The Gateways Festival Orchestra: The Color of Concert Music

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 t.....continued>
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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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Vincent House, London, Is Closing

Posted on August 27, 2026 by Richard Guzman

This morning brought an email from Richard Tomkins, general manager of Vincent House, a residential hotel in the Notting Hill neighborhood of London.  I stayed there in the Fall and early Winter of 2000 while teaching in a study abroad program at Imperial College.  Staying at Vincent House and making friends there was one of the high, high highlights of my life.  In late September of this year we planned to stop off in London after a trip to Austria and had hoped to stay at Vincent House.  But Mr. Tomkins’ email this morning foreclosed that possibility. He wrote:

“Dear Dr Guzman,
     What a great surprise to hear from you and thank you so much for the photograph.
     I am still involved with Vincent House but generally work from home now, having moved away about four years ago.
     I’m sure you have heard by now from our reception team, that we have sold Vincent House and are in the process of closing the business.
     It is a very sad time for all of us, but life moves on as they say, and we now look forward to the next chapter.
     Thank you again for the trip down memory lane. It’s great to remember all the wonderful times I had at Vincent House and the amazing people I met. I consider myself very lucky.
     I hope all is well with you and, who knows, maybe our paths will cross again someday unexpectedly.
Best Wishes and take care. — Richard”

The picture he refers to is this:

I took this in December 2000 in the middle of Christmas celebrations.  In the top center is Marietta, a Filipina and head of the kitchen.  She has her arms around Richard Tomkins and his wife. They were expecting their first child.

My dining room table was #17, with my regular mates Rochfort Young and Peter Knowles. Table #17 turned out to be the notorious social hub of breakfasts and dinners at Vincent House.  I wrote a series of sketches of my time in London called “Remembering London,” which I hope you will read to catch a fuller glimpse of the life I shared at Vincent House.

No less a traveler than PBS’s Rick Steves has also written about Vincent House’s closing:

“This may be of interest to some old London hands…
     For many years I have stayed at Vincent House London Residence when in London— either for a few nights or on occasion for 6 weeks…It started as a Residential Club in the WW2 era,and ended up as a combination long term residence (13+ weeks) , mid-term residence (5-13 weeks) and hotel. Very much like an upscale university residence hall for real grown-ups.
     Perfect location, immaculate but simple accommodation, excellent breakfast (and dinner if you were a “resident” ) and the presiding cat, Gigi. A common area/lounge and a fabulous garden, perfect for summer evenings. And very good for solo travelers.
     But it is closing (the sale was announced last November when I was staying there for 6 weeks); the last night of accommodation is July 30. I will stay there for a final five nights later this month, and say goodbye to the staff, many of whom have been there for years. And now I need a new perch in the UK….”

Vincent House’s closing has caused lots of sadness.  Travel and Tour World wrote a piece titled “London, UK Heartbreak: Iconic Vincent House Closing Forever.”  How sad, yet the memories are some of my brightest, and, it appears, that thought is shared by many.

♦  Read “Remembering London.”  It’s part of the cultural diversity focus on this site.

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The Book of Romans

Posted on August 4, 2026 by Richard Guzman

Below is a Video of a sermon I recently preached on the Book of Romans, Paul’s epistle to the church in Rome, written in the Winter of either AD 56-57, or 57-58.  It’s not my favorite book in the Bible.

Paul was in Corinth when he wrote it, and his letter to that church contains one of the Bible’s most famous passages: the so-called Love Passage in First Corinthians 13.  I suppose Romans does contain the uplifting More Than Conqueror’s passage starting in chapter Eight, verse 31, but so much of the book seems to run in circles with long, complex, seemingly contradictory passages trying to reason their way out of the conundrums posed by The Law. Here is part of the passage I was assigned to preach on:  “(7) What shall we say, then? Is the law sinful? Certainly not! Nevertheless, I would not have known what sin was had it not been for the law. For I would not have known what coveting really was if the law had not said, ‘You shall not covet.’ (8) But sin, seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment, produced in me every kind of coveting. For apart from the law, sin was dead. (9) Once I was alive apart from the law; but when the commandment came, sin sprang to life and I died. (10) I found that the very commandment that was intended to bring life actually brought death. (11) For sin, seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment, deceived me, and through the commandment put me to death. (12) So then, the law is holy, and the commandment is holy, righteous and good.  (13) Did that which is good, then, become death to me? By no means! Nevertheless, in order that sin might be recognized as sin, it used what is good to bring about my death, so that through the commandment sin might become utterly sinful.”  Enough said.

My first little Bible, the only one I had for years. Decades later it still has a marker at Romans 3:23.

Yet the Book of Romans has played a profound role in my life.  In the sermon below, I share my conversion story, which begins when I was 17, and was, one Sunday, at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. I think the day was a beautiful one, one which was seemingly spoiled when I got back to my car and found a religious tract under the passenger’s windshield wiper.  Religious tracts and the people who passed them out irritated me no end in those days when I was an agnostic at best.  The verse the tract first quoted was Romans 3:23—“All have sinned, and come short of the glory of God.”  Oh, sure, I thought, angrily.  Then I thought, even more angrily, I bet this isn’t even in the Bible!

