I had a pretty remarkable evening this past Friday night. My wife was busy having several of her friends over to work on their Creative Memories albums, so I searched the paper to find something to do on short notice, and saw that the Grand Rapids Symphony was performing Berlioz'Symphonie Fantastique that evening. Back in 1983, right after I became a Christian, I went through a phase of "discovering" classical music. I bought at that time, a bunch of cheap cassettes featuring famous orchestral pieces, and I remembered that this was one of my favorites, because of the colorful and sometimes evocative sonic effects of the piece. If you're not familiar with it, I would recommend you find a recording and give it a listen, it's quite cool.

So I whipped on down to DeVos Hall and got in a surprisingly long and slow line for tickets, considering that there were just a few minutes before the performance was to begin. As I stood there, a man walked up to me and asked if I was alone. I told him I was, and he offered me a free ticket. The story was that his uncle "Buzz" had given him a pair of tickets that he couldn't use, so this guy, Stuart was his name, had an extra as well and so he was just looking for someone to give the ticket to and watch the concert with. And I just happened to be that guy.

The seats were right in the center of the mezzanine level, a great spot to view the orchestra. And what a nice program they put together! The guest artist was a pianist, named Leon Fleisher. He performed two pieces, the main one being a Ravel piano concerto written entirely for the left hand. The piece was originally commissioned by Paul Wittgenstein, the brother of the famous philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Paul was a talented pianist destined for great things in the musical world, but he tragically lost his right arm in World War One. Undeterred, he continued as best he could to pursue a career in music and performed as many pieces as he could find for the left hand. Ravel was one of several composers commissioned to write such music.

As you could imagine, a left-handed piano piece is going to emphasize the low bass notes on the scale, but there was enough movement up and down the keyboard to provide plenty of variety and challenge. The music itself was grand, dramatic, sometimes grim in its martial cadence, but what I was most moved by was the thought of an artist maimed yet bravely pursuing his course in life. And of course, with the preoccupation with war, and our nation apparently on the brink of another campaign in Iraq, my thoughts were drawn to how many other young men are weeks or months away from having their lives changed by injuries suffered in combat.

Fleischer himself lost the ability to use his right hand some years ago due to a "repetitive stress disorder." In recent years, he's made some progress in recovering the use of his right hand and the first piece he performed indicated that it's coming along quite well. Though I'm not familiar with his career, apparently the crowd as a whole was quite moved and impressed by his valiant performance. One thing about the symphony, the musicians make it look pretty easy to produce the sounds they do, but what an achievement, to put all that together and make it sound so good.

After the intermission, the Symphonie Fantastique began. In the moments beforehand, I had realized that it was Friday the Thirteenth, the first time that day that I'd had that thought. How eerie, to be listening to this music, on such a "haunted" day. In case you don't know, the symphony is "program music," in this case telling the tale of a young romantic who overdoses on opium and winds up having bizarre visions of a witches' sabbath at the end. Well, I can barely begin to describe the music or its effects, but let me just say, it was quite an extraordinary sensation to let the music course through me - oh, the thoughts and impressions it produced! After it had concluded, Stuart and I chatted about it. He said he enjoyed it, but it was clear to him that the composer "had to be mad to conceive of such things." There was indeed, a kind of dark energy that seemed to be released, and I myself greatly appreciated Berlioz' willingness to really put himself out there, artistically speaking, to create such a memorable, ambitious, lush and romantic expression of his spirit. So very cool...

And after all that, I walked over to the Calder Plaza where the annual Mexican Festival was in full swing. A band was on stage, pumping out highly danceable Tejano rhythms to an appreciative crowd. Kind of a drastic change of atmosphere, but the evening was warm and lively, and I enjoyed a few minutes of walking around the tents and booths, checking out the crafts and other items of interest. It was one of those nights where I felt God was smiling on me, and it made me happy to be a free, living being.

