American Life Has Been Lost in Its Digits

It's a bit unnerving to be living at the end of an era.  When we were young, there was not doubt that the future held the promise of success.  We were not worried about the longevity of our nation, the threat of evil immigrants, or a new Cold War.  The politicians of my lifetime for the most part were caring about the substance of American life.  I was lucky enough, although I missed the Jazz Age, to live through three decades which reaped artistic benefit.  If you interview music writers, they will tell you that the 1970's were a time of unparalleled musical outpouring.  Like jazz, which remains mostly anonymous to mainstream America, this music and the music of the 1980's and 90's has yet to be studied.  The music that has been studied has been around much longer, so I surmise the music with which I am familiar and have come to appreciate will be recognized much further down the road.  Jeff Lorber, who pioneered the group The Jeff Lorber Fusion, waited forty years to receive his Grammy.  His albums of the l970's were ground breaking in both musical content and technology, and yet he saw no real recognition until last year, 2018.  Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock have been recognized for their stellar contributions to the field of music, and they are eighty years old.  True recognition of musical achievement it would seem in America is a matter of waiting.  Only pop stars reap the rewards of immediate success, and this fuels the American music industry.  Unlike in America's history music today has become a matter of immediate gratification, get rich quick, and show me the money.  This is a grave concern.  As I have aged in my career as a professional musician, performer, and composer, I have watched the institution of the American music industry die.  When the time is taken to study America's musical past it will become evident that our music industry has been in the forefront of artistic achievement.  Great strides have been made in American music, and most of them all ready are lost.  Listen to any film trailer broadcast on television, streaming, or in a preview at a movie theater and you will hear the same regurgitated "jungle drum" music cue that has been sufficing for a decade.  This same bombastic, compressed, soulless, noise brigade suffices as a musical teaser for just about any movie.  The only conclusion that can be made is that film studios spend zero money on music for their film trailers.  They have a limited library of prerecorded cues and drop one in with nary a thought for real promotion of the movie.  The same "jungle drum" cue is used over and over for different films.  There are several answers for the use of the cue, and let it become a metaphor what the film industry has become.  It also can be a metaphor for what America has become.  We are cheap, paltry, and superficial.  Japanese video games have infiltrated the film industry, and the one humanistic, intimate, and thoughtful nature of film characterizing human behavior has been replaced with violence.  It is startling if one really pays attention.  I have said it time and time again, that extremism has seeped into American society through television and film.  Who is producing this nonsense?  A step in the right direction for America is an examination of our pop culture.  I can't watch prime time television.  I can't watch movies produced in the style of a Japanese-made video game.  I can't watch senseless violence and murder.  Why would I want to?  Without expounding on the shortcomings in Hollywood, it is easier to make the example with American music.  As I played solo piano this weekend at a German restaurant in Fayettenam, my mind was assaulted with all of the possibilities.  My cocktail style of piano, which has been appropriate most of my life, didn't seem like the correct approach.  A German restaurant was not a country club.  It was not the Pinehurst Hotel.  It was not an expensive steak house.  It was a run of the mill eatery specializing in German food.  They play polka music on the stereo, but they hired me to play piano.  It was up to me to decide on the correct approach.  What should be such a simple engagement in fact was an epic lesson in the history of American music.  They had a digital piano, and it was a good one.  What are the possibilities?  It became clear to me then and there that America's pop history has been forgotten.  Being forgotten there is absolutely nothing left as a foundation for a new music industry.  Foreign interests, immigrants, and taken the reins of the American music industry, and it is a disgrace.  I thought, "I am not Billy Joel."  What a great artist this man was.  So many songs, a great singing voice, and a substantial pianist.  He was a star back in the day.  "I am not the Beatles."  What a catalog of songs which influenced America in so many ways.  Then there are blues, Broadway, Reggae, Folk, Rock, and Country.  There were so many ways to approach a simple engagement playing piano in a German restaurant.  So many different types of people.  So many age groups.  I did what I always have done.  I tried to mix it up.  Eventually my cocktail stylings prevailed.  What was most important was to be in the background providing a pleasant mood for the diners.  That meant that while "Hum and Strum" could have been appropriate, they hired a pianist.  While thinking about all of these options is when I realized that the music industry in America is now defunct.  If we want a pattern for healthy living in America free of the violence that came with the Trump administration, the first thing to do is reform America's music industry.  It is not really an industry at all anymore.  It is a distribution industry.  The new music that is being made today is a pale shadow of America's production in her heyday.  Whether it was the Roaring Twenties and Tin Pan Alley, the Jazz Age, Big Band Swing, or the moxy of Stax Records, pop music today in America is a castrated product to which youth have become addicted.  Everything it seems in American pop culture is an addiction.  Why must be become addicted?  The answer is because the quality is not there underneath the quick fix.  It is all quick fix.  It is quick fix, because what it takes to produce quality music indeed incorporates an entire industry.  There are writers in the Brill Building.  There are recording studios such as Columbia and RCA.  There are sound stages on movie lots.  There are jingle factories.  This was when real acoustic music, sounds waves created by people and things uninhibited from infrasonic pollution and noise had the power to shape lives.  It was a powerful industry, one that usurped the film industry.  What do we have today?  We watch millennials pantomime with prerecorded tracks on television.  Tracks do most of the work.  Prime time television is littered with exploitative talent shows promising dreams for middle America.  It is a charade.  It is a charade of charlatans exploiting America's youth in a much more insulting way than Stax Records.  At least the black characters in their Blaxploitation films were strong, independent, and forward thinking.  Through America's pop music, we have created a castrated, addicted, sheltered youth we are not able to cope with reality.  During Black History Month I have heard numerous black youths say they don't want to be reminded of what their people did, or your people, or our people.  Ignoring out past is the perfect solution to annihilation.  If you don't recognize and understand things that came before you, you are living in a bubble of constructed utopia, and it is far from that.  America has become a severe, violent, maelstrom of racism, classism, and nepotism.  I never have experienced anything so offensive.  When I think of jobs that were in existence during America's lifetime, plain and simple jobs that were deemed important and worthy of rewarding.  What do we have today?  What do we value?  Nothing.  We have tainted food, addictive drugs, fake art, polluted air and water, and a fascist as a president.  Inflation continues, wages are stagnant, and education is a ghost in America's closet.  Who in this country has decided this?  We are the digital age.  We are the age of the internet.  Therefore internet moguls have attained power and have devalued most of what is valuable in American society.  We are ashamed to look at slavery, blackface, and oppression, and yet these very things are what shaped the heart and soul of America.  We would not have jazz, blues, or many other artistic creations had it not been for our exact history.  Today we are hiding that history, which only is empowering the digital age.  When I heard a Hillary Hahn recording this evening on WCPE which was engineered direct-to-disc, I was overtaken with the authenticity, intent, and artistry of the music.  It was retro.  It was a sounds that I have not heard in years, an analog representation of music which was full of life.  American life has been lost in its digits.  

Tighty Whitey and Blackface

It is no wonder America is in a predicament.  (No one much is reading my blog except the Huff Post.  Kudos to them)  It is Black History Month.  This must be the reason why my instincts are telling me to research "blackface."  America is in a predicament, because we have failed our youth.  We have disguised our past.  We have exploited our children.  We have lined the pockets of racist America.  America had made great strides in civil liberties.  During the Clinton Administration "multiculturalism" was a focus of government, not "globalism."  That is because the Clinton's were democrats.  They cared about the lives of all Americans, not just the rich.  Multiculturalism was about American diversity through the influence of all races, nationalities, and cultures.  "It takes a village," Hillary wrote.  In came Bush, and "globalism" became the interest.  Globalism is a synonym for world dominance.  In an idealistic sense it meant opening world markets to each other.  How can one nation achieve this without savvy foreign policy?  Ronald Reagan set the stage for globalism by ending of the Cold War.  Richard Nixon forged a relationship with Red China.  Bill Clinton created the Dayton Accords solving the Bosnian Conflict, which no one remembers.  Slobodan Milosevic was relieved of power, convicted, and imprisoned by the International War Tribunal at the Hague.  America has regressed since then.  Ethical ideals, intelligent policies, and moral sentiments have been replaced with shallow, greedy, narcissist delusions implemented by racists hiding beneath orange skin, yellow hair, and swollen jowls.  Hitler has been reincarnated in the clever guise of  KKK cloak and hood.  Closet Confederates are inciting murderous violence at faux political rallies.  All of this harks back to historical education, but Washington no longer deems public education or its teachers worthy of respect.  We don't understand our own history, so what emerges is angered violence.  It is not easy, the history of America.  In studying blackface I realized this.  America never has been "white" America.  We are a nation of immigrants, and these immigrants make up the DNA of America.  Anyone thinking that Anglo Saxon or Caucasion blood should dominate America is delusional.  We are mixed blood, and this the beauty of America.  Whence does this white supremacist thinking come?  One only has to look at the history of blackface to understand.  The American South was built upon slavery.  Slavery gave southern whites their wealth and power.  When Abraham Lincoln began to call for an end to slavery, the Civil War was created.  After hundreds of thousands of innocent American lives were lost and slaves were freed, the South continued to wage war upon black culture.  If they were astonished by African rituals, it was because they were in denial of their own wrong-doing.  Upon what else did freed slaves have to fall?  They were kidnapped from their native nation, shipped in shackles across a great ocean, and sold into slavery to white Americans.  Whatever problems freed slaves had were created by their own owners.  Transplant a man from his own soil speaking a different language and ask him to assimilate into a condescending, classist, judgemental society.  It should be of no great surprise that freed slaves became unruly, disruptive, or criminal.  It would have been quite the predicament, not as challenging as educating an ignorant American public today.  You can't argue with stupid.  The active campaign against blacks through entertainment, literature, and marketing is America's culprit.  Who were the influential families championing this war?  When one studies the literature it is clear defamatory stereotypical images were used to damage blacks, but not all of the images are as guilty as considered.  What seems not to have been taken into account is African heritage.  How was white America to know about African culture?  We were fighting the British, Mexico, and Spain.  We slaughtered Native Americans at Wounded Knee to acquire this country.  When was there time to understand black culture, slave culture.  It was a difficult situation.  It seems millennials today want to ignore America's history in favor of a naive innocence thinking Washington has our best interest at heart.  The holocaust was not that far in our past, and if we do not face evil square in its face, keep it closer than our loved ones, and monitor it on a daily basis it is not unfeasible that genocide could happen again.  America is the exception to world politics.  We have not had apartheid.  We have not had recent civil war.  We have not had tribal segregation, but other countries have.  If we do not keep abreast of our elected officials, demand righteousness from them, and eliminate them when they are wrong, America could slip into the same destiny as other third world countries.  America's youth has been brainwashed into passivity.  They are so ignorant Washington has been doing they want with no response for over a decade.  Pop music is a core tool in this conditioning.  The power of popular music, its messages, themes, and motivations have been castrated like a mute steer.  The once inspiring, honest, and reflective nature of popular music has been replaced with soft core pornography.  It is easy to justify, because when one looks around at reality anything is better.  This brutal reality of our political regime has fueled the opioid epidemic, drug wars, and domestic violence.  If there were something to look at in America that was positive, spiritual, and comforting, let it be seen.  Instead we have the anodyne of popular music, sterile prepared "tracks" with graphic images of sexuality.  Hard core pornography is available for free on the internet, so music moguls have capitalized on its soft core version, a more human, intimate, and seeming emotional experience through pop music.  Most people don't even realize what it is.  Until the music industry is reformed and stripped of its pornographic intent, America may never recover.  We will spiral into a decadent, depraved, and violent society fighting to the second coming of Jesus Christ. 

