Jarrett House North

Eastertide

Geese at Peepers Pond. Full size at Flickr.

Another Easter has come and gone. This year I was sick, with a bad cold that came on suddenly after our first performance of the Kancheli “Dixi” and didn’t abate until partway through the day… after I had sung two services at church. There is something restorative about singing the Hallelujah Chorus, if it doesn’t kill you first.

I’ve been thinking a little about something one of our student ministers said yesterday to the children. He talked about Easter and the opening of the cave as a promise from God to us that we can all have that resurrection experience—not just in the context of literal resurrection, but as a second chance, as the removal of the metaphorical stone keeping us in whatever cave we currently occupy. I think about that as I look out on a cold, drizzly spring morning. I’d like to find some sunshine.

Cocktail recipe: Woodsy Owl

It’s a concert week, so I thought in lieu of a proper blog post I’d share this cocktail recipe I invented a year or so ago. Enjoy!

This is the Woodsy Owl. It’s a little like an Allen Cocktail, but the combination of sweet vermouth and Cardamaro gives a slightly sweet herbal flavor to what would otherwise be a less bitter variation on the Negroni.

Woodsy Owl

1 oz gin (recommend Plymouth)
1 oz sweet vermouth
1 oz Cardamaro

Combine and stir over ice. Strain into a coupe glass. Garnish with lemon peel (optional).

It’s about Sorry

I’ve been making more of an effort to write about music and recently accepted a challenge to post an 80s song a day on Facebook. This post (which I’m posting a day late, but which was actually written on the 23rd) comes from that effort.

I was listening to this track with The Boy today. He asked, “What’s this song about?”

I replied, “Well, I’m not sure. He sings about waiting for a call, and about choices, and says he’s sorry. But he lets us make up our own minds about what the song is about.”

The Boy said firmly, “It’s about Sorry.”

I said, “Yes, it’s about Sorry.”

And then we talked about apologies, and what it means to accept an apology.

Thanks for that, Michael Stipe.

RIP Andy Grove

CNN: Andy Grove, former Intel CEO and personal computing pioneer, dead at 79. It’s worth taking a second this morning to think about why we remember what Andy Grove did when other pioneers of silicon are mostly forgotten.

Motorola, Texas Instruments and others built chips. Andy built an ecosystem.

While Wintel may rightly be regarded as an example of a noxious monoculture, mostly because of the Windows side of the equation, Andy recognized the potential for personal computers and ensured that they would run on his chips. And he recognized that Wintel was only one ecosystem that could have been built with Intel as its foundation—witness his convincing Steve Jobs to shift the architecture of Macs away from PowerPC to Intel chips in 2006.

I had an opportunity during the 2001 MIT Sloan Tech Trek to meet Andy. He spoke with a bunch of MBA students for a few minutes, and took questions. He struck me as a long thinker, so I asked him a long thought question: how long could Moore’s Law continue to hold before the physics of small matter caused it to bottom out? He was airy as he said it was a “20 year problem.” And he was right: he knew that there was plenty of room to continue innovating on the silicon. He didn’t say it, but I suppose he was more focused on the business of the ecosystem; even then you could read the writing on the wall that the antitrust suit, a resurgent Apple, and mobile computing were about to take the wind out of Microsoft’s sails.

I don’t know that I’ll ever get to talk to a more brilliant man (not counting Bill Gates, but I never got a chance to ask him any questions as an intern). Rest in peace.

Happy first day of spring

After a warmish winter, it seems only appropriate that we got about five inches of snow on the first day of spring. We are hardy souls, though, and have already dug out and sent the kids to school (albeit two hours late).

There are other signs of spring, too, like the imminent arrival of the orchestra rehearsals for this week’s performance of the Kancheli “Dixi” with the Boston Symphony. More to come…

Friday Random 5: Because snow edition

It’s spring today and going to be winter on Sunday as we gear up for another foot of snow via a late-season northeaster. Time for a Random 5!

