Beauty in the Time of Pandemic

Below is a 3:30-minute video of a small but momentous occasion.  My son Aaron—a wonderful musician and talented teacher and conductor—leading the Gage Middle School orchestra, Riverside, California.  He’s been teaching there for 20 years and thousands of students. When he first got to Ri.....continued>
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Pentecost Means No “Supremacies”

We celebrate the Church’s “birth” on Pentecost Sunday, the day the promised Holy Spirit arrived.  This year we celebrated on May 20th, a Sunday where at my church—one of the most diverse in America—its large Filipino group took charge of the service.  The VIDEO below sh.....continued>
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Ornette Coleman: Lessons in Freedom (excerpt)

This is the first of 16 short excerpts from my radio series Voices and Freedoms: A History of Jazz.  Based on my book of the same name, the series (and book) were produced at the University of Virginia in the nation’s Bicentennial Year.  The show, syndicated by the Intercollegiate Broadcasting.....continued>
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Ronald L. Fair: “We Can’t Breathe”

May 2020 Update:  Another “I-Can’t-Breathe” incident. I could not watch the video of the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 26, 2020.  But I heard it while my wife described to me what she was seeing: a police man with his knee on the neck of an already-subdued bl.....continued>
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Songs by DAN GUZMAN: “CBS”

“CBS” (COOL BLACK SICKNESS) a song DAN GUZMAN co-wrote and performs with Brad Hoskins.  Fat Cats, Moses in the desert with the Great I Am, bleeding seas, and things tumbling from the sky.  Apocalyptic dread.  Cool grooves.  It not only sounds good—it&#.....continued>
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VIDEO: Sen. Dick Durbin visits Emmanuel House

Update:  IN APRIL 2018, EMMANUEL HOUSE MERGED WITH LONG-TIME PARTNER ORGANIZATION THE JOSEPH CORPORATION TO BECOME The Neighbor Project.  THIS INCREASED THE NUMBER OF FAMILIES SERVED FROM AROUND 25 AT THE TIME OF SENATOR DURBIN’S VISIT TO NOW, IN 2020, A NUMBER APPROACHING 3000.  WATCH A VIDEO.....continued>
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The New Neighbor Project

Posted on March 29, 2025 by Richard Guzman

The mission and core values are still solidly the same, but The Neighbor Project—a social change organization, part of which started as our family’s small foundation—has a new website and new branding.  These are cleaner and more direct, I think, and more forcefully show how home ownership builds up communities and family wealth.  How this also develops leadership, and how The Neighbor Project has been honored for this with, among many other things, a 2016 citation as one of the “Top 100 Most Innovative” social change enterprises in the world, and a 2024 $2 million gift from Yield Giving, MacKenzie Scott’s philanthropic organization.

Opening shot of the VIDEO below

But you never gain something without losing some things, so this post—as part of this site’s mission to preserve the history of Bryan House, Emmanuel House, and now The Neighbor Project—looks to preserve some of the old stuff.  (Go HERE for a compilation of most of that history.)  The VIDEO below, was used for years on the old website’s landing page and played many times at Neighbor Project galas and other events to introduce or re-introduce The Neighbor Project to everyone.  I narrate it and remember so clearly the afternoon I recorded it at the Zero Gravity studios in downtown Aurora.  My first take, I tried to sound so “professional,” but, said the recording tech, “You’re sounding a little like a voice from Star Wars.  Try it again in your own voice.”  So I did, easy and natural.  They had planned to use other voices reading different parts of the script, but in the end I guess I sounded good enough alone.  Cheryl Pacillio, a key member of The Neighbor Project staff, always said it made her misty-eyed every time she heard the first line of the narration: “What is a city without its people?”

And speaking of Cheryl.  The Video below also opened The Neighbor Project’s first, and so far only, virtual gala, which was streamed on September 19, 2020, the first year of our pandemic, which forced many things to go virtual. Watch the full virtual gala HERE.  It’s 47 minutes long, hosted by Cheryl and Peter Burchard, our fabulous live auctioneer at earlier Neighbor Project (and Emmanuel House) galas.  The video is itself a mini-history of The Neighbor Project and contains several other wonderful videos.  There’s one explaining Illinois’ first Financial Empowerment Center, sponsored by The Neighbor Project and the City of Aurora.  There’s a section honoring our long-standing relationship with Exelon Corporation.  There’s a moving video about Jerria Donelson, a key Neighbor Project staff member who suddenly realizes that Neighbor Project programs—some of which see oversaw!—could lead to home ownership and a more secure future even for herself.  There’s one of our earlier video’s “Kai’s Story,” about Burmese refugee Pao Kai, who started out at Bryan House, the earliest incarnation of what is now The Neighbor Project—after Bryan House became Emmanuel House and Emmanuel House merged with The Joseph Corporation to form The Neighbor Project.  And there’s executive director Rick Guzman’s talk “Every Person’s God-Given Ability to Contribute,” the best single place to catch the growth, vision and values of The Neighbor Project.  (It’s also on this site HERE).

Rick and Desiree Guzman started Bryan House in 2007 as a living memorial to Rick’s youngest brother Bryan Emmanuel Guzman, whom we lost in 2006 just days after his 21st birthday.  From its earliest days as a small foundation to today as The Neighbor Project, a foundation and social change enterprise honored as one of the best in the nation, I remember more keenly every day that it was all born out of the pain of losing my youngest child.

