day 9: have you seen this story?

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Across Atlanta Public Schools, staff worked feverishly in secret to transform testing failures into successes.

Teachers and principals erased and corrected mistakes on students’ answer sheets.

Area superintendents silenced whistle-blowers and rewarded subordinates who met academic goals by any means possible.

Superintendent Beverly Hall and her top aides ignored, buried, destroyed or altered complaints about misconduct, claimed ignorance of wrongdoing and accused naysayers of failing to believe in poor children’s ability to learn.

For years — as long as a decade — this was how the Atlanta school district produced gains on state curriculum tests.

in case you're interested, the rest can be found here; if not, i guess i understand--nobody much outside of atlanta seems to care.


i dunno, it seems like every day there's a new story of the sort that, a mere generation ago, would have not only have been generally unthinkable, but would have been met with the sort of national outrage of which we as a nation no longer seem capable.

when the rule of law and the public trust become nothing but meaningless catchphrases, how is a nation expected to find its way?

day 8: just another friday afternoon in LA

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so shortly before 4, the "breaking news" graphic flashes across the screen interrupting oprah, followed by a studio shot of the local anchor duo looking very animated, and then throwing to an apparent live shot of a big gray jet flying low--

what?  what the fuck is happening?   i grab the remote, turn up the volume, and...

christ, i had completely forgotten that the royal couple are flying in today.  i sit down to watch.

not, mind you, because i give a rat's ass about wills and whatsername.  or because watching americans scurrying about, scraping and making general gushing fools of themselves around royalty can be entertaining.

no, i'm watching because their first scheduled event upon leaving the airport, as breathlessly announced by the female anchor, will, by my rough calculation, put them at precisely the intersection through which i and tens of thousands of my fellow angelenos will need to pass, at about exactly the same time.

because they always pull this shit on friday afternoon at 4--you know, when nobody in los angeles is on the road.

so the plane lands, taxis a bit and pulls up alongside this straggly-looking line of local luminaries [our idiot mayor, i expected, but the governor?!], the anchors extemporize inanely as the ground crew set up the stairs and futz around with the door--and then, finally, the couple emerge.

they blow through the reception line in about a minute and a half, all smiles and charm.  she looks sensational, i gotta admit, and it's fascinating to watch their choreography--how he moves ahead, seemingly oblivious of her presence, and she always and very artfully manages to stay a step or two behind him.  they pile into opposite sides of a range rover, and they're off.

and the bloviating anchors lapse back into semi-coherence, because now they're on familiar ground--now it's just another car chase through the streets of LA, only this time with the cops helping.

the cops are on familiar ground, too, and their choreography is even better than the royals'.  the motorcade slices through the congested streets like a hot knife through butter, motorcycle patrolmen clearing one intersection and then racing ahead to take positions at another, in a seamless dance that not only moves the whole circus from LAX to the beverly hilton in less than 20 minutes, but does so with minimal disruption of traffic.

and, more importantly, gets them to their destination well ahead of me.

by the time i roll through the intersection of wilshire and santa monica boulevards, there is nary a trace of the hubbub i had seen on television there a mere 15 minutes before.  as i pull into my parking space right on time [ok, five minutes late, but for me that's right on time], i think about how different this experience was than the last time a dignitary came to town on a friday afternoon.

and it convinces me even more that if dignitaries can't travel like this, perhaps they shouldn't travel at all.

day 7: since we're talking about pianists

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this one probably never woulda seen the light of day had last night's post not triggered the memory--and even then, probably not if it wasn't for the fact that it's suddenly day 7 and i otherwise got nothin.

picture it:  a summer afternoon in waco, texas, 1970

so i'm thirteen and on a trampoline in some strange kid's backyard in a strange city, having been dragged there by the kid of the friend my mother had dragged me along with her to visit [that's clear, right?].

it's hot and we're jumping and hollering and generally having a good time, when suddenly there's the sound of a car out front and then the gate opens, three grownups appear and the action grinds to a halt. one of 'em (the woman, i think) steps forward and calls out, "c'mere, kids, there's someone we want you to meet!"

