Taken out of Context

Samantha and I had the pleasure of visiting the great city of New Orleans over this spring break.  Despite battling through a sinus infection (Samantha) and some sort of throat nastiness (me), and being the least partying people in the French Quarter (in bed by 10:30), we had a great time experiencing the sights and sounds of the Crescent City.  

One of the unexpected gems during our brief vacation was the Voodoo Tour.  We made reservations with Tree (yes, his name) of Racontours, billed on Tripadvisor as the number one tour in the French Quarter.  While occasionally a bit of a rogue, Tree’s colorful character danced our small group through the French Quarter, delighting us with the rich history of the former French and Spanish colonial periods.

I expected a New Orleans Voodoo Tour to aggrandize the stereotypes associated with the practice.  I anticipated bloody stories of animal and human sacrifices, of voodoo dolls and their unassuming victims, of black magic and demons.  I was wrong.  So many of my assumptions fell flat, no more than uninformed drivel handed to me by pop culture.

Voodoo at its roots worships ancestral spirits.  Certain spirits have gained a reputation for answering particular prayers, and those have gained more of a following than others.  Voodoo dolls are a way of inviting healing powers and luck into your life.  They can also be used as a way to extrinsically work out personal grudges without bringing actual harm to others.     

Louisiana Voodoo adopted many Catholic elements in the 1800s through the teachings of Voodoo Queen Marie Laveau.  A devout Catholic herself, Laveau drew her Voodoo followers into the church by drawing comparisons between the Voodoo’s spirits and the Cult of the Saints.  The Voodoo spirit of Legba fulfilled the same role as St. Peter - holding the keys to heaven.  Aida Wedo and the Blessed Virgin, Ghèdè and St. Expeditè, Ogun and St. Jude, all merged.  Marie Laveau taught that they were expressions of the same forces, the same spirits, and praying to one would mean praying to the other.

Taken out of context, glorified for entertainment value, Voodoo makes for good horror.  At its core, practiced in its intended form, Voodoo expresses an adapted version of an ancient tradition passed down by word-of-mouth through many generations by people struggling to live through more hardship than you or I could imagine.  Essentially, Voodoo helps people to find spiritual healing through prayer and meditation.  While its practices may appear foreign, its goals strike me as similar to every major religion I know.

Christianity taken out of context could look equally as ridiculous as Voodoo’s pop culture portrayal.  Masses of people who once a week grow hungry for the blood and flesh of their creator, who incidentally is now undead.  Zombies and Vampires?  Believe me, I don’t make this point to ridicule anyone’s beliefs, but I think the point is valid.  When taken out of context, just about anything can sound malevolent.

If you find yourself in New Orleans with four or five hours to spare, jump on the Voodoo Tour with Tree.  Besides a good time with an entertaining guide, the history of the Voodoo world will unfold before your eyes in a very enlightening way.

Suffer the Children a Robotic Rhino

At this time of year, it is not hard to recall the message of Jesus Christ.  While the overly commercialized Christmas season fades in our rearview mirror, Easter rapidly approaches, still mostly safe from the industrial gift-giving machine (mostly).  Yet, in some corners, the everyday commercialization of the Word commences with seemingly unabashed fervor.

Cornerstone Church in San Antonio recently opened its newest building - a $5 million children’s center called the Ark.  Designed after the story of Noah and the Ark, the new building is meant to attract young people to the church.  You can read the news story here.

Church members expect their leaders to responsibly spend their donations.  Appropriate stewardship should lead to church growth, spreading Christ’s message of love, sacrifice, and redemption.  An innovative pastorate crafts a message that resonates in the hearts and souls of its flock.  Children come to Christ through the Word and His calling.

While the design for the Ark is innovative and intended to capture the minds of children, and I do respect their creativity, I question the decision to aim for over the top extravagance.  Included in the building are sixteen life-size Ark passengers - nine of which are animatronics built by Hollywood company Animal Makers.  The rhino actually appeared in the movie “2012.”  

