CT passes Freedom from Religion law

In a seeming rebuke to the pro-Christian, anti-gay sentiment espoused last week by the Indiana General Assembly, Connecticut today became the first state to pass a Freedom FROM Religion law mandating that all CT residents have the right to a religion-free life. The law, which takes effect 30 days after Governor Daniel Mello’s expected signature, includes all religions. It makes illegal any “argument, rule, regulation or propaganda” that seeks to dictate personal behavior based on religious writing or belief.

The law, which passed along strictly partisan lines, also ends the tax-exempt status of all churches in the state.

Gay groups, women’s groups and liberals from Fairfield to Windham counties celebrated the passage of the law and looked forward to a more tolerant, relaxed and honest ethos in CT. Sex workers throughout the state also celebrated for, with the stroke of a pen, all references to sexual acts were removed from the criminal code, since they were found to be based on religious prejudice and preoccupation with pleasure.

“Finally, the free-thinking and intelligent good people of the Nutmeg State can live their lives without the homophobic, xenophobic, misogynistic centuries-old thinking promulgated from the state’s pulpits,” said Assembly speaker Wudnit B. Nice.

I'm mad as hell

and I'm not going to take this anymore.

With props to Paddy Chayefsky and Sidney Lumet (Network, 1976) I open my window and put my foot down. I will not submit to the tyranny of academic writing a minute longer.

I've been auditing a class this term, LGBTQ Cinema, and while I've enjoyed the experience immensely, some of the readings have made me crazy. I've come to believe that far too many academics believe one should never use a hundred words when a thousand will suffice.

So many paragraphs I've read go on and on, using words only another academic could love, confusing the reader (me) to the point of distraction (as you see, “trite” doesn't bother me; wordiness does).

Here’s an example I just came across. It’s from an article by Siu Leung Li in Cross-Dressing in Chinese Opera

Instead, I find that Lu Xun's brief passage betrays the politics of Chinese opera as a cultural practice: his appropriation of transvestism as a trope in his pungent political protest coincidentally yet appropriately reproduces significant cultural assumptions concerning power as the object of struggle at the intersecting site of cross-dressing, gender construction, and homo/ hetero-eroticism in relation to theatre in a culture where theatre has historically been both an integral cultural product, and one of the most unstable cultural products.

OK, so maybe that was originally in another language and maybe that language has punctuation marks that don't translate into English, but this is what I was given to read and this is what I am not going to read. I will skim it, looking for anything in simple declarative sentences that might make sense to me. Size and length have never impressed me, not in matters biological and certainly not in matters linguistic.

This next one was written in English, by the master of run-on intellectual potty-mouthism, Judith Butler:

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

Sorry. Call me lowbrow if you want — and pass the aspirin.

It would have been better not to know

Anyone who drives a car has had this experience: traffic comes to a halt; you sit, frustrated, not knowing what’s going on. After a time you begin to inch forward. In ten minutes you come across a police car pulled over to the side of the road and, once past it, traffic opens up and you're on your way.

You still have no idea what happened. Part of you, embarrassed, wishes you had seen something to explain your delay. The longer the delay the more you wish you had seen something.

It happened to me today, though I was on a train. Coming home from New York we made an unscheduled stop at Green’s Farms where we were told that, due to “police activity” at the next stop, we were being held. The conductor feared that it might be a while. No explanation of what “police activity” meant.

The wait turned out not to be so bad: 25 minutes or so. As we pulled into Fairfield station I saw lots of police standing around and perhaps a dozen cruisers in the parking lot, all with their lights flashing. No one was rushing around, no one seemed to be doing much of anything.

Then I saw it. As we left the station I noticed a yellow tarp spread out over one of the tracks — there are 4 sets of tracks in this part of CT — I didn't know at first what I was looking at, until I saw the naked foot poking from the edge of the tarp. Someone’s life had just come to an end within the last thirty minutes.

I had been inconvenienced. She had died.

I still don’t know most of the details, but Amtrak Train 88 struck the woman who was reportedly trying to get to the other side of the station. Why she was on the tracks rather than on the overhead crosswalk is not yet known.

