Category: Music

Art

The Keyboard I Didn’t Buy

I came within a few synapses of buying a keyboard today.  An old Yamaha, double-manual, polyphonic ensemble—portable, with a stand.  No amplifier.  There was a time I would have fallen all over myself to get one of these for under five hundred bucks.  This one—sitting on the grass in someone’s back yard, part of the swag obtainable at the annual neighborhood yard sale we attend—was going for twenty-five bucks.

And I passed.

Couldn’t change my mind, either, a young fellow was right behind us and snatched it up.

Now, I could say that I passed on it because I never buy a keyboard without trying it out, to see if all the notes and pots work, to see, basically, if it both sounds good and feels right.  Feel is very important in these matters.

But that would be waffling, really.  I didn’t buy because…well, why?  I’m going to be 55 in a few weeks and my days of gigging are more than thirty years past.  I do not play well enough anymore to justify having more than the one piano I have—an instrument, by the way, the capacities of which I have yet to max out.

I play at playing music.  Way, way back in the distant past, there was a period of a couple of years when I could sit in with other bands, could do a reasonably good evening of rock-n-roll with some classical stuff thrown in for the oohs and ahhs.  I played every day, usually for three hours, often more.  I wanted to be Keith Emerson.  I could do a couple of the less complex ELP tunes.

But I did not have all the other requisite drives to make it as a professional musician.  I hate dealing with the business side, for one thing, something I confess to still dislike.   I am not constitutionally equipped to make money.  I wanted to play music.

But I also wanted to play the music I wanted to play and the fact is that as in everything else one does to make a living, you don’t really often get to do what you want to do—you have to please the customer.  And I lost patience with the pathetic musical taste of my so-called audience back then.  I—and the guys playing with me—would break our backs learning some really cool piece of choice music (something by Genesis, say, or Yes or, one time I remember, something by Premiata Forneria Marconi—and if you do not know who they were, go check them out, for your musical education is lacking) and put it out there at a gig and receive lukewarm response and a request for something from the Doobie Brothers.  Not that I dislike the Doobies, mind you, but it just wasn’t up there, in my opinion.  Actually the audience just wasn’t up there.

So I walked away.  I sold all my equipment and said to hell with it.  Didn’t play for several years.

We bought a piano in 1989.  The last gig I’d done was about 1977 or 78.  I had forgotten damn near everything.

But I hadn’t bought the thing to relive glory days or revisit tunes I could enjoy easily on the stereo—I’d bought it to do what I wanted to do.  So I wrote a few pieces, played in the mornings just to reset my mood for the day, jammed, really.  Over the years, I have occasionally picked up a piece of sheet music and worked at it, but basically I play a kind of pretend music.  In my mind it is.  It’s kind of like Keith Jarrett, who improvises everything he does.  Of course, Jarrett is marvelously skilled and educated so his improvisations are fascinating, intricate.  Mine are a bit redundant.  I’ve developed a suite of a couple dozen motifs that I can mix and match and then just sit down and rip on them.

People listening, when I’m in a groove, think it’s amazing, and the structure is such that most of them think I’m playing something they just can’t quite recognize.  But it’s a rudimentary form of jazz freeform.  Middle-level musicians enjoy what I’m doing but know it’s more or less fake.

Oddly enough, the few really good musicians I know love listening, because to them it’s just spontaneous composition and they’ve worked very hard to get to a point where they can do the same thing.  As long as I don’t play too long, they’re actually impressed.

About once a month, if I’m not doing anything else, I play at a small church open mic from January to August.  The audience is small, they never have requests, and they think I’m pretty good.  At least, they clearly enjoy themselves when I play.

And that’s enough.  I’m playing.  I’m playing from the heart.  I’m playing what I want.  I don’t really need much more, though sometimes I’d like more.

So why did I pass on the yard sale keyboard?  Because two keyboards means more discipline.  It means I’m getting serious about doing music that I no longer do.  It means—to me, from inside my skull—that I have to knuckle down and practice and prove I deserve to be playing.  It means pressure.

There might come a time I decide, because I really want to, that I need to get my chops back in a serious way.  But not now.  I’m concentrating on my writing.  That’s the work that needs the lion’s share of my attention.  If I start playing music three or four hours a day again, I’ll short-change the important stuff.  So I passed.  I don’t need it.  I’m okay with where I’m at with what I do with the music I make.

