Month: December 2021

Lydster: an art debut at church

Honor Society

Jesus

My daughter had her art debut at our church on November 7. Actually, it was just outside the building, where we meet for coffee hour, weather permitting.

The church had acquired the piece of art, shown above. I was a tad confused when one of our pastors mentioned ME in the morning announcements. Oh, she saw the piece on my blog or my Facebook feed, which features my blog.

The pastor was so taken by it that my daughter was asked to make another one for the church. But the process was tedious, ripping up pieces of magazine pages – mostly Vanity Fair – and sorting the colors. She was disinclined to do it again. But she would consider parting with the original.

After it sat in our living room for well over a year, in no small part due to COVID, it finally got to church. After the unveiling, my daughter briefly talked about the meaning behind the work. She was trying to come up with a more representational Jesus while at the same time maintaining the beatific tradition. I annoyed her only slightly as I chatted with the church members about her fastidious process.

I’ve noted that my wife doesn’t often go to church in person these days. But both she and her mother, who’s moved to Albany in the past few months, attended.

One thing I had not noticed all the time the piece resided in our house. There are hymns, from a discarded hymnal in the background, but there are no titles or page numbers.

Also in November

There was an in-person ceremony for the new inductees for my daughter’s high school branch of the National Honor Society. The day before the event, she and her mother went shopping for a suitable dress. She and her friend since first grade, Kay, both were handing out the programs. When the school district newsletter came out a day or two later, both Kay and my daughter were featured.

Christmas Day in the morning

Handel, Rutter

waiting.christmasIt’s Christmas Day. And it’s Saturday. Obviously, it’s time for some more Christmas music.

Let’s start with the probably obvious choice, the first part of the Messiah by Georg Frederick Handel. This is performed by the Dream Orchestra. It was conducted by Daniel Suk on December 3, 2015. I don’t think I’ve linked to this particular version, but I could be wrong. Sometimes, choirs will end this part with Hallelujah, which actually ends Part II, the Easter section; I’m catholic about doing that.

I’ve been in the chorus when this part has been performed in its entirety at least four times. And I’ve been in plenty of choirs that have sung And The Glory Of The Lord, And He Shall Purify, Glory To God In The Highest, and especially For Unto To Us A Child Is Born a bunch of times. I never tire of them.

Noel

The version of Gloria by John Rutter I picked was new to me. This was performed by the Angeles Chorale at the First United Methodist Church in Pasadena, CA, on December 15, 2012. This piece is harder than it seems, I can tell you from having performed it twice. My favorite Rutter piece is the Requiem, but it doesn’t fit this season.

I think I used this before. The Alma College Choirs sing The Dream Isaiah Saw. It’s by composer Glenn Rudolph. Recorded live at the 2011 Festival of Carols on the campus of Alma College in Alma, Michigan. I love singing this song.

Here’s Aubrey Logan singing O Holy Night. It was released only yesterday. Your basic last-minute shopping present.

Finally, the title tune, performed by David Arkenstone. This was NOT exactly what I was looking for. Nor were all the versions of I Saw Three Ships I came across. But it’s like other Christmas gifts; sometimes they are very nice, even when they are not what you were expecting.

 

Perhaps the wait is almost over

Waiting for someone to come out of somewhere

waitOne of my sisters sent me this clip of a song called Wait for the Lord. It’s in the Taizé style, which is to say that the message is repeated. One can become impatient with that, but I think that repetition is its power.

Wait for the Lord
Whose day is near
Wait for the Lord
Keep watch, take heart

And it’s sometimes an impatient wait. O Come, O Come Emmanuel – Tarja.

One of the lesser-known Beatles songs, from Rubber Soul, is Wait.

It’s been a long time
Now I’m coming back home
I’ve been away now
Oh how I’ve been alone
Wait ’til I come back to your side
We’ll forget the tears we’ve cried

Perhaps the best cover version of a Rolling Stones song is I Am Waiting by Ollabelle. The group features Amy Helm, the daughter of the late vocalist of the Band, Levon Helm.

You can’t hold out, you can’t hold out, oh yeah, oh yeah
Waiting for someone to come out of somewhere
Waiting for someone to come out of somewhere
See it come along, don’t know where it’s from
Oh, yes, you will find out
Happens all the time, censored from our mind
You’ll find out.

Norah Jones sang Christmas Don’t Be Late on CBS Saturday Morning recently. Not much like Simon, Theodore, Alvin, and Dave Seville.

Tommy Pett

And of course, The Waiting by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers:

The waiting is the hardest part
Every day you see one more card
You take it on faith, you take it to the heart

This, not incidentally, is the first song on Unconventional Advent (A Think Christian playlist) on Spotify.

I’ve said it before. I do think the waiting IS the hardest part.

It might be waiting for Christmas: the presents, the festivities, family gatherings. Or it may be that you’re waiting for it to be over: the pain, the sense of loss, family gatherings.

Perhaps it’s the end of 2021, which might have been better than 2020, but not as good as you had hoped.

Here’s hoping that what you are waiting for, whatever that might be, comes your way.

Josephine Baker: I knew so little

Genius in France

Josephine BakerI knew that Josephine Baker was a famous black entertainer starting in the 1920s. Yes, I was aware that she left the United States because of its open segregation laws. She was a big star in France. That’s about it.

That is until I was watching CBS Sunday Morning while waiting for my train to arrive. This segment is rightly titled The legacy of Josephine Baker.

