Orchestral Maneuvers …

… but I’m not exactly in the dark. (I think this makes my third OMD-titled post. I can’t resist it when I’m sitting in Carnegie Hall being wowed by a beloved orchestra.)

Tonight is my final concert of the 22-23 season of the Philadelphia Orchestra. And the particular maneuvers that interest me tonight are the changes in seating for horns and winds.

I have a seat in a Second Tier box (because I’m spoiled and fancy like that), and tonight when I arrived I noticed that the last four boxes on both sides of the tier were closed … and set up with music stands and instruments. There were trumpets and French horns and bassoons and trombones … and what goes on? As people started coming to their seats, we were all wondering what could be happening over at the ends of the tier.

The second half of the performance was Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring (which he wrote when he was not yet 30 … I mean … damn). No one thought the curious arrangement of instruments could be for the Stravinsky, though. 

The first piece to be performed was Vespers of the Blessed Earth, by John Luther Adams, a piece getting its New York premiere at tonight’s concert. And – among many other excellent things about this extraordinary piece for orchestra, chorus, and soprano soloist – it was Vespers that required the curious orchestral maneuvers.

If you have a chance to see this piece performed live, GO. It was just incredible. Some quick notes of things that wowed me:

Somehow he created the sound of walking in a cold and frozen landscape. I could feel the ice cracking, hear the wind. 

The women in the chorus also played small, whirring instruments that looked like old-fashioned noisemakers I remember from my childhood. 

Those same women used their voices in the second movement to make the beautiful and melancholy sound of New Guinean fruit doves. In that same movement, the men’s voices sounded almost like the throat singers of Tuva.

Adams references the sixth extinction, naming the fourth of the five movements for the great dying-off we’ve created: “Litanies of the Sixth Extinction.” This movement would surely have been powerful even if I hadn’t read Elizabeth Kolbert’s book three times, but it was especially powerful given that fact. This was the movement that required the Second-Tier instruments. They played against one another from across the hall in a call-and-response style as the chorus sang the names of 193 threatened and endangered plants and animals (the golden frog!). That list of names is quite small compared to the number we’ve already lost. That list in tonight’s performance ended with … homo sapiens.

The final movement took my breath away. Meigui Zhang was the soloist, her gorgeous voice perfect in this piece. From the program notes:

The concluding “Aria of the Ghost Bird” revisits the sacred implications of birdsong and spiritual presence, but with a poignant, cautionary tone. In this movement, Adams sets musically the call of the now-extinct Kaua’i ‘Ō’ō bird (Moho braccatus) of Hawai’i. The composer transcribed the bird’s distinctive all from a 1987 recording of the last of the species – a male – singing for a female who would never come, but singing to the end nevertheless.

Christopher Gibbs 2023, Program Notes, Philadelphia Orchestra

*

Sigh. 

---

It’s the 16th annual Slice of Life Story Challenge!
Head on over to Two Writing Teachers
and see what the rest of this year’s slicers are up to!

A Little Shock

As I sat on the end of a bench waiting for my subway to work yesterday, I heard someone coming down the platform coughing loudly and wetly (yes, that sound is definitely on my “least favorite” list, especially since the coming of Covid). I glanced back and saw an unmasked man (of course unmasked) pushing a shopping cart full of trash. He was white and a little rough looking – disheveled, hair all over, mumbling to himself.

He stopped beside the bench, almost parallel to me, and turned to look at me. After a few seconds, he resumed his walk down the platform with his cart. As he passed me, he muttered, “Nasty dreads. Need to cut ’em off, burn them, burn them all off.”

Folks who read my woefully-occasional posts may remember a troubling one from last year about an angry and disturbed Black man at my station who took an instant, enraged dislike to me. He, too, spat out some hate as he walked past me. In that case, it was very obviously directed at me. In the case of this morning’s ugliness, it’s certainly possible the man on the platform yesterday was simply opining in a general way, continuing aloud a conversation he’d been running in his head about the merits or not of locs. I mean, it’s possible, but fairly unlikely. And, as I was the only person near him and the only Black person with kinky hair done in twists and the person he had so pointedly turned to look at, it was pretty clear his comment was a response to me, was meant for me to hear.

