Blog Archives

Bill Evans and Marian McPartland

10/26/2013

I found a collection of this interview/conversation with Bill Evans on You Tube and fused the parts together so that the interview/conversation could be heard in one sitting. Bill Evans is not only a great musician, he is a philosopher as well. In this wide ranging interview/conversation he shares his philosophy of music and provides example. It begins with his most famous tune, "Waltz for Debbie".

He discusses the change in his music, aiming for more depth, and rhythmic construction. He also discusses the idea of "displacement of phrases" which is most important to him and what he says is his basic conception of jazz structure. Evans illustrates what he means by displacement of phrases, against the melody, by playing, "All Of You" at the 4:30 mark.

Nobody can explain post-structure in jazz better than he. He does not just frame jazz as structure free. There is structure but, at the same time, there is freedom outside of that strict structure, where the music can move in and out. For Evans, the structure is not the melody or tune necessarily, it is more abstract that that. The structure is just "indicated" and not imposed. He explains what he means at the 19:00 minute mark. He suggests that the musician should have a complete picture of the basic structure. By structure he means it in an abstract sense. For example, the key of C to its dominate G 7th and back to the C and that is over a petal point. The song springs from there in a creative movement. He displays exactly what he means by that at the 20:00 mark and on. What a great teacher!

The explanation and example is awesome and as Marian mentions, there is a mystery there when you listen to it. There is so much in this exchange for the fan and for someone just interested in both the music and theory. Evans has an aphorism that it is better to practice one tune for 24 hours than 24 tunes in an hour! A good metaphor for many other things.

0 Comments

Canadian Coalition for Public Health criticizes throne speech

10/24/2013

0 Comments

On October 16, 2013, Governor General David Johnston delivered the throne speech to usher in this years parliament. It was greeted by concern from the Canadian Coalition for Public Health.

“We remain concerned, however, about the government’s hard-line approach to the mentally ill in the criminal justice system and the place of harm reduction interventions for its citizens who are fighting addictions,” said Ian Cubert co-chair of the coalition.

Our local MP Bruce Hyer had a humorous but clever retort to Harper's touch on crime approach saying that he should start in the senate!

Keep your eyes on the budget as the budget reflects priorities and priorities reflect values!

You can read the entire release here:

0 Comments

Happy Thanksgiving

10/13/2013

0 Comments

Happy Thanksgiving. For a humorous interlude, below is a clip from a famous thanksgiving movie, Planes, Trains and Automobiles. Granted the language is blue but the content is hilarious.

0 Comments

Congratulations Alice Munro on Nobel Prize for literature

10/11/2013

0 Comments

Alice Munro is the first Canadian woman to receive a Nobel Prize for literature. She wrote many short stories and was quoted in CBC as saying:

My stories have gotten around quite remarkably for short stories. I would really hope that this would make people see the short story as an important art, not something you play around with until you got a novel written.

Many of her stories focus on characters living in small, rural towns in Ontario. Hence my affinity for some of her work! While different than Flannery O'Connor who also wrote short stories as well, Munro nonetheless injects dark irony into many of her tales.

An example of that irony is her short story, The Bear Went Over the Mountain which was adapted into a movie, Away from Her (see Gordon Pinset on the film, Away From Her, below).

0 Comments

Walt Whitman and Breaking Bad

10/3/2013

0 Comments

Breaking Bad has finished and I will not add to the volume of commentary on the program. There are so many reflection and perspectives on the show that it is impossible to select just one theme to focus on; they are many and varied. One that I found particularly interesting though is the relationship between Walt Whitman, the famous American poet, and the program. In Breaking Bad, one of the characters, Gale, recites one of Walt Whitman's poems, When I heard the Learn'd Astronomer. It is first recited by Gale, the libertarian meth cook that Walt meets (see below). It is ironic that this man who is a self professed man of science recites a poem that seems to minimize the captivating role of science when compared with the vast expanse of the mystery of nature. But in many ways, this is apt. Gale is a free ranging thinker and while he appreciates the discipline of science, the allure of mystery captivates him. And so the scientist becomes the mystic.

When I heard the learn’d astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

There is a second allusion to Walt Whitman that Gilligan uses and that is the poem, Gliding Over All, which is a title of one of the episodes.

