A kind-of-South-Florida-centric list: 365 Reasons 2003 Sucked.

Can't say I totally disagree. And yet, I feel surprisingly hopeful about 2004. Go figure.

2004 Picks:

Best album: The Bad Plus, These Are The Vistas (runners-up: Steve Reich, Tehillim/The Desert Music [cond. Alan Pierson]; Terry Riley, In C [perf. Bang On A Can])

Best film: The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (runners-up: Bad Santa; A Mighty Wind; X-2: X-Men United; Finding Nemo)

Best books: (This one's hard. I think I read 30 or so books this year [my Kurt Vonnegut kick helped boost that total], but most of them weren't published in the '03.)

Fiction: Sacrament, by Dave Eggers (an updated version of the beautiful You Shall Know Our Velocity).

Nonfiction: Dude, Where's My Country, by Michael Moore. Runners-up: Thieves In High Places by Jim Hightower, Lies And The Lying Liars Who Tell Them by Al Franken, Writings on Music 1965-2000 by Steve Reich. That last book was actually published in 2002; I'm mostly including it so this list isn't too political. Plus, it was great.

Worst word or phrase: "Bring it on." Runners-up: metrosexual, "shock and awe," anything ending in "-izzle."

Most unfortunate celebrity death: Fred Rogers. Runners-up: Wesley Willis, choral director Moses Hogan, Johnny Cash, John Ritter, Benny Carter

Celebrity deaths that had no impact on me whatsoever, which probably makes me a bad person: Bob Hope, Maurice Gibb. How deep is your grave?

Lamest government lie: Christ, I don't have all fucking night here, OK? Pick one: yellowcake uranium, "mission accomplished," "Bush is a legitimate president," whatever. Moving on...

Best Internet trend: Blogs, when done well.

Worst Internet trend: Blogs, when done poorly.

Michael Jackson's publicist Stuart Backerman (I wrote about him here) has just resigned. Or maybe he was fired. It's not really clear.

Via TalkLeft, who apparently thinks MJ may be innocent.

Anything worth doing...

... is worth doing correctly. And elegantly.

In this spirit, if you come to a time in your life when you are actively contemplating suicide, you may want to check out Seppuku- A Practical Guide.

Of course, you may not have access to the ritual equipment necessary to perform seppuku correctly. In that case, here's a handy guide to performing seppuku with a frisbee.

A massive expansion of the PATRIOT ACT was signed into law...

... on December 13th. The same day we captured Saddam Hussein, and the day before news of his capture became the only thing anybody talked about for a week. An editorial is here. Also: another article, written after Congress approved the bill (but well before it was signed), and the text of the bill itself from a Library of Congress website.

My dictionary defines "sleight of hand" as "a trick or set of tricks performed by a juggler or magician so quickly that the manner of execution cannot be observed." Regardless of whether or not this is the case here (the blog TalkLeft seems to think that this was not "stealth legislation"), this certainly has the appearance of some tricky prestidigitation on the part of Bush and Ashcroft. And it stinks.

Julia Butterfly Hill has a blog. It's pretty good.

Changes in Episcopal Church Spur Some to Go, Some to Join. (NY Times link; registration required. Via Atrios)

I went to Mass in the Episcopal Church from childhood. I became very involved with the church in high school (my love of choral music can largely be attributed to singing in the choir at St. John's beginning in 10th grade), and was confirmed around the time I turned 20.

Although I think I'm still an "official" member, I don't go to the Episcopal Church anymore for a couple of unrelated reasons. First of all, I've worked a lot as a church musician, and I largely have to go where the work takes me (I've worked in a couple of different Methodist churches and a Disciples of Christ church as a choir director and/or soloist, and currently am a tenor soloist in a United Church of Christ congregation). And when I decided a couple of years ago that I was going to step away from church work for a while, I began going to Quaker meeting. I find that their beliefs and practices are more in tune with what I currently believe, and what I want out of a community of faith, than those of any other Christian denomination.

Those things notwithstanding, I am incredibly proud of my brother and sister Episcopalians for consecrating Gene Robinson as Bishop of New Hampshire in November. Christians should stand for compassion and a recognition of other people as being created in God's image, and Robinson's consecration exemplifies that commission. This is absolutely a step in the right direction.

