Tim Jarrett

The history beneath our feet

New Yorker: Unearthing the city grid that would have been in Central Park. Fascinating read about history right under our feet, in the form of 8.5″ square, three foot tall stone markers that were carefully placed across New York City to mark street intersections—including in the land that is now Central Park.

I did an archaeological dig in fifth grade—the site, a trash dump in the backyard of a commercial site, didn’t yield much—and another one summer in middle school in Colonial Williamsburg, which yielded foundations and fragments of pipes and glass. What I discovered didn’t change the world, but it changed me. I learned that sometimes the past is in the present, just a little out of reach—or maybe so covered that it’s not recognizable. Or put another way, history is garbage with context.

“The Business Manager … arranged a tour…”

"The Virginia Boys," Atlanta Constitution, January 28, 1894, p. 24. — “The Virginia Boys,” Atlanta Constitution, January 28, 1894, p. 24.

It was a busy fall. I gave my first public speech about the history of the Virginia Glee Club at last fall’s Glee Club banquet, and in the process did a little new research. I wanted to share a few notes from the background of that talk (slides here), which focused on the Glee Club’s tours beginning with its first off-Grounds concerts in the 1890s.

To do that, I’m including a short excerpt from a book I’ve been writing off and on on the history of the Glee Club. I’d love any feedback on the content below. The question I tried to answer was: given the Club’s spotty history for the first 20 years of its existence, why did it come roaring back in the late 1880s and early 1890s, going from virtual quiescence to mounting extensive tours? Here’s an excerpt that gives some of the background.

That the Glee Club’s early history should be bound to the Grounds of the University is unsurprising, if one considers both the fragile civil life and convalescing infrastructure of post-Reconstruction Virginia. That just 22 years after its founding it would be touring major Southern cities in four states staggers the mind until one thinks about one aspect of that badly injured infrastructure: the railroad.

Prior to the Civil War, the railroad did not enjoy the same rise to prominence in the South as in the North. In Virginia particularly, the spread of the railroad was hampered by the political power of the planters, who were suspicious of transportation initiatives that did not directly help get their goods to market faster, and of the elite in Richmond, who, starting with George Washington, had championed river transportation for goods, with an eye to keeping commerce in Virginia ports rather than sending it down the Mississippi to the port of New Orleans (under Spanish control until the Louisiana Purchase). In this spirit, the canal building enterprise that created the still-visible Chesapeake and Ohio Canal between Georgetown and Cumberland, MD and the James River and Kanawha Canal in Richmond sought to create water links from major plantations to ports. When railroads first started to be built in a significant way in Virginia, they were likewise viewed as ways to market for the planters; there was no vision of a network of rails that could assist with transit of goods over land and across state lines, much less comparable carriage of passengers.

After the Civil War, this began to change. The railroad company eventually known as the Chesapeake and Ohio bought smaller rail companies and began to connect the lines to out of state networks, beginning in the Reconstruction years. Following Reconstruction, the C&O was purchased by Northern rail barons and expanded still further.

And passenger trains became more widely available. In 1885, the Charlottesville Union Station, a passenger depot serving the C&O, the Virginia Midland Railway, and the Charlottesville and Rapidan Railroad opened on West Main Street in Charlottesville, where it still sits (serving Amtrak) today. Before this point, distance travel relied on horse power; afterwards, students could – and did – ride the rails.

So it was that the Glee Clubs of 1889–90, 1891–92 and 1892–93 mounted their first performances outside Charlottesville – albeit in the relatively close-to-hand locales of Staunton, Norfolk, Richmond and Petersburg. As we have seen, the Glee Club of 1889–90 had held a concert in the Public Hall in the Rotunda Annex, on April 11, 1890, and followed it that same weekend with performances in Lynchburg and Staunton. Two years later the Glee Club returned to the Public Hall on December 17, 1891, with a program that featured song in less than half the performance’s 15 numbers, the balance being devoted to banjo, guitar and mandolin works; the following night found them in Staunton, and a performance in Norfolk followed on April 20. The 1892–93 Club broadened its horizons still further, with a performance in “town” in the Levy Opera House in January, and a three city tour with appearances in the Richmond Theatre, the Norfolk Opera House, and the Academy of Music in Petersburg in February.…

After 1892–93, the group decided to travel much more ambitiously. Led by Bernard W. Moore and with help from a few graduating alumni, including George Ainslie, the group mounted its first major tour outside the state of Virginia. The 1894 Corks and Curls dramatically illustrates the growth of the group’s accomplishments, with the modest touring of 1891 through 1893 together taking up less than the space allotted to 1894.