Mira's Argument

I don't have much time to write an in depth and scholarly blog entry, but I want to say this.  I heard Mira Sorvino on television chastise John Hughes for his movie "Sixteen Candles."  Those of you who don't know, John Hughes authored many of the hit movies released in the 1980's.  Many of them were fantasies.  Are you listening, Mira?  I love your work.  "Mighty Aphrodite" was a delightful film, and perhaps you have a different opinion of it today, playing a whore that is.  Since Harvey W. tainted Hollywood with his foul-smelling semen dripped into a potted plant, things have not been the same.  That does not give anyone the right to project a value judgement out-of-context.  There has been a lot of out-of -context reporting lately.  As a naive, vindictive, selfish American society, no longer do we allow the accused innocence until proven guilty.  We sling mud to our hearts content, until someone responds.  It is not a prudent policy.  Mira's comment was anachronistic.  She was commenting on a fantasy film written for entertainment in an era when it was not politically incorrect.  If you grew up in a different era, you may not know this.  Most millennials have little understanding of American history, especially recent pop culture.  Things were different in the 1980's.  Then president Ronald Reagan ended the Cold War.  Are you listening?  Ronald Reagan ended the Cold War!  Today our President of the United States is resurrecting the Cold War.  Imagine the difference, a time when the threat of global nuclear war was gone?  The economy was solid.  Vehemently many do not agree with trickle down economics and its effects.  I'm not sure if I do, but the 1980's was more pleasant than today.  There was an integrity and solidarity in American society, a substance, which is lacking today.  That sense of well being gave Americans the security to laugh.  We were not fighting for our survival.  We could breathe, relax, and laugh at ourselves.  We could indulge.  We could fantasize.  Indulgent may be the most accurate word to describe the 1980's.  What's the big deal?  Today because millennials are culturally ignorant about American pop history, many things are being taken out-of-context.  For example a black face photograph in a year book may not have been as inciting then as it is today.  Many people do not know that black face was not meant to be insulting to Negros.  It instead was a raciest society trying to portray Negros in the Minstrels, Vaudeville, and Broadway.  Not unlike the limiting of civil rights in the Jim Crow South, Negros were not allowed to participate in musical drama.  Blackface merely was the the attempt of a white actor to portray a black character.  Like any dramatic role the depiction could have been good or evil.  No one seems to understand while stereotypical Negro images appear offensive today, they must be understood in context.  We don't even know what the context was, because American history writers have altered accounts of oppression in text books.  None of us has first hand experience living during slavery.  We can read about and imagine it.  All races can, because of the Nazi holocaust.  Black American slavery was not the only slavery.  It began earlier in many European nations.  Slavery was inherent in newly emerging American society, so society found ways to defuse it.  In entertainment one method of relieving racial tension was parody.  Mick Jagger forged his career in Rock 'n' Roll mimicking the gait of a clucking chicken often parodied by slaves themselves while engaging in the dance the Cakewalk.  These colloquial habits are the sources of many of the stereotypical Negro images which seem so offensive today.  Mammy.  Uncle Tom.  Little Black Sambo.  These not always were offensive.  Contrarily they attempted to provide love in a society charged with racial injustice.   Cartoon images of  stereotypical blacks were meant to provide warmth, familiarity, and escape from the everyday tensions of slave-owning plantation life.  Viewed today they would seem insulting and patronizing, but viewed in the time period in which they were conceived, they had a different intent and therefore meaning.  If Mira chooses to take a 1980's era John Hughes film and decry it, because it casts a woman as a drunken slut, then she is missing the point.  Film not always is art.  Often films are not meant to educate.  Especially they are not meant to be extrapolated into sexist entities, if during their time they functioned differently.  If Mira wants to champion the miscasting of females in Hollywood, then she should ask the actresses who played those roles if they would not have taken them for sexist reasons.  They chose to play those roles just as Playboy playmates chose to accept their images as sex symbols.  They had foresaw no problem with that imagery.  They were not championing civil rights.  Not all women feel the same way.  Not all women are offended by God's designation that women be feminine.  It was not Adam and Adamina in the Garden of Eden.  It was Eve, and some women still are comfortable being Eve-like.  Certainly in my experience many women embody the essence of Eve offering their bite from the forbidden fruit.  She was the temptation, Eve, not Adam.  Many want to change the definition of women, but many are content with it the way it traditionally has been defined.  "Sixteen Candles" was an adolescent sex fantasy never meant to be taken seriously.  Adults can tell the difference.  The financial instrument of taking people's words and actions out-of-context anachronistically to make money should cease.  History when appreciated for what it teaches will be the one thing which allows a plural interpretation of life over time.  The mono-dynamic, fascist, oppressive Trump doctrine which is being implemented today via Washington will be recognized, annihilated, and seen as the Nazi-ism it really is. 

Trump, and the Nazi Party

My mother had her tooth pulled this morning.  Trump's inaugural committee was subpoenaed.  About the same thing.  Instead of instigating campaign finance reform, immigration reform, or voting reform, things sorely needed in American society, our castrated Congress in the great model of Mitch McConnell spin the wheel.  It it lands anywhere else but these letters, "Looky there!  We are not capable of drafting any legislative reform, because that would require policy knowledge, wisdom, and a conscience.  (Some legal savvy would be helpful but not required)  Lawyers are a dime a dozen, and most immoral.  Morality, a sense of good and bad, comes from parental upbringing, education, schooling, and God.  If there were no God, no religion, how would the human race know the difference between right and wrong?  That is why we have God, and religion, and spirituality.  They are not necessarily conjoined.  Native Americans had a sense of spirituality, but it may not have included God as we know Him.  Many cultures have a sense of spirituality without necessarily mentioned God.  The cultures that do may call Him God Allah, Buddha, or something else resembling a graven image.  (say a cow)  What matters is there is something else other than us.  There is a being greater than man.  Man it has been proven in history does not have the capability to distinguish right from wrong.  He needs to be guided by Christ.  If Allah say there are a bevy of virgins waiting in heaven, so it is okay to murder a lot of innocent civilians, I would digress.  This is a metaphor for corruption.  There is no greater example of corruption than our president, Donald Trump.  Corruption stands squarely on its soap box, looks us straight in the eye, and lies.  Corruption lies for its on well being.  Corruption does not care about its fellow man.  Corruption is selfish, vain, narcissistic, and evil.  Corruption disputes learned fact, truth, and integrity.  Openly it decrees the opposite of known truth.  Maybe Mitch is doing the right thing, keeping your enemies closer than your friends.  It has come time for Big Brother to disappear.  1984 is too present, too stark, and too frightening for America to survive.  No civilized, humane, Christian nation can stare evil in the face every day.  We, as God taught us, must react.  We must fight.  We must conquer evil with the might of our own swords.  We cannot restrict the right to own guns, because those we will end up fighting will be our own people.  This is how America won the Revolutionary War.  A well-armed militia is a nations last resource for survival.  Fascism has inbred in America.  If we do not recognize it now, and defeat it now, another holocaust is possible.  All ready the Trump administration is persecuting immigrants.  In North Carolina U.S. attorney Robert Higdon is prosecuting legal immigrants for voting.  These legal residents, who have yet to be sworn into citizenship, have been coerced into voting by our own election officials.  Judge Boyle is convicting them of misdemeanors and fining them $100.00.  The U.S. Attorney's office has subpoenaed thousands of documents in North Carolina wasting valuable state revenue and clogging the legal system.  Who instructed Hidgon to do this?  Donald Trump. 

