Code critique process coming

Symphony brings fire from heaven; Cloth & Flame renewed for three years; city to launch code critique, revise LDC; Richard to defend arts on TAB; Cottonwood gets new tank; and bureaucratic babble

Sunday’s Sedona Symphony concert opened with the ever-charming Maestro Will describing the piano as “the video game console of its era” as an introduction to the romances of Clara Schumann, “the height of Romantic parlor music,” which the Symphony performed in his own orchestration with concertmaster Sara Schreffler in the soloist’s role. Schreffler delivered a graceful, genteel rendition of the violin solo, which in the first and second movements seemed to have the task to trying to cheer up the rest of the ensemble, who had to take a restless and uncertain mood like that of a gang of unruly colts in need of am experienced woman’s guiding hand. Maestro Will did his best with the orchestration, with the winds coming in and out to converse with the violin, but he didn’t have a lot of material to work with. The third movement picked up the pace, although it would still have to be described as languishing. It conveyed much more of an impression of a flirtatious maid batting her eyes at her lover while making him chase after her and trip over various bric-a-brac in the garden. The whole work in general came off as modest and blushing.

Before the concert, Maestro Will had encouragingly referred to Robert Schumann as an entirely incompetent orchestrator who had had to make his music “thick” to compensate for his own technical deficiencies. He added that under the circumstances, it was weird that the orchestration of the cello concerto had turned out to be perfectly balanced. The composer might have succeeded in this case with the orchestration, but less so with the thematic content, which showed a distinct lack of ideas. The cello and strings began the first movement together in a rich, ominous darkness into which soloist Gabriel Martins dropped interspersed outrage and despair. Schumann had left the cello exposed much of the time in a manner reminiscent of the eighteenth-century classical classical approach, but without the orchestral interactions with the ensemble that were key to sustaining interest in those earlier works. The more interesting parts of the concerto were certainly the 18th century-style eruptions.

Marked “langsam,” the second movement included more approachable moments for the cello, in which it had the opportunity to wax warm and loving while the rest of the ensemble kept butting in. The third movement represented an attempt at boldness and excitement but did not quite achieve it. Every so often, the composer attempted to develop a motif before dropping it, and towards the end, he made an effort to lighten the mood, briefly lifting thematic ideas from earlier works or giving the impression of doing so. The climax was the best part of the performance, the technical weaknesses of which were due to the composer’s writing rather than the Symphony’s playing, which was thoroughly satisfying.

“If you’re from Seattle where I’m from, you know the gray, you know the drizzle,” Maestro Will warned the crowd in regard to the thematic content of Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 3, the “Scottish Symphony” inspired by Mendelssohn’s visit to the Highlands, but there was almost none of either gray or drizzle in the Symphony’s performance, only occasional cloudbursts sweeping across an epic landscape. They opened with a beautiful balance of sound in the entry and some enchanting string playing into which the woodwinds intruded so subtly as to almost startle the listener, followed by a striding surge of power at the introduction of the second theme and its associated infectious, simple melodies. The orchestra handled the changes in dynamic levels neatly and even improved in the reprise, showing strong fusion and appearing to be at their most comfortable and responsive. Maestro Will even brought a bit of drama for the audience with his freedom and fluidity—and impressed by going scoreless as well. Here was the lushness promised for but absent from the first half of the concert, and it was fiery and intoxicating.

The ecstatic impression left by the first movement carried over into the sparkling joy of the second movement, which also served as a distinct contrast to the Beethoven-esque dark confidence of the first, full of verdant, springlike moments and the promise of tomorrow. Maestro Will was practically dancing the orchestra through the Highland fling with his energy and enthusiasm, delivering an absolutely terrific ride. The third movement was when the mists rolled in across the landscape, as if Mendelssohn had decided to swap the usual emotional structure of second and third acts. The moodiness set the stage for the emergence of a gentle warmth as a hedge against the grayness outside the bothy before the music grew march-like, led by the brass and winds, with a noble dignity emerging from some moments of travail. Amid the return of the ensemble in a surge, it was still possible to make out the fine details of the playing in the violin section.

