I have now reached a new level of coolness. Children are drawing pictures of me. This one is by Bryn, who took the time to reproduce my messy hair and crooked church name tag. And it makes a kick-butt Facebook profile pic!

An inspiring talk about creativity and the arts' relationship to public education, especially important for me as I seek to be a public school music teacher and a voice for change in music education.

My original plan for my blog today was to post a picture of the tiny, white, cabbage-like flowers growing in my backyard, as a way to celebrate the oncoming warmth. But Rochester had other ideas, and poured her obstinately cold and wet snow over me and my budding friends. Just a day ago I was ready to put away my insulated boots. I was looking forward to letting go of my obsession with the thermostat and its hungry, bill-inflating master in the basement. My bicycle is restless!

If I say: I won't mention Him
or speak any longer in His name,
His message becomes a fire burning in my heart,
shut up in my bones.
I become tired of holding it in,
and I cannot prevail.

My band, the Varnish Cooks, won the Juried Music Competition for the International Arts Movement Conference this year. We play Saturday, March 1st at the Tribeca Performing Arts Center in New York City. It is an amazing honor and I am very excited.

When I first went to the festival in 2005, I remember telling myself that I wanted to perform at the festival in the next couple years. But I imagined that I would perform original music at the festival, not old-time American traditional music. In the application to the competition, I quoted the minimalist composer John Adams: "Whenever serious art loses track of its roots in the vernacular, then it begins to atrophy." The International Arts Movement Jury accepted the Varnish Cooks not only for the quality of our collective voices, but because we play music that lives outside of money-driven industry and grounds us to the aesthetic wisdom of our cultural ancestors. It is truly independent music that by nature transcends our individuality as artists.

"A revolution without dancing is a revolution not worth having."
- V, V for Vendetta

What I really enjoy about this quote is that it means you should dance while London is blowing up. What revolution is can really justify itself without the arts? Maybe that's why Gabriel blows that trumpet at the end of the bible. While all the sinners are being destroyed by the wrath of God, hey, what a nice tune!

And happy Valentines day! May your chest cavity be impaled by the bolts of a fat flying toddler.

My old-time band, the Varnish Cooks, releases a second album tomorrow night! We recorded the first nine tracks of the album live in the Artisan church sanctuary with three microphones; no overdubbing, reverb, or special effects added. The last four tracks are live from a show last November at the House of Hamez.

I struggled a lot with the mixing and mastering process (it can be very tedious and difficult to satisfy my perfectionism), but I feel good about the overall sound of the album and the performances. The album has depth, passion, and a lot of playfulness to it.

Check out a couple of songs at the Varnish Cooks website.

The Red Sox won the World Series...again! We came back from three games down to Cleveland and swept the romanticized Rockies. Congratulations to everyone who played a part: fans, rookies, veterans, scouts, managers, owners, Fenway staff, and even the obsequious assistant who gets coffee.

When the Red Sox won in 2004, it was like new era began in my life. We had accomplished the impossible in sports, coming back from three games to none to vanquish the bitterly hated machine known as the New York Yankees. For superstitious fans, it could only mean a breaking curse. David Ortiz, Curt Schilling, and the rest of the Boston "idiots" became the great exorcists of Red Sox folklore. The ecstatic cheers of champagne-soaked Sox fans drowned the wail of Babe Ruth's fading ghost, first in house that Ruth built, and several days later in Cardinals stadium.

So I'm no longer a loser. And now that the Red Sox have repeated a post-WWI World Series win, I sense a confidence in Red Sox Nation and less of the lingering paranoia instilled by years of heartbreak. Earlier this year, I wrote a blog post about my fear of the Yankees, my inability to fully believe that the Red Sox had pacified the demons of loss. But now, I can't help but look at the Yankess with pity. I replay their 2007 post-season in my mind, the many clutch double plays that Jeter hit into, Clemens not making it through second inning, A-Rod playing like he belongs in some obscure gulf league, and I almost feel bad for them. Almost.