Of course, this move will no doubt cause many to continuing to view the Episcopal Church USA as a "hopelessly liberal" denomination (a difficult charge to avoid when the clergy includes John Spong and Matthew Fox among its members). Which makes the EC's stance on this issue all the more impressive, I think.

A note about Matthew Fox: When I was younger I was pretty disinterested in spirituality, despite my church attendance (I mostly went to sing in the choir). That changed when I read an interview with Matthew Fox in Rolling Stone, of all places. I was deeply impressed with his viewpoint, and that interview more or less jumpstarted my exploration of existential issues. Although I couldn't find a transcript of the RS interview online, here's a different interview with Fox with the same feel.

The triumph of nerd culture.

From the article:

"In the past decade, this once-derided minority has mutated and metastasised. The unloved school swots of the 20th century have blossomed into the alpha group of the 21st. They have gold cards and chat rooms and a whole rash of 'pre-marital' (and sometimes post-marital) interests that demand satisfaction. They have dictated the mainstream and spirited us all along for the ride. I am reminded of the circus performers' chant at the end of Tod Browning's 1932 classic Freaks: 'One of us. One of us.'"

I've been reading Billy Collin's poetry anthology Sailing Alone Around the Room off and on for the past couple of days. I heartily recommend this volume.

Most of the poems are wonderful, but I keep returning to this one for some reason:

Sonnet

All we need is fourteen lines, well thirteen now,
and after this one just a dozen
to launch a little ship on love's storm-tossed seas,
then only ten more left like rows of beans.
How easily it goes unless you get Elizabethan
and insist the iambic bongos must be played
and rhymes positioned at the ends of lines,
one for every station of the cross.
But hang on here while we make the turn
into the final six where all will be resolved,
where longing and heartache will find an end,
where Laura will tell Petrarch to put down his pen,
take off those crazy medieval tights,
blow out the lights, and come at last to bed.
Billy Collins

I'm also reading a couple of books on Biblical scholarship, an anthology of essays on pacifism called The Power of Nonviolence, and Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut. I fucking love winter vacation.

I was in a good mood...

... and then I started reading the blogs.

American Leftist has a great post up comparing the media's treatment of the Neil Bush scandals to the lambasting of Roger Clinton during President Bill's tenure. He includes a fantastic link detailing the ties that Neil and Marvin Bush have to Chinese tech corporations.

Reindeer Games

About a week ago, Julie and I had a disagreement involving "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer." Specifically, whether the name of the penultimate reindeer from the introduction was "Donner" or "Donder." I said it was Donder, and then had to endure several minutes of mockery from Julie, who swore up and down that I was wrong.

And what do you know: a couple minutes of Googling shows that I was correct after all, and that the reindeer's name was Donder. The evidence is here.

In all fairness to Julie, Gene Autry sang it as "Donner" when Rudolph was first written and recorded over 50 years ago. But that doesn't change the fact that when the poem "A Visit From Saint Nicholas" (also known as "'Twas the Night Before Christmas") was written (probably by Clement Clarke Moore, but even that is disputed), the original spelling was "Donder." Or maybe "Dunder." At any rate, it wasn't "Donner." Heh.

The geekiest thing I've read in a while: an essay about the environmental impact of the destruction of "Death Star II" in Return of the Jedi on the planet Endor. Can you say "Ewok Holocaust?"

Man survives a blood-alcohol concentration of 7.22.

Which reminds me of my stock line when talking about my college GPA: "The only 4.0 I ever got was on a Breathalyzer."

In my last post, I scribbled about the photo of Saddam Hussein and Rumsfeld shaking hands, with a follow-up link to George Washington University's National Security Archive. I first saw the photo in a political cartoon by Tom Tomorrow, and blogged about it back in May.

And yesterday, the Washington Post published an article about Rumsfeld's trips to Iraq as Reagan's special envoy to the Middle East in the 1980s. Including that photo.

Heh. Of course, the article was on page A42 (if we truly had a "liberal media," it would have run on page 1 above the fold in every major newspaper), but it's still encouraging to see that the media isn't totally asleep at the switch.

Since I often write about political issues in this blog, and since a couple of people have asked me how I felt about Saddam's capture, here's my definitive statement.

So. Frigging. What.