When asked whether or not the animatronics were too extravagant, Executive Pastor Matthew Hagee’s answer raised my eyebrows:  “If casinos can build opulent buildings to incentivize gamblers to want to come and enjoy their weekend, how then can you justify not building something that would incentivize people to come and hear about the Word of God?”

I am sure Jesus would appreciate the comparison between Sin City and a house of God.  In fact, by returning to the source and consulting the Son of Man himself, it would seem that I missed the animatronic Giraffe standing behind Jesus during the Sermon on the Mount; I lost it in the small print.  Oh, and a corrected translation of the New Testament reveals that it wasn’t Jesus who over turned the money changers’ tables at the temple - it was an animatronic Rhino.

Humor aside, my point is this.  Given the right collection of messages, a pastorate who teaches parents how to lead their homes, and an appropriate learning environment, there should be no problem guiding children to Christ.  Rather than spending money on unnecessary expenditures, raise money to help people who need it.

Mr. Hagee even acknowledged the extravagance: “I don’t have any problem with somebody saying it’s over the top.”  

You know who might agree with Mr. Hagee?  The more than 500 homeless children in the San Antonio area documented as of November 2012 by SAMMinistries.  

What would make a larger Christ-like impact on a child’s life?  Knowing animatronics wait for you at church?  Or, knowing that a Christian organization gave you a home out of the goodness of their heart.  

I think I know which one Jesus would choose.

Grill on Fire

I love to cook.  I hate to clean.  I will grudgingly clean my messes after I make them, and have recently learned to clean as I cook, which saves time in the end, but I still hate it.  Needless to say, aside from the grate, I have not cleaned my gas grill in more than a year.  Unfortunately, after all that time, the greasy build up is volatile, waiting for the right moment to ignite.

Have you ever looked down into the guts of your grill and seen the nastiness waiting below?  I use my grill frequently, and so I had more than a year of melted fat, carbonized grease, and mildly burnt meat parts, all built into a thick layer of detritus coating the bottom.  The way my grill is built, I would have to mildly exert myself to see the bottom - very mildly; the grates and the heat diffusers partially block the view.  And, I would have to be motivated to acknowledge how disgusting it is.  The grossness just gathers, fuel for a future fire.

I think the same can be said about ourselves.  If we looked deep inside, would we see the leavings of arguments unresolved, family and friend drama, social opinions we aren’t sure we really believe anymore?  These are all the elements of yesterday’s version of us.  As we grow and move towards who we are, we leave the remnants of who we were behind.  Sometimes, these little bits are just as flammable as the nast collected at the bottom of my grill.  The longer we ignore them, the more potent they become.

One of my menu items for this week was Teriyaki Chicken.  I use a recipe from my Dad, picked up from when we lived in Hawaii.  The recipe is simple.  Combine soy sauce, a homemade weak simple syrup, white onion, ginger, and garlic into a marinade.  Marinate chicken thighs and drumsticks overnight.  Grill.  Be prepared for flareups from melting chicken fat and dripping juice (the sugar).

I was ready to go.  I had my tongs for turning the chicken after eight minutes.  I had my timer.  I had my spray bottle for squirting the flareups.  I put the chicken on.

We are usually ready for personal flareups.  We know how to put out small fires and handle small dramas life throws at us.  Every once in a while a larger piece of our past catches on fire, but we deal with these as they come.  We don’t think about everything else lining the bottom, waiting for the big explosion.

The small flames are expected and manageable.  With a squirt here or a squirt there, I put out the fires quickly.  If they flare up too much, I move the piece of chicken.  This particular batch seemed to flare up quite vigorously, so I moved the chicken into the open spots between heat diffusers.  The grease and fat still dripped, but it fell in the depths of the grill instead of onto the diffusers right below.  Any flareups would be away from the chicken and wouldn’t lead to charred meat.  Smart right?