Let’s set aside the sad fact that I’ve never gotten my act far enough together to grow locs. I accept that many people don’t really know what locs are and can’t see that my two-strand twists are definitely only two-strand twists and not locs. Let’s also move past the fact that no one should be saying “dreadlocks.” In this man’s case, given his obvious distaste, he’d be exactly a person who’d say dreads instead of locs.

So, setting all that aside … what the actual fuck? Hating a hairstyle is one thing. Wishing to see hair cut off is admittedly a lot and pretty disgusting. Wanting to burn off someone’s hair? That’s about 78 levels beyond.

In that post about the other Stacie-hating man on the train platform, I talked about my Spidey senses, about how I’ve learned to trust my fear, trust my sense of danger. I didn’t have as much fear of the man I saw yesterday as I did of the man in the first situation, but I had enough fear, enough that I knew not to pretend I was safe near him, knew to keep close watch on where he moved on the platform. Which is why I noticed that he came off the train at the same transfer point I did, why I made sure to position myself away from the platform edge in case he felt inspired to push me to the tracks.

In 2014 I was in San Francisco. It wasn’t my first trip, but it was the first time I was pushed to be aware of the outsize number of angry, unwell people who seemed at all times to walk a tightrope between keeping things together and exploding with violent rage. I’ve lived most of my life in New York City, often in neighborhoods that are considered sketchy, and I’ve never felt as constantly close to danger as I did on that trip.

And no, I don’t feel constantly close to danger in my city today, but the fact that I ever feel close to danger here is new and entirely unacceptable. The fact that, since midway through the second phase of the pandemic, I have had that feeling again and again is new and entirely, unsettlingly unacceptable.

Nothing happened yesterday. The man wheeled his cart past me and on toward the elevator. My connecting train came immediately and drove me away from him. Done and done. But I am still unsettled.

Still unsettled, feeling as though something has been stolen from me, that my city isn’t as much mine as it has been all these years.

*

After work, I stopped at the grocery store on my way home. I opted for a person rather than the self-checkout, and the cashier was a young-young man. When I handed him my customer card, our fingers touched and we got a shock. We both flinched back from it. I apologized and we laughed … and the checker from the next aisle said when she was a kid, girls believed that getting a shock from a boy meant he would be your husband one day. (Was that ever a thing when you were a kid? Definitely wasn’t for me. What a wacky portent to attach to static!)

My cashier looked aghast (the first time I’ve wanted to use that word to describe someone’s expression). I told him not to worry, that I was old enough to be his grandmother, so not at all interested in marrying him. The woman cashier laughed, and I added: “If you need a granny to knit you a sweater, though, I’m the one.”

The look on my cashier’s face! His eyes widened and softened and he looked about ten years old, looked like a boy who needed and really wanted a granny who would knit him sweaters. My heart melted. It was all I could do not to actually offer to knit for him. I smiled, paid for my yogurt and veggies and took my mushy-hearted self home. A much better random encounter to end my day than the one that started it.

When I wrote the first part of this essay, I was going to title it, “Burn Them All Off.” But then I had that little shock at Foodtown, that reminder that the city is still mine most of the time, that there is danger but there is also light and sweet-faced young people who want to be cherished by their elders. It doesn’t erase the morning’s unpleasantness, doesn’t erase the reality that my world has changed and I need to be more wary than I’ve ever needed to be in my life. But I welcome the spoonful of sugar.

---

In 2017, I took up Vanessa Mártir’s #52essays2017 challenge to write an essay a week. I didn’t complete 52 essays by year’s end, but I did write like crazy, more in 2017 than in 2015 and 2016 combined! I’ve kept working on personal essays, kept at my #GriotGrind. If you’d care to join, it’s never too late! Find the group on FB: #52Essays Next Wave.

Continuous Passive Motion

Today, in a BIPOC antiracism group I co-facilitate, we talked about Atlanta, and one of the women in the group brought up the belief that Black people and Asian people don’t get along. She talked about some of the responses to the Atlanta attack that were coming up in her friend circles and in her family. And that conversation reminded me of this:

After my first knee surgery in 2016 (not my first knee surgery, but the first one I had that year … it’s a long and un-pretty story), I left the hospital and did the first couple of weeks of my recuperation in a really nice rehab facility in Manhattan’s Chinatown. Most of the nursing assistants in that place were Asian women. Many of the patients were Asian, too, but not all.