Maestro Will brooked no delay in launching the final movement, almost taking the Symphony by surprise, but they kept up and delivered solid, substantial playing while also keeping the music fast and crisp. There was that unmistakable feel of country fiddles scraping away at a dance; there was also great power under great control, a conjunction that especially made itself felt as the orchestra lingered down the long diminuendo leading into the symphony’s immense, glorious climax like crepuscular rays punching through thunderheads over the Grampians. The transcendence of those final moments was almost literally breathtaking, as if the music had drawn the listeners out of themselves and into itself—reminding them, however briefly, of the smallness of humanity in the face of the ideal and the greatness of humanity when it reaches for the ideal. Sometimes fire does come down from heaven.

Walking into SPAC for one of Maestro Will’s pre-concert talks and seeing the stage set up for the orchestra is itself a a purifying experience, like walking into an old college library or lecture hall. Here the nonsense is stripped away and the ideal, the purpose of humanity, is placed at the center. Here the reality of truth and fact dissolve the trash of materialistic distraction. As Dorothy Sayers wrote of Oxford and the Oxford ideal,

Here, then, at home, by no more storms distrest,

Folding laborious hands we sit, wings furled;

Here in close perfume lies the rose-leaf curled,

Here the sun stands and knows not east nor west,

Here no tide runs; we have come, last and best,

From the wide zone through dizzying circles hurled,

To that still centre where the spinning world

Sleeps on its axis, to the heart of rest.

Lay on thy whips, O Love, that we upright,

Poised on the perilous point, in no lax bed

May sleep, as tension at the verberant core

Of music sleeps; for, if thou spare to smite,

Staggering, we stoop, stooping, fall dumb and dead,

And, dying so, sleep our sweet sleep no more.

Coming up, mark your calendars for Chamber Music Sedona and the Junction Trio on February 15, preceded by the Oscar Penas Trio at the Mary D. Fisher Theatre on February 9. In SIFF’s efforts to revive live theatre in our community, Barrymore’s Ghost will run at the Mary D. Fisher from February 13 through 15, while at this year’s edition of the Sedona Arts Center’s Vision & Sound exhibition, attention is suggested to Elizabeth Denneau’s biting “They Will Never Pick You.”

The relationship of truth and beauty on the one hand and materialism on the other was in question again at the Planning and Zoning Commission on Tuesday as the commission approved a new three-year conditional use permit for the Cloth & Flame event venue up at the Sedona Airport. In spite of sixty-one neighbors submitting objections to approval of the venue’s original CUP on the grounds that the noise, which would be below legal levels, was unbearably offensive to them, in the year and a half since the permit was granted, the city has received no noise complaints attributable to Cloth & Flame.

“They’ve done an exceptional job in doing what they already promised to do, and not everybody does that,” Will Hirst noted.

Glen Baker of Panorama Boulevard claimed that the audible noise in the area from the venue—cited by one of his neighbors as being less than 43 decibels, or equivalent to birdsong—was “jeopardizing the lifestyle that I chose and invested here,” placing his own interests above those of the thousands of others who might want to enjoy the venue. “I believe in embracing the arts”—but not in his own backyard, he didn’t add. Comments included in the commission’s packet for the occasion also expressed continued opposition to the venue from other property owners in the area combined with an awareness that they have no legal grounds for complaint and outrage at the fact that they have no legal grounds for complaint.

As anyone who’s talked to people who have lived in Sedona for the long-term can attest, these sort of neighborhood cabals bent on selfishly destroying venues are why we don’t have much in the way of live performances in this town anymore. Harassment from one crazy old bat in Vista Montana killed Martini Bar. Selfish whining neighbors helped the city to kill Studio Live. This isn’t new, but it’s also destructive and completely antithetical to Sedona’s values.