Well, this plan, while seeming intelligent at the time, didn’t end up that way.  See, the chicken still dripped.  And there were still some flareup on the grate and on the diffusers, just not as many.  And I still sprayed them with the squirt bottle.  And the water from the squirt bottle would scatter the flaming grease, knocking it to the bottom.  Where it would land on freshly dripped grease.  Where it would flare.  And ignite a year’s worth of fuel.

Have you ever seen a grease fire?  It is quite magnificent.  The way it ignores water as if it isn’t even there.  The way it just bigger as it finds more fuel, burning through a year of my laziness.

I have seen some spectacular meltdowns in my life and participated in a few.  People who haven’t dealt with their own issues, burying them deep below the surface, hoping they won’t ever ignite again.  I can remember doing the same thing beforehand.  Leaving them there, ignoring the need for a resolution, creates a flammable situation, sure to explode some point down the road.  

After emptying my squirt bottle to no effect, I ran inside and grabbed the baking soda and dumped it on the flames.  It wasn’t enough.  Thankfully, we had a second box and I doused the remaining flames with the white powder.  My hand has now been forced.  If I plan to use my grill again, I have to clean it.  

We can never plan for the explosion, preparing before hand to manage it.  All we can do is deal with it when it arrives.  Avoid burying issues; deal with them instead.  Look deep, clean out the garbage, take care of yourself.  Avoid the fire before it happens.

About my meal?  Don’t worry.  I took the chicken off before putting out the fire.  It was delicious

Growing Musicians

I love this time of year.  Region Band auditions are over.  Solo and Ensemble is over.  Band Auditions and Benchmarks are still somewhere over the horizon.  The possibilities are endless.  This is the time of year I can once again mold my students into powerful musicians and not just chasers of notes and rhythms.  And it is Spring (well, maybe not officially yet, but Punxsutawney Phil did say it would be early this year).

The competitive focus in my bassoon and saxophone studio thrums with intensity during the fall.  Focus on region etudes and scales drives most practice sessions, many times stifling technical and musical growth because of the kids’ one-track focus .  Lessons attempt to balance fundamental musicianship with cramming notes and rhythms.  All in all, the fall is hyper-intensive, super-focused, and driven.  It wrings me out like a sponge - hearing the same music every day eventually begs questions of sanity.

At the same time, the local foliage goes through a transition into dormancy - much like my students’ musical development.  With a fiery burst, trees abandon their leaves, littering the ground with the past year’s greenery.  We are left with bare branches and skeletal woodlands.

Winter arrives.  Again, my students have a singular focus - solo contest.  While their efforts are more individual, their pieces catered to their own specific skill level, and I regain a measure of sanity from the variety of music, the students still have a short period of time in which to learn a complex piece of music.  Their attention has a little more flexibility, and just like in the fall, lessons work to balance good musical skills along with the solos, but they still prefer the solo to fundamental practice.

Now, Spring approaches.  The Spring season is my favorite and write I about it every year.  I love the newness in the air, the fresh balance of a chilly morning and a warm afternoon.  I can’t wait to get outside and plunge my hands into the soil, to take winter’s leavings and craft them into something extraordinary.  I look forward to the explosive emergence of greens, reds, blues, yellows, and every other imaginable hue and shade this beautiful planet offers.

In the same way that the planet emerges from the slumber of winter dormancy and explodes in growth and life, so do my students.  Now that individual competition sits behind us for the moment, I relish the opportunity to develop the personal strengths of each student, to tackle individual weaknesses, to foster a strong understanding of music theory and how to apply that knowledge to creating a beautiful phrase.  I cherish this time of year because I get to grow musicians.

The cyclical nature of our planet means I get to experience this feeling again and again.  If it always remained Spring, I wouldn’t appreciate its arrival.  In a way, I love the anticipation as much as I do the release.  In fact, I think I will focus on that particular aspect of making a phrase this week.  Because I can.