I had brought a lot of pass-the-time stuff with me, imagining that I’d need the distractions, that I wouldn’t just be doing physical therapy or sleeping, which is generally what one does after knee surgery. One of the things I brought with me was the baby blanket I was knitting for a friend’s newly-arrived first child.

Everyone was interested in my knitting. They would all ask what I was working on, and I’d tell them, and they’d say it was a nice gift. One morning, I’d gotten some super adorable pics of my friend and her baby, so when the first person asked me about the blanket, I decided to also show her the picture of the gift recipient. I pulled up the photo on my phone and handed it to the nursing assistant. She looked shocked, which wasn’t the response I was expecting. She turned the phone to face me.

“Your friend is Chinese!”

And that was true, but so? I acknowledged the yes, my friend was Chinese. She nodded and handed back my phone. “Wow,” she said quietly. I’m not sure she actually looked at the baby at all. I was puzzled, but let it go. I showed the picture to some of the other Asian women who took care of me and got almost the same response each time.

Months later, after my second knee surgery that year (as I said, a long and un-pretty story), I was back in the same rehab place. A friend had come to visit me, and then another friend arrived. Both are women I knew from my old job. The first woman who’d come by is white. The second woman who came by is Chinese — not the mother of the baby, whole different friend group. For the purposes of this story, I’ll call the white woman Anne and the Chinese woman Miao. While we were hanging out, one of the nursing assistants came in to check on me. She looked stunned to see Miao and immediately excused herself. Thirty seconds later, another assistant came to the room, got a look at Miao and dashed away. This continued. Maybe five or six more times.

Anne remarked on the incredible attentiveness of the CNA staff. It seemed pretty clear, however, that the staff were coming to see Miao with their own eyes, some in-the-flesh proof of my having Chinese friends. When I said this and told Miao and Anne about the baby photo, Miao nodded. “Yes,” she said. “It’s surprising that you have Asian people for friends. I was taught to think Black people don’t like us. Maybe they were, too.”

Which made me feel sad and naive at the same time. The idea that Black and Asian people don’t get along wasn’t new. I just hadn’t thought about it or seen it play out in such a glaring way in my own life.

my friends wondered if seeing Miao would mean I’d get better treatment. I waved that off as ridiculous, and am happy to say that I was proven right. I was already getting fabulous care. The only way they could have improved on their treatment of me would have been for one of them to morph into my mom and come sing me lullabies to put me to sleep each night.

The idea that Black and Asian people don’t like one another is absurd … or it should be. In the BIPOC group today, we talked about the ways anti-Black racism builds walls between groups, keeping everyone under its thumb, keeping everyone busy laying blame on one another rather than looking at White Supremacy. The careful and intricate constructions of racism keep doing their work, keep humming along under everything.

One of the tools used to support recuperation after knee surgery is a CPM machine: Continuous Passive Motion. You put your leg in this device and it moves your knee through its full range of motion until you turn it off. I both loved and hated that machine. And in our BIPOC group today, thinking about the shocked women in the rehab center, I made the connection that one of White Supremacy’s powerful tools is that it functions like the CPM machine. You don’t have to move a muscle. You are strapped into the apparatus, and it cycles you through the various ranges of hateful motion. It functions in the background with no need for your awareness and will continue to do so until you take deliberate action to shut it down.

When will we be ready to turn off that switch?

---

It’s the 14th annual Slice of Life Story Challenge!
Head on over to Two Writing Teachers
and see what the rest of this year’s slicers are up to!

What I Didn’t Do

Content warning: Atlanta shootings

I had a crap day today. I’m overtired and cranky. I discovered a huge error in the big project we’re slogging through at work. There was a worsening of a pain in my right arm that feels distressingly similar to how my rotator cuff tear started four years ago. I left work too late to make it to the UPS store, which likely means it’s too late to return a nonsense purchase I made a while ago.

I had a crap day on Monday when I hurt my hip and smushed my finger in a door and had a snarky interaction with a neighbor who refuses to wear masks or respect socially-distant space.

I could have an entire blog dedicated to writing about the crap days I have. The days when I come home feeling defeated. The days when it’s hard to get out of bed because what’s the point when everything sucks. The days when I’m more sad, angry, lonely, tired, fed up than I am anything nicer. I generally have pretty good days, but I have quite a number of super-bad ones, too.