Even before the tour proper, the Glee Club held performances in the Levy Opera House and the Staunton Opera House in mid-January 1894. The tour proper kicked off with a performance in Fayerweather Gymnasium on Tuesday, January 30, and was off to the Mozart Academy in Richmond the next day. Thursday saw the group in the Lexington (Kentucky) Opera House, and they continued in Kentucky with an engagement in the Louisville Masonic Temple on Friday. Saturday was the Grand Opera House in Nashville. The group took a day off for travel (and the Sabbath) but performed in DeGive’s Grand Opera House in Atlanta on Monday, February 5. Turning north again, they were in Chattanooga’s New Opera House Tuesday to conclude the tour on February 6. A performance in the Lynchburg Opera House on March 29 concluded the season.

How was such an elaborate and lengthy tour possible? Again, the railroad not only facilitated but was the only conceivable way to travel the miles from state to state so rapidly. Here the group had the assistance of the general passenger agent of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad, John D. Potts. Apparently having no UVa connection, Potts nevertheless worked closely with the group through the 1890s, to the point of being named business manager of the group in 1895–96.

Too many books

I stopped writing regularly on this blog a while ago, about the time that I stopped reading books regularly. (The usual culprits – career and children – lay behind both.)

Actually, it’s not quite right to say I stopped reading: I just slowed way down. Given that I used to rip through stacks of books as a kid and right up through college (the semester I spent reading a Nabokov novel a week, on top of other literature, probably stands as the high point), this has been a painful transition. I still keep a stack of books next to my bed to work on. Right now that stack is a foot tall, not including the latest Neal Stephenson novel.

Why has my backlog grown so deep? A few reasons:

Reduced time to read. This one is self explanatory.
Broadened interests. This one is more interesting to me. I used to be all fiction all the time, but lately am just as likely to be buried in history, or in Keith Houston’s Shady Characters (recommended).
Latent desire to find more books. My acquisition rate has slowed down, but not as much as my reading rate.
Slackened desire to read. Sadly, a lot of nights I just veg out—albeit with Facebook rather than TV.

I’m not making any resolutions about it, but I will be measuring my reading this year to see if I can pick up the pace. You can follow my progress at Goodreads.

Notes on updating an iPhone in 2016

If you’ve read my blog (and I imagine the three of you currently doing so have done so before), you know I’m an Apple guy of long standing. Of course I was watching the keynote where they announced the iPhone Upgrade program, in which you can update to a new phone every year for a moderate monthly payment with no carrier contract*. But I didn’t fully undersand how the program worked.

Historically, I’ve been on the S cycle for iPhone upgrades, starting with the 3GS, and with a January upgrade date. So I went to the Apple Store to get the scoop on the Upgrade program. Here’s what I learned (or re-learned):

Subsidized iPhones are a thing of the past, at least for the high end models. You used to pick a price point ($199, $299, $399, whatever) and accept a two year contract with the carrier. But that’s a thing of the past. You can basically choose either to pay full price for the phone (starting at $649), or you can pay a monthly fee either to your carrier of choice or to Apple. Net result: you pay more, because your data plan isn’t correspondingly cheaper.
I am paying for too much data. I have a legacy AT&T Unlimited data plan, but I only ever use about 2.7GB of data a month, based on a year’s worth of usage data. I could save a chunk of change by rebalancing my data plan, almost enough to pay the monthly charge for the phone.
There are good reasons to rent your phone from Apple rather than the carrier. For one, the phone you get from Apple is carrier unlocked, meaning you can switch to a different carrier. For another, the monthly price to Apple includes AppleCare.
It’s harder to avoid getting the high end model. My iPhone 5s was 64GB. I could mostly live with that, even with using it as an iPod for a lot of losslessly-ripped music. But I got the 128GB iPhone 6s, because the price difference was basically a latte a month (around $4).

