Must've Been the Last Straw

Oh, well. I'm sure DJ Trump's Freedom 250 party mix will have the national mall groovin' and swayin'.

Anyway, here's this week's sneak peek:

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Victoria Day's Sneak Peek

There were topics I would dearly have loved to draw about this week but didn't because ideas stubbornly refused to gel.

I sketched out a memorial cartoon for Jason Collins, the gay basketball player who came out of the closet in Sports Illustrated in May of 2013 and succumbed to stage 4 glioblastoma on May 12 of this year at age 47. But I couldn't come up with anything besides a caricature that I wasn't entirely happy with — no trenchant quotation or iconic photo image — and I certainly was not about to draw a basketball shedding a tear.

Then there is a local story that I thought would be worthy of a cartoon for a national, if niche, audience: the school board in Watertown, Wisconsin, voted 7-to-1 to stop their high school's Wind Symphony from performing "A Mother of a Revolution!" by Omar Thomas at their spring concert this evening. Thomas wrote the instrumental piece as "a celebration of the bravery of trans women, and in particular, Marsha 'Pay It No Mind' Johnson. Marsha is credited with being one of the instigators of the famous Stonewall uprising of June 28, 1969..."

It's a technically demanding work, but the hours of practice those kids in Watertown spent mastering the music were all for naught when the school board decreed that it violated the district's "controversial issues" policy. Board Vice President Sam Ouweneel called the board's action “a perfect example of what everyone here ran on, which was ending indoctrination and radical curriculum.”

Watertown students staged a walk-out protest that was duly reported on state television news. Someone with sympathies for the school board complained that the coverage was all one-sided, so one TV station sent a reporter and cameraman out to the board members' homes to offer them opportunity to comment. None of them would answer the door.

Over the weekend, the owner of Minocqua Brewing Company invited the Waterford Wind Symphony to perform "A Mother of a Revolution!" at the biergarten he is sponsoring in Madison this coming weekend. He soon realized that the band's director could be in trouble with the school board were he to participate, but the invitation to the band stands.

The guy in Minocqua is a leftwing gadfly perpetually in trouble with the Republicans in charge of Minocqua city government over zoning and licensing type issues. He has declared his candidacy for Wisconsin governor as a Democrat, to which the Democratic establishment has responded, "Gee, thanks, but we have enough candidates already." 

To give you an idea of the sort of person he is, he has publicly promised that his brewery will host a "Free Beer Day" when Donald Trump kicks the bucket. After the latest assassination attempt, he posted "Well, we almost got #freebeerday. Either a brother or sister in the Resistance needs to work on their marksmanship or he faked another assassination to get a positive news cycle."

All of which seemed like a lot to cram into a cartoon for readers who may not have heard of any of this. So I ended up drawing about something else very late last night.

This Week's Sneak Peek

Before putting last Saturday's Graphical History Tour together, I had never heard the song "Aquarela do Brasil" sung with words.

What I found when looking up its lyrics were what someone wrote for Frank Sinatra to sing; Ary Barroso's original lyrics in Portuguese have nothing to do with S.K. Russell's lyrics about kissing under an amber moon. 

Brasil, meu Brasil Brasileiro,

Meu mulato inzoneiro,

Vou cantar-te nos meus versos:

O Brasil, samba que dá,

Bamboleio, que faz gingar;

O Brasil do meu amor,

Terra de Nosso Senhor. ...

Ô! Esse Brasil lindo e trigueiro,

É o meu Brasil Brasileiro!

Granted, a direct translation would never have sold in the States. I can't quite imagine Sinatra crooning of "This Brazil, beautiful and swarthy."

Q Toon: Culture Cancels Back

Who says there's never any news between the holidays?

Chuck Redd is a jazz vibraphonist and drummer who has presented the Christmas Eve "Jazz Jams" at the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts every year since 2006. This year, he abruptly canceled his performance after Donald Joffrey Trump's handpicked board of directors voted to deface the building by bolting his name above President Kennedy's. 

