Margotlog: The Tuba, the Orchestra, and the Business Model
No offense, Senor Tuba, but you mostly don't belong in a symphony orchestra. Like your overgrown business compatriot--the contemporary "business model"--your music is too raucous, too lumbering, too prone to go awry in favor of swagger and ump-pa-pa. Good for a military goosestep, or "down home" flashy parade, but not flexible enough for sonorous blends or wild, heroic shouts at the white whale of the world.
The Twin Cities of Minneapolis/Saint Paul are currently in the unenviable state of having both symphony orchestras "locked out" by managing boards composed largely of the "business model." I am not privy to these "heads" who are wielding the cleavers, but I've learned enough during the recent recession to be suspicious. Let's recall how the business model brought the world to its knees within recent memory.
As I understand the financial mess circa 2008, huge insurance companies were betting against their wealthiest clients. This meant insiders would benefit mightily if clients failed. Picture tall columns of glass and steel filled with computer savants who rigged schemes of gigantic proportions, so out of touch with real-life below that they believed they could tweak the strings of the world with impunity.
Compared with such high-flying machinations, cutting a symphony orchestra down to size is small potatoes. But the mentality may very well be the same. Something along the line of a tuba swaggering its big bulk and flashy golden bell, drowning out everything less brassy and exaggerated in its wake.
In the place of the tuba, substitute large expenditures on building renovations. Both Twin Cities orchestra boards have committed their players/audiences to expensive building renovations. One of them, the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, has also kept ticket prices so low as to be offensive (especially now, given the cry of threatening insolvency).
I've seen similar moves in another area where the business model has taken hold: i.e. higher education. How many smallish, liberal arts institutions have been "blessed" with new buildings on campus, while within those buildings, staff and faculty are trimmed so tight that credible functioning is called into question?
Bricks and mortar versus the people that actually play the music. Big donors getting their names on glass and steel, while, horror of horrors, it's revealed that nearly 50% of the orchestra's budget is musicians' salaries! What else should an orchestra management be spending its money on?
A lovely young lady of my acquaintance recently commented that she thinks these orchestra boards simply don't want, in their heart of hearts, to do their jobs. Consequently, in her gentle parlance, they "need to be asked to step down."
I'm for it. It's time for the swaggering tuba to exit stage left. And let the serious tinkering necessary to preserve both orchestras begin.
Tuesday, October 23, 2012
Friday, October 19, 2012
Margotlog: The Painted BIrd
Margotlog: The Painted Bird
One of the strangest novels I've ever read. Yet as the small boy wanders from one grotesque encounter to another, uprooted and friendless in war-torn, peasant Poland, it is hard not to become fascinated, even obsessed with the bizarre horrors that envelop him.
Is this an autobiographical tale, or a series of macabre fantasies, engendered by folklore and wartime's loose civilization? Or it is both? Jerzy Kosinski, born Lewinkopf, was dubbed Kosinski, by his father when the family went into hiding during World War II. They were sheltered by peasant Catholics, who risked being discovered by the Germans for sheltering Jews. Jerzy even became a Catholic altar boy.
As does his character in the Painted Bird. But so inept and terrorized is the child, that he stumbles, drops the sacred text, and all hell breaks loose. By this time in the novel, however, we expect the worst. We expect brutish peasant fathers to force their daughters to copulate with goats. We expect an aged herb healer to stumble into death, pushed by boy she's taken in. We expect gangs of village boys to torture rabbits and wayfarers. We expect the kindly bird catcher to paint his favorite birds in gaudy colors, one by one, after his Ludmilla, a whore repeatedly raped by soldiers and villagers, disappears. When the bird-catcher sends the painted birds into the sky, they fly instantly to their kind, who attack them savagely, unable to recognize them through their gaudy disguise.
It's hard not to consider this an allegory of the artist's life, for Kosinski painted himself with one fable after another. He married an heiress who died shortly after from a brain tumor. She left him nothing. He was recognized as a fine polo player, he had a part in Warren Beatty's movie, Red. And he received grants and awards from a fake foundation he himself founded, as well as the bona fide Guggenheim. When he committed suicide in 1991, it's not hard to imagine that his own fictions were pecking him to death.
Still the powerful work remains, with its rather slow, subdued ending. As the war nears its close, the wandering boy is taken in by a group of Russian soldiers and becomes the side-kick of a crack marksman, as fine a shot as was the adult Kosinski himself who also enlisted with the Russians. When the boy finally is reuinted with his parents, a period of intense testing ensues. One can't help but consider this psychologically accurate. How could a child, forced to witness and participate in adult horrors, easily settle down to obedience?
Several times, I almost stopped listening to this novel. But after a period of disgust, I began again. It is an astonishing tour de force, and its truth, though extreme, became, for me, ultimately believable. Or at least knowable.
One of the strangest novels I've ever read. Yet as the small boy wanders from one grotesque encounter to another, uprooted and friendless in war-torn, peasant Poland, it is hard not to become fascinated, even obsessed with the bizarre horrors that envelop him.
Is this an autobiographical tale, or a series of macabre fantasies, engendered by folklore and wartime's loose civilization? Or it is both? Jerzy Kosinski, born Lewinkopf, was dubbed Kosinski, by his father when the family went into hiding during World War II. They were sheltered by peasant Catholics, who risked being discovered by the Germans for sheltering Jews. Jerzy even became a Catholic altar boy.