Throughout this day, I've tried to keep my focus more on the families, friends and communities most directly impacted by the crimes of 9/11/01, rather than the politics and international implications of it all. Not that I'm of no opinion or lack concern about those aspects, but as far as I'm concerned, the "anniversary" is a time of mourning and remembrance for the dead, and gratitude for noble men and women who gave so much throughout the crisis and recovery - not a place to make partisan statements or further an ideological agenda. So I've been avoiding the speeches made by public figures, focusing more on the images of flowers being laid down, or the sounds of music, names read, bells tolling. As for those calls for vengeance, justice, defense of freedom and our way of life... I'm just not inclined to interact with all that because to me, 9/11 isn't simply about bad people who did an evil thing to the USA, though that's part of it. To me, it's more about how violence and history and fanaticism and hatred and ignorance and prejudice have gotten so many in this world caught up in snares that would move them to dedicate their lives to the irrational destruction of strangers, and in the process create so much pain, grief and sadness. Yes, there was a political and cultural "statement" being made by the groups responsible for the terrorist attacks, but the horror goes far beyond that, and reveals something dark and menacing that has taken root within humanity itself. I don't want to sound flippant or melodramatic here, but in some ways, I can see in the symbol of the World Trade Center attack, especially, an indictment against humanity similar to what we behold in the crucifixion of Jesus and the death camps of the Shoah, and in other "hearts of darkness" that have occurred in living memory. Though I lament the misery and corruption that somehow drove the hijackers and their supporters to carry out their hateful plans, and though I grieve for those who were injured or lost loved ones that day, it seems to me that 9/11 reveals a problem that is even more difficult to root out, and more pervasive in its scope, than first meets the eye. It's not just that people are sinful and capable of doing exceedingly cruel things to each other. It's also that so often we do those cruel things based on our own sense of righteousness and justification, even a calling by God, the ultimate source of authority and direction in our lives. How tragic it is that we humans can be so divided among ourselves as to think we ought to kill each other! And yet I recognize that same impulse within me, even as a person committed to non-violence and mutual understanding. Watching replays of TV from a year ago, I feel so keenly the impulse to wreak destruction on anyone responsible for the images I see on the screen. And then I understand what a thin barrier separates me from the mob howling for blood, ready to spill its own if only for the chance to take some of the "evil-doers" to their grave.

It's such a beautiful, sunny, but dark, cold day. Mixed emotions indeed.

So to finish up my story about the focus group (see the 9/5 blog to read the beginning)...

Sitting there in a room full of guys put me into this wierd nostaligic mood that, rather than make me thing fondly of the good old days, instead stirred up a fair amount of cynicism about how this music, produced mostly by cocky young men in the full swagger of success and rock star glory, was now being used to capture a select demographic of middle-aged guys who were mostly reduced to listening to "their music" during the morning and afternoon drive times, or perhaps during the day at work if they had control over the station and were in an environment where classic rock an appropriate style of music (like a car repair shop or construction supply warehouse, I suppose.)

The raw libido coming through the speakers when guys like Robert Plant, Mick Jagger or David Lee Roth hollered into their microphones was now little more than a fantasy for most of us, who've settled into a predictable groove of work 'n family, with a little weekend warrior action thrown in to maintain a degree of self-respect and connection with guys like us who are in the same predicament. The entire focus of this exercise was, I gather, to determine which songs would get us chronic channel-surfers to hit the station and leave it there at least until 30 or 40 seconds into the next commercial break, rather than flipping over to the competitor rock stations that just might have something more emotionally satisfying on it at the moment. Dan's promise to us was that, besides the $50 bucks, we would be rewarded by "better music" as early as the next day, when his scrupulously gathered, sifted and analyzed bar charts and trend-waves would be delivered to his unnamed but predictably familiar client. But I found his promise disingenuous. He was really giving us a chance to tell him what our favorite music was, but was asking us to choose from within a set of closely defined and limited options. It's not just a case of the list consisting only of those artists that I listed in the previous blog, but also that there are only a handful of familiar tracks from each of the groups in the category. Gone, for the most part, are the days of true "album oriented radio" where the DJ really knew his music and would occasionally play some excellent but "non-hit" cuts. I won't take the time with another list here, but each of the bands listed will only be represented by maybe five or ten songs unless their career spans decades, like the Rolling Stones or Aerosmith, but then the list might go up to 20 songs or so... less than one per year for the bands existence. It's all about familiarity, taking us back to those carefree adolescent days I guess. Well, I'll say thanks for the $50 bucks, thanks for showing me a little more detail about how today's mind-control propaganda mega-marketing superstructure works its magic, and the cookie 'n coffee, too. But as for me, I'm a CD-playin', commercial-free radio-listenin' type of guy from now on.

