Purple Flowers

Pacific GroveI’ve got Ligeti’s Lontano running—vast sheaves of tones, building and yielding like the striated dark bands in the edge sands of a beach—while the sun sets through clouds and fern pines. The shadows on the windows are swarming minnows rising and falling before the dense mass of new rain like a Great Wall to the west.

I just returned from an overnighter to Monterey, running out from Cannery Row along the complex purple-flowered walls of Pacific Grove, yelping harbor seals cooking along the rocks and thin spits of sand, their voices mixing with the endless baby wails of seabirds as evening set in.

And Prince is dead. I seem to be commemorating dead people these days. I thought he was an interesting oddity in the earliest years of MTV with his soul moves, but didn’t really find a degree of respect for his talents until I was in the Peace Corps and on leave to the capital city of Fiji, Suva, over summer break (December-ish, 1990). I had nothing better to do than to wander the streets, meet-up and drink with whoever was available, and go to the air-conditioned movie theater whenever I could afford it. I saw Graffiti Bridge probably four times and, by the second showing, had revised my opinion of Prince to that of a great innovator. The music was both like and unlike anything I had heard, rippling with tempo changes and rapid polyrhythms, sharp synchronization and dense harmonies. The movie was, however, terrible.

Like Bowie’s Quicksand and Velvet Underground’s Candy Says, I memorialize Cream and Kiss, and, perhaps the most impressive, Sinead O’Connor’s rendition of Nothing Compares 2 U. It still brings tears.… Read the rest

Build Up That Wall

No, I’m not endorsing the construction of additional walls between the United States and Mexico. There are plenty of those and they may be of questionable value. Instead, it is Thomas Jefferson’s birthday and I’m quoting from Christopher Hitchens (who shared his birthday with Jefferson) in repurposing and inverting Reagan’s famous request of Gorbachev. Hitch promoted the Jeffersonian ideal of separating out the civic from the religious:

Be it enacted by General Assembly that no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief, but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of Religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge or affect their civil capacities.

from Jefferson’s Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom

A rather remarkable continuation of Enlightenment concepts that derive, typically, from a notion of “natural rights” and, even in the Virginia Statue, from religious concepts: “Whereas, Almighty God hath created the mind free.” With the following paragraphs noting that human rulers are fallible and have tended to create false religions down through time, apparently regardless of God’s wishes.

Natural rights are an interesting idea that re-occurs in the Declaration of Independence and were also championed by George Mason in the Virginia Declaration of Rights. The notion that natural rights did not extend to slaves was something that Jefferson was conflicted about, according to Hitchens, until the end of his life, with the issue of state’s rights a pragmatic basis for opposition to an institution that he both profited from and found morally repugnant.… Read the rest