Stuck in a Studio

There is a lot going on.  I feel like the whole world around me is spiraling downward out of control.   I remember irrational behavior from my childhood, petty, back-stabbing, jealousy.  I haven't had to deal with it in decades.  It is a downer.  When I was young and zealous in the field of music, you had to have a certain degree of moxy to succeed.  Without drive, confidence, and a tangible goal no musician would be successful.  It is a disheartening to be dragged back down into an environment where musicians are being competitive.  I don't do music for this reason anymore.  I never really did, but interestingly enough I was pulled into this behavior by another.  I am watching this scenario now as I write.  My only interest in the field of music was to be a college teacher.  I watched my father be a band director my entire life, and perhaps this is why it does not appeal to me.  All ready I have done it, vicariously through him.  He was excellent at it and had the proper training.  I do not.  My music education degree at UNC while empowering intellectually was not effective practically.  I have written about this before.  The School of Education was weak when I attended UNC.  I received very little instruction on how to teach.  I didn't need it, because I had watched my father do it my entire life.  I was not worried, but I knew I didn't want to teach high school.  As such I was able to teach college for three years, two as a graduate teaching associate and one as an adjunct faculty member making a whopping eight thousands dollars a year.  They took advantage of me in their time of need, USC.  I was cast into the wind after their crisis past, but it didn't.  I continued to be a crisis for several years, because they found the wrong man.  Water under the bridge.  I was pretty aggressive back in the day, but you had to be.  I was moving and shaking getting gigs, building my resume, and performing music I had written.  Today as an adult I am tired of myself.  I have no energy to go out and tell others how great I am.  It is boring.  I do music for myself for the spiritual and artistic fulfillment, but you can't help be be pulled back into the heat of it in one way or another.  There are two doctors of piano in Fayetteville and probably more.  I complete the coursework for a DMA in composition.  It is a different thing all together.  No endless nights playing classical music in a practise room reading music.  Reading.  Reading music.  I of course can read music.  I took twelve years of piano lessons.  I play Rhapsody in Blue on my senior piano recital on the heaviest Baldwin action ever.  It was a terrible piano.  Betty Mohn had a Steinway and it was light.  I fought it so Bob Ladehoff said.  He could tell I was struggling with the heavy keys.  I can read music, and I understand complicated musical language.  I just chose not to be a doctor of piano.  Like John Williams and many other concert pianists, we chose not to endure the anxiety of that environment.  I do play the piano, and I play it well.  I know jazz.  I have studied it my entire adult life.  I can improvise.  I can play various styes of music on the piano including country, blues, and rock.  I have an authoritative understanding of keyboards including the Hammond organ and synthesizers.  Still I cannot help but be sucked into what is the status quo of piano where I live.  I do not market my skills in public.  I do not tell others how wonderful I am.  I just play, because I am a musician.  It is a downer having to market your wares.  I watched the Rachmaninov documentary the other night, and it seems he was miserable.  One does not deserve to be miserable when they are composing or performing.  If you are it is the fault of a superficial society.  My grift is this.  I have a studio which I have crafted to record music.  I can sequence music via MIDI, and I can record digital audio with it.  Therefore I am capable of producing fully orchestrated pieces of music.  I can't replicate a full big band or orchestra, but on a small scale of commercial music I can create a musical and listenable product.  My sound is excellent, and the man with the best sound wins.  The problem is, as my mother likes to point out, that no one around here will her what I produce.  That is why we use YouTube.  I released by album projects of original music on Distrokid and immediately saw that I would make no money from it this way.  The issue with digital distribution and its unfairness to artists is real.  The performing arts societies along with industry leaders crafted new legislation and pitched it on capital hill with the help of Orrin Hatch.  It was an effective presentation, and the new legislation seemed poised to compensate writers and artists for their work.  