy Scriptures – take your pick – adherents to the faith must convert and evangelize. Are Judaism and Christianity miffed that the youngest kid on the block is winning, or is it more a matter of moderation? That is to say, where is the fervor? Where is the zeal? The billions of regular adherents of the Abrahamic faiths are creating disservices to their faiths and not upholding their bargains to make each heathen a true believer, yet the vast majority of mainstream participants in these faiths seem to find perfectly acceptable the fact that they are not upholding a major duty of their religions. If this is the case, there needs to be a radical re-cognition of religious duty. And, in so doing, we valorize the fallacious and the fallible. Which, therefore, eradicates any absolutist claim that one faith supersedes another or trumps a lack of faith.

The Constitution guarantees the protection of all people of faith; outrage over the existence of a religion is Constitutionally protected; the existence of a religion res ipsa is also protected. Debate and faith are on equal footing nationally and under the UN Declaration of Human Rights, no single one is elevated above another, and all people worldwide should have the ability to criticize and practice whatever faith they so choose. This should be self-evident.

In terms of the infamous “Ground Zero Mosque,” which – if it is not already apparent, is misnamed as it will be a community center, like the Jewish Community Center on the Upper West Side of New York – is being funded privately, transparently, through private hands with private property. Government money and government property are not being exchanged and are not at the center of the debate, yet the rhetoricians from the far right would have us believe that somehow this is being sanctioned by the Federal Government. It is private. Private development is just that, and cannot be subject to public debate or discourse beyond what is already subject to public oversight or transparency; if we as a populace want to dictate how land and real property trade hands, then the entire capitalist system of real property ownership needs to be overhauled so that we micromanage every exchange of money for land. I do not see this happening in human existence any time soon. Further to the point, do we ask for transparency each time a Christian church or community center is built in our neighborhood? Can we be certain that the local Christian church isn’t being backed by a domestic extremist or terrorist group? Do we impose and erect such barriers to the freedom of worship and community outreach when the Church of Latter Day Saints or American Catholic Church plan a new building? Should we? In all fairness, if we are to be selective of where and what faiths do in the public sphere through private means, perhaps we need to insert into the popular imagination a perpetual outcry about all institutions that hold such power and sway – over both our deepest beliefs, and our deepest fears, and how the twain meet.

The topic of what should and should not be built near “Ground Zero” is moot and I will not address it here.

Whether it is simple human nature, or if we as Americans – or we as Westerners – have been conditioned to do so, we seem to fall under the auspices of the binary and instinctively and intellectual have the necessity to find, or conjure, or create a nemesis. Historically, it this has been easy for Americans since the inception and nascence of this country: first, the English. Then, at various points, Native Americans, Chinese, Irish, Polish, Italians, abolitionists, anti-abolitionists, Blacks, Jews, Catholics, Lutherans, Swedes, Norwegians, Mexicans, Cubans, Russians, Germans, Japanese, and countless others. Since 9/11, Islam has been an easy target – a testament to an unbridled and well-embraced fear by the American population, and a further testament to our choice of viscerality and emotion over reason – although over the past few years, popular discontent has shifted to other venues. Popular hatred has regained focus on to the dark spot of Islamophobia, in no short measure aided by the Great Recession, lingering wars in the mid-East and South Asia, and the irascible, irrational fear of a Black President, yet somewhat well-effaced through populist “anger” (viz. Tea Party). We are growing, oddly, either as a species or as a civilization, one, in that we are verily struggling to find a new enemy. We are having difficulty latching on to one subject for derision, one entity to vilify. Perhaps we are finally maturing as an "American" society and, as such, are taking one long, last, brutal swing at an unseen apparition of an enemy that we've created out of our own xenophobia and ignorance.

Furthermore, since popular media and news reporting tend to straddle, if not cross, the line separating “reporting events and allowing the reaction to arise organically” and “creating the reaction in order to promulgate events and evince reportage”, it is ever more difficult to find the truth of a matter and retrieve the heart of causality. It goes without saying that popular media evokes reactions not merely because of what is reported but in the “unbiased” tone through which the mainstream media place “facts” on display.

Finally, we have Islam itself and its practitioners to observe. Dig out an original version of the Quran – not one that adds in the codices of Sharia law, which were added by Muhammad’s aides toward the end of his life and repeatedly reworded over the centuries. At the heart of Islam are messages no different from the other principal faiths of the world: peace, love, kinship, charity, compassion… Then, though, if you wish to read the words about Islamic law, it might be wise to break out the Talmud, or Leviticus and Deuteronomy, and, of course, it would be wise of us who practice these faiths to see the myriad ways we don’t practice these laws, and how Western governments and laws were based upon Judeochristian texts, and how many of these sacred duties were really hygienic and cultural practices: Hallal food? Simple: botulism and salmonella in poorly-cooked meats. No shellfish? Same deal: tough to cook properly. Don’t mix your wool and cotton? Simple: in the desert, it gets really hot, and wool will make you sweat your ass off while cotton breathes and keeps you at least slightly cooler.

So, with this, I say: hug a Muslim. Embrace plurality. Hold on to your faith, but don’t choke it into submission, and don’t let it drag you around. Mankind’s survival – or, at the very least, mankind’s ability not to look like a bunch of screeching, brainless idiots who can live peaceably – depends on it.