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Whales, and An Ethic for the Age of AI

Posted on February 24, 2025 by Richard Guzman

The graphic for Addrienne LaFrance’s Atlantic article.

Below is a 3:48 highlights VIDEO of a recent trip my wife and I took to Cabo San Lucas, specifically to watch whales.  We were not disappointed.  But aside from the Video, this commentary isn’t really about whales.  It’s my take on Adrienne LaFrance’s article in the July/August 2023 Atlantic titled “In Defense of Humanity.” As the subheading says, “We need a cultural and philosophical movement to meet the rise of artificial superintelligence.”  It’s more nuanced and sophisticated than my summary, so I’d urge you to read it for yourself.  It’s not long.  It amounts to four points from which a possible ethics for the age of AI could arise.  Whales are an illustration of Point Four below.

1.  TRANSPARENCY:  If you’ve used AI to create anything, just tell us you did. Writers like Ayad Akhtar, who won a 2013 Pulitzer for his play Disgraced, are already openly making AI a part of their writing process, as are many visual artists. As a former writing professor, I would just ask students if they used AI and have them describe their process of using it at the end of their papers. A law or an ethic of transparency would do much to warn consumers about AI-generated pictures purporting to be of someone doing this or that, including posing naked.  Short of banning such pictures or hunting down and prosecuting each offender—which would be the best solution, of course—a statement saying something like “AI was used to generate this image,” or “this sound,” would give consumers important information and afford victims some semblance of protection from the beginning.  This point is related to Point Three below.

2.  PERSONAL CONNECTION:  How convenient to meet on Zoom.  Yet this should not take away from meeting in person, face-to-face. Live, personal contact should be seen as a necessity. This point is related to Point Four below.

3.  PRIVACY:  LeFrance says, “privacy is the key to preserving our humanity.” On a personal level, this means learning that you don’t have to share everything you’ve ever done or thought.  This calls for a measure of modesty, a growing sense of your inner vs. public self, and for a careful drawing of lines that will protect you and those closest to you from outside intrusion.

4.  PERSONAL WITNESSING:  Whenever possible, go see things for yourself and through your own eyes.  Do not rely on a virtual reality tour of Rome, but go there yourself.  Which brings me back to the Video below.  How long I’ve wanted to actually see whales in the wild. I watched films, including one of my oldest son’s family going whale watching in kayaks and having a humpback surface no more than 10 feet from them. So during one of the coldest days in 2025’s Chicagoland winter, we were able to fly off to Cabo San Lucas and experience what the Video below shows.  What a privilege.  And how privileged was I. Not everyone can do that, or actually step onto Vatican Square in Rome, as I was also able to do many years ago, but the more you can see with, and through, your own eyes, with no intervening technology, the better.  Actually see your neighborhood, your backyard, the people closest to you, and even those who are strangers.

For the Video below, I tried very hard not to watch through the lens of my phone’s camera, but just point the phone in the general direction I was looking.  I was thrilled that I managed to capture a lot of what I saw with my own eyes.  There were the breaches, the waving fins, the lifted tails gliding gracefully back down under the water, the simple arching of the backs so close to us.  Most of all, as we headed back to dock, the captain of our little rubber boat spotted a mother whale teaching her calf to slap its tail down, smacking the water to say, Hello, I’m Here to other whales, or to say, Stay Away to predators, as well as a host of other essential things.  The calf tried but was only weakly successful at first.  It also breached instead of showing the mother he was trying to master the lesson. The mother seemed to remain unimpressed by this and continued smacking her tail down with both grace and splashiness until the calf caught on and smacked his tail.  It was far less graceful, far less splashy, but soon they both swam off with a lesson just beginning to be learned.

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Elitism and Elections

Posted on January 30, 2025 by Richard Guzman

The Atlantic is a magazine I think everyone should read, even though its analyses are often shot through with a kind of elitism it has often critiqued itself.  For example, the cover of one of its 2018 issues (at left) highlights its reporting on America’s growing aristocracy, which creates a “gilded future for the top 10 percent, and the loss of opportunity for everyone else.”  The January 2025 issue contains four essays on the 2024 election. They’re brilliant and need to be taken seriously.  But they also suffer from an elitism that clouds their reaction to some of the major reasons Donald Trump won, partly because of stunning gains among groups of people—the young, women, people of color—you wouldn’t have thought would vote Trump in such numbers.

George Packer’s “The End of Democratic Delusions” explores the Democrats’ misunderstanding of Identity Politics.  Just because you’re a person of color doesn’t mean you’ll always vote Democratic, etc.  Sophie Gilbert’s “The Gender War Is Here” focuses on—well, gender—though it struck me as somewhat schizophrenic, saying, on the one hand that this is going to happen to women, but that women don’t have to let these things happen to them.  It ends: “He won’t ruin women, but he will absolutely destroy a generation of men who take his vile messaging to heart.”  David Frum explores the new administration’s foreign policy, especially the threatened tariffs.  And Helen Lewis explores the Joe Rogan phenomenon, a testament to the power of new media and the continuing power of maleness.  I’d call it “patriarchy,” but part of my point here is to steer away, for a moment at least, from what many perceive to be “elitist language.”