Gliding o’er all, through all,
Through Nature, Time, and Space,
As a ship on the waters advancing,
The voyage of the soul — not life alone,
Death, many deaths I’ll sing.

James Bowman, scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, writes:

The many deaths that weigh on Walt’s soul may have their due in the end, but the one Death, that which was always ahead of him, certainly will. It was his encounter with the reality of his own death — his cancer diagnosis in the show’s first episode — that breaks him bad. That a confrontation with mortality should lead a man of science to abandon the world of Enlightenment values for the honor culture of the criminal lifestyle is strangely fitting. For although modern philosophy, politics, and everyday life are largely oriented toward the defeat or delay of death, the rational man of science can ultimately only think of his own death as the disincorporation of his material self, followed by incomprehensible void.

Death, if not any better understood in the honor culture, at least has a clear place carved out for it there: it is something that there are uses for, there are consolations from, and there are things worse than. Enlightenment science can account for so much of what we see in the natural and social world, but as Walt learns, there are mysteries that still defy the rational mind. Living with these mysteries, not least the mystery posed by our own confrontation with nothingness, means looking beyond the rationalistic Enlightenment vision of the world arrayed in its proofs and figures, charts and diagrams, to other, more primitive sources of wisdom.

Read Bowman's whole piece here: Criminal Elements

0 Comments

Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission Chair urges residential school training

10/3/2013

0 Comments

Justice Murray Sinclair told a suicide prevention conference in Winnipeg on Wednesday that judges are legally required to learn about residential schools and the same should be mandatory for anyone working with aboriginal people.

"There isn't a single profession in Canada that shouldn't be required to understand the aboriginal experience in this country because all professions deal with aboriginal people, particularly in the West, where the population of aboriginal people is so significant,"

"Trauma feeds on trauma. Once here is a cycle that's started f suicides or crime or physical violence, it begins to feed upon itself and passes from generation to generation. Residential schools are probably the most significant historical trauma that aboriginal people in this country have experienced"

CBC had a really good series back in February, 2012 on this same theme.

Truth and Reconciliation Commission Urges More Awareness of Residential Schools

0 Comments

The 10 Habits of Highly Successful Hunter-Gatherers

10/3/2013

0 Comments

Mark Sisson fromMark's Daily Apple had a great post on the 10 habits of highly successful hunter gatherers. I posted a video of Dr. Terry Wahls who had her symptoms of multiple sclerosis drastically and significantly reduced through the primal/paleo diet. Sisson offers some good tips on embracing the primal lifestyle not just in terms of diet.

The 10 Habits of Highly Successful Hunter-Gatherers

To summarize:

Take Responsibility

Taking responsibility obliges us to scrutinize our own complicity in our life’s difficulties, in the bad decisions, in the less-than-ideal circumstances. When we think about our health, our professional lives, our relationships or any other area where grievances live, what have we done/are we doing to perpetuate a miserable pattern? How have we conspired with the negative influences to get us where we’re at? Why do we continue to accept situations that genuinely don’t work for us?

That said, it’s not about chastising ourselves. Taking responsibility for our lives doesn’t call us to emotionally beat ourselves up...

Maybe we really did get a raw deal – in childhood, in the job market, in our first marriage, in that bout with cancer. Taking responsibility doesn’t mean forgetting the past or turning over all awareness of the difficulties we’ve faced. I think it’s more a question of owning our lives – for all their mixed circumstances.

Be Selfish

This flies in the face of our ancestors’ culture of immediacy. There’s something to that living in the here and now rather than for the sometime-down-the-road. I think it’s possible to balance the two for the benefit of both, but it’s a deal with the devil to think we can continually neglect ourselves for the people and projected future of our lives. Our sense of balance must demand current and continual well-being for ourselves. When we are nourished and sustained today, we have more to offer to those around us and to our futures.

Build a Tribe

In this day and age, we live in proximity to numbers that would’ve stunned our ancestors. We count our social media “friends” into the hundreds, but we often miss a sense of close, constant connection. Exposure doesn’t fill our social wells. Neither do status updates.

If you find yourself at this point in your life without a core group, build one. Don’t make the excuse that you just missed the boat. It’s just too important. You’ll be glad you didn’t later. Feed this “highly successful” habit by first deepening the relationships you already have. When you begin seeing your partner, family members, kids, and closer friends as your tribe, you gain a whole new level of appreciation for the role they play in your life.