“When I saw the name change on the Kennedy Center website and then hours later on the building, I chose to cancel our concert,” Redd told The Associated Press.

If you were hoping to ring in the new year with the jazz stylings of The Coolers, they, too, canceled tonight's program. Redd and the Coolers are by no means alone in disassociating themselves from the Trumpified JFK Center. 

Trump, in one of the first acts of his second term as President of the United States, fired the JFK Center's existing Board of Directors, naming a new board who elected Trump its Chairman. In response, producers of Hamilton canceled its 2026 run at the Kennedy Center; actor/producer Issa Rae and J. Geils Band lead singer Peter Wolf and folk singer Kristy Lee called off their scheduled appearances, as has Doug Varone's Dance Company; and folk musician Rhiannon Giddens moved her concert to a different D.C. venue, The Anthem. 

The Brooklyn-based Puerto Rican band Balún canceled their concert there last February, explaining, "Recent events made it clear that the space no longer aligns with our values. Our safety, integrity, and commitment to justice come first." The Washington National Opera were also mulling leaving the DJTJFK Center due to a 43%  drop in ticket sales since the Trumpsters' hostile takeover, although they have since denied thinking about it

The Center's Trumpist president, Ric Grenell, has announced that the DJTJFK board plans to sue Redd for breach of contract, sending Mr. Redd an angry letter on "Donald J. Trump & John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts" letterhead.

My guess is that Mr. Redd's lawyers might argue that he is not in breach of contract because anything calling itself "The Donald J. Trump & John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts Board of Directors" has no authority to act on behalf of the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts. The Center's birthname was explicitly mandated by congressional act at its creation, and another act of Congress would be required to change it.

Given Mr. Trump's history of stiffing contractors and performers at the long since bankrupt casino bearing his name, I wouldn't count on paychecks from the transfigured DJTJFK Center being worth the paper they would be printed on. No doubt, the ether through which any bitcoin from them wafts is worth even less.

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By the way, per U.S. Code § 76j,

(b)Restriction on additional memorials

(1)Except as provided in paragraph (2) of this subsection, the Board shall assure that after December 2, 1983, no additional memorials or plaques in the nature of memorials shall be designated or installed in the public areas of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

(2)Paragraph (1) of this subsection shall not apply to—

(A)any plaque acknowledging a gift from a foreign country;

(B)any plaque on a theater chair or a theater box acknowledging the gift of such chair or box; and

(C)any inscription on the marble walls in the north or south galleries, the Hall of States, or the Hall of Nations acknowledging a major contribution;

which plaque or inscription is permitted under policies of the Board in effect on December 2, 1983.

This Week's Sneak Peek

Instead of the usual snippet from this week's upcoming syndicated cartoon, here's one from a little over 28 years ago:

in InStep, Milwaukee Wis., Dec. 11, 1997

For those of you under drinking age in 1997, Anheuser-Busch had recently replaced a trio of animated frogs who croaked "Bud... wei... ser" in their television commercials with a pair of lizards with a more extensive vocabulary.

As for the reason for the cartoon: Thomas Martin, a former manager at Anheuser-Busch's Los Angeles brewery, filed a lawsuit claiming that he had been harassed and fired for being openly gay. In pre-trial depositions, Anheuser-Busch manager Bob Warner admitted having told Martin that "to tell co-workers that you are gay is unbecoming of a manager and will result in your termination." 

Warner and other managers testified hearing the words "fag" and "faggot" at work often, but counter-claimed that Martin was fired for having committed "sexual harassment and sexual misconduct" of two employees.

The case was to come to trial on December 1, 1997; Anheuser-Busch settled the case out of court for an undisclosed monetary amount.

♫

Here’s another recording of Schoenberg’s “Verlassen.” 

The Odds and Ends of March

We’ll return for The Fall of Indochina, Part Thieu, next week; but first, our Graphical History Tour steps back a further fifty years with a warning that March is almost over.

