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In 1972, several months after I completed one of my first musical compositions—"Heavy Metal," in which ambient sounds were melded, on magnetic tape, with the gurgling sequences of a primitive synthesizer—my new wife, Hawley, and I set off for California. At the time, aspiring composers typically pursued postgraduate study in Europe, learning the latest styles of twelve-tone music and soaking in the great traditions of the past. But the California that I'd been reading about in books by Jack Kerouac, Henry Miller, and the beats appealed to my contrary state of mind. I was twenty-five and had spent my entire life in New England, growing up in East Concord, New Hampshire, and attending Harvard for six years. I was eager to strike out on my own. "Heavy Metal" had been a defiant farewell gesture of sorts; it probably owed more to Stockhausen and the Beatles' "A Day in the Life" than it did to Schoenberg and Stravinsky.
After an eight-day drive across the continent, Hawley and I took up residence in the Bay Area. San Francisco housing was too expensive, so, in exchange for a free apartment, I took the humiliating position of assistant manager of a building just off Berkeley's famously eccentric Telegraph Avenue. Outside on the narrow street, Cal students in slacks and windbreakers mingled with aging hippies and street people muttering to themselves. Adolescent runaways with greasy hair lounged on the sidewalk, begging for spare change, stray mongrels at their side. Street venders sold hash pipes and Vietcong flags that smelled of verbena. For a buck, a street poet would improvise a verse for you. Ancient VW vans chugged and farted up the street, their doors and panels painted with Sanskrit phrases.
On occasion, I'd drive over the Bay Bridge to San Francisco and hang out in the cafés and bookstores in North Beach. Late one night, while sitting in a bar there, I saw Allen Ginsberg walk in. He was alone and appeared to be looking for someone, but he seemed good-natured enough for me to swallow my nervousness and go up to him and introduce myself. I asked him for William Burroughs's address; I wanted to send him a copy of "Heavy Metal," whose title was an homage to Uranian Willy, the Heavy Metal Kid—a character in Burroughs's novel "The Soft Machine." Ginsberg peered at me through thick eyeglasses, whipped out an old-fashioned fountain pen from a cloth book bag, tore a piece of paper from a notebook, and handed the pen and paper to me. He dictated Burroughs's address in London. "Send it to him," he said. "He's always interested." (I never did. When I attempted to make a copy for Burroughs, I discovered that my original tape had disintegrated in its box.)
My plan was to live as a proletarian worker by day and an avant-garde composer at night. I took a job on the Oakland waterfront, working for a dingy clothing-import business called Regal Apparel. My days were spent in a sprawling, drafty warehouse not far from the Bay Bridge. I was a "lumper"—a member of a team of men who climbed into the back of shipping containers that had been packed in Singapore or Seoul and unloaded them by hand. Each container held tons of "drygoods," usually cheap clothing. I personally handled most of the Bermuda shorts worn by Richard Nixon's Silent Majority during the summer of 1972.
I returned from my long workdays at Regal Apparel exhausted and in no mood to spend the evening composing. Hawley, a jazz violinist who had taken a job teaching yoga at an Oakland health club, often came home from work at nine o'clock to find me asleep on the sofa. I wrote no music for a year, and by midwinter I was falling into a depression. California was enchanting, but the prospect of surviving on a grinding minimum-wage job was enough to make me consider returning to graduate school. I ardently didn't want to become a university composer, but I felt caught in a crisis of my own making.
By the following spring, I was on the verge of returning to Boston and Harvard when a friend and fellow-composer, Ivan Tcherepnin, called me and said that the San Francisco Conservatory of Music was looking for someone to teach composing and to direct the school's series of new-music concerts. The two faculty members who had been organizing the concerts had recently resigned, and the school's president was desperate to fill the post. The day before, the rusted-out floor of my Volkswagen had collapsed on the Ashby Avenue freeway ramp as I was driving to the warehouse, and I had suddenly found my seat scraping along the pavement of Interstate 80 while I frantically headed for the shoulder. It seemed as emphatic a message as any that I needed a change. I took the job.
In those days, the San Francisco Conservatory of Music was based in a former home for unwed mothers in the Sunset district. In a city that was otherwise full of piquant character and stunning vistas, the Sunset district was oddly bland: one had to know it well to ferret out a decent ethnic restaurant or a bookstore. But the school was a place of pulsing, chaotic excitement. Students sporting wild hair and dressed in baggy jeans and sandals wandered through the hallways, and, every morning at 8 A.M., the practice rooms began emanating an Ives-ian cacophony of pianos, trumpets, drums, double-basses, and singers.
I taught there for twelve years, from 1972 to 1984, by fits and starts finding my voice as a composer. The Conservatory was still struggling to establish itself, and few students were on a par with the typical Juilliard or Curtis performer. But there was a keen interest in all kinds of avant-garde music, something unimaginable at any of the East Coast colleges. I had students who could barely play their instruments but were nevertheless delighted to join me in a John Cage "event" or perform in one of Alvin Lucier's electro-acoustic "process" pieces.
One of my duties was directing the school's New Music Ensemble. This group, although made up of students, had for years given attention-getting concerts of avant-garde music at the de Young Museum, in Golden Gate Park. The works of Cage, Stockhausen, Boulez, Ligeti, and others were presented to enthusiastic audiences, and the concerts were covered by three of the local newspapers—again, something unthinkable in Boston.
My first concert signalled my ambition: Cage, Schoenberg, and Robert Ashley shared the program with the Messe de Nostre Dame by the fourteenth-century French composer Guillaume de Machaut. For the Machaut, a piece whose strangeness had stirred my imagination, I composed a "trope" of electronic taped music, with ring-modulated bell sounds, traffic noise, and footsteps, meant to provide a "continuum" to the live singing of the Mass (which I conducted from the stage). The San Francisco Chronicle critic who covered the concert said that my surround-sound update of Machaut's Mass was "about as entertaining as discovering 'Guillaume Was a Head' scratched on Rheims Cathedral." I decided to take this as a compliment.
Homemade "guerrilla" electronics were becoming hip among those of us who wanted to be avant-garde. Composers like Lucier, Ashley, Cage, and David Tudor were making radical compositions featuring contraptions of their own design and construction. In the predigital seventies, electronic music came either from the manipulation of tape recorders or from oscillators whose sensitivity to heat made them capricious. On a typical day, I'd spend the morning talking to a class of glazed-eyed graduate students about Beethoven's Opus 132 string quartet; the afternoon rehearsing the school orchestra in "Petrushka" or a Mozart symphony; and the evening huddled in my office with a soldering iron, my desktop covered with resistors, capacitors, wires, and circuit-board chips that I had scrounged at a flea market near the Oakland airport.
I eventually emerged with the Studebaker—a homemade modular synthesizer that featured a bank of intermittently truant oscillators, filters, ring modulators, and a primitive sampling device. Housed in a heavy redwood case, it was comically bulky. Even so, I composed several live electronic pieces for the Studebaker (named after a recalcitrant car that my family had owned during my childhood). With all guns firing, the Studebaker was capable of producing a commotion audible from a distance of several Zip Codes. Among the works I produced with it was a forty-minute "ritual" called "Grounding," which I first performed with my students at the Hall of Flowers, a dank exhibition space in Golden Gate Park. "Grounding" was very much a child of the times, being a loosely structured process piece, complete with wailing soprano saxophones (anchoring a movement called "Strident Bands") and a trio of aggressively amplified vocalists chanting fragments of Tantric poetry and excerpts from "Laws of Form," a book on symbolic logic, by G. Spencer-Brown. To all this, the Studebaker contributed a sonic retaining wall of snarling sawtooth waves that no doubt reamed out the inner ears of the sixty or seventy brave and foolish souls who paid five bucks to attend the event.
At another Hall of Flowers concert, I supervised a collaborative work called "Lo-Fi." The idea of this piece—suggested by a friend and fellow faculty member, Alden Jenks—was to make music from junk. Unlike the pretentious faux Buddhism of "Grounding," "Lo-Fi" was genuinely whimsical and charming, even if, like most avant-garde pieces of the time, it overstayed its welcome by an hour or so. In preparation, I had gone off with students to scavenge Salvation Army stores, antique shops, and used-audio suppliers in search of out-of-date objects that could still produce sound. We surrounded the audience in the cement-floored Hall of Flowers with naked speaker cones yanked from automobile dashboards; transistor panels, whose winking blue and red diodes dangled from the ceiling; a wind-up Victrola phonograph; and a phalanx of pots, pans, iron brake drums, saw blades, trash cans, and alarm bells, all connected through jury-rigged wires to flimsy amplifiers and loudspeakers. We piped scratchy 78-r.p.m. disks of Liberace, Frank Sinatra, and the Andrews Sisters through punishing electronic circuits that turned the hit-parade songs of an earlier era into a din of squeaks, scratches, chirrups, and assaultive feedback. The mischievous and rigorously absurd—or absurdly rigorous—spirit hovering over "Lo-Fi" was John Cage, a guru to those of us who thought of ourselves as experimental composers. After the concert, one of my more skeptical students drolly offered to give me composition lessons.
Another piece of mine, "American Standard"—named after a familiar domestic appliance—dismantled several classic homegrown musical forms. One of its movements, "John Philip Sousa," was obviously a march, but it was stripped down to a plodding pulse, with no melody or harmony. The result sounded like the retreat from battle of a badly wounded army (not my original intention, but curiously evocative all the same). Another movement, "Christian Zeal and Activity," was a deconstruction of a famous hymn. The soprano, alto, tenor, and bass voices—which in the hymn move in rhythmic unison—drifted apart from one another, like slow bubbles rising in a dense liquid. My score invited the performers to add "extra-musical material," and, for the first performance, I taped a late-night AM radio talk show in which an abusive host argued about God with a patient man who eventually identified himself as a preacher. This is the version that appeared on my first commercial recording, which was released in 1975 on Brian Eno's appropriately named Obscure label.
Lacking a publisher, I had my ink autograph scores to "American Standard" and other pieces made into offset plates by a local printer, and I bound the large pages together with heavy electrician's tape. "American Standard" turned out to be a kind of bellwether piece, pointing the way toward later, more technically assured works—such as "Nixon in China," "Grand Pianola Music," and "Doctor Atomic"— that probed my sense of America's national identity.
My radical phase peaked, perhaps, on a morning in April, 1974, when I arrived at my local bank, three blocks from the Conservatory, to cash a ten-dollar check. The bank had just announced a change in its hours, and I couldn't recall whether the new opening time was nine-thirty or ten, so I arrived shortly before ten o'clock. Outside, I discovered a gathering crowd of neighbors, and I watched while police and paramedics loaded someone onto a stretcher and drove off in an ambulance. In a neighborhood as becalmed as the Sunset, a bank robbery was the last thing to expect. But this was no ordinary heist. The bank had just been hit by the Symbionese Liberation Army, and among the robbers was the twenty-year-old publishing heiress Patty Hearst. Had I arrived a few minutes earlier, I might well have been staring straight down the barrel of "Tania" 's submachine gun.
Around this time, my marriage to Hawley went into a tailspin. Increasingly exasperated by the endless hours I spent shut off in a room with my manuscripts, charts, and diagrams, she decided to go it alone and moved in with a group of jazz musicians on the other side of the city. What little we owned was divided up, and I soon found myself renting space in a garage, my bed only three feet from the landlady's Buick. Consumed by morbid self-pity, I survived on boiled eggs and ramen for half a year, reading Zen stories and studying electronic circuits. Finally, I moved into a splendid little cottage, a block from Golden Gate Park and two blocks from the ocean. From my bedroom, I could hear the breakers hitting the seawall and smell the brackish morning air. Things began to look up.
I made avant-garde music in every imaginable location in the city: in underground culverts, in an arboretum in Golden Gate Park, in vacant storefronts and bookstore lofts, even in a converted Masonic temple. I lugged my ridiculous Studebaker from one event to another. I composed a piece called "Triggering," in which, at a converted warehouse on Mission Street, I followed improvising dancers around the floor with a long-distance shotgun microphone. Each time a dancer hit the floor, or even grunted from exertion, my microphone picked up the sound and caused circuits on my synthesizer to fire, emitting a loud noise. These I mixed with audio "found objects" I had recorded on tape cassettes—chirping insects, clanging streetcars, humming ocean vessels. I vividly recall standing patiently in Golden Gate Park with my microphone, poised over a pile of dog poop, and recording the buzz of several blissed-out flies.
I started hanging out with half a dozen performance artists, filmmakers, and students from Mills College, in Oakland, who had moved into an abandoned flophouse, the Reno Hotel, in the derelict area of San Francisco known as South of Market. This was the same depressed part of town where Jack Kerouac weathered his crushing alcoholic benders. The Reno, on a narrow side alley called Harriet Street, had been condemned several years earlier and was awaiting the final stroke of the wrecking ball. But demolition had been mysteriously halted, leaving half the structure standing and the other half a lethal pile of bombed-out debris—smashed beams, broken glass, rusted nails, and live electrical conduits. Into this toxic shell of a building, bristling with any number of possibilities for serious bodily injury, came a bunch of artist squatters. One of them, Virginia Quesada, a graduate-student filmmaker at Mills, organized "A Night at the Reno Hotel," an avant-garde extravaganza unlike anything that even John Cage could have imagined. She invited electronic-music composers, conceptualists, video artists, monologists, painters, and various unclassifiable types to occupy rooms in the Reno and "do art" there. On a Saturday night in February, 1976, hundreds of people flooded the hallways of the hotel, drinking, partying, and checking out the various events. Many of the rooms upstairs had no electricity, nor was there a functioning stairway. Attendees had to climb up a ladder, through treacherous darkness, to get upstairs. Fancying myself an expert in these matters, I had threaded industrial-grade conduit along the dark, vermin-filled hallways to provide power to the rooms. Amazingly, the police were never alerted, and my hazardous, untutored electrician's work did not create a short circuit and cause what would have been a catastrophic fire. We were lucky: the Reno Hotel could have easily become the Coconut Grove of the avant-garde.
Life in San Francisco suited me, but I began to grow restless with the concerts I was putting on. Most were played to tiny audiences consisting largely of other aspiring composers. Boredom was not just an ancillary feature of these concerts; it was more often than not the main event, a provocation that each audience member had to come to grips with. I, too, pushed the boredom envelope, especially in a composition for chorus called "Ktaadn." This piece was founded on the chance principles of John Cage, and was inspired by Henry David Thoreau's description of climbing Mt. Katahdin, in Maine. I obtained a map of the area and, with a compass, drew around the summit of the mountain a circle with a radius of fifty miles. This, I estimated, was the view that Thoreau described. I then made a list of all the local Abenaki place names—Millinocket, Ambajejus, Mattawamkeag—and set these words to short, modal melodies. Finally, I invited the members of the chorus to make their own individual sequences of these melodies. For an indeterminate time, the chorus sang the names, accompanied only by the mewling of my electronic drones in the background. The result was a congenial but resolutely uneventful chaos of communal mumbling. I was hard put not to acknowledge the tedium that set in at about the fifth minute—once the audience realized that things were unlikely to change.
I remember such apprentice pieces fondly. They were genuine attempts to fit my emerging sensibility into what I perceived, rightly or wrongly, to be the governing aesthetic philosophy of the time. They employed chance procedures, but not with the Zen rigor that Cage practiced. They eschewed virtuosity: pieces like "Ktaadn" could be performed by the most modest of amateurs. Most of all, they avoided being earnest. I took Cage seriously in his admonishment to keep the ego out of the music.
Nevertheless, I was becoming increasingly alienated from the postures of the avant-garde. Boredom has its uses in a work of art: it can lend ballast to long, evolving structures and help to highlight a moment that might otherwise get lost. But the avant-garde—especially the musical version of it—had elevated tedium into a fundamental aesthetic principle. Composers avoided teleological forms like the plague. A musical form was "teleological" if it followed a purposeful development toward an end. Cage advocated an open acceptance of "no matter what eventuality," and, in order to take the "ego" and "taste" out of the creative act, he devised procedures such as tossing coins or using maps of stellar constellations to derive pitches, dynamics, and durations. Such gestures inspired in listeners a sort of analytical excitement, but without the benevolent presence of Cage himself the result of these chance operations was too often emotionally cold and expressively indifferent music. I didn't see much distinction between a work created, American style, by tossing coins and one created, Euro style, by transposing serial sets of pitches.
Despite my confusion and dissatisfaction during this period, I never doubted that I wanted to become a composer. I simply had not found the right mode of self-expression.
One day in 1976, the pianist Mack McCray, a close friend, proposed that I write a big solo piece for him—something virtuosic that would take advantage of his powerful hands, which had a subtle control of sonic colors. Mack had introduced me to the great key-board works of Chopin, Schumann, and Brahms, and it seemed only right to create something that complemented his abilities. To compose the piece, I moved a battered spinet piano into my tiny cottage near the beach. The room where I worked was so small that even that spinet sounded thunderous, and I banged away at it for months, testing out ideas for the music.
The piece, "Phrygian Gates," turned out to be a behemoth, a trial of endurance and difficulty for even the best pianists. Lasting twenty-four minutes, it was a non-stop tour of the piano keys—or, rather, half of them—that kept the pianist going at maximum concentration. I imagined each hand of the performer as its own "wavemaker," independent of the other. The "waves" were actually repeated patterns that slowly changed shape as the music moved along. Cagean principles of indeterminacy took no part in this piece. On the contrary, it was built on a precise formal and expressive plan.
"Phrygian Gates" was a hit with audiences, especially when McCray played it. Listeners were entranced by his big body hovering over the keyboard, and by his bear-paw hands, which could deliver both hammerlike blows and the most delicate caresses. After years of testing listeners' patience with chance-based music, I felt a new, visceral sense of engagement from the audience.
The piece also demonstrated the fruits of my initiation into Minimalism. I had heard a recording of "In C," Terry Riley's epochal work, while still living in Cambridge. "In C" was to contemporary American music what Ginsberg's "Howl" or Kerouac's "On the Road" had been to literature. With its insistent, unyielding pulse on the high C of a piano, and the sunny, upbeat fragments of melodies circulating over and over in a loose polyphony, "In C" captured the congenial hippie spirit of the West Coast while at the same time proposing a new, slowly evolving approach to musical form. It was also marvellously provocative—an R. Crumb-style middle finger to the crabbed, pedantic world of academic modernism.
In San Francisco, I heard a more elegant version of the Minimalist aesthetic when Steve Reich brought his ensemble to the city, in 1974, to perform his work "Drumming." Next to "In C," Reich's materials were more fastidiously organized, and the evolution of melodic, harmonic, and timbral elements was more methodical. In contrast to the anarchic "happenings" I'd been creating with my students and friends, Reich's music used precision and balanced counterpoint to create a sound world that was expertly controlled, musically engaging, and sensually appealing.
The Minimalism of Riley, Reich, and Philip Glass—whose "Einstein on the Beach" I heard selections from when Glass performed in San Francisco with his group—offered a way out of the cul-de-sac in which I seemed to be stuck. I had grown up listening to jazz, and later found myself surrounded by the insistent rhythms and simple harmonic language of rock. That music felt like my own genome, and, above all, I wanted to intone those roots musically, just as American writers like Whitman, Williams, Kerouac, and Ginsberg had found poetry in the speech of the common person. The early works of Minimalism, radical as they were, did not obliterate the fundamental elements of musical discourse. Indeed, they embraced pulsation and repetition with an almost childlike glee. To me, it felt as if the pleasure principle had been invited back into the listening experience.
The amassing of large, expressive structures through the repetition of small elements was the essential technique of Minimalism. Several years earlier, however, on a trip to Florence, I'd had a memorable initiation into a much older use of that technique. I'd gone there as a coach for a summer music program for American teen-agers, and found myself overcome with sensory excitement. The Italian Renaissance architects built large buildings, public and private, by repeating small motifs, whether in stone, marble, glass, or ceramics. I contemplated their perfect geometries in the warm summer light. Upon returning to San Francisco, I was determined to find a way to express in musical terms that same combination of order and sensuality. Minimalist procedures pointed to a way, but I also recognized that, as a governing aesthetic, Minimalism would rapidly exhaust itself. Like Cubism in painting, it was a radical idea, but its reductive world view would soon leave its practitioners caught in an expressive bind. Picasso saw the pregnant possibility of Cubism, but he also realized that it must eventually be absorbed into a larger, more embracing language. Achieving that integration became my overriding goal as a composer.
In 1975, a composer friend, Ingram Marshall, bought a small cabin in the high Sierras, some forty miles north of the town of Truckee, not far from the Nevada border. I began spending whatever free time I had in the area, and, with the help of another friend, I was able to co-own a cabin near Ingram's place. Ingram was a good companion in many ways. He had spent formative time in many places I had never visited: Bali; Scandinavia; SoHo, in New York City; and California Institute of the Arts, outside Los Angeles. He shared my interest in electronic music and Minimalism, but he also loved Bruckner, Sibelius, Strauss, and Mahler—late-Romantic composers whose work had little traction in the contemporary music world.
The Sierras' dense fir forests and craggy granite crests hiding jewel-like alpine lakes reminded me of the New Hampshire of my childhood. The route to the cabin starts in San Francisco, crosses the Bay Bridge, follows Interstate 80 into the Central Valley, past Sacramento, and begins climbing into the foothills near Sri Moonshine Ranch, Terry Riley's property. From here, the route ascends ever higher, into the country where "gold fever" spread in the eighteen-fifties, and it ends sixty-five hundred feet above sea level, on a dirt road deep in the Tahoe National Forest. In summer, the air is clear and brilliant, warm and dry. Trails wind along mountain ridges with vistas of the valley to the west, the hardpan terrain of Nevada to the east. At or near the cabin, I have seen bears, spotted owls, mule deer, giant porcupines, and once—in a remote turn of a high mountain trail—a large mountain lion, sitting in perfect stillness, her glassy eyes focussed directly on me.
On an early evening in the spring of 1976, I had a revelation while driving along a ridge in the Sierras, in my old Karmann Ghia convertible. At the time, I listened to music on a bulky portable Sony cassette deck the size of a small satchel, with a built-in speaker and a carrying strap. The ever-increasing piles of plastic cassette cases contained my current musical interests, everything from Monteverdi's Vespers to Miles Davis's "Bitches Brew." That evening, the Sony was playing a recording of music from Wagner's "Götterdämmerung." As I guided the car along the sharp curves and looked out on mist lingering below in narrow ravines and riverbeds, I listened intently to the shapely ascents and descents of Wagner's melodies and to the rich, morphing harmonic world that they described. Wagner had not been on my mind much in those days. But this music, especially the quiet opening bars of "Dawn and Siegfried's Rhine Journey"—with its graceful leaps of sixths and sevenths, its soft cushions of string chords—spoke to me. I said out loud, almost without thinking, "He cares."
What Wagner cared about was making the intensity of his emotions palpable to the listener. His harmonies, restless and forever migrating toward a new tonal center, moved between tension and resolution in an uncanny way that constantly propelled the listener forward. The melodic leaps, always singable, gave shape and direction to the churning harmonic movement beneath. This was not just music about desire. It was desire itself, and the emotional and sensual power it possessed was inescapable. Wagner's music was grounded in enormous technical and intellectual sophistication, but its overriding effect was something that, I realized, had been absent from my avant-garde experiments: a sense of ravishment.
Not long after my revelation in the Karmann Ghia, a young Dutch conductor, Edo de Waart, then relatively unknown, was named music director of the San Francisco Symphony. He presented a stark contrast to his predecessor, the glamorous Seiji Ozawa. De Waart cared little for his appearance onstage, preferring to focus on the quality of the sound and the excellence of individual players. His performances of Mahler and Bruckner were deeply affecting. He got to the emotional core of the music not through intellectual forethought but, rather, through pure intuition. I began to go to orchestra concerts regularly, something I hadn't done in a while. We became friends, and he hired me to help him in an area where he had little expertise—contemporary music.
De Waart was the first conductor to recognize my potential as an orchestra composer. One day, he posed a risky challenge: he asked me to compose a large-scale piece for chorus and orchestra that would première in the inaugural season of the orchestra's new home, the Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall, scheduled to open in the fall of 1980.
Up to this point, I was known only as an avant-garde composer with a penchant for arousing the ire of local music critics. Suddenly, I had a major commission from an establishment arts organization. This was daunting enough, but de Waart also wanted a "choral symphony," something not even remotely in my repertoire. Now living in a house in Haight-Ashbury, where I had crammed my piano into a room slightly larger than a closet, I puzzled over how I might put my newly discovered musical language to use for such grand forces, and how I would fill a hall of nearly three thousand seats with sound. My music had been almost entirely chamber music or electronic pieces. I could make as imposing a sound as anyone with the help of loudspeakers, but now I would have to summon a full panoply of orchestral and choral texture without resorting to synthesizers and electronics.
At first, I thought I'd get around the issue simply by using the choral voices as if they were sound generators, like the oscillators in my homemade synthesizer. I would have the chorus sing only sustained vowel sounds. This idea turned out to be stillborn, so I began a search for a text. I went through a lot of poetry, looking not only for strong words but also for a theme that would bind the poetry into a meaningful whole. I initially went to Wallace Stevens, thinking that I might share both his New England sensibilities and a common philosophical outlook. He'd published some of his first poems under the title "Harmonium," a word that clearly resonated with my own concerns. In the end, the word "Harmonium" was all I drew from Stevens. I loved his poetry, but it didn't fit my musical needs.
Then I stumbled across a poem by John Donne called "Negative Love." The poem was a trope on negatives, a way of saying something ultimately positive by means of a curious kind of conceptual inversion. I saw in Donne's verse the image of a soaring arrow—a vector pointing upward, its ascent impelled by ever-increasing rhythmic and sonic energy. "Negative Love" immediately suggested a musical form to me. Once I had that image, ideas flowed freely.
Starting with a pulsing D-natural, the chorus—reiterating the syllable "No" over and over—builds incrementally, accompanied by gently rippling figurations in the winds and, later, the strings. The music swells to the first of several expressive peaks with the words "fuell to their fire," and, after a sudden harmonic shift to E-flat major, begins ascending a long ramp, up to a pounding climax that exploits the full power of the combined orchestra and chorus.
How to follow a labyrinthine, philosophically allusive text like Donne's without veering toward the precious? I have by now forgotten exactly why I chose Emily Dickinson for the remainder of "Harmonium," but the juxtaposition offered a satisfying jolt. What drew me to her poetry was her gift for expressing thoughts of great subtlety in simple, direct language—a peculiarly American trait and the opposite of Donne's dense wordplay.
I began with a setting of "Because I could not stop for Death," which reminded me of my childhood in East Concord. The narrator's voice comes to us from beyond the grave, giving us a gently elegiac panorama of what she sees from a horse-drawn hearse as it passes through the familiar places in the small town where she lived. In East Concord, there was a cemetery only a few minutes' walk from my front door, and many of the graves dated from the time when Emily Dickinson lived. I treated the poem as if the images—the dignified grace of the horses, the school where children played, the fields of grain, the setting sun—were parts of a slow-motion film montage. There is pulse to the music, but it is barely ticking. The restless energy of Donne's "Negative Love" has wound down almost to a standstill.
Then comes the awakening of a new motion and energy. Perhaps I was unconsciously channelling that moment of discovery in the Sierras; I cannot be sure. The orchestra, heaving and surging from its very depths, begins a long, sustained crescendo that turns into a frenetic stampede, hurtling headlong out of the darkness. To the accompaniment of a monster orchestral gamelan, the chorus shouts a second Emily Dickinson poem, "Wild Nights." At a climactic point, I launched a mass accelerando. The chorus sings "Were I with thee / Wild Nights should be / Our luxury" over and over as the conductor drives the pulse ever faster, forcing it to the brink of chaos. At this point, the entire ensemble—some two hundred and twenty performers in the world première—comes together for two gigantic, spasmodic swells, only to leave the chorus hanging, pianissimo, over empty space.
The première of "Harmonium," on April 15, 1981, at Davies Hall, took almost everyone, including its composer, by surprise. The choral writing was full of unreasonable difficulties, the result of my inexperience in composing for voices. The San Francisco Symphony Chorus labored to follow my handautographed parts, struggling to cope with acres of seemingly identical repeating bars, counting and looking anxiously for cues and generally holding on for dear life. But the performance was electrifying, and the tsunamis of massed voices and orchestra elicited a palpable thrill among the audience. Seated in a box behind the first violins, I was in the first line of undiminished fortissimos, and by the end of "Wild Nights" I realized that I'd stopped breathing.
The audience greeted "Harmonium" with more than the customary polite applause for a new work—the sound of thousands of people clapping, and even cheering, when I appeared onstage seemed to indicate not only respect but pleasure. A tape of this first performance of "Harmonium" began making the rounds, not only locally but even as far away as Europe. Composers and conductors visiting San Francisco began calling, asking to listen to the piece. Undaunted by its difficulties, choruses and orchestras began performing it, in Cologne, St. Louis, Chicago, London, and even at Carnegie Hall. De Waart and his forces eventually made an impassioned recording, for ECM Records. On the album's back cover is a photograph of the young composer, shoeless and in jeans, sitting with his dog on a sofa in his Haight-Ashbury apartment. Through the window behind him, Victorian rooftops are just barely discernible in the late-afternoon fog. ♦