The model has some interesting implications, not least of which the shifting of the accounting for Apple to a recurring revenue model (more predictable), the likely change in Apple’s device mix to higher end devices, an improved customer service model (imagine how much happier Apple’s customers would be if all of them had AppleCare!), and more.

But for now, I’m just excited for a new device. W00t!

On not forgetting

As a fourth year undergrad student, I entered Julian Bond’s course on the history of the Civil Rights movement in the fall of 1993 not knowing what was going to happen to me. I didn’t really realize how much the class was changing me until I worked on my class project, which ended up being a paper on Virginia’s Massive Resistance laws.

Learning that my home state had, not fifteen years before my birth, decided that closing public schools was preferable to having to integrate them was mindboggling. Learning that a superintendent who still has an elementary school named after him in my home town could cite the small number of black applicants to a school as a reason not to desegregate it was shameful. Understanding the perfectly legal mechanisms that were used by segregationists and racists to avoid, subvert, and delay the implementation of the Supreme Court’s Brown vs. Board decision made me aware that there were more dimensions of evil than just cartoonish Klansmen.

In that context, it’s easy to understand why university students would want to remove the name of slaveowners from buildings. And why there have been calls to tear down monuments to Confederate soldiers. I find myself looking on such calls with mixed emotions, however.

As the historian of the Virginia Glee Club, I’ve had to grapple with the University’s mixed legacy on slavery and race. I learned about the Movement there, and the Glee Club was integrating truck stops on tours during the 1960s, but many of the Lawn buildings were probably built with slave labor, and as late as Faulkner’s first year as writer in residence, his proposal (in “A Word to Virginians“) of going along with integration met with an outcry there.

One cannot change history by removing names, and one cannot remove the stain of slavery’s original sin from the United States by removing monuments. Until one understands that one’s parents or grandparents felt no shame in putting out an issue of the student magazine with a triumphant Lee standing over Grant in front of the stars and bars (see above), one can’t understand the forces that shaped the culture that exists today.

On the legality of peeping Toms

Boing Boing: Free Stanford course on surveillance law. Now I know what I’ll be doing in my spare time this month, and you should too.

At last month’s inaugural Black Hat Executive Summit, I learned a few things that surprised me about how existing US law applies to “cyber,” and I expect to continue to be surprised by this course. Probably unpleasantly, but who knows?

Sending 2015 out with a bang

Happy New Year!

We went a little nuts yesterday and made Melissa Clark’s “modern timpano” for our New Years Eve dinner. Did it go well? Well, aside from taking more like five hours, and the pasta covering being pretty inedible, I’d say yes. The inside was delicious, though not much like the Stanley Tucci inspired dish it’s named after (and check Tucci’s feedback on that in the recipe comments!).

You can see what it looks like fresh out of the pan above, and served up below.

And the New Year begins, lazy, as we polish off leftovers for lunch – not a hardship when it’s leftover duck and shrimp gumbo – and think do I really want to cook that Hoppin John analog today? Well, yes, since I went to the trouble of mail ordering the Sea Island red peas from Anson Mills and they’re soaking in the fridge.

But for now it’s just a pleasure to sit and enjoy the quiet.

A New Year’s gift of data porn

Bored with Tufte? Looking for new horizons in data visualization? Bunky, look no farther than FiveThirtyEight’s “47 weirdest charts of 2015.” Including a pictographic of a marijuana leaf, multiple uses of lifeline charts and some stuff that must make Edward Tufte hold his head and groan, like the Twitter visualization above.

New Years resolution time

I miss writing here. I write a lot on Facebook, some on Twitter, and a few things on my company’s blog. But it’s very rare that I write anything under my own name any more.

My New Year’s resolution is to change that. Gonna see if I can write something every (week) day here. Starting with today’s post (which could have gone on my company’s blog) but hopefully with a broader focus as time goes on. Let’s see how we do!

In which I look a gift horse in the mouth

Springer has published a bunch of its books online for free. (Hundreds more were free until this morning but the plug has been pulled.) I went looking to see what I could find. There are some interesting finds there, including a festschrift for Ted Nelson, the inventor of hypertext. And, relevant to my work interests, a text called The Infosec Handbook.

What’s that, you say? A free textbook on information security? Sign me up! Well, not so fast, pilgrim.

