I sent this letter to the Los Angeles Times (not published):
If the parties were reversed, if it were a Democratic former president on trial in a 50-50 Senate, he would be convicted.
I believe enough Democrats would have the courage to put country before party and their own re-election.
California governor Newsom appointed a Latino man to replace VP-elect Kamala Harris as Senator. A Los Angeles Times columnist insisted that it should have been a Black woman. I sent this letter in response (not published):
So many who are complaining about this are minimizing the VP-elect. Yes, there will be no Black woman in the Senate. But instead, there's a first-ever Black woman Vice President! That's a pretty good trade-off.
Today's LATimes has a feature story on Luis Zapata. In the opening, it mentions that he died earlier this month.
As I see that, it just adds to the losses evoked by the story. As I've written previously, Kieran knew Zapata and, at my request, got him to autograph a book for Victor, who loaned the book and it never came back. Any mention of Zapata brings Kieran to mind. He died many years ago.
So, even before getting very far into the story, I'm feeling the loss of Kieran, of Zapata, and of the autographed book.
And I realize that this is just another sign of aging. More and more things will inevitably remind me of people and things now gone.
Or, as Julia Wick writes in the LATimes about a supercentenarian, "To defy death is to endure a long onslaught of loss."
Or, as Lawrence Wright writes in The New Yorker about Austin, "If you live long enough in a place, it becomes haunted by ghosts: memories of events and friends long gone still inhabit spaces that have been levelled and covered over by the unstoppable newness. It’s a form of double vision: you see things that are no longer there."
If he dies of it, I'll be sorry.
Sorry that I'll never get to see him in prison.
Mitch McConnell: a liar and proud of it.
Trump is a liar and never admits it, but McConnell is a liar and proud of it.
When idiots started questioning Kamala Harris's birthright to U.S. citizenship, I had one immediate response. I used it as a comment on a couple of Facebook posts that mentioned the subject.
Days later I was kicking myself, saying I should have sent it as a letter to the newspaper. But the next day, the Los Angeles Times had an op-ed about the topic, and that gave me a chance to send them my letter after all. They printed it today:
I hope the new birtherism has the same result as the 2008 version: The Democrat is elected.
This idea came to me in bed in the middle of the night, at least half asleep.
One composer writes a very short piece for a small ensemble. Several other composers write short works (for any or all of the same ensemble) in response. None of the composers are named until the final performance.
In my initial thought, the first piece is played just before intermission and the others respond during intermission, and their responses constitute the second half of the concert. (This is why I named it all "prompted improvisation".)
Upon later reflection, that seems impossible, so I revised it to "prompted composition" with the second set of composers given more time (24 hours? one week?) to respond. And I thought it could be named "Question and Responses".
Maybe I'll suggest this to the Los Angeles Philharmonic's Green Umbrella series.
P.S. (July 2025) In The New Yorker this month, I read about 24 Hour Musicals and 24 Hour Plays, where "creative communities produce plays and musicals written, rehearsed, and performed in twenty-four hours." My "prompted improvisation" idea is neither completely new nor completely impossible!
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