Senility in Disguise

As soon as the government shut down was resolved the trash news reappeared.  For a glorious month we had sedate, contemplative, compassionate news.  Things were in perspective in the media.  Then Trump "caved."  Trump Caved became the headline on most news sites.  There was no check and balance.  There was no dissent.  There was no third party opinion about how the agreement had been forged.  Only "Trump Caved."  The mud slinging began anew.  Trash news.  The president started his episode over again like a broken record.  There has been some notable news in the meantime.  The President is disagreeing with his intelligence chiefs.  They say there is no border crisis.  The President is pulling out of our Russian nuclear deal.  This is big news, and yet nothing much as been said.  Superbowl Sunday it is.  The President is slandering the Speaker of the House.  His lies are every bit as real as Big Brother's.  He looks you square and the face and lies his ass off.  Everything that comes out of his mouth is a lie, and still Mitch won't impeach.  Mitch is getting paid big money for his silence.  The lobbyists are lining his pockets with gold to support the Russian president.  What other explanation could there be?  Treason.  Espionage.  Things our of 1970's pulp fiction.  There has been a lot of good news, and yet the mudslinging sticks as news.  It is obvious all of the news is coming from one source, one corporate monopoly, Newscorp.  That would be Rupert, or now his sons.  (Why is Steven Colbert on on Sunday night?)  I am confused.  They want you confused.  I am fed up with academia.  There are more Phd musicians around Fayettenam than wetbacks all struggling to support their habits, families, and inclinations.  Music, music, music.  Too much music, and too many academics grandstanding about how important their music is.  The state of music in America?  Shit.  Spotify?  Rhapsody?  New players in the music business?  How is this possible, streaming services?  They don't even make music.  They just have come to control it.  It is dismal, which is why academia is important.  They understand the real music except maybe for jazz.  Jazz is not a transgendered teenager.  Jazz is African-American classical music.  That is what Lee Morgan said.  That is what John Coltrane said.  The white man called it jass later to become jazz.  There are many streams of it, and not all of the transect.  There is that ridiculous uncle Tomming band on Colbert.  Buckwheat is in the house, and a Broke Back Mountain drummer.  Jazz would not be happy.  TV bands have sold out, and Paul Schaeffer has left the building.  They play pop, and they look like they hate it, the Roots that is.  Never was that band so nervous as when Phil Collins really played the drums.  Conan lost his band, but the show is better.  TBS made the right decision.  Why is Colbert on on Sunday night?  Confused.  Bill Hurley cleaned up Hay Street in Fayettenam.  All of the physical and moral depravity of Fort Bragg harnessed by strip clubs and rightly so.  Those G.I.s need a place to let loose.  Prostitution is legal in most countries.  It is not a big thing.  Here, in Fayettenam, with the dough boy legislature, the bathroom bill, the ban on skateboarding, and old money.  It is suffocating.  So Bill cleaned up Hay Street, put the Lebanese mob out of business, and magically morphed heterosexuality into LGBT.  Instead of T & A now you can go downtown and buy a big load of man-hating lesbian.  The new democrats are talking about solidarity, bringing the country together.  A separatist movement like LGBT has presented itself is the wrong approach.  Demanding notoriety for your sexuality.  When I watch a play, a musical, I don't want drag.  I don't want to see a drag show.  I don't want to see Daddy Warbucks in drag making fun of his gay self.  There is a place for that, and it is in the underground clubs.  The theater?  "Annie?"  When you destroy the heterosexual dynamic that has been a core part of our existence for thousands of years, then the art that was based upon it withers into drag.  Men are wrong to desire women.  Not what God said.  It's a good thing that the bad guys are going to jail.  Bill in Philly.  The priests should be next.  Harvey.  Roger.  It is great to get those predatory buggers off the street and out of power in America.  Let the women rise up.  Hating men.  That is another thing, and it is separatist.  Cordoning off your group from the mainstream solidarity does not create.  It creates fissure, and that is what Trump is about.  The Grand Poo Bah of the KKK spewing his vitriolic rhetoric, inciting race riots, and slandering the House Speaker.  It is senility. 

Sealed in Blood

Never make the mistake of telling anyone that your musical psyche or "Id" is blocked.  You are opening yourself up to the worst kind of patronizing abuse from those only who want to live through you.  Vicarious is a humorous term around here.  Music as a profession is laced with cyanide, and the worst of it I have experienced.  The people around me never have been supportive of my musical inclinations.  Only they have been stunned that I chose to go my own path in music.  I lived my father's life of music my entire life.  I have no animosity about it.  He gave me what I have, and I am grateful.  It became clear to me when he wanted me to carry on his lineage, play his music his way, I said no.  Never did I want to become a band director.  Now after almost having a doctorate in music composition, I am feeling guilty for not being able to do the things he chose to do.  I took my class woodwinds and brass.  I learned my rudiments on the snare drum.  The music education program at UNC Chapel Hill was at a low point when I attended.  They hired a new Wind Ensemble conductor, who replaced a professor who should have gotten tenure.  He spoke German and played tuba, and they axed him.  Instead they hired James Arrowood, because he gave a charming and entertaining presentation in front of the Wind Ensemble.  He was a competent conductor, but one of his responsibilities in addition to conducting the Wind Ensemble was to teach the music education block courses.  These were two hour long affairs where basically he taught us nothing.  I sat in his classes for an entire semester and never wrote anything down, because he never told us anything.  When I turned in my notebook at the end of the course, he asked me why there was nothing written.  I said frankly, "You didn't tell us anything."  He didn't.  He was not prepared to teach these education courses, so my class was deprived of part of our necessary music education at UNC.  Because I had watched my father be a band director my entire life, I had an idea how to do it.  I didn't want to.  I got the Ed. degree, because it was something good to fall back on, teaching that is.  Because Mr. Arrowood didn't like me for my recalcitrance, my student teaching assignment was the bottom of the barrel.  The other students got good schools that were nearby.  I got Lee County Junior and Senior High Schools.  That sealed my fate of ever becoming a high school band director.  Never make the mistake of telling anyone close to you that your musical psyche is blocked.  What will ensue is the most patronizing, debilitating. insulting set of instructions ever.  Never make the mistake of asking anyone for musical suggestions, not in this day and age where musical ignorance is rife.  Look at television.  Listen to a song on any streaming service.  Music no longer is music.  No ones know better than you do what you should be doing musically.  To find that guidance one must separate themselves from the pack like Miles did.  No one can tell you how to excel in music.  Recently I had to listen to suggestions for my own vocation.  My mother continually yells at me that it is work.  
She accuses me of shirking work.  Truly she believes I don't want to work, but in reality it is all I want to do.  I just can't do it living with her.  The result is her trying to get her husband back by instructing me to play in his place.  I experienced this last night, and I will not experience it again.  I would rather be cooking in a food truck or busing tables rather then be forced to fill my father's very large and absent musical shoes.  I have no problems with his legacy.  I played  gigs with and for him many times when he was recovering from a stroke.  We worked well together, and he appreciated it.  Then he developed dementia.  Immediately I became an enemy and a competitor, just as I have become for my mother.  I have to coerce her into supporting my musical output.  There is nothing more I would rather do that work in the music field again in my own capacity.  It is not her fault she is not able to understand what that is.  Instead she demands I become the organist at her church, her husband, or any other music job that is prevalent in Fayetteville.  I am left feeling guilty, because I never studied the pipe organ.  I never studied church music or choral conducting.  I never sang tenor in our church choir.  I did different things, things which were interesting to me.  These are not.  They are old and stagnant to me.  There is no growth or development doing these things, unless you keep an outlet open for you own creativity.  I would have not issue with doing a rote music job, but the problem is I am not skilled in any of these areas.  I do not have adequate vision to read fly shit.  Instead I play jazz and improvise.  Of course I can read music, but sitting at the piano reading clumps of grapes never has been appealing to me.  It is the single reason why I was not a piano major at UNC.  I majored in the trumpet, and the entire time I was enrolled my teacher was threatened with my knowledge of the piano.  The same is true of my professors at USC.  When you skill rivals the skills of your teachers, in my experience, they are not supportive of you.  Instead they are threatened.  Hence none of my college teachers ever have helped me in the least finding a job.  Thirty years later and having returned to my childhood city, things have not changed.  They are still churning out the same hash at both schools.  I really thought about attending the South Carolina Masterworks Jazz Ensemble concert featuring Chris Potter in Newberry.  Chris played in my band when he only was in high school.  This was after John Emche, the director of jazz studies at USC, had died of a large brain tumor.  When I saw the program I knew why.  The taste is the same for me.  It is a noble accomplishment establishing this organization.  I have perused it with interest, all of its players and their achievements.  I take pride in having taught Dr. Robert Gardiner, while I was a Graduate Teaching Associate at USC.  He was my most serious student.  Still I have no interest in ingesting the same menu that was presented thirty years ago.  The faces are pretty much the same.  Columbia, although now filled with new and fresh faces of jazz, still is the same flavor.  That is because those academic jobs are long lasting, rewarding, and empowering.  They do not go away.  They just become "Emeritus."  In a society which needs freedom, change, and opportunity, this process is laboring.  It is too slow.  Forty years is long enough for anyone to have a well-paying university job.  It is time for those individuals to move on and let someone else have a chance.  