The only Bible I had was one I had gotten as a fourth grade child when we lived on the Fort Ord Army base, just north of Monterey.  It was black and small, measuring only 4 and 1/4 inch wide, and 6 and 1/8 inch high.  I remember being on the steps of the base church, being able from its hillside perch to see the ocean in the distance.  Pastor Paul was talking briefly to my parents, and I noticed the deep cleft in his chin.  I’ve kept that Bible to this day, and when I picked it up to bring to church and tell this story of my first encounter with the Book of Romans, it still had four small bookmarks in it.  One of them was Romans 3:23.  It was to this Bible I went when I was 17 to confirm that “All have sinned and come short of the glory of God” wasn’t even in the Bible.  But it was.  I broke out in a cold sweat, and a heavy burden started to press down on my head and shoulders.  It got heavier and heavier, and a couple of weeks later I gave in to the call of Jesus.

It all still seems illogical to me.  I was, as I said, agnostic and best, and I didn’t believe in the sanctity of the Bible at all. Yet as I was preparing the sermon you can watch below, I realized, decades and decades after this event, that I was skirting the peripheries of what Paul was trying, often clumsily, to get at when he was attempting to align faith with The Law. The good The Law did was to drive us to understand that it was something that could not save us, that it only made us feel worse so that we would turn elsewhere to have the burdens lifted from us.*

* In fact, my sermon conclusion below steers away from this deeper conclusion here and towards a more practical, every day one—one which ties The Law into the things we do at church to prepare us to serve in the world.

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

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Filipino Heritage Night at Dodgers Stadium

Posted on July 7, 2026 by Richard Guzman

I love Michael Wong’s Instagram-YouTube-Facebook-Tiktok series “Asian Verified.”  He’s a Seattle based commentator, digital creator, writes for Seattle’s The Stranger newspaper,  and calls himself a cultural anthropologist for Asian Americans.  He has a Chinese father, a Filipina mother, and is married to Tasheanna, a Black woman. One of his videos is about his wife and mom becoming fast friends while taking a trip to Paris (without Michael) only a couple weeks after their marriage. It’s quite moving, actually, and more serious than many of his videos, like the Dad Cam series, in which he mainly comments on the ways Asian dads dress.  They’re hilarious.

My favorite Asian Verified video is below.  It’s Wong’s commentary on the dress and food and Filipino swagger on Filipino Heritage Night at Dodgers Stadium, which happened just a few weeks ago on June 15, 2026.  “The Gen-Z lingo hurt my brain,” said my oldest son Rick after his brother Aaron sent the family a link to it.  What Micah, Rick’s oldest, liked best was when a shot of an older Filipino man came up and Wong said, “And the solo lolos* were out and about just swag farming the stadium.” “That looks like you, Lolo!” she exclaimed.

Wong is the master of the last-line, throw-away compliment.  We see an older lady with traditional wide-legged pants topped with a Dodgers jersey, and Wong says, “And ate* here mixes the provincial with the promotional. That’s talent, folks.”  “And while everyone was rocking Dodgers gear, tita* here went for the double pink Aeropostale situation on a Monday night.”  It’s all delivered fast and droll.  But my favorite is when a younger man appears, his back to us, and Wong says, “And Buddy here paired the barong* with the Fjallraven side bag, a never before seen combo pack, a new era in swagapino shit.”  One reason it’s my fav is that at pretty much the same moment I first saw this, I was pulling out all my barongs—a surprising nine in all—wondering which one to wear at an upcoming family wedding.  More about that HERE (the link goes live when I get around to writing about barongs).

At the end he says, “You gotta love Pinoys, the most love-pilled people on the planet.” As an aside, a joke might be that if “pilled” was really meant to be “filled,” many verified Filipinos might have pronounced it “pilled” anyway.  But no, it’s more Gen-Z lingo.  There’s all sorts of “pilled’s,” many of them referring to taking a pill, as in the movie The Matrix.  The pill—often in colors like red, blue, or black—wakes you up to a world view you adopt, or even become obsessed with.  For example, a quick Co-Pilot search yielded this: “‘Black-pilled’ refers to a pessimistic or fatalistic worldview, often linked to nihilism, social defeatism, and the belief that certain outcomes, especially in dating or social hierarchies, are predetermined and unchangeable.”  This may be opposed to “red-pilled,” which “promotes an individualistic approach to self-improvement and awareness of societal structures.” In a political context, it could refer to “taking the red pill” and waking up to “the supposed reality of the world” (my italics everywhere!).  It’s sometimes used as shorthand for radicalization into far-right political beliefs.  Whatever.  To be “love-pilled” seems simpler.  It’s a belief in traditional romance: that you believe men and women can get along, and that long-term relationships are possible and the healthiest places you can be.

Anthony Bourdain’s greatest single TV show throughout his many award-winning series is, I believe, his show on Manila, the first episode in season seven of Parts Unknown.  Near the beginning he says, “Filipinos are the most giving people on the planet. Think I’m talking shit? Keep watching.”  Now here on this short video Michael Wong says we’re the most “love-pilled” people on the planet.  It makes me feel a pardonable pride in my people that we’re so warmly verified.

_____________

♦ Go HERE for a list of my other writings about Filipinos and the Philippines on this site.

* WORDS: “Lolo/Lola” = Grandfather/Grandmother in Tagalog. In my own Philippine language, Ilocano, it would be “Apong/Apang,” which obviously don’t go as well with “solo,” as in Wong’s “solo lolos.”  “Ate” is pronounced ah-teh, and is an honorific used for an older woman.  “Tita” = Auntie.  “Barong“= Our special occasion shirt often made of very sheer material and usually intricately embroidered.

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