"This Is April First Anyhow" by Clifford Berryman in Washington Evening Star, April 1, 1925

President Woodrow Wilson had broken off relations with Russia immediately after the Bolshevik October Revolution in 1917, and that policy continued under Presidents Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover in spite of commercial ties between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. At issue, beside the communist form of government, was the Soviet renunciation of international debts incurred by the tsarist regime.

"Anti-League-ville" by J.N. "Ding" Darling in Collier's, April 4, 1925

"Ding" Darling's cartoon will serve to segue from Russia to Germany, which held presidential elections one hundred years ago today.

"Um die Meisterschaft von Deutschland" by Arthur Johnson in Kladderadatsch, Berlin, March 29, 1925

The first round of presidential elections was held on Sunday, March 29 because of the death of President Friedrich Ebert a month earlier.

Johnson pictures seven candidates in this cartoon. The top row are the mainstream party candidates: Karl Jarres (German People's/DVP and German National People's/DNVP), Wilhelm Marx (Center/DZ), Willy Hugo Hellpach (German Democratic/DDP), Otto Braun (Social Democratic/SPD).

Below are the extremist parties: Erich Ludendorf (German People's Freedom/DVFP), and Ernst Thälmann (Communist/KPD). Ludendorf, a German army commander, was prominent in the attempted Nazi putsches of 1920 and 1923, and a firm believer that Germany's defeat in World War I was due to a conspiracy of domestic Jews, Freemasons, and Marxists.

"In der Reichs-Entbindungsanstalt" by Arthur Johnson in Kladderadatsch, Berlin, April 5, 1925

With seven national candidates, none emerged with a majority of the votes on March 30, setting up a second round election a month later. Under the German electoral system, any of the first round candidates — even new candidates — could compete in the second round, and whichever candidate received a plurality of the votes in the second round would be declared the winner.

The Center Party renominated Marx for the second round, and he received the support of the DDP and SPD as well. The DVP's executive committee unanimously endorsed Jarres, but he withdrew in favor of Paul von Hindenburg, despite his having twice declined to run. Convinced by Alfred von Tirpitz to change his mind, and after seeking the approval of former Kaiser Wilhelm Hohenzollern, von Hindenburg announced his candidacy on April 8. He also won the enthusiastic endorsement of the Bavarian People's Party (BVP), a breakaway faction of the Center Party.

"Wilhelm Still Has Some Friends" by Wm. A. Rogers in New York World by March 31, 1925

William Rogers probably made up those four votes for the former Kaiser Wilhelm in his cartoon. It's hard to imagine the deposed emperor putting his name forward for popular election.

The actual results were a resounding defeat for the Fascist DVFP's Ludendorf, the last-place finisher, who thereafter withdrew from politics. 

"Des Feldherrn Abgesang" by Ernst Schilling in Simplicissimus, Munich, Apr. 20, 1925

I strongly suspect that in breaking up the German word "verlassen" in the dialogue, Schilling was making a pun of some sort. If so, there is a vulgar insult "aase" which can mean "bitch" or "swine." (Actually, no. Update below*)

Turning back to America:

"Unbegrenzte Möglichkeiten" by Werner Hahmann, in Kladderadatsch, Berlin, Apr. 5, 1925

Don't be fooled by the printer's choice of colors in Werner Hahmann's cartoons (or a certain saint's day this past week) into mistaking the character on the right is supposed to be Irish. I believe that the hatpin signifies that she is supposed to be a feminist, a harridan in men's clothing.

The six-pointed stars on Uncle Sam's suitcoat are no accident, by the way.

An explanatory note above Hahmann's cartoon states that moves to prohibit the import, production, and sale of tobacco were gaining popularity in the U.S. It is true that there were anti-tobacco activists agitating on the apparent success of the temperance movement, but they were a long way from convincing elected representatives in government to join their cause. 

Tobacco interests weren't giving up without a fight; why do you think that everybody in motion pictures of the era happened to be smokers?

"That New York Mastodon Find" by Orville P. Williams for New York Evening Graphic, by March 31, 1925

Construction crews unearthed a two-foot long jaw bone of a mastodon and other bone fragments during excavation for an apartment building at #2 Seaman Street in Manhattan on March 25.

