All posts tagged: Random DJB Thoughts

Tennessee Plates – Music Fit to a T

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I’ve been thinking about Tennessee recently, as both Claire and I head there next week.  Claire’s high school choir is in Nashville for a series of concerts, and I’m heading to town later in the week for work and then to connect with Claire.  We’ll end the week with a short visit with family. With all that on my mind, it was appropriate that John Hiatt’s Tennessee Plates came on the iPod as I was heading over to school to pick up Andrew tonight.  I get a big kick out of John Hiatt, and I love this song. The original video I posted was a terrific acoustic version, but it has since been removed, so I encourage you to check out the version from the album.  To keep the good feelings going, I’ll make this the first in a series of “Tennessee” songs over the next few days.  I have a Facebook friend who is posting a series of videos entitled “Music in the Key of Joe” (as all the artists are named Joe).  So …

2010 in review

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The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health: The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow. Crunchy numbers The average container ship can carry about 4,500 containers. This blog was viewed about 16,000 times in 2010. If each view were a shipping container, your blog would have filled about 4 fully loaded ships. In 2010, there were 68 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 329 posts. There were 207 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 385mb. That’s about 4 pictures per week. The busiest day of the year was December 20th with 145 views. The most popular post that day was Our Year in Photos – 2010. Where did they come from? The top referring sites in 2010 were facebook.com, netvibes.com, en.wordpress.com, happiness-project.com, and mail.yahoo.com. Some visitors came searching, mostly for monument valley, bratislava, farnsworth house, samuel beckett bridge dublin, and samuel beckett bridge. Attractions in 2010 These are the posts and pages that got the most …

Old-Time for the New Year

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The coming of the New Year is always a time to look back and look ahead.  I’ve done both the past couple of days as I’ve enjoyed seeing some new video of the “progressive” old-time banjo work of my buddy John Balch. John and I played together in high school and college under a couple of band names – the best one being The Fiery Gizzard String Band (which we used about 20 years before another band from the area took it up).  The name comes from a beautiful and wild area in the South Cumberland region of Tennessee that I’m pleased to say has recently been saved by my friends at the Land Trust for Tennessee (winners of a 2010 National Trust for Historic Preservation Honor Award). But I digress.  I’m talking about new style old-time music. John is a terrific clawhammer banjo player, with two stellar CDs out under his own name.  Clawhammer is known as an old-time style, but John’s music sounds as fresh and current as anything coming out in the …

18 Years, Yet Seems Like Only Yesterday

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Today began a new era.  Today was the first day after Andrew and Claire’s 18th birthday. The twins were born mid-day on a Sunday.  At the moment of their birth I happened to be singing There Is No Rose in the church choir for the last Sunday in Advent in 1992.  Because we adopted Andrew and Claire, we didn’t know they had been born until the next day after receiving a call from the adoption agency.  Eighteen short years later, Andrew, Candice and I were spending December 20th sitting in the Strathmore Music Center listening to Claire and her high school choir join the Cathedral Choral Society in a wonderful Joy of Christmas concert (blackberry photo at the top…don’t expect to see great detail).  It seemed a fitting bookend:  they came in to song, and they entered “adulthood” singing. When friends ask how it feels to be the father of 18-year-olds, I don’t offer any profound insights.  I usually say, “It seems like only yesterday…”  or “Time flies….”  The years and the associated memories have …

Music of the Season

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Among the treasures of Washington are the musical offerings at local churches and synagogues throughout the city and at all times of the year.  Today, the Madrigal Singers from Andrew’s high school sang a Music of the Seasons concert at St. John’s Church, Lafayette Square – the “Church of the Presidents” across from the White House. It was a beautiful 30 minute concert that was captured live on the Episcopal Church website.  Click on the link and you can see the entire concert which begins with O come, O come, Emmanuel, moves through Riu, riu, chiu and includes beautiful music by Holst and Parsons.  The mood shifts with the Thomas Dorsey Precious Lord, take my hand and the moving spiritual Ride on, King Jesus.  The Christmas Song and It’s Beginning to Look a Lot like Christmas round out the set. Although I didn’t know it when I arrived for today’s concert, Andrew had a few solos.  I wouldn’t be the proud father if I didn’t point out that you can hear him kick off Riu …

Images in Black and White

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I’ve always loved black-and-white photography. In college I learned my way around a dark room and can still remember the thrill of seeing a photo appear on a blank piece of paper submerged in a tray of chemicals. So naturally, I was overjoyed when our daughter Claire – then a freshman in high school – expressed interest in learning old-style black-and-white photography. Over the course of the past three years, she’s produced some wonderful pictures.  She has a great eye and has become more adventuresome each year. Now as she wraps up her work in high school, she’s put together a small gallery of 12 photos from her class.  Click on the link and you’ll see what she’s posted. And I’ll end below with a photo of Claire’s that’s now on prominent display in her school’s gallery.  This is a picture she took this summer at Mohonk Mountain House which looks like a time piece out of the 1940s. Can you tell…I think she’s great! More to come… DJB

Ave Verum Corpus – Music Made for a Cathedral

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Yesterday Andrew and Claire were confirmed in a magnificent service on a beautiful fall day at the National Cathedral. There’s so much I could cover:  The pageantry.  The three bishops.   The time spent with godparents and their families.  The wonderful discernment process that our Assistant Rector, The Rev. Jered Weber-Johnson, led the twins through over the past two years.  The personal thoughts that ranged from a baptismal service with two infants some 17 years ago to confirmation with two beautiful and talented young adults whom I admire for their thoughtfulness and integrity. Instead (no surprise) I want to talk about the music. The Cathedral Singers – comprised of women sopranos and gentlemen in the counter tenor, tenor, and bass roles – were in residence for yesterday’s service.  Their work was beautiful throughout. But when they sang William Byrd’s Ave Verum Corpus, I just closed my eyes and listened to the wonderful melodies that come together in that magnificent piece reverberate around in the acoustics.  When they finished, I turned to Claire’s godfather and said, …

War Horse

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I saw my first London theatre production this evening.  Wow!  I picked a great one to start. A colleague on the Executive Committee of the International National Trusts Organisation (INTO) pulled together a group of six of us to see the New London Theatre’s production of War Horse, at the end of two days of meetings at the National Trust’s London headquarters.   After a late afternoon tour of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (motto:  it is amazing what you can build when you have the world’s treasures at your disposal), we walked past St. Martin’s in the Field, the National Gallery, and into the theatre district.  London is a great place at night! War Horse is an incredibly moving story of horses conscripted to fight in World War I, told in a remarkable way with life-sized puppets.  The trailer that I’ve attached to the end of the post gives an idea of the realism these actors and puppeteers achieve, but seeing it live tops any video.  As one of my colleagues said, “I knew I …

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

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My daughter Claire goes to a wonderfully creative and nurturing school, where the administration and faculty are especially thoughtful as they work to bring important issues before the students and their families. Which is how I came to read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. At the beginning of the summer, the Head of School sent out a letter to the entire school family – faculty, rising freshmen, and high school students – and asked everyone (faculty, students, and parents) to read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot.  This is not the type of book I would normally read.  As a former history major I generally run from books about science.  (I still remember my high school biology teacher grabbing my ears in class one day to demonstrate to my classmates how ear lobes differ from individual to individual.  I wasn’t in favor of involuntary testing on human beings then and I’m still not!) But I’m so pleased we were “required” to read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks because this is …