DEATH DID NOT WAIT

Un homme de 63 ans décède dans un accident
sur la RD 1005  ledauphine.com  12/12/11

Un homme---Jay Wormus

We received the news through his daughter. Seems he was killed instantly by another driver who ran into him. Three other people were injured but Jay Wormus was killed.  Darkness was falling at this hour---it happened around 5 pm on Sunday December 11th in the Haute-Savoie, not too far from his home.
Like that, dead. One of those accidents that leaves families gravely injured--four generations of family in Jay's case-- and friends stunned, in pain, disbelieving.
I'm writing this because I must.  The loss of Jay hits the community of music friends very hard.
My previous blog described the World Music Project at the UN Staff Christmas event. 
http://lexieintrator.blogspot.com/2011/12/winter-ball-1955-winter-party-2011.html
There he was, less than forty-eight hours earlier, warming up with Get Your Kicks on Route 66, and then during the concert singing Mack the Knife, one of his favorites, with grit, with feeling......

"........When that shark bites, with his teeth, dear
Scarlet billows start to spread
Fancy gloves though wears Macheath, dear
So there's never a trace of red.

Sunday morning on the sidewalk,
Lies a body oozing life
And someone's creeping around the corner,
Could that someone be Mack the Knife?......."

So help us all, Jay was a good man, loved by so many.    


Obituary plus opportunity to write tributes:    
http://www.hommages.ch/Defunt/65377/Wormus_Jay#avis_129594

Winter Ball 1955/ Winter Party 2011

Palais des Nations 1955


She wears a formal dress, pale yellow silk with thin, dark velvet strips tracing bust and waist, he wears a formal black suit and bow-tie, and both are beautiful. I attend the preparations, cross-legged on their bed, in awe of my parents' tailored splendor and the mixed aroma of Mitsouko and Old Spice.


At the entrance to the ball official photographers are armed with film and phosphorus. Flashbulbs fire and die. Flesh is pressed (hand to hand):  Dr. Marcolino Gomes Candau, Secretary-General of the World Health Organization at the Palais des Nations, greets the guests. Flash!....him. Flash!....her. Flash!....them. Flash! Flash! The women do not remove their white gloves.  Wives are decorative and complete the portrait of the successful professional man in the international sphere. The greeting ceremony is followed by dinner, speeches and a formal ball. It runs according to courteous protocol, smiling and perhaps a bit boozy.


In the 1950s International civil servants were all well-to-do by local standards, living in attractive apartments and houses in Geneva and countryside in a quiet post-war economy: 4.27 Swiss francs to the US dollar. There were permanent contracts. Another reason to smile.


Palais des Nations 2011


People wear black coats, red coats, casual anoraks with fur and without, raincoats, sweaters.  The weather is warm for December, so no one shivers in the slow line snaking around poles with guard tape to keep people in a queue. Between Blackberry messages people debate whether the mild temperature is a result of global warming.
They are not waiting for the coat check. They are waiting to have coats and possessions scanned in an official UN scanner. The entrance is no longer the Main Gate at the Place des Nations. This was shifted years ago to the 'Red Cross Gate' after some demonstrators glided through and over 'security' and occupied one or two conference halls--an embarrassment, to put it mildly.
After the bombing of UN personnel in Iraq, the UN spent a lot of money catching up with reality. Concrete and metal barriers are in evidence, compromising the view of the nineteen-twenties design Assembly Hall building from beyond the gates.


Inside the 'New Building' the party is in full swing. The World Music Project, comprising UN organization employees and associates, is tuning up. Saxophones, trumpets, guitars, bass, drums, violin (John), flutes and a line-up of vocals, plus two (!) huge state of the art mixing tables, huge speakers and huge lights. 


