I have so much laundry to do :(

[conuly]

I hate laundry.

In other news, a tree fell down onto a neighbor's fence, and even though they put up safety tape I guess they thought that wasn't enough, because now they ALSO have a small barrier made up of plastic grocery bags that have been carefully tied together to form a rope.

Sometimes I love people, exactly as much as I hate laundry.

***********

Why Is American Classical Music So White?

On courtly love and pick up artists

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I Accidentally Uncovered a Nationwide Scam on Airbnb

No procedure exists that can prove virginity, yet dangerously unscientific virginity tests occur regularly — even in the United States.

She was a nurse for 20 years. Now she’s homeless on the streets of Houston. (And, until recently, stuck in the no-ID trap)

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Working Americans Are Getting Less Sleep, Especially Those Who Save Our Lives

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California Is Becoming Unlivable

What the ancient Greeks can teach us about Greta Thunberg trolls

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Police blew up an innocent man’s house in search of an armed shoplifter. Too bad, court rules.

Meth is most common drug in overdose deaths in chunk of US

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More than 30,000 children under age 10 have been arrested in the US since 2013: FBI

After the horror of ISIS captivity, tens of thousands of Iraqis — many of them children — are caught up in a mental-health crisis unlike any in the world.

Migrants endure rape and torture on route through Yemen

Comments

[adrian_turtle]

The article about working Americans getting less sleep is oddly silent about shift work causing sleep deprivation. Go! Individual solutions to societal problems! Go! When a person's work shift isn't supposed to end until midnight (and sometimes doesn't end until 2 or 3am), and it takes them an hour to get home, and they have to get their kid to school at 8am...I'm not sure how much that individual can fix the problem with mindfulness and eating vegetables.

[dewline]

And there's the reminders of the value of humility.

[siderea]

"Why Is American Classical Music So White?"

Thank you, this is SUPER pertinent to my interests (also allow me to recommend to all carving out the hour to sit down and listen to the embedded youtube video, Dawson's "Negro Folk Symphony"), and may be the resource (or the pointer to the resources) I need to finally write a post about the history of racism in American classical music I've had on my mind, but knew I didn't have the research chops to pull together. There's stuff in here I'm flabbergasted and somewhat smug to see substantiated. "What's new in my article is the other reason, which is aesthetic. And in some ways it's even more interesting — that the aesthetic of modernism, which prevailed in these decades, was not comfortable with the vernacular. [...] The reigning aesthetic of those decades was one that insisted on a kind of compositional ingenuity and complexity." - and he has receipts! The receipts I knew had to be out there, because if there's one thing white supremacist colonialist musicians cannot do it's shut up for even 5 minutes about their white supremacist colonialist ideas about music omg.

Only, I have a slightly different interpretation of his evidence; I think "a kind of compositional ingenuity and complexity" is too kind. There was a turn in classical music in the late 19th and early 20th century all right, and that was towards an avant-garde intellectualism that neurotically flaunted its supposed seriousness by eschewing being approachable or attractive.

This, btw, is like a communicable disease that sweeps, like the plague, through the population of composers every few centuries. This is how the Middle Ages got the Ars Subtilior. Arguably there was a little outbreak in the mid-late 16th and early 17th centuries, but it was usefully channeled, mostly into such movements as Musique Mesurée (which is worth a post of its own) and the really trippy stuff Costeley and Galileo and others were doing with experimental temperaments, but still wound up causing, obviously, Bach.

And it's been my hypothesis that the reason we wound up with Schonbergian tone-row abominations - something that was presented as a Great Mystery of Classical Music when I was a wee classical music student in in single digits – was because of the great florishing of African American classical composers at the time, both those bringing what this article calls a "black vernacular" to their work and those who did not, but rather beat the whites at their own classical music game. My suspicion is that the turn into recondite musical hermaneutics was precisely to give the white composers a means to differentiate themselves from the black ones, and move the goal posts on them. Writing attractive, accessible, popular classical music was declassé precisely because that's what the ascending black talents were composing.

When Horowitz says "What we're looking at right now, this extreme marginalization of classical music, is really the chickens coming home to roost," I agree 100% - but I suspect that it's not merely because it was "European", but because it was bad, because the dumb white racist motherfuckers burned down classical music rather than let it fall into the black hands that were so obviously its rightful heirs.

Iiiiii may have some strong feelings about this.

[conuly]

Do you have feelings about this? I couldn't tell!

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

So, she was a nurse for 20 years; now she's living in a tent under a bridge with some random guy, BUT:

"Stovall’s grown children live in Michigan. She won’t burden them what’s going on. The year was supposed to be her big adventure, a gift to herself after two decades nursing and even longer raising her three kids. She’d lived in Houston once before, back in the early 1980s. She said she’d let them know when she found her dream apartment."

So this grubby, scary, precarious lifestyle is not her only option; it's just that she prefers it to asking for help from her rotten kids. (I'm presuming they either ARE rotten, or she thinks they are, because decent kids would be way more 'burdened' by their mother being homeless than they would by helping her.) Three of them! and not one of the three she could call from the police station to say "Help, I'm in Houston and someone stole my wallet and phone"....?

Obviously this poor lady is not a champion at making good choices, and if she lived with abuse, so did her kids, who probably carry a lot of resentment for it. Possibly they are too bitter and broken to manage their own lives very well, and she rightly dreads having to rely on them. Still, if not one of the three could or would offer her a crash-space better than a dirty tent under a Texas underpass, this woman wasted her life raising them, and should have run off 20 years sooner.

[conuly]

Yes, I noticed they sort of elided the fact that she didn't give any reason for not staying with her kids. My guess was that she didn't tell them the situation either due to false pride or because she was such a terrible mother that they've been estranged (if three children are estranged from Mom, I tend to think it's Mom's fault instead of the kids' fault) and she wouldn't admit that to the reporter.

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

There's nothing in the article that says if her kids are boys or girls. Conceivably, she may have three daughters with 'controlling' baby-daddies of their own, who love her enough to take her in, but who might find themselves and their children homeless right along with her if they pushed their luck.

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

As for methamphetamine overdose deaths: choosing to use methamphetamine is choosing to die. Everyone knows what happens to meth-heads, and people who live around meth-heads know it better than anyone: it's a particularly ugly and painful form of slow suicide.

There are better, faster, pleasanter drugs with which to end a life judged 'useless' by the very person who's living it (who is the only person entitled to make that judgement.) I say that anyone who wants to register as an addict and give up their rights to drive or breed ought to receive as much as they want of the drug of their choice, at a safe, free clinic, for the rest of their limited life. If they choose to opt for treatment instead, that's their choice too, but it has to be THEIR choice. There are almost 8 billion humans on this planet; regrettably, a lot of them have to go - the least we can do is let them self-select, and depart as painlessly as possible.