As does his character in the Painted Bird. But so inept and terrorized is the child, that he stumbles, drops the sacred text, and all hell breaks loose. By this time in the novel, however, we expect the worst. We expect brutish peasant fathers to force their daughters to copulate with goats. We expect an aged herb healer to stumble into death, pushed by boy she's taken in. We expect gangs of village boys to torture rabbits and wayfarers. We expect the kindly bird catcher to paint his favorite birds in gaudy colors, one by one, after his Ludmilla, a whore repeatedly raped by soldiers and villagers, disappears. When the bird-catcher sends the painted birds into the sky, they fly instantly to their kind, who attack them savagely, unable to recognize them through their gaudy disguise.
It's hard not to consider this an allegory of the artist's life, for Kosinski painted himself with one fable after another. He married an heiress who died shortly after from a brain tumor. She left him nothing. He was recognized as a fine polo player, he had a part in Warren Beatty's movie, Red. And he received grants and awards from a fake foundation he himself founded, as well as the bona fide Guggenheim. When he committed suicide in 1991, it's not hard to imagine that his own fictions were pecking him to death.
Still the powerful work remains, with its rather slow, subdued ending. As the war nears its close, the wandering boy is taken in by a group of Russian soldiers and becomes the side-kick of a crack marksman, as fine a shot as was the adult Kosinski himself who also enlisted with the Russians. When the boy finally is reuinted with his parents, a period of intense testing ensues. One can't help but consider this psychologically accurate. How could a child, forced to witness and participate in adult horrors, easily settle down to obedience?
Several times, I almost stopped listening to this novel. But after a period of disgust, I began again. It is an astonishing tour de force, and its truth, though extreme, became, for me, ultimately believable. Or at least knowable.
Thursday, October 4, 2012
Margotlog: To Grandfather's House We Go
Margotlog: To Grandfather's House We Go - Part One
"Over the river and through the woods/ To Grandfather's house we go" meant traveling three days and two nights on the train from Charleston, South Carolina to Hankinson, North Dakota. Grandfather's house was a glorious, gingerbread affair set on a huge lot with elm-shaded boulevards on two sides. In Charleston, our apartment lay at the back of the block-long, castle-like Old Citadel, with a row of palmettos in front and beyond that, the wide expanse of a gravelly Marion Square. Waking up mornings in Grandfather's Hankinson house was like waking up in another country.
Not only another country, but another way of life. In our Old Citadel apartment, sixteen-foot ceilings rose into shadows, and window-wells were so deep I could lean my elbows on them. But we had only four large rooms edged by a long narrow hall and narrow bathroom. Nothing like Papa Max's house with its six rooms downstairs and five bedrooms up, topped by an attic covering the whole house. The quiet was so intense I sometimes "heard" sun motes keeping time to Papa Max's canary Sweetie Pie singing in the bay window.
Hankinson, named for a colonel in the Civil War, sat on the edge of onetime prairie, turned into fields of wheat. Glacier moraines sloped gently above sloughs and Lake Elsie. When my grandfather arrived there as a young man from Sheboygan, Wisconsin, it was probably around 1890. Calculating back from my mother's birth in 1908, he must have married his first wife, the daughter of his employer, around 1892. They must have built the house, only one-story at first, a year or so later.
The first wife died in childbirth, leaving my grandfather with a daughter. He was on the go a lot as county auditor, "giving the horses' their heads" to carry him over snow-mounded fences home. It must have been during one of these trips around the county that he met my grandmother-to-be, a school teacher whose name was Augusta Olein. She'd been born in Sweden. I never knew her. She died five months after I was born.
Her parents, who brought the family to Fargo, left her a kind of orphan, to be raised by two older sisters who, for the rest of their lives, kept watch from a distance over Augusta and her children. These were the Aunt Emma and Aunt Hulda who eventually moved to Spokane, Washington, and whose cards of congratulations fill my mother's fat fat memory book. My mother Maxine was the second-born twin to brother Max,. He was sturdy, she was slow to thrive, plagued with rickets (which gave her spine "two curves") and a weak stomach all her childhood. But she outlived all her siblings to die in Charleston, South Carolina, aged 94.
By the time she took my sister and me on these cross-country train trips, she was intrepid, vigorous, and truly fond of "home," meaning Papa Max's house. By the time we started visiting in the late 1940s and early '50s, the roof had been raised on Papa Max's house. Its scalloped and diamond-shaped shingles, painted tan, taupe and light pinkish brown, made it look like a gingerbread house.
Yesterday I had a call from a woman who, out of the blue, just bought Papa Max's house on the internet. I kept calling her Carol or Carla--not her name. I don't know what go into me. Cindy wants to return the house to its former grandeur before Papa Max died and it was carved into apartments. We spent at least an hour talking, and I was amazed at my ability to guide her through the front door, and into the spacious entrance hall with the parquet floors and the three-tiered staircase ending in a bronze Winged Victory.
I remembered how the staircase divided just before its final descent, and one set of steps headed back to the kitchen, the other to the front hall. She corroborated that the beautiful stained-glass window at the top of the stairs had been walled in for the apartments, but she has retrieved it, and is having it repaired. "We will hang it in the dining room," she said, "so it isn't buffeted by weather."
She has also located the second stairway, very narrow and steep, and entirely closed off from view. This was for the live-in maid--whom my mother called something like "Ennutz," telling us it meant "good-for-nothing" in German, my grandfather's family tongue. It's this sharp humor I've come to associate with my grandfather, altogether a sharp-dealing businessman who bought up farms around Lake Elsie, when the original owners couldn't pay their back taxes during the Great Depression.