Besides…where the hell would I put it?

Absurdity

On Knowing Your Limits

Something that annoys me no end is people who make promises they don’t keep.  Not people who are prevented from keeping them or due to circumstances beyond their control find they simply cannot do it.  No, as aggravating as that might be, life happens.  The circumstances deserve our ire, not the people—not if they’ve made an honest effort.  No, what I’m talking about are people who can do something, know how, but as they make the promise know they probably won’t.  Bad scheduling, bad planning, bad whatever—or just lack of real interest.  Or the habit traditionally known as Biting Off More Than You Can Chew.

Many years ago—decades, really—a local youth activist tried to draft me into service by writing a comic he intended to locally produce and distributed.  He knew I wrote, I was just beginning to garner a bit of a reputation, he thought it would be a good fit.  I demurred.

“I don’t want to commit to something I might not have the time or inclination to do,” I said.

He understood.  In fact, “I wish more people would be that honest about their limits.”

I knew what he meant, but had no idea it would become part of my own personal landscape of trials and tribulations.  But I remembered that and I’ve been scrupulous about not making unfullfillable commitments.

What happens is, of course, that someone says “I’ll do that” and you then feed the information to that person, get him or her set up enough to take the ball, and you go pay attention to all the other thousand to million details demanding your attention.  But all of sudden one day you turn around and discover that nothing has been done by this person.  They have completely dropped the ball and you then are left scrambling to repair the damage, build the bridge, make the call, write the report, and so forth.  The arrangements you’ve made based on their commitment fall apart because now you’re over-scheduled.  It’s a mess.

It would have been better had that person said “I don’t think I can do that.”

I don’t have a problem either saying that or hearing it.  The inability to do something, for whatever reason, honestly admitted up front before any time or resource is wasted does not offend me at all.  What offends is the unwillingness or inability to state that up front and said individual makes an unkeepable promise.  That promise did not happen in a vacuum.  Things get built around it and based on it.  So when the promise is broken, that section crumbles and everything else is put at risk.

(Yes, I have right now a particular something in mind, but I won’t air that laundry here.)

Sure, you disappoint someone by saying no.  For about a minute.  The disappointment that comes later when you can’t fulfill your promise lasts a bit more than a minute.  It can last a lifetime.

Now, there are all manner of external reasons why promises get derailed and the person who made those promises ought not be held accountable.  If they take on the responsibility and make an honest attempt at fulfilling it and Other Shit gets in their way and renders their task impossible, that’s not on them.  You might get angry and argue that they should have found a way, but that doesn’t bear on the issue of whether or not they broke a promise.  They showed up, ready to play, and then it rained.  Or  someone else didn’t bring the tools.  Or they got hit by a bus.  Or their best friend did, and that commitment trumps yours.  You can work with that if you know it’s happening.  What I’m talking about is the person who steps up and says “I can do that” and then goes off and doesn’t do it.  Because.

Because they really didn’t have the time or they really didn’t know how to do it or they simply lacked interest.

So why did they make the promise to begin with?  Because they didn’t want to look like a bad person.  They hate saying no, they wanted to impress you, or, worse, they didn’t really think it was that important.  Any number of reasons, most of them boiling down to a statement something like  “Oh, you really wanted that done?  Sorry, I didn’t realize you were serious.”

As a corollary to this, the next most annoying thing is to be told “I’ll get back to you” and then never, ever hear back.  It’s a species of Being Ignored that drives me personally right up a telephone pole.  Just exactly what is so damn difficult about picking up the phone, making a call, and saying “I really can’t/don’t want to/won’t do that?”  It’s polite.  Maybe there’s an aversion to saying No, as above, but this manifests as evasion rather than flat out honesty.

But plans get ruined by such inconsiderate failures of self-knowledge and integrity.  Sometimes plans involving many other people.  Telling me you can’t, or won’t, is infinitely better than promising me to do something and then not showing up.  I can shrug off the first.  The latter has a flypaper tackiness that takes years to peel off.

