I was going to work up a rhetorical sweat over Kristi Noem’s latest demonstration of her unfitness for office—this time, marking Teacher Appreciation Week by reminding teachers what destructive radical failures she thinks they all are. But we know what her “1776 Pledge to Save Our Schools” (and the unavoidable subtext there is, from all those evil teachers!) really is: one more campaign ploy, utterly detached from any practical problems or elected duties here in South Dakota, hitched to a false slogan from the dictator we just deposed and one of his least competent and coherent minions, all designed to get her more airtime on white-supremacist television.
Instead, I went to my daughter’s final orchestra concert of the school year. (Orchestra was the one class we felt safe sending our daughter to attend in person this year: small group, reliably mask-responsible director, small group of students, large classroom.) I watched and listened to my cellist progeny and a few dozen other black-clad Aberdeen Central musicians play the opening set of the school’s spring pops concert.
Tonight’s program:
Thunderstruck, indeed.
Earlier in my career as a parent, when the third member of this household was a much smaller bundle of very different daily joys, it struck me as a perfectly sensible expression of fatherly duty to show our toddler “Thunderstruck” as part of her education in cultural literacy:
The child seems not to have suffered from the experience. But under her mother’s guidance, she took up the piano and the cello, not the drums and Angus Young’s Gibson SG. And in this century of wonders, our child can listen to thousands of cellists right alongside thousands of rockers from all over the globe… including these two cellists playing AC/DC:
Our tax dollars made it possible for our daughter to do more than watch YouTube and dream. Our public school provided teachers and instruments and opportunities to learn music. Those teachers don’t have time to jet off to propaganda rallies and ideological conferences every other week. They don’t have private video studios to beam themselves onto national talk shows to finagle attention and influence. And they sure as heck aren’t spending their work hours cooking up cataclysmic myths of cultural conflict. They’re too busy coaching bow technique, restringing violins, and, as you may notice in the program clip above, composing their own arrangements of rock songs for strings to teach kids brilliant lessons in applying their classical technique to modern music.
And they are teaching my daughter, who has faced more and more serious challenges than I ever did in my mostly carefree and careless youth, to do something I still cannot do: play the cello.
She can play Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, disco-Beethoven, and AC-frackin’-DC on the cello.
While our Governor daily erodes the quality of life my daughter can enjoy in this state and this nation with her self-serving, teacher-hating malarkey, Aberdeen Central’s orchestra director, Mr. Joseph Berns, is helping craft a lot of splendid music-makers and finer human beings.
Thank a teacher? You bet your sweet bippy—thank a teacher!
Work up a sweat Cory. Noem deserves it.
Every teacher in South Dakota should be angry. (I wanted to use a stronger word).
Congrats to your daughter.
On the cello, Bach’s Prelude cadences within Cello Suite no. 4 remind we liberal aristocrats of the repetetive spewing of false conservative platitudes by Governor Noem.
-Over and over and back over and over and over and back over.
-Nothing new and certainly nothing worthwhile.
To Kovid Kristi, from her “people”:
“I was caught
In the middle of a railroad track
I looked round
And I knew there was no turning back
My mind raced
And I thought what could I do
And I knew
There was no help, no help from you”
Yeah, Chris, but Kristi’s favorite lyrics follow:
Rode down the highway
Broke the limit, we hit the town
Went through to Texas, yeah Texas, and we had some fun
We met some girls
Some dancers who gave a good time
Broke all the rules
Played all the fools….
Thunderstruck is one of the best songs in history, a classic, back when beautiful men wore long gorgeous hair. I think we all miss those simpler times.
I can do without the constant presence of littgle schoolboy uni. Got tiresome after the first video plus I couldn’t understand a single word in the Thunderstruck video.
Cory, may I suggest the band Apocalyptica for you and your daughter’s listening enjoyment? AC/DC is fine, but Metallica really gets the cellos going.
Alison Chesley (as Helen Money or in duo/ group work with Jason Narducy in Jason and Alison and Verbow) also really brings the cello up to rockstar status.
well…for Rock and Roll cello, go to the source. Late 60’s English band the Move, fronted by Jeff Lynne (later ELO and Traveling Wilburys) and unappreciated genius Ron Wood. Never a hit in America but then they had a record label that didn’t know what they had.
well…another great cello…the original “Walk Away Renee” credited to the Left Banke which was actually a collection of studio musicians and high schoolers led by a 17 year old savant named Mike Brown….followed up by “Pretty Ballerina” on the same session.Cello and violin bridge performed by some old classical cats who were in the studio to record a classical album. That was it for Mike Brown…had very odd career though he recorded thousands of hours of original songs he rarely released anything. He’s rock and roll history.
Great post! I’m so glad Aberdeen public schools have been able to keep music programming, and your daughter had this opportunity. Music is such an important part of human life. And nothing beats listening to music made by your F1 generation and friends.