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(ok, so obviously this is a slow parade. the clowns must have tripped up the ROTC squad or something.)
pattern: irish moss in alice starmore's aran knitting. i redrew the cable charts so they'd scan easier, added selvedge stitches, and left the shoulder stitches live for a 3 needle bindoff with the saddles. otherwise the pattern was straightforward and error free.
in: knit picks wool of the andes, which is holding up well so far. no sagging, a little pilling.
made for chuck, mostly on sundays over the course of 10 months. kind of. i cast on sometime in august 2007, and finished knitting all the bits by may 2008. it could be called the month of sundays sweater, since that ends up being about 40 sundays of knitting. the last bits of it really dragged. suddenly i was sick to death of it (maybe because i wasn't switching between 5 other projects) in a "i can't believe this isn't done yet" kind of way. the last inches of the second sleeve and its saddle were done in a mental frenzy where i kept wishing my hands would knit faster so i could be Done.
i blocked it before seaming (which i don't always), and took it on our MA trip.that was largely futile. seaming is one of those things i like time and quiet to focus on, which was in rather short supply this summer. i tried doing the saddles first as recommended, but they came out not quite right. the pattern doesn't specify the saddle length, and all the stretchy cables in the body made it hard to figure out just how long i needed. so i ended up doing them last, and they fit perfectly.the corners look so square and neat. i realized that this is only my third sweater, which may be enough of a reason for the amazed it-looks-just-like-a-real-sweater glee i have when it all fits together.this sweater was intended for chuck to wear last winter, and finishing it in july was a bit disappointing. i wanted to see him wear it right now right now. as it was, he did wear it the week i finished it, thanks to the chilly, rainy summer. i haven't managed to get a shot of him modeling it yet, but it fits and looks very good on him. hugs are extra cozy when he's wearing it, because i can snuggle up to him and the yarn.
15 December 2008
mini-parade day 3: irish moss
Posted by the boogeyman's wife at 14:58
Labels: sweaters
5 comments:
- Carole Knits said...
You did a fantastic job!
- 15/12/08 15:31
- Kate said...
You have "Aran Knitting"?!?!
*curls up in a ball of envy*
It's a gorgeous sweater and I hope it gets lots of wear. I admire your perseverance. When I get to the stage of being sick of a pattern, I tend to frog stuff... :-)
- 15/12/08 23:12
- Sunflowerfairy said...
My jaw hurts from dropping so hard.
Stunning. And only your 3rd sweater?? Wow.
(At first I wrote "stuffing" instead of stunning. Perhaps I have something else on my mind?)
- 23/12/08 06:14
- Angeluna said...
What a gorgeous sweater. Only your third? Wow! You didn't say which yarn you used. I'm with Kate..."You have Aran Knitting?!!!!
BTW, love your photos of The Jambs. My kind of day.
- 25/2/09 03:35
Hej mitt Troll!!
Har saknat dig. Roligt att se att det fortfarande finns "krut" i dig.
- 15/1/10 12:21
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subset: commoncrawl