Blue 7 – Sonny Rollins (Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz)
Ekta Deshlai Kathi Jalao (Light a Match) – Asha Bhosle & Kronos Quartet (Songs from R.D. Burman’s Bollywood)
In Christ There Is No East or West – Mavis Staples (You Are Not Alone)
Stop This World – Diana Krall (The Girl in the Other Room)
Virginia Yell Song (live) – Virginia Glee Club (Songs of Virginia)

Blue 7: This is the second time this track has figured in a Random n post, but since the last time was nine years ago I’ll allow it. Two notes: this was the compilation that I bought, excited to take Scott Deveaux’s History of Jazz class at UVa, and then disappointed that I had to drop the class because it conflicted with a required lab. And Rollins was absolutely incandescent when I saw him at the Tanglewood Jazz Festival back in the early 00’s. Here’s hoping that I have that level of presence and acuity when I’m his age.

Ekta Deshlai Kathi Jalao: A simply great collaboration with the Kronos Quartet. You can listen to this happily without knowing that a great many of the songs are about marijuana.

In Christ There Is No East or West: Not as transcendental as the Grand Banks version, and not one of the most spectacular fruits of her Jeff Tweedy produced works, but still great. A slow burn that’s buoyed up by the arrangement.

Stop This World: A former coworker of mine who was a local jazz DJ was underimpressed with this album, done in collaboration with Krall’s future husband Elvis Costello, because it saw her leaving the strict jazz repertoire and exploring blues and pop song forms. I love it for the same reason.

Virginia Yell Song (live): The loudest rendition of Linwood Lehman’s UVA football song on record, featuring the Glee Club with the University of Virginia Marching Band in the small confines of Old Cabell Hall. The Club singing in unison so they can be heard over the band gives a small flavor of what it must have sounded like back in the day that students sang at football games.

Where is James K. Polk when you need him?

CNBC: We choose the nominee, not the voters: Senior GOP official. Get out your popcorn; the GOP convention is shaping up to be a real doozy. And with Trump himself saying about the likelihood of a brokered convention, “I think there’d be riots,” it’s clear that the possibility of an out of the ordinary nominee selection process is not far from his mind.

Has there ever been an election this, with disagreement over so many issues in play? Well, I’d argue for 1844. With the Democrats split between the Van Buren wing of the party who opposed the annexation of Texas as a slave state, and the Andrew Jackson wing who strongly supported it, the deadlock between Van Buren and Henry Clay (both opposed to annexation) left the path open for a “dark horse” candidate to be nominated. That candidate was James K. Polk, who strongly supported the annexation of Texas specifically and the “manifest destiny” expansion of the United States generally.

So what’s the analogy? I’d argue the open racism and ignorant nativism of Trump and Cruz has left the door open for a more moderate Republican dark horse. But maybe that’s wishful thinking and Trump will show up at the convention with all 1,237 delegates he needs to take the nomination outright.

To offset that grim future, here’s a little They Might Be Giants to refresh you on the history lesson above!

Old music Wednesday

It’s been a crazy week as the house (and our children) adapt (poorly) to daylight savings time. So I’m cheaping out on the blog today but using the opportunity to plug a few things that I listened to in my “dark period” and want to remember and come back to. I listened to both these KEXP in studio sessions via their Live Performances podcast and only later found out that they were also available via their YouTube feeds. Note: Until I get the blog redesigned, you’ll need to embiggen the videos to actually watch them; sorry!

Lavender Diamond: The amazing voice of Becky Sharp. Some of the production on their 2012 album teeters on precious, but I keep coming back to this live performance that strips all the veneer off the songs and leaves them raw and beautiful. The second song in, “Everybody’s Heart’s Breaking Now,” is legitimately heartbreaking.

Dum Dum Girls: Completely different sort of band and sound. Dee Dee comes across as Siouxsie via Mazzy Star in this in studio, but the fun here is the sound and the interplay between the band members.

What’s at stake in the FBI iPhone case? Your privacy and safety.

NPR: Encryption, Privacy Are Larger Issues Than Fighting Terrorism, Clarke Says. With all due respect to Richard Clarke, who sits on the board of my employer and who has been on the right side of arguments about cybersecurity for about 20 years: of course they are. Of course, the correction should probably be aimed at NPR’s Writer of Breathless Headlines.