The Serpent space looks like a giant singles bar. Most are under thirty-five. I picture SMSs and tweets: "must party @ UN"  "c u @ bar @ 8". The human noise is overwhelming. The crowd is hungry and thirsty, six people deep at the bars, four deep at the food tables. Better to stay put with one samosa and a friend. There's a generous gastronomic spread with guacamole, smoked salmon, delicate pâté canapés and spreads, and steaming hot tables on the other side of the room. However the party began at 7 pm and the food is all gone by 8:15, except for numerous whole pineapples no one can cut. No more white wine. Young people are still streaming in.
The Director-General of UN Office at Geneva, Mr. Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, gives a brief friendly speech and leaves. The whole space is mobbed and few can navigate from one end to the other.  


The musicians have completed their sound-check*, the music is beginning, and the crowd, though not subdued, will be entertained if they aren't too obssessed with those in front of them on the drinks line. Perhaps they should have brought hip flasks, like in the bad old days of the twentieth century.....
The World Music Project kicks off, delivering rhythmic sambas, gypsy songs, Caribbean, jazz classics and world music....a smorgasbord of styles.
Followed by Kassav' with musique antillaise.


Gloves off.  The dancing begins.
(Anyone know how to waltz?)


*Through no fault of their own, the World Music sound-check began fifteen minutes after they were to begin performing, as the guest band Kassav' had priority. Then not all the sound monitors were functioning.  Considering that half the band couldn't hear the other half the music was remarkably good!

ARCHIMEDES

The Archimedes Palimpsest at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore

Blog en travail

GNOMON: musing on words at 40,000 feet.

I first saw the word Gnomon on Mass Ave in 1968 Cambridge, Massachusetts:  Gnomon Copy with its Art Nouveau door newly sanded to essential oak that swirled with début de siècle élan.   Gnomon sounded like a hunchback who lived in an old cellar, or a half-monster crouching mysteriously in one’s thoughts, a kind of intellectual incubus.  Or a very obscure figure of speech.

I enjoyed not knowing the definition for a few months so I could work on my private glossary.  But of course being a bit of a wordie I did look it up and was almost disappointed to learn gnomon is 

1)   the stable post or piece that casts the shadow on a sundial, the shadow that moves aroun as the sun travels east to west in the day sky;

2)   a line on a parallelogram.

Gnomon Copy was next to Harvard Square.  Students after all-nighters with long essays, doctoral dissertations, needing to have their words reproduced—these were the usual clients.  Copy centers were coming into their own, revolutionized by the invention of the photocopy machine, the ascent of Xerox, the miracle of paper reproduction.  No need for printing presses, stinky purple ink printers, hard to correct stencils, mimeographs and such.

* * *

The gnomon of the parallelogram creates a parallel by its very existence,  that which completes the parallel, lines that never meet up. (And what is it that happens with the curve of space-time when our parallel lines go on to infinity?) 
(Perhaps the secret to why they can go on forever is that they never meet and tangle in the first place, as in a long-distance relationship). 

* * *

The sundial was replaced by the analog clock and then eventually the digital. 

The analog clock is what we know best; but it’s the moving arm, not the shadow that shows the time.

The digital timepiece flips numbers at us.  Defining time with numbers only…

But time’s not a given. We learn now that CERN scientists believe they have discovered neutrinos travelling faster than the speed of light, with additional results and calculations that appear to confirm this.  The measure of our daily science, the speed of light is now fuel for discussion.  Light-years may be redefined. Or superseded (superspeeded?)

* * *

It's 4:30 US time and we are only an hour away from Baltimore.  The sun has been setting for hours, a pink-rose-lavender glow out the right-hand windows of our 767 from Heathrow-- a continuous streak of gorgeous color.  Our plane journeys west and we seem to escort the sun, parallel to it.  The horizon holds no mountains or clouds right now, so the horizon is pure, ending somewhere at the end of our vision.
* * *
A gnomon enables us determine time of day, using light, revealing by shadow.  

* * *

As a small child the night sky scared me because there were planets and moons and stars and galaxies so far away they were part of what I thought of as 'the infinity'.  It was accompanied by fear of space, space without shadow, or space as huge unfathomable shadow, an existential terror; the concreteness of death and the remoteness of something without end.