(This paragraph is an open letter to Theo Epstien. Please, please, please, please, please don't sign A-Rod. Let Mr. April fail in the clutch and build his MVP stats in blowout games someplace else.)

My pride as a fan no longer has to be rooted by stubborn, territorial allegiance. But it feels less noble to be committed to my team for anything other than stubborn, territorial allegiance. There is a dark side to this new level of confidence among Red Sox Nation. There is a new kind of fan who doesn't have any clue what it was like to be a committed Sox fan between 1918 and 2004. A couple of people said to me this year that it would be nice if we lost two games in Colorado, so that we could win the series at Fenway. My response to that is, are you crazy? Just take the freakin' win! Part of me thinks the new kind of fan will be the inevitable result of winning. I hope I don't have to complain, like some of my Yankee fan friends do, about capricious fans with more allegiance to the cuteness of a jersey than the team it represents.

David Ortiz, in an emotional pep talk to the team after the Sox went down 3 games to 1 against Cleveland in the ALCS, said while tugging on his jersey, "There's a reason why you wear this Red Sox uniform. [long pause] Because you're a bad motherf----r."

And with those eloquent words, Red Sox Nation inaugurates a new era of Boston sports fanaticism.

There is a lot of evidence in my life that I am quickly approaching thirty years of age. I can't remember the last time I slept in past eight in the morning. I make fewer assumptions. Lack of coffee induces withdrawal headaches and certain foods now disagree with me. But the most significant and uncomfortable change is my dependence on lists.

If I have any free time, it is because I choose to ignore my lists. Lists are never satisfied; they are cruel beasts that will attack any semblance of order in my life if left unfed. At first, lists are very attractive. They promise to graduate you into truly professional life. They prove your importance by orchestrating the world's reliance on your ability to get things done. Then they reveal their true nature and hover around your freedom like vultures.

My life used to be gestalt, greater than the sum of completed tasks. I could spend an entire day learning Kora rhythms on the banjo or composing atonally with slide guitar, and if the laundry was overdue it wouldn't matter because I had no trim appearance to maintain. Now, assembling a week is like doing a jigsaw puzzle. Because of time constraints, certain tasks on the list must be delegated to mediocrity and those tasks are usually the most personally precious: practicing my instruments, reading fiction, and, of course, procrastination.

This blog post is a defiant act of leisure, a way to ease the tyranny of the list. I need to learn how to tame the list and wrestle its supremacy, especially because my listed life will only grow more intense. I suspect this means I must develop a mentality that runs ahead of the list. I have to be smarter than it...I must beat it as its own game by anticipating tasks and (gulp!) doing things ahead of time. The difficult part for me is discovering ways to enjoy this, which feels like giving up on a dearly held principle of the artist's lifestyle.

A friend of my family loves to make the joke, you know you're middle aged when you reach down to pick something up off the floor and think, "is there any thing else I can do while I'm down here?" Even now, in the middle of my defiant act of leisure, I think of other updates my website requires. I have to add a performance date to the calendar...a small victory, and bittersweet...

I play in an old-time band called the Varnish Cooks, and we just released our first album! We recorded it in my dining room with GarageBand. I've listened to it many times now, and think that the band's sound is unique, although I hear a lot of things I need to work on. I think the band has enormous potential. We developed a musical philosphy that guides our aethetic decisions about playing traditional music; the first time I have experienced that in a band. It will help us play old-time music with consistent integrity while keeping the sound distictive.

Sample MP3s are available on the Varnish Cooks website. Check it out and let me know what you think!

