NO LONGER MUSICAL RARITIES

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

Looking at yet another recording of Vivaldi’s now ubiquitous Four Seasons reminds me of the first time I encountered the work. Two of our local FM stations each had an hour of classical music each night, and there it was, taking up the entire program, or at least most of it.

At the end of the piece, the announcer came on, leaving me to exclaim, “Who was that? Never heard of him.” A nobody composer, then. (Actually, I think my reaction was more graphic. In those days, I wanted BIG NAMES.)

A month later, the same thing.

And a month after that, the reaction continued.

I must have been a sophomore in high school. By my senior year, Vivaldi had gained enough traction to have one of the Four Seasons concertos be included in a Cincinnati May Festival concert I attended (Robert Shaw conducting), and even Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic had recorded an all-Vivaldi album that was a mainstay of my budding collection.

How times have changed.

I remember, too, discovering Mahler through a Boston Symphony recording under Erich Leinsdorf, probably about the same time. By my senior year of college, Mahler had gained enough visibility that I heard two live performances of his Fifth Symphony, one by an Indiana University orchestra and the other by the Cincinnatians under Max Rudolf – and that was within a span of one month.

Now that Mahler and Vivaldi are regulars in the repertoire, I keep hoping for a similar discovery of John Knowles Paine, George Whitefield Chadwick, Amy Beach, and their American Romantic-era colleagues.

Yes, times and tastes can change. There’s so much more to discover and embrace.

TEN HIPPIE MOVIES

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 9 Comments

We’ve already looked at music and literature from the hippie era, but now I’m wondering about movies. Yes, there were some that played straight into the stereotypes. Peter Sellars’ The Guru would head my list there.

But there were also others that took the issues and era seriously, even when they were comedies. Not all of them, I should emphasize, come from the ’60s or ’70s.

For a starter Top Ten list, let me propose:

  • Alice’s Restaurant
  • Putney Swope
  • I Love You, Alice B. Toklas
  • Yellow Submarine
  • Brother Sun, Sister Moon
  • Godspell
  • Hair
  • Jesus Christ Superstar
  • Love Story
  • Zabriske Point

Maybe The Graduate, Swept Away, 10, or Hippie Masala belong on the list. But it’s your turn to weigh in, savvy viewers that you are. What other nominees do you propose?

ACKNOWLEDGING TWO WORLDS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

So what have our children learned, as far as religion goes? What seeds have we planted? Actually, I’m thinking of this not so much as a curriculum matter for the Religious Education committee or as a reflection for parents but rather as a consideration of what’s happened in American society in general – the kind of place where soccer practice is now seen as more valuable (“value enabling”) than Sunday School. Or where a child may develop an aversion to being viewed, in any way, as a “Miss Goody Two-Shoes.”

My thoughts leap ahead to the tension many of us feel in the workplace. As Michael Lerner writes in The Left Hand of God, it’s the conflict of values between our dog-eat-dog competitive economy and those we hold dear and sacred. Fundamentalists, at least, attempt to resolve it by separating the two worlds, but at what cost? Children, of course, pick up on this, tuning out what they see as useless to their survival. And that includes what they observe at home. (Should we note the popularity of so-called “reality TV” – as manifested in The Survivor?) The Amish and other old orders attempt to hold the values of workplace, home, and faith in one sphere, but we can easily imagine the difficulty that, too, presents.

Obviously, I’m not going to resolve any of this in the next few sentences. Without the music of hymns and praise songs, the pageantry of robes, processions, lighting of altar candles, and communion, or the attentive consideration to set prayers and sermons, what do we give our children to cling to? (In the old days, did the plain clothing and “thee/thou” speech offer some refuge or rooting?) Or what invitation do we extend to those “voted off the island”? What I am going to suggest is that the answer is not found so much in any catechism or ceremony as in the way we treat our smallest members, our moments of laboring together, and, yes, the repeated ritual of a certain casserole on youth retreats and its reception.

