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David's spaceTrying to put the pieces of my life together and discover what I'm all about... Tim Carpenter gets in his two centsFox News, the ultra-conservative channel owned by Rupert Murdock, has always kow-towed to the big corporate interests. It is no surprise that it would support a system of "healthcare reform" that would allow the failed American service to remain under the thumb of private insurance companies, private hospital corporations and the pharmaceuticals industry, continuing to hawk medical care as a for-profit consumer commodity. Even though recent polls show that the majority of Americans now favor a universal single-payer plan, the mass media persists in ignoring this, pushing the idea of making healthcare "affordable" to all by enabling all Americans to have the "choice" of which for-profit plan they wish to pay for. The proposed single-payer plan has been systematically ignored by the media and by Obama and the Congress, who are under the pressure of the huge corporate healthcare lobby to continue business as usual. In this video clip, Tim Carpenter apparently slipped through the net and managed to get in his licks before being shouted down by the Fox commentator.
My letter to Senator Max Baucus re Healthcare ReformRe your position on the Senate Finance Committee, I urge you not to table a single-payer universal healthcare service for all Americans. There are sound reasons for establishing such a program: 1. A single-payer system will provide the broadest possible financial base, larger than numerous private insurance companies, enabling it to be more cost-effective than any privatized plans. 2. Reducing the cost will make basic healthcare available to all Americans, reducing the prohibitive expense to employers that is encouraging them to outsource millions of jobs to other countries. Thus, this is not only a healthcare crisis but also a major reason for loss of employment and the resultant non-competitive prices of American-made consumer products as compared with imported goods. 3. The lack of affordable healthcare has led to reduced longevity, more deaths and suffering, bankruptcies and other major problems that are not as acute in the other developed countries that have functioning universal single-payer plans. 4. Doctors and healthcare providers are hampered by the private insurance companies, which view healthcare as a for-profit consumer item and impose arbitrary and unreasonable restrictions on their coverage with only their "bottom line" in mind. The insurance carriers end up dictating the doctors' treatment plans and take up their valuable time by burdening them with mountains of paperwork. The old argument of "government bureaucrasy" does not stand up against the mountains of paperwork and unnecessary delays imposed by the tangle of private insurance carriers. We are now facing a shortage of young physicians because fewer people are enrolling in medical schools, anticipating the mess they would have to deal with should they enter the profession. 5. Recent polls indicate that a significant majority of the American public now favors a universal single-payer system, despite what the insurance companies, pharmceutical industry, and hospital lobbies are trying to claim. 6. Successful healthcare plans are in effect in all other developed countries in the world. The U.S. is the only one to rely upon a patchwork of disfunctional competing plans for delivery of service. Open Letter to the Candidates on Single Payer Health Reform[This open letter to the U.S. electoral candidates, signed by more than 5,000 physicians, appeared in the Oct. 13, 2008 issue of the New Yorker Magazine.]
Physicians to the candidates: Enact single-payer health reform America's health care system is failing. It denies care to many in need and is expensive, error-prone, and increasingly bureaucratic. The misfortune of illness is often amplified by financial ruin. Despite abundant medical resources, care is often inadequate because of the irrationality of our insurance system. Yet our political leaders seem intent on reprising failed schemes from the past, rejecting the single payer national health insurance model that is the sole hope for affordable, comprehensive coverage. Leading Republicans propose tax incentives to encourage the uninsured to buy coverage, but these subsidies fall far short of the cost of adequate insurance. For cost control, they suggest high co-payments and deductibles. Yet these selectively burden the sick and poor, discourage preventive and primary care, and have little effect on costs, since seriously ill patients - who account for most health spending - quickly exceed their deductibles and are in no position to forego expensive care. Most leading Democrats offer a mandate model for reform. Under this model, the government would require people (or their employers) to buy private coverage, while offering an expanded Medicaid-like program for the poor and near-poor. Variants of the mandate model, first proposed by Richard Nixon, were passed with great fanfare in Massachusetts (1988), Oregon (1989) and Washington State (1993). All died quiet deaths. As costs soared, legislators backed off from enforcing the mandates or funding new coverage for the poor. Massachusetts' recent reform, which largely excuses employers from the mandate but imposes steep fines on the uninsured, appears poised to follow a similar path. Of the middle-income uninsured who are required to pay the full premium for coverage, few have signed up. Meanwhile, the state has already announced a $147 million shortfall in funding