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americansamerican
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Name: Derby
Birthday: 3/13/1983
Gender: Male
Interests: Serving God, sometimes. Being a bum and screwing up and hurting people and myself, the rest. My Lord is so merciful to me... I'm still 100% blessed in everything, in spite of myself.
Expertise: I have standards. Josh doesn't.
Occupation: Artist
Industry: Education/Research
Message: message meEmail: email me
Website: visit my website
Member Since:
8/30/2004
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| I have a new blog on Google blogger. I lost the login information to my old blog, and I want to write some serious articles about issues people in today's society face. We have lost our sense of meaning in life, and I want to direct our attention from entertainment and money toward hippie things like family, music, and God. I want to teach people to live simpler, richer lives full of love and health and good things, like my family does. It seems that Michigan, especially, needs these things with its depressed economy. A coworker, my best friend at work, told me if he could have any one thing he asked for, he would ask for a billion dollars, because then he wouldn't have any problems. I don't understand how people can think that way, but it seems to be a problem especially with poor people like those I see at and around work. You can live an amazingly rich life without money, probably a richer life than you can if you are wealthy - but you have to do it right.
I've written some political items as well, but I don't want that to be the main focus of my blog.
Articles I've written so far:
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| Daniel J. Levitin, professor of psychology and music, writes in the New York Times
(login required) about the relationship between music and dance.
Apparently, the way we do music today, segregating those involved into
performers and a passive audience, is counterintuitive. He tells us
that Children (see also the Joshua Bell
experiment) naturally participate in music, and even when adults are
quietly sitting and listening to music, the parts of the brain that
control and coordinate the muscles are active. Classical music in
particular expects its audience to be passive, and I would suggest that
this is part of the reason that classical music is less popular than
modern rock and rap-related styles.
I love dancing to any kind of music, and I hate concerts with seating. At a recent Nickel Creek and Fiona Apple
concert, with a particularly danceable style, I couldn't stand sitting
still during the first half of the show. Finally in the second half, I
left the seats and danced on the side lawn under some trees. I couldn't
hear the music as well, but it was worth it.
The most profound
fact: "Even today, most of the world languages use a single word to
mean both music and dance." Let's go to more concerts with dance floors
and participatory activity.
How to find participatory concerts:
Style is the most
important indication of how much you can participate. Folk music and
rap (which, in its less commercial forms, is an urban folk style) tends
to be more participatory. Blues, jazz, country, and rock and roll skew
folk and attract more participation than classical music. "Indie"
music, with its younger audience and its relation to folk, attracts
less participation than I think it should, perhaps because it is often
quiet and introspective, emphasizes the lyrics more than the sound, or
attracts more intellectual/high-class, college-types. Perhaps I've just
gone to the wrong indie concerts.
Smaller
is better. Small music clubs generally have open seats; larger
auditoriums tend to have seats. There are exceptions: Detroit's State
Theater (now the Fillmore) has no chairs on its main floor, while the
intimate floor of the Ark, a folk venue, had chairs out when I
attended. High prices, such as classical concerts and big classic rock
names, tend to draw an audience that skews older and upper class, which
believe in staying still and acting dignified. More significantly, the
high prices seem to indicate an experience that is valued more for its
audiovisual experience than participation. Free, open-air venues, which
eliminate concerns about space and seating, are the best, such as the
lawn in front of a jazz band at the farmer's market. I particularly recommend large music
festivals such as the Warped Tour, with a variety of independent and
alternative rock acts from punk to acoustic to ska. They feature large,
open-air audience spaces that invite singing along, crowd surfing, and
great dances such as moshing.
link to "Dancing In The Seats" article | | |
| Ya durachil vas, in English, means "I fooled you."
No one in
Russia wants me to teach Russian to Russian kids. I wish it had been
true, really. It would have rocked, and I do hope to teach overseas someday. Thanks for the well-wishes, I appreciated them.
Props to Beth C and Kassie for not buying my story.
