Music Jeopardy

Alongside my Friday piano play at the Jewish Home for the Aged, I’m starting to get on the circuit of other homes for the elderly— the Redwoods in Marin, the Sequoias in San Francisco and another in Portola Valley. Yesterday at the SF Sequoias, I decided to play a music Jeopardy game and wasn’t that fun! The theme was classical music used in movies or TV shows. Want to play? Well, not quite the same without hearing the music, but courtesy of Spotify and Youtube, you can listen to the piece before answering. Good luck!

 

1.    Funeral March of a Marionette was used as the opening them of this TV show. (Bonus points: Who composed it?

2.    The William Tell Overture was the theme of this TV show.. (Bonus points: what three words did the main character say at the end?)

3.    The Merry Widow Waltz played in the background of this Hitchcock thriller. (Bonus points: Where was it filmed?)

4.    La Cumparsita was the music playing when Daphne and her fiancé were dancing. (Bonus points: What did the fiancé say when Daphne revealed she was actually a man in drag?)

5.    Also Sprach Zarathustra was the opening music to this famous science fiction film. (Bonus points: What was the name of the robot?)

6.    A famous waltz was also used in the above movie. (Bonus points: Who wrote it?)

7.    Rhapsody in Blue opens this Woody Allen film. (Bonus points: What airline also uses this theme?)

8.    Sleeping Beauty Waltz was used in this Disney cartoon. (Bonus points: Who wrote it?)

 

Of course, there’s more, but this is a start. (Answers below).

 

Meanwhile, on I went to play recognizable themes and then had fun re-naming them. In revenge, American Patrol is now officially renamed Canadian Patrol, The Stars and Stripes Forever is heretofore to be called The Maple Leaf Forever and Scott Joplin’s The Maple Leaf Rag will get to keep its name in perpetuity. The Emperor’s Waltz will now be known as The No Kings Waltz. And so on. 

 

Hope you had fun playing!

 

ANSWERS

1.      The Alfred Hitchcock Hour/ Charles Gounod

2.      The Lone Ranger/ “Hi Ho Silver!”

3.      Shadow of a Doubt/ Sonoma, California

4.      Some Like It Hot/ “Nobody’s perfect.”

5.      2001: A Space Odyssey/ Hal

6.      The Blue Danube Waltz/ Johann Strauss

7.      Manhattan/ George Gershwin

8.      Sleeping Beauty (of course!)/ Peter Tchaikovsky 

Service

The calendar page flips to September, the promise of a new month and for schoolteachers and children, a new year. Following yesterday’s theme, another excerpt from my hopefully forthcoming book. And R.I.P. to author Wendell Berry, passed over yesterday at 92 years young after a lifetime of writing essays, poetry, novels, plays in service of speaking for sustainability, simplicity, sincerity and the sacred land we are here to caretake. 

 

Service is a strange concept in our rugged-individualist-watch-out-for-number-one-grab the largest -piece-of-the-pie-before-it’s gone American culture. Yes, we have the Red Cross and volunteers at soup kitchens and food banks, but there is nothing in our upbringing that suggests that service is more worthy than fame and money. There is lip-service (and yes, also real service) to the Christian notion of charity and the Jewish practice of performing mitzvahs, the expectation of doing good deeds as part of one’s duty. There used to be philanthropic expectations that the excessively rich needed to pay back to the community, as evidenced by the Andrew Carnegie libraries, the Rockefeller agricultural schools, the Ford Foundation’s endowments to the arts. Some like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett and Dolly Parton still follow this model, but the new breed of tax-evading excessively rich (Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, etc.) prefer to fly themselves into space and buy 500-million-dollar super- yachts. With so much energy in the culture flowing to the notion of grabbing a disproportionate amount of our collective resources for one’s own personal power and profit, children in school are not likely to admire those in the service industry or feel their obligation to be of use. The Wolf of Wall Street is valued far and above the service dog for the blind or needy. 

 

All of which makes the kinds of service both explicit and implicit in Zen practice, jazz performance and Orff teaching a needed healing antidote to our mainstream greed and selfishness. Here we look at the unique ways each of the above encourages us to be of use, to be helpful in the community and attentive to the needs of others. 