Yesterday I participated in a focus group aimed at getting demographic information on guys my age who like to listen to "classic rock" format radio. Even though I don't listen to that kind of station all that much (I'm more of a CD-listener myself), when I do put the radio on in my car, I will usually at least give those stations a try to see what they're playing. But they promised me $50 for my participation in any case, and that was enough to pique my interest.

So I showed up at the Grand Rapids Airport Hilton at 5:30pm, got my free cookie 'n coffee and waited in the hallway with about 50 other guys like me until we were ushered into a banquet room. We sat down, four dudes to a table, each of us with a little keypad and dial gizmo that was our tool for inputing the precious data that a local radio station had paid thousands of dollars to acquire. A semi-boisterous fellow named Dan greeted us. He said he was from San Diego, but he didn't spend much time there, since his job required him to fly all over the country doing focus groups like the one tonight. But he informed us that he was happy to be in temperate Grand Rapids, MI after spending a few days in sweltering Birmingham, AL, which was not only terribly humid but also abuzz with talk about the West Nile Virus, which actually has grabbed a few headlines here in the past week because of a couple of local cases of the disease that have been discovered. But none of us told him that WNV is a threat here in West Michigan.

Anyway, I won't get bogged down in a narrative of the whole evening. I will say that I had to work for my fifty bucks though. Here's what we had to do: Dan would hit the "play" button on a CD player, and that would launch a track of fifty excerpts from classic rock songs that are a staple of this radio format. The excerpts are what we call the "hooks" of these songs, a portion of the song that is instantly recognizable to a listener who (presumably) grew up in the sixties, seventies or eighties and listened to the big arena rock bands who to this day remain unequalled in their ability to reach the pinnacle of ballsy macho eloquence when it comes to playing guitar, bass and drums and yowling over the top of it all in a suitably studly manner. And that goes for the female rockers like Heart and Stevie Nicks too.

Our job, upon hearing each of these hooks, was to crank the dial up or down based on our emotional response to each song. This, I must say, was quite a fascinating process for me, since I am one of those guys who not only knew each song that was sampled, but could also give a pretty fair rundown on the specific careers, offshoot projects, original years of release and relative achievements in the pantheon of hard rock bands that flourished in that era. If I can take a minute or two to list the more prominent bands that we tasted last night, allow me to rattle off a few names, in order of how they come to mind:

Led Zeppelin, the Who, Rolling Stones, Aerosmith, Ted Nugent, Bob Seger, Queen, Rush, Jimi Hendrix, REO Speedwagon, Styx, Boston, Foreigner, AC/DC, Peter Frampton, Jethro Tull, Pink Floyd, Deep Purple, Guns 'n Roses, Heart, Thin Lizzy, Cream, Eric Clapton, the Beatles, Van Halen, Black Sabbath, Ozzy Osbourne, Fleetwood Mac, Foghat, Georgia Satellites, J. Geils Band, Georg Thoroughgood and the Destroyers, the Eagles, Joe Walsh, Kiss, ZZ Top, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Pat Benatar, Kansas, Yes, Crosby Stills Nash and Young, Jefferson Starship, Def Leppard, Allman Brothers, Lynyrd Skynyrd, .38 Special, Steve Miller Band, Journey, Santana, the Doors, Rod Stewart, Alice Cooper, Emerson Lake and Palmer, Neil Young, Bon Jovi, Steppenwolf, Blue Oyster Cult, Cheap Trick. Well, that about exhausts the list of bands that I can spontaneously name without doing some "research." But I think you get the drift.