Admittedly, I come to the topic of information security with a very narrow perspective—a pretty tight focus on application security. But within that topic I think I’ve earned the right to cast a jaundiced eye on new offerings, as I’m going to celebrate my eighth year at Veracode next month. And I’m a little disappointed in this aspect of the book.

Why? Simple answer: it’s not practical. The authors (Umesh Hodeghatta Rao and Umesha Nayak) spend an entire chapter discussing various classes of threats, trying to provide a theoretical framework for application security considerations, and discussing in the most general terms the importance of a secure development lifecycle. But the SDLC discussion includes exactly one mention of testing, to wit, in the writeup of Figure 6-2: “Have strong testing.” And an accompanying note: “Similarly, testing should not only focus on what is expected to be done by the application but also what it should not do.”

Really?

It’s pretty widely understood in the industry that “focus(ing) on what is expected” and “[focusing] on what [the application] should not do” are two completely different skill sets and that even telling a functional tester what to look for does not ensure that they can find security vulnerabilities. The problem has been well known for so long that we’re nine years into the lifespan of the definitive work on the subject, Wysopal et al’s The Art of Application Security Testing. But there’s no acknowledgment of any of the challenges raised by that book, including most notably the need to deploy automated security testing to ensure that vulnerabilities aren’t lurking in the software.

As for the “eight characteristics” that supposedly ensure that an application is secure, take a look at the list for yourself:

Completeness of the Inputs
Correctness of the Inputs
Completeness of Processing
Correctness of Processing
Completeness of the Updates
Correctness of the Updates
Maintenance of the Integrity of the Data in Storage
Maintenance of the Integrity of the Data in Transmission

Really? Nothing about availability. Nothing about authorization (determining whether a user should be allowed to access information or execute functionality). Nothing about guarding against unintended leakage of application metadata, such as errors, identifying information, or implementation details that an attacker could use. And nothing about ensuring that a developer didn’t include malicious or unintended functionality.

The chapter also includes no mention of technologies that can be deployed against application attacks, though this may be a blessing in disguise given the poor track record of web application firewalls and the nascent state of runtime application self-protection technology.

All in all, if this is what passes for “state of the art” in a security curriculum from the second biggest textbook publisher in the world, I’m sort of relieved that information security isn’t a required curriculum in a lot of CS programs. It might be better to learn about application security in particular from a source like OWASP, SANS, or your favorite blog than to read a text as shallow as this.

Sarah was ninety years old

In the course of listening to all the music in my iTunes library at least twice (a multi-year project!), this morning I came across Arvo Pärt’s 1991 album Miserere. It’s a touchpoint for me—it was the first album of his music I ever bought, probably the first Hilliard Ensemble album I ever got, and one of the first albums of modern classical music I ever bought. (I think the first modern classical album I bought was the Kronos Quartet’s Black Angels.)

As I listened to it, I remember being simultaneously profoundly moved and confused by the third track, “Sarah was ninety years old,” scored for three voices, percussion, and organ. The piece begins in contemplative solo percussion, which gradually picks up intensity until the first vocal entrance, then repeats, until finally the long stretches are ended by the entrance of an organ and a soprano solo that spirals up into ecstasy (as Sarah conceives and bears a son at the age of 90).

Something that had puzzled me from my first listen was just exactly how it was that the percussion didn’t drive me nuts. The percussion consists of four-beat patterns of high and low tones, continuing initially for over five minutes before voices enter. How does it pull the listener in?

I think I figured it out listening to it this morning. Turns out, it’s math. The percussion part runs through permutations of three low tones and one high tone, with varying repetitions. So the first section goes:

L L L H (4x)
L L H L (4x)
L H L L (4x)
H L L L (4x)

And then it repeats, but now each permutation is only repeated three times. Then two. Then one repetition of each permutation, at high urgency and with a fierce percussive attack.

Then: the voices arrive.

And we realize that we have been counting the repetitions and that our breath has been quickening in anticipation of what happens when the pattern ends.

The work is literally minimalistic, but it’s also highly meditative. I don’t think anyone online has specifically written about how Pärt creates this effect, so I figured I’d share.

Enjoy!