 

The Buddhist Notion of Service 

The seven-day Zen meditation retreat (sesshin) is one of the most physically rigorous, emotionally challenging and mentally arduous experiences a person can willingly choose to do, up there with running a marathon, hiking the Inca Trail or climbing Mt. Everest. Why would one ever sign up for something so demanding when they could be lounging on a beach or binge-watching an engaging TV series? 

 

Why indeed. The motivation for each person is undoubtedly unique, ranging from escaping the difficult demands of one’s daily life to facing one’s traumas to slaking some spiritual thirst. In my case, it began with a few drug-induced experiences of higher consciousness that confirmed my intuition that there is a spiritual world beyond a mindless faith and belief in a stern Judeo-Christian God. When I began sitting in meditation, I hoped to reclaim some of my childhood sense of wonder. I was curious about the stories I had read about enlightenment. In short, I hoped to personally benefit from a practice that had a few thousand years behind it of transformation. Truth be told, the notion of spiritual achievement as a means of being of service to others never entered my mind. 

 

Yet there was a time in many sesshins when I’d be circling the walking meditation path with some 30 black-robed beings at 4:00 in the morning, all of us tucked away on a mountain alongside granite, pines, morning birds, an occasional coyote and a sky full of stars. More than once, I was suddenly graced with the unshakeable sense that though the world didn’t know we were there, we were somehow helping to hold it all together. We were bringing some light into the darkness. I had read that there are re-incarnated Buddhas somewhere in the Himalayas that are fulfilling their Bodhisattva vows to heal a broken world. No one has seen them, but that’s what’s keeping us from spilling into utter chaos and destruction. Up in our mountain retreat, I imagine we were doing the same, choosing this difficult practice not just for our personal transformation, but on behalf of all sentient beings. We were there to serve. 

 

(The chapter goes on to explore the ideas of service in the jazz world and in Orff Schulwerk teaching. I’ll leave that for another time.)

  

Live Fully and Help Others

Amongst my Fall projects, I’m working on getting out two books I’ve already written two drafts of. One is about a year-long trip around the world my wife and I took in 1978-79 and the other is titled Zen, Jazz, Orff: A Life in Three Worlds. Both are kind of back-door autobiographies looking at the things that have shaped — and continue to shape— my life. The second also looks at the Venn diagram of what these three practices share in common and what we can learn from their overlap without committing ourselves to be Zen students, jazz musicians or Orff teachers. 

 

Re-reading the chapter titled "Purpose," it rang out yet clearer in the face of all the deserved attention given to Dolly Parton’s passing. The mantra of “Live fully and help others do the same” perfectly captures her inspiring life. So here’s a taste of the importance of a purpose that is kind, generous and helps defend and sustain the life we all deserve. 

 

My Orff colleague James Harding was in his first year of teaching when he led the group of 3-year-olds down the hall into the music room.  They followed him singing a song and he expertly led them into a circle, ended the song and they all sat down ready to begin the next activity. Just before he started, a distressed little boy sitting next to him looked up with a pained face and asked, “Why are we here?!!!!”

 

Why, indeed. Haven’t we all wondered that at one time or another? It’s the question that has driven our species straight into the arms of religion or art or spiritual practice or philosophy. It’s the question that has seduced us into accepting other people’s answers gathered into dogma or party lines, often at our peril as we become obedient players in other people’s power games, be they priests, politicians, or professors. Easy answers designed to stop further inquiry, to impede or even prohibit further thinking, seduce us into a fundamentalist mindset that offers the illusion of comfort with a high price tag. 

 

At the other end of the spectrum are those who refuse both the question and the answers and wander aimlessly through a meaningless world, succumb to the scientific empirical view that we live in a random universe of mere atoms.

 

Then there are those who decide that “God is the least interesting answer to the most interesting question” and keep searching for signs that there is a hidden order inside of the apparent chaos that we can align ourselves with without having to believe that someone made it all and is running the show. They keep asking the question that leads to the next question and like Charles Ives, grow comfortable with simply feeling the beauty of “the Unanswered Question.” 

 

And so purpose. If we find ourselves in a Zen Center, up on a jazz stage, holding hands in a circle at an Orff workshop, how would each of them answer our question, “Why are we here?!!”

 

We’ve already touched on Zen, Jazz and Orff as ways to carry and ease the suffering mind, heart, body and achieve some form of liberation, release, freedom. All of which could be taken to mean to ease our personal suffering self, achieve personal freedom. A kind of radical self-care. 

