It takes more than a village

Yesterday I visited the Smilie Memorial School in Bolton to plan our upcoming concert there…my first-ever playground dedication gig.

It was a delight as my meeting with principal Derek Howard and music teacher Heather Schoppmann morphed into a spur of the moment invitation to join that morning’s rehearsals to accompany the 1st-2nd and 3rd-4th grade choruses, whose performances on June 6 will tick the “local collaborator” box on the program. Here is one of Vermont’s many wonderful, precious, obviously beloved small local elementary schools, now under intense pressures to consolidate due to declining enrollments and mandates that did not exist decades ago to serve a more diverse range of learners. 

The visit occurred the same day the US House passed a budget that slashes spending for everything but the military, which will multiply the already almost unbearable stress on Vermont’s schools. It includes massive cuts to healthcare, where costs are spiraling out of control even faster in Vermont than elsewhere. That’s because we’re an old, aging, and rural state, the very same things that account for shrinking local school enrollments.

The Smilie School’s unusual history speaks to the issues of local sufficiency, private aid, and public support. 

Due to the narrow bottleneck valley of its central village, Bolton suffered proportionally more than any other town in the Great Flood of 1927. Among many losses of life and property, the Pinneo Flats schoolhouse, once abandoned but fully rebuilt just the year before the flood, was completely washed away. 

The school became both an example and a symbol of the larger devastation. A statewide collection was taken; children all over Vermont contributed their pennies, philanthropic organizations organized donations, and Bolton daughter Ellen Pinneo Smilie gave $1000. Donations came from beyond Vermont’ s borders even—from all over the country and as far as France.

A model new school was built on higher ground. The Burlington Free Press editorialized: “We are glad this Memorial School was not created by one beneficient giver. That would have robbed a host of boys and girls of the abiding joy that will ever be there as they visit or drive past the structure and realize they had a part in this fine memorial.”

But Vermont was the longstanding most Republican state in the nation, without a single Democratic governor or US representative or senator until 1958. The New Deal and what it represented—the widespread socialization of responsibility and resources—would turn out to be unpopular in Vermont, the only state that never went for FDR. In that spirit, according to Deborah Pickman Clifford and Nicholas Rowland: 

To perpetrate the myth that resilient Vermont could do without government help in the wake of the 1927 flood, no mention was made of the $300 the town contributed. Nor [of] the $1,000 given by Emilie Pinneo Smilie.

So is a society that supports a decent education system and other human services without “the government” a “myth”? 

We’re about to find out.

How to schedule 252 concerts, part ??

Once again I’ve fallen behind in concert scheduling. I’ve been acting chair of the UVM music program, covering for a colleague on sabbatical. And for lots of reasons, including but not limited to the lawless chaos raining down from the authoritarian regime in DC, it’s been far more work than the advertised seat-warming gig. 

But whenever I’m in any kind of low point in the project, whether it’s because of delinquent posting frequency, scheduling challenges, new repertoire overwhelm, general burnout, or whatever, some serendipitous exciting new thing pops in to pull me up.

Today a quick call led to an immediate date just a few weeks ahead. (The hardest assignment is filling in the upcoming schedule on short notice.) At a nearby elementary school, a fun thing I’ve been looking to do more of. 

The only downside to an in-school gig is that it’s probably not appropriate to make it a fundraiser and may limit the audience—thus depressing my all-important STATISTICS. (I track attendance and donation amounts, partly for purposes of grant-writing, but mostly out of obsessive competitive self-analysis…I have a draft post about this, about the seductiveness and insidiousness of quantification.) 

But the school principal on the other end of the line said they were planning a celebration to dedicate a newly redone playground. On a Friday—my project’s only convenient weekday concert slot. Could we do something in conjunction with that? Thus making it a schoolday yet also a public event. 

I was already fully cheered up. Then he mentioned that a student was hoping to sing the national anthem at the event…there’s my “local collaborator” box ticked with no further legwork.

It was just one good vibe after another from there. To top it all off, he had what I (having admittedly little clue) would call a non-posh London accent. I’m a total sucker for that inflection; it was like talking to Idris Elba.

x

Hartland writeup & regime kidnappings

  ...a few days ago actually, here.

Another one of the serendipitous occurences I keep running into, this one poignant and somber. I’d been following the case of Mohsen Mahwdawi, who was kidnapped by ICE agents just five days earlier and is being held in violation of his first amendment rights; the protest demonstration for his upcoming court appearance in Burlington was in my calendar. But we drove down to Hartland not knowing it was home to Mohsen’s church. 