Since the internet revolution, Steve Job's advent of iTunes and the Apple store, and the inception of streaming music services, artists have gotten the shaft.  As such the entire process of creating and recording music, like our system of public education, has devolved into childish fodder.  Living in the midst of this unavoidable void of musical integrity is a challenge, and I will not give in.  I will not watch prime television.  I watch very little television anymore except for movies which have become classics.  They are classics because the possess all of the elements necessary for quality art.  Music is key in this films, and film music is an unsung hero in music history.  I am learning more about it each day.  What I like about film music is that it is the culmination of all things good in music.  Changing of mood and texture, style, modernism, and appeal at times challenge European orchestral an chamber music for viability.  We no longer live in the times of court.  We live in America today, and possibly film music in the near past has been most effective synthesizing disparate elements of American life.  Composers such as Dave Grusin, Jack Nitzsche, Lenny Neihaus, and Quincy Jones are the true musical celebrities of today, and yet they go unnoticed.  My musical drive competes with itself and no one else.  I am open to learning new and enlightening things, and each day opens a door to knowledge I do not possess.  I feel stupid at the moment, because I am surrounded by petty bickering.  It takes work to keep myself motivated and on track musically.  I do so by continuing to buy music on CD.  My classical and jazz selection is expanding to a more fulfilling level thanks to Jazz24 and YouTube.  This awareness does not usurp the level of intelligence around me.  It is a struggle.  I am stuck in the middle of producing in my studio (easy) and creating a live product.  It is confusing.  I am honing in on the concept, having drum patterns at my disposal for all of the styles I enjoy playing live.  These are very different from the majority of music I have recorded.  I need Bossa Nova, Samba, Cha-cha, Bolero, Waltz, Rumba, Polka, Funk and the rest.  I have drum sounds, but they are located in machines which are in my studio.   Should I extricate them and integrate them into my live playing system?  Never have I enjoyed the prospect of using a computer on my job.  First it is a major temptation for theft, a Macbook Pro just sitting there for the taking.  MIDI technology has shrunk over the years, so simple things are not as accessible.  I guess I need a new drum machine, a stand alone unit with programmable pads, many preset memory locations, ease of tempo change, and reliable not to mention good Latin and other ethnic sounds.  Any ideas?  My Roland Sound Canvas has nice Latin percussion sounds, but the Sound Brush no longer is available.  Floppy disc.  Really?  Bob Piasick?  Bueller?  Bueller?  Anyone?  Something that plays sample loops other than a computer plug in.  It is something to think about. I have diversified and began playing Hammond organ.  It is an aesthetic unto itself.  Never will I transport it out of my den, and that is okay.  It records well.  I am lacking studio space, a room large enough to hold all of my gear with enough space for performance.  I am squeezed into a house, and thus far it has been effective except that the neighbors are not thrilled with my musical inclinations.  A home does not offer the same mood as a jazz club nor an environment of creativity and freedom.  I am stuck. 

America's Preeminent Gutter Slang

I missed a large portion of American popular music, because I was not interested.  My youth after junior high school became methodical.  I had been taking classical piano lessons since first grade, and I wanted to play as well as my father.  I worked hard at it and playing the trumpet.  There was not much time for Rock 'n' Roll, concerts, smoking cigarettes, or drinking beer.  It was far more rewarding to me to try to excel in the field of music.  Since your opportunities were limited and the common consensus was musicians never make it, I had better try my hardest.  I did, so there was not any time for American popular music.  I was into jazz, because it was complex, interesting, and challenging to play.  Pop/rock tunes were simple and boring.  I never had a romantic crisis.  I never had an identity crisis, so I didn't need reconciliation from the pleasant words of a pop song.  I even missed the Beatles.  Luckily my awakening to the Beatles was during my thirties sitting in Chalkies' Billiard Parlor listening to their juke box.   Columbus, Ohio was a diverse place, more diverse than any other I had lived.  This is why I went there to work on my doctorate in music.  