The Sound of the Teens

I've come to the conclusion that the twenty-teens (at least the early part of them) now have an actual sound, as distinctive as eighties synthiness or seventies punk or fifties doo-wop.

Today's sound is epic. I don't mean "epic" describes it. I mean that's what it is.

I'm going to give Florence and the Machine credit for being on the leading edge of the trend, though lots of folks have been playing around the edges. The ever-annoying (at least to me) Black Eyed Peas like to record songs that COULD be epic and produce videos suggest that things are epic inside their heads (cars smashing out of the sky into the pavement), but the band never seems willing to get up out of their comfy porch rocking chairs to finally push things over the top.

Other earlier misses in the genre would include bands like Creed, where the attempt is to funnel the epicness through one large mass of self-indulgent Fabio-haired ego.

But the epic pop sing has become refined, and it's totally here. Imagine Dragons do it. Mumford and Sons, for all their folkiness, do it. Even less-prolific groups like the Ting-Tings, the Mowgli's and River City Extension do it. Even Ke$ha and Lady Gaga have played with the form. The distinguishing characteristics are these:

Percussion that seems to capture the sound of a thousand drums echoing across a large valley, all being hammered so intensely that the drummers hands are bleeding.

Vocal support that sounds like a wall of sound, a hundred hundred voices raised in blistering song.

Chord structures that lift and drive forward on a heroic scale. It's the most anthemy anthem ever.

If you conjure up a picture in your head to go with the music, it involves a camera view that comes sweeping across a windswept plain, dark mountains lining the horizon, as we sail past crowds of people with their faces uplifted, eyes and hands raised to the sky.

Part of the epic sound is not necessarily to write about epic subjects. "I Will Wait," for instance is simply one more love song, but its sonic palette suggests that declaring love is akin to climbing a tall mountain to touch a storming sky. At some point someone is going to mock the form by recording an epic heroic anthem about baking chocolate chip cookies.

I don't read much music press these days, so I may be noting a trend that is already well-documented, in which case, let me just say, "me, too." If not, I'll be using this note to help apply for my pundit's license.

Flag Day and the Elks

from 2003
 Saturday, June 14, it will be time to celebrate one of the great overlooked patriotic holidays. I speak, of course, of Flag Day.
 According to my research, Flag Day goes back to 1885, when Wisconsin school teacher B. J. Cigrand organized a student celebration of the anniversary of the Flag Resolution of 1777 on June 14. He called it Flag Birthday, and within a few years it had spread to New York City and the New York State Board of Education. In 1893 the Pennsylvania Society of Colonial Dames of America resolved to get behind the Flag Day movement (and when the Pennsylvania Society of Colonial Dames gets behind a cause, you know things are going to happen). Philadelphia City Schools, the governor of New York, and the PA and NY Sons of the Revolution also climbed on the bandwagon.
 But Flag Day got its major boost in 1907 when the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks Grand Lodge adopted a resolution to honor Flag Day, making that honoring mandatory for all Elk lodges in 1911. You have to love the BPOE. First of all, how can you not love an organization that was originally called the “Jolly Corks.” Really. Englishman Charles Algernon Sidney Vivian and some buddies in 1867 New York City took their name from a drinking gag of the time. Digression alert: I will now explain the old drinking gag. Each member would ante up fifty cents and place his cork in front of him on the table. The Imperial Cork would announce that the last man to raise his cork would buy the next round of drinks, then count to three. The new guys would quickly raise their corks, but the regulars would not raise their corks at all, ever, so the new guys were always the last ones to actually raise their corks. Get it? And this gag is at the root of the entire national Elk organization. Is this a great country or what?
 But late in 1867, one member died, leaving his wife penniless. The Corks stepped in to help and decided that maybe it was time to expand their horizons beyond playing drinking games. They didn’t wring their hands and say, “someone ought to do something about this.” They regrouped as the Benevolent and Protective Order (words not chosen idly or simply for effect) and chose the Elk as their symbol because it is “distinguished by its fleetness of foot and timorous of wrongdoing.”
 The Elks really are a true American story—folks who get together to enjoy themselves and end up standing up to be counted about things that matter. The Elks give out millions of dollars in scholarship money and maintain medical funding for a variety of institutions.
Locally, our Elks give support to a wide and varied group of causes. I don’t think there’s a civic group that gives any more real help to the area than the Elks.
And they keep Flag Day alive. The BPOE helped convince Woodrow Wilson to proclaim it a real anniversary in 1916, and it was BPOE member Harry Truman who signed an act of Congress designating June 14 as National Flag Day in 1949.
 The Elks have custody of Flag Day, and a whole written procedure to follow when the holiday runs around. It’s a good thing, too, because if the holiday were going to depend on the average everyday civilians who showed up to celebrate it, it would carry about as much clout as National Pickle Day or International Toaster Day.
 Sometimes patriotic holidays can be a bit depressing because they can underline the degree to which so many people have become armchair citizens. We’ve heard a lot of patriotic noise in the past couple of years. The flag has become a popular merchandising item, but people seem to prefer it in forms that allow them to just tack it up somewhere and forget about it.
 But a flag is a symbol, a way to say “If the idea of this country were a thing, I would respect it and take care of it this much.” There’s not much patriotism in the notion of, “I’m happy to honor this symbol as long as it doesn’t cut into any of my spare time.”
 The parade Saturday won’t be all that long, and the service is pretty simple. If you feel that patriotism matters enough to stand up and be counted, then by all means, take some time Saturday to join in. The Elks will be there to show how it’s done.

April and Peter 1959

April and Peter 1959, originally uploaded by Ryebaby0.

1971-1974 (3)

1971-1974 (3), originally uploaded by Ryebaby0.

Play name that face with this one...