My grandmother's taste (with the funds to indulge it) ran to dark walnut and oak furniture, with subdued, embroidered silk upholstery and drapes. I have some samples handed from my mother to me: deep turquoise silk, with leaves and vines and berries and flowers embroidered in subdued yellows, greens, and reds. The parlor, to the left of the entrance hall, had only one wide window overlooking the porch. It was always cool and shaded . Then I was reading from huge volumes stored in glass-fronted cabinets below half-pillars which separated the parlor from the entrance hall. More half-pillars and glassed-in cabinets led to the much sunnier dining room and Sweetie Pie's cheerful singing. We two girls and our mother flanked Papa Max who sat at the head of the long table, a huge napkin spread across his vest, as he ate lettuce soaked with cream and sugar. To us girls, raised on our Italian-American father's salads dressed with oil and vinegar, this was as strange as eating dirt.
"Over the river and through the woods/ To Grandfather's house we go" meant traveling three days and two nights on the train from Charleston, South Carolina to Hankinson, North Dakota. Grandfather's house was a glorious, gingerbread affair set on a huge lot with elm-shaded boulevards on two sides. In Charleston, our apartment lay at the back of the block-long, castle-like Old Citadel, with a row of palmettos in front and beyond that, the wide expanse of a gravelly Marion Square. Waking up mornings in Grandfather's Hankinson house was like waking up in another country.
Not only another country, but another way of life. In our Old Citadel apartment, sixteen-foot ceilings rose into shadows, and window-wells were so deep I could lean my elbows on them. But we had only four large rooms edged by a long narrow hall and narrow bathroom. Nothing like Papa Max's house with its six rooms downstairs and five bedrooms up, topped by an attic covering the whole house. The quiet was so intense I sometimes "heard" sun motes keeping time to Papa Max's canary Sweetie Pie singing in the bay window.
Hankinson, named for a colonel in the Civil War, sat on the edge of onetime prairie, turned into fields of wheat. Glacier moraines sloped gently above sloughs and Lake Elsie. When my grandfather arrived there as a young man from Sheboygan, Wisconsin, it was probably around 1890. Calculating back from my mother's birth in 1908, he must have married his first wife, the daughter of his employer, around 1892. They must have built the house, only one-story at first, a year or so later.
The first wife died in childbirth, leaving my grandfather with a daughter. He was on the go a lot as county auditor, "giving the horses' their heads" to carry him over snow-mounded fences home. It must have been during one of these trips around the county that he met my grandmother-to-be, a school teacher whose name was Augusta Olein. She'd been born in Sweden. I never knew her. She died five months after I was born.
Her parents, who brought the family to Fargo, left her a kind of orphan, to be raised by two older sisters who, for the rest of their lives, kept watch from a distance over Augusta and her children. These were the Aunt Emma and Aunt Hulda who eventually moved to Spokane, Washington, and whose cards of congratulations fill my mother's fat fat memory book. My mother Maxine was the second-born twin to brother Max,. He was sturdy, she was slow to thrive, plagued with rickets (which gave her spine "two curves") and a weak stomach all her childhood. But she outlived all her siblings to die in Charleston, South Carolina, aged 94.
By the time she took my sister and me on these cross-country train trips, she was intrepid, vigorous, and truly fond of "home," meaning Papa Max's house. By the time we started visiting in the late 1940s and early '50s, the roof had been raised on Papa Max's house. Its scalloped and diamond-shaped shingles, painted tan, taupe and light pinkish brown, made it look like a gingerbread house.
Yesterday I had a call from a woman who, out of the blue, just bought Papa Max's house on the internet. I kept calling her Carol or Carla--not her name. I don't know what go into me. Cindy wants to return the house to its former grandeur before Papa Max died and it was carved into apartments. We spent at least an hour talking, and I was amazed at my ability to guide her through the front door, and into the spacious entrance hall with the parquet floors and the three-tiered staircase ending in a bronze Winged Victory.
I remembered how the staircase divided just before its final descent, and one set of steps headed back to the kitchen, the other to the front hall. She corroborated that the beautiful stained-glass window at the top of the stairs had been walled in for the apartments, but she has retrieved it, and is having it repaired. "We will hang it in the dining room," she said, "so it isn't buffeted by weather."
She has also located the second stairway, very narrow and steep, and entirely closed off from view. This was for the live-in maid--whom my mother called something like "Ennutz," telling us it meant "good-for-nothing" in German, my grandfather's family tongue. It's this sharp humor I've come to associate with my grandfather, altogether a sharp-dealing businessman who bought up farms around Lake Elsie, when the original owners couldn't pay their back taxes during the Great Depression.
My grandmother's taste (with the funds to indulge it) ran to dark walnut and oak furniture, with subdued, embroidered silk upholstery and drapes. I have some samples handed from my mother to me: deep turquoise silk, with leaves and vines and berries and flowers embroidered in subdued yellows, greens, and reds. The parlor, to the left of the entrance hall, had only one wide window overlooking the porch. It was always cool and shaded . Then I was reading from huge volumes stored in glass-fronted cabinets below half-pillars which separated the parlor from the entrance hall. More half-pillars and glassed-in cabinets led to the much sunnier dining room and Sweetie Pie's cheerful singing. We two girls and our mother flanked Papa Max who sat at the head of the long table, a huge napkin spread across his vest, as he ate lettuce soaked with cream and sugar. To us girls, raised on our Italian-American father's salads dressed with oil and vinegar, this was as strange as eating dirt.
Sunday, September 30, 2012
Margotlog: The Potted Plant, Grey Water and Corporations
Margotlog: The Potted Plant, Grey Water, and Corporations
Let's admit right from the start: this is not an obvious connection. Just as it's not obvious that we, in our excessively individualistic and commercial mindset, will notice and shift in time when disaster is barreling down on us.
First the potted plant: It's an old and beautifully flowering hibiscus, repotted a few times and now about three feet tall with a "wingspan" of three to four feet. Just about as heavy as I can carry up and down three flights of stairs twice a year. In mid-spring I carry it outside. In mid-fall, I bring it back to its south-facing, third-floor window. This year, perhaps because I moved it out of direct sun into partial shade, perhaps because we had fewer lower spring temps, it's become a blooming maniac, with lacy blooms measuring four to six inches across.