 

All of which is good, as far as it goes. We all deserve to be more present, more free, more happy. But if as far as it goes is the border of our own skin, the country of our own heart, the territory of our own mind, all three disciplines suggest the same thing— not far enough. 

 

“Live fully and help others do the same” was today’s little Facebook post I received and it’s not a bad Mission Statement for Humanity. One without the other is incomplete and we should especially note, personally resist and publicly call out, those who purchase their own illusion of happiness at the expense of others. Parading around in super-yachts living the Pepsi life built on exploiting others is not what we came here for. Every religion, every artistic pursuit, every worthy educational pursuit includes a purpose that includes service to others, living beyond one’s selfish needs and desires. All likewise understand that we can’t heal others if we ourselves are broken, can’t uplift and inspire others if we haven’t done the work of following our own star. 

 

The most worthy purposes are those that sustain life, that nurture life, that protect life, that savor life. As we are called on to arrive at our own sense of meaning, it will be too small, too narrow, missing something essential,  if it only serves to make us comfortable or happy without consideration of others. We would do well to consider that “others” not only includes the full spectrum of humanity’s diversity, but the yet larger world of sentient beings— plants, animals, bugs, rivers, mountains, the whole of creation.

 

And so we sit silently with it all, praise it all in song and dance, walk through the magic and mystery of it all with the children’s hands in ours, in deep gratitude for the miracle of simply being alive. That’s a purpose worth considering.

 

The Architects of Addiction: Part 2

Understanding how manufactured addiction works may be the most important subject in our current school of life. And life of a school. We think we are free to define ourselves, can be anyone we dream of being, act out of our own free will. But do we? Might there be invisible puppet-masters pulling our strings, so invisibly and skillfully that we are wholly unaware of their impact on how we think, what we think we want, how we act? Here’s my thumbnail history of how I think those forces are working behind the scenes.

 

The original architects of manipulating human wants and needs were the religious authorities trying to sell you heaven and hell. Most used the strategy of convincing you to avoid the pain and torment of hell, with fear at the forefront. Some tried to entice you with angels with harps, with faith at the forefront. According to how you conformed to someone else’s standards, you would be punished or rewarded.

 

Then came the tradespeople at the marketplace trying to entice you to buy their fruit or baskets or tools. The game was survival and any way they could entice you— a tuneful “Strawberries! Succulent and delicious! Best price over here!”, a persistent haggling, an attractive display— all was fair game. 

 

Centuries later, the marketplace kept expanding with snake-oil salesman in the traveling entertainment shows, then the door-to-door salesman selling beauty products, encyclopedias, vacuum cleaners, aluminum siding and such. (See the fabulous films Paper Moon, Tin Men, The Music Man and read Death of a Salesman for a peek into these worlds.) Now the focus was not on avoiding pain, but feeling the promise of looking better, getting smarter, relieving the drudge of work, making your house better than your neighbors. 

 

The industrial revolution gave new energy to buying and selling and a whole industry was created—the Advertising Industry. Now cleverly scripted ads designed to attract your attention were in the newspapers, the magazines, on billboards, on the radio and later the TV. Psychologist were hired to show how to first make people feel inferior— feed on their fear by suggesting bad breath or missing the party if you didn’t drink Pepsi or being left behind if they didn’t get the latest and greatest. And at the same time, accent the pleasure—“double your pleasure, double your fun, with Doublemint, Doublemint, Doublemint, gum”— packaged in a catchy jingle that you’ll remember —like I do— some 60 years later!

 

Schools used the same techniques. First, a lot of fear, with literal caning, the dunce hat, punishment by isolation (I spent most of 3^rd grade out in the hall). But now the new preferred strategy is reward— “Be good and you’ll earn enough points for a pizza party!” In both cases, avoiding pain or pursuing pleasure become the primary motivators of how we are and how we act. 

 

All of this is confirmed by neuroscience. And then applied to the new round of snake-oil promises to make our life better— i-phones. As described in book The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt:

 

“When an action is followed by a good outcome (such as gaining food, or relieving pain, or just achieving a goal), certain brain circuits involved with learning release a bit of dopamine—the neurotransmitter most centrally involved in feelings of pleasure and pain. 

