Musings, what is to become of this blog, and other more important stuff

Of all the instruments in an orchestra, my favorite is the oboe. Its sound haunts me, and perhaps as in the screen grab above, has the same effects on the clarinetist sitting next to the oboist in the London Symphony Orchestra. And, perhaps as you read this and think I am going to write about classical music, you’ve decided that you’ve better things to do.

I’ll be brief. The oboist is playing part of Dvorak’s 9th Symphony, second movement, a beautiful haunting piece.  I recognized it instantly as I flipped on my iPad this morning. I tried to save it but could not. It only wants to show the entire video, and take you to Facebook in the process. You’re on your own.

I first came upon this piece of music years ago in a piano piece by Charlie Haden and Hank Jones, used by the producers of the TV series Bosch. In the episode a young boy had died before his time, and as the piano music, called “Goin’Home“, played, two detectives were informing the mother of her son’s death, and Harry Bosch uncovering the body at the morgue. The emotion that the piece invoked was overwhelming. I sent away for the CD on which Haden and Jones*** played it, and a couple of months later it arrived from England. The entire CD consisted of that piece and familiar religious compositions, none of which appealed to me. But I hung on to Goin’ Home piece because of its powerful evocative quality. Later I learned that the piece was played at FDR’s funeral, during a time when the whole nation was in mourning. (Have I ever written about FDR faking his death? All of the hallmarks of a fake presidential death are there, but I’ve never had the energy to write it up.)

I put the lyrics to the piece at the end here for anyone interested, as it was written to be a Negro spiritual. Lovely though they are, I think the lyrics ruin the music.

It was adapted into the vocal song in 1922 by Dvořák’s student, William Arms Fisher. A few years later, when my Aunt Dorothy died (at age 99), Covid was in full force, and her eight surviving children were not permitted to be within six feet of one another during her funeral. I offered the music to my cousin, and suggested it would be a proper goodbye, and Margie agreed. However,  she opted for a lyrical version performed by a singer with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, and that ruined it for me. 

It is probably just me, but the emotions behind the music are only carried instrumentally, and a baritone singing voice with Negro spiritual lyrics does not get it done. Piano works, and oboe works. (“It’s the truth, it’s actual, everything is satisfactual”.)

Enough of that! If you’ve decided you have better things to do, you probably do.

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I have not put up much of interest lately. Nothing has really motivated me. I did close out (in my mind) my exchange with Petra at her Substack, and by “close out” I mean that I had to just leave it where it is, as there will never be a final word with her. It has left me with an avenue to pursue, not the moon landings, which we all know were fake, at least here, but the method by which the whole scene was faked. They used cinematic techniques along with compartmentalism, and it has been preserved in history as real. Those same techniques, which also manifested in the Manhattan Project, keep the whole affair in the mind of the majority of the American public as a real event.

The other aspect of Apollo which has gripped me was about what NASA was doing, really, and why. The discovery of the Van Allen belts more or less killed Apollo, but still they went forward. They were not trying to go to the moon, as they realized that no human (and many machines) could not withstand that dosage. But they still kept putting craft into lower Earth orbit, and I do not know why. Things I know it was not –

• To justify NASA’s bloated budget, as I learned years later that access to money is something always going on, part of Modern Monetary Theory. There are no deficits, and no national debt. The Federal budget is a spider’s web of projects – maybe Apollo stands out, but so too does Vietnam. The money was never a problem. It was only a matter of where it would go, and in what quantity. Sometimes, as with DARPA, it pays off with technology that is actually useful. But most of what was done with Apollo, really, is still classified to this day.
• It was not about the Soviets and the Cold War. That theater was used to justify many military expenditures, Manhattan and Apollo among them, but there was never a real rift between the players. Each bloc used the other (and the Chinese) to keep their own people in a state of fear. The Soviets were used as scarecrows to frighten us kids, just as climate change and school shootings are now used. It is real child abuse.