As I’ve written before, it’s ironic that a federal government that can’t secure its own systems is presuming to dictate terms of secure computer design. What explains it is a continued reliance on magical thinking: a supposition that, if we try hard enough, we can overcome any barrier. In this case, the barrier is the ability to offer a secret backdoor to law enforcement in an encryption technology without endangering all other users of that encryption technology. Sadly, President Obama appears to subscribe to this magical thinking:

If, technologically, it is possible to make an impenetrable device or system where the encryption is so strong that there’s no key – there’s no door at all – then how do we apprehend the child pornographer? How do we solve or disrupt a terrorist plot?

The whole point of cryptography that works is that there’s no door at all for unauthorized users. If you put one in, you have to put the key somewhere, and you open yourself up to having it stolen, or having someone figure out how to get in. And if you ask for a special version of an operating system that can unlock a locked iPhone, you end up with software that can be applied without restriction to every locked phone, by the government, by the next 100 world governments that ask for access to it, and by whoever manages to breach federal computers and steal the software for their own use.

This would be a fun theoretical exercise, as it mostly was back in the days of the Clipper Chip debates, were it not for the vast businesses that are built on secure commerce, protected by cryptography; the lives of dissidents in totalitarian countries who seek to protect their speech and thoughts with cryptography; the national secrets that are protected by cryptography; the electronic assets of device users everywhere that are protected from criminals by cryptography. But because of all those things, to propose to compel a computer manufacturer to embed a back door system—or worse, to turn over their intellectual property to the government so that they can add such a feature.

And Clarke’s analysis says that the last thing is what this is all about: bringing technology companies to heel by setting a precedent that they must do whatever the government asks, no matter how much it endangers users of their products. Read this exchange:

GREENE: So if you were still inside the government right now as a counterterrorism official, could you have seen yourself being more sympathetic with the FBI in doing everything for you that it can to crack this case?

CLARKE: No, David. If I were in the job now, I would have simply told the FBI to call Fort Meade, the headquarters of the National Security Agency, and NSA would have solved this problem for them. They’re not as interested in solving the problem as they are in getting a legal precedent.

If Clarke, who helped to shape the government’s response to the danger of cyberattacks, says that the NSA could have hacked this phone for the FBI, I believe him. This is all about making Apple subordinate to the whims of the FBI. The establishment of the right of the government to read your mail above all rights to privacy is only the latest step in a series of anti-terrorism overreactions that brought us such developments in security theater as the War on Liquids. Beware of anyone telling you otherwise.

Winter Was Hard

The Rest Is Noise: For Peter Maxwell Davies. The death of the eminent British composer has me thinking about how hard 2016 has been so far on musicians and artists. First Bowie, of course, and then Glenn Frey, but also Natalie Cole, Paul Kantner, composer Stephen Stucky, George Martin, Maurice White of Earth, Wind, and Fire, Keith Emerson, Vanity. And of course Harper Lee and Alan Rickman, when broadening to other art forms.

What gives? Is 2016 a more fatal year than other years? Well, probably not, thought it’s easy enough to do the comparison in Wikipedia of notable deaths per year (2016, 2015 and so forth). I think what’s happening for me in particular is that musicians (and artists) who helped shape who I am when I was in my teens (meaning they had produced notable works at most 20 years before that) have now hit a particular point in the actuarial curve. It’s kind of a variant of the pathetic fallacy; the underlying drivers are more likely basic human actuarial trends, substance abuse tendencies in musicians active in the 1960s and 1970s, and the worsening of the American diet over the last 30 years than anything more profound.

And yet. It’s hard to escape the feeling of childhood slipping away. The older I get, the more I’m aware that a chunk of what I think of as “me” is defined in terms of how I relate to things outside myself, and while the death of Peter Maxwell Davies does not negate any of the art he produced, his being gone makes those relationships that much more tenuous.

Random 5: coffee deficit edition

It’s Random 5 time! And my dogs didn’t let me sleep last night, so I’m on my second cup of coffee (this one red-eyed with a shot of espresso) and this update will be accordingly off kilter. I’m going to try a new format for the 5 this time; let’s see if it sticks.