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During Warner Bros. Comic-Con panel this summer, the studio unveiled the first trailer for their highly-anticipated Kong: Skull Island, which is set to hit theaters on March 10, 2017. We haven't heard much about this prequel since then, but today we have a new international trailer, which is largely comprised of previously-used footage. But there is also a new, albeit, brief shot of the iconic Kong Kong. It remains unclear when Warner Bros. and Legendary will release another full trailer.
Back in August, Toby Kebbell revealed that he has been "asked to promote" playing Major Jack Chapman, who the actor described as the "sidekick" to Samuel L. Jackson's character. This came just after rumors surfaced that the actor, who has won rave reviews for his motion capture work in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and this summer's Warcraft, is actually playing King Kong himself. The actor confirmed that he provided facial references for King Kong, but the massive ape himself will be portrayed through motion capture by Terry Notary, an actor, stunt coordinator, and motion capture expert who worked with Kebbell on Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.
Still, he added that "time will tell who's playing Kong," so it is possible that he could be playing this iconic ape. Regardless of who's playing the ape, director Jordan Vogt-Roberts teased that this movie will showcase the biggest version of King Kong ever seen on the big screen before. The filmmaker says that this ape will stand over 100 feet tall when Kong: Skull Island hits the big screen next spring, which you can see in this new trailer that surfaed on YouTube.
In the spirit of its worldwide blockbuster Godzilla, Legendary Pictures presents a bold new take on the mythos of another iconic beast with Kong: Skull Island, which stars Tom Hiddleston. Directed by Jordan Vogt-Roberts (The Kings of Summer) and written by John Gatins (Flight) and Max Borenstein (Godzilla), Kong: Skull Island will fully immerse audiences in the mysterious and dangerous home of the king of the apes as a team of explorers ventures deep inside the treacherous, primordial island. Legendary's story honors the foundations of existing King Kong lore, but places it in an entirely new, distinct timeline.
Kong: Skull Island also features an international ensemble cast including Samuel L. Jackson, John C. Reilly, Tian Jing, Corey Hawkins, Jason Mitchell, John Ortiz, Thomas Mann, Shea Whigham and Eugene Cordero. Thomas Tull (Godzilla, The Dark Knight, Pacific Rim) and Jon Jashni (Godzilla, Warcraft) will produce and Alex Garcia (Godzilla) will executive produce. This movie will also set up Godzilla vs. King Kong, which has been set for release on May 29, 2020. Take a look at this new international trailer below for Kong: Skull Island.