Let’s be very clear: Sedona is a city animated by the arts. Most of us moved here because we appreciate, participate in, and support the arts. We do not appreciate these individuals who do not support Sedona’s values and who are in fact out to destroy those values. Why would someone who hates music and art move to an arts town in the first place except out of a sadistic desire to ruin the lives of others? The great value of having these permits come up for renewal—although permits should never be required either to do business or have fun—is that the process identifies those who do not share Sedona’s ethos, the Philistines among us, the barbarians within the gates. In a small city filled with arts uses, pretty much everyone will be abutting a venue of some kind, or should be, and should not only get used to it but embrace it.

There are two general principles involved here. The first is that self-interest can never outweigh the voluntary consideration of the welfare of others; to propose that it can is a fundamentally immoral suggestion. The second is that musical participation is biochemically and neurologically inseparable in humans from cognition, empathy, sociality, creativity, cooperation, freedom, and every other quality that is commonly associated with ethical behavior, and any attempt to suppress musical participation must therefore be viewed as an attack on the defining qualities of the human species and thus on humanity itself.

Neighboring residents’ comments submitted to P&Z also harped on the idea that the venue would exclusively serve tourists rather than residents, an unsupported fallacy, and emphasized that for that reason it should not be permitted, thereby implying that tourists’ needs are inferior to residents’ needs and that tourists are therefore inferior to residents, making some animals more equal than others.

The commission then moved on to considering early suggestions for reform of the city’s land development code during a discussion that revealed promising ideas for revision on the part of the commissioners, an ongoing and problematic willingness to coerce to achieve aesthetic results, and at least some small degree of awareness of the cognitive dissonance between ethical behavior and achieving one’s desired outcome.

Community development director Comrade Allender explained that the LDC is planned to go through a two-month “code critique” process in the near future, although the process is unlikely to begin until April. “We want to get as many opinions as possible,” Allender said, expressing an eagerness to cut out everything in the code not justifiable and inviting residents to send him lists of problems they have encountered with it. In the long run, he added, he planned to send the public comments out to a consultant to revise the entire LDC, which could take an additional twelve months.

“My hope is we find a way to simplify,” Kali Gajewski said. “Our code is incredibly limiting and complicated. It’s expensive. It causes divisions in our community…our code’s scary. I’ve been through our code through two major projects. Still scary…there’s a lot of data to support simplification.”

“In the 1900s, development happened organically,” Rob Smith said. “Factories were down by the river. Where the beautiful places were was expensive homes…you have a bakery of one story next to a four-story apartment building. It’s what we like. As time went on, municipalities, government if you will, decided we’re going to try to control and dictate what happens.”

“You can’t legislate beauty,” Smith emphasized. “How much do we think the city should control design and try to control the Sedona look? I think this code came out by trying to control and get all the buildings to look the same.”

He then went after one of the worst and most common undesign features in modern building in general, Sedona included: “Some of the most beautifully-laid out homes have a carport…now we legislate we have to have garage doors and, by golly, maybe three garage doors, and when you put three garage doors facing the street it takes up maybe half the property…Are the residential areas nicer with three garage doors and a sidewalk that goes around to the side?”

“We’re trying to draw more youth, and today’s youth doesn’t want something that all looks the same,” Jo Martin pointed out.

“Do you think that Sedona needs to dictate design standards?” Smith asked Allender.

“Yes and no,” Allender temporized, making the argument that city staff would have to use the rules as a “guardrail” to cut out architects whom they felt didn’t have “that same respect for sense of place.” “We have to create a minimum framework because we have to anticipate not everybody is going to think like you.” The trouble here is that the city is not an appropriate arbiter for making such decisions.

“Owners should be able to do what they want to do…with guardrails,” Wiehl agreed.

In the most promising suggestion yet about getting back to a small-town environment, Martin raised the topic of removing asphalt pavement altogether and going to decomposed granite, pointing out the hypocrisy involved in the city’s pretense of sustainability while paving over Sedona.

Last Wednesday, that gang calling itself the Sedona city council made four new appointments to the city sewing circle known as the Tourism Advisory Board: Julie Richard, Brett Labit, Lars Romig, and Gregory Stein. Three of the one and one of the other, in effect. Richard and Labit were selected for four-year terms and Romig and Stein for two-year terms. The board also interviewed Tracy Randall, who was not selected. Of the candidates, four expressed a vision of Sedona limited to its physical geography.