These pieces all focused by and large on deep, underlying issues.  But in one of his many post-election interviews, Trump said, “I won this election because of one word: ‘groceries.’”  Not one of the Atlantic analyses mentioned groceries.  When, during the campaign, I got texts from James Carville asking for money to bolster the Harris-Walz campaign, I couldn’t help but think: Are you kidding? You invented the phrase, “It’s the economy, stupid!”  It’s groceries.

Not to say that groceries is less deep than misunderstanding identity politics.  Abraham Mazlow’s popular Self-Actualization Pyramid puts “Physiological Needs” and “Safety Needs” at the bottom of a pyramid which puts “Self-Actualization” needs at the very top.  Perhaps the pyramid should be turned on its head, or perhaps it shouldn’t be a pyramid at all but a circle. Elites tend to take Self-Actualization more seriously than groceries.  And they also tend to forget that Trump’s appeal in fact goes well beyond groceries: that abortion continues to divide the nation, that a kind of cultural trendiness has crept into LGBTQ issues that alarms many people (even in the LGBTQ community itself), that many of us rail against government inefficiency all the time. Etc.  The biggest disconnect in all this for me is that despite being so against the cultural elite, MAGA nation seems not to rail much against the economic elite, which so many of its members definitely are not part of.  The growing wealth gap in our nation is one of those deep things that needs attention.  That may be too much of an elitist concern for the moment, but it seems to me closer to groceries than self-actualization. It’s also true that it’s harder to draw a direct correlation between billionaires and groceries.

There’s also a fifth essay in the January 2025 issue appearing about one-third of the way through.  It has nothing directly to do with the election but might have been included by design anyway.  It’s Caitlin Flanagan’s lovely tribute to her parents and to the great Nobel Laureate Irish poet Seamus Heaney.  Its title comes from one of Heaney’s most famous lines: “Walk on air against your better judgment,” which is an invitation to hope even though hope itself seems to go against your better judgment.  She says Seamus Heaney “didn’t believe in a force as mere as optimism.  He believed in hope, “something far greater and more powerful.” She also quotes lines from his The Cure at Troy, which is a good way to end this commentary on the election as so many people on both sides of our stark divisions look out on what they believe is a terrible, almost apocalyptic, future.

So hope for a great sea-change
On this side of revenge.
Believe that a further shore

Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles
And cures and healing wells.

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Subterranean Fun

Posted on December 30, 2024 by Richard Guzman

Vana Liya’s shows remain flowing and gently strong, but they’re getting more fun, too, as witnessed in the VIDEO below of her October 2024 show at The Subterranean in Chicago, her second in the city this year.  The video captures 8-minutes of the fun, beginning with her signature song “Gold.” Everything moves along, probably as it has concert after concert, but when it comes time for Daniel and Derek (aka Man of the Forest) to do their neat solos in harmony, Daniel suddenly flips the guitar over his head and plays it upside down as it rests on his shoulders.

The first time I experienced this live was when I was in high school and directed the year’s talent show.  A band—Sato and the Mellotones, I think—were auditioning and were really good.  They were going to make it.  But halfway through their song the guitarist flips his guitar over his head, at which my assistant director, Phil Brooks, jumped up and shouted, “No! No! That cheapens your act!”  I didn’t agree, and neither did Sato, who said, stunned, almost pleading, “But he’s got to do that because next he picks it with his teeth.”

Well, Daniel stopped short of that, thankfully, but it was good to see him having fun on stage.  I think he’s a great guitarist, and I still point people to this YouTube Video of him playing “Way Down Low” at the Stork Club in Oakland, California, as a prime example of someone building a beautiful, improvised solo.  It’s brilliant.  And he’s played brilliantly for a long time, but early on he seemed shy, almost stepping out of the spotlight sometimes when he played.  Being in Vana Liya’s band has made him more of a showman, perhaps a secondary concern in music, but still a crucially important part of making live music spark.

Vana Liya and the band were second on the bill to KBong and Johnny Cosmic, and things really start sparking when KBong himself comes out to finish off Vana’s “Feeling Good.”  “It all started with him.”  She says something like that because it was KBong who took her on her first tour many years ago, and why, when she’s doing “Feeling Good” on the acoustic Sugar Shack Sessions, she says, “Shout out to my boy KBong.”  So behind the good fun there was a long history of togetherness, something that adds to the fun a deep joy.

♦ Go HERE for more of Dan Guzman’s music, as well as music from others in our family.

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Awards: A Father’s Perspective

Posted on December 3, 2024 by Richard Guzman

Below is an 8-minute VIDEO of Rick Guzman’s remarks after receiving one of his alma mater’s 2024 Alumni of the Year awards.  It was a stellar group, including a doctor, a widely published poet, and a 3-star general, which explains Rick’s first comment: “I’ve never followed a general before.”  His brief remarks beautifully combined several themes he has honed over the past few years when talking about The Neighbor Project, especially the ideas that you have to believe in your neighbors enough to invest in them, and you have to help them become the leaders and change makers they are inherently capable of becoming. The links below take you to other videos where these ideas are explained more fully.

Here I’d like to expand on another perspective, the one of a father watching his sons mature and become those change makers themselves.  My perspective is grounded in profound gratitude. When my youngest son Bryan died at the age of 21, my grief was mixed with an overwhelming sense of privilege.  How fortunate was I, I felt, to have had the luck of being this person’s father. I feel this way about each one of the boys.  Rick, Aaron, and Daniel followed me in speaking at Bryan’s memorial service, and afterwards, Hal Wilde, then president of North Central College, came up to me with tears in his eyes and said, “You’re the luckiest man in the room.”  I told him later that it was a moment I’ll never forget because for me it was a truth that touched the core of my being.