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In celebration of the holiday season, I purchased a bottle of Bière de Noël, brewed by Brasserie Thiriez in the town of Esquelbecq in northern France.
Poured into a glass, this amber beer develops a frothy head that quickly dissipates. Clear on the first pour, it became progressively cloudy as I got down to the bottom of the bottle. (Brasserie Thiriez does not filter its beers.) It has a strong malty flavor that is followed by a bitter aftertaste. The beer was fairly sweet by the last pour, at the point where the beer was the cloudiest.
In Paris, the Bière de Noël by Brasserie Thiriez can be purchased at La Cave à Bulles, a shop that specializes in French artisanal beers.
We participate in Wanderfood Wednesdays. Head over there to explore food from around the world!
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Type: Posts; User: Buck
My favourite excuse is "can't - those are all for the BN going overseas"
As a camo, I like it. As a concept, I fking hate it.
Waste of time and money at best. Waste of life at worst.
So will there be helmet and armour covers in the NSV-DPM? Bush hats? T-shirts?
Apod: my list wasn't meant as a list of must haves as such, more just what people are suggesting.
I have a German fleck desert shirt here at home and they have put vents rather than zips.
So is there a general consensus on the board as to what is a must in a uniform?
Pit zips
Elbow/knee pad inserts
Slanted pockets
Poacher pocket
Arm pockets/velcro biceps
Helmet with rail...
Slight topic derailment but is that navy dpm actually going on issue? That has been bouncing around for years.
The Danes too. Their stuff is top of the line
Civil Defence come under DoD don't they?
Can't really say much more.
I feel like I know the answer, apod, but how do these uniforms get approved? Are there people looking at international uniforms/best practices? Or is it just a bunch of officers going "how cheap can...
Posted by the DF on FB:...
That Kampfstiefel Schwer looks decent
Actually tempted to buy one of those Irish flashes...
And the raingear NG, is it in good nick? Photos?
Rest in peace, sir.
That Ukrainian ad is great
Trell is right. Do a bit of running between now and then (don't injure yourself!)
You'll never make enough money out of it to make it a full time job. To be brutally honest, you'll probably come out with a net loss.
It's a great experience, just don't rely on the money.
Surely the basic issue black tape would have been though?
Actually, the fella in the middle. Is he wearing a green beret?
I don't like the look of that new fleece. Material looks way too stiff and what's with the yellow piping? We'll look like James Bond baddies. Also the hairy fella looks to be struggling in it and...
Mate, that would involve spending cash.
Is it just me, or have the toes/heels of the boots been polished? Is that just the design of the boot?
Just the boot design. Rubber toe cap and heel protector.Brand new so shiny.
Anyone here Galway based?
Off topic, but any pics of the kit bag?
Just heard from a lad out there that the Scouts are to be issued later this week - 3 months late. Take that info as you want, just passing on in good faith.


