Music by Muzak Ain’t No More!

If you can believe what they say in the newspaper, all you elevator riders can relax. It seems Music by Muzak is finished. Can we say “it’s the day the music died?”
by Charlie Leck

The newspaper said this morning: “Music by Muzak is dead! Gone! Finni! Over! Done for!”

I sat back in my chair and whispered to myself: “Thank goodness!”

I remember so many elevator rides, when I looked around the small cabin at my fellow passengers. Not one of them enjoyed it.

“Forget it! Give me silence or a fart by the rummy standing next to me! Just knock off the absurd music, will ya?”

And now it’s gone! Horray!

I gotta move on! There’s more important things to write about. The President played golf with Tiger Woods over the weekend – his little President’s Day vacation. I wondered about the criticism; you know, what’s the leader of the free world doing playing golf with the world’s leading philanderer? Is there no forgiveness? No rebirth? Bring on the mood music?

I’m listening now to a new album I just purchased: Car Wheels on a Gravel Road with Lucinda Williams. I’m not good at categorizing music, so I don’t know what to call it. If pressed, I’d say “Southern Country Rock Blues!” Whatever, it’s the kind of stuff I like listening to while I’m writing or reading. This one is about a drunken angel, or “a derelict in your duct tape shoes, your orphan clothes and your long dark hair.”

The sun came up. It was another day.
And the sun went down, you were blown away.
Why’d you let go of your guitar?
Why’d you ever let it go that far?
Drunken angel, could’ve held on to that long smooth neck,
Let your hand remember every fret,
Fingers touching each shiny string
But you let go of everything!

Drunken angel! Drunken angel, you’re on the other side.
Drunken angel, you’re on the other side.

Don’t ask me why I bought the album! I heard someone I respect talking about it on the radio. They played a tune called Lake Charles and I liked it. I’ll keep it! I like Lucinda’s gravely, distinctive voice. And it definitely ain’t Music by Muzak!

Now, on those crowded elevator rides you’ll get to listen to Mood Media. That’s the Ontario company that owns the now defunct Music by Muzak and Mood Media promises the experience will be all different.

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By Love Alone We Live!

I get cranky when I hear or read long, complicated definitions and descriptions of God. Something so beautiful and so simple should not be complicated.
by Charlie Leck

One of my daughters, because of pressure from some family members, I think, attends church quite regularly with her husband and two children. She struggles through some of the sermons and much of the litergy – for a couple of reasons: (1) she has the analytic and critical mind of one who teaches creative writing, which she does; and (2) she finds a lot of religion to be a bit of the hocus-pocus variety and lacking substance. When we are together, we talk occasionally about whether one can formulate a concept of God for oneself – a concept with which one could be satsfied. I think, over the years, we've gotten to that place by using the definition offered by the writer of the Epistles of John in the New Testament of the Christian Bible. That is, “God is Love!” Or, more precisely, as the epistle itself puts it….

“Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God, and he who loves is born of God and knows God. He who does not love does not know God; for God is love.”

And, further on in the same letter, John continues…

“No man has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.”

Often, in her church, my daughter will try to hear the minister saying this to his congregation. Instead, she mostly hears the clutter that comes from centuries of struggle within the church to come to grips with the bulk of scripture versus this little bit of brilliant information from the letters of John. I chuckle when my daughter tells me that she often listens to these Lutheran sermons and substitutes in her own mind the word “love” for dangling, mangling ,wangling descriptions of God by the pastor.

It is too bad that thinkers within the church over centuries and centuries have made so complex what John makes so simple. Few churches talk with the brilliant minimalism of John. The church I go to happens to be one of those exceptions and my wife and I both came away from services yesterday shaking our heads in wonder about how a sermon could be both brilliant and simple – and, by the way, beautiful.

During the service yesterday, the congregation sang a lovely and short hymn, By Love Alone We Live (2012). The music is by Stephen Paulus and the lyrics are by Michael Dennis Browne. The lyrics thrilled me (as did the music):

By love, by love alone we live,
     By love alone.
Whoever has love is in God
     And God is in every heart.
All to be held, all found.
     By love alone.

By love, by love alone we live,
     By love alone.
Now bless, now redeem, now heal,
     These are the leaves of the Kingdom.
All to be saved, all changed.
     By love alone.

By love, by love alone we live,
     By love alone.
Spirit remembering light,
     Out of death we pass into life.
All to be told, all known
     By love alone, by love.

By love alone, by love! Amen

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Here I Go Again!

