Still going after all these years.
After a warmish winter, it seems only appropriate that we got about five inches of snow on the first day of spring. We are hardy souls, though, and have already dug out and sent the kids to school (albeit two hours late).
There are other signs of spring, too, like the imminent arrival of the orchestra rehearsals for this week’s performance of the Kancheli “Dixi” with the Boston Symphony. More to come…
It’s spring today and going to be winter on Sunday as we gear up for another foot of snow via a late-season northeaster. Time for a Random 5!
Blue 7: This is the second time this track has figured in a Random n post, but since the last time was nine years ago I’ll allow it. Two notes: this was the compilation that I bought, excited to take Scott Deveaux’s History of Jazz class at UVa, and then disappointed that I had to drop the class because it conflicted with a required lab. And Rollins was absolutely incandescent when I saw him at the Tanglewood Jazz Festival back in the early 00’s. Here’s hoping that I have that level of presence and acuity when I’m his age.
Ekta Deshlai Kathi Jalao: A simply great collaboration with the Kronos Quartet. You can listen to this happily without knowing that a great many of the songs are about marijuana.
In Christ There Is No East or West: Not as transcendental as the Grand Banks version, and not one of the most spectacular fruits of her Jeff Tweedy produced works, but still great. A slow burn that’s buoyed up by the arrangement.
Stop This World: A former coworker of mine who was a local jazz DJ was underimpressed with this album, done in collaboration with Krall’s future husband Elvis Costello, because it saw her leaving the strict jazz repertoire and exploring blues and pop song forms. I love it for the same reason.
Virginia Yell Song (live): The loudest rendition of Linwood Lehman’s UVA football song on record, featuring the Glee Club with the University of Virginia Marching Band in the small confines of Old Cabell Hall. The Club singing in unison so they can be heard over the band gives a small flavor of what it must have sounded like back in the day that students sang at football games.
CNBC: We choose the nominee, not the voters: Senior GOP official. Get out your popcorn; the GOP convention is shaping up to be a real doozy. And with Trump himself saying about the likelihood of a brokered convention, “I think there’d be riots,” it’s clear that the possibility of an out of the ordinary nominee selection process is not far from his mind.
Has there ever been an election this, with disagreement over so many issues in play? Well, I’d argue for 1844. With the Democrats split between the Van Buren wing of the party who opposed the annexation of Texas as a slave state, and the Andrew Jackson wing who strongly supported it, the deadlock between Van Buren and Henry Clay (both opposed to annexation) left the path open for a “dark horse” candidate to be nominated. That candidate was James K. Polk, who strongly supported the annexation of Texas specifically and the “manifest destiny” expansion of the United States generally.
So what’s the analogy? I’d argue the open racism and ignorant nativism of Trump and Cruz has left the door open for a more moderate Republican dark horse. But maybe that’s wishful thinking and Trump will show up at the convention with all 1,237 delegates he needs to take the nomination outright.
To offset that grim future, here’s a little They Might Be Giants to refresh you on the history lesson above!
It’s been a crazy week as the house (and our children) adapt (poorly) to daylight savings time. So I’m cheaping out on the blog today but using the opportunity to plug a few things that I listened to in my “dark period” and want to remember and come back to. I listened to both these KEXP in studio sessions via their Live Performances podcast and only later found out that they were also available via their YouTube feeds. Note: Until I get the blog redesigned, you’ll need to embiggen the videos to actually watch them; sorry!
Lavender Diamond: The amazing voice of Becky Sharp. Some of the production on their 2012 album teeters on precious, but I keep coming back to this live performance that strips all the veneer off the songs and leaves them raw and beautiful. The second song in, “Everybody’s Heart’s Breaking Now,” is legitimately heartbreaking.
Dum Dum Girls: Completely different sort of band and sound. Dee Dee comes across as Siouxsie via Mazzy Star in this in studio, but the fun here is the sound and the interplay between the band members.
NPR: Encryption, Privacy Are Larger Issues Than Fighting Terrorism, Clarke Says. With all due respect to Richard Clarke, who sits on the board of my employer and who has been on the right side of arguments about cybersecurity for about 20 years: of course they are. Of course, the correction should probably be aimed at NPR’s Writer of Breathless Headlines.