Burrito Gigante

I grew up in San Antonio.  To us, the Riverwalk area was a nice place to take out of town visitors, and as I grew older, a fun place to hang out during the All-State Convention.  By my young rationale, simply due to location, the food on the River was majestic, high brow, and unarguably upper-class.  Now that I am an adult, I have quickly learned that a fancy location does not mean fancy food.

The Burrito Gigante is a humongous dish.  It is a flour tortilla practically stuffed with an entire tex-mex buffet, smothered in a curious chile sauce.  It is a harbinger of future heartburn, a muddled mix of tastes, textures, and aromas, and, as its name states explicitly, too large for the average person to eat.

I have been better pleased eating a Taco Bell 7-layer Burrito drenched in Fire hot sauce.

Now, had I paid the same price for this smorgasbord of mediocrity as I might at my local tex-mex eatery, I would not be sitting here typing this out.  But, with a couple of drinks, two burritos, and an appetizer (which was the best thing about the entire meal), I spent as much as I might for delightful dinner date at a decent steak place.

It might be the ambiance of the place that helps drive the price upwards.  Nope.  I felt like I was dining in the back end of a mess hall occasionally used for storage.  Then maybe it was because of the high quality service.  Again, no.  Service was not poor, but I did not feel well taken care of.  Or maybe it was the claim that this kitchen served only the the most authentic of foods, after all, it was the Original Mexican Restaurant.  Again, and this time in Spanish - no.

Ok, ok.  It must be the River then.  In fact, I am sure the location is the only, the ONLY reason for the prices.

But does that explain the low quality meal?  Does the NY Phil phone it in just because they are in one of the most culturally vibrant cities in the world?  Does the Louvre hang bad art on its wall - they have the location, why do they need quality?  Do the Los Angeles Lakers only strive for a .500 winning percentage - oh, oops, this one is true.

Just because you have the draw and you know people will show up to eat, doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice quality.  I can stomach the price if the food is right, but not when you can’t really even stomach the food.

All Work and No Play . . .

The setting: a frozen mountain retreat in the midst of winter, cut off from the rest of the world until the spring thaw arrives.  The caretaker family looks forward to a secluded winter, free from distraction, to help the three of them heal from the familial stress fractures life forces them to suffer.  While it seems the setting is ideal for putting a family back together, there is a problem - all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

Happiness, or at least its pursuit, resides in the Declaration of Independence as one of humanity’s unalienable rights.  We have the responsibility to discover our own happiness and exactly how to achieve it, absent the interference of a tyrannical and despotic government.  Because the process of finding individual happiness falls on our shoulders, we often find ourselves missing the mark.  Samantha and I recently had a conversation in which we both discovered that we had possibly just done that.

While I love both the movie and the book versions of The Shining, I experienced the movie first, and so its impression upon me runs deeper.  Stanley Kubrick’s masterful directing captures the isolation and loneliness felt by the Outlook Hotel’s winter family.  Accompanied by a haunting collection of modern music by Ligeti, Penderecki, and Bartok, the score broods, summing up the overall mood through the constant threat of the Dies Irae - the Day of Reckoning approaches.

Step back and take stock of your life periodically.  In doing so, you might discover that you have taken a wrong turn or stayed too long on a short path.  Life doesn’t have GPS; a computerized voice doesn’t instruct us to decide this way or that and so we find ourselves lost sometimes.  Discovering our wrong turn and rectifying the mistake puts back in the right direction.

The Torrance family sought to find healing in the solace of the mountains.  Jack hoped to mend his relationship with his wife and son while beating his alcoholism - a reversal of his normal behavior.  He also hoped to find a novel.  So, as the winter settled in, he began to work.  And work.  And work.

During Samantha and my analysis of our own recent life, we discovered that we do not take enough individual time for ourselves.  We do other things than just work our businesses, but our lives fill up quickly with obligations to other people, other activities, and other organizations; we find ourselves scheduled to death by our own hand.