Healthcare Is Killing Us

It was amusing to turn on Saturday Night Live and hear my own words.  Evidently someone does read this blog.  Their parody of the Baby Boomer generation in comparison to Generation X and Millennials was spot on.  They are a gilded generation, the perfect metaphor for a time in American history when people mattered.  After all people are America.  People live in America, but they also make up America.  Buildings cannot be built by themselves or by animals.  Laws cannot be enacted by spirits.  People make up America.  If one looks at America today at least through the lens of reported news, it would seem that America is not fair.  America no longer is equal, if it ever were.  Certainly it wasn't to the millions of imported African slaves.  America's history never was Christian, but Americans have worked hard at making it so.  Progress has been made, and much of it has come in the last century.  Suffrage and civil rights are two important watershed events in American history.  Still one issue remains.  Equality.  America never has been equal.  While immigrants worked hard and accomplished much with the Protestant work ethic, racial inequality still remains in America.  I do not know the statistics, but older white men still hold the reins.  Comically SNL suggested it was time for them to move on.  If a city, state, or nation does not entrust the future leadership of their community to a younger generation, then you get what we have now.  We stopped embracing the younger generations, when we stopped supporting public education.  In America's prime public schools were the core of American life.  What better place is there to focus attention than on the preparation of the younger generation to come to economic fruition?  Not that long ago America forgot this.  Instead we began a covert systematic exploitation of our younger generations.  That is because Capitalism, the chosen socioeconomic system of America, cannot work without the spending of money.  Corporate America looked around and decided that the youthful generation had the expendable capital.  Emerge the iPhone, another perfect metaphor for the exploitation of American youth.  Instead of G.I. Joes, Barbie dolls, and tinker toys we primed Americas youth to want more.  Now everyone including adults are walking around staring at their palms.  I am a staunch Apple user.  I love my Apple computers, a Mac Pro, an iMac, and a Macbook Pro, but I do not have an iPhone.  I do not have an iPhone for two simple reasons.  One is I can't afford the contractual monthly charges, and the other is it is too small for me to see and hear adequately.  The three times I have had cellular phones they were nothing more than a nuisance.  I had a Samsung that burned up.  I had a Startac flip phone, and it never worked at all.  Finally I had a Nokia that did work, but I needed an ear piece to be able to hear on it.  Whatever happened to Nokia?  They were the phone of choice back then.  My mother has an iPhone, and it was my task to acquire it for her.  I did the research and then did the leg work to import her photos, contacts, and other important information.  It was not easy.  To set up video calling on the Amazon "Show," you had to have an iPhone.  We are set, but watching an 86 year old woman learn to use an iPhone is not amusing.  It was painstaking.  Remnants of that process still linger.  She enjoyed her desktop PC the most, when picture taking was still done with a digital camera.  Both Outlook Express and her Kodak software were enjoyable for her to use.  Now she struggles with Apple mail, its graphic interface, and Photos.  Neither are fun to use.  The iPhone proves to be more conflating creating confusion between it and her iMac.  Quickly she realized that a larger screen and more encompassing software create an easier human interface.  You can see more, so you can do more.  The iPhone was entertaining for a while, but now the reality has set in.  In today's political climate nothing is fun anymore.  The news headlines are severe.  Political bickering is the norm.  Few positive headlines make their way to the dinner table.  We carry on.  Luckily in my mother's case my father was an astute wager earner.  Although now he has passed, his hard work and talent have manifested themselves greatly in my mother's security.  She tells me stories of her church friends, and most of them are destitute.  Constantly I hear her reiterate how down and out most people in Fayetteville are.  With my help my mother and I have prepared for her future.  Contrarily I have not planned for my future, because it is impossible.  Her life of almost a century is overwhelming, histrionic, antagonistic, and unsupportive the way America has become to her youthful generation.  It should be no surprise there is no model for the appropriate Christian behavior to support our youth.  Instead I bear the brunt of her hardships.  Effectively she transfers her anxiety, worry, and grief to me, like all good parents should.  Truly in her own mind she feels this is appropriate.  It is unusual for a fifty-six year old single man to be living with his mother, or is it?  Not today.  With the depression of 2008 came a great economic change in America.  A handful of conniving Wall Street traders bet against the American economy.  To make good on their bets, the powers at be convinced W. that the taxpayers needed to bail out the Wall Street investment businesses.  If the American people saw that Wall Street was bankrupt, it was rumored it would be another great depression.  W. created the Troubled Assets Relief Plan, dipped his hand into the American cookie jar, and handed these Wall Street companies our money.  The money went to pay off this handful of investors chronicled in the film, "The Big Short."  Today still they have our money, and where is it?  Was this group of men qualified and responsible enough to possess that sum of capital?  Under the system of Capitalism money has to be spent.  It is a system of supply and demand.  Money must be spent for Capitalism to work.  It has to flow through society to stoke the process.  Money must flow.  The problem with America today is that the money is not flowing.  It is sitting shelved in overseas banks and otherwise invested for the gain of its proprietors.  These men and the other American corporations which refuse to infuse the middle and lower classes with economic opportunity are to blame.  Instead America has regressed back to slavery, but our slaves are in Asia.  All of our pollution as a byproduct of the production of goods squarely is in Asia, unregulated, naive, and accessible.  In a perfect metaphor for quid quo pro, China is polluting America with Gen X.  Not the Generation X, but the byproduct of making Teflon.  Likewise the Mexicans are making polyester resin at a plant on Cedar Creek Rd.  Turnabout is fair play.  Fayetteville, our Fayetteville, is a rail freight yard for DAK Americas.  Daily trains make their way down the middle of Russell Street supplying DAK Americas with the appropriate raw materials to make plastic drink bottles.  These plastic drink bottles end up creating small islands floating in the Pacific Ocean, killing marine life, and not biodegrading.  They will be on earth until someones decides what to do with them.  This is not good commerce.  Neither is accumulating money in a system that needs it to flow.  A super rich social class that has no authority, no qualification, and no stomach for doling out money to the lower classes should not be in power.  This is why and how Capitalism has failed America.  What is the most appropriate metaphor for failed Capitalism in America?  The answer is the medical industry.  Not the medical profession, but the newly created medical industry that began with the invention of HMO's.  This was the beginning of the end for American health care.  Who suffers?  The answer is the youthful generations.  I do not have health insurance and as such have not one ounce of care about my well being.  I am on my own, and I am watching out for my eighty-seven year old mother.  Because there is no model, she does not know how to support me and my life.  We have prepared for her future but not mine.  I am in a necessary stasis reflecting only her sentiments, worries, and passions.  My artistic voice, my own personal emotional expression has been silenced.  It is hard.  I played a gig last night, and instead of playing from my musical soul, I emulated my father.  I couldn't shake fifty years of paternal influence enough to reach deep into my own well of musicality.  That is why it is called work.  I realized that I didn't want it.  I don't want it.  I don't want my mothers emotional psyche.  It is thirty years older than me, and consequently there is little correlation.  While the patrons at my gig were kind and appreciative, it was not musically rewarding to me in any way.  It was rote labor hashing out tunes my father would have played.  I even made this decision, to play in his style with instruments that emulate his sound.  It has worked since he has been playing professionally.  Why would it not work again?  It is the same place, the same city where he played most of his life.  The patrons of the party were of the blood of their local predecessors.  Like the cast of SNL I was being haunted by the ghosts of the Baby Boomers.  We want the spirit of the Baby Boomers to be laid to rest like it should be.  America has not been kind to us.  In fact Millennials have received the rawest deal of all.  It's a good thing they are finding this out.  What is healthcare in America?  It is a bureaucratic spaghetti bowl of red tape which seeks only to line the pockets of its owners.  At America's inception one could go see the local doctor downtown, get an X ray, get a flu shot, or get a prescription for pain.  It was simple.  Medicine was grass roots.  The battleground of America starkly was apparent.  It was littered with the corpses of Union and Confederate soldiers, dead lynched slaves, and the sick and dying of disease.  There was no spin.  There was no hedge.  There was no future.  Healthcare was meant to save your life.  America no longer is a Christian nation.  Rest assured that satan is alive and well and living in Washington, DC. 

Doomsday

I can't believe what I am reading, hearing, and feeling.  When did it become normal in the United States of America to hear about abject
poverty as a result of slave wages?  When did our federal government become a club for rich businessmen who care nothing about the middle and lower classes in America?  These are our elected representatives, and starkly it is clear that our voting system deeply is flawed.  If these men purport to have the best interests of citizens at heart, they are lying.  Never in my memory have I witnessed such a flawed Washington.  The image of Hank Paulson coaching Bill Clinton from the podium is enlightening.  The film "Vice" which recently was released was enlightening.  When did elected Washingtonians become puppets manipulated by wealthy Nazi's?   It is frightening.  News stories about detainment, harassment, deportation, and border security.  It is our President Trump waging a campaign against evil Mexican terrorists trying to penetrate our southern most border?  It is commonly understood drugs do not enter our country walking across a border.  They are tunneled in by a complex cartel system of bribery with fast boats, aircraft, and strategy.  No humble South American citizen fighting for their own survival has enough time to fathom smuggling drugs in the United States.  A border wall is nothing more than a symbolic campaign promise made in 2016 relating to nothing more than vote gathering for the 2020 presidential campaign.  If Trump openly voiced it was his token to the American steel industry, that would be different.  All ready we are a socialist nation.  The government supports the American people, but the American people do not own the means of production.  They are not smart enough to manage it.  What is left of our private work force quickly is becoming a posse of slaves.  Stories of despair, humiliation, poverty, suicide, and murder frequent our headlines.  Murderous violence in North Carolina is enough to make one shudder.  All of it accelerated with the inauguration of Donald Trump.  When he took office in January of 2016, CSX-T expanded their rail activity.  It has not stopped since.  There has been a standing wave in my home for over two weeks.  I am forced awake at 3:40 a.m. by a humming, vibrating, pounding freight which stops and sits for the next five hours.  The air pressure is so strong from their infrasound, it could knock you over in your home.  We wonder whence the violence comes.  Why are Americans violent and unhappy?  Who is doing anything to ensure Americans have clean air, clean drinking water, and economic opportunity?  Who is trying to get American's jobs, knowing that to survive in America without government entitlements jobs are necessary?  Our manufacturing has been outsourced to foreign countries.  Wages have been stagnant for decades, and yet, "The price of concrete keeps increasing."  Inflation.  Adjusted for inflation.  What inflation?  Wages have not increased, they have decreased with the lack of presence of labor unions.  Our entire support system ensuring economic opportunity for everyone has been crippled by wealthy Republican businessmen who want only for themselves.  It is depressing.  There is no American Dream.  The only dream is to escape persecution, poverty, and slavery.  Escape imprisonment.  Escape torture.  Escape genocide, the same genocide which happened less than one hundred years ago.  All ready it seems to have begun in America but from within.  It is covert, internal, and subtle.  We poison our population with genetically modified foods.  We tempt them with fatty fast good.  We addict them to substances which are necessary to make it through the day.  America no longer is America.  We have become surrogate America, a population of childish images, behaviors, and habits.  Television commercials depict us as cartoon characters at the level of mindless, naive, stuffed animals.  When did America regress from a nation of renegade, recalcitrant, hippy, good-hearted souls to a nation of student murderers?  "What am I going to do today?  I think I'll motor on down to the local elementary school and murder some innocent children."  What kind of nation produces such behavior with an elected leader who patterns his presidency after a child Asian dictator?  Fuck us, because we all are doomed. 