“A musical entertainment in the Town Hall”

It’s been some time since I’ve posted any narrative about my work researching the history of the Virginia Glee Club. That’s honestly because a lot of it has been fairly uninspiring heavy lifting: looking up death dates of alumni from the 1930s, transcribing rosters from bad photocopies of Corks and Curls, and so on. But this week, as I tried to put some narrative around the first decade of the Glee Club’s history (which for this purpose we’ll describe as 1871 to 1880), I ran into another one of those interesting corners that pops up from time to time.

This time the question that I found myself asking was: what were all the musical students at the University of Virginia doing between the demise of the Claribel Club in 1875 and the coming of Woodrow Wilson’s incarnation of Glee Club in 1879?

Turns out, they were putting on minstrel shows.

To summarize: between 1876 and 1878, the Virginia University Magazine published notes about three different minstrel performances. The first note, published in October 1876, noted that some students intended to form a “negro minstrel troup” to perform for the local audience and also for the “young ladies, orphans and lunatics” of Staunton, Virginia. The following year, we are told that a “repetition with slight variations of the long-to-be remembered minstrel performance of last year” will be held in the Town Hall, for the benefit of the Rives Boat Club. (The Town Hall, later known as the Levy Opera House, would be the site of a Glee Club performance in 1894; the Rives Boat Club was in existence at least through 1889 and appears to be the distant forerunner of UVa’s crew team.) In 1878, the performance returned and once again benefited the Rives, though the Magazine noted that attendance had fallen off the previous year. There is no mention of a show in the years following, during which the Glee Club returned, though there is evidence, in the form of a program, that a troupe re-formed and performed in 1886 or 1887.

This isn’t the first time we’ve bumped up against minstrel traditions in researching the history of the Glee Club, and it likely won’t be the last. But it’s fascinating to me to see how the threads intertwine, and see the Glee Club in a larger context. That 1886 program lists Glee Club president Sterling Galt as one of the performers in the minstrel program, along with J.R.A. Hobson and W.P. Brickell.

I’ve looked for minstrel troupe programs in the library catalog; while the 1886 program is there, there’s no record of the 1870s performances—they may have been lost in the Rotunda fire. But I hope to find more information about the performances some day. The dividing line between outright minstrelry and the banjo and mandolin performances—and membership—of the Glee Club appears to be pretty faint. Understanding the complexity of the interplay between Southern culture, race, and music in the formation of the early group provides a fascinating glimpse into student life in the dawn of the Glee Club’s years.

New mix: My timing that flawed

Midsummer, so time for another mix. At some point I’ll break this meta-thing I have where the mix starts out party and ends up somber, but this will not be the mix to break the pattern.

A few track notes in line below.

Blind Man Can See It – James Brown (In the Jungle Groove). This is a classic James Brown groove with nothing much else going on, but it’s on here for the first 30 second snippet of Brown talking with the drummer. Dag-a-dag-a-dag-a…
Jungle Grove – Buckshot LeFonque (Music Evolution). I had written off Buckshot LeFonque as a kind of lazy exercise after the first album. I finally got around to checking out the second (and last) platter Branford’s gang waxed, and I’m glad I did. This track features some seriously hot playing as the group plays some live jungle.
Blue Line Swinger – Yo La Tengo (Prisoners Of Love). Yeah, I know, there are probably a bunch of live cuts of this that are better, but this is the one I first learned to love.
Lotus Flower – Radiohead (The King of Limbs). Get your Thom Yorke dance on.
Song Of The Stars – Dead Can Dance (Spirit Chaser). Get your mid-90s cultural appropriation dance on.
The Great Curve – Talking Heads (Remain In Light). I think this is the only track on this album that hadn’t previously made it onto a mix tape.
Optimistic – Radiohead (Kid A). To think that I once considered this the happy song on this album.
Idioteque – Virginia Sil’hooettes (Best of BOCA: The First 20 Years). I know, I know. But honestly I was blown away by what these Hoos could do in the studio.
Ascension Day – Talk Talk (Laughing Stock). I’m still not sure what this song is about, but I do know that I haven’t been able to stop playing this album since I finally picked it up a few years ago.
Total Trash – Sonic Youth (Daydream Nation). Is it bad that reading Kim’s autobiography made me want to listen to Sonic Youth songs that weren’t sung by Kim?
You Get What You Deserve – Big Star (#1 Record – Radio City). Ditto the comment on track 6.
Nicotine & Gravy – Beck (Midnite Vultures). Okay, here we go. I enjoyed this album ironically when it came out, now I just enjoy it. “I’ll feed you fruit that don’t exist/I’ll leave graffiti where you’ve never been kissed/I’ll do your laundry, massage your soul/Then turn you over to the highway patrol.”
Beykat – Youssou N’Dour (Joko From Village To Town). I could listen to Youssou sing anything, even a track that would be at home on a Europop radio station.
Rose Parade – Elliott Smith (Either/Or). Haven’t been able to let go of this one.
Prïtourïtze Planinata – Bulgarian State Television Female Choir (Le Mystere Des Voix Bulgares). Another album I came to late, and can’t stop listening to.
Love Will Tear Us Apart – June Tabor & Oysterband (Ragged Kingdom). Surprising how well this works.
Nothing But Heart – Low (C’mon). Fighting through.
Cherry Chapstick (Acoustic Version) – Yo La Tengo (Today Is the Day! – EP). Have loved this tune for a long time in its original form. The acoustic is wistful and summer afternoonish.
Into Dust – Mazzy Star (So Tonight That I Might See). Another track that echoes around my head when it’s quiet.
Fading Away – The Church (Gold Afternoon Fix). This may not have been the album that The Church wanted to make—stories of their fights with the producer and their despair at LA and their label are plenty—but it’s still an album that I know almost every track on.
Bye Bye Beauté (Coralie Clement) – Nada Surf (if I had a hi-fi). Not the first time I’ve bought an album based on a cover. I originally wasn’t taken by too many songs on this cover album but this one kept at me, thank goodness.
A Mother’s Last Word To Her Daughter – Washington Phillips (The Half Ain’t Never Been Told, Vol. 1). Very little dulcimer work in the gospel music I’ve heard. This is a fascinating track to sign off this mix as we go and see the King.