Facebook, I’m coming back if you’ll have me; and I apologize for all the times I’ve said how glad I’ve been to be parted from you. You’ve made it so difficult! It seems so many people communicate now only by means of Facebook. I’m too old for Facebook and I’m too technologically illiterate, but, nevertheless, here I am again.
by Charlie Leck

I am planning to eat some crow; and, while chomping it down, I am going to make my return to Facebook.

“Warum?” As my German friends might ask. Ou, “Pourquoi?” As all my dear cousins and second cousins in France would ask.

Well, though I seem to be just fine doing without it, I keep getting these emails telling me that this person has befriended me (my profile and all my information must still be active) and this other friend, for whom I have really warm affection, has posted a knockout-bangdiddeldeedoo photograph that I just must see.

So, in all humility, I will see what I can do about going back to Facebook and, with minimal activity on my own, I’ll see what’s going on – if, of course, Facebook will have me.

No, I don't know where I'm going
But, I sure know where I've been
Hanging on the promises
In songs of yesterday
An' I've made up my mind,
I ain't wasting no more time
Here I go again
Here I go again

An' here I go again on my own again
Turnin’ back to Face the facts again!

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On Eugene O’Neill

Long Day’s Journey into Night is playing at The Guthrie Theater right now and is bringing in excellent crowds. I’m going to pass on it.
by Charlie Leck

My wife went off without me to our famous repertoire theater last week – The Guthrie Theater (named after the famous Sir Tyrone Guthrie). For you out-of-towners who don’t know about the Guthrie, you simply should if you like theater (especially classic theater). People travel here from all over the world to attend the Guthrie Theater.

Well, Anne and her daughter had dinner together at the theater and then saw Eugene O’Neill’s remarkable play, Long Day’s Journey into Night. It’s been called, by a number of theater and literary experts, the finest dramatic play ever written in America. Well, to tell the truth, I was sort of glad not to have been included in the evening. I’ve seen the play a couple of times and auditioned for a part in it once (I didn’t get it!). The play is pretty tedious and I really didn’t need to sit through it again.

As a matter of fact, O’Neill himself was not even in attendance at the opening night in 1941 of Long Day’s Journey into Night. Because he thought the play was so provocative and intense, he had asked that it not be performed until 25 years after his death. It was (and is, I guess) very autobiographical in nature. His parents are portrayed in the play (and not generously) and so is a broken down brother.

Nevertheless, Eugene O’Neill was some guy – an extraordinary playwright and a real genius in so many ways. I glanced through the theater program that my wife brought home and I came up with a delightful little snippet that I felt I must share with you. It was taken from a letter that Eugene O’Neill sent to Harvard along with his application for admittance nearly 100 years ago. I chuckled at it so and found it also very compelling. I’m going to reprint it here for you…

“Less than a year ago I seriously determined to become a dramatist and since that time I have written one long play – four acts – and seven one-act plays. Although I have read all the modern plays I could lay my hands on, and many books on the subject of the Drama, I realize how inadequate such a hap-hazard, undirected mode of study must necessarily be. With my present training I might hope to become a mediocre journey-man playwright. … [It is} because I want to be an artist or nothing, that I am writing to you.

“If varied experience be a help to the prospective dramatist I may justly claim that asset for I have worked my way around the world as a seaman on merchant vessels and held various positions in different foreign countries.

“Hoping you may look favorably upon this earnest desire of mine to become your student, I remain,

“Sincerely yours,
Eugene G. O’Neill
July 16, 1914”

By the way, O’Neill was accepted at Harvard and studied there with the famous George Pierce Baker. This was, mind you, after having graduated from Princeton.

P.S. My wife’s sister is on the Board of Directors of the Guthrie Theater and she’s been extremely faithful to them for many years. We’re proud of her for that and admire her dedication to what the Guthrie does.

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North Dakota or Bust!

North Dakota is our neighbor to the Northwest, but we’ve never regarded it all that highly; and now it is in a boom period that is difficult to believe. The question is, however: Is North Dakota selling its soul?
by Charlie Leck

I’ve never given North Dakota much of a chance. I’ve always thought of it as a bland state without much to offer in the dream story about the United States and its “sea to shining sea” beauty. North Dakota has just been left out of the discussion! Now, however, it is definitely a part of the conversation. Indeed! (I think it’s time, when the weather improves around here, for me to take a slow, observant drive around North Dakota – especially the western half of the state.)