Employment in America

What's the scrow, bro?  Nada.  Word up, Homey.  Hammond smorgan.  I have been working on my organ, so to speak.  Recently I asked a thirteen year old girl if she would like to try her hand at our organ, a Hammond A-100.  Not really, but I try to be careful about the innuendo.  "Would you like to try your hand on our organ?"  Currently I am not teaching.  I have not taught since I was enrolled in the doctoral program at Ohio State.  I taught a few private jazz piano lessons.  One was to a MOP, a miscellaneous oriental penis, I mean pianist.  They were plentiful in the OSU School of Music.  Because they can read fly shit on a newspaper, I wasn't very effective for her.  She just wanted to read jazz transcriptions, or else I should have told her to buy an Oscar Peterson book and read away.  Jazz piano is a much more involved process.  I stopped thinking about jazz music when I was in the program.  To complete the D.M.A. in composition I had to adhere to their curriculum guidelines.  That meant focusing on contemporary classical music, concert, or symphonic music from the 20th century.  All of these titles are misleading.  WCPE calls themself "The Classical Station," but they are not really that.  While they do play music from the Medieval, Baroque, Renaissance, Classic, and Romantic periods, none of that except Haydn, Beethoven, and Mozart correctly are thought of as classical.  The Classical Period, or more specifically the "High Classic Period" is thought of as 1780-1790.  This is what I learned from Lois Rosow in my History of Classical music at OSU.  The first time I took this course at UNC-Chapel Hill, I made a D.  This was the only D ever I made in my entire tenure at Chapel Hill.  Dr. Harold Andrews was the professor, and his class was dry.  Not only that he was not an effective lecturer.  The exam I took in his class was the only exam I ever took which had nothing to do with what he said in class.  Nothing.  Nothing he said to us during his lectures was on his written exam.  All of the material was foreign to me when I read his test questions.  I suppose it came from his assigned reading, but why did I even spend time in his class?  Instinctively I knew this, and hence I hated sitting there.  Not only was it boring, it was a waste of my time.  One evening when I was walking through the foyer in Hill Hall, I spied the light on in this very classroom.  Then I heard the faint whisper of opera music coming from behind that closed door.  I had forgotten we had an extra listening session for his class that night.  I pondered walking in late, and then I decided to blow it off.  It was horrible, that opera stuff.  Today I have learned that opera is a visual affair.  The music truly is high art, perhaps the highest form of music because it is coupled with drama and the human singing voice.  Writing for chorus, soloists, and orchestra indeed is a lofty accomplishment.  It is worthy of study, but fully to understand the intent of opera one must SEE it.  What is happening on stage, the sets, the lighting, and seeing people sing is important in the opera genre.  Simply to hear the music is not enough.  It is and should be an encompassing experience, one which draws you in with human emotion and anoints you with passion.  This was not happening in that classroom.  What was happening was students were sitting stationary in hard wooden seats watching a bumbling man blather on about something which was nondescript.  Never in his class was the intent of classical music expressed.  It was the pedagogy of the Ivory Tower, an "I know more than you about something that is very important" kind of deal.  This precept in the music department at Chapel Hill was not helpful.  Students are no less than professors.  They just know less.  The reason why they are enrolled, paying tuition, and supporting the personal habits of tenured professors is to learn more, so that one day they may be able to do the same thing, teach music.  Possibly at the undergraduate level this philosophy is not evident.  Students are just trying to make it through.  If a professor did instill the worth of the music, its meaning and expression, perhaps the students would become more interested.  That was not the case in Dr. Andrew's class.  Instead, like Judge Rick Pfieffer in environmental court, he dissuaded me from being interested.  Pfieffer changed me from being penitent to being angry, because he enacted a sentence that was not related to my crime.  It was hypothetical and motivated only by his desire to try to seem like a powerful judge and to collect revenue for the city.  There was no correlation between what I had done and his fine.  It was arbitrary.  Already I had remedied my mistake, and I brought him evidence of my contrition.  He was not interested.  I was ahead of his game.  I was on top of the bell curve.  I already had put myself through the criminal justice system.  I realized my wrong-doing, amended my foible, and asked for forgiveness. None was given.  Instead he enacted retribution that far missed the mark.  He conspired with the prosecutor before I appeared with no knowledge of my situation.  I was not given a fair trial.  I assume this is commonplace.  Especially it is in the American South, in a good old boy network of selfish ladder-climbing.  They are not interested in you in the least.  You are inconsequential.  You are nonexistent except that you broke their law and were responsible for your own lynching.  This kind of premeditated stereotyping is rampant in America.  It hangs on from our times of slavery, racism, and white supremacy.  These roots are hard to swallow, because America has come a long way.  We had a Civil Rights Movement, but one would not know it.  America has regressed to violence, ignorance, and greed.  Dr. Andrews repelled me from classical music with an unskilled, dispassionate, condescending approach only that made me angry.  I took the History of Classical Music again while working on my masters degree at the University of South Carolina.  I made a A.  I took it again at OSU, and also made an A.  This is a lesson in politics of America.  One region will put you in the grave, and another region will lift you up.

Things That Go Bump in the Night

I am not sure how Trump supporters cannot see his dictatorial tendencies.  He is modeling his inexperienced, narcissistic, near fascist presidency upon communist leaders such as Kim Jong-un.  Do Trump supporters not understand that our democratic republic is destined for a military dictatorship if Donald Trump is allowed to continue to be the American President?  Do they not see he wants to bypass Congressional oversight and rule America like a mob connected CEO?  Perhaps this is acceptable, sidestepping a gridlocked Congress, pissing away billions of taxpayer dollars for symbolic purposes, and reinforcing extremist, naive, and zealot machinations?  Trump will go down in history as the American pinnacle of evil which no one recognizes.  Is this how and why our civilization will end, with Trump as Brutus still yet to be discovered.  How long will it take for breast fed, dough boy, silver spooned Republicans to impeach him for the host of crimes all ready he has committed including treason.  It is like an epic B grade movie unfolding in our consciousness each day, but it is real.  Or is it?  Is the deficit real, how much the United States owes in debt to India and China?  Could the debt be eliminated by a covert operation destroying all of Wall Street?  V for Vendetta?  Fight Club?  Raze the selfish trader's playground and let America reemerge from the rubble.  All I see is a dictator waving his hands in the air pretending to be the American President, and yet Donald Trump has no clue how to govern America.  America is not a nepotistic, private, real estate firm, and herein lies our problem.  The wrong man was elected president.  Has this ever happened before, a completely incapable and in denial politician who gets off throwing darts at the America people rather than helping them?  What a great example.  I am going to say this, and fervently I believe it.  Guns are not the problem in America.  Guns do not shoot people, people do.  When people shoot other people it is because America has failed them.  America has failed to instill a sense of morality, security, and hope in those who erupt in violence.  We can blame this problem on illegal immigrants, or we can see reality and confess that our country is the only country where those seeking acknowledgment for neglect travel directly to churches, schools, and entertainment centers and murder the innocent.  That is because other countries still maintain a sense of God, religion, spirituality, and conscience.  America has become "America the Violent" at the joke of angry and jaded foreigners many of whom were persecuted by America.  That skewed blade of terrorism is fueled by America's lack of interest in her own population.  The violence in America is not the result of too many guns.  It is the result of our failure in public education, religion, and economic opportunity.  When the parents of a child in Robeson County, North Carolina cannot read we could try to blame them, but we can't.  The violence in America is a result of our failure in public education, through generations, and capitulated by our increasing lack of morality in the absence of God.  Criminals are Americans who have been neglected, and whose animal instincts are being stoked by pollution.  Because we no longer embrace academia and its disciplines, psychology, philosophy, religion, and the arts, we no longer have the capability to understand why Americans would commit genocide on innocent children.  We have regressed to a time of cavemen, basic needs and desires, and violent means for our own survival.  We are an ignorant culture, and we will continue to grow backwards until the second coming of Jesus Christ.  Only a resurgence and support of the educational process, the elimination of military and industrial pollution, and a revitalization of America's capability to produce goods and services will save this civilization.  Guns are necessary for America's survival, because a well armed militia is the citizen's last line of defense against a tyrannical government.  If we are not careful as in other countries the common man will be fighting our own military.  In the world this is commonplace.  What is America?  What is our culture?  What have we become?  We are a drug addicted, introverted, sedentary, naive, bisexual, and narcissistic club of video gamers who are prepared for nothing.  This often is reiterated as prominent community leaders such as Joe Biden tell us America lacks a trained work force.  Why is this?  It is because our millennial generation was sidetracked by the tech industry.  They were neglected by our system of public education.  They were ignored by Washington, and they were exploited by corporate America.  The millennial generation has become America's new wave of Yuppie's whose skills are so immature, defined, and extraneous to human survival they are incapable of becoming a meaningful part of our culture.  Slowly through the school of hard knocks, millennials are waking up to the concept of social inequality.  It widely has not been reported that the perpetrators of 9/11 were the Saudi Arabian junior league.  As such the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammad bin Salman should not be allowed into this country.  He is a war criminal no different from Slobodan Milosevic.  How could American allies, the Saudi Arabians, have planned and implemented the most grievous attack on American soil since the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor which began World War ll?  This prince is scourge, and he should be treated as such.  How is it possible that the sister of the founder of Blackwater, a private contracting security force employed by Dick Cheney, is our current Secretary of Education?  As is the pattern of the Trump administration, when the nemesis of a cabinet position instead is appointed to that job, eventually they will resign or be forced out in disgrace.  Miss DeVos is next.  Education in America will not resume until she is fired or steps down.  We will call her Medusa DeVos, the least capable Secretary of Education America ever has known.  The bodies are buried deep in the Trump administration, and this country will not recover until they are exhumed, recognized, and given salvation.  Trump will not be so fortunate, as God will have words for him. 

