Farewell to Moristotle & Co.

By Chuck Smythe

Dear Morris, you lasted far longer than I! Your endurance was a marvel to behold, and offered us a wonderful stable of writers. Alas, after Esther began her long decline, I just didn’t have the will to create, and haven’t written anything for a long time. I did continue to follow Morisco, though, and occasionally I even left a comment. And I emailed you once in a while, though my messages were brief.

In Pursuit of Ecstasy

By Chuck Smythe

[Editor’s Note: I posted Chuck Smythe’s musing, “Second Monday Music: In pursuit of ecstasy,” ten years ago, on April 7, 2013. I repost it today, on my father’s 118^th birthday, not only in remembrance of my father, but also in recognition of ecstasy as a forever pursuit.]

“The Tao of which one can speak is not the Tao.” Thus Lao Tzu began the Tao Te Ching—then went on to speak of the Tao at great length.

Side Story: You knew Hunter S. Thompson?

With apologies to the 1961 American
musical romantic drama directed by
Robert Wise & Jerome Robbins

Paul, you or someone else said you used to know Hunter S. Thompson? There is obviously a story here. Tell! —Chuck Smythe

Reply by Paul Clark (aka motomynd)

Sharing the Gift of Music

Last Ensemble before Social Distancing 2020

By Chuck Smythe

As you know from my several posts about the Seicento Baroque Ensemble of Boulder, Colorado (most recently on January 12, 2015), I concertize with that ensemble, singing tenor. When we began “social distancing,” we had to take some time off from making music together. However, as Amanda, our artistic director, informed us by recorded statement, “While we cannot gather together in the concert hall, we can still share our love of music.” Here is a sample from the concert we recorded in an empty church prior to social distancing, two settings of “By the Waters of Babylon,” by Baroque composers Franz Tunder (North Germany) and Salamone Rossi (Northern Italy) [7:46]:

Copyright © 2020 by Chuck Smythe

Hippy vs Protester

Let’s get something straight

By Ed Rogers

Reading Chuck Smythe’s story “A Creek Runs through It” the other day brought back to mind the misconception that we were all hippies back in the sixties. We had long hair and dressed the same as the hippies, and smoked the same weed and listened to the same music as the hippies. However, we were as different as night and day.

A Creek Runs through It

By Chuck Smythe

In eastern Colorado, the Continental Divide makes a great sweep to the East at 40 degrees latitude, where Arapahoe Peak towers only thirty miles from the Great Plains. This bend funnels the great westerly winds, which pile up there and fall over a mile to the prairie, picking up speed as they drop. The ghost town of Caribou, which I visited in our recent story “Snow Hiking in Colorado High Country,” is just below Arapahoe Peak, and the wind howls through town like a Banshee much of the winter.

Snow Hiking in Colorado High Country

Detail

Introduction & Afterwords by Chuck Smythe

Photos by Ed Schmahl

A couple of friends and I have been doing weekly “social-isolation hikes” out here in the high country of Colorado (Caribou Top). Colorado in the spring, it’s wonderful! Ed Schmahl’s photos from our April 30 hike try to illustrate it, but, as Moristotle’s poems attest, if you weren’t along you can’t really get the wonder. Ed sent me the four photos that appear here with the note, “Let’s go someplace up there again!”

Side Story: You knew Paul Newman?

With apologies to the 1961 American
musical romantic drama directed by
Robert Wise & Jerome Robbins

Paul, you or someone said you used to know Paul Newman? There is obviously a story here. Tell!
—Chuck Smythe

Reply by Paul Clark (aka motomynd)

Most people think of Paul Newman (1925-2008) as a famous American actor. I knew him as a race car driver. Preparing for the 1969 movie Winning, Newman took a driver’s course on the famed Watkins Glen road course in the Finger Lakes region of New York. From then on, acting may have made him rich and famous, but racing was arguably what inspired him.

Side Story: California versus Colorado

With apologies to the 1961 American
musical romantic drama directed by
Robert Wise & Jerome Robbins

What besides snow drove you from Colorado to California, Shirley Skufca? My wife and I both love Colorado.
—Chuck Smythe

Reply by Shirley Skufca Hickman

Off to see Bears Ears

Yvon Chouinard

The President is stealing your land

By Moristotle

Wilderness adventurer Chuck Smythe wrote me Friday that he and a hiking buddy “are shortly headed to Bears Ears, to see it once more before the criminals trash it.”