The beast was believed to have been a baby of the species, but was still considerably larger than a donkey. The first bones in this find were from the mastodon's three-foot-long jaws, including seven of its six-inch-long teeth. At least three of the teeth were seized by passers-by, although one of them was eventually returned to the American Museum of Natural History.

Williams used the find to point out the Democratic Party's misfortunes since Woodrow Wilson's presidency. The Democrats' years in the wilderness would continue as long as Republicans could point to a strong economy and a soaring stock market.

Which brings us full circle.

"The April Fool Pocketbook" by Tom Foley in Minneapolis Daily Star, April 1, 1925

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* My friend Winfried Schmidpott tells me that the dialogue in Schilling’s cartoon references a Bavarian-Austrian song. You can hear Arnold Schoenberg's arrangement of it here. 

Toon: Town Hall Do-Si-Don't

We interrupt today's regularly scheduled cartoon for this important breaking cartoon:

In case you missed it, Donald Disco Trump had a Town Hall rally in Philadelphia the other night, fielding pre-screened questions from the pre-screened audience, when, a couple of questions in, two members of the audience fainted.

Trump stopped taking questions, which is perfectly reasonable, and asked the backstage staff to play some music.

As a church organist, I've had to wing some music because somebody in the back pews has collapsed. I fainted in church once myself a very long time ago (fortunately, not as the organist). I've been in the congregation when a woman suffered a heart attack.

On those occasions, the worship service was interrupted, but not for long. In the case of the woman having a heart attack, the EMTs arrived soon and got her to the hospital as quickly as possible.

For reasons that defy logic, Trump had the backstage crew DJ an impromptu concert for 39 minutes, starting with not one, but two renditions of Franz Schubert's Ave Maria — two, because the DJ played an instrumental version and Trump wanted Luciano Pavarotti's performance.

Followed by several songs by artists such as Rufus Wainwright who have demanded that he cease and desist playing recordings of their performances at his rallies.

According to video from the evening, Trump played Rufus Wainwright’s cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” as well as Sinead O’Connor’s “Nothing Compares 2 U,” Oliver Anthony’s “Rich Men North of Richmond,” Guns N’ Roses’ “November Rain,” James Brown’s “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World,” Elvis’ “An American Trilogy,” the Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.” and Andrea Bocelli’s “Time to Say Goodbye.”

All the while, South Dakota Governor Kristi "Shoot the Pooch" Noem (the moderator for the evening) and a mute Greek chorus of special guests were trapped on stage. You could see them distractedly swaying and shuffling and clapping along with the Donald, clearly wondering how to get the hell out of there without being noticed.

In the end, Trump answered only four people's questions, and left town happy and pleased with his performance.

Q Toon: The Dating Game

Is there time before the Superbowl™ for one more cartoon lampooning magazoid Swiftophobes and fusty oldsters who somehow don't remember Beatlemania?

Actually, I can sympathize with any Baby Boomer who took his girlfriend to see the Beatles and she spent the entire concert screaming at the top of her lungs. But at least he didn't pay current TicketMaster prices to get his eardrums split.

But frankly, I just can't understand what Clyde and his buddies have against Travis Kelce dating Taylor Swift. I mean, don't they want their macho football star to be seen with a pretty blonde white girl, a country singer to boot?

Okay, I get it that she's not joining you in the Cult of Trump; and yeah, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert are available. But be reasonable. He's Travis Action Movie Star Lookin' Kelce with the perfect pearly whites gleaming through an effortlessly virile beard. If Clyde here had his choice of those three women, I don't think he'd pick either of the congressional harridans.

Just turn to the Talladega Channel, Clyde. Maybe they'll have a shot of Kid Rock and Ted Nugent in the stands for ya.

You May Ask Yourself, My God! What Have I Drawn?