As a young businessman, working for a company founded by the famous columnist and publisher, David Lawrence, North Dakota was part of my territory. However, my boss told me not to pay too much attention to that. “Perhaps an annual drive through the state would be good enough,” he said. “Just, you know, to show our presence off a little.”

Those annual drives weren’t very interesting. The only restaurant I ever found worthwhile, for taking an evening dinner, was a joint in Grand Forks called Whitey’s. I wonder if it’s still open. From Fargo to Williston, it was a pretty bleak drive across the state. There just were any places where you absolutely had to stop the car in order to take a photograph. Frankly there just wasn’t any need to haul a camera along. Desolate is the way I thought of North Dakota. It was the least populated state in the nation. The farms were immense and the weather was usually horrible. It would be unbelievably cold in the winter and frighteningly hot in the summer. It was difficult to pick a time to make my annual trek across the state to call on whatever lawyers and/or accountants I could find. Autumn was normally the best – late September, perhaps – and it wasn’t to view the changing leaves because North Dakota only had a tree or two once you left the Red River region on the eastern border.

Now a lengthy story in the New York Times Magazine is calling North Dakota “the Luckiest Place on Earth.” It carries this subtitle: “In the belly of the boom in North Dakota.”

Yup, North Dakota is in a boom time and its enjoying some economic luxuries we never believed would be associated with that forlorn state. It’s got the lowest unemployment level in the entire nation. People have been streaming into North Dakota for jobs. . North Dakota has grown into the 2^nd largest oil producing state in the nation (only behind Texas) and the state’s treasury boasts a 3.8 billion dollar surplus.

The New York Times Magazine story by Chip Brown is an extraordinary account of just what’s happened in North Dakota. To give you just a taste of how good the writing is, here’s Brown’s way of telling you what I was trying to say two paragraphs above.

“In a way, of course, this kind of frontier is as much a state of mind as an actual place, a melancholy mood you can’t shake as you drive all day in a raw spring rain with nothing but fence posts and featureless cattle range for company thinking, Is this all there is? until finally you get out at some windswept intersection and gratefully fall on the fellowship of a dog-faced bar with a jukebox of songs about people on their way to somewhere else.”

Just what’s going on?
Western North Dakota is in the midst of an oil boom! And, it’s a big oil boom and North Dakotans are hoping this is a sign of much better days to come. At these oil drilling sites, former flat crop fields are being turned into housing settlements where small, inexpensive single-family homes are being quickly constructed to house the needed workers who are pouring into the state.

Brown writes:

“It’s hard to think of what oil hasn’t done to life in the small communities of western North Dakota, good and bad. It has minted millionaires, paid off mortgages, created businesses; it has raised rents, stressed roads, vexed planners and overwhelmed schools; it has polluted streams, spoiled fields and boosted crime.”

The population of sleepy, little Willeston, North Dakota has tripled in the last ten years. That town, which I used to enjoy just about a much as any community in the state and is the birthplace of famous NBA coach Phil Jackson, is right in the heart of the Williston Basin. Geologists of good rank now believe it may contain “one of the largest oil fields in the world.”

About 200 wells have been dug and are working right now. Soon the process will move toward oil production and new roads, new railroad tracks and new pipelines will need to be built. That’ll bring more workers and more new residents.

This is a remarkable development – sometimes a “revolting development” and sometime heroic. It would probably help the reader appreciate the story more if he’s been a visitor to North Dakota and knows the lay-of-the-land up there, but it is not a requirement at all. This is an extraordinary piece of writing and the subject matter is sometimes honorable and sometimes downright low-down.

If you have some interesting in North Dakota, I can’t recommend any Sunday morning reading more highly than this story by Chip Brown. Read it here!

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Return to the White House Boys

No blog I’ve ever written has received more attention than one I posted after reading an upsetting book about “The White House Boys.”
by Charlie Leck

Now the New York Times gives front page attention to the diggings going on at the old Florida State Reform School for boys!

I had dozens of responses to my blog called The White House Boys. It’s a blog I posted over three years ago. It began as a review of the very depressing book written by Roger Dean Kiser You can find the blog here. I was unable to post most of those comments for a number of reasons. Some were vile and the language was too tough and harsh for me to handle; and I certainly wasn’t going to subject my readers to it. Most were so anonymous and made such serious charges against people that I couldn’t post them in fairness. I had no way to fact-check these comments and therefore I couldn’t attest to their accuracy. Now don’t think I wasn’t troubled that I couldn’t post the comments. I was. The comment process leaves me no way to contact the people who made the statements and charges. That’s why I prefer, in most cases, to hear from people by email.

