Wednesday, March 26, 2008
2-6 am fillin at WFMU tonight. My current sleeping hours will make it a bit of a grind. I always have longer recordings set aside specifically for these late slots, & force myself to do one every so often. Probably airing complete works by Steve Reich & Gorecki - 90 minutes right there. I don't plan much, or concern myself with pacing, creative DJing, & hauling lots of records on the train. I keep my backpack light & rely on what WFMU's new bin has to offer. I kick back & do the program like I'm still at home. I put more thought into snacks, sweet food usually, smoothies & cookies.
***
Hillary Clinton is sounding stupid. Is this a change of campaign strategy? Did her pollsters tell her 10% of undecided Pennsy voters like stupid? How stupid is it when Sinbad the comedian exposes her faulty memory? How stupid is it when she broadly claims that people ought to just walk away from their churches if they don't like something the pastor says? Might be a church one's family has been attending for many generations. A church might have other things going for it. My parents were very active in a church where they attended Sunday services three, four times a year. Pastor couldn't complain about it when my dad was a Boy Scout leader & headed up the stage crew every year for the Married Couples Club theater production in the social hall, & three of their kids were in the Children's Choir. That's the way churches are, Hillary.
I didn't jump for joy over Dukakis, Bill Clinton, Kerry, or even the 2000 version of Gore, but I didn't dislike those candidates as people. Keep working on it, Hillary, & I might yet become as alarmed by the possibility of you becoming president as I am by John McCain.
***
Early tentative discussion about bringing my long poem Boardwalk back into print. The online version is a larger & substantially different concept than the poem itself. It deserves a chapbook edition & a better cover than it had in two earlier printings. I'm aware of the poem's weaknesses, but they're incorporated into the structure & can't be corrected without doing what boardwalk property owners do - burning the place down to pilings & starting over. The magic of the poem, for me, is that I deliberately built it the same way classic boardwalks take shape, & the same way boardwalks are experienced, without knowing if the method would work. As the years have passed, I've become more convinced that Boardwalk is less a poem than my only major musical composition, positing an alternate creative path I never took but for which I was educated to follow had I wanted it. I simply left out of the process the musical materials & instructions I'd collected in my sketchbooks during the same period I was collecting the "libretto" materials. Why? The technology was too expensive & difficult at the time.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Thomas Jefferson
***
Hillary Clinton is sounding stupid. Is this a change of campaign strategy? Did her pollsters tell her 10% of undecided Pennsy voters like stupid? How stupid is it when Sinbad the comedian exposes her faulty memory? How stupid is it when she broadly claims that people ought to just walk away from their churches if they don't like something the pastor says? Might be a church one's family has been attending for many generations. A church might have other things going for it. My parents were very active in a church where they attended Sunday services three, four times a year. Pastor couldn't complain about it when my dad was a Boy Scout leader & headed up the stage crew every year for the Married Couples Club theater production in the social hall, & three of their kids were in the Children's Choir. That's the way churches are, Hillary.
I didn't jump for joy over Dukakis, Bill Clinton, Kerry, or even the 2000 version of Gore, but I didn't dislike those candidates as people. Keep working on it, Hillary, & I might yet become as alarmed by the possibility of you becoming president as I am by John McCain.
***
Early tentative discussion about bringing my long poem Boardwalk back into print. The online version is a larger & substantially different concept than the poem itself. It deserves a chapbook edition & a better cover than it had in two earlier printings. I'm aware of the poem's weaknesses, but they're incorporated into the structure & can't be corrected without doing what boardwalk property owners do - burning the place down to pilings & starting over. The magic of the poem, for me, is that I deliberately built it the same way classic boardwalks take shape, & the same way boardwalks are experienced, without knowing if the method would work. As the years have passed, I've become more convinced that Boardwalk is less a poem than my only major musical composition, positing an alternate creative path I never took but for which I was educated to follow had I wanted it. I simply left out of the process the musical materials & instructions I'd collected in my sketchbooks during the same period I was collecting the "libretto" materials. Why? The technology was too expensive & difficult at the time.