I remember when I broke the evil piano teacher’s vase. A frustrated child will often fend off his enemies through seemingly careless impropriety. He was not a pleasant man; he had large bones in his wrists that protruded outwardly like great malignant pulleys under his skin. He had me play the same piece of music for several months. It was about a song about the sea and the notation featured a picture of a schooner. I might have practiced it twice. I mostly focused on my own compositions, which consisted of careful dissonances and shoving Legos in between the strings of the piano. (This was also an excellent way to torture Lego men from the evil space alliance.) I did not know how to read music, but my giant-handed piano teacher assumed that because I could tell him what the names of the notes were, I would be able to play the music with little effort. He would ask me to play it in lessons, and then when my incompetence so inspired him, he would use the piano to violently render a schooner crashing into the side of a young boy’s skull.

I’m not sure I meant to break the vase. Nor am I sure what moved me to kick the shards methodically from the entryway onto the asphalt driveway. Or what brilliant emotion possessed me to continue to kick the shards around the driveway even after a rude admonition from the gorilla-handed piano boxer. But I did not feel guilty, even after my mother made me apologize, because I knew that an artist and king of a Lego empire could not flourish under the tutelage of such a maladroit oaf.

Just before I went on vacation, I moved into a new place. A friend from undergrad at Geneseo and I are renting the whole house (we have shared a house before in Genseo, so he knows what he's getting into). I now have a separate room for private teaching and a nice big kitchen. The house is at the end of a dead end street in a diverse city neighborhood. Across the street is a housing complex so there are always kids wandering around. I no longer have to stack instrument cases on top of one another to get to the bathroom...

I spent seven days in Novia Scotia, a vacation with my family. It was an amazing trip; the weather was gorgeous, the air was salty and crisp, and the water was 40 freaking degrees (I went swimming and it hurt). I grew up near the ocean and spent weeks of my childhood summers at my grandparent's seaside cottage, so living in Rochester leaves me frequently pining for the sea. Lake beaches seem tame to me; they don't have the raw expanse or mystery of the ocean.



This is a picture of the Bay of Fundy, which has the largest tides in the world. In some places on the bay, the tides rise and fall more that fifty vertical feet. We went to a beach along the bay and in three hours the tide recessed close to a mile. We literally walked on the ocean floor. I took the picture above at Cape Split, which has high cliffs and extends into the middle of the bay. The view from the top is one of the most awesome things I have ever seen.

Quotes from a sermon I listened to today called "things I don't need in a pastor":

"I think laughter is really the carbonated form of Holy Spirit."

"Crying is the way home...it's good to never get over it."

"...it makes you a little lighthouse, when you've gotten down to what's true and what's real. And lighthouses don't go running around the islands looking for boats to save...they are on the islands of wreckage and disaster and they give off a little bit of light, so that people might be saved."

Two mandolins, two banjos, two acoustic guitars, a solid body electric guitar, a hollow-body electric guitar, a fiddle, a trombone, two trumpets, a clarinet, a keyboard, an acoustic instrument amplifier, a tube guitar amplifier, several harmonicas, a frame drum, and a penny whistle. Plus the condenser mic my Dad got me. Scary part is that I actually play all of them, at the expense of my social life...

My friend Mel made a really funny and appropriate comment the other day, "Another family torn apart by one man's quest for tone."

I had the great privilege of leading music in church this evening (my church meets Sunday nights in an old theater). I took the opportunity to fulfill a dream of mine and play Bob Dylan's Ring Them Bells in full rock and roll fashion (lyrics here). It was a great spiritual moment for me, thank you to Anna, Bethany, Aaron, and especially Mike for the opportunity.

Next time, Every Grain of Sand...

We have the best record in baseball. The Yankees continue to find new ways to lose. Why am I paranoid? Why am I still afraid of the Yankees?

While living in New York City, I endured the garden variety Yankee maltreatments. I went to Yankee stadium proudly in my gray Sox away jersey, where I was heckled, spat with beer, and met with mocking sympathy. Out of the times I went to see the rivals, I never got to see the Sox win in the house that Ruth built. I still cringe at the thought of the 2003 American League championship series when the Sox should have beaten the Yankees and gone on to the World Series. I am disturbed by childhood memories of believing in my team then being heartbroken in the playoffs--every year. Like a neglected child, I still can't fully trust the 2007 Red Sox even though they look so unbeatable.