"my parents," one of the kids who lives there mutters.  "c'mon, we have to."  obviously, he's done this drill before.

we dutifully dismount and cross the lawn to the grownups.  i'm embarrassed as i always am when meeting new grownups, but even more so than usual because they're all impeccably turned out in their church clothes, and we're a fuckin' mess.

the parents proudly introduce their guest and the kids are all like, yeah, whatever, give him a half-hearted wave and head back to the trampoline.

the parents are obviously mortified by their kids' reaction.  i'm mortified, too, and more than a little stunned--because, unlike them, i know exactly who this guy is.

see, my grandmother had told me all about him as we watched him perform on television one night.  about how he'd gone to the soviet union at the height of the cold war as a callow young kid from the nearby town of kilgore, competed in their fancy piano contest, beaten the russkies at their own game and come home with the prize.

about how america had celebrated his victory with magazine covers and ticker-tape parades.

but more importantly--at least for my grandmother--about how he had vindicated east texas.  because suddenly we weren't backwoods hicks anymore--we had produced a prodigy.

so without overthinking it too much, i walk my sweaty and grass-stained ass up to this elegant, imperially-slim gentleman, stick out my hand and say, "nice to meet you, mr. cliburn.  my grandmother loved you."

and then feel myself flush as it flashes through my mind--"holy shit, is 'van cliburn' like 'van dyke'? does he have a first name i don't know about and i just made an even bigger a fool of myself?"

no worries--he smiles and takes my grubby little mitt in his without hesitation.  his hand is cool and supple, and i marvel at the fact that he'd let anyone touch it, much less me.

we talk for a minute.  turns out the kid's parents are real estate agents and are helping him find a house for his mother.  he asks me about school and about my grandmother, and seems genuinely interested.

and then he heads into the house to talk business with the parents and i head back to the trampoline to join the others, but i can't get back into it.  the afternoon has changed, and i can't put my young finger on why.

alas, the word "surreal" hasn't yet entered my vocabulary.

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day 6: how about a classy "it came up on shuffle" for a change?

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this wasn't mere blogfodder--for my money it's the undisputed kick-ass piano composition of all time, presented to you below the way i first heard it.

and i'm glad entremont's chopin was the first chopin i ever experienced.  yeah, even to my untrained ear he's a little sloppy sometimes, but the passion he brings to the music he so obviously loves more than makes up for it.

since then, i've heard many interpretations of this piece by many different hands, and even when more technically perfect, they all seem flat and bloodless when compared to this one.

enjoy.

day 5: presenting the mkf unified theory of the evolution of art, part 2

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years ago when i was a lowly second-year architecture student trying (and failing) to re-create a pencil perspective of some baroque building or other, i remember at some point flinging my french curve across the room in disgust and deciding that modern architecture didn't evolve because some early 20th century geniuses had a collective vision--it evolved because the bauhaus crowd were a bunch of lazy motherfuckers who realized it was easier to compose a building using only squares and straight lines and call it a new "style" than take the time to develop the skills necessary to draw--much less artfully employ--all those goddam curves and curlicues.

and i was only half-kidding.  the modernists, in a single stroke, threw out about 95% if not more of the architectural vocabulary that had developed over the millennia--i kinda think of modernism as the ebonics of architecture.

and as i started looking around me--at contemporary painting and sculpture and music--i saw much of the same reductivism at work.

is it, i wondered, because, as a civilization evolves, it strips away all the extraneous crap to get to the essence of a particular art form?  or is it because, as a civilization becomes corrupted by abundance and everything becomes easy, it relaxes its standards and allows anybody to call themselves an artist?

or maybe it's not that clear-cut; whatever--here's the mkf unified theory of the evolution of art: 

to the degree technology advances in a given civilization, artistic technical virtuosity tends to decline.*

if i had to prove the theory?  well, i couldn't, but i'd sure postulate the following:  take any average renaissance painter, sculptor, musician or architect and plop 'em down in the middle of now, and, once they stopped laughing, they'd be up and running in the modern version of their respective art form in fairly short order.  do the reverse, and the modernists would be reduced to panhandling raphael and botticelli on the streets of florence for loose change.

am i right? i dunno--you got a better theory?

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*since i first developed this theory, computers have of course changed everything--the technical virtuosity of the scientists has made artistic virtuosity easy.

day 4: presenting the mkf unified theory of the evolution of art

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a.  painting

       classical:

       modern:

b.  sculpture

       classical:

 

       modern:

c.  music

        classical:

  
        modern:

d.  architecture

       classical:

       modern:

  

sober update:  actually, this one wasn't quite ready for publication yet, seeing as how it's missing the "theory" that's actually the point of the post, but i've been really good at hitting the wrong button lately.  i'll try to finish it tomorrow.

day 3: comida reconfortante

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if you're down, feeling empty, and happen to find yourself in van nuys, may i suggest...

 
alberto's asada nachos--cheap heaven in a styrofoam clamshell.

and yes i did eat the whole thing--what's your goddam point?