I believe parents take too much credit for the things their children do well, and also too much blame for things that don’t work out as well.  In the end, especially when it comes to their successes, it comes down to the fact that they were born with something outstanding in them. Of course, we play some role in nourishing and shaping that something, but finally it’s mainly them.  We’re just fortunate enough to be at their side as that something matures. Rick’s voice breaks slightly as he mentions me knowing how important it is to spend your life equipping someone to be the best leader they can be.  Doing that is one of the major themes of his career.  However, I never actually spoke to him directly about doing that.

My intellectual patron saint is James Baldwin, and it was Daniel who once reminded me of something Baldwin wrote: “Children may not listen to their parents, but they never fail to observe what they do.”  Many times I have talked directly to my sons about some big life issues and what they should and should not be doing, but it’s a simple truth bordering on cliché that they probably learn more by just watching you.  They learn both small things and the large important things in life.  Daniel once sent me a picture of his Christmas tree.  It showed him pointing to simple silver balls hanging near the trunk on the inside.  He wrote, “Brings out the inner glow,” just as he had heard me say and do when decorating our trees for years.  Aaron once told me he said to his daughter Grace, “I did this with my Dad, and you’ll do this too with your little one.” In church, on a Father’s Day, the pastor asked if anyone would like to say anything about their Father.  These moments sometimes backfire when nobody has anything to say, but Aaron spoke up right away, saying, “When I think of my Dad I think of all the time he spent with us, watching our sports and concerts, playing catch, taking us to Wrigley Field….”

My profound gratitude is also for these supposedly small times that really add up in the end. I can’t say that I enjoyed every single minute, but in retrospect that’s what I tell my sons and all parents to try to do.  Enjoy every minute: because one day you may be a bit bored watching your umpteenth baseball game, but the next moment—because time does seem to go that fast—you’ll be watching your child conduct an orchestra, play a concert, or make a speech like the one below.

♦ The best introduction to The Neighbor Project’s vision—including the idea of believing in your neighbor enough to invest in them—is Rick’s short talk “Every Person’s God-Given Ability to Contribute.”  See Aaron conducting a beautiful piece, which features his daughter Grace.  And see Daniel in concert.

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Filipino Flag Raised in Aurora

Posted on November 1, 2024 by Richard Guzman

As part of mayor Richard Irvin’s One Aurora initiative, the Filipino flag was raised in Aurora, IL, on October 18th, 2024.  It was only the third time this has happened in the entire country:  in New York, 2022, in Los Angeles, 2023, and now in Aurora.  The VIDEO below shows about half of the full 23-minutes of video I shot on that day.  You can see that full video HERE, and read Steve Lord’s article for the Aurora Beacon/Chicago Tribune HERE.

In the full video you’ll get to see all of Kayla Tejero’s rendition of America’s national anthem, all of Lou Ella Rose Cabalona’s singing of the Philippine national anthem, all of Rev. Nancy Abiera’s invocation, all of mayor Irvin’s proclamation, and more of Clayton Muhammad’s wonderful emceeing.  Though I missed entirely a funny moment when Mark Taghap, Aurora’s chief information security officer, apologized to his parents for not becoming a nurse—a theme recurring throughout the ceremoney—The VIDEO below does capture a lot.  I’d call your attention to Abbey Tiu-Kemph’s history lesson, for example.  She was the one who mentioned that this was only the third Filipino flag raising in all of America.  “It’s only now that we’re being recognized,” she said, “but we’ve been a part of American culture for a long, long time.  This is a very signifying moment.”  She, like Clayton Muhammad noted that the first Filipinos landed in America on October 18th, the exact day of this ceremony—but in 1587!  More important, she gave historical context for why so many Filipinos are nurses and recommended a new documentary, Nurse Unseen, about how many Filipino nurses took care of COVID patients—and died doing so—during the height of our pandemic.  It was an emotional lesson for us all.

The VIDEO below also shows some of the many special guests who showed up.  Tejero, who sang the American national anthem, is, fittingly, a nurse, but also an author, model, and international performer, having won Aurora’s first Aurora’s Got Talent competition in 2012.  Lou Ella Rose is lead of the SamaSama Project, the Philippines’ premiere folk, pop, rock fusion band.  Besides the mayor, the deputy mayor and several alderpersons, were there, as well as many other leaders from the Chicagoland Filipino community.  I was even recognized, which I didn’t expect, and Rick gave me a shoutout as well at the end of his short remarks on being recognized with one of several PEARL awards.  (Steve Lord’s story ends with this detail.) The Philippines is often called the Pearl of the Pacific, though this PEARL stands for Philippine Excellence, Aurora Resilience, and Leadership.  It was Rick’s second big recognition in as many days, the night before being honored as one of the alumni of the year at his alma mater, North Central College. (Watch his acceptance speech HERE.)

PEARL Award winners. See the Steve Lord article (at link above) for full names.