I lost my voice for two days after screaming when the Sox came back to win the American League championship series in 2004, coming back to beat the Yankees after being three games behind. I relished the irony when one of my coworkers told me, "You just wait until next year." We broke the curse. The Sox won the world series, and at first I thought, we'll never be losers again. But it wasn't enough to slay the paranoid, insecure Sox fan inside me. There is no salvation in baseball.

I want to say things like, "Well, I guess 194 million dollars just doesn't buy what it used to." The mistreated fan inside me wants to lash out in anger and rub the Yankees in the mud. I've lectured children at church about how George Steinbrenner is involved the occult. I taught my friend's five year-old daughter to torment her dad with, "The Yankees are evil. My favorite team is the Red Sox!" I'm so bad I go after kids...but the lack of grace is what makes the game so enjoyable! I love to watch the fighting highlights--Pedro shoving Don ZImmer into the dirt and 'Tek stuffing his glove into A-Rod's nauseating face. I'm still insecure about my team because the fear and hate is what drives the tradition behind my love of the game.

So I embrace it all. I fear the Yankees and will gladly throw them under a bus. I take solace in knowing that what I endured at Yankee Stadium is far worse for Yankee fans visiting Fenway. And what's the Yankees record now? 21 and 29? Well, at least you're not in last place alone...at 25 million, those Devil Rays make stinging company, huh?

"Real grace is simply inexplicable, inappropriate, out of the box, out of bounds, offensive, excessive, too much, given to the wrong people..." --Michael Spencer

"The danger we have is that we want to water down what Jesus said to make it mean something that aligns with our common sense. But if it were only common sense, what He said would not even be worthwhile." --Oswald Chambers

"There is, in the end, only two ways to read the Bible: is it basically about me or basically about Jesus? In other words, is it basically about what I must do, or basically about what He has done?" --Tim Keller

"Then he isn't safe?" said Lucy.
"Safe?" said Mr. Beaver. "Don't you hear what Mrs. Beaver tells you? Who said anything about safe? 'Course he isn't safe. But he's good. He's the King, I tell you."
--C. S. Lewis

"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." --Don Marquis

"Information must be moved and consumed continuously. That is the price to be paid for speed-of-light transmission. What the information may be is of no consequence, as long as it is attention-getting, and does not inhibit the flow of new information coming fast behind it." --Neil Postman

Information is becoming less and less meaningful. In the information age, people don't want information, they want to feel informed. We consume information rather than internalize it and allow it to affect how we live our lives. That is why popular poetry and song lyrics crumble into paranoid and graceless sloganeering.

(While I'm writing...anyone see the Sox come back with six runs in the bottom of the ninth to win the game yesturday? That was off the hook...I think the O's need to spend some time practicing...how to catch a baseball.)

...and I survived. I am alive to tell tales of conquering a five-legged bear with a small white stick (Holst's Mars), hacking through dense jungle undergrowth (incorrectly documented degree requirements), and hypnotizing swarms of wide-eyed, mischievous forest creatures (kindergarten). Eastman is not a grave for the banjo-playing avant-garde jazz pundit...

I learned this semester that to live on the edge of failure is a blessing. God does not want me to look back on a master's degree from the Eastman School of Music as my accomplishment. I am in school by grace, I'll make it out by grace, and I can say, look how great my God is.

This is what I want to do to every Eastman concert-music snothead: "Reginald, this is Skip. He only knows how to play three Lynard Skynard songs on the guitar. Now go make music with him. The concert will be tomorrow, attended by every important person you know." It would be so good for them.

"Uh, Skip, so...can you read music?"

I think the internet is my common-law wife...

Sometimes beautiful things happen. Today is a gorgeous day in Rochester. I stood outside work and a light breeze blew styrofoam packing pellets across the parking lot. They were small and white against the sandy gray like popped up beans. They made the most precious and musical tinkling sounds against the asphalt. They spun in circles, played dead, and tumbled over each other like they were not the waste of a hedonistic society. I was nearly overwhelmed with joy before returning to the machine.