John Emche, my cooperating professor at USC-Columbia told me why he went to OSU.  It was a capital city, Cowtown, so there were gigs.  There was a "scene."  You could get playing work while you were working on your degree.  What he said was true, and my time at OSU became the best music education of my life.  It is hard to remember now being enveloped back in my hometown of Fayettenam.  It is a real challenge going backwards.  It nearly is impossible to change the clock and advance city past its limitations, limitations that have arisen because of lack of exposure to progressive ideals.  Things stay the same, and they have both at UNC and USC.  Nothing is different.  The same people are there or have died living there.  While there is new blood in Columbia and that is encouraging, for me it is old hat.  Been there, done that.  Columbus offered new musical challenges including the study of European chamber and orchestral music.  The main difference was the diversity, diversity having much broader influences from different peoples from different places.  Columbus was not a sheltered southern city steeped in its own traditions and unwilling to grow.  They were happy with things the way they were, and still they are, the way they were.  It is comical almost to have driven back through Columbia and see everything exactly the same thirty years later.  University traditions will do that.  They are good enough to persevere.  I am struggling to remember past that time and that education, and it is difficult.  When I can remember Columbus a sense of peace and tranquility overcomes me.  My anxiety to have to prove myself dissipates and I relax.  Musical creativity comes much easier in this state.  You can't force it, and that is where I have been for the last few months.  You must live in the space you are, or you will be unhappy.  Each day you will deal with the reality and limitations of your environment.  For me here it is a colloquial music education.  That is how my student teaching experience was, and it has not changed, this place.  Still it is sheltered and mired in the smegma of its own people.  What's the point?  The point is that we have to survive, and to survive we must try to be happy.  For me to be happy I deserve at least a drop of camaraderie.  Of this I have none, except for one acquaintance with which I share a professional contract.  Instead I find myself trying to define myself in everyone else's terms.  How can you not compare yourself to what is around you.  There are no composers here, and if there are they have their own circles and obligations.  I have pontificated making a stab at their world, but I am cynical.  Instead I have opted to forget myself and stew in the mash of life that surrounds me.  It is frightening.  What I see on TV is a depiction of music that is not real.  Its language aspires to bring the English language to its most uneducated form.  It glorifies contraction, short hand, slang, jargon, and seeming ignorance as music.  Even in my never-ending interest in American dialect for musical purposes, I can find to merit in this language.  The only way I can justify it simply is to say it aspires to be ignorant so that others ignorant will feel included.  It is the lowest level of capitalism not seeking to state a message, a concern, or a point-of-view.  It only is tribal and seeks to unify at the most base human level.  It may be that this also is Trump's method.  Extremism, violent terrorist sentiment has infiltrated American pop culture and is is stoking a deconstructionist movement that threatens to tear our country apart in tribal civil war.  And yet there is little concern.  We are broadcast the most ignorant images and messages on television underscored by innocuous, insipid, menial music which attempts to lull us into a blind allegiance.  Truly it is brainwashing as potent as Big Brother, but disguised as the most tepid saccharine.  During Black History Month television is littered with racist images as insulting as blackface.  Hypocrisy of race is seen on late night television each day beneath exploited images of the Little Rascals, slavery, and minstrels, yet we decry such imagery during the day.  There is nothing pure, just, or honest in the intentions of modern television.  It seeks only to exploit for its  own gain with a promise of integrity.  If I ever did find myself teaching in a public classroom in America today, the first step to educating our youth is teaching them to speak and write, and not in the gutter slang that has been created and manipulated to gain favor and revenue.  That language has no meaning and no purpose other than to devolve our children.  No parent, elected official, or clergyman has the courage to say it. 