As I’ve written before, it’s ironic that a federal government that can’t secure its own systems is presuming to dictate terms of secure computer design. What explains it is a continued reliance on magical thinking: a supposition that, if we try hard enough, we can overcome any barrier. In this case, the barrier is the ability to offer a secret backdoor to law enforcement in an encryption technology without endangering all other users of that encryption technology. Sadly, President Obama appears to subscribe to this magical thinking:
If, technologically, it is possible to make an impenetrable device or system where the encryption is so strong that there’s no key – there’s no door at all – then how do we apprehend the child pornographer? How do we solve or disrupt a terrorist plot?
The whole point of cryptography that works is that there’s no door at all for unauthorized users. If you put one in, you have to put the key somewhere, and you open yourself up to having it stolen, or having someone figure out how to get in. And if you ask for a special version of an operating system that can unlock a locked iPhone, you end up with software that can be applied without restriction to every locked phone, by the government, by the next 100 world governments that ask for access to it, and by whoever manages to breach federal computers and steal the software for their own use.
This would be a fun theoretical exercise, as it mostly was back in the days of the Clipper Chip debates, were it not for the vast businesses that are built on secure commerce, protected by cryptography; the lives of dissidents in totalitarian countries who seek to protect their speech and thoughts with cryptography; the national secrets that are protected by cryptography; the electronic assets of device users everywhere that are protected from criminals by cryptography. But because of all those things, to propose to compel a computer manufacturer to embed a back door system—or worse, to turn over their intellectual property to the government so that they can add such a feature.
And Clarke’s analysis says that the last thing is what this is all about: bringing technology companies to heel by setting a precedent that they must do whatever the government asks, no matter how much it endangers users of their products. Read this exchange:
GREENE: So if you were still inside the government right now as a counterterrorism official, could you have seen yourself being more sympathetic with the FBI in doing everything for you that it can to crack this case?
CLARKE: No, David. If I were in the job now, I would have simply told the FBI to call Fort Meade, the headquarters of the National Security Agency, and NSA would have solved this problem for them. They’re not as interested in solving the problem as they are in getting a legal precedent.
If Clarke, who helped to shape the government’s response to the danger of cyberattacks, says that the NSA could have hacked this phone for the FBI, I believe him. This is all about making Apple subordinate to the whims of the FBI. The establishment of the right of the government to read your mail above all rights to privacy is only the latest step in a series of anti-terrorism overreactions that brought us such developments in security theater as the War on Liquids. Beware of anyone telling you otherwise.
The Rest Is Noise: For Peter Maxwell Davies. The death of the eminent British composer has me thinking about how hard 2016 has been so far on musicians and artists. First Bowie, of course, and then Glenn Frey, but also Natalie Cole, Paul Kantner, composer Stephen Stucky, George Martin, Maurice White of Earth, Wind, and Fire, Keith Emerson, Vanity. And of course Harper Lee and Alan Rickman, when broadening to other art forms.
What gives? Is 2016 a more fatal year than other years? Well, probably not, thought it’s easy enough to do the comparison in Wikipedia of notable deaths per year (2016, 2015 and so forth). I think what’s happening for me in particular is that musicians (and artists) who helped shape who I am when I was in my teens (meaning they had produced notable works at most 20 years before that) have now hit a particular point in the actuarial curve. It’s kind of a variant of the pathetic fallacy; the underlying drivers are more likely basic human actuarial trends, substance abuse tendencies in musicians active in the 1960s and 1970s, and the worsening of the American diet over the last 30 years than anything more profound.
And yet. It’s hard to escape the feeling of childhood slipping away. The older I get, the more I’m aware that a chunk of what I think of as “me” is defined in terms of how I relate to things outside myself, and while the death of Peter Maxwell Davies does not negate any of the art he produced, his being gone makes those relationships that much more tenuous.
It’s Random 5 time! And my dogs didn’t let me sleep last night, so I’m on my second cup of coffee (this one red-eyed with a shot of espresso) and this update will be accordingly off kilter. I’m going to try a new format for the 5 this time; let’s see if it sticks.
Say Goodbye: I don’t resonate with this album as strongly as I did with its predecessor Sea Change. That one felt achingly melancholic and honest. This one feels like “It’s time to make Sea Change II.” But you can’t fault Beck’s craft. The banjo seems an unorthodox choice when it drops into the break but it fits. His harmonies have been getting better over the years, and the stacked chords on the chorus introduce some needed tension into the song. It still feels more like an exercise, though.
