For the locals: This Sunday, I'm singing a bunch of choral works by Mozart, including the Coronation Mass and Regina Coeli (I'm the tenor soloist for the quartet sections in both works). It's in Burbank, and if you want additional details just email me.

My vocal health has been up-and-down lately... so I'm pleased to report that, at tonight's orchestra dress, everything sounded fine. On the agenda: continued babying of the voice coupled with intermittent practicing on Saturday.

Back from the funeral. More on that later.

I know that California has a reputation for being this liberal/left bastion, but that assumption is torpedoed when one thinks about some of the political whackjobs that have come from this state: Randy Cunningham, Bob Dornan, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan spring to mind (all products of super-conservative Orange County or north San Diego), and any state that actually elects Arnold Schwarzenegger as it's governor--twice!--is probably not the most rational political landscape. So, Dana Rohrabacher (R-Berlin Costa Mesa)'s recent hearing, where he expresed support for the practice of extraordinary rendition, isn't exactly a surprise. From the transcript:

But, here’s the other shoe dropping, we are at war, and we’ve got to make sure that we do not let go 50 terrorists who will go out and plant a bomb in London and kill 20,000 people in order to protect that one person who we arrested accidentally because his name was the same. That’s the type of unfortunate consequence.

[Audience groans.]

Well, I hope it’s your families, I hope it’s your families that suffer the consequences.

My gut instinct is that this yet more finger-pointing of the kind Rohrabacher has been doing since 2001, to distract from his own enthusiastic support of, and back-room negotiations with, the Taliban.

Freeze. Rock.

In lieu of a real update, here's a little experiment I recorded this weekend: an all-vocal arrangement of the old-school hiphop track "White Lines" by Melle Mel and Grandmaster Flash. Some people just shouldn't rap, and I am sadly among them... but the arrangement, written in my head while out for a walk, features some cool four-and-five part harmonies on the background vocals (dig that crazy dom7#9b13 chord toward the beginning, and I'm happy with how the horn break turned out), vocal bass and percusion, and should at least be entertaining.

As I mentioned in the comments a couple of posts down, one of the reasons I was so affected by the death of Kurt Vonnegut was because of a number of striking parallels with the life of my grandfather. Therefore, I was unsurprised when Grandpa passed a few short days later.

Like Vonnegut, Ray Hardy came of age during the Great Depression (he dropped out of school and joined the Civilian Conservation Corps) and fought in World War II (a decorated paratrooper and medic who served in the Pacific). I recognize the fact that the phrase "Greatest Generation" is kind of a cliche... but there's some truth to it. Anyone, man or woman, who wasn't broken by the twin horrors of economic malaise and war was probably made of stern stuff, and my grandfather was no exception. He enrolled in correspondence school, taught himself fairly advanced math, and ended up working for aerospace firms and writing engineering manuals for General Dynamics.

The more poignant similarity between Vonnegut and Ray is the fact that they've both been ready to go for a long, long time. For the past several years, Grandpa's health and cognition had been declining, especially heartbreaking since he was once a really clever man. He was a classically Yankee character with a deep irreverent streak--he once claimed that the only way he'd join a religion was if every faith's adherents fought to the death, at which point he'd join the church of the last man standing--and was quietly tough, with a mock gruffness that didn't conceal the affection he had for his children and grandparents. Plus, back in the day, he was a really funny guy. Here's a conversation he and I had a few years ago, after he started to go senile but while he still had some of his wits about him:

BONE: Hey, Grandpa. What are you watching?
RAY: Oh, the usual... The History Channel. Right now they're running this marathon of "everything that ever happened."

It's hard for me to be sad, given how unhappy he was at the end of his life. I'm more bewildered that he's gone. As one of my brothers put it, to whatever extent a familiy like ours could have a patriarch, he was it.

Ray Hardy, you magnificent bastard, we'll not see your like again. Rest in peace.

Radio silence

It looks like my grandfather's on his way out, so I don't anticipate having much to say for a little while.

"Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt"

Kurt Vonnegut, 1922-2007

This one is really, really hard.

If I were to compile a collection of scriptures for myself, writings that inspire me and create an ideal for the type of person I want to be, there would be several works by Vonnegut in between those two covers. When I read things like this...

"Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies - 'God damn it, you've got to be kind.'" (God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, 1965)

or this...

I've worried some about why write books when Presidents and Senators and generals do not read them, and the university experience taught me a very good reason: you catch people before they become generals and Senators and Presidents, and you poison their minds with humanity. Encourage them to make a better world. (Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut, 1988)

... I want to run out and save the world.

Kurt Vonnegut wasn't just my favorite author, he was just about my favorite person ever. He's been ready to go for a few years now, I believe, and I think he's said everything he's ever needed to say (and honestly, how many people can say that? Isn't that fucking awesome?), and yet the world is still a worse place for his passing. I'm tempted to say that, with his death, the world now officially sucks... the only thing keeping me from doing so is the fact that he's left behind an immense body of work with which I can commune anytime.

So it goes. God bless you, Mr. Vonnegut.

Some person managed to swipe my ATM card information, and took almost five hundred dollars out of my account last week. It looks like the bank will credit my account, so that's good, but the card was closed to prevent further fraud (in retrospect, a good idea; the jackass tried to pull another $500 from the account a day or two later, but the transaction was declined). In the meantime, I've been writing checks out to cash, standing in line at the bank, and walking around with paper money.

Having used my debit and credit cards almost exclusively for years, I'd forgotten how much I love the anonymity of cash. We trade away so much of our privacy for the sake of convenience, and not much brings that home more than my impulse to pull out my driver's license when I'm just handing the cashier at the bookstore a piece of paper with some genocidal asshole's portrait on it. It's like a reverse Jedi mind trick performed by our entire culture: "You need to see his identification."

Hmm, not sure where I was going with that. Remember, kids: insomnia is the enemy.

Reading between the lines

I read Baudrillard, underlining phrases, taking notes in the margins... and you're there, in the spaces between the text, in the white field upon which the letters sit, in the blank eye sitting in the heard of every capital "R." A strange sort of différance where you are present in your absence.

Baudrillard writes:

The Italian miracle: that of stage and scene.
The American miracle: that of the obscene.
The profusion of sense, as against the deserts of meaninglessness

Not all "deserts of meaninglessness" are external.