At least once a month, this Graphical History Tour dredges up some of my old cartoons at decade intervals, and today we start with September of 1983.

in University of Wisconsin Parkside Ranger, October 13, 1983

This is one of less than a handful of cartoons I drew using gesso and an artist's blade. The technique involves coating the drawing surface with a white plaster called gesso (it is available in other colors), then painting over that with ink. Once that is dry, you cut away at the ink to reveal the gesso beneath. The resulting heavy shadows can be striking.

You don't have to completely cover the gesso with ink; I've seen cartoons and other artwork where the creator drew the scene on top of the gesso, then continued by cutting away some of the ink in order to lessen shading — the result resembling a woodcut.

My cartoon here came in response to a drunk driving crash in which the president of the student government was critically injured. Although I had made no attempt whatsoever to make anyone in the cartoon a caricature of him, my editors worried that some readers would find it in bad taste.

Well, not every cartoon is meant to be funny, and a cartoon of the student mascot crying would have been trite. To their credit, the Ranger editors held the cartoon to include it in a four-page feature section on drunk driving a few weeks later.

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in Gaze Magazine, Minneapolis, 1993

Some cartoons are meant to be totally serious. Other cartoons are meant to be utterly silly.

In 1993, it was hard to avoid Barney the purple dinosaur, whether you had small children in the house or not; there were various cartoons and late-night comedy sketches around riffing on his "I Like You, You Like Me" song and that dopey voice of his. 

Years later, I saw that some other cartoonist had gotten around to drawing pretty much the same idea that I had. Or maybe it was a meme. Or quite possibly both.

Puns are low-hanging fruit in the cartooning biz, and yours would have to be extremely elaborate and exquisite before you'd have any right to claim, "Hey! That's my idea!"

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2003 marked Harley Davidson's centennial celebration in Milwaukee, and the people putting the big 100th anniversary party together thought it would be a great idea to keep everyone guessing what the big-name entertainer they had hired for the big concert at the Marcus Ampitheater.

Rumors flew that they were bringing in Steppenwolf, whose "Born to Be Wild" is a biker anthem, but who had broken up in 1972. Or perhaps the Allman Brothers, or George Thorogood, or Judas Priest. Or maybe even the Rolling Stones!

in Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee, Sept. 5, 2003

So fans of those bands were disappointed and upset when the mystery headliner was revealed to be Elton John.

Make no mistake: everyone recognized that Elton John was and is a star performer. But he doesn't have that biker vibe one generally associates with riding on a Hog.

Front or back seat.

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for Q Syndicate, September, 2013

One of my favorite things to do in a cartoon is to take a cliché and turn it on its head. The occasion for this cartoon was actually how little opposition arose when six counties in New Mexico began granting marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

The counties had responded proactively to an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit on behalf of same-sex couples in the state. The New Mexico State Supreme Court would rule unanimously in favor of marriage equality in December, extending marriage rights into the more hesitant 27 counties.

A year and a half later, the Supreme Court granted those rights to the rest of the nation, and opposition has proven to be nowhere near "fever pitch."

Except in the case of a few county clerks and a couple of ethically challenged Supreme Court Justices.

This Week's Sneak Peek

Somewhat of a mess-up at the church where I'm the musician yesterday. 

Our pastor was on vacation, and the guest pastor wanted to change the Hymn of the Day from what I had originally picked, to go along with an alternate Gospel reading he wanted to preach on. So I had replaced in the overhead projection PowerPoint the hymn I had chosen with the one the guest preacher wanted.

Or so I thought. I had mistaken the hymn he wanted with a hymn the congregation knows well. The hymn he wanted was one the congregation has never sung. And in spite of being in 4/4 time, there is an inexplicable 3/4 measure second from the end of each verse, guaranteed to trip everybody up. Including the lead musician.

Saturday night, my husband and I came home from a family gathering to find a message from the president of the congregation on our land line phone. The guest pastor had come down ill, and there was no second-string guest pastor to fill in.

Then, when I came in on Sunday morning, the computer that runs the PowerPoint wanted to spend half an hour installing an update to the operating system, leaving me very little time to adjust the PowerPoint to match what we worship leaders decided upon. Furthermore, I had forgotten my glasses at home, so I couldn't read what was on the PowerPoint slides as I attempted to move them around.

