Summer: "Summer King," WUAS Corporation address verification, new French President Emmanuel Macron married his high school drama teacher who's 24 years older than he is, Visiting communities in the British Isles in my teens, Fettes College, a bit of a Deadhead / Eric Clapton / acoustic folkie / Allman Brothers / Blues' head, Could we revisit the Grateful Dead playing at Stanford with YouTube's into 3D augmented virtual reality around us? Does music and Winterreise do this anyway, somehow internally in our bodyminds?

Hi Scott,

Sunday evening - very cold - maybe even a frost tonight, but then it should be warming up.  

Attended an interesting new opera, Summer King, about a black baseball player, Josh Gibson, who played in the “Negro” leagues and lived in Homestead.  While Jackie Robinson was the player that finally integrated the major leagues, this man, Josh Gibson, just missed being that person.  The singing, staging, lighting were wonderful.   The opera could probably do with a little editing.  It was exciting to hear so many beautiful black voices of operatic caliber and to have the story performed by the Pittsburgh Opera about a hometown boy.  The composer/librettist was a man named Sonenberg from Portland, Maine.

It’s late - thanks for your ‘phone message.

Hope you have a good week.

L, M  

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Hi M,

Thanks very much for your email. "Summer King" sounds edifying - thanks for the heads' up about it. Not sure that it will make it to the Bay Area, but if it's available on YouTube or similar for free I might check it out, having gone to high school in Pittsburgh . 

Received the WUAS Corporation address verification, and another related, letter yesterday when I checked my P.O. Box. Another momentous baby step to say the least for this big process I'm developing ...

The new French President Emmanuel Macron married his high school drama teacher who's 24 years older than he is. They connected in school when he was 15 apparently. Interesting to think/see how this plays out inter-culturally, French-American wise, and in the media too. French sexual practices, shall I call them, probably have and will inform American ones, yet the legal systems remain very different. And Macron is Roman Catholic religio-culturally, and America has puritan roots with plural/diverse religio-culture, (and with growing focus on the 3rd monotheistic religion, Islam) even as secularism grows too.

Will probably play in the Open Band for Scottish Country Dancing at St Clement's in Berkeley again this evening after~2 months. Music making is fun.

L,
Scott

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Hi M, 

Just sent this to E, which you might enjoy. 

Hi E, 

Our conversation which brought us to what we experienced and learned as teens this morning lead me to look up Prinknash Abbey again - and it's Benedictine, not Cistercian! (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prinknash_Abbey and http://www.prinknashabbey.org). I had Buddhist books in hand in visiting Prinknash, and was interested in community (hippy too) as a 16-17 year old! What were you alluding to Benedictine-wise again re your father's thinking - and renunciation questions as a teen? Fettes College in Edinburgh where I studies in 1976-77 in the 1st Year 6th (of a two year A-level process there) was Anglican (Church of England) and Church of Scotland - and all the Scottish, English, as well as the kids from the Middle East, went to Church every morning in the beautiful main Fettes building - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Fettes_College_from_the_south-east.JPG and https://fettes.com/fettes-college/life-at-fettes/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fettes_College - and had evening prayers in their houses. (I was in Kimmerghame House - https://twitter.com/KimmerghameH and https://twitter.com/Fettes_College). I see religion as ongoing-ly problematic, and have a stream of anti-religiosity running through me, even as I appreciate aspects of unprogrammed Quakers, Unitarian Universalist singing and music, and soaking in the Harbin warm pool - and writing ethnographically about it!

Have you heard about "Summer King" (which opera my m just saw this weekend in Pgh)? Just emailed my mother below about "Summer King" plus. 

Fondly, 

Scott

L, 

Scott

E:

Glad too to hear Jack is getting better, E - sounds like a long healing time, however, and I hope his ailment wasn't too serious! I liked hearing Winterreise a lot at Stanford. It's a very pretty (Romantic) piece. I'm a bit of a Deadhead / Eric Clapton / acoustic folkie / Allman Brothers / Blues' head these days  ... yet I liked too understanding the German as it was sung, - and as poetry (even heard ethnographically). Do you like Winterreise? The Stanford student sung it beautifully.

Scott

S:
I haven't decided whether I like it.  It is a masterpiece investigation of obsession, to the point of pathology, or at least to use a more neutral term, pathos.  The setting to music, though, is genius.  Hard not to admire, even if the poetry is chilling.

E

E:

When I listened to the recording, I was struck by how the Stanford student sounded similar to it - both good (but there may be a variety of interpretations out there). I listen to music these days to be moved - not explicitly listening to elicit far-reaching neural cascades of pleasure or loving bliss neurophysiology as cosmic music of the spheres (my taste-wise) - and I was moved by Winterreise and its skillful singing, although it-s from a very different time, place and style. Thanks for your thinking. Could we revisit the Grateful Dead playing at Stanford with YouTube's into 3D augmented virtual reality around us? Does music and Winterreise do this anyway, somehow internally in our bodyminds?

Scott

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RE Schubert's Winterreise {and consciousness}

Fledermaus: Mouse came out of near my windshield wipers Friday night coming home from UC Berkeley Tourism Studies Working Group (I'm giving a talk on my Harbin book on F May 5!), Glad we're talking about modeling a mouse brain with artificial intelligence by 2020 - https://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/2017/03/molecule-stanford-googles-tom-dean.html - which I heard at Stanford from Google's Thomas Dean, And to this day, we still don't know what happened to that little mouse flying through the night on his moving car jungle gym space ship on Skyline Drive high above Berkeley, "Cheep, cheep" and emergent sound/human language pathways?

http://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/2017/04/fledermaus-mouse-came-out-of-near-my.html

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summer

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_summer

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