As the pandemic mounts its surge across North America – and people increasingly succumb to the government’s fiat for isolation – there is a rising needfulness to communicate with one another.  Staying indoors during springtime is itself a high order; then add to that the prescription to avoid contact with others. This isn’t an invitation to move the party into the garage out of the rain. It’s a cancellation of the get-together entirely. As a result we’ve had to learn new skills for meaningful and inspiring exchange. Suddenly those casual rendezvous at the coffee shop seem more impulsive than we may have once credited them to be. There is as well the awakening of erstwhile dormant connections, conveying their own implications and complications, urges and urgencies.

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Being confined to the apartment for the past ten days has revived the homespun diversions of my youth. Nothing like a global pandemic to call for unpretentious entertainment. I was never a fan of Mister Rogers. Perhaps the Presbyterian ministerial history worked against him. He wouldn’t be the first man of the cloth whom I encountered making a 90-degree shift to the profane – though certainly not smutty or disrespectful. I do however recollect with fondness Clarabelle the Clown (the mute partner of Howdy Doody), Mickey Mouse (and to a lesser extent Donald Duck), Dick Clark and American Bandstand, Annette Funicello, Father Knows Best, Leave it to Beaver, Lassie and My Three Sons. Middle-class American boyhood set a high standard! As apparently did Maurice Chevalier for my parents. It was the fifties in Washington, DC. We lived a block from then Vice President Richard Nixon whose daughter Julie and I were in Mrs. McGee’s class together at Horace Mann Elementary School on Newark St NW.

“His heavy French accent, melodic voice and Gallic charm made Maurice Chevalier the prototype of the gallant French monsieur in the American cinema of the 1930s. Before he went to Hollywood he worked as a farmer, circus acrobat, cabaret singer and, starting in 1908, a comical actor in French films, a few times even with the celebrated Max Linder. Chevalier fought as an infantryman in the French army during World War I and was taken prisoner by the Germans in 1914, spending two years in a POW camp. After the war he returned to the entertainment field, and eventually tried his luck in Hollywood. He made his first American movie in 1929, The Love Parade (1929). The film was a success, and Chevalier made more successful films with directors like Ernst Lubitsch (The Merry Widow(1934)). He retired from films in 1967, his last few roles being mainly friendly patriarchs.“

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This morning we precipitously cancelled our reservation on Key Largo for next year’s season. Though at first we were hopeful all would aright itself within the next three months, the current talk on the popular news channels is overwhelmingly discouraging. In particular the United States of America (because of its president’s mendacious treatment of the virus) is reportedly about to see an explosion of contamination and deaths.  If nothing else the pandemic will discolour the general atmosphere and likely limit the availability of businesses big and small. It is not in any event predictably productive of a relieving holiday environment.  We have accordingly drawn in our horns and contented ourselves to contemplate instead what if anything we might do closer to home if and when we’re able to move more openly than at present. The prospect of travel anywhere abroad is now much diminished.

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“While fully recognising the superior excellence of unselfish benevolence and love of justice, we did not expect the regeneration of mankind from any direct action on those sentiments, but from the effect of educated intellect, enlightening the selfish feelings.”

Excerpt From
Autobiography
John Stuart Mill Continue reading →

In the news only days previously we had read the Canadian government’s advice to expatriates to return to Canada within ten days to avoid the risk of a border closing. We reasoned it would not in any event apply to Canadian citizens such as ourselves. The advice – which as I say we had initially esteemed permissive not mandatory – became incontrovertible upon receiving a subsequent notification from our vacation health care insurers that they intended to cancel coverage within the same timeline. Presumably the insurers relied upon a contractual exemption for pandemic infection since otherwise the unilateral termination would have been illegal. Our last health care bill in Florida in February 2017 had been in the vicinity of US$850,000 so it wasn’t a time for enquiry, debate or equivocation. Reluctantly – that is, with the instinct of escaping a collapsing roof – on Thursday, March 19th we ended our tenancy, closed our account with Florida Power & Light, packed up and precipitously left Longboat Key to commence our two-overnight and three-day motor vehicle trip northward to Canada. We arrived on Saturday, March 21st approximately one month earlier than planned. Within days we received an email from the Board of Directors of our Florida residence that the pool had been closed. Florida was shutting down as well. To have lingered would have proven anti-social quite apart from the pervasive isolation of humanity and services. Continue reading →