Comin’ Round the Mountain: A few years ago, Doom and Gloom from the Tomb posted a link to a download of the granddaddy of all Dylan bootlegs, the “full tapes” from the Basement Tapes sessions. This tossed off fragment of the traditional song isn’t essential but it’s fascinating: with instrumentation that sounds like hammer dulcimer along with bass, acoustic guitar and drums, the vocal fades in and out like a half remembered thought and the second verse fades into inaudible mumbles. We know she’s coming but we don’t know when and we don’t know why. Typical of the Basement Tapes, Dylan lifts the corner of an old traditional children’s song and finds mystery.
Lullaby for an Anxious Child: Originally a 1990s b-side, Sting fleshed out the arrangement for this on his surprisingly good winter/holiday album a few years ago, with strings, harp and harmonium (accordion?) supplementing the acoustic guitar. I’ve been vocally dismissive of later Sting work, but I liked this album, and though I could wish for fewer chimes and a less affected vocal on this track (does every entrance need a little swoop?) it’s still lovely and done with a light touch.
The Parting Glass: I like the Pogues, and Shane McGowan, best when they’re rooted in their craft and their tradition. This straight take is fantastic and wouldn’t have been out of place on a Clancy Brothers album… well, maybe on an album of drunken outtakes.
L’enfer: I was introduced to Coralie Clément’s music via the Nada Surf cover of the title song of this album. The title song, with contributions from that band’s Daniel Lorca, is still the essential track on this album for me, but “L’enfer” is a perfect slice of fuzzed-guitar summertime French pop, with Clément’s breathy vocals sounding like Jane Birkin hanging out with an indie pop band. Fun for Friday.
As I celebrate the appointment of a fellow Glee Club alum to the bench of the fifth judicial district in Virginia, I thought it would be fun to take a look at the company he joins of fossils who’ve been judges.
John W.G. Blackstone (1879–1880 season). Blackstone (1858–1911) was one of the more notable politicians of the 1879–1880 class (Wilson aside), serving in the Virginia State Senate from 1884 to 1896 when he was appointed the county judge for Accomac and serving as a judge on the Eighth and Eleventh Judicial Circuits until his retirement in 1908.
Oliver Whitehead Catchings (1891–1892 season). At Virginia, he was a law student, captain and quarterback of the football team, member of Phi Kappa Psi, the Z Society and Eli Banana, and editor of both Corks and Curls and College Topics. He completed law school at Virginia and practiced law in Washington, DC while his father, Thomas Clendinen Catchings, was in Congress, then returned with his father to Vicksburg to establish the practice of Catchings & Catchings. He was appointed judge of the 9th Mississippi District in 1905, and died unexpectedly of heart disease in 1916.
Duncan Lawrence Groner (between 1894 and 1896). As Wikipedia records, Groner served as a judge of the Eastern District of Virginia and as chief justice for the United States Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit, as well as serving six years in the United States Senate for Virginia.
George Latham Fletcher (seasons between 1895 and 1898, music director 1897–1898). A member of the Z Society and Eli Banana, he practiced law, served as judge of the 28th Judicial Circuit of Virginia in Warrenton, and served two terms as a state senator. Possibly the most memorable case over which he presided as judge was the divorce of future Duchess of Windsor Wallis Simpson from her first husband, in 1927.
Frederick Garner Duval (1905–1906 season). A member of T.I.L.K.A. and the dramatic troupe the Arcadians while at Virginia, Duval was an attorney in Alexandria and later became civil police justice there.
Sheffey Lewis Devier (1917–1918 season). Devier practiced law in Harrisonburg, and served as both a justice of the peace and judge of the juvenile and domestic relations court for Rockingham County. He later served a term as mayor of Harrisonburg.
Absalom Nelson Waller (from 1922 to 1925). Vice president of the Glee Club, he served as a county judge in Spotsylvania County for 32 years.
Robert Fitzgerald (1939–1940 season). An engineering student at Virginia, he served in the US Marine Corps during World War II at the Pacific front and and was discharged a second lieutenant. He practiced law in Falls Church, was appointed a trial judge in Fairfax County, and was later elected to the Virginia Senate.
Charles Stevens Russell (from 1945 to 1948). A Raven, he was appointed to the Seventeenth Judicial Court of Virginia in 1962, and served there until he joined the Virginia Supreme Court in 1982, retiring in 1991.