 

The release of dopamine feels good and gets us wanting more. When you eat a potato chip, you get a small hit of dopamine, which is why you then want the second one ever more that you wanted the first one.”

 

Remember the Lay’s Potato Chip ad? “Betcha can’t eat one just one!” 

 

It’s the same with slot machines: A win feels great, but it doesn’t cause gambling addicts to take their earnings and go home, satisfied. Rather, the pleasure motivates them to keep going. It’s the same for video games, social media, shopping sites and other apps that routinely cause people to spend far more time or money than they had intended to spend. The neural basis of behavioral addictions…all involve dopamine, craving, compulsion and feeling powerless to act on your own conscious wishes. That happens by design. The creators of these apps use every trick in the psychologists’ tool kit to hook users as deeply as slot machines hook gamblers. Our children’s desires are being hacked and their actions manipulated. 

 

The author then gives the specifics of this nefarious and purposeful manipulation. He imagines a 12-year-old girl trying to study for her test tomorrow in science class. The app designers see her as prey to be lured away from her task and brought into their world. Not for her growth or well-being, but as a pawn in their game to earn big money. How do they do it?

 

Step 1: An external trigger— like the “ping” on her phone that gets her to exit her straight-road focus and take the off-ramp to see what it is. “Did somebody like my last Facebook/ Instagram post?”

 

Step 2: From past experience, she hopes a little dopamine rush awaits her and thus, she is invested in the game and motivated to see what it is.

 

Step 3: She naturally hopes for a reward— “20 likes!” But it turns out the reward is not dependable. It’s variable. There might just be one “like” or a snarky comment. That feeds her persistence, like that gambler at the slot machine. The anticipation of possible more “likes” keeps her distracted and indeed, the anticipation of the reward makes for a heightened dopamine rush when it finally comes. 

 

With her attention split off in all these directions, it is no surprise that she has trouble focusing on studying for the test. To make the whole show even more evil, she then may be diagnosed with ADHD as if it’s her fault that she can’t concentrate while the App designers who consciously strive to lure her away with promises of rewards, novelty and surface emotion, are celebrated as good businesspeople making millions while the poor girl is then given drugs to manage her “learning disability” that they created. 

 

Like drug or alcohol addiction, once the nervous system becomes dependent on device distraction, the “brain enters a state of deficit when the user is not taking the drug. If dopamine release is pleasurable, dopamine deficit is unpleasant. Ordinary life becomes boring and even painful without the drug. Nothing feels good anymore, except the drug. The addicted person is in a state of withdrawal… the universal symptoms of which include anxiety, irritability, insomnia and dysphoria. 

 

My 11-year-old grandson is allowed an hour of videogame play, set by a timer. At the end, I notice some of those symptoms above. By contrast, after an hour of hiking or swimming or playing basketball or playing cards together or reading, none of those symptoms appear! (Well, he gets a little irritable when I beat him in basketball. Ha ha!)

 

That’s the bad news. 

 

And there’s more. In yesterday’s post, I mentioned all the ways I thought I had built up my immune system so none of the above would happen to me. But that’s not the case. When traveling, I have the phone on the bedstand because of the alarm, but I find that if I awake in the middle of the night, turn it on to see the time, I find myself also wondering, “Any messages?” And start to scroll a bit. Bad idea. And be honest, how many people take their phones in the bathroom with them. Don’t want to waste any time while sitting on the toilet! 

Walking in the city, I often listen to my Audible story, but then miss the bird calls high up in the tree or the soothing sounds of the ocean waves. Whereas once I waited for two hours for a bus in India without batting an eye—because back then, the whole culture was immersed in real time just sitting and observing and chatting—now after a minute at the bus stop, I’m checking my phone. 

As someone with that free-range childhood foundation, a meditation and music practice and time spent in nature, as an elder with frontal lobes developed as much as they ever will be, I am capable of setting some limits. While I write Blogposts or books, I silence the phone or ignore all pings. Same with practicing piano. Now I set a time limit to how much I’ll listen to my book while walking in the neighborhood and just shut it off for the rest. A while back, I tried out limiting myself to three different times of the day when I’d check in on the phone. 