It irks me to read an advertisement for those seeking an exceptional life – especially in Country Life magazine! For one thing it is exceptionally bad poetry. What in the world does it mean anyway – an exceptional life! Exceptionally what? And to whom exactly are the retailers directing their product? Isn’t life exceptional enough already? If it isn’t, do they really think they have the elixir to make it so? How exactly do they intend to reach the apogee? I dread to speculate what they imagine those fleeting ingredients may be. I’m sorry, but if you haven’t figured it out yet, the buzz of Acts 1 – 6 in this drama we call life only gets better! And we’re not relying upon storehouse commodities. Continue reading →

While it persists throughout the year as a masterful musical composition, my abiding affection for Handel’s Messiah noticeably escalates when approaching Easter (though I doubt it ever was intended to coincide with that particular event on the Christian calendar). I can happily listen to it every day until then. The work was first performed in Dublin on 13 April 1742 and received its London premiere nearly a year later. The conjunction of the scriptural text of the oratorio with the King James version of the Bible and Psalms included in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer has a stimulating effect as well. It is consistent with the Church of England with which I have communicated through the Anglican church similar to the Episcopal church in the United States of America. Continue reading →

Jeremy Bentham (15 February 1748 – 6 June 1832) was an English philosopher, jurist, and social reformer regarded as the founder of modern utilitarianism.

Bentham defined as the “fundamental axiom” of his philosophy the principle that “it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong.” He became a leading theorist in Anglo-American philosophy of law, and a political radical whose ideas influenced the development of welfarism. He advocated individual and economic freedoms, the separation of church and state, freedom of expression, equal rights for women, the right to divorce, and (in an unpublished essay) the decriminalizing of homosexual acts. He called for the abolition of slavery, capital punishment and physical punishment, including that of children. He has also become known as an early advocate of animal rights. Though strongly in favour of the extension of individual legal rights, he opposed the idea of natural law and natural rights (both of which are considered “divine” or “God-given” in origin), calling them “nonsense upon stilts”. Bentham was also a sharp critic of legal fictions.

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Roberto Cacciapaglia (born 1953 in Milan) is an Italian pianist and composer. His compositions blend electronic experimental music with the classical tradition.

Cacciapaglia is a well-known, influential and imposing artist from Milan, Italy, his full legacy extending not only over the field of electronic music, but also into avant-gardism, into a (decidedly) different language of rock, into computer-based music or natural experimenting, into classical opuses and into concept-filled fresh, generic art-leaning language.

Cacciapaglia first studied composition at the Giuseppe Verdi Conservatory, in his hometown. From there, he moved towards defining his studies in orchestral art and computer/electronic music. Collaborations with several TV stations or such networks were at the base of his approfoundation into the electronic field of music. In his music, Cacciapaglia generally blurs (or melds, better said) he line between classical and electronic, between orchestral and soloistic designated playing, between fully-researched and improvised music, between tradition(al) and emotion-driven ingenuity. Much of what he offers is down with avant-garde impulses and with an artistic superior code.

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“Those who knew him, whether friendly to him or not, always anticipated that he would play a conspicuous part in public life. It is seldom that men produce so great an immediate effect by speech, unless they, in some degree, lay themselves out for it; and he did this in no ordinary degree. He loved to strike, and even to startle. He knew that decision is the greatest element of effect, and he uttered his opinions with all the decision he could throw into them, never so well pleased as when he astonished anyone by their audacity. He presented the doctrines in the most startling form of which they were susceptible, exaggerating everything in them which tended to consequences offensive to anyone’s preconceived feelings. All which, he defended with such verve and vivacity, and carried off by a manner so agreeable as well as forcible, that he always either came off victor, or divided the honours of the field. It is my belief that much of the notion popularly entertained of the tenets and sentiments of what are called Benthamites or Utilitarians had its origin in paradoxes thrown out by Charles Austin.”

Excerpt From
Autobiography
John Stuart Mill

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