“I’m very biased. I think people predominantly come here for the red rocks and the trails,” Randall said. “The assets are the beautiful natural landscapes,” Labit said, and also suggested promoting the words “serenity,” “rejuvenation,” and “inspiration.” Romeg, a prominent opponent of public access to public lands, described Sedona’s assets as “the recreation…you can really access all of the rocks trails from pretty much every neighborhood so you don’t have to get in the car that much,” thereby portraying Sedona as the ideal destination for the lazy. “Mainly the visitors here are looking for hiking and biking...they’re just looking for the scenery,” Stein agreed.

Randall proposed “amenities at the trailhead,” by which she meant allowing or encouraging businesses to set up shop and sell things to “folks who are coming off the trail.” She also claimed that “the trails need a lot of work,” a Leninist hallucination that professional expertise is required to maintain them. Trails are created by people walking on them; if people choose not to walk on them, they don’t need work.

Labit advocated trying to attract high-spending shoppers from Scottsdale. “I’m sure the city could use the budget,” he said regarding tax collections, as if Sedona’s budget, the highest or second-highest for any city of its size in Arizona, could possibly need to get any bigger. He dropped in the buzzwords “a lower impact on the environment and more sustainability,” and in discussing the arts, his approach was all business: “We certainly could compete with an Aspen or a Vail or Santa Fe or a Scottsdale. Scottsdale’s art district is troubled.” He then confirmed that young people generally choose not to buy expensive art and that the high-end art buyer demographic is simply disappearing.

Romig took the opportunity to repeat the lie that Sedona receives “3.3 million visitors” when in fact it receives only about 1.39 individual visitors annually, a significant portion of whom are Yavapai and Coconino county residents and therefore not tourists. He described the ideal visitor as “people that want to get intimate with the landscape”—on a previous occasion he equated all tourists with terrorists—and said his reason for applying was that “I want to keep it pristine for myself, but I also enjoy sharing.” Labit had similarly said, “I want to do my part selfishly. I have businesses here that I think will benefit from my involvement.”

Stein, who is a Sedona Ranger, suggested that “the city needs to put more effort into debunking some of the misinformation on the web,” such as telling people that they cannot drive under Devil’s Bridge, and suggested that his “being a non-resident would improve the image of the board.”

Richard was the only candidate who had a clear message for the council and the only one who emphasized the importance of arts in Sedona’s tourism. “All it was was pictures of photos of red rocks. And there’s a lot more to Sedona than than pictures of red rocks,” Richard said of the city’s tourism website. “I think the nonprofit arts community, of course, is the very best asset…cultural tourists are the right kind of tourists. They’re the kind of tourists who stay longer and spend more money. It’s been documented over and over again. Sedona can draw those kinds of people. We at the art center are very much a tourism organization.”

“Funding begets events and festivals. I would love to see more um more dedicated festivals. I really would,” Richard added before committing sacrilege by calling out the absence of arts in the city’s holy sustainable tourism plan prepared by the flawless staff.

“You want me to be honest or political?” she asked the council when invited to comment on the plan.

“Honest is preferred,” Comrade Furman said.

“Both. And don’t tell us which is which. Let us figure that out,” Comrade Kinsella urged.

“I’d say it’s very measured,” Richard said. “It doesn’t really talk about what we want to do here. I think that there’s a lot of room for vision.”

“What you said was that the plan doesn’t address what we want to do here. What do we want to do here?” Kinsella asked.

“Well, I think we want to focus on cultural tourism,” Richard explained. “We really want to shine a spotlight on the arts that exist here. And by doing that, that is going to not only help the nonprofit arts and culture community here, but also the galleries and the shops and the retail and the hotels and everything else. That all comes with it. That also elevates the community so it becomes a more desirable place for people to visit.”