Jack Torrance discovers this same problem the longer he spends pounding away at his typewriter.  The unfortunate consequence of taking a winter sojourn in a mildly haunted hotel and working nonstop?  As the movie says - all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.  He goes crazy and attempts to kill his family.

While we may not be sequestered in a lonely haunted hotel, the message is the same for us as it was for Jack.  Left to our own overworked lives, without manifesting change, we would find ourselves heading down a similar slippery slope.  Death by axe is not a typical result, but don’t doubt that your relationships could end up broken and mangled, not to mention your own happiness.  Take stock and make sure you are not headed down the same path as Jack.  You might find yourself frozen out of happiness.

Paralysis of Analysis

I have a student who probably should have made region band this year.  Honestly, there is no probably about it.  Had he guided his practice efforts the right way, he would have made region band.  Unfortunately, he succumbed to his insecurities in a way most of us would find familiar.  He couldn’t ever get out of his own head.

Probably three-quarters of the work my students need to do lies in personal perception and how that guides their practice and performance.  Fundamentally, most bassoon students, if placed correctly, are highly intelligent, strongly independent young people.  If prepared the correct way from the moment they first begin to learn their craft, they would all experience high levels of success.  Unfortunately, from the first time they touch the instrument, they experience instruction aimed primarily at correcting mistakes.    For many students, their early instruction teaches them to ferret out errors.  While this may seem like the best way to focus practice, these students have learned to do it to a fault.

The student I mentioned above suffers from this problem.  We can hardly make it through a measure or two before he stops to point out his errors.  He constantly stops, describing the mistake, reasoning out the origin of the error, before restarting.  Left to his own devices, we would never make it past the first line of anything in our lessons.  I am certain his practice sessions proceed the same way.  He is plagued with paralysis of analysis.

My job in his lessons is to deflect his focus from errors.  I work in small chunks of music; any time he stops, I instantly redirect - “keep playing, keep playing, keep playing” - until he resumes.  I don’t let him offer a single unobstructed comment until he has completed the chunk.  Once he achieves that, we dissect the phrase, find the errors, prescribe a solution, and work through it again - without stopping.  Slowly, I am teaching him to practice the right way.  He will make region next year.

Most of us succumb to the same sort of paralysis at points in our life.  We over-think to the point of negativity, sometimes thinking long past the point when decisions should be made.  Often, we wait so long, decision making slips from our skill set, leaving us bereft of the ability to even decide something as simple as what to eat.  

This paralysis resides in fear.  My student fears someone will catch him unaware of his own mistakes, so he stops constantly to point them out when playing on his own.  When playing in band class, the fear retreats - the likeliness of getting caught making mistakes reduces substantially when playing with sixty or seventy other musicians.  If we looked deep within ourselves, our insecurities develop from similar fears.  Our society prides itself on perfection.  We learn from an early age mistakes are frowned upon, so we prevent them by avoiding activities in which they occur or we jump the gun and point them all out unnecessarily.  Neither are the solution.

I teach my students that mistakes lead to growth.  We are human; we err.  I tell them to give themselves permission to make mistakes.  Allowing themselves to err reduces the power a mistake has over their psyche.  Eventually, they roll right past their mistake unaffected.  Now, to be clear, I stress the difference between ignoring a mistake and moving past a mistake.  One is healthy, the other is not.  We practice with a “mistake basket” in which they deposit their mistakes while playing a particular passage.  After they complete the passage, we examine the basket’s contents and decide which items need our focus.  Eventually, we free ourselves from the paralysis of analysis.

Mistakes are necessary for growth, for developing character.  Learning how to handle mistakes in our lives positions us to roll with anything the world might throw our way.  Avoiding or over indulging them does not offer a solution to the problem, rather it roots the problem deeper.  Avoid the paralysis of analysis before it sets in too deep.