Give Me Your White Trash

I have thrown myself back into the stew.  After spending the majority of my life studying music, musical styles, and music composition and arranging, I have dropped myself back into the stew of the history of American music.  When I took my General Exams for completion of the Doctorate of Musical Arts in Composition at The Ohio State University, little did I know how unprepared I was.  I adequately was prepared with the appropriate knowledge in my subject area.  I knew and understood music theory.  I had studied various forms of harmony, counterpoint, form, motivic development, and melody.  This included J.S. Bach's four part writing which we learned in Music Theory 101 at UNC-Chapel Hill.  I knew tonal harmony, modality, twelve tone, pan diatonicism, and other harmonic systems such as those used by the Second Viennese School.  This included Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, and Alban Berg, his pupils.  I have written a breadth of contemporary classical piano music, which I will publish in the future.  It is in the process of being refined in computer notation.  None of these areas of study remotely are related to musical reality in my current station in life.  While there are two universities nearby with music schools, I doubt that either has a program in music composition.  They struggle to keep any music students at all, and while they have graduated professional musicians in the past, their music faculties have been hired to do things other than graduate music students.  This is a bit of an irony.  The faculties at both universities perform a different function.  There are not enough music students to merit a full time faculty, so a core of doctoral level professors cover the bases.  I am not sure what they are, even though my sister graduated from one of these institutions.  I can be bold enough to say that they are very different from UNC-Chapel Hill.  I have had one college job interview in my lifetime.  It was Western Carolina University, and I did not fare well in my interview process.  I had been working on the D.M.A. in composition at OSU, therefore I was accustomed to graduate lecture classes, composing music, and existing in a professional plane.  Little did I know that Western Carolina University had no doctoral program.  They had a limited Master's program, and the job for which I was interviewing was?  I to this day don't really know.  It was a four area position.  Those four areas were Sightsinging, MIDI Lab, Jazz Ensemble, and Contemporary Theory.  No music history.  No music appreciation.  No applied lessons.  (or perhaps there was some jazz piano)  I was capable of covering these topics, but I'll admit sightsinging was not my specialty.  I learned my intervals in Music Theory 101 at UNC, and I could sing them mostly.  I was a capable pianist, so I could harmonize, transpose, and improvise.  I was a good musician, but that Sightsinging thing.  Most people don't know what that really is, being able to sing a melody from written notes on a page.  The method taught at UNC by Dr. Anne Woodward was solfege.  Solfege assigned a syllable to each note of the diatonic scale to make it easier to sing them.  Each syllable, say Do, Fa, or La represented a pitch in the major scale.  I all ready know how to sing the intervals, say a  Perfect 6th having learned it in Music Theory class.  "N-B-C."  Having to learn a syllable, a word to represent this pitch seemed ludicrous to me.  "Do -La."  This is what she required.  For me it became strict memorization.  She wanted us to sing all the parts of Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" in solfege for our final exam.  They were in different clefs.  Most people don't know that there are clefs other than treble and bass.  There are alto and tenor clefs.  There is soprano clef and mezzo soprano.  She wanted us to be able to sing in this clefs by using moveable Do.  Moveable Do assigns the syllable Do to the tonic of whatever key in which you are going to sing.  I had been reading piano music since the first grade, and I all ready knew how to sing these pitches.  Her method meant I had to learn and assign a word syllable to each pitch and sing it instead of a lyric.  If I had just resigned myself to her methodology, I would have memorized these syllables.  Do through Ti like the song from the Sound of Music, but I had a mental block.  Why do this, when I all ready could sing the appropriate pitches having learned the intervals.  It appeared to me to be jumping through hoops to get a grade.  As such I made a 59 on my final exam, which would have kept me from graduating.  Because she knew I deserved my degree, she gave me the one point.  Thank you, Anne Woodward.  We don't live long enough to waste time in this life, and I did not have enough time to learn her method.  It was not necessary.  In any case this is what they wanted at Western Carolina, a class in solfege.  I wonder if Mr. Pavel Vlosek, the North Texas graduate who got the job is still teaching this.  It would seem at any university the responsibility of its music faculty is subjective.  I have heard horror stories about music faculties and their accompanying politics.  These are the hoops which must be jumped through to teach at the collegiate level.  It is difficult to say if any music program at any university is viable anymore.  