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Income tax power 'pretty useless' says First Minister
The income tax powers on offer to the Welsh assembly are "pretty much useless" and would not help the economy, the first minister has said.
Carwyn Jones gives evidence to MPs on Monday on the draft Wales Bill to give the Welsh government the power to vary income tax, subject to a referendum.
In an interview with BBC Wales, Mr Jones criticised restrictions attached.
Welsh Secretary David Jones has said the law will enable the devolved government to support economic growth.
The Wales Bill offers the Welsh government the power to vary income tax after a referendum.
But the UK government has insisted on a "lock-step" system that stops Wales varying tax bands individually.
That means if the Welsh government decided to cut the basic rate by 1p, it would have to cut all other rates of income tax by 1p too.
And if it wanted to raise the top rate by 1p, it would have to raise all other rates by 1p.
"It's a bit like someone giving you a car and saying 'by the way there's only one gear on it'," Mr Jones told Sunday Politics.
"As a way of encouraging the economy to grow it's pretty much useless."
'Rigid model'
In December, Welsh Secretary David Jones said the draft legislation would "enable devolved governance in Wales to become more accountable and better able to support economic growth in Wales".
Labour opposes holding a referendum on income tax unless and until the UK Treasury changes the way it sets the Welsh government's budget, known as the Barnett formula.
The Welsh government says it is short-changed by this calculation to the tune of hundreds of millions of pounds a year.
"Barnett has got to be reformed first, and then if there's going to be an income tax model it's got to be far more flexible than the rigid model that we've been given," Mr Jones added.
"It's not what we wanted. It's not what the Silk Commission recommended either," he said, referring to a report last year from the commission, set up by coalition ministers, which said the Welsh government should have new tax and borrowing powers.
The Welsh Affairs Committee visits the National Assembly on Monday to take evidence on the draft bill.
In its evidence to the committee, the Federation of Small Business also criticises the lock-step powers, saying they are unlikely to be used by any administration in Cardiff Bay.
Mr Jones also responded to Wales' slide in the Pisa assessments - the worldwide ranking of education systems - in his interview with the Sunday Politics programme.
He said: "It's a disappointment. You have to accept these things some times. The key is, of course, to improve in the future."
On a failure to hit key targets for the NHS, he said: "I don't buy this idea that somehow the NHS in Wales is failing.
"I don't think that's correct and the vast majority of people in Wales we know have a good experience from the NHS.
"But yes there's always room for improvement."
Sunday Politics Wales is on BBC One Wales at 11:00 GMT on Sunday, 19 January.