I don’t imagine I’m all that unusual. Don’t we all have crap days sometimes?

I had a lousy day. What I didn’t do was pretend that my unfortunate day was a reasonable catalyst for terrorism. What I didn’t do was go on a killing spree and explain my actions by saying I was in a bad mood. What I didn’t do was make my victims out to be villains who left me with no choice but to end their lives. Somehow I managed not to do any of that.

I had a crap day and this is what I did: some impulse grocery shopping when I was finally on my way home and got back here with watermelon, tortilla chips, and ice cream (hey, my binge doesn’t look like everybody’s binge). What I didn’t do, it bears repeating, was kill anyone and then blame them for my violence.

I’m not surprised that a police officer (one who has been revealed to be — surprise! — a racist) would talk about Robert Aaron Long’s act of domestic terrorism in a way that offered up excuses for the murder of eight innocent people. I’m not surprised that this racist police officer told the killer’s story and erased the victims from the narrative as easily as Long did with his racist, misogynistic violence. I’m not surprised. But I am, too.

I had a bad day. And it was made worse by the reverberations of this latest act of white male violence against people of color. Robert Aaron Long isn’t some lone wolf, some individual crazy guy who had a bad day, some unfathomable mad man. Long is one more in a line of violent white men we are asked to ignore over and over again. This morning I wrote on FB that he looks like all of his brothers — like Dylan Roof, like Tim McVeigh, like Biggo with his feet up on Nancy Pelosi’s desk, like every murdering incel. They all look alike, because they are all alike. And we are asked to ignore everything that is plainly similar about all of them, asked to pretend that each of them is a stand-alone case of mental illness rather than force the conversation about the violence of angry white men, rather than act.

I had a bad day, but I’m still here. I wish I could say the same for the eight innocents who were gunned down yesterday.

---

It’s the 14th annual Slice of Life Story Challenge!
Head on over to Two Writing Teachers
and see what the rest of this year’s slicers are up to!

Give Caesar What Belongs to Caesar …

… or, rather, listen to Caesar angrily and petulantly demand to be given a whole lot of things that don’t belong to him at all. Damn, but that Caesar is an aggravating prick.

The Washington Post published the full recording and transcript of the call Caligula made on Saturday to the Georgia secretary of state. The full recording. I listened to every minute.

To say that I found this conversation extraordinary is inaccurate and a serious understatement. To call this a conversation is equally inaccurate. Yes, this is an hour-long recording (just over an hour and two minutes, to be exact). It’s a lot to listen to, but I recommend listening. It’s fascinating in a horrifying kind of way, fascinating in an infuriating kind of way. This is the most I have listened to Caligula in a long time, and it’s a good reminder of why I haven’t spent a lot of time listening to him.

Things that struck me:

1. It’s eerie to hear the desperation in Caligula’s petulant blustering.
2. It’s amazing to hear Caligula offer up as proof of his election win the numbers of people who came to his campaign rallies — including rallies that haven’t happened yet.
3. Even though the people on his side of the call are all there to support his bullshit, Caligula can’t let them speak for more than a minute. And, in the case of Cleta Mitchell, he repeatedly slaps her down, no matter what she is trying to say to support him.
4. WaPo makes a point of bleeping out the name of “an individual about whom the president makes unsubstantiated allegations” … but has no trouble leaving in Stacey Abrams’ name when Caligula makes plenty of unsubstantiated allegations against her. WTF? Caligula actually says at one point that he ran against Abrams. Said he “only ran against her once,” in reference to his endorsement of Brian Kemp. Double-WTF?
5. For some reason, some really hard to understand reason, Caligula takes pains to point out Ryan Germany’s last name, to call out what a nice last name he has. Please make it make sense.
6. Brad Raffensperger and Ryan Germany are really, really, really good at biting their tongues. They sit through a crazypants “tallying” of numbers from Caligula, listen to him say over and over that he won Georgia and won it “very substantially” … and not only do they say nothing, they neither sigh with loud exasperation nor explode with laughter. Instead, Raffensperger is able to say, without a hint of a chuckle in his voice, “We don’t agree that you have won.” So calm and collected … as if he had the cool breeze of FACTS washing over him.
7. Brad Raffensperger offers up the best response I’ve ever heard to bullshit. “Well, Mr. President, the challenge that you have is the data you have is wrong.”
8. Outrageous to hear Kurt Hilbert, one of the lawyers with Caligula, talk about how annoying it is that Raffensperger’s office hasn’t handed over data that’s been requested, saying that “if the information is not forthcoming, there’s something to hide” … saying all of that after Caligula’s people made a sideshow attraction of not turning over information that was requested from them during the impeachment proceedings.