 

But for all these efforts to tie myself to the mast of the ship, the Sirens keep calling. In the reversal of the Indian situation where very few people (back in 1978) had phones (back them, landlines) or cars or rat-race schedules where they had to punch in at work, the whole society moved at the same slow pace and no one was punished for moving that slowly. But when the hyper-mania increased to the point that if you’re going to be two minutes late to the restaurant, you’re expected to text your impatient friends, it is hard to resist getting pulling into the rush hour race to nowhere. 

 

But the good news is that somewhere deep inside, free will still exists. We can join with our family, friends, colleagues and community to refuse that which makes us more isolated, more anxious, more manic and just chill out together. There are many hopeful signs that people are deciding to do just that. Parties where people leave their phones at the door, meals where looking at a phone is as rude as lighting up a cigarette (remember that we changed that rule!), Facebook posts that are more poetry and important social justice information than cute cat pictures. 

 

But consider the children. They are vulnerable and minus frontal lobes and prone to sensation and distraction and while we think we are protecting them from predators out in the dangerous world by keeping them at home, we fling the doors open wide to the IT folks preying on them for profit, doing nothing whatsoever to protect them from overuse and addiction (indeed, just the opposite) and never having to be accountable for it all— as in, having to teach a whole class of kids with their phones blazing. If I were to punish them, that would be my first choice. 

 

Reflect on your own addiction, resolve to protect children and let’s learn to use our creations responsibly, not with mindless platitudes, but with law, policies, procedures, limits, the same way we once protected children from pornography (available at a click of a button!), alcohol and drugs. It’s not just possible, but necessary. 

The Architects of Addiction

Growing up in the 1950’s/60’s, I, like all of us back then, had a free-range childhood. Made yet more glorious by living a half-a-block from a 200-acre park where my friends and I roamed and played with sticks and stones, bats and balls, climbed trees, caught autumn leaves, played tag and hide-and-seek and generally basked in the glory of children being 100% children, not an adult or a device in sight. 

 

From that foundation, I grew into an adulthood that included hiking and biking and backpacking, still roaming in a park (Golden Gate Park in San Francisco) a half-a-block from my house, often with a ball or frisbee in hand, playing, singing and dancing with children— and sometimes adults— day after day after day, sitting meditation in Zen retreats for 10 hours a day just following my breath— no talking, no reading and certainly no screen-viewing. For many years, I didn’t own a TV and when my wife and I got one, it lived in the hall closet, to be rolled down the hall on Thursday nights and sometimes on Saturday with a VHS video chosen from Le Video. 

 

So for the first 60 years of my life, I was almost entirely free of the addictions that awaited us all. Somewhere around 2010, I finally got a flip phone and quite late amongst my peers, didn't get an i-Phone until 2018. So it is only in the past eight years of my 75 that the epidemic entered my life. You would think that with this solid background of freedom from mindless distractions and feeling thoroughly at home with silence and stillness and mindful attention to the real world around me, that I would not be vulnerable to the kind of device-addiction plaguing us all. 

You would be wrong. 

 

I just read the section in Jonathan Haidt’ s important book The Anxious Generation about addiction (pp. 129-136) and if I’m honest, I have to admit — they got me! Their purposefully manufactured poisonous intentions for their own profit are working. If this is true of someone like me who theoretically would be more aware and less vulnerable with decades of autonomous experience freed from devices, imagine how much more devastating it is for defenseless children who know nothing else but this world of 24/7 phones. And not only are the people creating and selling this venomous snake oil not in jail, but they’re rich as hell and driving up the housing prices in my fair city and unleashing their driverless vehicles into the street. What’s wrong with this picture?

 

To be informed and aware of these forces at play theoretically is the only defense against them. But again, their toxic presence is in the air we breathe and all around us. It takes almost a superhuman effort to resist. But nevertheless, we should persist.

 

Drawing from Haidt’s book, I’ll summarize how this designed addiction works in the next post. But first I have to check my Facebook likes. 

Reforming Teachers

I imagine we all feel the world would be a better place if everyone put us in charge and did what we command. But the mantra “That ain’t gonna happen” rings out loud and true. We can’t single-handedly change the toxic practices of an entire school, school system, parenting practices, cultural practices, rulings.  We can’t single-handedly hold tech companies responsible for the children’s well-being or change laws that forbid certain information and pass on other lies. Since we are powerless to single-handedly change all the rules, laws, policies, beliefs, attitudes that might make for happier teachers teaching happier children in happier schools, we have to come to terms with the irrefutable truth that the only thing we have the power to change is ourselves. That’s where the real work begins. 