All in all, it was a wonderful ceremony.  We Filipinos are often in-between people.  We’re caught in between pride in our homeland and in being Filipinos in the first place, and pride in being Americans, though we often feel lost in the vast juggernaut of American history.  This flag raising helps us find ourselves, though not entirely. Part of our uneasy stance is, in fact, that we have been so close to America for so long, and that closeness often compromises our sense of what being Filipino means.  Early on, the closeness was so tight that Americans referred to us as “little brown brothers,” a phrase both racist and endearing.  I’ve written a lot about this, and you can read some of that writing at the link below.  What comes to mind now is a line the late Anthony Bourdain says in what is perhaps his greatest television show, his episode on Manila.  “Beware pampered American rock star.  At any moment in the Philippines, there’s at least one person, and probably many more, who can step in and do your job better than you can, and with only about an hour of rehearsal.”  We’re often better at doing American music than Americans themselves.  But does this mean we’re too close to see clearly what makes us, at our core, Filipinos in the first place.  Many times it does.  Abbey Kemph mentioned the American program of “benign assimilation” towards the Filipino people, a program that in many ways worked way too well.

♦ See a partial index of all my writing on the Philippines HERE.

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Let’s Pretend

Posted on July 23, 2024 by Richard Guzman

Below is a Video of a sermon whose title (“Let’s Pretend”) is taken from one of the chapters of C.S. Lewis’ book Mere Christianity.  The book is a compilation of radio shows Lewis did during World War II.  Some of his explanations of the basic things Christians believe don’t hold up in retrospect, but the book helped me a lot when I first joined the faith. The title of this chapter also fit in with the special Sunday this was, when the church’s Filipino members of the congregation conducted the whole service and the luncheon afterwards, complete with lechon, the roasted pig delicacy Filipinos are famous for, as well as me preaching the sermon.

“Let’s Pretend” struck me immediately as appropriate for this Sunday because it also fit in with one of the main qualities of Philippine culture: it’s musicality, especially it’s uncanny ability to do Western music better than most Western people can do it.  I’ve written about this before.  In “Filipinos in the Land of the Hyper-Real” I use Arjun Appadurai’s phrase “hyper-competent reproduction” to understand this, and I provide links to outstanding examples of Filipinos out-doing their Western counterparts, I believe.  There’s Arnel Pineda, the Filipino singer—once homeless and singing on the streets—who is now the lead singer of Journey.  There’s Charise doing Celine Dion doing “My Heart Will Go On and On.”  The video accompanying this article features Pops Fernandez and Martin Nivera doing “Beauty and the Beast.”  I also provide a link to what I believe was the late Anthony Bourdain’s best show, “Manila,” the first show of the seventh season of his Parts Unknown series.  Use these two links to get a fuller sense of the Filipino’s uncanny ability to imitate Western music…plus more.

There’s just a short step from “imitation” to “pretending,” the latter being I deeper word for what’s happening.  And there are at least two senses of the word “pretending,” one negative, one extraordinarily positive.  Negatively, to “pretend” is to act in ways that cover up the truth that you are not really generous, or patient, or caring.  You may in fact be the opposite of these things and are trying to fool people for your own advantage.  But “pretending” in the positive sense is when you act in a certain way in order to eventually become generous, or patient, or caring in the end.  It’s a kind of practice to become those positive things, and, in the Christian faith, we especially “pretend” to be like Jesus by imitating him.  I focused on one thing in particular, knowing there are many more things about Jesus we should emulate, practice at, or “pretend” to be in order to become more like him.  That one thing was peace.  Among the lectionary readings for the day was the 23rd Psalm, and at the beginning I played my take on the 23rd Psalm, one of my earliest compositions, “Lay Your Head Down.”  The 23rd Psalm may be the most peaceful passage in the entire Bible, and we could do worse than turning to it often to begin to become as peaceful as Jesus was, even when pressured from all sides.

But there’s a final twist to this “pretending.”  In his “Let’s Pretend” chapter, C.S. Lewis says this: ” In a sense you might say it is God who does the pretending. The Three-Personal God, so to speak, sees before Him in fact a self-centered, greedy, grumbling, rebellious human animal. But He says, ‘Let us pretend that this is not a mere creature, but our Son. It is like Christ in so far as it is a Man, for He became Man. Let us pretend that it is also like Him in Spirit. Let us treat him as if it were what in fact it is not. Let us preltend in order to make the pretence into a reality.'”  God pretending we could be like Christ is, for me, the very definition of what Grace is.  The reading from Ephesians, one of three scriptures used this Sunday, speaks of God changing us by showering us with Grace.

Besides the reading of the scriptures of the day, the Video below opens with an excerpt of a Filipino choir singing the popular devotional song “Ang Tanging Alay Ko” (My Only Offering).  Thanks to all my Filipino brothers and sisters for making this a truly beautiful service, and especially to Mila and Boyette Valdez who led us in putting it all together.

♦ Go HERE for a complete list of sermons, like “Pentecost Means No ‘Supremacies,’” “Sacred Doing,” and “Theology and Race.”

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The Gateways Festival Orchestra: The Color of Concert Music

Posted on May 8, 2024 by Richard Guzman

The event described below is part of a series of initiatives of the Anti-Racism Taskforce of the Northern Illinois Conference of the United Methodist Church.  See below for details.