I left town over the weekend and forgot to water it immediately the day I returned. This morning, when I climbed the stairs with its huge pitcher of water, it was sadly woebegon: droopy leaves with many yellow ones hanging limp.
We are all, more or less, potted plants. Let that sink in a moment.
According to "my weather guy," this September is the second driest on record, following a set of extremes, with (thankfully) lots of rain in the spring, but very very little from July until now. Let that sink in (what little there is to sink). White Bear Lake, so my friend who lives there reports, is so low that various town and community groups toss back and forth notions for raising the level. A few days ago I sat on the Minnesota side where the Mississippi widens into that lovely expanse slightly reminiscent of Switzerland called Lake Pepin. The water level was significantly lower than I've ever seen it--exposing a spit of land much further into the lake, with a long bloom of migrating white pelicans.
In my fear for the imminent demise of trees and shrubs, I've been watering almost daily at various trunks and roots. As I walk the neighborhood and see newly planted boulevard trees with leaves either already crinkly brown or dropped, I occasionally put a slip of paper in the nearby household's mailbox. "Please consider watering your boulevard tree...." these tiny missives conclude with "A concerned neighbor."
I wake up in the middle of the night thinking about "grey water." Some western states allow water from showers and washing machines to be deviated into tanks for watering lawns. I tried to have this made part of the Saint Paul DFL platform four years ago, but was told it would be too costly to retrain licensed plumbers to do this. Now I'm thinking about asking someone who's handy but not "a licensed plumber" to make the shift in our water flow.
We obviously need a much bigger fix than my single household.
Now to the corporation. When corporations achieved the status of "persons" in the Citizens United suit, and even before, they exercised immense influence on our lives in the United States, often more than government at any level. Not persons, not really, corporations are huge conglomerates of very very rich executives (note the emphasis on execute) at the top, and widening pyramid of underlings. With the hybrid status they now enjoy--wealthy conglomerates plus "persons"--corporations and their "bottom line" mentality strive for the greatest possible revenue at the least cost. This has led to such changes in U.S. trade policy as the North American Free-Trade Agreement which allows corporations to out-source jobs to much lower paid populaces (India, Mexico, etc.) than those (often unionized) in the U.S. These out-sourced jobs not only lower manufacturing costs for many US corporations, but also deprive U.S. citizens of work.
As corporations ceased needing to abide by U.S. environmental (or any other) regulation, they developed what I see as hubris (i.e.pride) of a dangerous sort. They began to market (for instance) huge cars, SUVs, and trucks, just as the message of global warming was beginning to take hold. When what we needed were much smaller cars, with higher (much higher) mileage standards, we were treated to ads linking American icons--the West, the rancher, etc--with these huge new vehicles.
Fast forward to my block this relatively quiet Sunday morning. Up and down the avenue sit huge behemoths. Yes there are a few hybrids like ours. But mostly the "family car" has gone the way of wringer washing machines. For no good reason except corporate greed. And the gullibility and determined ignorance of the American consumer.
We are potted plants in the hands of these corporations, who are after all "persons." Persons who care little for the well-being of the plant/planet as a whole. Who would just as soon wreck mountain tops, river banks (for mining and fracking), who often operate far from their corporate office where just maybe local protest might curb their excesses.
My weather guy, Paul Douglas of the Strib, notes that at a recent gathering of weather reporters to discuss global warming, a Saint Thomas University expert noted that a magnolia tree was blooming on the Saint Thomas campus this past MARCH. Paul says in essence, that environment changes predicted to be in place by 2090, are already occurring.
I am very much afraid we will not act at all, much less act "in time." Remember, we are potted plants. Luckily my potted hibiscus belongs to a real-live, singular person who now feels guilt, who promises to be more vigilant. Who will in a few moments trot upstairs to the third floor with another pitcher of water. We, who are real persons, need to take the reins away from these pseudo-persons called corporations and demand that our governments at all levels make the extreme changes necessary to allow our survival. Then we need to walk, ride our bikes, take public transportation or buy hybrids or plug ins. And no, I own no stock in Toyota or Honda.
Let's admit right from the start: this is not an obvious connection. Just as it's not obvious that we, in our excessively individualistic and commercial mindset, will notice and shift in time when disaster is barreling down on us.
First the potted plant: It's an old and beautifully flowering hibiscus, repotted a few times and now about three feet tall with a "wingspan" of three to four feet. Just about as heavy as I can carry up and down three flights of stairs twice a year. In mid-spring I carry it outside. In mid-fall, I bring it back to its south-facing, third-floor window. This year, perhaps because I moved it out of direct sun into partial shade, perhaps because we had fewer lower spring temps, it's become a blooming maniac, with lacy blooms measuring four to six inches across.
I left town over the weekend and forgot to water it immediately the day I returned. This morning, when I climbed the stairs with its huge pitcher of water, it was sadly woebegon: droopy leaves with many yellow ones hanging limp.
We are all, more or less, potted plants. Let that sink in a moment.
According to "my weather guy," this September is the second driest on record, following a set of extremes, with (thankfully) lots of rain in the spring, but very very little from July until now. Let that sink in (what little there is to sink). White Bear Lake, so my friend who lives there reports, is so low that various town and community groups toss back and forth notions for raising the level. A few days ago I sat on the Minnesota side where the Mississippi widens into that lovely expanse slightly reminiscent of Switzerland called Lake Pepin. The water level was significantly lower than I've ever seen it--exposing a spit of land much further into the lake, with a long bloom of migrating white pelicans.