Brazilian Anarchy

As opposed to being thought of as a chronic complainer, I would rather be thought of as an adult American, who has lived long enough to look back past Generation X and see the shortcomings of the Millennial Generation.  If that makes me a chronic complainer, then I am nothing more than a modern George Carlin.  I am someone old enough to be able to remember American history rather than learn it out of a modern textbook.  That would be a disaster, because American history has been doctored from the beginning.  As I age and begin to realize what really happened in American history, I get angrier and become more malcontent.  Because I am a mature, educated, intelligent being I do not choose to commit acts of violence.  I don't protest either, although maybe I should.  My sociology professor at UNC-Chapel Hill deeply wanted his students to engage with current public issues.  As a graduating senior this was not an appealing prospect.  We simply wanted to write the paper, study, and pass the exam.  Seeking an issue in the public forum, researching it, adopting a position, and engaging with the local community to support your cause?  There was too much time involved.  Instead like other savvy UNC seniors, we preferred to find a way around it.  I wrote a paper about something which I all ready knew, hydro-electric power.  I laced it with personal opinion and submitted it as my project.  It was no surprise I passed with a C.  It was well-written, because I had written it before.  It sufficed.  Never have I had to engage with protest, civil rights, or inequality.  Although when I graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill, immediately I knew America was not fair, I continued.  That was more music study.  I missed the link that at some point one needs to work to earn a living and secure one's future.  Beginning teacher salary in North Carolina was $18,500.00.  Looking at the figure for a beginning band director, I felt extremely disappointed.  Graduating from Chapel Hill was the single most difficult thing I ever did.  On graduation day I had to look at the program to make sure my name was on it.  I had to take an extension on my woodwinds class, so I learned to play the flute by myself over the summer.  Brooks Smith gave me a C, because of the extension.  I was penalized, because I didn't have time to learn my scales during the regular semester.  I made an A in clarinet, because I could play all of my scales three octaves and did it on time.  I felt what I had learned and what I could do was worth more, so I went to grad. school.  It was not difficult to get a Graduate Teaching Assistantship with my newly obtained college degree.  It paid for my Masters degree.  During this time I was successful and lived the "jazz" life.  It was a nice time, but I am relatively sure this type of lifestyle is rare these days, especially in Fayetteville, North Carolina.  Jazz is not appreciated, and as such there is no jazz scene.  That is a big disappointment when you are living in a particular place.  What I do is not appreciated.  Perhaps that has something to do with my malcontent in America.  Perhaps in other cities life would be better for me.  Life was better in Columbia for a while.  Life became better in Columbus, Ohio after a while.  I am a capable and reliable musician.  I am passionate about my chosen craft.  The common connotation of a Phd is being an independent scholar.  An independent scholar will be productive in their chosen field of study no matter what.  Why not?  The alternatives are to get up each day and look at Trump America.  I have been reasonably successful at remaining musically productive over the last few years.  My father died on May 6, of 2016.  I am looking after my mother, and she has no one else.  She is 87 years old.  We live in the same house.  It is becoming increasingly difficult to be musically productive, because as Lenny Bernstein said a musicians soul is the world around him.  The political dynamic of the day is the pool from which we draw musical inspiration.  Even when the dynamic is violent, depressing, and immoral, musicians find a way to tell the truth.  Never have I felt the need to protest anything until now.  As an adult looking back modern day America is a pale, polluted, mockery of the once American Dream.  I have an entire list in my head why beginning with Global Warming.  The newest entry is democratic collapse in Brazil, their military's role in this event, and its implications in North America.  I live in a city which hosts the largest military installation in the United States, and yet I do not feel safe.  When I sit with the GI's and their families at restaurants, it is clear to me that we are not about whom they are concerned.  They are in the Army as a job.  Many of them have moved into my neighborhood and are raising families.  Still I am not sure they know the purpose of their service other than showing blind allegiance to their Commander and Chief.  This is their duty.  This creates an extremely unsettling scenario for me.  We have a dishonest narcissist in the White House who is setting the wrong example for America.  He is their Commander in Chief.  Many of the social programs and cultural practices which have been championed in America have been abandoned by his administration.  The American majority is not being represented by our elected officials in Washington, DC.  Most upsetting is the failure of Capitalism for the middle and lower classes and the eventual dismantling of our republic.  It is imminent.  Why?  It is imminent because the renegade spirit which grew America has been stifled by a sterile, authoritarian, militaristic rule especially in North Carolina.  We are very close to losing our democracy to a club of dough boys.  I am not sure the millennial generation understand what America truly has been is.  It is cloaked under the damp, mildewed, old tarpaulin of affluent America.  Affluent America wants America to be quiet and hand them their money.  This is not America. 

Foreign, Fascist, Phenoms

I have been babbling away about train noise for going on two decades.  That's twenty years of intense train funk, which actually began in 1990 with the inception of AC Traction.  No one in the general public is much interested in hearing negative feedback about something they feel they have no control.  No control.  You can't argue with stupid, and stupid we are.  Maybe a few of the older generations know the deal, but they are dying out.  For some reason this Christmas with the blooming of my tray of six Christmas cactus, I have had a reckoning.  I guess my cruise ship training at "Greeting and Smiling" has brainwashed me to believe that in the end everything will turn out alright.  At least on the seven seas the general adage is that everyone is supposed to have a nice time.  Whenever a grievance arises, the crew are taught to as quickly as possible to "Own the problem."  Whatever the cost solve the problem for the guest.  In the hospitality industry or leisure world, all problems are solvable.  There never will be anything so great to keep a family from enjoying their vacation, except possible a disable engine or an outbreak of the Norovirus.  For the most part living in this forced happiness oils the gears of profitability.  The cruise companies are prospering, and Americans are taking their leisure time away from the homeland.  Is that because the homeland has become a drag?  My reckoning this Christmas not quoting the words of Donny Hathaway was that America has become like she is for a reason and a purpose.  There is no happenstance involved.  Not only are we fighting a class war again akin to the class war fought during slavery, we have had our American Dream legislated out of our government.  The laws necessary to protect the underdog and to provide opportunity in the Capitalist socioeconomic system are been repealed.  The social and economic programs of proceeding presidents, fair and honest presidents who cared about middle America, have all but been reversed.  America has become a third world country without our even knowing.  The easiest example of the abandonment of the people, the common people, is the support of small business.  When the telephone system became too big for the federal government to manage they chose to break it up into smaller factions.  They were called "Baby Bells."  Our government did the same thing with Microsoft in the more recent generation.  Antitrust legislation was an important part of the checks and balances system of American capitalism.  Corporate monopolies were not healthy for the economy, because they stifled healthy competition of commodities.  Capitalism needs stimulation and competition to keep her products great or even marginal.  When you outsource all of your manufacturing to China, all of the products are the same and mediocre.  CEO's will tell you that they cannot afford to pay wages in the United States, so they took their plants to foreign lands where their economies are so weak workers will slave for pennies on the dollar.  This was not good for America.  We have been sold out in one fell swoop, and now another car company is shuttering doors on domestic facilities amid talk of huge profits in their company.  There has been a concerted effort to eradicate God from American consciousness and stifle the economic opportunities of the common man.  This was happening during the Obama administration, because many of the repeals of legislation took place under George W. Bush.  I am not sure he knew what he was doing, which will be evidenced in the new film "Vice."  He just did what others told him to do, and as in most cases if you do what other people say, you will get burned.  Bush burned most of middle America's opportunities through the repeal of corporate regulation.  Trump did the same thing when his administration repealed "Net Neutrality."  I'm not sure anyone knows what that actually means, but the essence of it has come to fruition in an extremely short period of time.  Internet service providers now control the flow of information on the web, both content and speed.  Hello Red China.  The system in America purposefully has been rigged, and the rigging has escalated during Trump's tenure as president.  Not only did he hand corporate America a twelve percent profit with absolutely no work on their part, he favors the oligarchy which has come to power in America.  The Millennial generation has no clue to understanding our plight, because they were the thugs of the effort.  Pay them off with tech jobs, and keep their minds polluted with childish cartoon commercials and video games.  They could not mount a coup if their lives depended on it.  My squawking about train noise is legitimate, but the issue is not frivolity, fancy, or delusion.  It is a life or death issue that can seal the eventual extinction of the human race.  It is so grave and far reaching that to expose it would mean an exchange of power.  They say America has no work force.  Joe Biden says we do not have enough skilled workers to handle America's chores.  How is that possible?  It is possible because we used the millennial generation to accomplish this task, to eradicate God from the consciousness of America and to limit social and economic opportunity for the middle and lower classes.  The oligarchy, foreign fascist phenoms immigrated to America and quietly purchased our American institutions.  They implemented a hostile takeover of distinct American values with evil.  We are living it. 

America, the Con Artist

It has been a long time since I took American history.  It was in ninth grade at Terry Sanford High School with Mrs. Shaw.  There are a lot of Shaws in Fayetteville.  There are the doctor Shaws and their "farm."  It is a property that borders Fort Bragg.  Then there is Harry Shaw, who was a major proponent of the Cape Fear River Trail.  Hopefully in the near future the city of Fayetteville will finish it.  CSX-T agreed to allow the city to build a hiking bridge underneath its railroad bridge over the river.  It will be a complicated affair, a concrete, steel, or wood affair which will traverse a huge gully directly underneath the railroad bridge.  Either they will drive pilings into the riverbed, or build an elaborate wooden skeleton to support the bike and walking trail.  I am ready.  This link will be the final chapter in French architect's Andres Duany's vision for downtown.  It will link Shaw's Linear Trail to the Cape Fear River Trail which runs all the way to Methodist University.  It will be a great boon to Cumberland County as will be the skateboard park which yet has to be built.  We are hung up in the "Train Horn" politics of stake holders of downtown Fayetteville.  Built it and they will come.  Certainly Jordan Jones has ascribed to this philosopy.  On the political front America is headed for annihilation.  I wasn't sure why pundits were grieving the loss of Secretary Mattis until now.  His replacement is a Boeing crony.  Like all of Gump's appointments they do not in any way represent the well being of the people, the people being common Americans.  If one appoints a major attacker of the EPA to be its head, it is a conflict of interest.  If one appoints a Boeing employee Secretary of Defense, it is a conflict of interest.  If a nation elects Donald Trump president, no matter how rich he is, it is a conflict of interest.  There is no military experience, there is no civic experiences, and there is no leadership experience.  Nepotism does not qualify as efficient leadership.  Looking out for one's own does not a leader make.  Appointing a Boeing representative to be Secretary of Defense.  It is a major conflict of interest.  Choosing Dick Cheney as Vice President....  Well you can decide for yourself when "Vice" opens in theaters.  No Iraq.  No waterboarding.  No ISIS.  The defense budget is the largest drain on America's GNP.  We have been hemorrhaging money through the United States military since 9/11.  9/11 never would have happened had it not been for the Bush Dynasty.  Perhaps H.W. was a great man, and I am sure he was.  America no longer is great, because we have sold out to the elite. 