No props to Laura W and Brian P. They know Russian and should have been able to read the last line
of my blog, translated "this is not true". For shame. And special
recognition to Jonathan C, who was fooled in 2005 when I announced that my mother was expecting triplets. Don't get fooled again, Jon. It's more than a song, it's a way of life. | | |
| Some of you know that I've been studying Russian for the past year.
Well, I've been looking for an opportunity to put my new skills to good
use and see an awesome part of the world.
So I applied a couple weeks ago to the Eurolingua Institute, and have been accepted to teach with them next year! Here's my new job description.
While
they haven't told me for sure where they will place me, the lady who I
talked with (Lirpa Solovyava, in charge of recruiting and placement)
said there was a good chance that I'd be near St. Petersburg, working
as part of a new government project to combat illiteracy in rural
children. Because children there usually have to work on their family
farms and can't regularly attend school, almost 35% of the rural
population are classified as illiterate when they reach adulthood. So
I'll be teaching them to read and write Russian.
The job will
last for a year, this August through next July, after which I will come
back and lay down some pwnage on anyone who wants to play me in chess.
And perhaps anyone who wants to try to outdrink me.. just kidding. I'll
tell you more specific dates, where I'll be, etc. as I find out.
не верьте этому!
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| From Benjamin Franklin: His Autobiography. The first paragraph illustrates an important consequence of human reason. I couldn't resist including the second and third paragraphs for your entertainment. I believe I have omitted mentioning that, in my first voyage from Boston, being becalm'd off Block Island, our people set about catching cod, and hauled up a great many. Hitherto I had stuck to my resolution of not eating animal food, and on this occasion consider'd, with my master Tryon, the taking every fish as a kind of unprovoked murder, since none of them had, or ever could do us any injury that might justify the slaughter. All this seemed very reasonable. But I had formerly been a great lover of fish, and, when this came hot out of the frying-pan, it smelt admirably well. I balanc'd some time between principle and inclination, till I recollected that, when the fish were opened, I saw smaller fish taken out of their stomachs; then thought I, "If you eat one another, I don't see why we mayn't eat you." So I din'd upon cod very heartily, and continued to eat with other people, returning only now and then occasionally to a vegetable diet. So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do. Keimer and I liv'd on a pretty good familiar footing, and agreed tolerably well, for he suspected nothing of my setting up. He retained a great deal of his old enthusiasms and lov'd argumentation. We therefore had many disputations. I used to work him so with my Socratic method, and had trepann'd him so often by questions apparently so distant from any point we had in hand, and yet by degrees lead to the point, and brought him into difficulties and contradictions, that at last he grew ridiculously cautious, and would hardly answer me the most common question, without asking first, "What do you intend to infer from that?" However, it gave him so high an opinion of my abilities in the confuting way, that he seriously proposed my being his colleague in a project he had of setting up a new sect. He was to preach the doctrines, and I was to confound all opponents. When he came to explain with me upon the doctrines, I found several conundrums which I objected to, unless I might have my way a little too, and introduce some of mine. Keimer wore his beard at full length, because somewhere in the Mosaic law it is said, "Thou shalt not mar the corners of thy beard." He likewise kept the Seventh day, Sabbath; and these two points were essentials with him. I dislik'd both; but agreed to admit them upon condition of his adopting the doctrine of using no animal food. "I doubt," said he, "my constitution will not bear that." I assur'd him it would, and that he would be the better for it. He was usually a great glutton, and I promised myself some diversion in half starving him. He agreed to try the practice, if I would keep him company. I did so, and we held it for three months. We had our victuals dress'd, and brought to us regularly by a woman in the neighborhood, who had from me a list of forty dishes to be prepar'd for us at different times, in all which there was neither fish, flesh, nor fowl, and the whim suited me the better at this time from the cheapness of it, not costing us above eighteenpence sterling each per week. I have since kept several Lents most strictly, leaving the common diet for that, and that for the common, abruptly, without the least inconvenience, so that I think there is little in the advice of making those changes by easy gradations. I went on pleasantly, but poor Keimer suffered grievously, tired of the project, long'd for the flesh-pots of Egypt, and order'd a roast pig. He invited me and two women friends to dine with him; but, it being brought too soon upon table, he could not resist the temptation, and ate the whole before we came.
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