Bascom Lamar Lunsford: the Berea recordings

Bascom Lamar Lunsford, courtesy Asheville and Buncombe County on Flickr

Thanks to Tyler, I’m spending the morning listening to archival folk music recordings and grinning from ear to ear.

I’ve written about cousin Bascom Lamar Lunsford before. In the years since the CD reissue of the Anthology of American Folk Music, which features several of his songs, quite a few folk artists have approached his tunes anew, with varying levels of success (check out Frank Fairfield’s version of “I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground“). But nothing’s like the real thing.

So I was thrilled to get a link from Tyler on Facebook pointing me to the digital archives at Berea College with a collection of forty-two Bascom Lamar Lunsford archival recordings, plus a few large group songs and a newsreel, available for free listening and download. The quality of the recordings, made for Columbia University in 1935 and archived by Berea, isn’t great — there’s reel-to-reel noise on most of them, and the otherwise revelatory performance of “Mole in the Ground” is marred by uneven recording or playback, leading the pitch to wander all over. But hey–free Bascom Lamar Lunsford! Go listen!

More reading: a Bascom Lamar Lunsford/University of Virginia/Virginia Glee Club connection.

Listen: “Swannanoa Tunnel” by Bascom Lamar Lunsford from the Berea archive

An appreciation of John Oliver

Boston Globe: Tanglewood chorus director Oliver to step down.

I auditioned for the Tanglewood Festival Chorus almost ten years ago. In that audition, I showed my lack of symphony and opera experience by singing a work by Landini — a good audition piece for an early music ensemble, woefully out of place for a symphony chorus. But John Oliver took a risk on what he heard and invited me to join the chorus. And he let me continue to participate through travel, at least one blown reaudition, and the appearance in the chorus of many other more qualified singers.

In the process, he has taught me a great deal as a singer, including:

Sing with the whole body as an instrument. Be aware of the resonant space in your head, the position of your body, the depth of your breath.
Language matters deeply. Articulating precisely conveys not just words but meaning.
Memorization allows you to inhabit the music deeply and fully — and sometimes builds electricity in the performance via sheer terror.
Connect with the conductor and the audience.
Be committed completely. Don’t settle for less, in yourself or others.
There isn’t one “correct” interpretation of a musical work. Be open to what others bring to it.

There is much to be said for John’s tenure as founder and director of the TFC, and I’ll write it someday. For today, I’ll just note my gratitude for this acerbic, demanding, opinionated… and secretly generous man, and for what he taught me as a singer.