America, Bootylicious?

Is there any other country where immigrants demand they have a hyphenated ethnicity?  "Hey, I'm Japanese-German!"  "I'm Romanian-Italian."  "I'm French-Greek."  "Hey, I'm Asian-American!"  I am not a Trump supporter.  I am not an athletic supporter.  Even at their most base level, I am beginning to understand the Trump camp.  They are not intelligent, but their ideology is not evil.  Intelligence demands that a human being does not use their emotional kaleidoscope as a means of operation.  What am I talking about?  I am living with it.  A stream of consciousness.  What I feel, right now, on the spur of the moment.  Right now, Mother Fucker!  Talk like a pimp.  Play like Miles Davis.  Talk like a pimp.  "Yeah, baby.  That's right.  Smooth and easy, YOU FUCKING WHORE CUNT!"  That's dynamic contrast.  Emotional volatility.  There is validity to emotional response in art.  Trying to navigate Trump Land?  Nada.  No emotions please.  No manipulation.  No Newspeak.  No spin.  Please, Mr. Producer.  Is there any other country where immigrants demand they have hyphenated ethnicity?  That now is the metaphor for the Whore of America.  We are being taken advantage of.  I am a native American whose ancestors were murdered in cold blood at Wounded Knee, so therefore I will demand my just revenge.  I will demand acknowledgment and compensation.  I am gay, so I will shout "Gay" at the top of my lungs, until someone decides to pay me to shut the @#$% up.  The Trump Camp does not believe in this.  They believe that America is for Americans.  There are legal immigrants who have entered the United States, applied for citizenship, passed the test, and have waited.  Kudos to them!  They have fulfilled the necessary requirement to become American citizens.  This should not allow them or anyone to pronounce that they deserve special treatment.  Entitlements.  "I'm gay!"  It is a platform.  "Pay me.  Recognize me!  I am special."  All of those Americans who suffered, built, and sustained?  Those American who built this once great country?  The tired, the poor, the Christian people who understand Christmastide for what it is and should be in America.  Here is grievance number one.  America is under siege by evil.  How do I know?  This only became clear to me, as I was shopping today for Christmas presents.  America, in her recent campaign to eradicate God from our sovereignty, is doing everything she can to distract the populace from the meaning of Christmas.  Inasmuch as corporate America wants profit, what is more important is to eradicate the idea of God.  They have enough money.  It is housed in overseas accounts shielded from the IRS.  Evil will have no problem prospering until they are dead.  Their game plan is to eradicate the notion of God, the Redeemer, the Father, the Forgiver, our Father who art in heaven.  The only salvation for humanity.  They are attempting this with the ruthless and unpalatable strategy of politics.  Trump is evil, and Trump is evil because he does not recognize God.  The Christmas season is meant to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ.  Christmas is and should be about the birth of Christ.  Christmas.  The American political system is doing everything in its power to dismiss Christmas, the real meaning of Christmas, the birth of Jesus.  It is a tough call.  Forfeit the many profits of holiday good cheer in lieu of spewing political vitriol.  Could this Christmas season be any worse?  Shutting down the government.  We might be better off, but now that America is infiltrated with evil in every corner...  If government gives up and fails to combat the evil that is inherent in our current government and corporate America.  We would be doomed.  It has become clear to me.  Washington has defaulted on her loans.  The deficit has reached inconceivable proportions.  Washington has no money, because Washington has given all of the taxpayers dollars to cheap, tawdry, dishonest, unethical, and immoral evil capitalist entities.  This has become America.  If America has no money, we have no power.  We have no influence.  We are not great.  We have become a cheap, tawdry, low rent whore.  America the whore.  Republican leadership has failed to accomplish a single goal, because the republican party only is a political axe for evil.  There is no money for hurricane relief.  There is no money for infrastructure repair.  (I have to pause for a moment to weep at the beauty of Chanticlear.)  I am not familiar with this choral ensemble, but I am lucky to at times listen to God.  When I am at peace enough to be quiet and listen to God, he speaks through me.  Is that a delusion of grandeur?  God speaks through me?  Music is the breath of God, saith Heir Beethoven.  When I listen, God at times speaks through me.  I am listening.  America is bankrupt.  Our current president purports to be a gazillionaire, and yet America is broke.  We do not have petty cash enough to make it through Christmas.  I am not a German-American.  I am not a Scotch-Irish American.  I, unfortunately, am an American, and I am ashamed.  I am ashamed at the deepest level.  My diploma from UNC-Chapel Hill has earned me nothing.  My doctoral work at OSU as earned me nothing.  I am a pauper, like Jesus.  I am poor, but I am a worthy artist, and I do not care much about money.  Society which surrounds me, American society, only is about money.  There is no feeling of Christmas, the birth of Jesus.  There is little feeling about Santa Claus, because we are poor and desolate.  America, evil America, is trying hardest to undermine God.  "Government Shut Down at Christmas."  Who cares?  Let them shut down.  It is excess.  Wasted money.  Washington has failed on every level, managing the money of her citizens.  Handing money in TARP funds to evil elitists who shelve their money in overseas banks.  We do not have a pot in which to piss, and Gump wants five thousand million for a wall.  Could he be more absurd?  Evil has overtaken America.  Facebook is evil.  Repealing Net Neutrality was a grievous mistake.  Now internet service providers are filtering information.  We do not receive the truth.  We now are at the behest of Big Brother.  Big Brother is choosing what we read, who sees our ideas, and what becomes mainstream.  Facebook has become evil, and as difficult as it is, we must cast it out.  It is the pinnacle of Big Brother.  It is the beginning of our end, the censorship of truth, honesty, and God.  Word.  Fuck off Zuckerberg. 

The Last Stand

I should have written about Gump's border wall.  Our federal government is shuttering themselves to hunker down not to help solve the opioid crisis.  They are not embracing Global Warming and the emission of radiation which causes it.  They are not discussing America's crumbling infrastructure.  They are hunkering down to try to thwart yet another shut down of the federal government.  Maybe we would be better off if they shut down.  Most of the workers in America are funding by the government anyway.  We all ready are a socialist state.  Anytime our president opens his mouth on national television, it is....  It is disruptive.  It is disruptive, because most of what comes out of his potty mouth is not true.  The dirty deeds merely are words that skew reality.  They attempt to spin the truth.  For the first half of the national news lucid, intelligent, honest people spoke.  It was refreshing not to see a conman trying to sell snake oil on national television for a change.  It was real news.  Then they buckled and on came orange with his lies.  Lies that spew from his mouth, the most disruptive thing in politics.  So this border wall. It is ludicrous, say the biggest examples of Trump's lies.  It is not worth debating.  Drugs come into America under the border or over it.  They come in tunnels or in airplanes.  They come in boats.  They do not come across the border on land.  The thought of erecting a wall to try to keep out vagrant Mexicans is absurd.  Only does it appeal to those ignorant enough to follow Trump.  Those people follow orange because he is their idea of a leader.  They cannot reason.  They do not try to understand.  It is America at her worse, her roots, during the Civil War.  Hundreds of thousands fighting for what they want for themselves, not what they agree upon is good for the  populace.  A country must compromise.  A country must sacrifice.  A country must meet in the middle for the good of all.  It is his last plea. 

Maybe We Need to Shoot the Sheriff

What is it about Robeson County, North Carolina?  Is it even possible that somewhere in the civilized United States people get mauled and killed by loose rottweilers?  There have been two attacks in Robeson country in the last week.  My bet is they are related.  How is it possible that dogs, supposedly pets, run wild and are brazen enough to attack and kill human beings?  It is because they are being trained to do so.  They are being fought, in dog fights for money.  They are being used as protection in illegal activity such as the sale of drugs.  How is it possible that America, North America allows such activity?  How is it possible that a rapist who was identified by DNA over two years ago never was incarcerated and raped and murdered a thirteen year old girl?  The North Carolina crime lab notified the appropriate authorities in Robeson county, and yet this repeat felon, this murderer was free.  He murdered a thirteen year old girl and threw her in a pond.  Loose rottweiler dogs killed a woman and seriously harmed two children, both in this same country.  Trump spent over two hundred million tax payer dollars sending American military troops to our border with Mexico in a publicity stunt to rally votes for the republican party, and yet the police force in Robeson County cannot keep their citizens safe from this heinous crime.  Two prostitutes were murdered and stuffed in garbage cans a year ago.  A mother had to sit in a court room and look at the man who raped and killed her thirteen year old daughter.  This is America?  This is our America?  This is less than an hour drive from where I live.  A local prominent car dealer molests boys in his trailer at Nascar races.  They suppress the case.  The Trump family is soliciting hollowed out regions of the country for help.  Hollowed out.  Hollowed out as in Lumberton, North Carolina, one of the poorest per capita regions in the continental United States.  Struck by two major hurricanes in two years, they need something to keep them going.  I guess it has become fentanyl.  Life is so miserable, so impoverished, and so worthless people train rottweilers to attack humans.  This is their diversion, raping adolescents and throwing their dead bodies in ponds?  There is something wrong here.  There is something so wrong that I have to take up my own time writing about it.  I am not composing music.  I am not cleaning the house.  I am writing about insanity so incomprehensible it makes the logic of the Wild West seem normal.  Roaming the desert on a horse searching for your fortune.  Taking so many drugs that you just kill for the sport of it, because it gets you off.  Welcome to Robeson County, North Carolina. 