Granted, sometimes it’s hard to know your limits.  It’s hard to know that you really don’t want to do some things until you get into them and see what they are.  But as time and life hand you experience, you should get a clue.  Then it’s just a matter of acting on that knowledge.

Learn your limits,  Know them.  Then let others know.  It’s polite.  And it saves a tremendous amount of clean-up later.

Art

Sound, Fire, and Solstice

Occasionally, you stumble on something beautiful, often by the grace of friends, and it needs sharing.   A little name-dropping here, but that can’t be helped.  Context is occasionally very important, and in this case the setting was essential.

Last night we went to a solstice celebration at Laurell Hamilton’s and Jon Green’s  house.  It was an R.S.V.P. affair and the invitation noted that “entertainment” would begin at 7:00 PM.  Laurell and Jon have a nice house, a good bit of grassy area for a yard.  A good bit.  They had erected a tent over a platform, with tables and chairs.  Food—good food—was catered.

It became clear that the “entertainment” was not coincidental.  Three women occupied a corner of the tent (big tent) with guitars, a keyboard, a few drums, a few Apple computers, microphones…

…and an undeniable presence.  Evening listening to them doing sound checks, you could tell something special was in the offing.

No more teasing.  Here’s the link to S.J. Tucker the main anchor of the trio, which was comprised of her and two women who formed a combo called GBMOJO—Ginger Doss and Bekah Kelso.

Basically, they do music in the pagan, earth goddess, eco strain.  I don’t care about that so much.  Lyrics, to my ear, are secondary to the sound, something I’ve gone on about before.  Music to me is a purely abstract art form and words more often than not just get in the way.  For me.  I’m weird, I know, but there it is.  This is not to say sometimes the words are absolutely essential, but only that the first and often only thing I listen to is the total sound.  The music.

And they make music.  Precise, highly trained, beautiful music.

But that is not all!  S.J. Tucker and her significant other, a gentleman named Kevin K’ Wiley, work together as something called Fire & Strings.  They firedance.  Twirling orbs of flame, dancing with fire, acrobatically risking scorchment…

When it got dark enough, they left the tent (I said the yard was big) and put on a show for us.  It was very hot, St. Louis hot, and they were working with flame.  An amazing performance.

Then back to the music.

Excellent evening, a wonderful way to welcome summer.  We bought two CDs and I will keep an eye peeled for Ms. Tucker’s shows.  So I’m doing some recommending here.  Take it and look them up and give your ears a treat.

Happy summer.

culture

Atheists Are (Perhaps) Us…Or Not

There was a time in this country that an open admission of atheism could get a person severely hurt in any given community.  Ostracism, mainly, which over time can be very damaging.  But like so many other “out of the mainstream” life choices, this too is no longer the case.

According to this article in the New York Times, “No Religion” has more than doubled on surveys in the past ten to twenty years.  Now, that does not mean all these folks are atheists or agnostics.  It means, quite specifically, that they align themselves with no organized religion.

Some folks might wonder at the difference.  What is having faith if not in the context of a religious umbrella?

When I was fifteen I left the church.  I’d been educated in a Lutheran school and received a healthy indocrintation in that faith.  After entering public high school, I found myself growing less and less involved or interested.  There was in this no profound personal insight or revelation.  It was adolescent laziness.  I’d never been a consistent Sunday church-goer, and although there had been a year or two when I actually practiced Testifying, born out of a powerful belief in Christianity, other factors managed to draw my interest away.

I stopped attending church at all.  I didn’t give it a lot of thought—some, but not a lot—until some visiting teachers showed up at my door from my church.  They were nice, they were concerned.  I’d been receiving the newsletter and so forth.  They wanted to know where I’d been.  I handed them some sophistry about finding another path.  At that point, I still believed in god and accepted Jesus and all that.  And in truth I had begun to suspect that the whole church thing had some serious problems.  But basically, I just didn’t want to be bothered, and all my new friends came from other backgrounds and didn’t go to that church.  I hadn’t especially liked the whole school experience there (having been bullied, mostly, till almost 8th grade) and didn’t have much motivation on that score to go back and make nice with people who had basically treated me like shit.

They accepted my explanation and went away.  A few months later I received a letter from the P.T.L. and church board telling me my soul was in jeopardy if I didn’t return to the fold.  It took two pages, but the bottom line was I needed to get my butt back to church and beg forgiveness (and pay my dues) or I’d end up in hell.

I was furious.  My father read the letter, laughed, and pronounced that they were obviously hard up for money, and suggested I ignore it.

I did for another nine months.  Then I got another such letter.  Shorter, more to point, and the financial aspect was sharper.  This time I didn’t ignore it.  I went to the next open P.T.L. meeting there and when they asked for questions from the floor I stood up, read the letter, and then told them that this amounted to harrassment.  I didn’t care if they needed money, this was a threat and if I heard from them again, especially this way, they would hear from my lawyer.

I never heard from them again.

My anger did not subside.  It drove me into a frenzy of religious questioning.  Over the next two years I visited dozens of churches and more than a few off-the-wall sects (even the Church of Scientology), looking for…something.

I found bits of it here and there.  Being a rather idealistic youth, having not found a satisfying answer in any of them, I opted to have faith my own way and to hell with all of them.  I was done with Organized Religion.

And that’s how I felt about it for a long time—that it wasn’t god I didn’t believe in, but the church.  The more I studied the more I came to see how the church had become an institution that looked out for its own interests and my personal moral salvation was but a product sold to make sure the slate roofs didn’t leak and the clergy could dress well.  It wasn’t until I almost married a Catholic and went through some of the courses offered that I came to my final revelation that it was all just an extra-governmental method of social organization and control and had no real connection to anything holy.

Whatever that might be.

For several years I was militantly anti-religion.  I’ve mellowed.  All that I felt then about the church I do still feel, but not to the exclusion of much else.  I no longer view “church” as evil or even remotely culpable in social ills.  I’ve come to feel that many individual parishes and congregations have staid the tide of harm that sweeps over communities periodically and that without them communities would suffer more because frankly there isn’t anything else that does what a church does.  I believe that if all churches vanished tomorrow, by the end of the year there would be new ones, because people seem to need them.  They might not be called churches, but, like the organization in the Times piece, would serve all the social functions of one.

I also feel that belief in god is not something that will ever go away.  There is a connection people need to feel to things larger than themselves and for many the amorphous thing they call god is it.  I dropped that notion when I realized that I felt exactly—exactly—the same feelings I’d felt toward god when in the grip of great music or in the presence of great art.  It is, in any of its manifestations, a human thing that takes us out of ourselves and shows us what the universe can mean, and there are many ways to tap into that.  There was a time when for the vast majority of people the Church was the only place to go to find that.  Seriously.  In one place, people could stand in the presence of grandeur that took them out of themselves and connected them to a larger realm, through the architecture, the music…and the stories.

We live in a time when all those things can be experienced by many more people than ever before and in contexts shorn of the rather monopolistic trappings of religion.  Perhaps people do not consciously make that connection, but I think more and more people find that they are, for lack of a better term, spiritually fulfilled in the course of living a full life than was ever possible before.

So I am careful about associating labels that may not be exactly correct to this growing phenomenon of people rejecting churches.  They are not all atheists.  Many may not be agnostics.  But all of them have discovered that the thing they sought in religion can be found without it.

The best thing about this is that for all these people there is no one who can write them a threatening letter about hellfire and make them dance to a tune they no longer find danceable.

culture

On Knocking ‘Em Dead

By now I think everyone on the blogosphere has heard the story of Susan Boyle.   It is an amazing moment and I hope she goes on to do more, because this woman has the fire and the talent.

You can tell, when you watch the video, that everyone in the audience and the judges thought this was a joke.  Here’s this dowdy, middle-aged woman with no looks and from a small town and with no creds who claims to want to be great and is going to sing a sentimental song from a musical and, well, shame on them and shame on us, she looked like she was going to croak like a frog.  So many people of like appearance do.  They step up on stage at the karaoke lounge and bellow or whine and it’s terrible and embarrassing and one hopes everyone was drunk enough not to care, but expectations get set.

To be clear, people who look like that ought to have this kind of talent sound like frogs, too, but somehow we don’t characterize them that way.  We keep expecting beautiful people to be beautiful in everything, or at least to have the good taste to not try what they can’t do.

One of the judges said that Susan’s performance was a wake-up call.  Indeed.

I can’t sing.  I know this.  Even though, on occasion, with the right amount of brandy in my belly, I’ve been known to surprise a roomful of people, this is not a talent I have in any reliable measure.  And when I get nervous, it gets worse.

But I can play piano and guitar and from time to time I’ve actually pulled off a minor coup in public performance.  The hindrance is always the nerves combined with my expectations.  I want to be great.

And I know I’m not.

I’m okay with that, though.  As much as I love music, it is not my first love, and playing okay is, well, okay with me.

But it’s the guts to actually overcome self-consciousness enough to do what you know you can.  Susan Boyle has that.  I have no doubt there are many people who go onto those kinds of shows who really do have talent and blow it because, standing there in front of that audience and those judges, the little troll in the back of their brain tells them they can’t.  It is as much a talent and an ability to ignore that little shit as it is to then perform.  To some extent you have not care.

But how do you do that when really you care so much it’s painful?

The only way to shut that troll up is to do this kind of thing at least once.  And then again.  And again.  And so on.

There was a girl in my grade school, a couple years behind me, who was the epitome of wall flower.  She could never manage to keep her hair combed right, her clothes never fit the way they should, and she muttered in class.  I found out later that she got straight A’s all through school, but she as unremarkable as they come.

Because I was bullied through most of grade school, I made a deal with the teacher one year to be allowed to come in and play piano during recess.  I did this for a few months until I got in trouble for playing Never On Sunday (it was a parochial school).  A few others would come in, mostly girls, and listen.  I was not a great player by any stretch of the imagination then, but I was 12 and I could play I wasn’t playing hymns, so it was special.

This girl came in a few times and once she asked if she could try.  There were giggles, but I slid aside and she sat down.

She was 10 and proceeded to play Claire de Lune almost note perfect.  I recognized it because we had a lot of classical records at home, but the others didn’t.  Still, for about three minutes, it was mesmerizing.  Small hands, they nevertheless flew over the keys during the latter sections of the piece.

When she finished, I said “That was terrific!  What else can you play?”  Whereupon she turned a brilliant red and ran from the classroom.  I never heard her play again.

Now I hadn’t thought of her till I saw Susan Boyle.

Never underestimate the power of human potential.  People will surprise you every time.  If they get a chance.  If they get a shot at living a dream.

And we should never, ever laugh at someone’s dream.

culture

Peter Banks

You wonder where they go sometimes, and then you stumble on a recording on an obscure label (of course, all labels seem obscure these days) and you think, “Damn!”

I treated myself to a new album this week.  Peter Banks, Reduction.

Who?

Peter Banks.  Let me do a little raving about Peter Banks.

Way back when my hormones and my ears synched in perfect openness and my future musical tastes became established, I discovered a small band (at the time) that I have since come to think of as seminal.  Yes.

No, really, the band Yes.  I’ve written about my affection for Yes elsewhere.  For the purpose of this article, let me repeat only a couple of details.  Yes becamse emblematic for me of everything that might be possible in the rock idiom (even though later I came to believe that they really weren’t a rock band, but only used the aesthetics of rock to advance a broader kind of music).  The first tune I heard, late one night on the radio, was a short little thing called Sweet Dreams, which sort of nailed my brain to a plank and infused me with a euraka-like recogntion.

The guitar player on that cut was Peter Banks.

I have come to realize that some musicians are just rough fits for certain bands.  There were two players in the early Yes that went on to do amazing stuff—Peter Banks and Tony Kaye.  Kaye was the original keyboardist for Yes.  (He reappeared later, with the Trevor Rabin line-up on 90210.)

Now, the first two Yes albums featured both these musicians.  Banks left, replaced by Steve Howe.  Kaye recorded the third Yes album—called The Yes Album—and then left to be replaced by Rick Wakeman.  History proceeded.

You wonder about people like Banks and Kaye. Both left a band that later broke into the mega bigtime.  What happened to them?

Well, the two of them formed a unit that many people heard as a kind of Yes rip-off, a band called Flash.  Flash had a couple of hits, they were popular on the college radio circuit, and did a lot of touring.  There was a Yessish flavor to their music, but really it was more that Banks, the leader, took the path that Yes veered from when he left.

I have Peter Banks’ first solo album, which had such players on it as Phil Collins, Jan Akkerman, John Wetton, and others.  All instrumental, which is exactly my kind of thing.

Kaye left Flash, founded a band called Badger, which did a few albums, then a band called Detective, and then became a session player.  I lost track of him until he reemerged with the reconstituted Yes in 1983.

Banks sank even further out of sight for me.

Then I stumbled on an independent cd called Instinct in 2001 or ’02.  Instrumental again.  I noticed a few other discs, and all I could think was “Where did these come from?”

So I broke down and bought another one, this one, Reduction.  I’m listening to it now.

This will be one of my regular rotations for writing.

Here’s the thing.  Banks didn’t play this well when he was with Yes.  I’m sorry, but he didn’t.  He didn’t find his own voice, his skill level, until he left.  Then it was like, where did this guy come from?  The playing he exhibited with Flash was rawer, gutsier than what he did with Yes.  The playing on his solo albums is intrictae, sophisticated, nuanced.  Nothing like what he did with Yes.  Perhaps nothing like he could do with Yes.

I have the same reaction to Tony Kaye when I hear his other work.  He was a basic keyboardist in Yes, competent but nothing memorable.  With Flash, with Detective, with Badger, the guy would really play.  When he rejoined Yes, it was like all that surprising skill disappeared.

Peters Banks seems to be doing all his albums in his own studio, completely solo, these days.  So here and there you find some excess, some bars that perhaps ought to have been cut, a track that lasts maybe a minute too long, things like that.  But nothing that, for me, diminishes from the work.  This is a musician who has finally found his groove, so to speak.

Usually with bands you have the opposite reaction—there are musicians who simply never sound as good in any other context, that once removed from The Band they lose something.  In this case, it may be that Yes and what it tried to accomplish was so specific that only the absolute perfect musicians for that aesthetic would work, and everyone else could only ever be just placeholders until the right players could be found.

Whatever.  There are a couple other Banks albums out there.  Not much.  But if they’re as good as what I’ve heard so far (I’m listening to Reduction as I write this) then I won’t complain.  Too much.

career

Chapter the Next

Yesterday, I stayed home from work again.  Nothing to do.  In a way, I like this.  I’d go on contract with the company if I could, go in only when there was actually something to do.  But it’s not that much money, so it’s a quandary.

On the other hand, I finished a chapter in a book that’s been teasing me for a couple of years.  I’d walked away form it to write something else, and I’ve been finding it difficult to go back.  I have a lot written—almost a third of it, at least—and I’m loathe to just give up on it, but with one thing or another I just haven’t been able to get any forward momentum.

Till yesterday.  So this morning I’m taking a stab at the Next Chapter.  And if that flows, if the words come, if the story proceeds, well…

Couple of things.  I posted a new piece over on Dangerous Intersection about one of my pet peaves with the Culture At Large.  Premature though it is, some folks are declaring that Intelligent Design as a movement is dead on University campuses.  Follow the links.

I pulled out an old piece of vinyl this morning to listen to, Todd Rundgren’s Initiation, which has some appropriately irreverant material on it—Eastern Intrigue, Initiation, A Treatise On Cosmic Fire—and a lot of good, solid rock’n’roll.

I’m going into work early this morning, just to wrap it up for the next four days.  I’m now looking forward to doing some actual fiction writing.  Maybe confession is good for the soul—or at least the creative muscle.

Have a good Christmas.

Life

Procrastination

The end of 2008 approaches.  2009 is going to be…

Not more of the same, I sincerely hope.  Mea culpa, I am procrastinating.  I watch myself do it.  I’m doing it now.  I’m writing this instead of hammering out the classic fiction of the future.

I have tio admit, since the beginning of December I have been more and more depressed, which is a horrible, downward spiral, the likes of which I haven’t felt since I broke up with a woman I thought was going to be my wife, a long long time ago.  I was a mere 24 then, contemplated ending it all, took a lot of long walks, and came out the other end determined to do better.  A few months later I met Donna and the last 28 years have been a terrific ride with a wonderful companion.

So I know by experience that things turn around and get better.  It’s cyclic.

But you do have to do something to encourage the process, like maybe some real work.

I have been working, but it’s all peripheral stuff.  Procrastination.  A lot of it will end up being useful, I have a limited range of things I do while I procrastinate.

I have three novels I want to write in the next couple of years.  Two of them will be sequels, so writing them would be an act of faith that the first volumes to which they are connected will be published.  I just don’t know by whom.

I finally got a decent scanner, so I can start playing with Photoshop the way I’ve been intending for lo these many years.  (I’ve had Photoshop 7.0 on my system for some time now and once in a while I open it up and gaze at it…)

There is a model kit under my workbench I’ve had for several years now that I want to build.

I went to the Christmas coffeehouse last weekend, something I usually can’t do because there is an annual party we attend that always falls on the same night.  Well.  As you might guess, it was all—ALL—Christmas music, which I have a childish affection for.  But I ended up playing poorly, mainly due to a lack of practice, and, in myown ears at least, I muffed it.

I’ve fallen into a holding pattern, waiting for the world to change.  I know better.

So after I finish this post, I’m going to say a word or two on my MySapce blog, then turn my back on the internet for a few days.  I need to find a groove in my writing.  I need to stop feeling like a failure.

December is traditionally the month during which all publishing seems to disappear.  Editors are not to be found, switchboards are put on automatic, no one does anything much to speak of.  So when December 1st rolled around with no news, I sort of collapsed.  Expectations were once again not met.  I have to wait.  I am not a patient man.  I’ve never been good at waiting.  (I’ve walked away from grocery carts when it took too long to get through the line.)  It took hold for a bit.  Still does.  It’s bloody cold, the sky is grey, and I have no idea what’s going to happen in the next few months.

But I have responsibilities.  O have Center for the Book paperwork that needs tending.  I have to prepare a package by April for the transition of the presidency to someone else.  I need to walk the dog.

Mostly I have to stop acting like I’ve been defeated.  That’s hard.  But easier than watching everything else melt down and drift away.

Anyway, I’m going to fiddle around with getting a new version of WordPress so I can start uploading videos and the like.  I tend to learn a given level of software and then, because I don’t like constantly stepping outside my comfort zone, stick with it long past the time when everyone else has moved on to the new and improved.

I’m posting it here.  Mark this.  I’m not going to proscratinate anymore.  Really.  I mean it.  Cross my heart.  See if I don’t.  I’m going now.  Bye.  For now.  Till later.

Oh, hell.

culture

Sibelius

I love Sibelius.  I find his themes, motifs, melodies absolutely immersing.  He was touted once as the heir to Beethoven and while I think Dvorak rightly deserves that title, in the 20th Century it’s hard to beat Sibelius.

I’m reading Alex Ross’s history of music in the 20th Century, The Rest Is Noise.  It’s a fine book.  Ross has a gift.  Every once in a while I run across a piece of writing that is just begging to be shared.  Today I read this, about the place where Sibelius lived.

Ainola stands much as Sibelius left it.  The atmosphere of the house is heavy and musty, as if the composer’s spirit were still pent up inside.  But you get a different feeling when you walk into the forest that stretches out on one side of the house.  The treetops meet in an endless curving canopy, tendrils of sunlight dangling down.  The ground is uncluttered: many paths fork among the trunks.  Venturing a little farther into the wood, you lose sight of all human habitation.  A profound stillness descends.  The light begins to fail, the mists roll in.  After a while, you may begin to wonder if you will ever find your way back.  Many times in Sibelius’s music the exaltation of natural sublimity gives way to inchoate fear, which has less to do with the outer landscape than with the inner one, the forest of the mind.

Mm!

And yes, you can certainly get that from the music.  Especially the later symphonies.  But I can talk about that another time.  For now, I just wanted to share this piece of exceptional writing.

culture

One of the Pink is Gone

Richard Wright is dead.

Pink Floyd was unbelievably influential on me as a musician, even though I have never been quite able to define why.  Perhaps that’s not important.

I always thought something had happened that set Wright back on his heels, because the work he did within the band kept growing thinner and thinner.  Compared with the gutsy soloes of Gilmour or with other keyboardists in weaker bands, after Dark Side of the Moon he simply failed to stand out to my ear, but the ability was clearly there.

In its own way, this is as significant as the dying of the Beatles.