Say Goodbye – Beck (Morning Phase)
Comin’ Round the Mountain – Bob Dylan (A Tree with Roots)
Lullaby for an Anxious Child – Sting (If On a Winter’s Night…)
The Parting Glass – The Pogues (Rum, Sodomy & the Lash)
L’enfer – Coralie Clément (Bye Bye Beauté)

Say Goodbye: I don’t resonate with this album as strongly as I did with its predecessor Sea Change. That one felt achingly melancholic and honest. This one feels like “It’s time to make Sea Change II.” But you can’t fault Beck’s craft. The banjo seems an unorthodox choice when it drops into the break but it fits. His harmonies have been getting better over the years, and the stacked chords on the chorus introduce some needed tension into the song. It still feels more like an exercise, though.

Comin’ Round the Mountain: A few years ago, Doom and Gloom from the Tomb posted a link to a download of the granddaddy of all Dylan bootlegs, the “full tapes” from the Basement Tapes sessions. This tossed off fragment of the traditional song isn’t essential but it’s fascinating: with instrumentation that sounds like hammer dulcimer along with bass, acoustic guitar and drums, the vocal fades in and out like a half remembered thought and the second verse fades into inaudible mumbles. We know she’s coming but we don’t know when and we don’t know why. Typical of the Basement Tapes, Dylan lifts the corner of an old traditional children’s song and finds mystery.

Lullaby for an Anxious Child: Originally a 1990s b-side, Sting fleshed out the arrangement for this on his surprisingly good winter/holiday album a few years ago, with strings, harp and harmonium (accordion?) supplementing the acoustic guitar. I’ve been vocally dismissive of later Sting work, but I liked this album, and though I could wish for fewer chimes and a less affected vocal on this track (does every entrance need a little swoop?) it’s still lovely and done with a light touch.

The Parting Glass: I like the Pogues, and Shane McGowan, best when they’re rooted in their craft and their tradition. This straight take is fantastic and wouldn’t have been out of place on a Clancy Brothers album… well, maybe on an album of drunken outtakes.

L’enfer: I was introduced to Coralie Clément’s music via the Nada Surf cover of the title song of this album. The title song, with contributions from that band’s Daniel Lorca, is still the essential track on this album for me, but “L’enfer” is a perfect slice of fuzzed-guitar summertime French pop, with Clément’s breathy vocals sounding like Jane Birkin hanging out with an indie pop band. Fun for Friday.

Fossils on the bench

As I celebrate the appointment of a fellow Glee Club alum to the bench of the fifth judicial district in Virginia, I thought it would be fun to take a look at the company he joins of fossils who’ve been judges.

John W.G. Blackstone (1879–1880 season). Blackstone (1858–1911) was one of the more notable politicians of the 1879–1880 class (Wilson aside), serving in the Virginia State Senate from 1884 to 1896 when he was appointed the county judge for Accomac and serving as a judge on the Eighth and Eleventh Judicial Circuits until his retirement in 1908.

Oliver Whitehead Catchings (1891–1892 season). At Virginia, he was a law student, captain and quarterback of the football team, member of Phi Kappa Psi, the Z Society and Eli Banana, and editor of both Corks and Curls and College Topics. He completed law school at Virginia and practiced law in Washington, DC while his father, Thomas Clendinen Catchings, was in Congress, then returned with his father to Vicksburg to establish the practice of Catchings & Catchings. He was appointed judge of the 9th Mississippi District in 1905, and died unexpectedly of heart disease in 1916.

Duncan Lawrence Groner (between 1894 and 1896). As Wikipedia records, Groner served as a judge of the Eastern District of Virginia and as chief justice for the United States Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit, as well as serving six years in the United States Senate for Virginia.

George Latham Fletcher (seasons between 1895 and 1898, music director 1897–1898). A member of the Z Society and Eli Banana, he practiced law, served as judge of the 28th Judicial Circuit of Virginia in Warrenton, and served two terms as a state senator. Possibly the most memorable case over which he presided as judge was the divorce of future Duchess of Windsor Wallis Simpson from her first husband, in 1927.

Frederick Garner Duval (1905–1906 season). A member of T.I.L.K.A. and the dramatic troupe the Arcadians while at Virginia, Duval was an attorney in Alexandria and later became civil police justice there.

Sheffey Lewis Devier (1917–1918 season). Devier practiced law in Harrisonburg, and served as both a justice of the peace and judge of the juvenile and domestic relations court for Rockingham County. He later served a term as mayor of Harrisonburg.