"The unhappy person is one who is possessed by some idea which he cannot convert into action." --Goethe

the rising music in me finds no outlet;
it cannot wrench itself from
the pragmatism of survival
of the body that carries it.
this world favors toil over joy!
what can I say about the curse
that is not evident?
that which can only be expressed
through melodies
drowning.

There is a fine line between finding inspiration and indulging compulsion. Frequently in my notes, written on scraps of paper, in notebooks, and in computer text files, I have written "find inspiration." Inspiration to write, inspiration to play music, inspiration to love. But I compulsively indulge distractions to plug the haunting emptiness of life. These distractions often masquerade as things in which I find inspiration: poems, music, the word of God, people, and nature. I listen to the same song over and over, read the same verse over and over, but I feed on it as escape and do not search its subtleties for the muse.

Is it inspiration I really look for? If I became inspired, would that lead to truth or more self-indulgence? Even now, I sit here at my desk, drinking beer and having completed no work today, after just coming back from an hour-long midnight walk around my neighborhood which I took to get away from the computer addiction. Lord God, have mercy on me, a compulsive man who indulges counterfeit grace. My generation has a fetish for media. We are addicted to online social networking, cell phones, and television. It is our compulsive perpetual search for meaning, or distraction from the reality that we lack meaning. May we see you, Lord Jesus, and know you as the one who gives life. May we not feel guilty for our failures and boast only in your grace.

oh God, show me how
you redeem this world.
let me walk the dark streets of
its decaying cities
and see unfulfiled grace,
may I speak prayers of compassion
in my mercenary heart.

At last year's IAM conference, I asked Dana Gioia, the chairman for the National Endowment of the Arts, about his recommendations for arts in the public schools. I was working with Young Audiences at the time as a visiting performer for kids in various schools. He said, "Let me be very clear about this. Public school teachers have the most important job in the country." He went on to describe the increasing need for arts in our schools in the 21st century and the importance of having teachers who believe in the arts as a means to communicate redemption, truth, and beauty to younger generations. His words convicted me. That was the most influential moment in my decision to attend Eastman for music education. Even though Eastman is the most elite school in the country for graduate work in music, it was the only school I applied to; there was no backup plan. I felt called by God and followed Him not knowing how it would all work out.

My experience at IAM this year was equally as moving. As our culture becomes increasingly fragmented and media-centric, artists will play a crucial role in providing a message of hope. The utilitarian, deterministic philosophies that plague our society have more trouble convincing us of their universal relevance despite their objective stability. People are haunted by the suspicion that science, despite its power to explain the laws that govern our universe, cannot explain me. Reason alone cannot provide humanity with the mystifying, fundamental needs of beauty, love, and truth. What is truth? The enlightenment, for all it's service to the human condition, has failed the human soul.

Unfortunately, the church has been infected by these utilitarian values. The logical four-point plan for salvation seems just as dry and lifeless as deterministic science. The Bible as a life instruction manual discredits the longings of the human heart. Art has the power to communicate the longings of the human heart. Art can articulate the brokenness of the world and the hope of redemption. The truth and beauty we cannot explain with reasoned arguments, artists are called by God to breath into their colors, sounds, movements, characters, poetry, and lives. IAM is a movement of artists whose passion for art is yolked with with a passion for humanity. God has privileged us to join our work with His work, the redemption of His creation.