What's more, the title of the guest pastor's choice of hymn was in the bulletin, but over the score of the hymn I had originally chosen. I had no slides for my choice of the hymn, but I decided that it was better to have the congregation sing the hymn they know rather than the one they didn't. Besides, I couldn't lead the singing if I couldn't read the words.

Meanwhile, the tech guys were having problems getting the live feed to Facebook — a mix-up copying a key code, then the signal deciding to buffer during the service — but at least that was not up to me to worry about.

And to top things off, midway through the service, I noticed that the Sending Song in the bulletin was not the one I had chosen for this week; it was the one I'd chosen for the service two weeks earlier. Oh, well: it was too late to get that hymn into the PowerPoint. We sang the hymn in the bulletin, and I'm sure nobody was the wiser.

(Psst — don't tell them!)

Q Toon: All Safe Zones Matter

 

My cartoon this week derives from a local news story here in Wisconsin, but it's a story that is being repeated with minor variations across the United States.

The Arrowhead Union High School Board in ruby-red Waukesha County, immediately west of Milwaukee, voted this month to forbid any teacher from posting that their classroom is an "LGBTQ+ Safe Space."

Board President Kim Schubert strongly opposed having safe space stickers placed on classroom doors. Having such imagery and messaging, she said, could stunt students’ development at pivotal points in their lives.
“I believe that safe spaces are, in fact, a detriment to our society,” Schubert said.

One of the TV news reports included a comment that "all areas of the school should be considered to be safe," which struck me as a particularly specious argument, given that our current right-wing Supreme Court believes that the First Amendment to the Constitution gives a Right to Refuse Service Card to anyone who claims a religious exemption from doing their job.

In other states, legislatures have passed laws requiring school staff to out LGBTQ+ students to their parents, regardless whether the home environment is a safe or unsafe space for LGBTQ+ kids. If kids in those states get kicked out of the home and into the streets, I guess that's just fine and dandy with the Republican legislators who don't have to worry about being kicked out of their safe seats.

So as not to appear to be singling LGBTQ+ youth out for abuse, the Arrowhead High board also forbade flags or other signage associated with Black Lives Matter, Latino/a heritage, and so forth (well, of course they would). They even included MAGA flags in the ban, although I don't think there is much danger of any kid in Waukesha being teased or beaten up for being a little Trumpster.

Elsewhere in Waukesha, the school district fired a first grade teacher who complained after the district told her she couldn't include the Miley Cyrus and Dolly Parton duet "Rainbowland" in a school program.

The lyrics were widely believed to focus on acceptance, but district officials said they found the song "could be deemed controversial."  

Tempel raised her concerns on social media and received national attention. She told news outlets, including Wisconsin Public Radio, that the Muppets' "Rainbow Connection" was initially banned but later accepted after pushback from parents and the Alliance for Education in Waukesha. 

She also told WPR the district had not offered any specific reasons for the ban, but "the only common thread between those two songs was the word rainbow."

Waukesha school district officials claim they are just avoiding potential controversial subjects in their elementary schools, but don't be surprised if you see a choir of Waukesha schoolkids singing "The Donald Trump Song" at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee next summer.

Toon: Led Sailor Man

 Testing out the new scanner so I don't run into any snags at deadline:

This Week's Sneak Peek

I was hoping to find inspiration in any of the commercials or halftime show during the Superbowl last night. But I decided that having Rihanna's and her floating dancers targeted by U.S. fighter jets was just too damn mean to draw. 

Although I'm sure someone else has done it by now.

The musical performances were impressive, one way or another. Sheryl Lee Ralph gave a stirring rendition of "Lift Every Voice and Sing" (which has stirred up the hornets nest of Butthurt Right Wingers). I schedule the Black National Anthem every February, so we had sung it at Redeemer that morning — if not quite as slowly as Ms. Ralph's version. We did sing three verses of it to her one, however.

