pub notes A Fond Farewell This week I’m turning Pub Notes over to local educator Dera Weaver’s remarks delivered at the memorial service for Despy Karlas Ljundahl (1919-2010) at the Unitarian-Universalist Fellowship on June 27, 2010—Pete McCommons. In May of 1966, Joe Shockley wrote in my yearbook, “Guess we’ll be lost in the crowd of 20,000 at the Big U next year!” Athens was only 30 miles from my home in Madison, but each of those short miles might as well have been a light year. My mother was terrified—she was right to be—and would have much preferred Georgia Southern or Women’s College of Georgia in Milledgeville, but I had my heart set on Athens. Like all wise mothers, she gritted her teeth and let me go. Almost immediately, my life became intertwined with Despy’s. Because I met her when I was only 18, and perhaps because the world in those years was re-creating itself around us, Despy became a constant in my life. Those weekly lessons and seminars shaped me as a musician, as a teacher, as a woman and, as I realized much later, as a soul alone in the world, always looking for the best path forward. Despy Karlas Ljundahl So, what was it like to be Despy’s student? Well, that first of all, you always knew where you stood. Despy never minced words, and she could get to the point with terrifying clarity. Once, when I was just beginning work on a particular Beethoven sonata, I said, “I have a stupid question.” Despy, always ready to explain and clarify, answered, “Oh, now, don’t be silly—you know there’s no such thing as a stupid question. Go ahead and ask.” So, I said, timidly, “I just don’t get all those trills in Variation 6 of this last movement—what’s going on with that?” And there was a long silence (during which the floor refused to open up for me), and then Despy said, “You know, that really is a stupid question.” Despy was a genius at teaching the mechanisms of practice. She insisted on dividing problems into their component parts. She would subdivide the musical score into numbered sections, then at the next lesson call out a number to make sure you could play each section on its own. And she never let us lose sight of the simple truth that no matter how hard you work a problem today, you have to keep coming back to it tomorrow and the next day—maybe not as hard, maybe not as often, but always respectful of its power to blossom once again into trouble. Despy had a thing about musical scores. She absolutely refused to see musical pages fluttering, and she insisted that we break the spine of our scores in several places so that the pages would always lie open perfectly flat. I can still see her, taking my brand-new (expensive!) Henle edition of the Beethoven sonatas and cracking it open in six places, slamming it up on the music rack and daring a page to flutter back or forward. And she’d write in those scores, too: she always kept colored pencils on the music rack—orange, green, blue, a particularly bright pink, a different color for each week. She pencilled copious notes in our music, and woe to the student who saw “less pedal” or “quieter thumbs” written in the same place in more than one color! In every way, that score had to belong to us, had to carry the imprint of all the work we’d done on it, had to carry us forward into the music itself. Long ago my relationship with Despy changed from teacher/ student into a friendship dear to us both. Yet she has never stopped being my teacher, and even today I base so many of my choices and responses to life’s events on the lessons I learned from her. Despy once said to me, “You know, Dera, change is the only constant in life. You may as well get used to it.” Her own life saw tremendous shifts and changes, and some of those changes nearly brought her to her knees. But every single time, I saw Despy seize change in both hands, break its back in at least six places, throw it open and make it her own. And the end result was always something beautiful. Dera Weaver
THIS WEEK’S ISSUE: News & Features City Dope . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Athens News and Views
The financial crunch appears to have eaten into the sign maintenance budget at UGA.
Whatever It Takes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 Education Partnership’s Name Is Its Ethos
A new initiative is designed to ensure that every child in Clarke County gets a post-secondary education.
Arts & Events Movie Pick . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 Holy Nolan
Director Christopher Nolan’s newest film, Inception, may be his best yet.
Film Notebook . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 News of Athens’ Cinema Scene
Updates on the Summer Classic Film Series at Ciné
COVER DESIGN by Kelly Ruberto featuring artwork by Tex Crawford on display at Brick House Studio
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Music Slopfest . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 Two-Day Punk Rock Smorgasbord
Our picks for a weekend filled with 40 kinds of rock and a plate full of BBQ.
The Spooks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 It’s Always Surfy in Philadelphia
Garage rockers hoping to haunt someone’s couch this Thursday.
CITY DOPE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 ATHENS RISING . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 CITY PAGES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 CAPITOL IMPACT. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 COMMENT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 WHATEVER IT TAKES. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 GRUB NOTES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 MOVIE DOPE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 MOVIE PICK. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 FILM NOTEBOOK. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
THREATS & PROMISES. . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 SLOPFEST. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 THE SPOOKS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 THE CALENDAR!. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 BULLETIN BOARD. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 ART AROUND TOWN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 COMICS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 REALITY CHECK. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 CLASSIFIEDS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
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This week at Flagpole.COM Read Patterson Hood’s Tour Diary as the Truckers
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support Tom Petty on the road
Local music podcasts, live reviews and tweets at
twitter.com/FlagpoleMusic Talk back! We want to hear from you. Send a Letter to the Editor Place an ad! Our online Classifieds program is a snap Get your event listed! Our online Calendar form makes it easy Prof. Eugene Wilkes describes what the U.S. Supreme Court is doing to the basic rights of people detained by the police.
EDITOR & PUBLISHER Pete McCommons ADVERTISING DIRECTOR & PUBLISHER Alicia Nickles PRODUCTION DIRECTOR Larry Tenner MANAGING EDITOR Christina Cotter ADVERTISING SALES Anita Aubrey, Melinda Edwards, Jessica Pritchard MUSIC EDITOR Michelle Gilzenrat CITY EDITOR Dave Marr CLASSIFIEDS, DISTRIBUTION & OFFICE MANAGER Paul Karjian AD DESIGNERS Ian Rickert, Kelly Ruberto CARTOONISTS James Allen, Cameron Bogue, Aaron Fu, Missy Kulik, David Mack, Sarah Trigueros, Matthew Ziemer ADOPT ME Special Agent Cindy Jerrell CONTRIBUTORS Hillary Brown, Russell Cox, Tom Crawford, David Fitzgerald, John Huie, Carl Jordon, Gordon Lamb, Ryan Lewis, Jeff Tobias, Dera Weaver, Drew Wheeler, Kevan Williams CIRCULATION Charles Greenleaf, Harper Bridgers, Jimmy Courson, Swen Froemke, Matt Shirley WEB DESIGNER Ian Rickert ADVERTISING ASSISTANT Maggie Summers EDITORIAL ASSISTANT Erin Cork MUSIC INTERNS Nicole Edgeworth, Jessica Smith ADVERTISING INTERNS Laura Claire Whatley
VOLUME 24 ISSUE NUMBER 29
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JULY 21, 2010 · FLAGPOLE.COM
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