1. "Bevara Sverige Svenskt!" - which, literally, means, keep Sweden Swedish. Personally, a nation of 8 million teutonic, blond-haired, blue-eyed beautiful people is not just a false stereotype, but aesthetically and culturally boring.

a confession

I enjoy college football. A fair amount.

There. I feel cleansed, and I'm happy I shattered some of your expectations.

project status almighty-uh

Never fear! I am working on an essay about the "experimental" epithet I'll post here sometime soon, but for now, I'll regale you with some projects I'm working on in the actual-writing-music part of my existence.

gravity express for standard orchestra (3222-4231-Hp-Timp-2-Strings):
On my website, it says that the piece is already done. I call it: extrinsic motivation. At any rate, I haven't composed an orchestral piece in eight years, and I've never composed a good one.¹ I figured it was time. It's a train piece, alright, with some requisite effects and train-y sounds, but it veers a little more closely into tonal-reference category and is more likely than not to be seen as a "crowd-pleaser" type of piece. (I don't have many of those, either.) I estimate the finished product will probably be around 11 to 12 minutes long, which should be safe territory for a lot of contests and hopefully a few performances. To wit: I'm writing it in a less-challenging style and leaving out some of my rhythmic idiosyncrasies that seem to damn a lot of my pieces to a one-performance-and-done existence. I project that the work should be done within two weeks.

deep cover for pre-recorded electroacoustic sounds
Some time back, I posted here about a fixed-media piece I wanted to write based on the numbers station phenomena, and it actually came to fruition. I'm in the last stages of work on that piece and it ended up taking quite a different path (duh) from what I originally anticipated. It became, in the words of a colleague and friend, a "musical short story" with a number of narratives threading through the work. The piece is currently 14 minutes long - which makes it quite iffy when it comes to unsolicited performances and conferences - and while I'm typically fine about writing long pieces, this one actually feels somewhat long for what I want in the piece. I imagine there will be some editing, some remixing, and some fussing with Vegas to make it glitch-free before 2033.² I also expect it to be done within two weeks or so since it, more than anything else, is in the final stages of birth.

resemblematics for wind quintet
"But, Tom!" you cry, "You've already written this!" I can explain.
Back in 2004, I, a little bassoonist-composer, decided I needed to write a wind quintet. I did. It has sat on a shelf. Deemed too hard by a lot of undergrad performers, I decided that I wouldn't revise the existing movements but, by fiat of necessity, instead add two more. I laid out sketches for movements 4 and 5 some years ago but never finished them. I could never figure out if the piece was strong enough as a three-movement work, and I finally decided: no. I'm balancing out the long-scale form of the work, extending some idioms I was toying with while composing it initially, and wrapping up what I see as thematic loose ends. I don't have a firm end date on this, but I'll try to get this done by the middle of October. I don't realistically have much to add to the sketches, other than decide among the material.

seven selected points of reference for a lingering spectre for violin and piano
I dug out an old sketch, from 2006, of a violin-piano piece I wanted to write. Multi-movement, short movements, reduced materials and rather simple approaches. I had one movement written already: for some reason, I called it the 5th movement, and in its previous form, it clocked in at just around 22 seconds long. I plan to add about 8 seconds of music to it and I finally got around to sketching some things for the other six (!) movements. It follows an arch form (cf: Brahms Requiem) and has a rather minimal approach to pitch material. The vicissitude of the lone written movement is a guiding principle for the rest of the work - none of them can be more than a minute long, except for the 4th movement (the keystone), all must have very simple forms, and use the same kinds of pitch material. I get around this by excising certain pitch classes for certain movements and toying with my interval sequence structure.³ I want to get this one done by the end of October; seems like it could be a strong festival entry, or at least feasibly performable by good performers - and by that, I mean, if a seven-movement piece is only 9 or 10 minutes long, it stands a much better performance chance. It's also been years since my last piano-and-instrument work -- I'm guessing around seven or eight.

Oh! Before I forget, the violin/piano work (should it get performed) will be curiouser in that the movement titles are the program notes. Observe!

i. she appeared at my door wrapped in snakes
ii. a capricious spirit she seemed to have
iii. i could barely hear her whisper
iv. she held her glass up to my visage
v. and then the ghost descended lengthwise
vi. and proceeded to flash a tender iris
vii. before it shuttered and hissed away

On deck:
violin/clarinet/piano (mid-late Novemeber 2010)
wind ensemble (mid-late November 2010)
saxophone orchestra/sextet (no, really, it can be both) (mid-late December 2010)
solo piano work (finally) (mid-late December 2010)

I've also been tempted to dig out some of my older, underperformed chamber pieces and arrange them for wind ensemble and/or orchestra. I see potential in at least a few of them.

***

1. I don't count the viola concerto in this. The viola concerto, while an orchestra piece, is totally soloist-driven. It's also 40 minutes long. It's a good piece, but, damn, I retrospectively got a little too Mahler - or Feldman - on that ass.
2. I run Win7 on my primary soundmaking machine, and for years my multitracker of choice has been Cubase. Steinberg, Cubase's parent company, has been extremely, painfully slow about releasing Win7 compatible upgrades; I fear Steinberg will, if they haven't already, just dump their old platforms, scrap upgrades, and make a new, expensive version of Cubase for Win7. So, I've been stuck running Vegas - a good program for what it is - in compatibility mode, and I get inexplicable glitches here and there in complex renders. No fun. It leads to lots of swearing and panic and surgery.
3. Don't make me explain it. It's a homegrown algorithm based on fairly simple probabilistic math.