And the concert, rescheduled from a couple weeks earlier because of weather. was on the 250th anniversary of the start of the American Revolution, fought to free the colonies from a mad king restricting civil liberties (and imposing unfavorable trade policies...)

When we arrived, our sponsor, Chiho Kaneko, told us the church had just hosted a 300-person vigil where, she said, the fear was palpable. 

On the spot, we added Woody Guthrie’s classic “All You Fascists Bound to Lose” to the program. The entire audience joined in, and I think drew some courage from the music and the special solidarity that comes from singing together.

The speed and effectiveness with which the current regime has been wrecking our government and norms  is breathtaking. But the pushback is having a manifest effect.  I suspect it is not a coincidence that two of the three currently most high-profile immigration cases  are being heard in Vermont, home to just 0.2% f the US population but to 50% of the team  (Bernie and AOC) that has been barnstorming the red states with their message of resistance. If it was intentional, it will prove to be another instance of overreach. Vermont has a strong and deep tradition of independence and libertarianism. Just saying.

Franklin writeup posted

Franklin (almost a year past) was the first of what will eventually be 13 Canadian border town concerts. As I relate in the writeup, it was once the staging area for an invasion of Canada by Irish Republican American Civil War veterans. It is thus implausibly timely for our present insane historical moment, which is the reason I bumped it to the front of the queue as I deal with the backlog of 40 or so undocumented performances. That, and so I could have it up in time for St. Patrick's Day tomorrow.

As with Williston, I got maybe carried away with the interesting context. But this is what makes the writeups fun for me. I approach them as artistic creations just as much as the programs. Maybe more so: they are like compositions, and as people sometimes say about art, a way of making experience make sense. 

And they give the project a sense of solidity and completeness. Also I have a sieve-like memory, and without the writeups, past concerts would quickly dissolve into a hallucinatory vagueness.

complete comic by Kate Beaton here

Williston write-up posted

Here. I got maybe a bit carried away with some of the town context. But it’s a big part of what’s fun to me about the writeups and about the shape of the project as a whole. Of course, for most of the towns I know very little to start with, and not that much more even after reading and visiting. Because we lived in Williston for 5 years, and because Williston looms large in the contentious debate over development in Vermont, I had more to share.

It’s been a long time since my last writeup. Almost 6 months. I’m now about 40 behind—more than half of the 77 completed concerts, with the oldest undocumented concert almost 2 years old now. 

But my crack webmaster, UVM CS major Lindsay Hall, has designed an improved concert writeup template that allows for more flexible and easier-to-compose layout. And with each video clip I’m getting a little more fluent with Final Cut, my editing software. Clearly I need to examine how much background and detail I put into each writeup, but I’m optimistic these developments will help me get through the backlog in a few months.

It’s also been a long time since my last blog post—about 4 months. I have a lot to say, but recent events make me feel different about what’s worth saying. Also just other, non-earth-shaking life stuff has kept me extra busy. Still, a bunch of my thoughts do want to get said, so that will happen eventually.

the bells that still can ring

(thoughts after defeat)

I never thought we’d “win” the climate fight, that we’d stave off catastrophe. It’s always been about harm reduction, trying to do what we can to so things get less worse.

That remains true if the baseline of hope, what we can reasonably imagine can be saved, just got knocked down a piece, though it’s hard to get up and keep going after a big defeat. In an interview with Norman Solomon, peace activist Fred Bronfman said:

I find it hard to have much “hope” that the species will better itself in coming decades. I have also reached a point in my self-inquiries where I came to dislike the whole notion of “hope”. If I need to have “hope” to motivate me, what will I do when I see no rational reason for hope? If I can be “hopeful”,  then I can also be “hopeless” and I do not like feeling hopeless.

When I looked more deeply at my own life, I noticed that my life was not now and never had been built around “hope”. Laos was an example. I went there, I learned to love the peasants, the bombing shocked my psyche and soul to the core, and I responded — not because I was hopeful or hopeless, but because I was alive.

We respond because we are alive.

Back to Leonard Cohen (I guess things are dark when the appeal is to Cohen)—

I’m on the side that's always lost against the side of Heaven
I’m on the side of snake-eyes tossed against the side of seven 

Time to pick up the silver captain’s bars and pin them to our shirts.

Paralipsis, or, this is not a blog post

It feels like Nov. 5 changes everything, including the concerns of this project. So it would be weird not to post anything about it. On the other hand, I have nothing I want to say at this point, in this space. So I’m not writing a post-election post.

“Fight On” by Pedro Molina