A few weeks ago, Daily Show guest host D.L. Hughley showed film of himself asking White people-on-the-street if they could sing the Black National Anthem; and I realized that while I could sit down at a piano and play it from memory, I wouldn't make it through the second line singing the words.

Which would at least save me the embarrassment of trying to hit the two pairs of high E's in every verse. 40 years ago, I could just barely hit the high E in the bass part of "Even So In Christ Shall All Be Made Alive" in Handel's Messiah, and that's just an eighth note at the top of a run up from a low A. In "Lift Every Voice," the high E's come as a climactic dotted quarter and a triplet in a song meant to be sung at a stately pace, and they're quite out of my range now.

I'd transpose the song down a step, but that puts the low notes out of the range of most sopranos and tenors. The song spans well over an octave, just one step less than "The Star-Spangled Banner."

Which makes Ms. Ralph's modulation up a step for the final two lines all the more impressive.

This Week's Sneak Peek

I've been compiling playlists on my iPod for a long drive I've got in a couple weeks, and one piece I was looking for, to add to a playlist of classical concerti, was a flute concerto by 20th Century Armenian composer Aram Khachaturian. I have a recording of the third movement on an old cassette tape somewhere; it's a lively virtuoso piece with a lot of flair.

I couldn't find that recording in Apple Tunes, but I knew that it was actually an arrangement of a violin concerto. I found that on a double CD along with a bunch of other Khachaturian orchestral music, mostly unfamiliar to me other than a couple movements of the Masquerade Suite.

Too bad that liner notes didn't come with download of the double CD. I listened to one of the unfamiliar pieces, his Piano Concerto in D-flat, over the weekend, and what struck me was that in the middle of one movement, a Theremin completely steals the limelight.

For anyone who doesn't know what a Theremin is, it's an electronic instrument created by Leon Theremin in 1928. The eerie sound is created by waving one's hands through an electronically excited field between a pair of antennae. You're likely to have heard it in old movies or TV shows about ghosts or space aliens or hypnosis.

The Theremin is an extremely difficult instrument to play well; you might compare it to playing Trombone Champ. So what is it doing in a piano concerto?

To begin with, the concerto is probably the least Soviet musical form there is. One performer gets to be the star of the piece, showing off his or her superior performing ability with the rest of the orchestra in a somewhat subservient role. And yet Khachaturian, Prokofiev, Shostakovich and others got away with writing them anyway.

But not without a whole lot of supervision from the regional commissar. And along comes Soviet inventor Leon Theremin with his new-fangled instrument, so the word from Stalin comes down to showcase Soviet Russian ingenuity. Comrade Composer, you have a choice: stick a Theremin part in your piano concerto, or it's off to re-education camp for you. 

And be happy Stalin is not insisting you include it in a piece for marching band.

This Week's Sneak Peek and Rant

One question we cartoonists get all the time is "How do you come up with your ideas?"

I can't answer that question, but I can tell you that how we don't come up with ideas is spending a whole week trying to figure out where we put something that is determined not to be found.

I have — or perhaps I had — a little iPod that I was listening to last Monday as I mowed the lawn, and that's the last I've seen of it. The earplugs are safely put away in the case they came in; the bandanna I wore to keep the earplugs from falling out every five minutes was on the clothes dryer until I washed it and put it away in a drawer. But the iPod is nowhere to be found, in the house, in the garage, in the car, on the patio, in my pockets, ad infinitum.

That effing little iPod has been a disappointment ever since it arrived from Amazon. I bought it because my previous iPod Nano was a.) full, and b.) synced to a laptop that died in 2011. We were planning a family trip to Italy, and I wanted to have a playlist of Italian music and another of music to try to help me sleep during the flight. I also had previously downloaded a couple hours of Bach organ music I could only listen to on the computer, that widely panned U2 album Apple had released for free on iTunes, and a few other random pieces of music.

When the iPod arrived, I discovered that the marketing geniuses at Apple had redesigned the product so that it can't play on the iPod docks I have at home and at work. I could plug earphones into it or hook it up to the car radio, and that's it.