Now, I’m hoping those people who sent me so many comments will take note of the NY Times story this morning (Sunday, February 10, 2013) about the anthropological dig that is going on at the old reform school in an attempt to understand better what happened in that awful place.

This is not an easy story – a Sunday morning blog, so to speak. That original blog is one of the most difficult I ever wrote and the people who sent in comments about it were obviously still suffering from the pain, torment and anger which the place caused for them or their family members.

This little snippet from the NY Times story will give you an idea of the horrors we’re dealing with here…

“Almost from the moment it opened as the Florida State Reform School, there was a steady stream of reports of abuse, indentured servitude, crowding and neglect. So many children — among them incorrigibles and runaways — were sent to the institution that it became the largest in the country.

“Accounts surfaced early on of children as young as 6 chained to walls. Fierce whippings were common. Children were forced to pick crops, make bricks and print paper, all to profit the prison and other businesses, records show. A fire in 1914 killed eight boys who had been locked in a room. Flu epidemics killed others. Some runaways were shot.”

This is not a subject I really want to write about; however, I’m posting this blog in hopes that some of those angry, angry people who sent me comments over the last few years about The White House Boys and their connection to that story will read this and go to the New York Times story.

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Moose Hunting is Off!

The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources has been doing a moose count in the northern part of the state. What they’ve found out has thrown a scare into naturalists, ecologists and plain-old animal lovers!
by Charlie Leck

A front-page story in yesterday’s StarTribune, our local paper here in the Twin Cities, says that the moose population in the state has “plummeted by one third in the last year! Repeat that last part slowly to yourself: “…in the last year!”

As we’d say here in Minnesota: “Ain’t that somethin’ now?”

The story was posted by Josephine Marcotty. If you have questions to ask her, you can email her at marcotty@startribune.com because she has a good rep for answering readers’ questions. Read, first, my summary of her story.

The word “alarmed” is used a lot by the scientists and statisticians over there at National Resources. I’d bet so!

Moose hunting has been canceled – called off – brought to a sudden conclusion! No more hunting moose in Minnesota!

The big, out-front, inevitable question is: “What is decimating these majestic animals?”

Only eight years ago, in 2005, the census came back to tell us we had over 8,000 moose in the state. This year’s count is reported in at 2,760. In January of 2012 the count was 4,230. OMG! If this count is correct, and it sure sounds like it is, we’ve got a big problem on our hands and the brainy types over there at the department and on the University of Minnesota campus better get to work to figure this out. Because, at this rate, the moose could be gone – GONE – from Minnesota in just a matter of a decade. The method used to take this count has drawn global attention and a great deal of praise for its thoroughness. The department used planes and helicopters to search for the dark-colored moose on the fresh, pure, white Minnesota snow. The process of fitting tracking collars on one-hundred of the moose has already begun. This will allow scientists to gather a significant amount of data about the habits, practices and movements of the moose; and, then perhaps, to some kind of answer to this knotty question. Even more significantly, the observers will be alerted when a moose dies and they can try to get to its body before it is consumed by scavengers. Then they can haul the body into university labs for examinations and determinations about the cause of death. This spring, the department is also hoping to put collars on 50 new born calves to track them in the same manner.

Before the hunting crowd all get their underwear knotted up, the state mucky-mucks are making it clear that this has not been caused by hunting. They say they’re suspending hunting because, frankly, because they don’t know what else to do. The researchers are making a list of the numerous possibilities – climate change, predators, infestations of ticks, brain worm. It’s the only thing they can think of doing right now. The Department of Natural Resources has taken its case to three different bands of the Chippewa nation to ask them to suspend hunting as well. The agency’s director points out that the hunts “are of great cultural importance to the tribes.” It will be a tough decision for them to make, but we’ve got to hope they’ll understand that soon there may be no moose to be found.

How could the warming climate be causal? Moose are incredibly susceptible to heat. If it’s too hot in the summer, instead of eating, they lay low in damp, dark places to escape the temperatures. If they don’t eat, they don’t build up the fat that is required to get them through a long Minnesota winter. The collars placed on these selected animals will tell the researchers a lot about the habitats of the moose in both summer and winter.

We can be sure the researchers will come up with an answer eventually. What’s frightening is that there may be no solution to whatever might be happening to these elegant creatures.

This is a story worth watching. I’ll keep my national readers up-to-date on what the Department of Natural Resources comes up with.

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