In my fear for the imminent demise of trees and shrubs, I've been watering almost daily at various trunks and roots. As I walk the neighborhood and see newly planted boulevard trees with leaves either already crinkly brown or dropped, I occasionally put a slip of paper in the nearby household's mailbox. "Please consider watering your boulevard tree...." these tiny missives conclude with "A concerned neighbor."
I wake up in the middle of the night thinking about "grey water." Some western states allow water from showers and washing machines to be deviated into tanks for watering lawns. I tried to have this made part of the Saint Paul DFL platform four years ago, but was told it would be too costly to retrain licensed plumbers to do this. Now I'm thinking about asking someone who's handy but not "a licensed plumber" to make the shift in our water flow.
We obviously need a much bigger fix than my single household.
Now to the corporation. When corporations achieved the status of "persons" in the Citizens United suit, and even before, they exercised immense influence on our lives in the United States, often more than government at any level. Not persons, not really, corporations are huge conglomerates of very very rich executives (note the emphasis on execute) at the top, and widening pyramid of underlings. With the hybrid status they now enjoy--wealthy conglomerates plus "persons"--corporations and their "bottom line" mentality strive for the greatest possible revenue at the least cost. This has led to such changes in U.S. trade policy as the North American Free-Trade Agreement which allows corporations to out-source jobs to much lower paid populaces (India, Mexico, etc.) than those (often unionized) in the U.S. These out-sourced jobs not only lower manufacturing costs for many US corporations, but also deprive U.S. citizens of work.
As corporations ceased needing to abide by U.S. environmental (or any other) regulation, they developed what I see as hubris (i.e.pride) of a dangerous sort. They began to market (for instance) huge cars, SUVs, and trucks, just as the message of global warming was beginning to take hold. When what we needed were much smaller cars, with higher (much higher) mileage standards, we were treated to ads linking American icons--the West, the rancher, etc--with these huge new vehicles.
Fast forward to my block this relatively quiet Sunday morning. Up and down the avenue sit huge behemoths. Yes there are a few hybrids like ours. But mostly the "family car" has gone the way of wringer washing machines. For no good reason except corporate greed. And the gullibility and determined ignorance of the American consumer.
We are potted plants in the hands of these corporations, who are after all "persons." Persons who care little for the well-being of the plant/planet as a whole. Who would just as soon wreck mountain tops, river banks (for mining and fracking), who often operate far from their corporate office where just maybe local protest might curb their excesses.
My weather guy, Paul Douglas of the Strib, notes that at a recent gathering of weather reporters to discuss global warming, a Saint Thomas University expert noted that a magnolia tree was blooming on the Saint Thomas campus this past MARCH. Paul says in essence, that environment changes predicted to be in place by 2090, are already occurring.
I am very much afraid we will not act at all, much less act "in time." Remember, we are potted plants. Luckily my potted hibiscus belongs to a real-live, singular person who now feels guilt, who promises to be more vigilant. Who will in a few moments trot upstairs to the third floor with another pitcher of water. We, who are real persons, need to take the reins away from these pseudo-persons called corporations and demand that our governments at all levels make the extreme changes necessary to allow our survival. Then we need to walk, ride our bikes, take public transportation or buy hybrids or plug ins. And no, I own no stock in Toyota or Honda.
Sunday, September 23, 2012
Margotlog: "It is a truth universally acknowledged..."
Margotlog: "It is a truth universally acknowledged..."
So begins Jane Austen's divine novel "Pride and Prejudice." Austen's satiric pen turns like a double-edged knife toward the reader and the characters in her novel. Let's try that tactic: It's a truth universally acknowledged, in the U.S. of 2012, that all houses, forever forward and aft, sport white goddesses reposing in their basements.
Segue back to Charleston, South Carolina of the 1950s. I rush in from school, the screen door slams behind me. My mother stands at the sink. Above her rises a 14-foot ceiling, deep with shadows and cobwebs. She is washing clothes--my school uniforms, socks, night gowns, my father's heavy khaki uniforms, her own cotton house dresses, my sister's play clothes.
Standing at a deep window well I stare out to a cobblestone parking yard. We live in the Old Citadel, built a hundred years ago to house cadets in a military college. Behind me, now, my mother is ironing the uniforms which she has starched and hung in the courtyard on a metal and rope contraption that looks like an upside down umbrella. She has sprinkled the stiff trousers and shirts with water, then rolled them into balls and let them sit. Once moisture has softened the hard starched khaki, she can manage to smooth them with her iron. If steam irons have been invented, we don't have one. Even as a girl in third grade, I understood that my mother worked very hard.
There was no white goddess in our basement. We had no basement. I had not yet met that era's version of a washing machine, and dryers meant the contraption she set up outside, letting the sun and wind do the work.
I've often thought of her as a pioneer housewife. Partly because she came from North Dakota and read to us from the "Laura and Mary" books--"Little House on the Prairie," etc. But also because her strength and resilience supported a physically demanding life. She did not have to cut wood for a stove--we had a gas range. But she did almost everything else "by hand," except bake bread. Though she was only a mediocre cook, we never went hungry. She sent me and my sister to walk across Marion Square with nickles and dimes clutched in our pockets. We bought loaves of bread, and bags of tapioca for puddings at a little grocer. The Mars bars tantalized. Sometimes we bought milk in a bottle, but most of the time, these clinking sweating dames were delivered by a man driving a horse and wagon. Later he acquired a truck. We had one car. My mother didn't learn to drive until I had graduated from college.