The color of concert music is white. Its gender: male.  So goes the popular perception.  To start a conversation on the nature of exclusion, I would often ask my students if they could name a woman composer of “classical,” concert, or symphonic music.  Over decades of asking I only ever got one answer: Clara Schumann, Robert Schumann’s sister.  What could this mean? I asked—That women are simply incapable of writing concert music?  The same could be said of blacks in classical, symphonic, or concert music.  Are they, too, incapable or have they been kept out my multiple systems of exclusion?  The answer is the latter.  Against all odds, however, they’ve been involved in formal concert music for centuries.  The Video below combines two videos: first, a short explanation of the Gateways Music Festival; second an excerpt from Symphony #3 in C minor, by Florence Price, who is both a woman and black.

The Gateways Music Festival started in 1995 in St. Louis, with the goal of bringing together black, professional, classical musicians from around the country to form various ensembles, including a full orchestra, and to educate and transform public perceptions through the power of performance.  In mid-April of this year, we were at Chicago’s iconic Symphony Center, home of the Chicago Symphony, to hear the Gateways Festival Orchestra.  As Andrew Laing, principal clarinetist of the Phoenix Symphony says in the video below, “The Gateways Festival Orchestra opens a line of enquiry with the audience even before we’ve played a single note.” The orchestra is all black.  It may also be the finest orchestra I have ever heard, even including—though I border on heresy here—the Chicago Symphony itself.

That evening the Gateways Festival Orchestra played Worship: A Concert Overture by Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson, named after one of the earliest black composers to gain considerable fame: Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (not to be confused with the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge).  The person who championed Coleridge-Taylor was Edward Elgar, the famous, white English composer, so Elgar’s Enigma Variations, was on the program, followed by Margaret Bonds’ Montgomery Variations.  To close out the concert, the great a cappella group Take 6 took the stage doing several numbers on their own and several backed by the full orchestra as well.

The orchestra’s current conductor, the seemingly ever-present Anthony Parnther, spoke of Chicago’s central place in black concert music.  In the video below you’ll see Michael Morgan conducting the Gateways Festival Orchestra, and it was his appointment, by Georg Solti, as assistant conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra that made Morgan the most visible black conductor in the United States. Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson also spent significant time in Chicago, perhaps most notably when he was appointed artistic director of the performance program at the Center for Black Music Research at Columbia College Chicago.  Florence Price composed her most significant pieces in Chicago after moving there from Little Rock and becoming an important figure in the Black Chicago Renaissance.  She lived for a while with her good friend Margaret Bonds, whose Montgomery Variations graced the program we saw at Symphony Center.  In 1932 the two Chicagoans, Price and Bonds, gained national recognition when they came in first and second in the Wannamaker Prize for Composition.  On June 15, 1933, the Chicago Symphony premiered Price’s  Symphony #1, making her the first black woman, and one of the first women regardless of race, to have a composition played by a major American orchestra.  One critic called the symphony, “a faultless work, a work that speaks its own message with restraint and yet with passion…worthy of a place in the regular symphonic repertoire.” “So…” said Anthony Parnther, “playing in Chicago tonight is a kind of homecoming.”

Towards the end of the first video I excerpted below, Paul Burgett, Chair of the Board of the Gateways Music Festival, and Vice President and senior advisor to the President of Rochester University, says, “I personally struggle, and always have, with a sense of hopelessness about race in America.  But when I see [the Gateways Festival Orchestra] on that stage, I think, Maybe…Just maybe.  It feels really good to see those people on stage and it eases my sense of hopelessness.”  The beauty we witnessed that night on the Symphony Center stage is both all we need to behold without further commentary, but also yet another testament to overcoming great odds with bold, shining excellence.

♦  This event is part of the Northern Illinois Conference Presents series, now in its third year.  For more details go to:  Art and Culture Series (2024), Film Series (2023), Speakers Series (2022).  For the first event of the Film Series I did an introductory talk at the Illinois Holocaust Museum on racism and images of blacks in films. Watch this Here or on the Film Series link above.  For the final event of the Speakers Series I interviewed Chabon Kernell, executive director of the Native American Comprehensive Plan of the United Methodist Church.  Watch this live-streamed interview at the Speakers Series link above.

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At the Band Festival

Posted on April 22, 2024 by Richard Guzman

What a joy it was to be able to attend several performances during one day of the Orchestra and Band Festival of the Riverside Unified School District in California this late March 2024.  The 8-minute Video below shows two performances. First, the Gage Middleschool band, conducted by my son Aaron, playing Randall Standridge’s “Fields of Clover.”  Aaron has taught in the RUSD for over 20 years, creating a deep, lasting legacy—which brings us to the second performance in the video below: the Poly High School band, directed by Arwen Hernandez, playing Ralph Vaughn Williams’ “Rhosymedre.”  “We have to see this,” Aaron said, “because these are my Covid Kids.”  It’s a magnificent performance (as is “Fields of Clover”) showing how much you can grow through difficult times.  Ralph Ellison, author of the great novel Invisible Man, called the Blues a “technique of survival,” an idea that can be extended to most, if not all, of the arts.

It goes well beyond survival mode, however.  It elevates our humanity in profound ways. Elsewhere on this site, in “Beauty in the Time of Pandemic,” I write again about Aaron and another one of his groups that helped build community in the midst of our Covid crisis.  In “Art, Rhythm, Intuition, and Social Change” I write about how art helps produce some of the most fundamental characteristics of great leaders.  Here I just wanted to say how beautiful it all was, and how profoundly it must have affected all those students playing in the Gage and Poly bands to have created such beauty together.  I just wanted to say how meaningful if was for everyone there, both the teachers and the audience, to experience that beauty together with those students.

