Mela

Kalikimaka –R. Alex Anderson

Mele Kalikimaka is the thing to say
On a bright Hawaiian Christmas Day
That’s the island

greeting that we send to you
From the land where palm trees sway
Here we know that Christmas will be green and bright
The sun to

shine by day and all the stars at night
Mele Kalikimaka is Hawaii’s way
To say “Merry Christmas to you.”

As we all well know, tonight is the longest night,

counterpart to the day with the shortest period of daylight. (Oddly, it is not the day with the latest sunrise or earliest sunset —

those occur a bit before or after the solstice.)

Enjoy the long darkness and the recurring promise of the other half of the cycle,

with daylight stretching towards warmth and growth. Nothing is more sacred nor worshipful than this: Season’s Greetings! mjh

PS: Precision freaks may like knowing that Winter begins at 11:35am. I accept that we can measure the time

any point on Earth’s elliptical orbit occurs, but I’ll be marking the Solstice from sunset to sunrise.

Welcome and

thanks for taking the time to read my blog.

I hope you can just dive in and find something worthwhile. If you’d like

some guidance, here it is:

• Like most blogs, the most recent entry or post is at the top of the first page. As you read

  down any page, you are reading back towards the earlier entries written over 14 days.

  Sometimes this seems weird, especially

  when a recent entry refers to something older that you haven’t read yet.

  If you are returning, as you read down you will

  eventually run into something you’ve already read. No blog seems to have an effective way to “show me only things I haven’t

  seen”.

• My remarks usually appear like this text. Text from other sources usually appears in black on white.
• Entries are also categorized and can be read on category pages (see links to the side of the main column).
• You can

  search for entries. See the little search box at the top of each page.

• You can bookmark or send a link to a specific entry by

  browsing it first (click the heading over that entry). That takes you to a particular page for just that entry. Then bookmark that page

  or send that address to a friend (thanks). Blog-nerds call this the permalink for that post.

• I’m interested in any

  thoughtful response. You can use the comments link for an entry or write me directly

  anytime.

Sometimes, I just want to preserve something I’ve read and encourage you to read it, too. Other times, I

feel I have something to add, often brief, sometimes sarcastic or angry. Once in a while, I feel more creative or verbose. mjh

Merri and I had a couple of nights out on the town this week. Thursday night, we went to hear

Carmina Burana, by Carl Orff, performed in Popejoy Hall. From the mezzanine, crowded with friends and family of the performers, we looked

down on the densely packed stage, including bleachers spanning the entire stage and half its depth for about two hundred singers from the

UNM University Chorus and Concert Choir.

I’m not much of a concert-goer, but it is amazing to be in such a context, united with

many strangers by something beautiful and uplifting.

Even if you don’t recognize the names Carmina Burana or Orff, you know the

opening and closing of this piece. It may be the best or most rousing 5 minutes of music ever. Even if that is hyperbolic, it has to be

on the short list of greatest choral pieces of the 20th Century. Oddly, I first heard it in the stunning-at-the-time movie Excaliber.

Since then, we’ve heard it once before at UNM Popejoy and we have a couple of recordings of it.

To me, Carmina bridges pre-20th

Century and 20th Century music. It has long moments seeming plainly classical and then punctuates those with a more modern dissonance and

cacophony. Strings are plucked instead of stroked. There’s a xylophone, two gongs, bells, etc. The 5 percussionists work their asses

off.

My knowledge of music isn’t sufficient to be sure, but it seems full of humor — something Frank Zappa might have liked.

Surely Orff despised some tenor enough to require him to be on stage for over an hour and sing not 5 minutes, indeed, singing the part of

a roasted swan (O miserable me. Now I am roasted black!) Then there are the two grand pianos which don’t seem to play in more than two

of the 25 sections.

In the midst of this, I had an epiphany about what an extraordinary programming language musical notation is.

One can write a page of black dots and lines to control the simultaneous operation of hundreds of individuals. Though there must be

variations intentional and accidental, a music “program” runs the same anywhere, anytime — across centuries. The same cannot be said

about any other human-written programming language.

The story of the libretto seems fictional. A collection of poems and songs

written by defrocked priests between the 11th and 14th Centuries. Yeah, OK. The Latin lyrics are well-worth translating; much of the

non-musical humor is there.

And yet, again, that opening and closing (which was played a third time as an encore) is stunning

musically and lyrically:

O, Fortune!
Like the Moon
Everchanging
Rising first
Then declining;

Hateful life
Treats us badly
Then with kindness
Making sport with our desires,
Causing power
And poverty alike
To

melt like ice.

mjh
PS: Two little tangential items about me and music, one of which no

one else knows. First, I was the Data Processing Manager for the National Symphony Orchestra over 20 years ago. My office in the Kennedy

Center had been a broom closet which I shared with an IBM System 34. The other is that over 30 years ago I took a Music Theory class and

wrote a piece of music in a strictly mechanical manner — I don’t play any instrument. I called it “The Cacophonous Cavalier” (after the

University of Virginia’s namesake) and sub-titled it “Mund voll Kartofeln” (I was a German Major; that’s literally “mouth full of

potatoes” and an old-fashioned way to call someone dim. The TA wrote “quatscherei” (nonsense). I don’t recall the grade; I never heard

it played.

Thank you for

stopping by to read my blog.
peace,
mjh

Who Does This Guy Think He Is?

My name is Mark Justice Hinton. I am a life-long old school liberal who believes America has been

hijacked by the Radical Right, a consortium of corporate money-launderers, inflexible ideologues and evangelical fanatics, a group

trending towards fascism.

I regret that America is fracturing into warring camps while I recognize my role in that. I will not be

the first to turn the other check or to forgive them their trespasses. The party of Lush Limbaugh and Pat Robertson uses corporate money

to set the citizenry at each other’s throats while passing money under the table to buy what they want from those with power. We are at

the edge of dark times with the dawning of The Christian Nation of AmeriCo, the NADA (New American Dark Ages), where ignorance isn’t

just bliss, it’s good for business.

Still, I am a cynical optimist and a fool for our system of checks and balances. I have

little faith in the electorate but I believe the system tends towards self-correction. Duhbya and Company will go the way of

Nixon; we’ve seen it all before.

peace, mjh

write me

www.edgewiseblog.com
www.mjhinton.net/revolt/
www.bush2mars.com