From where we sit 2010 is extremely well begun. The dog is dozing by the stove. There are birds of one feather or another greedily eating at our expense in all directions. The frontal weather patterns in concert with falling temperatures and our own activities make it a high pain day. And there’s no place I’d rather be, no one I’d rather be here with.
We watched part of the Rose Bowl parade this morning. I’m reminded of my days in high school marching and concert band. It was decided that we would submit an entry film to be considered for participation. Unfortunately, the theme for the upcoming year was based upon the musical, “Mary Poppins.” The music was rather insipid to begin with. When re-scored for marching band instrumentation, it was just plain awful. We weren’t selected to participate and I was not disappointed at the news.
Cold and windy, intermittent sun breaking through overcast. The forecast is for colder, colder, and colder. Wood is available, filter shack is keeping the filters warm enough but once it drops into the single digits at night I’ll leave a faucet running so that there is a steady influx of well water into the filters and through the inflow plumbing. Well water will be above freezing temperature and will transfer some of its relative heat to the filter tier. This bears close watching and monitoring with our IR reading thermometer during the next week. Keeping filters warm is yet another thing we had to learn about using a well.
Rather than listen to or watch the inevitable lists of best/worst/most/least (insert your choice of ), I cued up a list of songs by Peter, Paul, & Mary, Dave Van Ronk, David Grisman, Jerry Garcia, Beausoliel, Jimmy Buffett and Leonard Cohen to listen to today. It is, after all, great music. It resides on my hard drive and would not be there unless it had passed several selection criteria. They are nearly all acoustic music, non-electric. What is electric in production is scored so that it can be performed using an acoustic stage if desired. As much as I enjoy the Grateful Dead’s music, my primary love is acoustic, folk, jazz, mountain/old-timey, bluegrass, orchestral, blues. While many people love electric blues, I truly believe that acoustic blues will always eclipse Chicago or any other electrified and amplified blues. The electrified performance becomes a style and capability battle between performers. Acoustic blues is just one singer pouring out emotion with an acoustic guitar or harmonica underlining the emotion.
In an acoustic performance, every note played or sung by every performer is important. When amplification intrudes, the soundboard/output mix becomes a battle ground and all too often the music is the loser. The current practice seems to be that bass and drums take precedence over everything else. Lead guitar gets pushed up by some soundmen. Bands traveling without their own sound crew can really wind up with a horrible mix by using local sound crews. There’s also the serious problem of hearing loss that is endemic to amplified band performers. Many of them have damage as serious or even more serious than that I incurred in the Army.
The political outlook, as we enter the new year is highly uncertain. The GOP is making use of every error or glitch in the Obama administration’s performance to hammer out a high volume, highly repetitive series of lies and misinformation commercials. The Democrats have yet to learn that they must play together in a cohesive manner, that not every voice gets top-billing every moment. They still can’t understand that far too many people stand ready to believe ever lie published by the GOP.
The last decade has shown that the American public seems unable to understand that repetition and volume do not make a statement true, do not make the unethical ethical. No amount of whispered truth will overcome the treachery and lies that are spread by right wing talk radio. Those ready to believe in conspiracies will continue to believe that Israel took down the World Trade Center, that Obama is not a citizen, that Sarah Palin’ s family was targeted rather than thrown out as a prop by her. The decade was one of foreign and domestic policy determined by theocrats, oligarchs, and liars who used the government to advance personal fortunes and those of their cronies while bankrupting the nation. We need new leaders who are not financed by lobbyists. We need to block any access by lobbyist for industry and commerce to our lawmakers. We need new leaders who actually understand that they work for the populace. It may be possible to make these changes in our government, but I seriously doubt it. The people who would be willing to serve the nation under such circumstances generally don’t enter politics and don’t have the capital to finance a campaign. It is time to look at how we choose our elected officials. Our party system has served us moderately well but as the two dominant parties emerged and solidified their hold on the voter base, the option of fielding serious candidate from other parties decreased markedly.
“You who choose, to lead must follow,
But if you fall you fall alone,
If you should stand then who's to guide you?
If I knew the way I would take you home. “
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