Absalom Nelson Waller (from 1922 to 1925). Vice president of the Glee Club, he served as a county judge in Spotsylvania County for 32 years.

Robert Fitzgerald (1939–1940 season). An engineering student at Virginia, he served in the US Marine Corps during World War II at the Pacific front and and was discharged a second lieutenant. He practiced law in Falls Church, was appointed a trial judge in Fairfax County, and was later elected to the Virginia Senate.

Charles Stevens Russell (from 1945 to 1948). A Raven, he was appointed to the Seventeenth Judicial Court of Virginia in 1962, and served there until he joined the Virginia Supreme Court in 1982, retiring in 1991.

Edward Earle Zehmer (from 1949 to 1951). Another Marine, Zehmer practiced law for 23 years before his appointment to the First District Court of Appeal in Florida in 1983.

There are probably other still-living Glee Club fossils who sit on the bench, but those are the ones we know of for now. So my friend is in very good company!

Back in the saddle

I started rehearsal last night with the Tanglewood Festival Chorus for an upcoming series of performances of the Kancheli Dixi. Giya Kancheli is new to me; he’s a composer from Georgia who wrote the Dixi, apparently, partly as a memorial to his mentor, conductor Jansug Kakhidze. It’s going to be a fun work, with huge dynamic swings, lots of interestingly intricate writing for the chorus, and some meaty chromaticism. I’m also interested in seeing what the orchestration looks like—the one recording I have has some passages that sound like they might be written for Ondes Martenot…

“Has a Bacon number of 3”

I added a line to my Twitter bio recently that probably bears some explanation. Here’s my current bio:

Grammy Award winning product guy for Veracode, building the most powerful application security platform in the world. Has a Bacon Number of 3.

Most of this is self explanatory, as I’ve written about the Grammy and my employer before. But what the heck is a Bacon number?

Turns out, it’s an established measurement of celebrity that even has a (portion of) a Wikipedia article about it. The “Bacon number” of an individual is the number of degrees of separation he or she has from Kevin Bacon, where a degree of separation is usually understood as “has worked with.” You can use the Oracle of Bacon, online at the University of Virginia since the mid-1990s, to determine an individual’s Bacon number.

As for mine: I can justify it two ways. One is via former Boston Symphony Orchestra music director James Levine, with whom I share a few recording credits (including the Grammy), and who has a Bacon number of 2.

The second, and funnier, one is via the Soup Nazi, the Seinfeld character created by Larry Thomas. Larry Thomas has a Bacon number of 2, also, and he and I shared billing in Veracode’s trade show booth at RSA in 2013, when I spoke in the booth about application security. So there you go.

The author with Larry Thomas, Seinfeld's Soup Nazi, in 2013. — The author with Larry Thomas, Seinfeld’s Soup Nazi, in 2013.

The fabric of the University

Members and alumni of the Virginia Glee Club have contributed many things to the University, from musical theater to classical performances to “The Good Old Song.” But until this weekend I didn’t know that they had also contributed a piece of the University’s facilities.

I read through the 1905 edition of Corks and Curls in the San Francisco airport Friday morning. (I know, I know: the high life.) I found a page on the 1904-1905 Glee Club that I had previously missed. It listed two Humes, Howard and John, as among the officers of the combined Glee and Mandolin Clubs. Over the weekend I did some research on them.

Howard Hume, it turns out, was quite the adventurer. A physician, he got an officers’ commission in the Army Reserves in 1913 and went to Europe as a surgeon attached to the British Army during World War I. He was head of surgery and later head of the hospital at a series of camps, forts and other army posts for the next few years, even spending a few years on Corregidor in the 1930s. He continued to serve in Army hospitals across the American south in his early 60s during World War II.

His brother John Edmund Norris Hume worked as an engineer for GE. We know less about his background, except for one sentence in the finding note for the archives of the president of the University, John Newcomb: “J.E.N. Hume-Memorial Fountain.”

John and Howard were the sons of Frank Hume, Civil War veteran and noted producer of whiskey in Alexandria at the turn of the century. And apparently John was the major donor for the fountain and wall—the Hume Memorial Fountain, with its whispering wall—that once sat in front of Monroe Hall and now is at the end of Newcomb Plaza.

So Glee Club alumni have contributed not only song, but also physical monuments to the University.