All this goes to say that truths "universally acknowledged" fly away with the wind. Times are changing all around us. I'm often besieged by thoughts of how to lower energy use. I'm stymied by this current drought, quite aware that by watering my trees (from the boulevard ash all the way to the backyard white pine and spruce), I'm using a precious, dwindling resource. What will happen to my beloved trees when the Mississippi runs so low, water can't be pumped to supply the Cities? What, ultimately, will happen to us if we have to live with one bucket of water per person, per day? Images of North African nomads flit through my mind. The women are clothed in layers of long flowing garments. Their faces are mostly covered. Sand stings. Bodies need protection from hot winds. The truth "universally acknowledged" that Minnesota with its 10,000 lakes will never run out of water, may one day crumble to dust.
For now, I conserve this way: I use and reuse and reuse water in the sink. First to wash hands, then catching the runoff in a dish, to swipe left-over food off plates after a meal, finally to clean cat-food cans before recycling them. Several years ago, I did an internet search on "grey water" usage--the recycling of rinse water and shower water for irrigating backyard lawns, trees, gardens. Several U.S. states allow this. Minnesota not yet. I tried inserting a proposal for grey water into the DFL platform, but met resistance from plumbers' unions. Plumbers would need to be retrained. "It is a truth universally acknowledged..."
I cut down on energy use: raising the blinds high for "natural" light, using long-lasting and minimal energy-use halogen bulbs, turning off all the way every computer once it's not being used. Putting TVs on power strips and turning them off all the way. Making a deal with my husband that if he completely unplugs the myriad "chargers" for his hand-helds, I won't run the outside water when he's exercising in the basement. Sensitive ears, that man.
I cook in bulk. I keep the freezer totally filled with frozen leftovers. In deep cold, we turn the heat down to 62, early in the evening, and raise it to 68 late in the morning. No, we don't wear wool against the skin, but we wear warm night-clothes, and, my one decadent indulgence, I use an electric blanket. I figure it's cheaper to heat one bed than a whole house. Recently we received an approval rating from Xcel Energy: we used 12% less energy than our neighbors. It's because we have no air conditioning. Fans will do.
And our dryer? The second of our two white basement goddesses? I dry my "wash 'n' wear" clothes maybe 3 minutes, then hang them on the line. Anything else--towers, sheets, napkins, socks, washcloths, nightgowns--dry on a line in the basement. The husband has to have anything that will touch hi sensitive skin fluffed in the dryer. Hmmm! I wonder how he managed as a kid. No dryers then. "It is a truth universally acknowledged..."
So begins Jane Austen's divine novel "Pride and Prejudice." Austen's satiric pen turns like a double-edged knife toward the reader and the characters in her novel. Let's try that tactic: It's a truth universally acknowledged, in the U.S. of 2012, that all houses, forever forward and aft, sport white goddesses reposing in their basements.
Segue back to Charleston, South Carolina of the 1950s. I rush in from school, the screen door slams behind me. My mother stands at the sink. Above her rises a 14-foot ceiling, deep with shadows and cobwebs. She is washing clothes--my school uniforms, socks, night gowns, my father's heavy khaki uniforms, her own cotton house dresses, my sister's play clothes.
Standing at a deep window well I stare out to a cobblestone parking yard. We live in the Old Citadel, built a hundred years ago to house cadets in a military college. Behind me, now, my mother is ironing the uniforms which she has starched and hung in the courtyard on a metal and rope contraption that looks like an upside down umbrella. She has sprinkled the stiff trousers and shirts with water, then rolled them into balls and let them sit. Once moisture has softened the hard starched khaki, she can manage to smooth them with her iron. If steam irons have been invented, we don't have one. Even as a girl in third grade, I understood that my mother worked very hard.
There was no white goddess in our basement. We had no basement. I had not yet met that era's version of a washing machine, and dryers meant the contraption she set up outside, letting the sun and wind do the work.
I've often thought of her as a pioneer housewife. Partly because she came from North Dakota and read to us from the "Laura and Mary" books--"Little House on the Prairie," etc. But also because her strength and resilience supported a physically demanding life. She did not have to cut wood for a stove--we had a gas range. But she did almost everything else "by hand," except bake bread. Though she was only a mediocre cook, we never went hungry. She sent me and my sister to walk across Marion Square with nickles and dimes clutched in our pockets. We bought loaves of bread, and bags of tapioca for puddings at a little grocer. The Mars bars tantalized. Sometimes we bought milk in a bottle, but most of the time, these clinking sweating dames were delivered by a man driving a horse and wagon. Later he acquired a truck. We had one car. My mother didn't learn to drive until I had graduated from college.
All this goes to say that truths "universally acknowledged" fly away with the wind. Times are changing all around us. I'm often besieged by thoughts of how to lower energy use. I'm stymied by this current drought, quite aware that by watering my trees (from the boulevard ash all the way to the backyard white pine and spruce), I'm using a precious, dwindling resource. What will happen to my beloved trees when the Mississippi runs so low, water can't be pumped to supply the Cities? What, ultimately, will happen to us if we have to live with one bucket of water per person, per day? Images of North African nomads flit through my mind. The women are clothed in layers of long flowing garments. Their faces are mostly covered. Sand stings. Bodies need protection from hot winds. The truth "universally acknowledged" that Minnesota with its 10,000 lakes will never run out of water, may one day crumble to dust.
For now, I conserve this way: I use and reuse and reuse water in the sink. First to wash hands, then catching the runoff in a dish, to swipe left-over food off plates after a meal, finally to clean cat-food cans before recycling them. Several years ago, I did an internet search on "grey water" usage--the recycling of rinse water and shower water for irrigating backyard lawns, trees, gardens. Several U.S. states allow this. Minnesota not yet. I tried inserting a proposal for grey water into the DFL platform, but met resistance from plumbers' unions. Plumbers would need to be retrained. "It is a truth universally acknowledged..."