We’ve had a small place in Sedona, Arizona, for well over 20 years.  There are crystals everywhere, and salt baths, and studios for taking pictures of your aura.  Most of all there are vortexes, special places on the earth where the universe’s cosmic energies align in special ways.  The Great Pyramids is a vortex spot.  Machu Pichu is too. And Sedona supposedly has more of these than any place on earth.  I was once up on Bell Rock—a mountain our family calls Bryan’s Mountain—when an Italian man asked me, “Is this the vortex?”  Yes, I replied, and he burst into tears, sobbing, “I knew it. I knew it.”  I’ve gotten somewhat adjusted to Sedona’s New Age loopiness, and don’t necessarily disbelieve, but when people ask me about cosmic alignments, I usually say, Well all of this could also be explained by beauty.  Sedona is just beautiful.  The beauty both stuns you and gives you a sense of peace and oneness.  On his first visit, my brother Joe, who had suffered insomnia for years, woke up his first morning there at 9:00 a.m. profoundly rested. “What the hell just happened?” he said.  Could have been vortexes, but for sure it was beauty. In my over-40-year career in college teaching I often asked my students why they were there in the first place.  A great education gives you many things, I would say, but to access its real depth ask yourself two questions: Do I have a greater hunger for beauty? Do I have a greater passion to serve.  Beauty in the widest sense, and serving, too, because these are deeply interrelated.  So justice is beautiful, and serving to help turn injustice to justice is beautiful.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, the old saying goes, which doesn’t mean that the beautiful is totally relative just because it’s deeply personal.  For me the two pieces below were beautiful not just as music, but also because I got to see one of my sons conduct and got to see his legacy in the high school band later that afternoon.  He’s a beautiful conductor as well, fluid and graceful, and I especially liked when his left hand flashed fully open to coax a swelling, blossoming sound from his band.  More than that, his daughter Grace, our granddaughter, helped highlight their band’s performance when she played the opening clarinet duet in “Fields of Clover” with first clarinetist Desiree Vargas.  She’s just in 7th grade but is in advanced band already and loves it so much she wants, she says, to be a music teacher like her Dad.  What a beautiful moment when, at the end of “Fields of Clover,” he has both Desiree and Grace stand. He tries to get his French Horn player to stand, too, but that student, says Aaron, is usually off in his own world, and Aaron just smiles and takes a bow for everyone.

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The Neighbor Project Recieves $2 Million Grant

Posted on March 29, 2024 by Richard Guzman

Note:  In addition to the honor reported below, read about how The Neighbor Project’s precursor, Emmanuel House, was named one of the Top 100 Most Innovative social change organizations in world in 2016, and how executive director Rick Guzman was recognized as the Emerging Leader of the Year in 2023.  These and many other honors and accomplishments mark The Neighbor Project as one of the finest organizations of its kind in the world.

 

The VIDEO below shows around 15 minutes of a 34 minute news conference announcing another momentous event for The Neighbor Project (TNP): receiving a $2 million grant from Yield Giving, the organization of billionaire philanthropist MacKenzie Scott.  I urge you to watch a video of the entire press conference because what’s been left out may be as important as what’s been left in.

The story took up much of the front page of Tribune-owned Aurora Beacon and was widely covered in Chicagoland media. Go to the Yield Giving website for more coverage, as well as this group’s philosophy on giving and who to give to. Yield Giving was established by MacKenzie Scott.

TNP’s executive director Rick Guzman announces the award and details the selection process before turning things over to four staff members who read some of the criteria for the award and some comments from peer reviewers who graded TNP on how well they met those criteria. I fade out after David Blancas, Chief Equity and Operating Officer, opens his remarks on how peers graded TNP on equity.  During her portion of the news conference Cynthia Rica, Networked Savings Program Manager, read a review which said every community should have a program like TNP.  Miguel Rivera, Director of Property Management and Real Estate, read a review saying, “It was really a pleasure to read this application” because of the talent and deep knowledge of the staff.  So in the interest of time only Jerria Donelson’s remarks were fully included. Jerria has been with TNP for a long time, even during the years when it was just Emmanuel House. She read comments asking how well the community was represented in TNP organization, included those who had been in its programs.  Jerria was a graduate who has risen to a manager position, Homebuying Counselor Program Manager.  She’s brought other family members and friends into TNP’s programs. It was a moving tribute from a long-time friend.  “The Neighbor Project has brought generational wealth into my family,” she said.

Rick Guzman’s comments were marked by five words: “gratitude,” “responsibility,” “leverage,” “investment,” and “partnerships.”  “We can’t afford to lose a penny,” he says.  “We don’t just plan to double this money’s effects but to grow it exponentially.” He’ll do it partially by investing in the partners that helped get TNP where it is today, partners like The Community Fund, the City of Aurora, and The Dunham Foundation.  His gratitude to them glowed. “We literally would not exist without the Dunham Fund. It was the Dunham Fund that suggested Emmanuel House and The Joseph Corporation merge [to form The Neighbor Project], then gave us a grant that put us on a firm financial footing.” In giving thanks for partners and saying a substantial part of this $2 million was going to be invested in them, Guzman also talked about the programs it has started with those partners. For example, with the Community Fund there is now a Closing the Gap program, aimed at giving extra help to bridge people into home ownership, and in particular aimed at closing the immense racial wealth gap between whites and blacks.