"I cannot miss that art is about humanity - faces. After all is said and done, the simplicity of coming face to face will be what matters. Could it be that art - creation - all of our labor - all of our work - is so that we as human being can come face to face and know at the deepest level each other? And by that, know God? We create, I think because we want to know and be known beyond expression - though expression is the necessary road by which we must travel." --Alex Scott

We are surrounded by so much media--how can we tell the difference between the message and the noise? The purpose of modern media is to distract you and lead you astray, to impregnate you with ideas for commercial purpose. A very small number of people controls the vast majority of media in this country--who are these people and what are their values? We are like Pavlov's dog with media; we salivate to these powerful images regardless if they lead to any truth. American culture is America's biggest export. The rest of the world sees us through the denigrating messages of our media. Are we amusing and distracting ourselves to death? Artists will play a crucial role in the developing post-information age. Artists communicate ideas with precision and meaning. It will be a challenge for artists to communicate redemption powerfully without falling in love with that power.

E pluribus unum: out of many, one, written on our money. But isn't our society increasingly fractured? Isn't it more like the many becoming even more?

The mission field is no longer geographic, it is a cultural one. Artists are the trailblazers of culture.

Artists specialize in excess, like God's love, grace, and creation is excessive. The arts are excessive, yet they are vital.

Art can be so beautiful that it makes you nostalgic. It makes you homesick. It is longing for God.

Before the fall, God had Adam name the animals. In doing so, Adam discovered that he lacked. God used man's creativity to help him discover his his need for Eve.

In this declining age of information, we know more about everything, but less about everything.

Artists must create with the belief in the liberation of all people.

This world is world is 95% catastrphe, 100% grace.

Artists live with monsters. We cannot separate ourselves from the twisted, broken, and lost realities of life. Artists often suffer from depression. For this reason, the church has exorcized us if we are monsters ourselves. We artists must learn how to live in the critical zone, living with both Jesus and monsters, and challenge the church to do the same. Only by embracing the brokenness of the world, as Jesus did, can we draw out the beauty of redemption. An example: this sculpture of a tree made completely out of decommissioned guns.

"The artist queries the last privelages of our existence and tells us to change our life." --George Steiner

If you desire influence as an artist, what you really want is responsibility. Artists who wield irresponsible influence afforded them by their gift betray humanity. As Jesus took responsibility for us, so artists are called by God to take responsibility for others and be servants to a broken world. Artists can be the good samaritans of a culture that has been highjacked by utilitarianism and greed.

For art to be authentic, it must maintain the posture of art the the world is both beautiful and broken. For art to produce hope, the artist must have a vision of the world that ought to be, the world as God wants to re-make it.

“We cannot mingle with the splendors we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumor that it will not always be so... The door on which we have been knocking all our lives will open at last.” --C.S. Lewis

Jesus' parables used simplicity that a child could understand, yet depth that wise men cannot fully understand. God drew from the same toolbox that artists use: metaphor, imagery, cadence, and story.

Every finished work must be redrawn several times, re-written, re-discovered. Find a doorway into the story, into my deep self.

From Daniel Libeskind interview: In business, there is a very specific goal that is to be attained. You live your life for this or that. But artists don't live like this. We wander this very narrow path, discovering each step along the way.

How can we, as Christians, be dangerous as Christ is dangerous?

This software is way to much fun. Here is the result of my fooling around with the program for the first time.

I have a 4-year old student who I teach general music and guitar. His mother told me that at home, he called her into the room and had the keyboard and the guitar all set-up. He proceeded to give her a music lesson. He directed her to tell if what he played was fast or slow, the same or different melody, playing things on both the keyboard and guitar. The same stuff I do to him in lessons! I think that is so awesome. Maybe he has a future is music education...

Happy new year to my friends, students, colleagues, and family. I hope everyone happily grows one year older, stays in touch, and finds a healthy way to deal with failing to fulfill their news years resolution. My new years resolution is to finally record a full-length album of traditional and original songs. (That was also my resolution last year--please help me hold to it this time...)

I taught a couple days of music to kindergarten kids at a local city school this week. When I walked into the room the second day, one of the kids explained to her friend, "he's a songer." A songer! I can't help but love the made-up word, it's like a hip a title for someone who loves to play tunes. Can I tell you how fun it is to teach music to a roomful of six year-olds?