With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.
The good life, as I conceive it, is a happy life. I do not mean that if you are good you will be happy - I mean that if you are happy you will be good.
Too much sanity may be madness and the maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be.
The only way to find the limits of the possible is by going past them into the impossible.
November 15, 2009 - 11:24 a.m.
Last you heard from me I said that I wasn't going to leave the house or even get dressed yesterday. That ended up being less than accurate. I saw on Facebook that Abbie Gardner had a gig at The Postcrypt Coffeehouse in Columbia University at 9:30. I couldn't turn that down.
I don't know when but at some point before I left my apartment I was exposed to red kryptonite. How do I know? I lost my superpower, commuting. How did I screw up? Let me count the ways.
After I got on the subway I opened my bag to get my book out and found that the only thing in the bag was my camera. It was in bag before I put the camera in. Why did I take it out?
When I got to 59th street I had to switch to the Uptown 1 train. One problem. Uptown 1 train platform was closed. I had to go down to 42nd Street and switch to the uptown train. If I had known that before I left I could have gone a much simpler route.
When I got to 42nd street the uptown local platform was closed. There was a sign saying that the 1 was running on the express track. The 2 train, an express came first and I hopped on it. My plan was to switch to the 1 at 96th street. One problem. The train skipped 96th street because of construction. I then noticed that the train went local after that. It stopped at 116th street, where Columbia is. I got out of the train and was totally turned around. I wasn't right in front of the University. I was someplace I'd never been to before. I never go up there other than to go to Columbia and forgot that the 2 diverges from the 1 after 96th street. I was way too far east. I took a bus west to Broadway but that left me 10 blocks south of Columbia. I walked that. I got there a half an hour late. Good thing I planned on getting there a hour and a half early.
It's often hard to get a seat at the Postcrypt, That's why I wanted to be early. It didn't mean sitting around for an hour. Another singer was on at 8:30 an I figured I'd watch up first. When I got there, the place was almost empty so that wasn't an issue. It was also about 6,000°F. Right after I sat down I got up and went to the bathroom by the "green room" where it is usually cooler. It was slightly. I was surprised that Abbie wasn't there. I was about to go back in when I saw Abbie and Anthony da Costa walk by the other door so I went back to the Green Room to say hi. The singer on wasn't bad, he just wasn't good enough to sit in a room that was 6,000°F for. I hung out with them till Abbie went on.
I wasn't the only one that didn't know about the show. Hardly anyone was there for Abbie so Anthony texted people and got her an audience. He goes to Columbia so he has people on the spot.
Abbie's parents showed up and I invited them to join me. There crowd was small but the show was great. Abbie did all original songs. She should do that more often. Anthony joined her on about half of them. She did a new song I didn't know. It was great. I
After the show I hung out for a while with Abbie's parents then with Abbie and Anthony. I kept saying I had to leave but ended up staying till they left.
My commute home wasn't as bad as the two hour trip there but I was still weakened by the red kryptonite. I took the 1 train to the D train to the E train and took the E train back to my house. The E train only stops at my stop on weekends and evenings. The problem is that when it does stop here it runs local in Queens. That's 10 extra stops. If I had remembered that I'd have gone one more stop on the D train and taken the F home and saved 9 stops. Oh yes, the final commuting humiliation was finding that I got on a car too far back so had to walk more than a car length to the stairs on the platform.
I have photos from Friday night and last night but Picasa is working super slow, another gift from my computer. I'll post them tomorrow.
Instead of showing you pretty pictures I'll talk about something completely different. On the way home from seeing Red Molly on Friday I listened to my favorite classical music show, Exploring Music. One of the pieces that Bill McGlaughlin played was Charles Ives's Central Park After Dark. As always before he plays a piece Bill gave some wonderful background information. I discovered that Charles Ives lived a block and a half from my school, on the site of the Time-Warner Building! I pass that every day. I also discovered that Ives amused himself by playing popular songs like Swanee River simultaneously in different keys with his left and right hands. That tells you a lot about the man and that's what I want to talk about.
When it comes to classical music I'm an anti-modernist. My favorite periods were the Baroque and Classical. I reject so much of what was written in the 20th Century. It always seemed to me that Schoenberg just wanted to show off how clever he was and Cage waned to point out how gullible everyone else was. It rejected tonal music as an arbitrary convention, something that is simply false. Harmonies are based on the fact that people finds the sound of notes played together pleasant when the ratio of their frequencies are small whole numbers. The ratio of major chord is 4:5:6. It is based on people's perceptions, not abstract theory. I find it hard to believe that even Schoenberg liked the way his music sounded, he like the idea of it.
On the other hand it always strikes me that Ives did like the sound of his music. He enjoyed the ratios of the frequencies to be larger whole numbers. When I listen to his music, even if I don't think the sound is pleasant I can see how he did. It gets me into his head, perceiving the world as he did. He's accomplishing exactly what I want to accomplish in writing Wise Madness; letting others observe the working of my mind. Do I want to listen to Charles Ives all the time? No. But now and then it's an enriching change of pace. Listen to the piece I heard on Friday, Central Park After Dark.
Oliver Twisted - November 20, 2009
Don't Mind My Body - I Don't - November 19, 2009
Thoughts from the Shower - November 18, 2009
If You're Reading This You're Elite - November 17, 2009
I'm Not A Number I'm A Free Man - November 16, 2009
Email me: GordonLew at gmail
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. Horvendile November 15, 2009