* * *

I’ve never had a real guru or mentor.  I tried not to listen to my parents. I admired my piano teacher and a number of academics whose paths I crossed, yet I was anti-mentor, and by age 17, not wanting to be guided, was mistrustful and independent-minded, isolated and unprepared.  So be it.   I was lacking a 'gnomon' who could cast a protective shadow, telling me what time it was and why and how one could view it, interpret it.  How to work with science.  How to pray, or how to meditate on it all.

Without a gnomon I was, in fact quite déboussolée --- disoriented, not knowing my magnetic north, not knowing what I wanted to do when I grew up.  

My compass still spins, but not as fast. 

* * *

The lid of my computer stands at 90 degrees, a sort of laptop gnomon. It is computer day when the top is open, the computer awake.  I read, I write. Top closed, it is computer night, there is no gnomon,  only the white apple shining through the silver crust.

* * *

The sunset colors have turned dull, the sky a deep blue. We seem to have caught up with night. The cabin crew is coming around economy class with plastic sandwiches, preparing us to alight on another continent.

                                                           Man as Gnomon......!

Blog-shy: how I (mis)manage my time

So I've been a bit blog-shy for the past couple of weeks. Sometimes I'm too busy, other times, despite the  words arranging themselves in my brain, I don't actually do anything about them, so they either vanish or fester, or in the best case scenario, come to slow maturity like a good cru bourgeois.
I wish.
Some ideas are too intimate for the blogosphere.  Or too over-arching and in need of some supportive architecture, flying buttresses of thought.  Damned if I have the time to build up those buttresses when I'm reinforcing core muscles and abs with my dear slave-driver of a Pilates teacher. But I make time for my Pilates once a week in exchange for English lessons, and we each feel we have a great deal.  There's time for group gym once a week and semi-private gym training once a week, luxuries I accepted when I realized after fifteen years of self-flagellation (not good exercise) I would never do upper body work unless someone made me do it.  Thank you Virginie, thank you Nick. And then there's always the rewarding plat du jour after Pilates, during which I really do teach English, and then the fine cafeteria where I must eat copiously to build up strength for afternoon workouts after Shakespeare class...........There's time for the two choirs and classical voice lessons with a terrific teacher.  There's time to attend John's jazz concerts, visit with friends, help out friends, transport friends, go to MetOpera broadcasts, travel to Paris (last week) to help out family, which turned into a medley of long daily hospital visits with a well-loved relative, and tourism, using my new iphone GPS to navigate on foot, and iphone metro map to navigate the Metro.  Time to read the press in French and English, time for John to read me Underworld by Don deLillo (wow), time to feed nine cats and clean the kittens' litter, do housework & other paperwork obligations I won't bore you with.
I mismanage writing time.  I have blogs blogging in my head, so it's time to get serious about Time for Blogging and Other Writing Projects.


Meanwhile we leave before dawn tomorrow for four days in Spain with dear friends.  So much for serious.  But I am, I really am. Serious.

Le beau château de Paul Claudel. A weekend.

We were invited to stay at the Château de Brangues en groupe--several of us with seeing-eye labradors on- and off-duty cavorting on the lawns.  It's a real castle, the kind that has you dreaming history.....

Our hostess Annabelle is the great-granddaughter of Paul Claudel, the 19th-20th century French writer, poet, Catholic, dignitary, diplomat, playwright, world traveller, académicien and controversial personality.

Politics can look quite different in the version originale. 
To be continued.

In one of the (several) drawing rooms:  Rania on piano and John on fiddle.

Ellen Johnson Sirleaf bis: note on the 1993 Liberia talks in Geneva

Ref.  http://lexieintrator.blogspot.com/2011/10/ellen-johnson-sirleaf.html

As a member of the UN conference secretariat, I don't feel comfortable revealing all of my observations, as I still consider what went on there confidential.  Also--memory may serve, but then again not always.

A clear description of the events can be found in this book:
Building Peace in West Africa: Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea-Bissau 
by Adekeye Adabajo, Lynne Rienner Publishers, Boulder, CO. 2002 192 pp.