NOT EXACTLY A BOOM

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 9 Comments

I’ve never really liked the “baby boomer” description. Besides, I think there’s a major barrier between the early experiences of those born before ’47 or ’48, and those after. Around ’48, my wave, was when TV sets were present from the very beginning of our exposure to the world. We can’t remember ever not having one at least somewhere in the neighborhood. (Suddenly, I remember being three or four and having the Sullivan brothers show up to watch “Howdy Doody” with me. They didn’t yet have a tube of their own.)

Every year as our class advanced, our new round of teachers was baffled. All they knew was we were “different” from the previous ones. So to some extent, the TV influence feeds into the hippie outbreak. We were, in effect, wired differently from our seniors. Still are, for that matter.

But the other big shortcoming in the boomer classification is the way it ignores the huge fissure within our generation between those who supported the Vietnam Conflict and those of us who opposed it. That’s something that’s never fully healed, and it’s certainly crippled our ability to come together to advance the ideals some of us, at least, so passionately embraced. I suspect there are many politicians and corporate executives – the dreaded Establishment, that is – who actively worked to keep the wound festering.

So here I am, calling for a renewed vision of our legacy. That’s been one of the promptings of the novels in my series Hippie Trails. You’re welcome to come along on the trip.

 

 

LISTENING TO A POETRY READING

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 4 Comments

Sometimes as I listen during an open mic, especially (and oh how I hate that spelling!), I find myself focusing on a particular reader’s moralizing and editorializing or cliche or heavy reliance on simile rather than metaphor, and that soon sends me into a disturbing zone.

What happens is that I begin editing heavily with an imaginary thick black marker, striking through all of the offending words and phrases, and pretty soon I’m tuning into only to the blackened blocks in the air and tuning out everything else.

Admittedly, I edit myself heavily, and this is a central step in the creation of many of my own works. Admittedly, too, I’m projecting myself onto the poor writer onstage. Admittedly, in particular, I’m forgetting to be humble and open here, star that I might imagine myself to be.

Does anyone else experience anything similar?

WHICH SIDE OF THE REVOLUTION?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 6 Comments

In drawing on the hippie era, I realize how many different strands there were to the movement. Mine happened to lead into a yoga ashram, and though we were drug-free and celibate, we were also at the crossroads of a lot of the hippie action.

All of that’s reflected in my Hippie Trails novels.

As I ponder the era, I also realize DL’s journey in those pages could just as easily turned toward underground violence, had he joined one of the cells of bombers targeting military research operations in frustration, and that version of the story probably would have had commercial publishing cachet. But to me, it would have been dishonest.

More meaningful to my vision is the comment by Mari (River Mama 5) to an earlier posting here:

Amazing how many different views there are. … Hippies to me were quite different. To me, it gave birth to great changes in our society. … I am quite thankful for … the back to the land movement and the Calvary Chapels churches that came to exist during this time. I came to know Jesus Christ in one of them.

They also pioneered living a simpler life … showing compassion to others. Taking care of this gift that is our planet. The “hippies” in America, were great artisans. As a weaver, quilter, and knitter, I look back at this time and find myself inspired by the way creativity roamed free among this way of living.

This is the side I wish to nourish and celebrate. And thank you, Mari and all the others, for sharing.

ALONG THE MISSISSIPPI

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

On my Monday free of the office, I drove up the palisades to nose around a picturesque river city in dull, mid-October weather. Looked at the signs. City Fish Market – Fresh or Smoked, down along the water. “Bill’s,” one door said; the other was “Private.” Down the main street from Doug’s Steak House, which was supposed to be THE place for Mississippi catfish, the town school stood in front of Lock and Dam No. 10.

I pulled into the Corps of Engineers parking lot as the Jack Wofford pushed its barges into the lock, noticed an observation tower, and climbed up to a deck  occupied by mostly married retirees. But in the corner, more my age, was a woman in a London Fog trench coat and big boots, her long, black hair blowing in the cold wind. For a while I wondered if she was part of the pairs and quartets of older folks with their cameras who had come to view the autumn foliage and poke around the gift shops and galleries. She turned her head, noticed me briefly, turned back several times. Between twenty-five and thirty-two, I guessed. Proper makeup, classy.