Edward Earle Zehmer (from 1949 to 1951). Another Marine, Zehmer practiced law for 23 years before his appointment to the First District Court of Appeal in Florida in 1983.
There are probably other still-living Glee Club fossils who sit on the bench, but those are the ones we know of for now. So my friend is in very good company!
I started rehearsal last night with the Tanglewood Festival Chorus for an upcoming series of performances of the Kancheli Dixi. Giya Kancheli is new to me; he’s a composer from Georgia who wrote the Dixi, apparently, partly as a memorial to his mentor, conductor Jansug Kakhidze. It’s going to be a fun work, with huge dynamic swings, lots of interestingly intricate writing for the chorus, and some meaty chromaticism. I’m also interested in seeing what the orchestration looks like—the one recording I have has some passages that sound like they might be written for Ondes Martenot…
I added a line to my Twitter bio recently that probably bears some explanation. Here’s my current bio:
Grammy Award winning product guy for Veracode, building the most powerful application security platform in the world. Has a Bacon Number of 3.
Most of this is self explanatory, as I’ve written about the Grammy and my employer before. But what the heck is a Bacon number?
Turns out, it’s an established measurement of celebrity that even has a (portion of) a Wikipedia article about it. The “Bacon number” of an individual is the number of degrees of separation he or she has from Kevin Bacon, where a degree of separation is usually understood as “has worked with.” You can use the Oracle of Bacon, online at the University of Virginia since the mid-1990s, to determine an individual’s Bacon number.
As for mine: I can justify it two ways. One is via former Boston Symphony Orchestra music director James Levine, with whom I share a few recording credits (including the Grammy), and who has a Bacon number of 2.
The second, and funnier, one is via the Soup Nazi, the Seinfeld character created by Larry Thomas. Larry Thomas has a Bacon number of 2, also, and he and I shared billing in Veracode’s trade show booth at RSA in 2013, when I spoke in the booth about application security. So there you go.
Members and alumni of the Virginia Glee Club have contributed many things to the University, from musical theater to classical performances to “The Good Old Song.” But until this weekend I didn’t know that they had also contributed a piece of the University’s facilities.
I read through the 1905 edition of Corks and Curls in the San Francisco airport Friday morning. (I know, I know: the high life.) I found a page on the 1904-1905 Glee Club that I had previously missed. It listed two Humes, Howard and John, as among the officers of the combined Glee and Mandolin Clubs. Over the weekend I did some research on them.
Howard Hume, it turns out, was quite the adventurer. A physician, he got an officers’ commission in the Army Reserves in 1913 and went to Europe as a surgeon attached to the British Army during World War I. He was head of surgery and later head of the hospital at a series of camps, forts and other army posts for the next few years, even spending a few years on Corregidor in the 1930s. He continued to serve in Army hospitals across the American south in his early 60s during World War II.
His brother John Edmund Norris Hume worked as an engineer for GE. We know less about his background, except for one sentence in the finding note for the archives of the president of the University, John Newcomb: “J.E.N. Hume-Memorial Fountain.”
John and Howard were the sons of Frank Hume, Civil War veteran and noted producer of whiskey in Alexandria at the turn of the century. And apparently John was the major donor for the fountain and wall—the Hume Memorial Fountain, with its whispering wall—that once sat in front of Monroe Hall and now is at the end of Newcomb Plaza.
So Glee Club alumni have contributed not only song, but also physical monuments to the University.
It’s been a long week at the RSA Conference in San Francisco and I’m happy to be headed home today. Thankfully I have a random 5 to help me unwind!
BTW, If you’re interested in the sorts of things I was learning about at the conference, check out a few Storify stories here:
It’s been a busy week at the RSA Conference in San Francisco, so I’m just going to summarize a few things that interested me enough to put them on Delicious or otherwise check ’em out.
Doom and Gloom from the Tomb: Grand Banks – QB4: 1877–1896. This week’s Bandcamp Monday on this great music and bootlegs blog featured my friend and fellow Glee Club fossil Tyler Magill’s band Grand Banks and their first label release. I’ve been enjoying their self-released stuff a lot and am looking forward to this one.