Again, what’s been left out may be as important as what’s been left in, so you’re urged to watch the video of the entire news conference.  You may also look at TNP’s full, written press release on The Neighbor Project website, or Here on this site.

MacKenzie Scott

In his thank you’s Rick acknowledges his wife Desiree, who co-founded Bryan House with Rick nearly two decades ago as a living memorial to Rick’s youngest brother Bryan Emmanuel Guzman. He acknowledges his step-mom, Linda, my wife.  And me, too: “his greatest cheerleader.” In the toast ending the conference he thanks TNP’s newest donor, MacKenzie Scott.

This award is the third major award for the Emmanuel House / The Neighbor Project organization. In 2016 Emmanuel House was named one of the “Top 100 Most Innovative” Social Change Organizations” in the world.  In 2023, Rick Guzman received the “Emerging Leader Award” from the national Neighbor Works organization.  And now this.  The Neighbor Project is now consistently regarded as one of the finest organizations of its kind in the nation, but one of Guzman’s favorite lines is that it’s an organization that wants to “flip the script.”  For all its honors it’s the people it serves that are the real heroes, the real leaders helping to create real wealth and stability for the marginalized in our society.

♦  I also left out of the video below Rick Guzman’s “90-second elevator speech,” which was a requirement of the grant application.  It is essentially a shortened version of his 2023 TNP Gala talk which I posted on this site under the title “The Affordable Housing Crisis.” Watch it for an important take on what’s wrong with “affordable housing.”

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Healing Racial Trauma

Posted on March 21, 2023 by Richard Guzman

Below is a 6:30 video showing a segment from Lenard McKelvey’s Comedy Central show Tha God’s Honest Truth.  He’s taken the performance name Charlamagne Tha God, which explains the name of his comedy show, which sometimes takes on topics not all that funny, as in the video below. He’s shown with three guests, but the clip I’ve edited down focuses on Resmaa Menakem, author most recently of My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies.  Earlier in the show McKelvey had interviewed two friends, Chico Bean and Ice Wave, about processing their racial trauma, and during the process had become triggered himself. “I thought I was past all that,” he says, and the video below begins just as Menakem says, “I saw it happen,” to which McKelvey just says, “Lord, have mercy.”  “That’s why when we came out I said to you, ‘We’re holding you, brother,’” Menakem says, and then we go on to watch Menakem lead everyone through a practice to help alleviate one aspect of racial trauma.

It’s been only 43 years since the American Psychiatric Association added, in 1980, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, PTSD, to its central diagnostic guide, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM for short. This was the third edition, DSM-III, and the addition was controversial.  Today PTSD is accepted virtually throughout society, though it’s also misused, as its central component, trauma, is often attributed—sometimes jokingly, but many times not—to incidents that aren’t really that severe, intense, or injurious physically or emotionally. But who can deny that soldiers in combat or victims of rape haven’t been truly traumatized?

The same goes for victims of racism, though we’re just beginning to admit this to ourselves as a society. It’s taken so long because…well, because our racism blocks our full realization of how traumatic racism has been and continues to be.  Just over a year ago I posted on this site a five-minute video distilling the main ideas behind a 2008 lecture by Joy DeGruy.  As with many things, you have to go back to W.E.B. Dubois for someone who started a discussion pertinent to race, and it’s the same with the recognition of the trauma of racism.  But Joy DeGruy has been a key figure in bringing a growing recognition of race trauma to us today.  She calls it Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome.  You see your children sold off, your sister raped, your husband lynched.  You endure the absolute traumas of this with no mental health intervention whatever.  This goes on for centuries.

“Trauma in a person can appear like personality over time.  Trauma in a family can appear like family traits over time. Trauma in a people can appear like culture over time.”  This is one of Menakem’s key insights, as is the idea of “bracing.”  We walk around waiting for the next shoe to drop.  We brace for it, and this continual “bracedness” turns up the adrenaline, turns up the cortisol, and our bodies suffer because of it.  Menakem’s focus is on the bodily damage racism causes—the body which houses our instincts, our fight-flee-or-freeze reactions.  Racism not only attacks our minds, our emotions, but the very fiber of the bodies we inhabit.  And we all suffer from it, even whites, who are also profoundly damaged by the white supremacy that damages and traumatizes Blacks and other people of color all the time.  The police suffer, too, and much of the brutality they commit—no matter what color they are—comes from the culture of racial trauma that surrounds them.  It surrounds all of us.

I was recently in San Francisco.  I grew up in Hayward, California, just across the Bay.  And because our Pandemic had renewed and intensified anti-Asian hate, had caused the number of violent incidents against Asian Americans to soar across the country, but particularly in California, and particularly in San Francisco, I walked around “braced” all the time.  I felt my mind, my emotions, my body continually “braced,” continually clenched, every moment I was outside.  I was guarding against the possible blow, continually turning to watch reflections in the windows of stores I walked past so I could check who was behind me.  In that hyper-vigilant mode I realized how much of my life I’d spent being braced, though the racial trauma of my life is just barely on the scales of the traumatic.

♦ Go to the Diversity Training and Teaching page and to the LEAD POST for the anti-racism workshop Becoming the Beloved Community, where this article and video are also listed.

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