A Highway Shoulder to Cry On: Music for Prague

This is just a random thought I wrote and I'd rather not lose and thought I might as well hide it here. It started as a formspring question and then snowballed into this.

Q: What was the best concert you went to?

A: Music for Prague 1968.
When I was in high school our Symphonic Winds played a piece called Music for Prague 1968.

It was a musical narrative of the spring of 1968 when a new national government swept into Prague and began instituting changes like allowing freedom of the press and freedom speech and a possibility for multiparty government. The leaders of the USSR feared this democratization so they started talks with the government of Czechoslovakia. When talks broke down the USSR and three other nations decided to invade with more than 200,000 troops. The results were bloody and brutal.

The music is designed to reflect the events in very literal ways. Oboes play Morse code. Trombones are meant to be air sirens. The entire third movement is nothing but percussion. In the music you can hear the chaos of the invasion.

Woven into Music for Prague 1968 is a melody of a folk song that is traditionally symbolic of resistance and hope. In the movement describing the chaos of battle and the brutality of the USSR invasion the folk melody is played on the timpani almost as a song of mourning.

It made me cry in a way nothing else had ever made me cry. It was a deep and inexplicable pain that made no sense so I tried to stop the tears and move on.

We all left the concert hall and as I was driving home I ended up in the wrong lane and had to exit and merge on to the highway. I was finally alone in my car and I had to pull over on to the shoulder of the freeway and put on my emergency lights because I was crying so hard I couldn't see or breathe and I didn't know why. The thought of people being shot as they tried to help people, of people being killed for wanting to be free made me physically hurt inside.

That was the first time I ever understood what a really well written and well performed piece of music can do.

The Dots

 Redux. I know I did a post a while back about "The Dots" but I just thought I'd throw a new one out there.

It's been awhile since I dragged this theory out but I think everyone can use a reminder now and again.

There is a school of painting known as pointilism. The idea is that you can create a huge picture using tiny, individual dots of paint. The most famous of these paintings is "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte". Everyone knows it but few people realize that there is not a single brush stroke in the painting. The whole 6ft x 10ft canvass is nothing but a field of tiny dots. It's an amazing thing to see.

What if the whole of existence was a blank canvass full of empty dots, each of these blank dots representing an interaction, action, feeling, or thought? As we live our lives we slowly fill the canvass and create our own picture. Subtle changes in the colors and tones of the dots can change the picture from a Van Gogh to a Bosch.
What if each of us lived our lives trying to make each dot as beautiful as possible?
What if we all tried to create a beautiful picture of our lives and in turn made the pictures of other people's lives more beautiful?

It doesn't take a lot of effort to be compassionate or empathetic so what if we all went ahead and put in that extra bit of effort?

My life is largely dedicated to the pursuit of making each dot as beautiful as it can be and to making the dots in other people's pictures as beautiful as they can be. You can think it's hokey or stupid but I think it's making the world better one dot at a time.

It's all about the dots.

My reflection and life philosophy.
Fair warning: I abandoned grammar some hours ago and am now going for broke.


I honestly loved this class. I know I dropped off the face of the earth halfway through and was kinda craptastic about regular upkeep but I still loved this class and I loved the chance to really examine something I see as on the rise and important- blogs in the context of activism.

I see the human spirit as having so much potential. My entire life philosophy is based on the painting "A Sunday on La Grande Jatte" by Georges Seurat. This idea doesn't make a lot of sense until you know what the painting is made of . The painting is made up of tiny individual dots of paint, millions of them. There isn't a single brushstroke on the canvas.

My theory is that life is a canvas and each of us is a blank dot. As we live our lives we fill our dots up. We can either have our dots be beautiful and contribute to the end result being beautiful or we can contribute to the painting being ugly. What will your dot look like? What can we do to make the dots around us more beautiful? What can we do to make the whole painting more beautiful?

I also feel that each act in our lives is a dot within our dots. Our lives add up to those things we accomplished and those lives we touched and those people we loved and were loved by. All of these things are part of the picture.

It's hard to create change more than a few dots beyond yourself but with blogging and the internet we are starting to reach a point where entire portions of the picture are able to shift quickly to being more beautiful, more loving, more accepting. The ideas and changes and words move quickly across the globe.

In this class I enjoyed reading as people grew and changed and became more comfortable with themselves as bloggers. I'm excited to see where everyone goes from here. The potential is just mind blowing.

I want to thank everyone for being supportive and amazing and really building a blogging community. It rocked and I hope everyone continues their blogs because I'll keep reading them...




PS: I apologize if "the dots" analogy got long winded and weird and incomprehensible. I'll try to explain it more clearly at a later date.

You guys rock!!