A stop on Maui’s Ke’anae Peninsula

Ke’anae Peninsula

Lava at high noon

By Chuck Smythe

Last October in Hawaii, on the way to Hana, I visited the island of Maui’s Ke’anae Peninsula. [“Ke’anae” is Hawaiian for “the mullet,” a chiefly marine fish that is widely caught for food – according to hanamaui.com.]

Outside the Box: Machine translation

By Chuck Smythe

I stumbled on to this piece from a December New York Times Magazine: “The Great A.I. Awakening” [Gideon Lewis-Krause, December 14, 2016]. It seems that artificial intelligence researchers have made a Great Leap Forward in machine language translation. The article is fascinating on many levels, among them its glimpse into the Google corporate culture.

Outside the Box: Robotics and the jobs paradox

By Chuck Smythe

I’m afraid I only know about robotics what I read in the science magazines (which don’t pay enough attention to applied technology) and articles like “How to Make America’s Robots Great Again” [Farhad Manjoo, NY Times, January 25], from which I share this excerpt:

You say you want a revolution?

Notes on the Women’s March on Denver

By Chuck Smythe

Fifty years ago, there was Nixon. The people took to the streets. Watching, I decided that was accomplishing nothing, so I didn’t participate. Years later, I learned that protests had in fact eventually made it impossible to continue Vietnam, and furthermore fueled the paranoia with which Nixon eventually destroyed himself. I resolved that I would show up next time. The time has come, and as a first baby step I attended the Women’s March on Denver a week ago yesterday.

By popular request

J. Price

C. Smythe

W. Silveira

B. Sperry

P. Griffiths

From recent correspondence

Edited by Morris Dean

Since you are open to requests [“More politics, religion, and (by analogy) sex,” Friday June 10], I would like to request that we hear more from other members of your staff as well as from Kyle Garza. For example:

Movie Review: The Martian

Hard Science Fiction

By Chuck Smythe

Once upon a time, there was Hard Science Fiction. It has deep roots, but the modern, genre paperback tradition started with the Greatest Generation. They came back from the war with heads full of The Bomb, computers, and rockets, and were an eager market for pulp science fiction. Quite a bit of this, of course, was formula adventure fiction tarted up with spaceships. Some of the most interesting examples, though, had scientifically literate authors, who were interested in exploring the possibilities, for better or worse, of all this new technology. This was Hard Science Fiction, and the best of it insisted on getting the science right.

Characters

First Monday, as were

[Editor’s Note: My call for “character updates” went out to all of the blog’s staff members before I faced up to the fact that regularly scheduled columns weren’t working for me, and the call was graciously (if not habitually) answered by updates from a number of them. I trust that updates will continue to come in as our “characters” have something they want to share about themselves. We look forward to publishing these under their own bylines. To remind yourself who each character is, you may consult their blurbs in the sidebar. And remember that the link of each character’s name calls up all posts whose name they labeled.]

Moristotle & Co. abandons regular scheduling

Baldassare Peruzzi, “Muses Dancing with Apollo”

Our muses insisted

By Morris Dean

This week I notified the staff that it was no longer working for me to try to live up to the blog’s commitment to have regularly scheduled columns. I told them that I wanted to give up specifying the days of the week (or month) on which particular columns would appear, so that there would be no stated or implied commitment to publish anything on any given day.

Second Monday Music: Monteverdi’s Vespers of 1610

Claudio Monteverdi
by Bernardo Strozzi, c. 1630

Performed by the Seicento Baroque Ensemble

By Chuck Smythe

Five years ago, Evanne Browne, the music director at Boulder’s First Methodist Church, made a great leap of faith. Her chancel choir, augmented by ringers such as myself, were occasionally performing major works. She decided, at that time, to do Monteverdi’s Vespers of 1610. She is a specialist in early music and knew the piece to be fairly difficult, not least because it used musical styles strange to the modern singer. It also requires a full orchestra of 17th century instruments and a large corps of virtuoso vocal soloists. And it had never been done in Colorado before. Still, we did it, and it was a great hit.

First Monday with Characters

[From ozphoter.com]

Susan C. Price, recently in Italy

This was REQUESTED, so...if it’s not funny or interesting, blame the requestor :-) (Oh, and yes, i have a sort of shopping...interest / addiction / whatever. In the years when i was working it made sense, as i wore something different five days a week. i still have the appetite...but not the...oh, lets call it “need”…I buy things anyway...and...i’m working on it, so judge away...but don’t expect me to listen.)