I cut down on energy use: raising the blinds high for "natural" light, using long-lasting and minimal energy-use halogen bulbs, turning off all the way every computer once it's not being used. Putting TVs on power strips and turning them off all the way. Making a deal with my husband that if he completely unplugs the myriad "chargers" for his hand-helds, I won't run the outside water when he's exercising in the basement. Sensitive ears, that man.
I cook in bulk. I keep the freezer totally filled with frozen leftovers. In deep cold, we turn the heat down to 62, early in the evening, and raise it to 68 late in the morning. No, we don't wear wool against the skin, but we wear warm night-clothes, and, my one decadent indulgence, I use an electric blanket. I figure it's cheaper to heat one bed than a whole house. Recently we received an approval rating from Xcel Energy: we used 12% less energy than our neighbors. It's because we have no air conditioning. Fans will do.
And our dryer? The second of our two white basement goddesses? I dry my "wash 'n' wear" clothes maybe 3 minutes, then hang them on the line. Anything else--towers, sheets, napkins, socks, washcloths, nightgowns--dry on a line in the basement. The husband has to have anything that will touch hi sensitive skin fluffed in the dryer. Hmmm! I wonder how he managed as a kid. No dryers then. "It is a truth universally acknowledged..."
Saturday, September 15, 2012
Margotlog: The SPCO's Divine Coherence
Margotlog: The SPCO's Divine Coherence
The process of creating an orchestra is like working a manuscript through a thousand drafts, each adjustment, adding and subtracting, listening and blending, heightening and subduing finally produces a glorious resonance of refinement and depth. It's simply not possible to achieve--except with rare flashes of inspiration--without hours, days, months of constructive work. The same group of musicians must practice and perform together until they can hear each other with such finesse that their intelligent, lively coherence becomes a thing in itself. Like a forest where the trees talk to each other. Not possible if a tall beech or maple occurs every 500 yards with only stumps in between.
Those who know little about slow growth but lots about "cut and run" make extremely poor managers of organic wholes. In fact their mind-set is not to foster and maintain but to take away as much as possible, leaving only a skeleton of the glorious whole.The "screen of trees along the highway" mentality, beyond which lies a cut-over horror.
Unfortunately the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra has been put through a wrenching process by its managers, and the end is not in sight. After living through the summer with a draconian proposal hanging over their heads--reduce salaries more than 50%, cut the number of full-time musicians and the number of performances, and bring in "guns for hire"--the orchestra received what looked like a more acceptable proposal on the eve of their opening concert. Long-time players could retire with a comfortable settlement, newer players would be paid less than the current rate but not starved, and the number of performances would remain the same. Evidently a pot of money exists to support up to fifteen or so such retirements.
Though this "buy out" looked good at first blush, it has implications that could reduce the current memberships by so significant a number that the divine coherence, honed and crafted over years, may sadly dissipate.
There has to be a better way. Over the last decade, the musicians have "given back" around 2 million to the organization. Now we propose that the organization reciprocate. Take the millions set aside to pay for retirement and increase the yearly wage for all players, encouraging most to stay. It seems self-evident that retaining the divine coherence benefits the musicians as well as their eager audience. The solution will be received with such resounding gratitude that many of us who've enjoyed years of SPCO glory will dig deeper into our pockets. We will start a fund dedicated to the musicians and their continued well-being. It's the least we can do to honor the tradition of excellence fostered by players and conductors as well-known as Pinchas Zuckerman, Dennis Russell Davies, Christian Zacharias, Hugh Wolff, Edo de Waart, and many many others.
Let's step around the clear-cut proposal and keep the musical forest alive.
The process of creating an orchestra is like working a manuscript through a thousand drafts, each adjustment, adding and subtracting, listening and blending, heightening and subduing finally produces a glorious resonance of refinement and depth. It's simply not possible to achieve--except with rare flashes of inspiration--without hours, days, months of constructive work. The same group of musicians must practice and perform together until they can hear each other with such finesse that their intelligent, lively coherence becomes a thing in itself. Like a forest where the trees talk to each other. Not possible if a tall beech or maple occurs every 500 yards with only stumps in between.
Those who know little about slow growth but lots about "cut and run" make extremely poor managers of organic wholes. In fact their mind-set is not to foster and maintain but to take away as much as possible, leaving only a skeleton of the glorious whole.The "screen of trees along the highway" mentality, beyond which lies a cut-over horror.
Unfortunately the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra has been put through a wrenching process by its managers, and the end is not in sight. After living through the summer with a draconian proposal hanging over their heads--reduce salaries more than 50%, cut the number of full-time musicians and the number of performances, and bring in "guns for hire"--the orchestra received what looked like a more acceptable proposal on the eve of their opening concert. Long-time players could retire with a comfortable settlement, newer players would be paid less than the current rate but not starved, and the number of performances would remain the same. Evidently a pot of money exists to support up to fifteen or so such retirements.
Though this "buy out" looked good at first blush, it has implications that could reduce the current memberships by so significant a number that the divine coherence, honed and crafted over years, may sadly dissipate.
There has to be a better way. Over the last decade, the musicians have "given back" around 2 million to the organization. Now we propose that the organization reciprocate. Take the millions set aside to pay for retirement and increase the yearly wage for all players, encouraging most to stay. It seems self-evident that retaining the divine coherence benefits the musicians as well as their eager audience. The solution will be received with such resounding gratitude that many of us who've enjoyed years of SPCO glory will dig deeper into our pockets. We will start a fund dedicated to the musicians and their continued well-being. It's the least we can do to honor the tradition of excellence fostered by players and conductors as well-known as Pinchas Zuckerman, Dennis Russell Davies, Christian Zacharias, Hugh Wolff, Edo de Waart, and many many others.
