Washing Dishes

The morning feast is winding down as Ron, Linda, Peter and I get up from the picnic table overlooking the green drape of our yard on this July 4th. Sirens whine here and there. As long as we don't hear the thump of bass drums at 120 bpm, we know the parade hasn't begun. Dishes gather at the island in the kitchen. Dad seems content to manage the cleanup with Mom. She seems more intent on moving along so that she can witness the annual ritual two blocks away. Dad carefully cleans plates, scraping remaining food into the trash can or sink, piling similar sized plates on each other, and filing silverware into the dishwasher. He runs the garbage disposal which churns up and swallows the meal Dad fed it. Now he starts running water and hand washing the bigger pots and pans with a soapy froth of water that smells of lemon detergent. The lingering aroma of sausage and pancakes comforts the air that has the tension and urgency Mom brings to it with her dissatisfaction with the morning's production sprawl.

School Gym

Walking out of the boy's locker room on sneakers that send me bouncing just a bit, I push open the door and step onto the shiny maple floors. My shoes squeak with every step. The smell of rubber mingles with the reverberations of teenagers shouting and running around with the soccer ball. They push for position, yelling for the ball so they can swing their leg with full force, slamming the ball into the bank of bleachers that smack loudly on impact. Now two of these adolescents collide followed by the thud of elbows whacking the floor. One of them, now grimacing, grabs his arm, muttering  curses. Our gym teacher blows his piercing whistle  to halt the scattered boys and give us instructions. This won't be as fun as the spontaneous match that he interrupted.

Premiere of Jesus Savior of the World

We're thrilled at the fantastic launch of the new hymn Jesus Savior of the World at Redeemer NYC on Sunday, March 16. It was great to be in the middle of 600 people singing this hymn the first time they ever saw it. I look forward to this going far and wide now.

Review of Choral Anthems and Motets

http://www.muruch.com/2013/03/charles-hammell-choral-anthems-and-motets.html

Camille Paglia: The Avant Garde is Over

Something I roughly said 32 years ago while still in college. This applies to music, too.

FTA:

"The avant-garde was a magnificent and revolutionary phase in the history of art, but it’s completely over. Artists and galleries must (in Ann Landers’ immortal words) wake up and smell the coffee! The avant-garde, whose roots were in late-18th-century Romanticism, was a reaction against a strong but suffocating classical tradition. The great modernist artists, from Picasso to James Joyce, were trained in that tradition, which gave audacity and power to their subversion of it.

"But then modernism began to feed on itself, and it became weaker and weaker. As I argue in 'Glittering Images,' there has been nothing genuinely avant-garde since Andy Warhol except for Robert Mapplethorpe’s luminous homoerotic images of the sadomasochistic underground. Everything that calls itself avant-garde today is just a tedious imitation of earlier and far superior modernist art. The art world has become an echo chamber of commercially inflated rhetoric, shallow ironies and monolithic political ideology."

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