Eventual Genocide

I am listening to Gail Pettis, and satan once again is trying to bring down my spirits.  It is stifling, hot, and oppressive like it was when I woke up this morning to diesel trains.  It is electromagnetic energy, energy that is hot from the flowing electricity but also undulating, moving, and invasive from the magnetism.  I am sitting here trying to think of the perfect analogy for electromagnetism, but I can't.  We are exposed to it on a global level each day we wake, each day we sleep, and we will be to the grave.  It is part of the 1.7% increase in carbon emission that broke all records in 2018.  What little we do know about it has been mustered in 1960's vintage horror movies.  Remember that sound?  That throbbing low frequency sound that accompanied alien spacecraft, murderous creatures, or covert governmental military activity.  It is not that complex, but those are efficient analogies.  When you are being irradiated by electromagnetic energy whether it is gamma rays or microwaves, there is no respite.  There is no where to hide.  Suddenly it just came to me.  During the Cold War, the arms race between the United States and Russia, people built underground bomb shelters.  They understood all too well that when a nuclear bomb landed near you, underground was the only place you could go.  Today we are bombarded with the same energy on a daily basis.  It is heating the earth, and there is no solution.  I was lying in bed trying to think of how to solve this problem.  Heat is energy, and so it must be harnessed and repurposed.  In the form of sound its energy is vibration in the air.  Sound waves.  I think the proper methodology in sound abbreviation is to capture the vibration and dissipate it into heat.  If we could do this and use this heat for our own good?  How could I harness that electromagnetic energy that flows into my bedroom on an hourly basis?  Thirty trains a day Captain Justice says.  He posts train videos on YouTube.  Because of the proximity of our house to the CSX-T mainline, it flows into my bedroom like lava.  There is nothing I have been able to do about it except try to think of a way to curtail its impact on my body.  This all is pretty boring, but I am convinced that it will kill us all.  The "War Against the Machines" all ready has begun.  We may have missed Y2K.  We may have missed 2012.  Certainly we have missed George Orwell's "1984."  Then again those weren't specific dates upon which to rely.  Consider them marginal boundaries.  The things thought to happen around those times may themselves take time to evolve into conscious problems like cellular phones.  1.7% rise in carbon emissions for 2018 breaking all records for heat.  Our president denies global warming completely as a hoax.  The Federal Communications Commission always had stated that those specific frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum are dangerous.  If a microwave can make water particles oscillate in an oven, what would happen if you place them on tall towers and erect them all over God's creating?  What would you get?  Global warming?  If you had an intelligent and conscientious president with an effective Congress, all kinds of things could be done to solve the world's problems.  The first day would be "No Fly Day."  For one day no planes would fly.  The second day would be "No Train Day."  All of those diesel locomotives that never get turned off.  For one day they all get turned off.  Of course this is not possible.  America has become such a strung out and unregulated country, it would not be possible to force rail carrier employees to accomplish such as task.  Immediately you would create the second Civil War in America.  It almost has been created by our own president.  Immediately you would pinpoint those Americans who care more about their own sustenance than the well being of the populace.  I am surrounded by them, non-Christians.  They heckle me.  They invade my bedroom an on hourly basis and laugh as they do so.  When we emerged from the Cumberland Country Public Library Sunday afternoon after out big band Christmas concert how were we greeted?  We were greeted the same way as the patrons of the International Folk Festival.  His exact words in Captain Justice's train video were,"They have a rail yard in their downtown."  People were trying to walk to event and enjoy downtown, and they had to wait on CSX freight trains to pass at grade crossings with no protective swing gates.  In downtown Fayetteville pedestrians freely walk on the mainline railroad tracks without a worry in the world.  It is like playing Russian roulette.  Mothers pushing strollers.  Children playing.  It is frightening.  He is a bearded grizzly bear donning a dayglo florescent yellow vest.  He starts and stops his GP-38-3 with the push of a button.  There is no "All Points Inspection."  He kills the prime mover, and then pushes a button to start it.  I heard this as he sat on his afternoon run to DAK Americas.  That locomotive of which he seems to be very proud, started as easily as a Chrysler.  It took all of one second.  Rarely do they do that.  On Sunday it was a consist, more than one engine.  Yesterday it was his GP-38-3 which I am sure has been rebuilt into alternating current.  Where did they find the room for the auxiliary electronics cabinet?  It wasn't there before.  Inverters must be getting smaller.  There is nothing I can do to escape his electromagnetic footprint.  It is in my ass most of the day and night like right now.  In the morning I have to turn on my window AC unit to counteract its effects.  I have to turn on my air conditioner during winter to cool the excess heat that is being radiated into my bedroom my diesel electric locomotives.  Of course there are C-130 aircraft.  There are helicopters.  There are the gunners at the post.  All day fifty caliber machine guns clear as a day.  It was reported in the Fayetteville Observer that their targeting system uses sound waves.  Sound waves?  It is a mobile RADAR that sits on a large truck with its own dedicated generator.  Sound waves?  That would explain a lot.  When I wrote to them and asked if this was a mistake in the article, nada.  Nil.  No answer.  Anyway I am listening to Gail Pettis, and it is enlightening.  She is a black jazz singer who used to be an orthodontist.  Should I say African-American?  I don't think she would care.  Can I sing "Dixie."  Elvis Presley sang "Dixie," and he is dead, long dead.  In America when you die that's it.  I realized that tonight, and it frightened me.  All of the good things for what America is known, they are disappearing.  Walt Disney and his pioneering films.  Elvis Presley and his singing.  Frank Sinatra.  Quality television.  There is nothing with which to replace them.  The scourge Nazi fascists, Italian Mussolini's, German Hitler's, and Russian Stalin's.  Now they are in America waiting patiently for their turn.  Where else would they be?  Certainly they are in Yemen.  In Afghanistan.  There was a United States senator who cold RPG's to Afghanistan with which they shot down invading Russian helicopters.  Who was he?  Forgotten.  All of our recent history will be forgotten, because it is not being documented.  Patiently satan is waiting, watching as Elvis dies.  Miles Davis dies.  Frank Sinatra dies.  Bob Marley dies.  Rock long has been dead.  Luckily jazz still is alive.  It is frightening.  What did I learn from listening to Gail Pettis for the first time?  I am wise about my music purchases.  No more MP3's which sound like train horns.  I have an active interest in the study of music.  That seems reasonable seeing as I completed all of the coursework for a DMA in music composition at Ohio State.  I wasn't quite ready to be a college scholar.  I was ready to carry the teaching load, but my diplomatic skills were lacking.  I was a bit angry, and my pen showed this.  Twenty-five years later I am much more qualified, because I have had this time to live and understand how music evolved in real life, not from books and treatises.  Dr. William Ted McDaniel said to me, "You're reading is a little light."  One doesn't really learn music from books, but his point was well taken.  You should have a historical perspective of music and how it evolved.  I didn't really have this at the time.  His question was effective on my General Exams.  I won't repeat it here, but it was something like was the evolution of jazz music a continual freeing of the melody from the harmonic/rhythmic accompaniment?  When you get to the Avant Garde, it is easy to see that it was the pinnacle of this journey.  In the most misunderstood style of jazz music, the Avant Garde didn't dispense with the complex language of bebop, it abstracted it.  It abstracted it the same way that Abstract Expressionist painters created their language.  You must understand everything that came before in minute detail, but then you have an emotional freedom to distort it in what hopefully will be a compelling and communicative way.  Probably to this day I haven't known the answer to his question.  It is not easy.  Jazz has not been around long enough to have the appropriate scholarly study.  A century, but I am working on it.  Listening to Gail Pettis I appreciated her choice of the American Songbook, standards which you will recognize.  I appreciated her crystal clear vocal which showcases here extremely knowledgeable and tasteful interpretations of the melodies.  Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughn did this well, as good or if not better than most instrumentalists.  It was perplexing to me to hear how she uses the human voice as an instrument, spinning paraphrases of the original melody, understanding each and every note, and its relation to the chord changes.  I believe she is using her mind as well as her ear to do this.  When I hear Frank Sinatra sing, it is clear that he hears chord changes, understands tonal harmony, and creates melodic lines that are more natural than jazz instrumentalists.  Is this because of the words, that these melodic lines never were meant to be excised from their accompanying words?  Perhaps the words were first, as with Oscar Hammerstein.  I think this may be the case.  I didn't experienced her renditions on two different levels.  There was an emotional level, and it moved me.  There was an intellectual level to her melodic interpretations and the arrangements they were playing.  It dawned on me that although they were swinging, their mix was pop.  Her vocal was the loudest thing, the piano was next, and the bass and drums were cleverly cloaked in their background.  Unlike mainstream jazz, the bass and drums were meant to accompany her vocal performance.  Always I have had a disagreement with Kris Killingsworth, the Musical Director on the Adventure of the Seas.  He is a proponent of the Count Basie Orchestra, and such he loves to hear Ella Fitzgerald sing with Herb Ellis and Ray Brown.  As many may or may not know, Ella was not just a jazz singer.  She covered songs from many styles, and some of it was more commercial than jazz.  It is what I call pop.  The rhythm section's function is not to interact or create musical interest, it is meant to accompany.  That accentuates the vocal performance.  I wanted to hear her drummer, Gail Pettis get off the cymbals and rims and play the drums like Elvin Jones or Mitch Mitchell.  The sounds of the wooden drums is a large part of the sound of jazz.  I realized for some reason listening to her that we are losing the heart and soul of America, we are killing the population, and we are headed for eventual genocide.  We need change.