Musical Service now digitized

Musical Service: The Life and Times of the Franklin Silver Cornet Band is the book that I wrote about... well, it's self-explanatory, isn't it. The book is now available in digital (cheap) form for those of you so inclined. Here it is at amazon for the kindle:



and here it is at Barnes and Noble for those of you of the nook persuasion.


It's a good book-- really! Not just the band, but many bands and other varieties of local performance are covered in the context of small town life. I worked hard on this puppy, and I'm proud of it, and if the digital format puts it in front of a few more eyeballs, I'd be pleased.

And also

Okay, I'm going to leave this old blog up and open to the public as it has been. The new stuff will go to Venangoland 2.0, which will be a non-public blog, open to only a select few. Who knows -- maybe I'll put some of the stuff I can't use in the newspaper here. At any rate, I know many of you have been waiting on pins and needles to see how this all turns out. Now you know...

Changes to This Blog

Local readers may be aware that the News-Derrick in its on-line version is now behind a pay wall. While I know not everyone has greeted this with shouts of joy and delight, it has become a fairly common practice in the world of newspaper publishing as newspaper folks search for new ways to not starve. We can argue the virtue of that decision some other time; the fact is that it's here.

In conjunction with that, my editor, who pays me very nicely for my work for the paper, has asked me to stop giving it away for free. I have to agree (did I mention that I'm paid very nicely) that this is a reasonable request.

So I am going to take Venangoland to private status. I know this will have an impact on the many handful of readers who follow me here on this blog. Those of you who are far away, related to me, and/or old college friends who will never be in the market for the newspaper in which I usually appear can get an invite to still catch what appears here.

For local folks, I'll point out that regular subscribers can add a cyber-subscription to the paper for a buck a month.

Admittedly, this requires me to let go of a small dream. I put this blog up so that my children could follow the column without my having to remember to attach and mail it to them every week, and later so that old friends could get the equivalent of a Christmas letter 52 weeks a year. But in the back of my mind was always the thought that by having these all on line and searchable, somehow traffic would be kicked up and I would make Venangoland (the place) a little more known and give the home territory that I love a bit more of a web presence. But I've seen my readership numbers and that dream belongs on the same shelf as the dream in which I wake up in the morning with a full head of hair.

It will be a few days yet before I finish sorting out the buttons etc, and then this will bump even further into the internet background. Thanks for all the fish!

Finding Bad Teachers

(News-Herald, April 7) Periodically folks get their High Dudgeon on (that’s fancy talk for Large Hissy Fit) about Bad Teachers and the need to Weed Them Out. Contrary to some reports, you can find plenty of classroom teachers who support that idea, at least in principle.
With the exception of students, nobody suffers more from the work of a bad teacher than the competent teacher in the next room who has to live with the mess that Professor Numbskull creates day after day. We would be delighted to see him retire to Florida or take that job in Antarctica.
Even if we aren’t going to fire some lemons of learning, parents still want to be able to spot these potholes of pedagogy before their children smack into them. Unfortunately, identifying these educational examples of classroom clutter is harder than it looks. Currently, our leading educational experts, loaded down with big ideas and unhampered by any actual experience in schools, have come up with two definitions of a bad teacher.
1) A bad teacher is one whose students don’t bubble in the preferred answers on a government-designed test.
2) A bad teacher is one who gets paid more than other teachers.
These are not helpful; neither is focusing on age. I have known teachers who taught for decades and never stopped firing up their students. My Uncle Frank has taught high school history for over fifty years and his students still do things like dedicating entire sports seasons to him. But I have also known young teachers who were already burned out when they were straight out of the package. So here are some telltale signs that a teacher might not be as fresh as a didactic daisy.
The Big Countdown. A teacher who is focused on how many days are left in the year, how long till the weekend, how many minutes left in the day, is a teacher whose head is not in the game. Granted, a teacher who is so lazily comfortable that he doesn’t need a break, ever, may not be putting his back into it. And everyone has the occasional day that they simply want to be done with.
But a teacher who constantly observes how much he’d rather be somewhere else should do everybody a favor and go be somewhere else.
It’s Not My Fault. My old co-operating teacher Joe McCormick told me two rules of education. Rule number one is that some students will refuse to be taught. Rule number two is that there is nothing teachers can to change rule number one.
He may have been right. There are some students who aggressively resist learning, and others who are so distracted by the mess at home that they cannot focus on school. It is likely that some children would be better off being raised by wolves. Nevertheless, it’s a teacher’s job to try to find a way. We aren’t hired to teach the people they’re supposed to be. We’re hired to teach the people they actually are.
If a teacher bemoans how every lesson is scuttled by those lousy kids, if class is a noisy uncontrolled mess because of those lousy kids, if the teacher complains that he can’t get his job done because of those lousy kids, here’s a news flash—it’s not the lousy kids.
I’m Fine, Thanks. Teaching carries several sources of stress that they never tell you about in teacher school. One is realizing that no matter how hard and long you work, no matter how many years you refine your game, there are things you don’t do quite well enough.
Any teacher worth his chalk (or keyboard) can tell you where he’s weak, what he needs to fix. He may very well be collecting pointers from co-workers, doing more reading, experimenting with new ideas in his classroom. A teacher who doesn’t think he needs help or advice is a classroom disaster waiting to happen.
A teacher should be an expert in his field. If he isn’t a lifelong student of his subject, he’s little use to his students. If he couldn’t teach without teacher editions, he can’t do that much better with them.
There are other signs. A good teacher takes his job very seriously, but not himself. Bad teachers get it the other way around. Bad teachers hide from their students and community in their off hours. And bad teachers think It’s Just A Job, not a particularly large part of life. For that last point, unfortunately, many reformers agree.