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Four employees at Apple supplier Foxconn's factory in China have tried to killed themselves in the last month.
The owner of the factory, Foxconn, which assembles products for Apple, refuses to let reporters in to tour the place.
Malcolm Moore has the latest in the Telegraph:
Even as the iPad breaks all sales records, something deeply disturbing is happening at Foxconn, the China-based company that manufactures the gadget for Apple.
Yesterday, an 18-year-old female worker at Foxconn became the fourth person in as many weeks to attempt suicide by jumping from one of the factory buildings…
The girl, only known by her surname, Rao, had only been working at Foxconn's Longhua plant for a month…
On March 29, a 23-year-old man, named Liu, jumped out of a dormitory window at the Longhua plant at 3am, dressed only in his factory shirt and underwear.
On March 11, at 9.30pm, a worker in his twenties, named Li, jumped to his death, again at the Longhua plant. According to Chinese media reports, the man's bonus was stolen at Chinese New Year.
Finally, on the morning of March 7, a female employee named Tian jumped from her dormitory building and injured herself, saying that she was under a great deal of pressure.
This, by the way, is not your average factory. It's as big as a small city:
The Longhua plant is the single largest assembly base in the world for computers, mobile phones and consumer electronics. Around 300,000 workers reportedly live and work there. To give you an idea of the scale of the place, one Foxconn consultant once told me that he had turned up at the wrong entrance to the factory and was told to travel to the next entrance along. The journey took half an hour by car.
Read Malcolm's whole report here >
And don't miss: Photos From Inside China's Gadget Sweatshops
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Finance minister in cyber war with BJP
Under fire from BJP for the rising prices, Chidambaram turns around to question the party's claims of having managed the economy better during its tenure.delhi Updated: Jun 07, 2008 09:05 IST
Under fire from his political opponents for the spiralling prices, Finance Minister P Chidambaram on Friday turned around to question Bharatiya Janata Party's claims of having managed the economy better during its tenure.
<b1>That the BJP was in the Opposition did not mean that its duty to the people was only to oppose the government, he said, reminding the BJP that it had not come up with a single concrete suggestion so far that would, if implemented, help in moderating inflation.
"I regret to point out that the (BJP national executive's) resolution is an exercise in self-deception and is aimed at spreading disinformation," Chidambaram said in a 15-point rejoinder to the resolution that compared the NDA's track record in fiscal management and inclusive growth with the UPA's.
His statement on his website www.financeminister.gov.in, which is bound to raise the political decibel level over the current round of price rise, questioned claims that the economy grew faster during the NDA's tenure.
In 2003-04, the economy registered what seemed to be an impressive growth rate of 8.5 per cent because of a low growth rate of 3.8 per cent the previous year. The 10 per cent growth rate in the agriculture sector was a statistical quirk because the previous year had recorded a negative growth rate of 7.2 per cent. "Not surprisingly, when the NDA claimed in 2003-04 that India was shining, the people voted them out," the finance minister said.
Chidambaram credited the UPA government's vision, compassion and prudent fiscal management for raising expenditure on social infrastructure.
Accusing him of spreading disinformation on price rise, the BJP asked him to visit markets and see for himself at what rate people were buying essential commodities. BJP spokesperson Ravi Shankar Prasad said, "We don't need a certificate from the Finance Minister. We are only stating facts which are stark and blunt."
Inflation was a problem, Chidambaram said, but the NDA couldn't wish away the fact that it was a problem during their tenure too. "The current inflation is almost entirely due to the relentless rise in crude oil prices… The Government of India, like governments all over the world, is fighting inflation," he said. To criticise the government without going into the causes of the current inflationary trends and without offering any concrete solutions would amount to politicising the issue, added Chidambaram.
Prasad argued that the BJP was only voicing the concern of the common man. "We are not spreading disinformation… We urge the Finance Minister to go to any market in Delhi and see for himself the rates. It has now proved beyond doubt that inflation and the resultant torture of nearly every segment of the population is the direct result of the gross mismanagement of the food economy," he added.


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Product no. 98230
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This is the one that started it all. The first flavour to come in the iconic hyperbolic paraboloid (do a search, it's cool) shape that perfectly stacks into that unique tubular can. So much history - from newfangled to fever-inducing to fun that doesn't stop - it's no wonder you don't just eat 'em!


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Written by Devorah Pahmer
Devorah is interning at Wisestamp. She loves traveling, her dog, and crafting the perfect post.
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Education Level and Ethical Attitude Toward Tax Evasion: A Six-Country Study
68 Pages Posted: 21 Mar 2014
Date Written: March 17, 2014
The purpose of this study is twofold – to review and summarize the findings of more than 30 prior studies that surveyed student opinions on the ethics of tax evasion, and to expand on that literature by examining the relationship between level of education and views on the ethics of tax evasion using a larger, more heterogeneous demographic. A number of surveys of student opinion have been conducted, both in the United States and elsewhere, soliciting the opinions of various student groups on the ethics of tax evasion. Students in various disciplines and students at various levels of education (graduate and undergraduate) were asked their opinions regarding when tax evasion could be justified on ethical grounds. The present study summarizes and analyzes those findings for the first time. The second part of the paper uses the Human Values data that was gathered by social scientists in Brazil, Russia, India, China, the USA and Germany and examines the relationship between level of education and attitude toward tax evasion, using a 10-point Likert Scale. An analysis of the data found that education level does make a difference in attitude toward tax evasion, as do gender and age, in some cases. A bibliography of further reading is also included, along with links to more than 80 other tax evasion studies.
Keywords: tax evasion, ethics, empirical study, demographic variables, gender, age, education level, employment status, income level, occupation, marital status, family size, religion, size of town, social class, happiness, health, political spectrum, income inequality, competition, confidence in government
JEL Classification: H26, A13, A14, D63, E26, I1, I2, J1, J12, J14, J16, K34, K42, M4, O17, O52, Y5
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation


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She has a new album out, but we learned so much more about superstar Barbara Streisand in the new episode of carpool karaoke on The Late Show with James Corden this week.
She just renewed her driver's license recently—after failing the written test three times— and the pair had some fun when she took both hands off the wheel to fling back her long curly locks.
At one point, we find out that she actually called Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, to ask if it were possible to get Siri to pronounce her name correctly. She also revealed that one time she called Steve Jobs to ask why Apple users can't delete old addresses.
"He blamed it on Microsoft," she quipped.
MORE: Watch George Clooney And Julia Roberts on Carpool Karaoke w/ Gwen Stefani
Together they crooned her blockbuster hit, "The Way We Were," and sang several snippets from her new LP, Walls — a collection of songs related to today's cultural upheaval, including "Imagine," and "Wonderful World."
WATCH the fun video below…


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On October 10, ACEEE's Behavior and Human Dimensions of Energy Use Program will be releasing the first in a series of white papers on popular approaches for driving energy efficiency using social science methods and insights. This paper, Reaching the "High-Hanging Fruit" through Behavior Change, shows how Community-Based Social Marketing (CBSM) puts energy savings within reach across different types of programs, especially when it comes to the savings achieved through a "home energy retrofit" program. The paper is also the basis for a webinar ACEEE will be hosting on Thursday, October 11, at 4:00 pm (Eastern) in conjunction with One Change Foundation, who will be on hand to share details on their "High Five" home energy retrofit program model, as outlined in the paper. Information about how to register for this webinar can be found at the bottom of this post!
CBSM is, in particular, an alternative to two pervasive models about behavior change: the attitude-behavior and economic self-interest models. The attitude-behavior model suggests that informing individuals and convincing them to adopt a positive attitude towards a particular action will suffice for them to change a behavior. The economic self-interest model assumes that individuals will always change their behavior to maximize financial benefit. Neither of these older models has sufficed to close the gap between the energy savings we know are out there and the participation levels necessary to address them. CBSM, in contrast, targets a community (the social context) as opposed to the individual. It recognizes that behavior is never isolated, but occurs under specific, local circumstances, with both historically and culturally determined parameters.
Working at the community level, practitioners of CBSM use locally based research to identify (potentially unique) barriers to the implementation of a program. A prime example of this phenomenon (and one we explore in the paper) is that of "a pilot program in New York [where] research uncovered that a major barrier to getting tenants to turn off their air-conditioning wall units…was that many of the modules lacked knobs"! Without this knowledge, a well-crafted program of incentives, prompts, and social norming would have still failed spectacularly because of not taking into account a simple, physical, obstacle.
In addition to identifying barriers "on the ground," appropriately deployed CBSM programs use human sociability to reinforce positive behavior change. As is well known, the adoption of new behaviors and technologies typically follows an "S" curve, whereby sets of individuals influence one another in a sequence: first the "innovators," who are followed rapidly by the "early adopters," who are more slowly copied by the "early majority," and then by the "majority" (no change ever has 100% acceptance, so there will always be "non-adopters"). CBSM co-opts this process by formally engaging innovators and early adopters, using social diffusion as a pillar of the program. For example, as cited in the upcoming white paper:
Xcel Energy piloted a house party model called Halloween Gone Green, offering Colorado customers a kit to host a house party. The kit included games that informed about energy-saving opportunities in the home. The parties were a form of social diffusion in that hosts tended to be energy efficiency leaders and the parties allowed them to talk about energy efficiency and show guests what they had done in their homes already. According to Chris Dierker ... Market Communications Manager for Excel Energy, preliminary survey data (presented at ACEEE's Energy Efficiency as a Resource Conference in 2011) showed that the parties effectively demonstrated how trusted peers were taking actions to save energy.
By communicating through trusted social networks and making community-wide action visible, programs also activate the process known as "social norming"—when we see the behavior of other actors and are prompted to see it as widely accepted and socially supported. Therefore, new activities are most swiftly adopted when presented via actors with a high (local) status and in a context that is "normative." The initial outlay in time and labor needed to identify barriers and design programs with the support of key innovators should be ultimately offset through the reduction in financial incentives, the higher savings achieved, and the spread and persistence of energy savings resulting from the new social "norm."
As you can imagine, there are many ways to encourage behavior change with respect to energy efficiency, and we hope you will join us for a lively and in-depth discussion of the pros and cons of using CBSM practices in your program design. If you are interested in participating in our webinar on Thursday, October 11, please RSVP to Michelle Vigen at firstname.lastname@example.com.
Michelle Vigen contributed to this post.