I doubt I will soon forget that yellow tarp. It would have been better not to know.

It certainly would have been better not to see.

Amtrak Train 88 -  NOT the one in today's accident

The man does it all

Gentle readers, you may remember that in April of 2013 I said my days of buying music were over (read the post here). After five plus decades of buying 45s, LPs, Cassettes, CDs and MP3s I decided I had enough. Any new music I was going to hear I would rent, via Spotify, not buy and own. That’s turned out pretty well for me. I pay $10 a month for the upgraded version of Spotify, which eliminates all adverts. I have access to over 30 million tunes; only once has Spotify not had what I wanted to hear. I have in fact purchased a couple of things, but nothing like in the old days.

Back in the 80s and 90s I spent quite a bit of money replacing vinyl LPs with CD versions. I also paid attention to what was popular and though I didn’t dig deep, I did buy some things I had only read about, not heard.

One of those albums was In My Tribe by 10,000 Maniacs. It was released in 1987 and featured wonderful vocals by Natalie Merchant. I remember liking it a lot when I bought it but, alas, it joined the shelves of bought-and-played-once discs, not because it wasn’t good but because other things landed in the player more often.

(An aside: the main reason I pay for Spotify rather than Pandora is because I’m someone who almost always knows what I want to hear; others like being surprised by the radio, or by Pandora, the internet version of radio. Not I. I have so much music that I mostly play what I’m in the mood for).

So Natalie Merchant came and went in my life.

She returned on Friday. She played a concert at SUNY Purchase with her band (piano, guitar, bass) backed by the Purchase Symphony Orchestra conducted by my husband, Ransom Wilson. It was fascinating. She still has a beautiful voice and she's always been a wonderful songwriter. She’s also become quite an arranger; she scored her songs for her combo and orchestra. The sound was lush, the lyricism intoxicating and the total package magnificent.

Oddly though, it didn't totally win me over. I think because often I could not understand all the words and almost never could I follow the tale of the tune. It was delightful to hear but I would have to listen repeatedly to “get it.”

And I may well do that. I have long known that I am much more a “music” person than a “words” person. It is always the sound of a song that wins me over; I may come to love the words later, but only if I’m first moved sonically. And her arrangements moved me.

The point of this post though is to send props to my man. He did a brilliant job, with scant rehearsal time, pulling together these talented students to play music they had never seen. One orchestra rehearsal and one with Ms. Merchant — that’s all they got.

But when someone as talented as Ransom is on the podium, it's enough.

We don’t applaud; we’re too civilized

I had a terrific time last weekend in Second City, which is in fact my second favorite US city, Chicago. I got with my long-time buddy Malette for a few days of culture, conversation and comestibles.

We ate twice at the Italian Village, an old-school Italian restaurant in the Loop that stays open late. We had good, not great, grilled meats at the Honky Tonk BBQ restaurant in southwest Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood, while listening to Scotch Hollow, an excellent acoustic roots band. We loved the brunch at Eggsperience Pancakes and Café in the River North neighborhood and we toured the Harold Washington library (right), mainly so I could show Malette its incredible and whimsical exterior.

We also visited the six-year old Driehaus Museum, a gilded age mansion decorated to the hilt – in a style far from mine, but impressive nonetheless.

But the high points of the trip were musical: Richard Wagner’s Tannhäuser and Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s The Passenger at Lyric Opera and Sir András Schiff in recital at Symphony Hall.

The Wagner was splendid, as his operas always are, and at times boring, as his operas always are. (The second act includes a long argument on the definition of love; high on wordage, low on wattage). The overture and the Pilgrim’s Chorus more than made up for anything superfluous and the orchestra played flawlessly under the baton of Sir Andrew Davis.

The Passenger was likewise semi-successful. Fascinating staging and a compelling tale well sung didn't quite make up for a score that is too jaunty at times and too chaotic at others. Still, I was impressed with an opera that takes on the Holocaust; its emotional wallop is searing.

The highest of the high points, however, was the exquisite, beautiful-in-tone playing of Sir András in four piano sonatas, one each by Haydn, Beethoven, Mozart and Schubert. As if that weren't enough he took four encores.