Berkeley College of Music in Boston began selling degrees not that long ago.  If you pay your tuition, they will give you a degree.  It may have nothing to do with music study.  I suspect our entire academic system in America has become the same way.  Upper education became big business, and state legislatures kept approving the maximum amounts of tuition increase each year no matter what.  College educations became high dollar affairs, and students began to graduate with debt before their careers even had begun.  This is a travesty.  As such never have I looked back.  The academic system of music in America is antiquated, anachronistic, and ineffective, because the only jobs to be had in the field of music are back in academia.  It is an incestuous relationship.  Pop music was bought out by digital distributors, and prime time music talent shows have become radio stations.  It all is smoke and mirrors, and dare I say that symphony orchestras are the only musical entities left which are realizing music in a historically thoughtful way.  Wynton Marsalis and his jazz foundation are not promulgating jazz, they are marketing pop for their own well being.  Never have I heard such an unswinging, unhip, Uncle Tomming orchestra in my life catering to what they think is the "In Crowd," these exact academicians.  It is a huge jerk off assemblage, and it has nothing to do with music or music's real intentions.  It is vying for power, prestige, and money.  Wouldn't it be nice if we could exorcise this contingency in America and return her to her grassroots?  Reestablish core American values shaped by the settling and development of virgin land.  Rid America of the controlling populace who grossly are ignorant of any real effort, sweat, or blood?  I have dropped myself back into the stew of America, and it is awful.  The racism, the violence, and above all the ignorance.  I have come to realize that America is nothing more than a posse of privileged white trash.  This is why my musical education is inconsequential. 

The White House Becomes the Farm House

How to bring light to a subject, a touchy subject, which requires attention.  I feel like a teacher.  I feel like a teacher in an era where teachers are not supposed to have opinions.  The profession of teaching has been so degraded there is no visible model left to buck the status quo.  It has become all about being liked.  "Like us on Facebook."  "Like us on Twitter."  The longevity of society no longer has anything to do with being liked.  During the plantation South perhaps protocol was so authoritative it dictated one's behavior.  There were manners, and I grew up with manners.  Manners are a good thing, when the controlling faction of society is honest and good.  This would have been a time when teaching was in vogue.  The P.T.A. were honest and good.  Society respected teachers and vice versa.  There was a mutual respect, because teachers were entrusted with the responsibility of rearing children.  Parents may have been busy running the family business or household.  It was acceptable that children spent the majority of their time in public schools, which were well funded, efficient, and useful.  What changed?  From my viewpoint American society reneged on this obligation.  They implemented a power play for control and left schools and their teachers in the lurch.  Modern parents became the all knowing caucus, and they took control.  Teachers no longer were free to educate children, because if a teacher is not allowed to have an opinion, they are nothing more than a pawn in America's system.  That is what we all have become.  "Like us on Facebook."  Be part of our club.  Get along.  Don't make waves.  If you are one of the "In Crowd" things may be okay for you.  If you are an outsider then you get what we have now, a White House full of society but with no clue how to educate anyone.  It takes teachers.  It takes engineers.  It takes artists.  It takes an entire force of intellect to form a nation.  That intellect must at all costs question society and its intent.  Tough questions must be faced.  Difficult decisions must be made, and these queries must challenge the status quo.  America no longer is able to trust the status quo, because so many things have changed.  Because of status quo disease has escalated.  Cancer is on the rise.  Pollution is rampant.  The earth is warming.  Many of these ills have been created by accepting the status quo.  "We're making money, Jim.  Why change?  What's wrong with our coal-burning power plants?"  During fruitful times in American history teachers were a necessary catalyst in change.  They resisted the pressures of society and government and challenged students to think through issues concerning the longevity of American society.  They were able to stand up to bullying politicians, governors, mayors, and school boards, because a breadth of information was their tool.  Knowledge prevailed.  That no longer is true.  We now live in a time of lies, rhetoric, and spin.  Wealth provides this false comfort.  It has become foreign and uncomfortable to resist the status quo or the "In Crowd."  Luckily we have current models, and in due time have left the White House.  These members of Trump's administration have made the tough decision to part with what has been the accepted status quo in America, the White House. 

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.