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World Health Assembly, day 4: proposals on coordination of noncommunicable disease response
The World Health Assembly approved proposals to improve global coordination of efforts to address noncommunicable diseases like diabetes, cancers, heart disease and stroke. It also approved a resolution to improve the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of viral hepatitis.
Highlights for the European Region
- At a meeting with the WHO Regional Director for Europe, Ms Zsuzsanna Jakab, the Minister of Health of the Republic of Moldova, Mr Andrei Usatîi, described progress made in his country on increasing the quality of health services and on tobacco legislation. The Minister said that integrating services into decentralizing primary health care was a challenge. He thanked the Regional Office for its support and for expert missions on issues including noncommunicable diseases, health systems, health information, telemedicine and communicable diseases.
- Dr Anvar Valiyevich Alimov, Minister of Health, and Mr Asilbek Khudayarov, First Deputy Minister of Health, of Uzbekistan, discussed an upcoming high-level meeting on health, nutrition and food safety with Ms Jakab. They also discussed a sub-regional meeting on Health 2020 to be held in the autumn. The Regional Director suggested that the Michael Marmot study be presented for introduction in other central Asian countries.
- The Regional Director met with delegates from the Russian Federation at a bilateral meeting to discuss the tuberculosis epidemic in that country and ways of improving harm reduction. They also discussed the next steps in establishing the geographically dispersed office of the Regional Office on noncommunicable diseases in the Russian Federation .
- The Consultative Expert Working Group met in Committee B to discuss health systems on the basis of two key reports and an addendum. They requested more analytical and operational guidance for finance mechanisms and exploration of alternative models for financing. The group also called for better country ownership, more demonstration projects, extension to other diseases, development of new indicators and greater inclusion of discussions on health systems. On behalf of all 53 Member States in the European Region, Finland expressed its commitment to the vision of Working Group and acknowledged the substantial work done by WHO in that regard.
- The delegate of Finland emphasized that women's and children's nutrition remained a high priority and that the issue of good-quality nutrition overlapped with those of climate change and food security.
Richard Horton, Editor of The Lancet, hosted a side event with the Independent Expert Review Group. Dr Margaret Chan, WHO Director-General, opened the meeting. She summarized the history of the Review Group, which was receiving increasing numbers of calls for accountability. She stressed that the mechanism by which that could be achieved was strengthening health information systems.
Mr Horton said that the goal of the global strategy was to save 16 million lives by 2015 and described the steps to be taken. The Review Group would welcome feedback on what they had achieved and on the remaining challenges. Presentations were given by delegates of Malawi, Peru and the United Republic of Tanzania, outlining progress made on responding to the recommendations of the Commission on Information and Accountability for Women's and Children's Health.


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Player Skill: twitch and tactics
As you can see in upcoming mmo's, the emphasis is slowly moving from character skill to player skill. So it will matter more how good the player behind the computer is, and not just how much strength/agility/intelligence his in-game character has. I think this is a very good evolution. But now my question is: which parts of current mmo's can be improved by involving more player skill?
A first thing I can think of is the character build: give the player a lot of choices, so he can build his own, unique strategy and there will never be two players with exactly the same build. The general rule here is: the more choice, the better, as long as the different choices are properly balanced.
Another thing where player skill should definately be more involved is crafting. I've seen a lot ideas about crafting mini-games. But I think that there should also be the opportunity for players to experiment with new materials and different proportions of those materials, instead of having fixed recipes for everything.
The most important part however, and perhaps also the most difficult, is combat. I think everyone agrees when I say the time of auto-attack-->afk-->loot is over. But what is coming in it's place? There are two ways to involve player skill into combat. The first one is twitch: the player with better reflexes, will win. Some upcoming mmo's are trying to implement this with an fps-like combat system with manual targetting and no auto-attack. The second one is tactics: the player who makes the better decisions, will be the better player here. For this system to work, there obviously have to be a lot of non-trivial choices during combat. Choices that have a lot of different possibilities that all have an unique outcome and have an impact on the combat. But for such choices to be made, the player has to get a little time to think before he acts. This goes however head-on-head with the first possibility: twitch. So when making a game, there has to be made a choice: what kind of player skill do we want to reward: fast reflexes or good decisions?
Now this is I think a matter of personal preference: it's the reason why some people play shooters, while others prefer strategy games. I will give my personal preference however. That would easily be the second one because I think in order to win a battle, you have to adapt to your enemy and try to counter his decisions. This can only be accomplished when the player has time and, more important, opportunities to do this. This is simply not possible when everything depends on the speed of the player.
To sum it up: Involving more player skill in mmo's is good, but it should be more in the form of meaningful decisions with maybe a bit of twitch. Please keep the pure twitch for shooters. I'd like to hear what you prefer: more twitch, or more tactics? Or do you rather have the old system, where the player with the most time spent in-game will have the strongest character?


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Yesterday we struggled back out through the metro and went to the Sensoji Temple in Asakusa. This takes three metro rides adding to Y580 each each way from Oizumi Gakuen. If you want a comparison $1US is about Y116.
These ticket machines have a mysterious square portal
where an adviser will appear when you press "Help"
where an adviser will appear when you press "Help"
We came out of the metro in Asakusa and first took a walk by the river overlooking barges on the water and high-rise commercial office blocks.
We then walked the eight or so blocks to Senso-ji temple, passing through a series of arcades.
The temple was full of Japanese tourists and also a very colourful throng of cos-play zoku girls or costume play gangs who are largely teenage girls and their boy friends from the suburban gulags acting out their dysphoria and love of visual pop groups creatively by donning rebellious suggestive costumes and wigs.
We then walked back by a different route, passing this Otanuki-sama or Raccoon Dog temple Chingodo. Otanuki-sama is a god of the art of public entertainment, also protecting from fire and robbery.
Bow-tie kimono sashes
We took the subway back to Ueno and walked through the park and some of its museums and temples to the Yanaka cemetery, catching the metro again from Nippori.
We ate noodles and walked miles through Ueno park to the Yanaka cemetary which was desolate and refreshingly wild. We descended through the railroad tracks to Nippori and struggled back totally overheated to our funky island of quiet sanity at Yoshida House.