Listening to Caligula is morbidly fascinating.

• “We have all the votes we need. You know, we won the state.”
• “It’s just not possible to have lost Georgia. It’s not possible.”
• “We have won this election in Georgia.”
• “It can’t be disputed.”
• “I don’t need the link [Raffensberger offers of share a link to a video that clarifies a question Caligula keeps asking]. I have a better link.”
• “You’d have to be a child to believe that.”
• “I won this election by hundreds of thousands of votes.”
• “Stacey is as dishonest as they come.”
• “Fulton County is totally corrupt. As she is totally corrupt.”
• “We can go through signature verification, and we’ll find hundreds of thousands of signatures if you let us do it.”
• “You know that. You know that. You have no doubt about that.”
• “In my opinion, based on what I’ve heard.”
• “I just want to find 11,780 votes.”
• “We need only 11,000 votes. We have far more than that. We’ll have more and more.”
• “Look, Brad. I’ve gotta get — I have to find 12,000 votes, and I have them times … a lot. And, therefore, I won the state.”
• “So what are we gonna do here, folks? I only need 11,000 votes. Fellas. I need 11,000 votes. Give me a break.”
• “Brad, what are we gonna do? We won the election, and it’s not fair to take it away from us like this.”
• “Look, ultimately, I win.”
• “It’s very simple. We won the election.”
• “The real truth is that I won by 400,000 votes. At least.”

Caligula sounds tired and frustrated. At times he sounds whiny. He sounds annoyed that he is having to do this work when others should have done it for him already — Powell, Giuliani, the Supreme Court. And he clearly believes if he says something, that thing should automatically be seen as true. He seems surprised when Raffensperger and Germany don’t just go along with everything he throws at them.

You’ll notice that I included several instances of Caligula claiming victory. It probably seems repetitive. Just know that I only transcribed a few of those statements. He says it throughout the hour-long call. It’s as if he’s attempting some kind of neuro-linguistic programming, that if he tells Raffensperger that he’s won — and keeps telling him — that Raffensperger will begin to believe it and will throw out the actual election results and claim victory for Caesar. Ugh.

None of this is surprising … and all of this is surprising. The only thing I’m grateful for in listening to this call is that creepshow vaudevillian Rudy wasn’t in attendance. I shudder at the thought. Every day of this presidency has been a new day for me to discover just how unendingly naïve I am, how absolutely I’ve been walking around with my rose-tinted glasses, a little of the color coating being worn away at a time, but still enough shading there for me to be ever and always surprised by the venal evil that occupies the oval office.

Two and a half weeks. In theory, that’s how long we have left to deal with Caligula in his current role. Still plenty of time for him to shock and horrify me. Plenty of time for him to find another way to stage a coup. Plenty of time for him to activate the violent thugs he ordered to “stand by” a couple of months ago.

I’m trying to breathe deeply, but my chest is so tight.

Addendum:

I can’t stop reading about this call. I mean, I did say “morbid fascination” … In another WaPo piece, there’s an excellent quote from Edward B. Foley, a law professor at Ohio State University:

“He was already tripping the emergency meter,” Foley said. “So we were at 12 on a scale of 1 to 10, and now we’re at 15.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-raffensperger-call-georgia-vote/2021/01/03/d45acb92-4dc4-11eb-bda4-615aaefd0555_story.html?utm_source=pocket-newtab

If it weren’t so alarming, this would all be comedy gold.

___________________________________________________

In 2017, I took up Vanessa Mártir’s #52essays2017 challenge to write an essay a week. I didn’t complete 52 essays by year’s end, but I did write like crazy, more in 2017 than in 2015 and 2016 combined! I’ve kept working on personal essays, kept at my #GriotGrind. If you’d care to join, it’s never too late! Find the group on FB: #52Essays Next Wave.