Be Present

For our ancestors, life was an exercise in continual hyper-vigilance. Not every second, but close. It wasn’t just the risk of becoming another creature’s dinner either. Attentiveness also meant watching for weather, catching migratory patterns, and deciphering water sources – just to name a few examples.

The Primal Connection is to be found in giving the moment your full attention. It’s about minding the difference between thoughtful deliberation or reflection and so-called monkey brain. It’s about throwing off the strangling self-absorption we trap ourselves in every day standing in line with our phones or with our mental chatter. See the people, places, and possibilities in front of you.

Be Curious

The thing about us hominids, is this. We think. We imagine. We create. We explore. We experiment and extrapolate. We’re driven to go around yet another corner of the path. We’ll push the envelope continually because it feels good to do it. It’s how we got ahead in the evolutionary game, how we’re so vastly successful after all. The wheel didn’t invent itself. Neither did all the continents come knocking at the door of the African savannah. You get the point.

Fast forward to today, and we’re a tale of contradiction. As a species we’ve advanced to the outer edges of the solar system. As individuals, however, our daily lives might not appear so inspiring. The thing is, we’re so ungodly busy. We’ve got filled calendars, packed schedules, pocket-sized devices and big screen distractions to keep us occupied and then some.

Trust Your Gut

That said, we do carry the same genes, the same inherent abilities to tap into the telling but understated detail of our environment (and each other). When we feel this again, use it and strengthen it like a neglected muscle, we also become more in touch with our own gut sense. There’s something decidedly Primal about the philosophies that say we find self-awareness and “awake-ness” in true silence.

Pick Your Battles

Ask yourself where your energy goes. Ask yourself what amount of risk you take, what amount of conflict you generate or accept in your life? Is it worth it? This doesn’t mean nothing is worth a risk or nothing is worth fighting for. It’s simply a recognition that your time, energy and other resources are limited. At a midlife inventory or, worse yet, the end of life, will you feel you pursued the right relationships and endeavors and let go at the right times? Were you the best person you could’ve been in those relationships? Is there a chance you’ll say to yourself, “I fought all the wrong battles”?

Get Over It

As Michael E. McCullough, author of Beyond Revenge: The Evolution of the Forgiveness Instinct, explains, the ability to forgive is as much a result of natural selection as the impulse for revenge. Forgiveness, he suggests, likely evolved as a means of social cooperation. For our ancestors, life was about conservation – of energy, of resources, of good will. In a cost-benefit analysis, nursing an unrelenting grudge would’ve been a major liability. If you couldn’t get along with the group, eventually you likely wouldn’t have been welcome anymore. Be upset, sure. But once it starts eroding the group dynamic, you’d better find yourself another band. The risk wasn’t worth the emotional indulgence.

Sharpen Your Spear

Whatever stage of the game you’re at, make the investment in yourself. Pursue a new career that aligns more with your passion. Delve into a hobby that gives you genuine pleasure. Resist the modern idea that life or professional success has to follow a linear track. Define your personal trajectory in terms of your own satisfaction and sense of self-development rather than an outside template. You decide what tools and skills you’ll hone and the value you’ll assign to them at varying points in your life.

Be Affluent

What does abundance mean to you? While we don’t need to swear off the blessings of modern conveniences and novelty, it’s important to define our most deep-seated priorities. What genuinely nourishes you at the physical level? What fills your intellectual, creative, social, emotional and spiritual dimensions, however you conceive of them? Too often we wind ourselves around a bloated and distorted sense of our basic needs (e.g. food, shelter and security, every knick-knack that Pottery Barn sells) all while depriving ourselves of the latter dimensions (e.g. genuine and close friends, time and outlets for self expression and development, etc.).

0 Comments

My Pensées

The title of this blog is an allusion to the famous work of Blaise Pascal. This blog represents the variety of my interests and thoughts on any given day and are strung together, like Pascal's Pensees, in no particular order. I work in the field of mental health, education, and human rights. I write and am a human rights advocate. I enjoy poetry, jazz, spirituality, politics and a potpourri of other interests that you will see reflected in this blog.