Bill Peschel: Sherlock Holmes Outwitted: The Adventure of the ‘Hot Feet.’ Reprinting, with annotations, a Sherlock Holmes pastiche from the 1904 Corks and Curls. Usually student parodies are too full of in-jokes to be readable but this one comes off. It’s also notable due to its authorship by Armistead Dobie, future UVA law school professor and federal judge. Peschel gets most of the annotations right, only missing in calling College Topics a literary magazine (it was the school newspaper, the early incarnation of the Cavalier Daily).
Krebs on Security: Credit Unions Feeling Pinch in Wendy’s Breach. Two things: first, what is it going to take to get merchants to move away from swiping (extremely vulnerable to theft of credit card info) to dipping the chip? Second, if you use a debit card at merchants, please stop. You’re putting your bank account at risk with every swipe.
Virginia Memory: Forsaken: The Digital Bibliography. Fantastic project linking the plot and characters of the novel by Ross Howell, Jr. to their real-life counterparts using information from the Library of Virginia’s archives. Makes me want to go out and buy the book.
I’ve written before about traditional ballads and ballad collectors, but I always feel as though I am discovering new things about the way in which songs are written and passed down. The archetypal music developed (not written) by singers in places as diverse as rural England and western North Carolina and continuing into modern day provenance via folk singers like Dylan and Leadbelly, who then inspired a whole generation of rock musicians to embrace the ballads…
I always feel an electric shock when I find an artifact of balladry. In September 2015 I was lucky enough to discover UVa professor Ernest Mead’s copy of UVA professor and Glee Club alum Arthur Kyle Davis’s More Traditional Ballads of Virginia in a local used book store, documenting the work that he and other members of the Virginia Folklore Society did in collecting ballads from Virginia singers. Last week I had a bill for dinner delivered to me in an 1879 book collecting English ballads (albeit a little heavily focused on lords and kings for my tastes). And of course my discovery years ago that I have western North Carolina’s preeminent folklorist, Bascom Lamar Lunsford, as a distant relative was one of my early connections to the tradition.
What’s interesting to me is that the application of this “oral tradition” to other forms of song, like camp meeting songs and minstrel songs, resulted in some of the most enduring songs that we remember today in the context of universities and student songs. It’s one thing to note that the University of Virginia song “Glory to Virginia” is a football song with words set to the tune of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” It’s another to note that the “Battle Hymn” itself takes a tune that was previously known as “John Brown’s Body,” featuring words collectively written by the members of the 2nd Infantry Battalion of the Massachusetts militia as a marching tune. But the story doesn’t stop there; the “Tiger” battalion used a tune for their words that had originated as a camp meeting song in the late 18th and early 19th century, “Say, Brothers, Won’t You Meet Us,” with the earliest printed version of the tune appearing from 1806 to 1808 in camp meeting song compilations. And beyond that, credit for the inspiration of the tune is given to an African American wedding song from Georgia, a “Negro folk song,” and a British sea shanty that originated as a Swedish drinking song.
All of which is just to say that authorship is complicated and history is everywhere.
On Sunday, details emerged in the case of Otto Warmbier, a University of Virginia student being detained in North Korea after an arrest two months ago as he prepared to depart the country. In a televised press conference, Warmbier confessed to attempting to steal a banner bearing a North Korean revolutionary slogan. He apologized for his “severe” crime and said that he was encouraged to commit the crime by the Friendship United Methodist Church, the Z Society, and the CIA. He begged for mercy, saying, “I beg that you see how I was used and manipulated. My reward for my crime was so much smaller than the rewards that the Z Society and the Friendship United Methodist Church get from the United States administration.”
Let me be clear: I’m very worried for Warmbier and don’t mean to make fun of his captivity, and hope he is returned soon. But to be honest, were the stakes not so high, this would read like world class trolling. For one thing, it’s pretty unlikely that the UMC is involved in funding petty theft of the sort practiced by university students with road signs on their walls all over the world. But what is the likelihood that the Z Society is involved?
Answer: pretty low. While you can choose to accept or not the Z Society’s denial of contact with Warmbier, the likelihood of their encouraging international hooliganism is quite low. The Z Society has always been the most staid of the University’s semi-secret societies, especially when compared with Eli Banana and their tradition of public processions with a huge bass drum, or the IMPs and their devil costumes and pyromania (not to mention their predecessors’ fun with taxidermy).
So: I think Warmbier is being forced to confess to his crime by a North Korean government that employs scriptwriters with overactive imaginations and inadequate research. If you’re going to frame an undergraduate for espionage, at least blame the right secret society.