Let's step around the clear-cut proposal and keep the musical forest alive.
Sunday, September 9, 2012
Margotlog: For the Love of an Orchestra
Margotlog: For the Love of an Orchestra
It's difficult to love a huge aggregate. But the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra is small by orchestra standards: thirty-some versus over a hundred (I'm guessing) for the Minnesota Orchestra. Saturday night's concert at the Ordway was for me a love fest. It came just after the board's announcement of a much more lenient package for the orchestra--instead of keeping only a small core and bringing in "players for hire"; cutting salaries as low as $25,000/year, and reducing the number of concerts, most salaries would hover around $62,000. A full complement of musicians would be retained, and there'd be a satisfactory retirement package to encourage some long-timers to exit.
The past week has been fraught with sadness and tension. Could the board truly institute its draconian intention? Many of us cried out, NO NO NO. The opening concerts were a love fest of relief between players and audience: the flayers had been sent away. Our beloved players in their jewel of a hall would gather another year to challenge and delight us.
The challenge came first in two "neoclassical" pieces by Stravinsky. As I write this, I'm listening to that Russo-American's 1920s ballet score "Pulcilnella," created for the Dyagliev Paris ballet, with sets designed by Picasso, and the music based on Pergolesi and the Commedia dell'Arte masked traveling Italian troupes. If time travel could take me back to that first performance, I'd bring the SPCO players with me. Stravinsky in "Pulcinella" is a more lyrical, story-telling composer than in the two pieces the SPCO played last night: a flute, woodwind and brass "Octet" from 1922, with some of the charming quick tempo and mood changes and "hoots" that always make me smile. But lacking the expansive charm of "Pulcinella." I liked better the other Stravinsky, a 1940s all string "Concerto in D." It had more coherence which helped with the rather dry melodic business.
After the intermission came the piece de resistance--Beethoven's "Eroica" symphony--grand, complicated expression of the heroic spirit, intended originally to honor Napoleon. Surely this work was chosen way back in the spring, before all the wrangling about continuing the orchestra took place. But it was a completely fitting shout of joy, and weeping in suffering and relief (the second "Marcia funebra" movement). I had to close my eyes to fully take in the glorious playing--Beethoven's fascinating shifts (sometimes almost like flying up stairs) from gloom to light, from plodding and slow to eager tripping, all gathered and consumed in the simplicity of a few dominating motifs.
The audience was (I'm guessing) to a person on their feet with applause. Then with my eyes open and full of tears, I looked at my beloved orchestra, the faces and figures I know almost like a family (though of course they don't know me--that odd one-way relation of performer and listener). And I saw relieved tears in some of their eyes too. They honored their vigorous, talented, steadfast maestro Edo de Waart who has stood with them in the week's public discussion. Thank you, indeed, from our hearts, with sadness for the initial, dismal way they were treated. And relief in hopes we may continue, full force and together, this exploration of excellent performing.
It's difficult to love a huge aggregate. But the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra is small by orchestra standards: thirty-some versus over a hundred (I'm guessing) for the Minnesota Orchestra. Saturday night's concert at the Ordway was for me a love fest. It came just after the board's announcement of a much more lenient package for the orchestra--instead of keeping only a small core and bringing in "players for hire"; cutting salaries as low as $25,000/year, and reducing the number of concerts, most salaries would hover around $62,000. A full complement of musicians would be retained, and there'd be a satisfactory retirement package to encourage some long-timers to exit.
The past week has been fraught with sadness and tension. Could the board truly institute its draconian intention? Many of us cried out, NO NO NO. The opening concerts were a love fest of relief between players and audience: the flayers had been sent away. Our beloved players in their jewel of a hall would gather another year to challenge and delight us.
The challenge came first in two "neoclassical" pieces by Stravinsky. As I write this, I'm listening to that Russo-American's 1920s ballet score "Pulcilnella," created for the Dyagliev Paris ballet, with sets designed by Picasso, and the music based on Pergolesi and the Commedia dell'Arte masked traveling Italian troupes. If time travel could take me back to that first performance, I'd bring the SPCO players with me. Stravinsky in "Pulcinella" is a more lyrical, story-telling composer than in the two pieces the SPCO played last night: a flute, woodwind and brass "Octet" from 1922, with some of the charming quick tempo and mood changes and "hoots" that always make me smile. But lacking the expansive charm of "Pulcinella." I liked better the other Stravinsky, a 1940s all string "Concerto in D." It had more coherence which helped with the rather dry melodic business.
After the intermission came the piece de resistance--Beethoven's "Eroica" symphony--grand, complicated expression of the heroic spirit, intended originally to honor Napoleon. Surely this work was chosen way back in the spring, before all the wrangling about continuing the orchestra took place. But it was a completely fitting shout of joy, and weeping in suffering and relief (the second "Marcia funebra" movement). I had to close my eyes to fully take in the glorious playing--Beethoven's fascinating shifts (sometimes almost like flying up stairs) from gloom to light, from plodding and slow to eager tripping, all gathered and consumed in the simplicity of a few dominating motifs.
The audience was (I'm guessing) to a person on their feet with applause. Then with my eyes open and full of tears, I looked at my beloved orchestra, the faces and figures I know almost like a family (though of course they don't know me--that odd one-way relation of performer and listener). And I saw relieved tears in some of their eyes too. They honored their vigorous, talented, steadfast maestro Edo de Waart who has stood with them in the week's public discussion. Thank you, indeed, from our hearts, with sadness for the initial, dismal way they were treated. And relief in hopes we may continue, full force and together, this exploration of excellent performing.
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