Maybe I’ll carry on with this topic, but from this day forward, Petra is banned!

I’m kidding! I like her and the way her mind works, her persistence and diligence, and welcome her here anytime she wants to stop by. That we don’t see eye to eye? Who really gives a shit about that?

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I’ve been ruminating about the fate of the blog and whether I want to move forward with it. I cannot force any more of it. Topics must appear naturally here, or in the comments. If you go for days at a time seeing nothing new appear here, so it goes.

These past couple of weeks  I’ve been doing something to ease my conscience, hard work. We live on a three-acre hillside, a steep one. We try to mitigate, but that trying lately has amounted to investing in what they call at the government level, pork projects. One day at Costco months ago a young man approached us with a business card, wanting to do mitigation. Rather than call an established company, and rather than doing it myself (which is fantasy), I called him, and we used him for a while. But it bothered me that I was sluffing it off, and further that we he was not terribly diligent, leaving more work behind after six hours work than he started with.

When we moved here, our acreage was mostly lodgepole pines**, and overgrown. I announced at a dinner with some friends as we looked out over it that I intended to clean it up myself. One of the guests told me, and he was right, “Mark, that’s a young man’s work.” Some weeks later a young man, Casey*, wandered up our driveway. He was the son of neighbors who are still here. He had worked the prior year for the Forest Service, and offered to clean up our mess. We took him on, and found him to be thorough, diligent and honest. He must have cut down 300 trees, all of them dead or dying lodgepoles. He stacked them at various places, using due diligence, putting smaller pieces at the base of each pile to form a base for the larger ones, for each of which he trimmed of branches. ‘

What we ended up with was a manageable hillside with piles of logs here and there, and which were not a fire hazard. Because of Casey’s diligence, they would never burn – there would not be enough oxygen to maintain a blaze. They were too closely stacked.

Our new guy did not work that way, and in the end, before we decided not to ask him back, we had disheveled piles that had on top and within them smaller logs with branches that created air gaps, and which were fire hazards. I wish him well and hope that he learns his craft better and finds new clients. He’s forty or so, long-haired and balding, and engaged to marry a beautiful younger girl, far outkicking his coverage.  I hope it works out.

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In the meantime I decided to deal with the piles of logs close to our driveway myself, pulling them down off the hill, and cutting up much of them into firewood-length logs I can later split as needed. I also dragged three of the piles down our driveway to the back of our house where I have a cutting station. I merely made a stack there. I’ve done plenty of work there in the past, stacking logs and them cutting them to length, and then wheelbarrowing them up the small hill to a place where I can split and stack them.

The work is grueling, and I am 76. Yesterday, after moving a pile off the hillside, I came in for lunch, and as I drank down some water felt something inside me I had not felt in years, a “spent” sensations that runners call “the wall”. I was exhausted. I ate a plate of meatballs under sauce, relaxed until I felt rejuvenated, and then went out, put the logs in our truck and then carried them from the truck back to the cutting station. I did recover.

How long can I keep this up? I don’t know. I am going back out today  to work a lower, flatter part of the property where our former logger left both cut trees and stumps to be dealth with later, probably hitting his own wall. Higher up on the hillside is a huge mess of unkempt stacks mixed with debris, a fire hazard. However, it is all outside our mitigation zone, so not one will object if I leave it. Our neighbors to the south and west have done nothing, meaning all of our work over time is pointless. If they burn, we burn.

*Casey went on to Graduate the University of Colorado, Boulder, with advanced degrees in mathematics and some other theoretical science I do not grasp. He now works for NCAR, I think.
** Our hillside now comprised of Douglas firs, which have displaced the lodgepoles, and which are much more pleasant.
*** I did not know, until I found athe above link for this song, that Hank Jones was 91 years old when he recorded it, and that it was he who played piano accompaniment to Marilyn Monroe in 1962 when she sang “Happy Birthday, Mr. President at Madison Square Garden.

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Goin’ Home, ‘From the New World’
English source: William Arms Fisher