for subsidies for the poor. Mandates and tax incentives can add coverage only by increasing costs. They augment the role (and profits) of private insurers, whose overhead is four times Medicare's, and whose efforts to avoid payment impose a costly paperwork burden on doctors and hospitals. The cost cutting measures often appended to such reforms - computerization, care management and medical prevention - have repeatedly failed to yield savings. In contrast, single payer reform could realize administrative savings of more than $300 billion annually - enough to cover the uninsured, and to eliminate co-payments and deductibles for all Americans. It would also slow cost increases by fostering coordination and planning. Political calculus favors mandates or tax incentives, which accommodate insurers, drug firms and other medical entrepreneurs. But such reforms are economically wasteful and medically dangerous. The incremental changes suggested by most Democrats cannot solve our problems; further pursuit of market-based strategies, as advocated by Republicans, will exacerbate them. What needs to be changed is the system itself. We urge our political leaders to stand up for the health of the American people and implement a non-profit, single payer national health insurance system. PHYSICIANS FOR A NATIONAL HEALTH PROGRAM http://www.pnhp.org/facts/single_payer_resources.php
A Really Cool New Movie....Hey, folks
If you are a resident of the U.S. or Canada, you are welcome to download and view Michael Moore's latest movie, SLACKER UPRISING. Here is the direct link to it:
Michael Moore is eager to have as many people view it as possible, so he has released it to the general public for no charge and has given his permission for all U.S. and Canadian residents to download it. If you wish, you may burn it to a DVD or send the link to your friends. The Secret of the Universe[exerpt from an email I sent to a friend on 7/5/08] The gifts that were bestowed upon me carry both rewards and an enormous burden. The downside is the obligation to work hard to exercise them and the nagging sense of guilt that I have when I don't, and the extreme loneliness and feeling of isolation that I feel because there are so few people available who are capable of sharing their lives with me. As a result, I've had to condition myself into being basically a loner, always torn between my need to work and my yearning for a soulmate. I'm resigned to this now, because I perceive of life and the entire universe as a cosmic game of musical chairs, with nothing ever completely resolved, the very existence of everything generated by the rush to fill the vacuum. Instability is the engine that powers the Universe. Letter to a young Russian composer[Email letter to Pavel Komyukhov, a young Russian composer and computer technician living near Moscow] Dear Pasha, Thank you for your reply and your fine MIDI file of your 1999 composition. I have just played it on my PC and I find it most impressive. It is certainly very tonal and resolves immediately to D minor. However, it stays in that key throughout the duration of the piece, resolving over and over to D minor without even trying to modulate to any other key. This creates a very static effect and makes it too predictable -- there are no surprises. If I were writing such a piece, I would create more tension by having ambiguity about the direction, modulating unexpectedly to other keys, and delaying the resolution as long as possible before returning to a final resolution, and then only once near the ending of the piece. I'm sure your more recent work has undergone considerable changes, so I do not know if this criticism is still a propos. Although I am 71 years old, I am not able to retire because my Social Security pension is not sufficient to pay all my living expenses, so I had to take a job. In the town where I live, jobs are very hard to find, so I had to take the only one that was available here. I am the general cashier for the two biggest resort hotels in my town, which are next to each other and owned by the same family. I am responsible for handling all the cash that is received from the hotel reservations, restaurants and bars, and I have to process the daily deposits, enter the amounts in the computer and take the deposits to the bank each day. I also have to keep all the departments supplied with enough money to make change for the customers. Because of the nature of my job, I have to work six days a week, with only Sundays off, so I have very little free time to work on my music or on my email. I do not consider this job as my career, and I still cling to the dream that I am really a composer and that is my actual life's work. I do not like to make definitions of artforms. Many years ago, I took a course in Russian literature with your illustrious countryman, Vladimir Nabokov, who was then on the faculty of my school. Professor Nabokov always used to tell us that literature is a "divine deception." In other words, it is a form of illusion designed to fool us into believing a scenario that does not actually exist. I would take this concept one step further and apply it to all the arts. In painting, it is simply pigment on a canvas designed to fool the eye into entering a particular reality, and in poetry it is an artform that makes use of words as a form of nonverbal expression. In music, it uses the features of sound (tone, timbre, volume, rhythm, duration, etc.) to create a dramatic illusion that causes an emotional reaction (and also a kinetic reaction, in connection with the rhythms). However, I have to stop short of trying to define any of the