“Do you think that there is an aspect of Sedona that should be marketed other than the arts? A particular aspect. Other than the arts,” Kinsella pursued.

“The scenery and hiking, excuse me, and the outdoor aspects of what we have here are kind of interwoven into what we’re already doing,” Richard pointed out.

The dishonesty of the city council with regard to the Sedona Cultural Park is continuing with ongoing efforts by one or more members of council to discredit the revival project on social media. On Monday, the board of SCP 2.0 sent the members of the city council a document containing their comments and suggestions regarding the upcoming public survey on the amphitheater’s reopening. Within a few hours, that document appeared on NextDoor, posted by well-known concentration camp advocate Sean Smith, who also made a number of comments attacking the SCP 2.0 suggestions.

The question at first was which of the comrades on council decided to feed Smith the document. We know the unlamented Jablow used to pass information to Smith for astroturfing purposes, and the rumor mill has it that Comrade Pfaff is still willing to be Jablow’s tool for some reason. Smith, incidentally, later apologized for spreading misinformation in his comments. Meanwhile, Pfaff, who had been absent from NextDoor along with the remainder of council since the Jablow fiasco in September and council’s reappraisal of its rules of ethical conduct, abruptly rejoined NextDoor in order to confirm that he had forwarded the document to Smith and to deny there was any impropriety in his doing so.

To the average person, this looks like yet another smarmy attempt to influence a ballot initiative. It was, of course, completely coincidental that the “number of others with whom I regularly discuss Sedona-related matters” to whom Pfaff forwarded the email included an individual known to have consistently been used as a shill by council and staff, one who immediately reacted to the document by publicly attacking its proposals. One wonders what the likelihood would have been of Pfaff sending the document to a group including individuals likely to support the amphitheater revival.

What the members of the city council seem to fail to understand is that by running for and being elected to office, they have agreed to place the views of the public, their constituents, who put the council in office to enact public policy, above their own. Once they take their seats, for the next four years, they have no views other than those of the public as expressed through the democratic process. It is completely inappropriate for the council or its members to express any opinion whatsoever either for or against the amphitheater until they have been informed by the public as to what the public’s majority opinion is.

The Sedona Peace Force group has announced that they have rescheduled their ACLU training and speaker session for March 7 at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, with the event to run from 10 AM to 5 PM. More details to follow.

The all-American city council of Cottonwood, led by its city manager from the People’s Republic of California, voted on January 20 to purchase a new tank, specifically a Lenco Bearcat, on the grounds that their old one, a 2012 model, was too old. In context, I will point out that their Leninist counterparts in Cuba quite successfully employed the T-34 tank from 1960 until at least 2018 to keep their own population in submission. Cottonwood could use a lesson in fiscal responsibility from the Cubans, it seems. The new tank will be paid for with a $100,000 handout from the state of Arizona, and will not actually be a new tank, but a lightly used tank to be transferred from another Arizona paramilitary agency. Presumably its braking system will continue to function, which Cottonwood’s staffers claim is the problem with the current tank.

It’s always nice when the Leninists are candid about their totalitarianism. The agenda bill for the purchase described the old tank openly as “a decommissioned military armored vehicle” and “a 2012 decommissioned military platform.” It makes it so much better to know that our public employees and servants are being honest about their plans to use military force on us—oh, wait, how did Bakunin put it? “When the people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called ‘the people’s stick’.” The open militarism also dovetails with Joe Butner’s description of the Camp Verde marshals as paramilitary and Ed Mezulis’s fantasies about the Sedona fire department being a paramilitary organization—not according to the Third Geneva Convention, darling. Against their militaristic candor we might recall the words of the early constitutions of Pennsylvania and North Carolina: “As standing armies in time of peace are dangerous to liberty, they ought not to be kept up.”