 

The teachers that come to the Orff trainings my colleagues and I teach are there precisely for that purpose. And it works. Testimonies abound about how the training helped them understand the details of their craft— how to create coherent curriculums, make each lesson more musical with a clear shape and design, how to guide student composition and improvisation, etc. It helped them consider how to be more patient with their students, more compassionate, more relaxed and more capable of having fun with their students while holding them to high standards of accomplishment. It helped re-ignite their passion and love for teaching so that even with its hard parts, the pleasure was always present. 

 

But they often report that what they experience with fellow teachers in an idyllic magical retreat setting is hard to carry into their classes when the school year begins, because of the other factors listed above. They leave the Orff training feeling fully embraced by the closing circle of 100 beautiful souls singing while weeping and step back into the first back-to-school meeting watching a Powerpoint on national standards and legal requirements. What to do?

 

My advice is to pay Caesar whatever coins you must to survive, but when you shut the door to your room and begin class, God is in the house. Do everything you can to be the change you wish to see in the world. Don’t dwell on the challenges of toxic school practices or culturally-induced kid traumas. Start from wherever you are and moment by moment, adjust your teaching to bring maximum fun, challenge and healing into each and every activity. 

 

Let me be clear. Reforming teachers as I described above is the opposite of pouring them into a mindless mold to make them all alike, compliant and goosestepping to the mandated script and perfect lesson procedure. It means giving teachers permission to grow into their own natural shape and teach from the center of their passion, to follow their unique and particular way of unleashing each child’s genius. In this way, to re-form is to discard the imposed herd-mentality die and cast and claim yourself wholly as a teacher ready to lead children to their own natural forms. When you do so, regardless of what happens outside your classroom door, you have the power to make life beautiful inside your door. Enjoy!

Reforming Children

 

This may seem a strange title when we think about that institution we used to call Reform School. That was the place we sent children who had not been properly formed in the first place (according to our society’s standards) and so, were in need of re-forming. And though there are many families, counter-cultural groups and yes, schools, doing a fine job of getting it right the first time and giving children what they so deeply need and richly deserve (a lovely phrase coined by my colleagues James Harding and Sofia Lopez-Ibor), the reports are coming in that the choices we are making are obstructing the natural formation of children— and thus, on some level, they all are in need of re-forming. How does that play out in the school? 

 

When the kids line up outside your door, they also will step in with a crowd of invisible companions. There’s the personal life they carry that will affect how they can receive your brilliant teaching. Did they get enough sleep? Eat breakfast? Spend four hours last night playing violent video games or scrolling through toxic tik-tok posts? Is their dog sick or their sibling mean or their parents struggling with alcoholism, drug abuse, anger issues, trouble paying their bills? None of which we can fix but all of which we should be aware of. 

 

Then there’s the collective permissions given by the greater culture for kids to give up their play-based childhood and outsource their physical fitness, social intelligence, critical thinking, emotional well-being to electronic devices. A child who walks through the day with a phone in hand is a different being than one carrying books, pens, paintbrushes, xylophone mallets, balls, jump-ropes and such. Well-researched books like The Anxious Generation and The Myth of Normal paint a bleak picture of depression, anxiety, bullying, suicide, addiction, a growing epidemic of learning dysfunctions, lack of motivation and more. Phone-based childhoods are rapidly replacing play-based childhood and nature’s timetable for the child’s developing intelligence, emotional regulation, social skills has been disrupted in a mere 15 years of “technological progress.” Teachers who have been teaching 20 years note the difference in their students’ motivation and ability to read, think critically, respect the teacher. People who have been teaching for 40 years, even more so. Many feel that it is has never been so difficult to teach children of all ages.

 

Does all of this affect what happens each day when the children walk into our classroom? Yes, it does. Should we be concerned? You bet. Should we educate parents about the dangers of these devices, outlaw cell phones in the classroom, read and discuss the books above (and others?), monitor our own use of screens in the classroom? Of course. But again, that’s a strong current to swim upstream in and again, we will not solve these problems in time for Monday’s class. 

 

And that brings us to the next post.