arts in terms of words alone, because every one of the arts does what words alone cannot do, and that is the whole point of art. Words are very inadequate as a means of expression, and any attempt to describe an artform in verbal terms is sure to end in failure. The arts are needed to do what words alone cannot do. As a child, I was very musically gifted. I came from a musical family, and both my parents studied at Juilliard School of Music in New York. My mother was a pianist and my father was a singer. I first started playing the piano when I was three years old, but I did not take my first piano lesson until I was seven. When I was ten years old, my family lived in New York City and my mother enrolled me in the Juilliard School children's classes, where I studied piano with Maro Adjemian (an Armenian/American concert pianist who gave the first performance of the Khatchaturian Piano Concerto in the United States, and later became famous for recording all of the music for "prepared piano" by the American avant garde composer John Cage). I also studied theory and musical composition there with Suzanne Bloch (the daughter of Ernst Bloch). However, when I was eleven my father was transferred out of New York City to another job 300 miles away, so my family had to move and I was unable to continue my studies at Juilliard. A few years later, I entered Cornell University and majored in Art History because my father did not trust my ability to support myself financially on the basis of my music (even though he had a musical background, he himself had a very negative impression of music as a career, often referring to a composer-friend who spent the years of the Great Depression [1930s] starving in an attic, writing quartertone music that never got played or published). Since I had also shown some interest and talent in art, my parents encouraged me to become an industrial designer because they thought it would be a better profession for me to make a living. I still managed to take as many music courses at Cornell as I could, and while there I studied composition with Karel Husa a young Czech composer and conductor newly arrived from Paris who had studied with Artur Honigger, Olivier Messiaen and Nadia Boulanger. After I completed my undergraduate degree at Cornell I studied industrial design for one year at the Institute of Design in Chicago, but had a disagreement with the school director and left after the first year. My father encouraged me to accept a position in social work (which did not make use of any of my talents), but I continued to dabble in music occasionally for several years until I moved to San Francisco in 1963 and, after working there for a few more years, saved up enough money to attend San Francisco State University, where I eventually got my masters degree in musical composition in 1974. I am, unfortunately very shy and I was afraid of getting into a college teaching program where I would have to deal with administration officials and faculty members. For the same reason, I was afraid to become a conductor because I was frightened about working with other musicians and appearing before audiences. When the computer revolution occurred, I jumped at the chance to acquire a home music studio and write my music on the computer. I took a course in MIDI and assembled a studio from the best components I could find in the 1990s. I was able to transcribe and edit my older compositions into MIDI files and write new ones directly onto the computer. So far I have managed to create a number of works, including three string quartets, a woodwind quintet, a tone poem for soprano chorus and orchestra, a symphonic scherzo, a fantasy for winds, and two symphonies, as well as a number of shorter works. I managed to download a MIDI file of my 1999 New Century Fantasy for winds into my computer, and I am attempting to send it to you in this email. It is set up to play on Windows Media Player. This is the first time I have ever attempted to send music files over the Internet. Let me know if the transmission was successful, and if so, I'd like to hear your opinion of the piece. I used Finale 3.2 for most of my music, including the piece I sent you, but I now have Finale 2005, which I still have not gotten around to using for composition because I have been too busy with my other activities. The new Finale versions are totally different from the one that I used originally and, since I did not grow up with computers, I find it difficult to adjust to changes in this technology. My main reason for switching to the newer version was that I bought a new Apple computer with a 20" monitor in order to be able to view two full pages of score at once, because using my old computer with its 15" monitor and half-page viewing area was like peering through a mailslot when I tried to edit my scores. I wanted to be able to view the entire score at once. In order to use the new computer, I had to buy new software because the older version of Finale is not compatible with the operating system of the new Apple computers. Although piano, as well as other keyboard instruments, is my major instrument, I am not a very good pianist and have no desire to play in public. My technique is just good enough for me to use for my own compositional purposes. My childhood in Kew Gardens during WWII[The following are excerpts from some letters that I wrote to the webmaster of oldkewgardens.com, an amazing website that I accidentally came across two years ago, which has been meticulously preserving data concerning the ongoing history of Kew Gardens, Queens, New York, where I lived as a young child during WWII.]