A just-resigned state official named Virginia Rountree has demonstrated once again the heights of inanity to which bureaucrats can routinely rise during her testimony, so-called, before the legislature on health insurance fraud: “As a result of the fraud, you know, all kinds of actions had to be taken in order to stop it and that’s important and we have to continue to take actions and use our tools and our processes to ensure that we are mitigating as much as possible fraud, waste, and abuse in the system.” Riveting, Virginia. I am floored by your grasp of detail. “All kinds of actions”? What were they? “That’s important”? Thank you, Captain Obvious, for noting that one of the few modern crimes humans have actually considered to be a crime for thousands of years is a bad thing. “We have to continue to take actions”—such as? “Our tools and our processes”—which ones? “As much as possible”—how much? What’s your numbers goal? There’s nothing there. She wasn’t saying anything. Her words are completely devoid of content. And this is a woman who was getting paid at least $176,000 a year out of our tax dollars to condescend to those in need and waste the legislature’s time.

It’s worth noting that the same behavior was displayed by the character of Lord Dorwin in Asimov’s Foundation, where it was hilariously demonstrated via mathematical analysis:

I had thought his Lordship a most consummate donkey when I first met him—but it turned out he was actually an accomplished diplomatist and a most clever man. I took the liberty of recording all his statements…When Holk, after two days of steady work, succeeded in eliminating meaningless statements, vague gibberish, useless qualifications—in short, all the goo and dribble—he found he had nothing left. Everything canceled out.

Lord Dorwin, gentlemen, in five days of discussion, didn’t say one damned thing, and said it so you never noticed.

Anyone who’s ever spent a few minutes listening to Chamber figurehead David Key rattle on knows that he does exactly the same thing: empty buzzword followed by contentless platitude followed by filler euphemism. Where’s the Golgafrincham B Ark when you need it?

In what should be a humiliating commentary on how spoiled and effete Americans have become, The Times has now pointed out that almost 40 percent of Stanford undergraduates are claiming to be disabled to get housing perks or, more troublingly, exemptions from classwork. With laziness comes cynicism, triviality, and materialism, as the article’s author admits:

At Stanford, almost no one talks about the system with shame. Rather, we openly discuss, strategise and even joke about it. At a university of savvy optimisers, the feeling is that if you aren’t getting accommodations, you haven’t tried hard enough…Some “disabilities” are just downright silly. Students claim “night terrors”; others say they “get easily distracted” or they “can’t live with others”. I know a guy who was granted a single room because he needs to wear contacts at night. I’ve heard of a girl who got a single because she was gluten intolerant.

The gaming even extends to our meals. Stanford requires most undergraduates living on campus to purchase a meal plan, which costs $7,944 for the 2025-26 academic year. But students can get exempted if they claim a religious dietary restriction that the college kitchens cannot accommodate.

And so, some students I know claim to be devout members of the Jain faith, which rejects any food that may cause harm to all living creatures—including small insects and root vegetables. The students I know who claim to be Jain (but aren’t) spend their meal money at Whole Foods instead and enjoy freshly made salads and other yummy dishes, while the rest of us are stuck with college meals, like burgers made partly from “mushroom mix”.

And this being Stanford, of course, these are the future elites being groomed to become the Randian techbros of tomorrow, optimizing the planet for themselves at the expense of humanity and sanity.

Historian Ken Burns is apparently out demonstrating how little he knows about American history by declaring that “we have sanitized the American Revolution”—true enough—but attributing the sanitation process to “an understandable fear that if somehow we reveal how dark and bloody it is, that it will somehow diminish those big ideas.” In other words, because the realism of war offends the snug sensibilities of modern Americans. By making a statement like that, Burns reveals to what degree he is part of the problem of the received narrative. The Revolution hasn’t been sanitized because it was unaesthetic, it’s been sanitized because the idea of the people overthrowing their government is very, very frightening to those in government, who have tried to write that idea out of history. As early as the second half of the nineteenth century, the new public school districts, the imposition of which was fiercely resisted by many Americans, were publishing textbooks in which they declared that the age-old right to revolution no longer existed—that it had come to an end with the establishment of the United States and citizens no longer had any right to resist the government. It was such maneuvers to erase the right to revolution that led the early authors of dystopian fiction to speculate on whether the Declaration of Independence would one day be banned in schools: “When, in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another…”