First a bit of biography. “She was born Freda Josephine McDonald in St. Louis, Missouri, on June 3, 1906, to washerwoman Carrie McDonald and vaudeville drummer Eddie Carson. Eddie abandoned them shortly afterward, and Carrie married a kind but a perpetually unemployed man named Arthur Martin.” After a brief and difficult career in the US, her career thrived in Paris.

I’m fascinated by how France has been perceived as this sanctuary, at least for a little while. Some of the notable transplants, at least for a time, included James Baldwin and Lenny Kravitz. My noted activist cousin  Frances Beal lived there for a few years. And American soldier Henry Johnson, for years, got a lot more recognition for his World War I exploits by the French than by his home country, the US.

A star over there, but…

For Josephine Baker, a “1936 return to the United States to star in the Ziegfeld Follies proved disastrous, despite the fact that she was a major celebrity in Europe. American audiences rejected the idea of a black woman with so much sophistication and power, newspaper reviews were equally cruel (The New York Times called her a ‘Negro wench’), and Josephine returned to Europe heartbroken.”

She was active in the French resistance during World War II. “She performed for the troops” and… smuggled “secret messages written on her music sheets.” The French government later awarded her medals for her valor.

In the 1950s, “she began adopting children, forming a family she often referred to as ‘The Rainbow Tribe.’ aided by her third husband, composer Joe Bouillon. Josephine wanted her to prove that ‘children of different ethnicities and religions could still be brothers.’ She often took the children with her cross-country.” She raised two daughters, from France and Morocco, and 10 sons, from Korea, Japan, Colombia, Finland, Algeria, Ivory Coast, Venezuela, and three from France.

Civil rights advocate

But she did make it back to the United States again. I was struck by this dialogue in the CBS piece.
Reporter: “How long are you going to stay?”
Baker: “You want me to stay, don’t you?”
Reporter: “I’d like you to stay. I think you could help the Negro movement in the United States.”
Baker: “Oh, don’t say that.”
Reporter: “Why not?”
Baker: “Because it’s not a Negro movement. It’s an American movement.”
True enough.

She spoke at the historic March on Washington in August 1963. “You know, friends, that I do not lie to you when I tell you I have walked into the palaces of kings and queens and into the houses of presidents, and much more. But I could not walk into a hotel in America and get a cup of coffee, and that made me mad. And when I get mad, you know that I open my big mouth. And then look out, ’cause when Josephine opens her mouth, they hear it all over the world.”

Triumphant return

Josephine Baker “agreed to perform at New York’s Carnegie Hall” in 1973. “Due to previous experience, she was nervous about how the audience and critics would receive her. This time, however, cultural and racial growth was evident. Josephine received a standing ovation before the concert even began. The enthusiastic welcome was so touching that she wept onstage.

“On April 8, 1975, Josephine premiered at the Bobino Theater in Paris. Celebrities such as Princess Grace of Monaco and Sophia Loren were in attendance to see 68-year-old Josephine perform a medley of routines from her 50-year career. The reviews were among her best ever. Days later, however, Josephine slipped into a coma. She died from a cerebral hemorrhage at 5 a.m. on April 12.”

And in 2021, she has been inducted into France’s Pantheon, the first black woman, the first performing artist, and the first American so honored. She joins Voltaire, Victor Hugo, and Marie Curie among the 80 so honored.

It’s all relative, apparently

Machetunim

new cousinsBarbara Wallraff’s May I have a word column in the Boston Globe tries to address It’s all relative. Specifically, what you call certain folks to whom you are connected. For instance, how do you “refer to your grandchildren’s other set of grandparents”?

Her favorite suggestion was “parallelogrands, ‘owing to the pairs’ literally parallel positions on one’s family tree. Variations might include parallelogramps and, well, parallelogram. Readers also recommended grandsisters and outlaws. A couple of decades ago, the wives of my wife’s brothers and I would refer to each other as the “outlaws.”

Wallraff’s readers contacted her to inform that “a Yiddish and Hebrew term for relationships of these kinds is machetun in the singular and machatunim or machetunim in the plural… Machetunim covers “all one’s relatives by marriage,” per the late New York Times language columnist William Safire, and its singular form can refer to a relative by marriage even as distant as “your spouse’s mother’s second cousin.” I LOVED Safire.

The writer also discovered on her own “that Spanish has consunegros to describe some or all relationships of this kind, Italian has consuoceri, Greek symbethèra (or συμπεθέρα), Russian a gazillion specific terms categorized in a way I don’t understand, Tagalog magbalae, and English-speaking cultural anthropologists affines.”

Para, perhaps

Mushing all of these suggestions in my head, I think I’m going to opt for para- as a choice. It’s a nod to the parallelogram, but that has too many syllables! Para- means “alongside of”, or “closely related to”, among other things.

I’m thinking about this specifically because I was looking to find a tidy definition of a guy who died this year, who I’ve alluded to before. I was very fond of him. His name was Jack White; no relation to the guy from the White Stripes. He was the husband of my wife’s first cousin, Diane; yes, Jack and Diane. It was she who got me some of his cool baseball books.

In fact, I had envisioned Jack, my late father-in-law Richard, and me going to a major league ballgame one of these days. We always talked about the game at the Olin family reunions. So I’m trying on para. Jack would be my para-cousin. Or maybe para-cousin-in-law because he was my wife’s paracousin, or cousin-in-law?

Or maybe just cousin, because it’s what I call my great aunt by marriage’s nephew. Cousins cover a lot of ground.

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