Sure, the guy was a horrible ruler. He tortured many of his citizens, used chemical weapons against Iranians and Kurds in the 1980s, and on a list of contemporary global malefactors would probably be in the top 10.

But I remind you... he did it all with the help of our government and American companies (a wealth of information about US companies and their specific Iraq sales in that link). Hell, the CDC was sending Iraq "viruses, retroviruses, bacteria and fungi" until 1993! When he used gas on Iran in the late 80s, our government and media gave him a complete and total pass (the evidence is here).

Showing Saddam's dental exam on national TV, with him looking like Santa after a three-day bender (or an exceptionally swarthy Walt Whitman), may play well in Peoria. But it doesn't change the fact that violence continues in Iraq, or that we were lied to about the reasons for war.

I'm glad Saddam's out of the picture (I'm certainly not going to serve as an apologist for his actions; he was a total bastard)... but his capture doesn't mitigate our complicity in keeping him in power for so long, nor does it excuse the lies told to the American people to justify our country's latest foreign policy misadventures.

----------
Since we're now being told that we went to war to remove a dictator (and not because of WMDs), I have a long list of people I'd like to see us go after with the same might: let's start with Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, those who ruled El Salvador in the 80s, and the bastards responsible for Indonesia's brutal history of human rights abuses in East Timor. Oh,yeah- and Henry Kissinger.

But that won't happen. All of the above individuals and groups were supported and/or trained by the US government (or, in the case of Kissinger, were the government).

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I would pay a lot of money to see a candid reunion between these two men:


"Shaking Hands: Iraqi President Saddam Hussein greets Donald Rumsfeld, then special envoy of President Ronald Reagan, in Baghdad on December 20, 1983." Link found here.

I strongly suggest to all South Florida denizens that they go see the South Beach Gay Men's Chorus perform Nutcracker: Men In Tights at the Gusman tomorrow evening. We had a huge crowd tonight, the chorus sounded great, and the audience loved it. More later.

Poets for the war.

Poets against the war.

I posted this on warfilter yesterday. One commenter adroitly noted, "I think the relative caliber of the poems on each site is rather telling." Another dredged up this gem from the "for the war" website. More so than almost any other poem I've ever read, that one made me want to claw my eyes out. Yes, even more than the poem George W. Bush wrote to his wife, or the anti-abortion poem writen by the "Ten Commandments" judge.

The greatest thing about the "for the war" site is their quote from the Tao Te Ching on the front page. They completely misinterpreted that chapter; I own two different translations of that great religious work, and it's pretty evident from both that the stanzas quoted there are a condemnation of war. Here's chapter 31 of the Tao Te Ching, as translated by noted scholar John C. H. Wu, to give a little context:

31

Fine weapons of war auger evil.
Even things seem to hate them.
Therefore, a man of Tao does not set his heart upon them.

In ordinary life, a gentleman regards the left side as the place of honour:
In war, the right side is the place of honour.

As weapons are instruments of evil,
They are not properly a gentleman's instruments;
Only on necessity wil he resort to them.
For peace and quiet are dearest to his heart,
And to him even a victory is no cause for rejoicing.

To rejoice over a victory is to rejoice over the slaughter of men!
Hence a man who rejoices over the slaughter of men cannot expect to thrive in the world of men.

On happy occasions the left side is preferred:
On sad occasions the right side.
In the army, the Lieutenant Commander stands on the the left,
While the Commander-in-Chief stands on the right.
This means that war is treated on a par with a funeral service.
Because many people have been killed, it is only right that survivors should mourn for them.
Hence, even a victory is a funeral.

'Tis the Season

Once again, my life is put on hold because of holiday-related music activities. Now that I'm not teaching high school I'm not nearly as busy, but preparations for the upcoming Nutcracker: Men In Tights concert at the Gusman Center for the Performing Arts are keeping me hopping.

I'm pretty psyched... I've already conducted the chorus in performances at some other major venues in Miami: the Jackie Gleason Theater (when the chorus performed with Tammy Faye Bakker in January 2002) and the Lincoln Theatre (home of the New World Symphony). The opportunity to present this ensemble in the historic Olympia Theater is wonderful.

Unabashed plug: If you live in the Miami-Fort Lauderdale area, come see us. These concerts are going to be awesome. You can buy tickets online at our website.