April 9, 2006
Dear Joe:
Imagine my surprise when I suddenly stumbled upon your website, replete with childhood memories! My family, originally from Brooklyn, moved around quite a bit because of my father's career. However, we did live in Kew Gardens from 1943 to 1946, when my father was transferred to Syracuse, New York. I subsequently attended high school there and got my undergraduate degree at Cornell, then moving to Providence, Boston, and back to New York for a short time before finally settling in California in 1963. I am now living in Desert Hot Springs, near Palm Springs, where I am still working parttime at a resort, supplementing my pension. I attended P.S. 99 from the second through the fifth grade during World War II and the War was very much a part of our lives there. We lived in a duplex apartment in Dale Gardens (I think the address was 84-10 126th St, if my memory serves me right). At the time, the neighborhood was full of war refugees, mostly Jews who were lucky enough to get out, and their children were my classmates. One of my closest friends was Herbert Dahl (shown in your 1949 graduation photo). Herbert and I shared the same birthdate. His father had been a civil servant in Berlin until the Nazis came in, and the family fled to Holland, eventually making their way here. Herbert used to tell me horror stories of being dragged by his mother across fields in order to escape the bombs that were being dropped behind them. I remember that every time when we were outside playing, he would instinctively duck whenever an airplane flew overhead. A few years later, in the summer of 1953, I returned to my old neighborhood for a visit and found Herbert there, now a student at Dartmouth home for the summer recess. When we were standing outside talking, a plane flew overhead and I remembered how he used to react. This time, he didn't duck; he merely blinked.
There was a moratorium on most construction during the War, and P.S. 99 was hardly able to hold the large influx of new students. I remember that my morning classes were held in the school auditorium until 11, when we went into a classroom for an hour to allow the teacher to use the blackboard to teach arithmetic. After lunch, we had our class in the school basement. The school made up for the lack of facilities by having a dedicated bunch of teachers and the war-refugee students were more mature than most American children, having been forced to grow up before they were chronologically ready. My 4th-grade teacher, Mrs. DeAzoff, had some ideas about teaching languages to young children that were apparently considered quite revolutionary at the time. She experimented by teaching Spanish for half an hour a day to her own class, and it worked out so well that she organized a Spanish Club the next semester, open to any students who wished to learn the language. We had coloring books in Spanish, with pictures of a Mexican family. Later that year, the Spanish Club put on a musical in the auditorium, with a few songs ("Rolito es Mexicano, si, si", "Amapolo", etc.). An interesting followup to the success of the experiment: when I moved to Syracuse, several years later I studied Spanish in high school. When I graduated, I was awarded the school Spanish medal for having the highest Regents examination grade in that language. However, it didn't stop there; when they checked, they found I had the highest Spanish Regents grade in the entire 25-year history of that school! At Cornell, I passed the Spanish proficiency examination, thereby exempting myself from having to take a college language course. When I revisited Kew Gardens in 1953, I went back to P.S. 99 and found the old principal Mrs. Oliver still there. I asked her if Mrs. DeAzoff was still around, and Mrs. Oliver replied, "I'm sorry you missed her. She's away in Spain right now on a Fullbright fellowship. It seems she got into some trouble here with the Board of Education. They didn't like her ideas about teaching languages to children." I told Mrs. Oliver about my own experience, but it did not seem to register. I have a few interesting memories of Dale Gardens: when we moved there in 1943, the interior of the block was like a small park, and an artificial brook ran through the center of it. Later, the water was shut off and the brook was filled in, probably because of maintenance problems. We actually lived in two apartments there. I remember being outside with my mother, who was talking to her friend and neighbor Mrs. Korodi, a Hungarian refugee and sister-in-law of Antol Dorati, the conductor. Then, my mother invited Mrs.Korodi to come inside our apartment. When we opened our front door, Mrs. Korodi's small wire-haired terrier broke away and dashed inside, coming back carrying a live rat in its jaws. Mrs. Korodi, nonplused but angry, pried the rat from the dog's mouth, holding it by the tail, ran back to her house and threw it in a box, which she mailed to the Dale Gardens janitor. We did not hear directly of the janitor's reaction upon receipt of this package, but we were moved posthaste into another unit a few doors down, where we continued to reside