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Whistler Accommodation
Searching for hotels in Whistler (Canada) or Whistler accommodation? Whistler is a Canadian pretty alpine village near Whistler Blackcomb ski resort. It will host the 2010 Winter Olympics.
It will come as no great surprise that most visitors to Whistler are there to ski or snowboard. Whistler Blackcomb ski resort is the largest ski area in North America. In summer, Whistler is a very popular mountain biking spot, and the area is also good for hiking and rock climbing. There are three golf courses close by.
Staying at Southside Lodge (2102 Lake Placid Rd, BC, 2102 Lake Placid, Whistler) will save you some money; staying at 4-star Fairmont Chateau Whistler (4599 Chateau Blvd, Whistler V0N1B4) will not. - Browse the Whistler Map or compare Whistler accommodation from Hotels, Motels, B&Bs, Lodging & Hostels to Holiday & Caravan Parks.
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HouseKeeping Resumes are the best way to get the job interview for a housekeeping job. With hospitality and other sectors are in huge demand of housekeeping jobs. And, if you taking your chance for a housekeeping job, then we have Housekeeping resumes to get you started.
A housekeeper can have many titles and some of the few titles are HouseKeeping, Executive HouseKeeper, HouseKeeper/Room Attendant.
At BFWR, We always keep our readers updated with resume related articles. If you are new, then you can read How to write a resume. If you already have the idea on creating resume then you can look further on the tips that make the resume work.
We also have a great collection of resume/CV and a practical guide on how to build a cover letter that works! And, if you want to automate the process of resume building, check the free resume builders.
Let's move on to the housekeeping resumes. These resumes are handpicked so that they are best suited for the people who are looking for jobs.
So, what is the role of HouseKeepers?
Housekeepers are the new age warriors that keep the environment clean. They do their duty in smaller chunks and on regular intervals. They also work on the request of the guest and takes care of their needs if needed.
Some housekeeping jobs also requires taking care of cooking and laundry section. They are also responsible for sanitizing the place and keeping it free from any form of diseases that happens due to non-cleaning of the surroundings.
The housekeepers are also responsible for working without disturbing the other workers or patients in the hospital or any other organization. The work hours needs to be flexible and there would be no reason to disturb others.
If you are looking for a housekeeping job, then it is always a good idea to have a housekeeping cover letter. We have already linked how to create a cover letter that works — have a look on how to approach the problem.
Let's dive deep into the list of amazing housekeeping resumes.
Do you have anything to add to the story? Comment below and let us know!


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Finding Unique Home Items in Cost Plus World Market, Livingston NJ #WorldMarket_NJ #Sponsored
Recently I shared with you about the opening of Cost Plus World Market store in Livingston, New Jersey and the events during the grand opening week. I hope some of you visited the store and enjoyed the activities.
Note: This is a sponsored post on behalf of Cost Plus World Market. I was invited to a sneak peek night and received a gift card to shop the store. However any personal views expressed are always 100% my own.
During that week not only did I visit the store but I also shopped for a few items based on my readers comments. In my last post I asked what items you wanted me to shop and find for your homes.
Since Cost Plus World Market is filled with home furnishings, décor, fashion accessories, and gourmet food and beverage items from around the world, I knew I'd find some great items.
And I did! Here's a few of the items I found in Cost Plus World Market in Livingston, NJ just for you!
For Robin (Masshole Mommy) who said "I would love to see maybe some toss pillows?" I found pillows in lots of great color and patterns.
For Terry (My Journey With Candida) who said "I am looking for great storage ideas so if you happen to see anything, I would love to read about it." I found unique store containers, metal cabinets and rustic shelve units.
For Aimee Fauci who said "How about the unique foods and snacks." I found flavorful snacks and season sauce blends from other cultures. I also found (and sampled) refreshing beverages like these Italian sparkling sodas.
For Janelle Shank who said "...table decor, i am always looking for new stuff for my table" I found an assortment of table lines, dining sets and kitchenware.
Desk Accessories
Apothecary Jars
Painted bugs wall hangings
Clothing, Jewelry and Fashion Accessories
Vintage Wall Clocks
Inspiration Saying to Hang on Wall
For Ronnie E. who said "Surprise us! :D Find some unique goodies that look interesting and not like the typical, boring purchase." I found LOTS for all areas of the home.
And this is just a FEW of the items I saw. There was lots more. Lots more. So if you are in the New York/New Jersey Metro area and want to shop for unique and amazing items for your home, then be sure to visit Cost Plus World Market in Livingston, NJ.
For more information about Cost Plus World Market Livingston, NJ store, visit www.worldmarket.com/livingston
On Facebook - www.facebook.com/worldmarket
On Twitter - www.twitter.com/worldmarket


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Hello everyone. I've not been keeping up with the blog the last few weeks because I've been shooting and learning every day.
Last year I failed after 21 days to keep a 366 project going. It was a relief to can it and I thought I'd never have another go. I thought wrong.
So here we are in 2013, and I have no time pressures while I am (currently) living the self-employment dream. I've just come back from a new KAP location which you'll have to check my Flickr stream out later to see my day 25 submission. Below is a panoramic format collage of my first 24 days which can be viewed on Flickr here.
In comparison to 2012, it has been a pleasure to get out in the cold and sometimes dodgy weather to keep the string of aerial images going. I've set a new personal best of KAPing 11 days in a row and been to some new spots which is half the challenge for this project. There are two likely show-stoppers to the success of this 365 attempt: weather and personal finances! The weather hasn't stopped me yet but the success of Aerial-i will likely determine whether or not I can make it happen.
So on I go. If there are any parts of Guernsey you want to see from the air (low level!) then drop a comment and I'll see what I can do. Today's location was less tricky than I had envisaged since day 1 of KAPing and it is one that I look forward to going back to on a sunny morning in the future.
Stay tuned.
Leave a Reply.
January 2016


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A Picture Perfect Resolution
Drug Store | Right | December 29, 2010
Me: "Hello, sir. How can I help you?"
Customer: "I came in a couple hours ago to pick up my pictures, and my wife says we're 17 pictures short! This always happens when we come here! Is it really so hard to keep track of one f***ing order?"
(The customer continues to rant for several minutes, getting louder and more obscene. The phone rings.)
Me: "Thank you for calling [store], how may I help you?"
Caller: "I was in there an hour and a half ago and the dumb*** in front of me left 17 pictures on the counter that I accidentally took home with my pictures. What kind of moron leaves pictures on the counter?"
(I hand the phone to the irate customer.)
Me: "It's for you."


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Sligo Archaeological Summer School
Chris Read
The 2017 summer school will comprise two separate courses, each worth 6 ECTS credits, transferable to 3 semester hours/credits in the North American system. The first 2 week course will commence on the 15th of May and will combine lectures and guided fieldtrips to introduce students to the prehistoric and medieval archaeology of Ireland. Field trips will focus on the northwest of Ireland and counties Sligo, Roscommon and Leitrim and will include Carrowmore and Carrowkeel megalithic tomb cemeteries, the Caves of Keash, Queen Maeve's cairn and Knocknarea, Boyle and Fenagh Abbeys, the site of Spanish Armada wrecks at Streedagh Beach, Roscommon Castle and sites around the stunning Lough Arrow and Lough Key. The second course, also two weeks, will start on the 29th of May and involve joining Institute of Technology Sligo archaeology students on their annual training excavation at Moygara Castle, County Sligo, a 14-17th century castle linked historically to the O'Gara clan, medieval rulers of the area. This excavation has been running at a small scale since 2013 and will be expanded this year to fully investigate the hall uncovered in 2015.
The site of the current IT Sligo Applied Archaeology training excavation is at Moygara Castle, located in the south of County Sligo, overlooking Lough Gara. The subject of considerable historical research and architectural analysis, including geophysical survey, over the last decade, small scale archaeological excavation has been underway since 2013.
The castle is a multi period construction, comprising 4 walls, 4 corner towers, the remains of a gatehouse, all from the 16/17th century and an earlier towerhouse (14th/15th century). Geophysical survey has revealed a number of anomalies both inside and outside the castle walls, including a pre castle, oval ditched enclosure, possibly contemporary with the towerhouse.
The castle is linked with the O'Gara clan, rulers of the area during much of the medieval period, although their is debate as to whether the main parts of the castle, walls, towers and gatehouse were built by the O'Garas or their English enemies in the 16th/17th centuries. The castle was besieged and partially destroyed by Cromwell in the mid 17th century.
The excavation over the last 3 field seasons have revealed parts of the earlier oval ditched enclosure (awaiting C14 date) and a possible iron smelting furnace outside the castle walls in addition to a number of features inside, including the walls, cobbling and fireplace of a large hall constructed against the west internal wall. It is planned to fully expose this hall in the 2017 field season.
For more information about Moygara Castle, please visit www.moygaracastle.com
To the Summer School's Website go to: https://www.itsligo.ie/study-at-it-sligo/undergraduate/archaeology/summer-school/
For more information or to apply please contact Chris Read at email@example.com
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