The audience sat enraptured, and, for the most part, stone silent – except for the woman behind us who rustled her program, opened and closed her purse, dropped things and otherwise made a nuisance of herself through most of the first half. Luckily she realized she didn't belong there and left at intermission.

To get to the subject line of this post, it has long struck me odd the rules classical music fans think they must obey. The oddest is the rule of silence. No matter how beautifully played a movement is, no matter how profoundly emotional its effects are, proper fans sit quietly at the end of each movement – no clapping aloud; no clapping allowed. Why is that? We don't abstain in any other art form. When Juan Diego Flórez hits those nine high C’s in La fille du regiment at the Met the music stops as we show our appreciation by wildly cheering. When a dancer executes a perfect grand jeté we shout, "Bravo!" and applaud. On Broadway we even stop the show when a beloved actor or actress simply makes an entrance.

Yet in the concert hall we are expected to sit ever so prim and proper and wait til the final chord has melted away before we react. It makes no sense.

The New York Philharmonic is beginning its search for a new music director to replace Alan Gilbert. The March 11 Times includes an article on just who or what the Philharmonic needs in a new MD. (Who Should Lead the New York Philharmonic? Five Critics Answer). Vivien Schweitzer speaks for me when she says

… ideally, the next maestro or maestra will continue to loosen stuffy concert protocol. Hopefully, by the end of the next music director’s tenure, classical music newbies who show enthusiasm by clapping at the end of a movement won’t be silenced by haughty stares.

Here! Here! -- he said silently.

Addendum, related to nothing above: I took the picture below on the train home from New York last night. I have seen plenty of selfish people before, but this couple takes the cake. They have commandeered EIGHT seats: the six they have spread their rude selves on and the two made unusable by the bag visible in the lower left. More proof of the selfish assholes so many Americans have become. Bring on the stand-up-for-consideration jihad!

Cooper v Aaron

If you're like me you remember certain Supreme Court cases, even if you can't necessarily explain what they decided. Brown v Board of Education is easy: it outlawed segregation in public schools. How about Plessy v Ferguson? That’s one you likely remember in name only. It was the 1896 decision that Brown overturned: it had legalized state-supported hatred, uh, sorry, segregation. What about Roe v Wade? Yeah, easy: it gave women control of their own bodies. (Who would have thought a court needed to make that clear?)

Miranda v Arizona you probably know through hearing people read their “Miranda Rights” while being arrested — at least on TV. United States v Nixon ordered the embattled president to release the incriminating White House tape recordings.

Marbury v Madison is a name you surely remember from high school but probably wonder now what it was all about. It is perhaps the most important decision the court ever reached, as it established the concept of judicial review, the raison d’être of the court’s existence:

It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is. Those who apply the rule to particular cases, must of necessity expound and interpret that rule. If two laws conflict with each other, the courts must decide on the operation of each. — Chief Justice John Marshall

And that brings me to Cooper v Aaron, the 1958 decision which made clear that state courts were subservient to the U. S. Supreme Court, whether or not they agreed with the court’s decisions. States are not free to ignore the nine justices sitting in Washington.

The Alabama Supreme court seems to think otherwise. Yesterday it ordered state probate judges to stop issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. To be clear the Alabama court ordered AL judges to ignore one federal judge, not the Supreme Court, but the trajectory of this fight is clear: as have other Southern states, Alabama believes it can do whatever it wants, the US Constitution and the Supreme Court be damned.

When will the South tire of being on the wrong side of history?

When will the Confederate states wake up to the new realities and stop trying to preserve the racist, misogynistic, homophobic past?

Will someone please tell the good folks in Alabama that the year is 2015?

Can we not turn our attention to things that really matter and get past this hateful Christian take on the world?

Enough already!
__________

Addendum: I've been called to task for lumping all the "Suthren" states together. I plead guilty to spacial profiling. Alabama is likely the worst, unless Mississippi takes that title, and I admit there are intelligent, progressive people even in those states. But the old farts who run the courts and the legislatures -- well their time needs to end. And my dearly loved Virginia recognizes gay marriage; if it can happen in the Capitol of the Confederacy it can happen anywhere.