Believe it or not, one more of my talents is singing. I am not sure I have ever really talked about it in this blog or not, but if not, here it is…

I started singing at Temple Beth Ami in Reseda California at about the age of 8. I then carried on through high school, playing trombone and singing scat for an ensemble called “Grey Smoke”. The highlight of that stint was the late night jam session with Dizzy Gillespie one hot summer Tuesday night at Dante’s in Burbank. I did 6 months with the LA Metropolitan Opera (Wagner’s Ring Cycle, oy) understudying Donald and Fafner. In 1999, I hooked up with The San Fernando Valley Valleyaires, a Barbershop Chorus, and eventually created a Barbershop Quartet call SOAP. That all ended a few years ago and now I am back on the singing scene looking for a new quartet, but not just any quartet…

So here I am in Vegas looking for a place to sing (thank god Nancy enjoys Barbershop too) and I find the Gambleaires. Ok, they are not the best around, but they are very non-political, and that is exactly what I wanted to hear. So you can imagine my consternation when others tell me I am too good for them and ought to be somewhere else. Really, all I want is to sing and here is everyone else trying to make me political within the group.

Well, to make a long story short (yeah, yeah… too late) another group tries to recruit me to sing the tenor part for their quartet. One of the other members of the quartet is a known name to me, but I thought I made it clear that I wanted to sing lead and tenor was out of the question. I guess that message did not make it through because I get an email with tenor dominate part for their repertoire. I politely turned them down, after all there is a tenor out there for them, but it is not me. (Besides, any good lead can sing tenor, I just don’t like the range.)

But there were other reasons for turning down the role, and maybe they were more to the point than me just not wanting to sing tenor. The current lead sings very covered and they are shooting for a “swing” feel for their group. Swing requires a very clear lead singer, the other parts can be covered a bit, but the lead needs a clarion voice. In swing the lead is a soloist despite the idea that Barbershop is a quartet. So what is it, a swing or barbershop group? Mixed messages, not good. Also, one of the members is very knowledgeable about music and barbershop, but his coaching seems to take precedence over the learning and singing of the music. Seems to me that getting the notes and words sung correctly first is foremost when learning new material; craft comes after the group is singing the song with familiarity. Lastly, to be honest, they were not at my level of singing even with my voice being out of shape (although that will change quickly enough), not that that would have stopped me had they at least let me sing the part I wanted. At that point I would have hoped to shape the group a bit and get them to understand what jazz and swing is.

I will give them this, for the most part they were organized with a repertoire and learning tracks. But they were lacking decent communicates and that is hard to deal with too.

But for now I live with this truism; there is a quartet out there for me; one that will be able to keep up. There are three other singers who are relaxed enough to be able to enjoy the experience that I want to have (any they too hopefully). And when it comes right down to it all, maybe that is the real reason I turned this last group down, it would not be fun when push came to shove with one other extremely opinionated person in the group.

I wonder if the other guys in that group have figured it out… they are not going to get rich singing so it had better be a lot of fun to do, otherwise the effort is not worth the meager returns it may offer.

You know me; if you read my blog it should be quite obvious that I am a middle of the road Republican; I certainly am not a Democrat, and I register as an Independent. So you can imagine that I am following this presidential campaign pretty closely, being a bit of a politics wonk. So when the John McCain campaign put out an ad trying to scare white fathers and mothers away from Barack Obama, McCain made up my mind for me.

I was truly looking forward to a straight forward, clean campaign promised by both candidates, but what did I get? I got the Republican smear three months out from the election… hell; the candidates are not yet even “rat”ified by the party conventions yet and the mud is piling up. To Barack’s benefit he does not sling it as well as McCain, but he is getting more politically savvy at the backhanded putdown that is more his style.

So what prompted this entry? The Spears/Paris McCain ad that say as subtext that Barack Obama is coming to get your daughters and have sex with them. It is “Birth of a Nation” all over again with darkies waiting in the shadows. The implication is that Barack is dating (or as a radio talk show host say “dating equals porking”) young, vapid white celebrity girls (your daughters; also implying your daughters are not too bright), and having sex with them using his really big black tool (the images of the “Leaning Tower of Pisa”, and the “Washington Monument”). This ad has no other value other than it is meant to scare the hell out of white folk.

So, who played the race card? Well, to be honest, both of them, but at least Barack’s use of the racial issue is fairly self deprecating. Barack has been using the line that he does not look like the past Presidents on the money we use. This is true, and what it gets Barack is that he is new and different for a new and different country, now. Where as McCain use of the race issue is “By the way… he’s black” attitude has no redeeming value other than to scare white people away from Barack using latent racism.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised at the Republican tactics, they have been doing the same thing for a hundred years. What I am upset about I guess is that the candidate made a pledge to no go negative, was haranguing the other candidates not to go negative, and at the first opportunity flip-flopped on that pledge and went negative. But again, why should I be surprised, McCain has been flip-flopping on issues since the start of the campaign run to appeal to the current constituents he needed to win primary races. Now he is flipping both to the conservative left and trying to roll the center into one campaign and not being effective. Barack, by virtue of his stubborn nature is not really flipping so much as tacking his message to the center. He ran on a more centrist message anyway, now he is correcting course to include moderate and middle of the road republicans, as expected.

So, at this point I can make up a small list of the things that I do not agree with in the McCain campaign. They are:

1. McCain’s gas tax holiday is bunk. I would rather spend the $14 dollars I am going to save and let 300,000 people remain working. This does not help the long term problem; it is just a band-aid and not a very good one.
2. Drilling offshore and in ANWAR is not an answer both because it will take years to gear up and even then will not provide a significant saving to an oil hungry nation.
3. Yeah, the surge worked, but then again, it surely should have for what we are spending.

   (Let me state that at the time I was for going into Iraq and kicking out Saddam Hussein. Once we did that though we really needed to be out of there. And now that the Iraqi government that we installed wants us out too, we should be preparing with all haste to make a victorious retreat from there. Why victorious? Because we not only did what we came to do, we have even set up a government that thinks it is ready to stand on its own. It’s not, but we should not let that minor fact prevent us from getting out of a situation that is more and more looking like “revenge for daddy”. Honestly we should have been out of there six months after “Mission Accomplished”.)

4. Health care? What health care plan?
5. Education? What education plan?
6. Really, I am not sure where McCain is standing on anything lately, he changes positions so often it is hard to keep track.

That is not to say that Barack has articulated his cases any better. He does not have an Energy plan that is of any worth, there is some movement there on education, but not as much as I would like to see, and he dodges the health care issues with quick aplomb. He is on the right side of the war, he is an inspirational speaker, and maybe that is what the country needs right now.

So, here is my Ballot…

[     ]  Charles O. ‘Chuck’ Baldwin
(Constitution)

[     ]  Robert Laurence ‘Bob’ Barr
(Libertarian)

[     ]  John Sidney McCain
(Republican)

[     ]  Cynthia Ann McKinney
(Peace and Freedom, Green)

[     ]  Ralph Nader
(Independent)

[ X ]  Barack Hussein Obama
(Democratic)

I highly recommend you look at the bios for Chuck Baldwin, Bob Barr, Cynthia McKinney and of course Ralph Nader (my vote in 2004) and make some decisions for yourself. Each has some interesting views that should be considered.

Remember, no one is ready to be president from day one, the amount of experience in the role of President is always zero on day one, so don’t let experience be a your road map. It may be that person with no experience that brings the greatest change and creativity to the office because they lack experience and thus have no preconceived ideas how it is all supposed to work.