Then, on the riverboat, a cook appeared at a door and fired back with his camera.  She laughed.

Once the retirees beside her left, I asked her how the crews got their three lengths of barges – 3×3, for nine in all – out of  the locks. “I don’t know,” almost a question. “I’ve never been here before.”

This time I noticed her crooked teeth. Began to wonder about games.

The cook emerged again, this time from the pilot house, and threw something, calculating for the wind. The object curved sharply at the last moment, into her fine catch. She unwrapped it a bit, saw it was a brownie with a phone number and address inside. She giggled to another old couple: “I think he’s had a lot of experience.”

Once the riverboat churned out of the lock, she descended to a powder blue Ford Torino, donned kid gloves with little holes for driving, and drove off.

The wrapper around her plates left me wondering if she was from the Henry County in Iowa or the one up in Minnesota.

I was left wondering, of course. Why so dressed up? And free on a Monday? That wasn’t a typical single person’s car. A professional, between stops? An art major, who gave it up for money? A government worker, with Columbus Day free? Off to a sweet rendezvous? Delightful divorced? Bored, with kids?

Me, at the time, with my own wife a thousand miles to the west, presumably finishing college.

THE MISSING VOICE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 4 Comments

A central problem for newspapers in the past half century is that they became increasingly homogenized and thus lost their distinctive, individual identities. Admittedly, that was always a problem when people saw it as “the paper” rather than the Times or Post or Chronicle or Herald and so on. But in the days when a city would have two or more daily newspapers, each one needed to have some unique identity to set it apart in the marketplace. Sometimes it was along party lines – Republican or Democrat – or social identities, such as blue-collar or proper society, but often it also meant the kind of news that was emphasized: national and international, for instance, versus local. And hometown columnists were always a voice that readers could count on. Think Herb Caen in San Francisco, Mike Royko in Chicago, or Jimmy Breslin in New York – or any of the great sportswriters.

In those days, newspapers were thinner than they became in the last decades of the 20th century – often just two sections – rather than the four to eight that followed in the great mergers and closures that led most cities to have only one daily journal. Much of that problem, we should note, could be blamed on the “unduplicated readership” that ad-space buyers relied on in allocating their budgets. No matter how marvelous the Washington Star was in its final days, or the suburban Journal papers were in the counties around the city, they couldn’t overcome that hurdle – when it came to outright readership, the Washington Post had the monopoly. Since everybody had to read it, there was no point in advertising elsewhere.

With few exceptions – New York, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia – we’re left with single-paper markets where the product looks and reads like those everywhere else, except that the stories take place there than elsewhere.

As the local newspaper more and more became a one-size-fits-all model, what I no longer heard was the feeling that it “speaks for me” or my section of the wider community. And now, even those special voices within its pages are no longer there – one by one, the columnists were never replaced.

The newspaper I longed to create had little resemblance to that bland crime-and-crashes emphasis that too often prevails these days, in place of more difficult and costly investigative reporting or a bigger view that critically examines education, the fine arts, social justice, the environment, and so on.

It’s hard to get excited by what’s there. And we wonder why circulation kept declining even before the Internet?

This is, I should note, a contrarian viewpoint, since the publishers kept proclaiming the “improved service” each time they merged two papers into one. So here we are, online and blogging.

~*~

Hometown News

To find out more about Hometown News or to obtain your own copy, go to my page at Smashwords.com.

LOVELY LEEKS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 20 Comments

Unlike the rest of my family, I have an aversion to onions. Or maybe it’s the other way around. It’s not pretty. I’ll spare you my rant. Likewise, I could cite a long history, with heavy childhood quagmire, but we’ll just leave it there.

Leeks, on the other hand, create no problems. They’re marvelous and so beautiful in and out of the garden. So it’s a glorious compromise, all the way around. (Shall we say that potato-leek soup is one of my favorites?)

And I’ve developed quite the love for garlic. In and out of the garden.