until we left the area. We indulged our patriotism by planting a small "victory garden" in a roughly 5'x10' patch near the doorway of our apartment. I remember trying to pull up a few tiny, shrivelled carrots from the hard yellow clay soil and proudly plucking some limp, withered heads of lettuce from it. I also have memories of playing marbles with the neighborhood kids in the sand in the middle of the inner courtyard. I also remember when, one day in 1944 or 1945, my younger brother and I were out in front of the apartment playing, when we looked up and watched the terrifying black clouds of a hurricane rolling in. I remember running inside, where my mother was frantically locking the wooden sash-type windows to keep the rain from pouring in. This didn't work, and she had to resort to wadding up towels in the cracks to keep the house dry. The next day, when we went outside, we saw that all the willow trees in the neighborhood had been uprooted. (These trees constituted a large part of the original landscape scheme.) I never thought of myself as much of a businessman, but when I was about ten and my brother Joel was about seven, I noticed that most of the people in the area were avid readers of the New York Times; yet in those days there was no delivery service. I got the bright idea of starting one, so I went door-to-door, canvassing the neighborhood to see if people would like to have the Sunday Times delivered to their door. When most of them were happy to have this service, we made arrangements with the owner of the corner store to buy a stack of these papers every week, and we would take a wagon to the store early in the morning to pick them up and deliver them to the Dale Gardens residents, who paid us a nickel for each delivery. The following year before we moved to Syracuse, I sold the business to another boy (I'm not sure now, but I think it was Jerry Portnoy). When I came back to the neighborhood in 1953, I asked about the business and was told it was still going strong. Now, the New York Times is available all over the country (and in many other parts of the world) and we have delivery service available even here in California. I don't know if my venture was the first one, but if it was, Dale Gardens could very well be the first place in the world to have New York Times delivery. I hope these recollections will enrich your website and fill in a few gaps in your history. Sincerely, David Carp _______________________________________________________________________________________ April 11, 2006
If my septuagenarian mind is able to recall any more memories of my Kew Gardens childhood, I'll be happy to send them to you.
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A few more memories of my Kew Gardens days (1943 to 1946):
Playing in a tonette band in P.S. 99. (A tonette was a plastic whistle-flute similar to a recorder and had a range of slightly more than one octave.) I remember endlessly rehearsing two pieces by Percy Grainger -- Amaryllis and Country Gardens, which we played in a concert in the school auditorium... Being sent to the school nurse when my classroom teacher panicked after noticing my eyes were red and puffy. The nurse, unable to determine the nature of the disorder and obviously afraid I would start a classroom epidemic, telephoned my mother and sent me home. (A few years later, after I moved to Syracuse and was tested for allergies, I found out that the culprit was giant ragweed, a huge, ugly weed that flourished in abundance in the vacant lots that I used to cross every day on the way to school.)... Our trips on the streetcar to Jamaica for shopping and one time to attend the Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey Circus, where after the show ended, we encountered a clown in the aisle heading to his dressing room. My father, stopping him, asked excitedly "Aren't you Emmett Kelly?" He and Dad chatted for several minutes, and on the way home Dad explained how lucky we were to meet such a famous person...Taking the Long Island Railroad and then the Subway to uptown Manhattan, accompanied by my mother, where I attended classes at the Juilliard School Preparatory Division every Saturday (in the original building near Riverside Church). ...I later became quite angry at my parents for moving the family to Syracuse because I knew it would curtail my musical development. (I was able to partially compensate for it by taking piano lessons with a jazz pianist who had a small following in Central New York but was unknown elsewhere. Many years later, I minored in music at Cornell and finally got a master's degree in musical composition at San Francisco State University in 1974. During the intervening years, I had to settle for a succession of non-music-related jobs but was able to squeeze out a couple of string quartets and small symphonies over a long period of time. Now I am all set to enter the 21st century with my state-of-the-art MIDI studio in my home in Desert Hot Springs.)
Sincerely, _______________________________________________________________________________________ |
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