What I found rewarding about this was (besides fifty bucks) the chance to give my support to groups that I like and express my abhorrence of groups I didn't. I tend to favor late-60's/early-70's British Rock (Led Zep, middle-period Stones, the Who), early Aerosmith, anything fairly blues-y, and some of the grittier artists like Neil Young and George Thoroughgood. I despised the mid-70's and later "corporate rock" of Boston, Styx, Foreigner, etc. as well as the 80's bands like Journey that were even worse. But now I'm called away to dinner so I'll wrap this up and conclude later.

Sorry for any inconvenience!

Labor Day 2002. Yesterday I went to a worship service at All Souls Community Church, a fairly new gathering affiliated with the Unitarian Universalist Association. While I have some reservations about linking up with a classic liberal religious denomination, I've had a bit of interaction with the pastor, Brent Smith, through email and in person, and I see him as someone I could connect with intellectually in some beneficial ways. So we'll see what comes of that.

Anyway, the service and his message were on the topic of "the Work of the People" and he used as one of his readings, the passage from Genesis where God cursed Adam after the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil was eaten. Adam's curse, as we all know, was that he would have to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow. Thus was the idea established, deep in the roots of our culture, that work was a punishment, a toilsome, wearying "sentence" that all men were condemned to endure over the course of our lives.

His take on this passage was that we should keep in mind, this is probably a story that pre-dates the Hebrew tradition, and he notes that many parallels to this story can be found in the literature of other cultures of that era. In contrast, the first creation story, of the seven-day process culminating in the appearance of male and female created in the image of God, is quite unique and distinctively Hebrew. Thus, he feels we are at some liberty to take a harder look at this notion that work is a God-ordained curse, since it can have a negative impact on how we regard our work, especially those aspects of work that make us something different that the animals.

Work is something we do, using tools, operating on levels of greater sophistication in our relationship to the world around us. At its best, our labor can be a vehicle whereby we are "reintroduced" to God, where, as Brent put it, a "mystic harmony" can be achieved as we realize a sense of fulfillment and belonging to the world and our community that we wouldn't find if we were once again to find ourselves in a Garden of Eden, where all needs were provided, where everything came to us so easily.

He talked about how Western religion comes to us in two basic forms - the Orthodox, which tends to look back to a point in time when everything was perfect, and sees us as having fallen from that state of perfection. It preaches a hope for an eventual restoration to a state that we once knew. The Liberal tradition, which Brent espouses, is more uncertain - it looks forward to an improvement in our condition, it hopes for something better than what we know now or have ever known, recognizing a pattern of ever-increasing complexity and gradual progress in our study of the trends of our past history. While I'm not completely ready to endorse this basic division of religious types (I haven't really thought it all through,) there's validity in what I heard him say. I personally see nothing all that attractive in a "return to the Garden" and when I listen to what many say about Heaven, it seems to me that they are envisioning something rather along these lines. Now rather than go off in a tangent of discussion about Heaven and Eden, I'll try to stay on the topic of work...

I see our work, both in the aspect of doing the many tasks it takes to sustain our present way of life, and also our efforts to bring a better world into existence, to have profound spiritual dimensions. Many people don't share this assessment. I'm particularly thinking of so much of what I see happening with the end of pure profits and subsequent indulgence as the goal. Think of all the resources that are just squandered, and for what reason other than flaunting excess, accumulating more power, indulging petty appetites. Not that I'm the model of thrift and simplicity, but I see so much waste. And in the process, so much bitterness and dissatisfaction from people who hate their jobs or go about their occupations so cynically.

We would do better to take some time to reflect on whatever we might see as timeless and nourishing about our labors, and view them as an offering to God and to our world. If we can't find those redeeming aspects to what we do, maybe a different method of earning our daily bread should be pursued.