Well, fine. I made playlists of Italian music, boring music, Latin American music, organ music, Tchaikovsky and Grieg. I downloaded from iTunes a few albums I had had only on cassette tape, one of which was the soundtrack to Philadelphia.

I later discovered that the only cut from the Philadelphia soundtrack on the iPod was Maria Callas singing "La Mamma Morta," which I had marked to go into the Italian playlist. The rest of the soundtrack was on the computer, but nowhere on the iPod. Indeed nothing I had bought from Apple or copied from CDs after some point early on was in the iPod unless it had first been tagged to go into one of those six playlists. I tried making new playlists, but to no avail.

For a while, I could still add music to those playlists. Before long, however, the iPod quit accepting any new music at all, even though it was only about 20% full.

So now, I have to decide whether to give that little shit up for lost; and if so, whether it's worth replacing, given that the marketing geniuses at Apple have ended iTunes.

I think I'd be better off replacing my tape player.

Q Toon: Nunc Dimittis

Representatives of the worldwide United Methodist Church met in St. Louis, Missouri, February 23-26, and fought over competing resolutions to describe their church's attitude toward LGBTQ clergy and parishioners.

The conservative "Traditional Plan," which strengthened the church's prohibitions on "self-avowed practicing homosexuals" from ordination and mandated a year-long defrocking of any clergy who perform marriage ceremonies for same-sex couples or ordain LGBTQ clergy, passed in a 438-384 vote.

Delegates to the General Conference had earlier rejected a pro-LGBTQ "One Church Plan," which would have left those matters up to the conscience of individual clergy and congregations, by a vote of 374 to 449. A "Simple Plan" submitted by the Queer Clergy Caucus fared just as poorly.

Although many (but by no means all) Methodists in the United States now have liberal attitudes toward LGBTQ clergy and marriage equality, the majority of Methodists in the Third World do not. And it is that second group who are growing. 41% of the delegates were from outside the U.S., 30% from Africa alone.

"The old ladies in the villages, the old men in the villages, the young boys in the towns and villages, are all celebrating that the United Methodist Church has maintained its traditional view of the Bible," says Dr. Jerry Kulah of Liberia, general coordinator of the church's Africa Initiative. "Other denominations all across Africa are celebrating the United Methodist Church. That is the kind of euphoria being expressed right now across Africa."
Some United Methodists in Africa say they hear U.S. and European liberals lecturing to them on what positions they should take on issues of sexuality, family and marriage, and it strikes them as the latest example of a colonialist attitude.

As conservative congregations had threatened to leave the Methodist fold had the "One Church Plan" been adopted, there are now liberal American congregations and clergy (here's another) who no longer feel welcome. The General Assembly obligingly voted to accommodate their exit.

The UMC also voted to pass a disaffiliation petition, often called a “gracious exit” plan, to help the transition for those who felt they could not remain part of the denomination.
Though all UMC church property is deeded to the regional body, under the new legislation, churches with a two-thirds vote among professing members would be allowed to leave with their property after paying any pension liabilities and outstanding financial obligations.

Which is either an example of Christian charity, or the conservatives telling the liberals, "Hey, don't let the door ya on the way out!"

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Since this week's syndicated cartoon hinges on a very obscure reference, I'm going to just come right out and tell you that it's a play on words on a 1973 hymn by Brian Wren, "How Can We Name a Love" (written to the much older tune of "This Is My Father's World") included in the United Methodist Hymnal.

You'd have to ask a Methodist whether Methodist congregations ever sing it. I'm Lutheran, and it's not in any of my hymnals.

Q Toon: Let's Give Them Something to Talk About

Not to mention guns and climate change.

Seriously. Don't mention them, either.

Boo!

Look out! It's the screaming memees!

and

and he wants you to want him:

Happy Hallow Days!

So THAT's What It Means

The things you learn at Urban Dictionary! My goodness gracious me.

A Trump Cabinet Meeting

...set to music: