bleh

Last night was the final night of Tuning the Air at CHAC. We had a large audience, the largest of the entire run, and BR counted 83 occupied seats.

After tearing down, packing up, and saying goodbye to CHAC, I rode with Igor A. to the after-party celebration.

Merlot wine, pizza, salmon, salsa, beer, chocolate-covered pretzels, champagne, toasts, and good cheer abounded.

Later, while Igor A. and Travis cleaned up, Igor K. told the tale of how the KGB interrogated him when he was a young man in the old Soviet Union. Igor K. was a long-haired rocker dude, clearly an enemy of the Revolution. They led him down long, enormous hallways with endless doorways on each side, all designed to make a person feel as tiny as an ant. They sat him down at a table and stuck a bright light in his face. They asked him about his reading habits (specifically, a book by Ouspensky that apparently contained a passage describing the Bolsheviks in disparaging terms). They confronted Igor with extracts from his own personal diary.

Igor is still with us, so the story ultimately ended well.

He dropped me off, and I stayed up for a little while reading the latest Thomas Covenant book. I've been a Stephen Donaldson fan for many years, but sometimes I must either take a break from his writing or only read it in small chunks; his characters and situations are always so in extremis that it wears me out.

Today, I eventually rolled out of bed around 1:45 PM, hungover, grumpy, and feeling like a zombie.

I stopped by UW Bookstore and found a small gift for my parents. I had it gift-wrapped, and the gift-wrapping lady virtually threw it at me when she was done.

One of those days.

don't trouble your beautiful self

Following the House Team Circle meeting with CG, I looked at the stuff I wrote about the Birdman. I didn't like it. I didn't like how it upset my self-image as a Beautiful, Lovely Person(tm).

So, I took it out.

But just now I put it back in. Why should I lie to myself?

And if anybody else out there imagines I am some kind of Beautiful, Lovely Person(tm)--a stretch, to put it mildly--then let them be properly disillusioned (don't worry...it builds character). Life is too short for that nonsense.

Besides, I have to admit that I greatly enjoyed it this afternoon when I once again pulled out Captain Beefheart's troutmaskreplica as a treat for the Birdman and his boyfriend. Their third sex session of the day was stretching out toward the 60 minute mark, and I suddenly hankered to hear some Captain Beefheart. Loud. Really loud.

A little later, I went to brush my teeth, and as I passed his room, it seemed to me the Birdman had fled the building.

Did I mention that I'm a Beautiful, Lovely Person(tm)?

Anyway, yesterday during the morning sitting, I had a kind of breakthrough. My thoughts would not sit still. I kept drifting away into clouds of fantasy. I wrestled with my thoughts, trying to still the troubled waters.

And then all at once, I realized I could just walk away from it. Don't bother trying to tame the beast. Don't even bother to judge it. Just walk away.

So, I did.

And there I was back in the room with the texture of the carpet in front of me, the space around me, the light streaming in through the windows, the sound of cars passing in the distance and reverberating in the hard acoustics of the space.

Then I drifted away again into some nasty snarl of thought.

Once again, I just walked away from it. And there I was back in the room.

So, maybe I had an insight of some kind. And I will inevitably forget about it and get lost once again. I always forget. Then I remember. Then I forget again.

Then the House Team Circle met with guitars, and we spent 90 minutes grinding our way beat by beat through "Eye of the Needle."

Then it was the afternoon meeting with CG. We sat down with our guitars. CG asked how he could help us. We talked. We sat around and stared at each other. We talked some more. Then we played "Asturias." CG asked us to pick a note and then play. So we did. Then he asked us to adjust until we were all playing the same note at the same time. Eventually, we coalesced onto the F at the 13th fret, 2nd string.

Then he got out the metronome.

He led us through the bass notes of "Asturias," and had us working on nailing the metronome click.

I asked a question about working with the metronome: when trying to nail a metronome click, the click sometimes disappears--does this mean I've nailed it? He seemed to agree this was possible.

He asked us each to rate how close we were to being dead on to the click. I estimated I was maybe 50% dead on and 50% ahead. He told me I was actually behind, that my pick was taking a while to get through the string, and the note was consistently beginning behind the beat.

Hmmm...

I found myself drawn into explaining that I had been deliberately practicing this way as an effort to get away from swatting at the string. He suggested I could also "just play the note."

I have to admit I was indeed sitting there in the circle self-consciously practicing my picking. I was thinking about it, in detail, while doing it. Maybe I should forget about all of that when I enter the circle and just play the note.

Then we tried to circulate C Major up and down through an octave. Then we did it with a metronome. We made mistakes. One mistake led to the group circulating on a slow triplet against the click, which I thought was pretty cool, even if it was uninentional.

In the end, he suggested that to get better playing together, we needed to spend time playing together.

Then Igor K. dropped me off on NW Market street. I got lunch and fell in love with a skater girl.

Then I went home, ate some chocolate and fell asleep without brushing my teeth.

Then I woke up with this awful taste in my mouth. I brushed my teeth.

The clock was blinking "12:00 AM." What time was it?

I still had time to catch Electrochakra at Mr. Spot's.

The 44 bus to Ballard was on time. There was an aggressive drunk at the bus stop, a young man who looked like he had passed out in a puddle earlier in the evening. He left me alone and harassed the skate punks sittin on the bunch, instead.

He left me alone.

Electrochakra was good. They had "hook." I drank a beer.

Then I went home.

around and around and around

I've decided to post again for today. Otherwise, I wind up with epic-length posts.

Last night, I went to see I'm Not There, the fractured new Dylan biopic. The movie was another of those Todd Haynes surrealistic journeys where I feel like I'm inside a dream; I find his movies unfold with a very dream-like sort of logic, not as extreme as a David Lynch movie, but I feel like he's creating his art from a similar place.

I expected I would like the Cate Blanchett portrayal of the mid-'60s electric Dylan, but I found the Christian Bayle portrayal of the early folk Dylan and the Born-Again Dylan convincing beyond my expectation. In the Born-Again guise, Bayle perfectly recreated that peculiar worry line Dylan developed between his eyebrows during that period.

The "Jude Quinn"/Cate Blanchett renditions of "Maggie's Farm" and "Ballad of the Thin Man" were clumsy and disappointed me; then I saw in the credits that Stephen Malkmus of Pavement was the vocalist for those tracks, and it made sense. Malkmus has sometimes had a slight Dylanish thing in his vocal performance on his own material, so it baffles me that he apparently has no idea how to interpret actual Dylan material. He's also not a particularly skilled vocalist in terms of tone or pitch, but I'm baffled they didn't do at least a little bit of pitch correction on his voice in these tracks; beside being a clumsy interpretation, Mallkmus' vocal track was also a lot more out of tune than I'm used to hearing from him.

Whatever.

Following up on a reference to "Beatwear" in the closing credits, I today find myself surfing through pages of Beatle boots and Shea Stadium Nehru jackets.

Yeah!

I love that stuff. Maybe when I get some money, I'll play dress-up.

In the early '90s (pre-Internet), I went in search of Beatle boots and never could find what I was looking for. One shoe salesman at the mall in Bloomington, Indiana, was actually rude to me for inquiring and appeared to resent me personally; I have no idea why.

This morning, the paramedics came to check on S, who is dying from a brain tumor; he wouldn't open his door and sent them away. Soon after, a Seattle cop showed up and got the door open. Then the paramedics came back and took S to the hospital for severe dehydration.

I also heard the paramedics and the cop make note of the powerful stink emanating from the Birdman's room; the paramedics seemed at first to believe it was a dead body odor. I'm pretty sure it comes from the Birdman's numerous bird cages and fish tanks.

In any case, I later found out that JX, the landlord, is now compelled by law to warn the Birdman in official writing to clean things up in his room. It turns out the police and paramedics are compelled to document these things when they come across them.

Good!

The stink has been seeping into my room, and I'm getting really sick of it.

Last night, I also finally had enough of the squealing-pig sex sounds produced by the Birdman and his boyfriend.

If I am in fact hearing what I think I'm hearing--the alternative theory, given how often I hear these noises, is that the Birdman has multiple personalities and extremely strange personal habits. Otherwise, it means the Birdman and his boyfriend are having sex five to six times per day.

The first time I overheard this stuff, I thought some guy was beating up his girlfriend in the next room. I really thought I was overhearing domestic violence, and I almost called the cops. It sounded like bloody murder.

Also, one of the two talks a lot during sex. It doesn't sound like the ongoing rhythmic grunts and moans you might expect; instead, I usually hear a series of high-pitched squeals, followed by a bunch of demented mumbling muffled by the wall between our rooms: "...you little bitch...you thought you were the big man...ha ha hah...now look at you... bitch..." [Compiled and extrapolated from a hearing a lot of this shit--dude, why don't you shut up and get on with it already? We don't have all goddamn day...]

I have never heard anyone talk that much during sex. I never talk that much during sex. No heterosexual couple I ever overheard in entire life talks that much, if at all, during sex; instead, you mostly get a lot of moaning, usually rhythmic and slowly speeding up until the "Big O" is finally achieved. In one apartment building, the couple upstairs made the closet doors shake. None of this blah blah blah I keep hearing from the Birdman's room.

In fact, now that I think about it, I have never heard anything that sounds like they've reached a climax...so maybe it's just some bizarre, multiple-personality weirdness. Who really knows?

In any case, last night I decided it was time to crank up the stereo and pull out the most irritating, arrhythmic, and unsexy music I could find in my collection.

First up was Edgar Varese's "Arcana," followed by "Ionisation."

Then I burned an iTunes compilation featuring as much troutmaskreplica Captain Beefheart music as I could fit onto the CD. I defy any man, gay or straight, to keep his erection in the face of Beefheart's "Frownland."

Sure enough, the Birdman had enough and left for the entire night, maybe to his boyfriend's place.

Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out, dude...

that pesky pinky

Again, I remind myself: every single person around me has their own life, and their own experience of their life is as complete and immersive as my own.

Guitar practice last night was mostly slow, slow, slow work on the left hand pinky stretch between F major at the 13th fret (2nd string) and B diminished at the 14th fret (3rd string). This is a move from the Tony Geballe exercise in C Major triads that Curt showed me in calisthenics a while back. I can do it easily if I use and index finger stretch, but I want to widen my capabilities a little bit here.

I've been using my little mirror to watch my left hand, and I'm having to work really hard at releasing tension as I reach into my hand, find the muscle I need, and move the pinky. The index finger wants to react, and my entire body tenses; all of this has to be released as I proceed.

I get a little advantage from the fact that I'm stretching the pinky out while I have the ring finger firm and planted on its note; but, the shift to the B diminished arpeggio is still beyond my neuromuscular abilities. For the very next move, I keep the pinky planted and drag the ring finger over to its new position, but this is a whole other ball of wax. So far, it's impossible.

I'm generally debating the problem of pinky stretch when the pinky is the first finger down--think a 4321 First Primary where you are descending, fingers up, 4 goes down first, then you need a stretch between 4 and 3.

Do you begin with the left hand in a "pre-stretched" position with the thumb already set in its center of gravity for that position? So far that seems like the best answer.

on the in-betweens

My first quarter of classes is complete, but my second has yet to begin.

I already feel like I've been in Seattle a long time, but it's only been about three months. My sleep cycle is skewed, and day is night; I feel like I'm in a time warp.

The house is now so wonderfully quiet.

I exchanged emails with old rock band pal DSM yesterday, and it turns out he's now married, with a two year old son and a two-hour commute to his job.

I enjoyed the House Team Circle meeting last Wednesday. One big positive point for me was that I went to my "alone place" during the meeting, that internal place where I play the guitar because I enjoy playing the guitar. And I now recognize this is the state of mind I need to bring with me onstage if I ever intend to put stage fright into its proper place as a source of energy.

The House Team Circle meeting with CG on Saturday was also eye-opening, and I feel like I now am at the beginning of knowing how to break down a piece of repertoire and learn to play it in solid time.

Saturday was also the day when I realized that other musicians universally perceive the metronome as speeding up and slowing down while practicing to a click. I've noticed it before now and then in my personal practice, and it's been a regular feature of House Team Circle meetings, but I somehow never made the connection in my own consciousness that this is a common perception and that it might be important.

Always before, I thought of it as the musicians speeding up and slowing down, or the music speeding up and slowing down. "Are we speeding up in this passage?"

During the TTA rehearsal, CG told the team to pay special attention to moments when the metronome seemed to speed up or slow down while rehearsing a particular piece. He didn't ask them to look for moments when the music sped up.

For me, this points toward something about the subjectivity of musicians' time sense, especially in a group.

After all, a metronome doesn't really speed up or slow down (within the statistical limits of quartz oscillation, of course). It's in our consciousness.

Although, I should point out that the music unequivocally sped up when the Chicago group played "Eye of the Needle." I can't remember if we rehearsed it with a metronome or not. Maybe my internal clock was reasonably well-calibrated after 15 or more years of practicing with a metronome, enough that the music was an external reality that was speeding ahead of my internal time sense.

Here's the funny thing about listening to the TTA team after CG's statement: in order to hear any slight variation in the perceived metronome tempo (and there were a few here and there) I had to enter the time flow of the music as a musician by tapping a finger and listening as if I were performing the music. If I had been casually listening, I would not have noticed anything, at least not with this group.

I've also been pondering how my ongoing experiment the "touch-pressure" picking paradigm has changed my relationship to time.

If you're swatting at the string with a stiff arm and picking hand, the pick contacts the string somewhere along a curved arc, and it's hard to control exactly where (and therefore when) you strike the note. Unless every swing is exactly the same, you could be a little early, you could be a little late. You might even miss the string.

If you are already touching the string, it's then just a matter of applying pressure and getting to know where the "break point" is where the pick and the string slip past each other. If you want to, and you've learned control, you can push the break point a bit earlier, or hold off until later. Or you can be dead on to a metronome click.

The touch-pressure paradigm definitely makes things easier when you're working at ultra-slow metronome speeds, say 40 bpm with four clicks per notes. Your ability to swat and control the point of contact breaks down.

From another point of view, it's also occurred to me that very fast picking may also lead to the same thing. I sometimes see guitar magazines advising players to "make their movements smaller" as they speed up. In our first meeting, one very good guitarist advised me to make my pick strokes "narrower," no more than the width of the string.

So, if you progressively make your movements "smaller" and "narrower," won't you logically at some point cross over into touching the string with each pick rather than swatting at it? Your pick stroke can't get much smaller or narrower than that, can it?

Time to go eat, and then practice...

finally

Crazy lady L got the heave-ho yesterday. It was everything I expected, and more.

I woke up around 10:30 AM to the sound of the Eviction Sheriff and house manager D taking L's door off its hinges. L wasn't there, so they got out the power drill. I just sat under the covers for a while and listened; by the time I grabbed my shower tote and headed for the bathroom, the door was leaning against the wall in the hallway, the Eviction Sheriff was gone, and D was busy bagging up L's stuff. The door had two eviction notices posted.

I peeked into the room as I flip-flopped past, and D said, "I have never seen someone tear up a room that fast."

Bits of broken glass, plaster, baking flour, cigarette ash, and other unidentifiable bits of detritus littered the floor. The wall shared with the hallway had been punched full of holes, and I'm guessing these were made three nights ago when it sounded like L was attacking the house with a hammer; I could hear the hammer pounding, and after a few swings, the crumbly sound of the drywall giving way beneath the blows drifted down the hallway.

After showering, I heard a commotion as I exited the bathroom.

L was back, and she was throwing a screaming fit in the downstairs hallway:

"I had until 5 PM! Where is my stuff! I want my stuff! Get it now! Now! NOW!!"

D told her she had to leave or he would call 911, and she screamed and pushed him. I was up in the kitchen where several residents had gathered to watch through the windows (including the window L had broken near the back stairs).

"I had a right to be here! Where is my paperwork! I had a right! I want my stuff! Call 911! Now! Call 911! NOW!! CALL IT NOW!!"

She ducked into the room:

"Fuck you! Where's my stuff! FUCK YOU, SCHINDLER!!"

[Note: I've before overheard her screaming at "Schindler" in the wee hours of the morning. I have no idea if this is a real person, one of her hallucinated menagerie of tormenters, or her nickname for the house manager.]

She found some of her possessions near the garbage can in the hallway:

"This is my stuff! My stuff isn't garbage!! Where's my stuff!! I want my stuff now! NOW!!"

I was wearing only a bath towel, and it was several long moments before she swept out into the alleyway and I could sneak down into my room without running into her.

After I changed, I went back up to the kitchen and rejoined the Peanut Gallery watching the proceedings.

The black kid from upstairs was busy heckling L from the rear door. L habitually banged on the door and harassed him whenever he tried to use the downstairs shower, and now he was repaying the courtesy.

"You think this is funny?!!" she shouted.

"I'm laughing my ass off!" he said.

Three cars with grim-faced Seattle cops arrived, and they stood surrounding L while she rifled through the bags of her possessions D brought up from storage. W from across the hall noted the cop who kept his hand in his right rear pocket, close to his gun.

L was running her mouth and gesturing as she sorted her stuff.

"Ah, she knows how to work the cops," said the kid. "She ain't crazy! She knows how to work it!"

Eventually, the cops left and things settled down. D came back in and told us to get him right away if she ever came back; if she entered the house again, it would officially be a charge of "criminal trespassing." By law, they would hold her possessions in storage for 45 days, but she would have to be accompanied by the cops when she eventually came around to pick up her stuff.

A from Texas arrived near the end of the row with bake sale brownies, and we speculated about who the Chocolate Milk Bandit in the house might be. He said he was a bake sale fanatic and couldn't understand people who put store-bought sweets into a bake sale; when he discovered such an offense, he said, he found himself wanting to run through the bake sale, kicking over tables like Jesus in the temple (kicking out the the False Brownie Prophets).

W gave us a quick run-down on tenant law in Seattle; he knew all about it from his previous rental experience. He moved in from another county, and the room he rented sight-unseen had a gas leak beneath the floor, urine-soaked carpets from the previous tenant, sewage leaking through the wall whenever someone flushed the toilet, and other horrors. He eventually documented all of it, sicced the city government on his landlord, and got all of his money back from several months of living in this hellhole.

But, back to L...

Last night, around 1:30 AM, I swear I woke up and heard her screaming "Whore!!" in her inimitable way, probably outside one of the sorority houses a block or two away. It had to be her. Nobody else screams that particular word in quite the same way, with quite the same vehemence.

I saw no sign of her today, but did find myself astounded by the incredible quiet in the house.

The only thing I heard this morning was cancer-stricken S growling "Bastards!" as he entered the basement bathroom. I later understood his anger when I walked past and smelled it. I'm not going in there again until it's clean.

It smelled similar to the bird/fish stink from the Birdman's room, so maybe he's responsible.

W's fuzzy pink slippers were lying outside L's room--marking his territory in triumph, perhaps?

strange week

I'm finally past the hump for this week, and my first quarter of classes is almost over. One more week to go.

The Wednesday Circle meeting qualified as a rough slog, but I can't say I felt any pain. It just was what it was. Eye of the Needle is putting our collective sense of rhythm to the test, and it's hard to describe how surreal it is to begin a piece with the metronome--the most objective musical time reference you're going to find--and then have the experience that the metronome is slowing down.

I can only conclude that members of the circle need to break out the metronome and work, work, work, especially on dividing each beat into units of three and four notes. This is about as basic as it gets.

We tried everything. I introduced the TA KE TI NA rhythmic recitation method (which has worked wonders for me, but may not help everyone). MB introduced VS's version of bodybeat work they've been using in the Boston group, and then she led us through a circulation of the second 4/4 figure. All very revealing, but the solution mainly lies in individual personal practice.

At the grant proposal work meeting afterward, CG said that he usually has the student put away the guitar and work on slapping out rhythms versus a tapping foot. In the end, rhythm is in the body.

Maybe next time I should take the group out for a walk around the block.

And I find myself flashing back to 7th grade marching band and all the work it took to march in step and play "El Abierto." That was a good marching band, and we had some rockin' cadences.

The grant proposal meeting was productive and kept us up late. Although I woke up several times this morning, I didn't get out of bed until about 2 PM, and then it was straight into finishing up some Tech Writing homework.

L received her eviction notice Tuesday morning. I woke up when I heard a male voice announcing that he was from the sheriff's office.

And so L has now gone completely gonzo, screaming and throwing things around in her room. She's not even making the pretense of controlling her behavior any longer.

Somewhere in there, she knows she has to learn to control herself, and has said things to that effect, but I don't know that the penny has quite dropped with her.

I have a feeling that her recent run-in with the police after screaming the "n-word" at one of the residents may have sunk any chance she had to fight the eviction in court. If she went to court, that incident was bound to come up. I overheard her today muttering to herself about it, and I don't think she gets it.

I get the impression from things she says that she somehow believes she has a license to do anything by virtue of being a diagnosed crazy person. She's crazy and therefore not responsible. That may be true in the legal sense, but in the everyday interpersonal sense, she is badly mistaken. She shoots herself in the foot.

On the way to class, I returned SE's call and caught up on happenings in Florida.

He described how a drunken bum came into a Starbucks, sat right down at SE's table, and began aggressively intruding into SE's personal space. I related my story of the aggressive drunk at the bus stop the Saturday night I went to see Electrochakra in Ballard.

An aggressive, grimy drunk--"Gene"--rushed up to me when my attention was focused on the bus schedule. He got right up in my personal space, kept me off balance with profanity and inappropriate personal disclosures, and then propositioned me--"Yeah, I'm married, but really...I'm into men!...A guy really knows what another guy likes...Yeah, you're a gorgeous guy...My hair used to be long, too..."

At that point he reached out with a grimy hand and touched my hair. I was furious. If he touched me again, I was going to rip off his arms and beat him to death with his own limbs.

He had this magic ability to push the situation right up to the edge and then ride the brink without quite precipitating a violent response.

I'm not totally convinced he was actually looking for guy-on-guy action, though. I think he was there to intimidate people and feed off the angst.

In the meantime, the 44 bus to Ballard refused to arrive and this interminable horror just went on and on.

After that last comment, I said, "I'm going to go look at the bus schedule for a while..."

I walked away, and when I looked back a moment later, he had already moved on to another unfortunate person trapped there waiting for the bus.

Finally, the 44 bus arrived about 40 minutes overdue. As this crowd of people got on the bus, Gene sat on the bench, waved goodbye, and cackled. I spent the next 30 minutes of the ride to Ballard struggling to bring my attention to my feet on the floor and fend off a wave of blind, helpless fury.

It didn't pass completely until about midway through Electrochakra's set when the music finally overwhelmed me with ecstasy. Igor A's fretless bass playing just kept turning one badass, funky corner after another, up and up and up, until I thought my head would explode. Just when you thought you'd experienced the most in-the-pocket moment of groove possible, he'd do one better.

No bad vibe was going to survive in this environment.

It may be that encounters with aggressive street people is just part of living in the big city, but I've been considering how much permission I'm going to give myself to just get out of the situation. I gave myself permission to run following the friendly mugging in Covington, Kentucky, so maybe I'll give myself permission in other encounters with drunk morons to just walk or run away and make no excuses.

I adamantly stood my ground in this case, right up until I couldn't take anymore, and I paid for it with a nasty, violated feeling. Is that worth it?

lots of guitar playing

I couldn't seem to get going for a while when my alarm went off this morning, so I only caught the last half hour or so of guitar calisthenics at HQ. I think they were working on close-voiced arpeggios when I came in (7ths in C, perhaps?) rather than the usual NST fully-inverted triads in 6ths. But once I sat down, the group shifted to three-triad stacks in A Harmonic Minor, which has been an ongoing project for a while now; Harmonic Minor produces a lot of interesting chords and combination, and I think today everybody found the F major/B diminished/E major stack particularly wacky. Some eyebrows went up when that one came around.

My onboard tuner no longer works for some reason. I have no idea why. I don't think the battery is dead, but I'll change it out and see if that helps. The Peterson digital strobe tuner is too bulky to drag all over the place, so it's back to the A 440 on the metronome and my ears.

Wow, using my ears to tune--how weird is that?

I've still gotten better at tuning by ear, though; after studying the overtone series for a little while, I've learned to compensate a little bit for the slight sharpness of the 3rd harmonic (the just-intonated Perfect 5th) when I tune by ear. I always used to wind up with my lower strings flat relative to equal temperament.

Igor K. tune up with a digital tuner, and when I checked against his open strings, I was close enough that I didn't find it necessary to retune.

The Tuning the Air team took off for tech rehearsal at CHAC, so Igor K. and I stayed to work on repertoire for the House Team Circle (since Andrew M. is now going to be working on the house team, I guess we can officially go with that name).

Igor and I worked mostly on "Eye of the Needle" and stopped a few times to break a few patterns down no-tempo; there were a few stress points here and there for both of us that were destabilizing the following notes. Igor had one pattern with a finger pivot that was tying him up in knots, so we got in there with no-tempo and posing to practice building a relaxation response into our muscle memory.

We even took a few patterns into time with the metronome after cleaning them up no-tempo, and with one of them we made it 80 bpm with two clicks per note. Which felt fast, especially when you're intentionally studying every tiny physical movement and trying to rotate your attention through your body to relax unnecessary tension.

At some point, once you have something exactly how you want it in muscle memory, you're supposed to hand it off to your autopilot system as the metronome speeds up, but I can safely say I have not reached that point yet. I'm not sure yet at exactly what point you begin the handoff. I'm still learning to walk before I can run.

But I can definitely say that the feeling of intimate contact with the string, of "playing from the string," hasn't completely found it's way into my full-tempo playing. Not to the point where I can feel it unambiguously and say, "Ah, there it is!"

I do have a feeling of smoothness when I play various things, and my left hand finger release is better than it used to be; that is, my fingers generally do not react and pop up--at least on things that I've worked on in detail and where the skill has somehow transferred to other material. When I hit something requiring physical moves that are not polished and ready in my collection, I sometimes crash. The pinky stretch combination was killing me today in calisthenics; that move creates so much stress in my playing mechanism, that I crash the pattern and have to drop out about 50% of the time.

I'm still thinking out how to approach that one, and it occurred to me today, that a pinky stretch based in the First Primary 1234 fingering might work as a place to at least start working on this. With this pattern, the first three fingers would at least already be firmly placed and out of the way, and I might find it easier initially then to study, inhibit, and direct my sympathetic tension reactions to stretching my pinky out. I will also have to begin on the higher frets where the stretch is smaller, and the pressure on my left hand from being supported farther out from my torso won't be so intense.

Thing is, the particular section of the Harmonic Minor fingering under study begins with a pinky stretch while two of the other fingers are in a "light," relaxed state where they are more prone to tense up. The ring finger is down, and stays down as the pinky stretches and frets (a Succession and Completed Flow issue), but this pattern in the series is down below the 5th fret in Key of A (if my notes are correct) where the stretch and the tension are huge.

This is going to take a while.

I have pretty good stretch and strength in my index finger, but you don't always get infinite choice in fingerings when you're whipping something out on the fly. You sometimes find yourself boxed in by a previous fingering choice.

And while I'm thinking about it, here are a few big questions on my mind about learning to play the guitar and make music:
--How is it exactly that work on a particular fingering or exercise goes into your general guitar playing toolbox and improves everything you do, while other things that somehow should transfer to other situations don't?
--What is the exact mechanism by which this happens?
--How can I identify the important, transferrable stuff and therefore speed up my development as a player?

The no-tempo work of "dragging" relaxed, light fingers from position to position when shifting fingerings has begun to show up on a general level. Maybe this points toward some sort of skill or approach waaayyyy down below the surface of a guitarists physical practice that leads to general improvement.

In the end, I want to make my practice time count. I want to get improvement for every minute of time I put in.

I realize this is probably unrealistic. Maybe it's just my intellectual self wanting to run, run, run, when I should be asking my body to figure it out--however the hell you do that!

When I look back to my pre-Guitar Craft playing, I remember working on exercises from guitar magazines and just sucking for so long. And then something happened. On some level, I got something and all of a sudden I was shredding heavy metal leads, but I couldn't tell you what it was that changed. I can't even remember a particular moment of transition. It's like one day I just woke up and there it was, at least in my memory.

Maybe my memory is just faulty.

So how's that? A long entry and I refrained completely from reporting on crazy roommate antics. Yeah!

the saga continues

I've been busy, busy, busy with school and Seattle Circle stuff. I have volunteered to help write and edit Seattle Circle's application to the 4Culture grant. A few moments ago, I completed work on some revisions and prompts for further material destined for the two-page "Narrative Statement" section of the grant.

I had some fun taking the material and applying the technical writing concepts I've been learning in Jan Spyridakis' class. I found lots of juicy verbs hidden inside nominalizations and moved those into verb slots to make the writing more active. I even used a conjunctive adverb!

Cohesion and coherence will still take some work. We'll see how the rest of the team responds.

I spent Thursday night after class at the House of TravGor eating hot khashi and drinking cold vodka.

Khashi is a Georgian specialty, made out of hooves and tripe (stomach), cooked with lots of garlic, and then served hot and gluey. If you have a nasty cold coming on, like I did on Thursday, khashi will fix you right up.

And now I know how vodka is really supposed to taste!

So Igor cooked up the khashi, and then taught us various toasts in Georgian, Russian, Ukrainian, and Polish. The vodka flowed, conversation flowed, and it was a good time.

At various points in the conversation, I noticed surprising things about the intonation of my voice when I contributed from time to time to the conversation. When I deeply believe something is important, it shows up in my voice, and people listen. I found myself realizing just how important certain things are to me by hearing it in my own voice. In some cases, I didn't even realize I had such strong feelings about various topics.

In contrast, when I'm just prattling along, sometimes even on things I think are important to me, my own voice does not convince me. I see listeners turn off, and my own voice irritates the hell out of me.

Sometimes I hear my own voice talking about something I thought was important, and I can tell when I'm not totally convinced of what I am saying.

Ah, the weird process of paying attention and noticing things about yourself...

Igor pulled out a vinyl album of a Polish blues-rock band circa 1971, and these guys were awesome! They had "it," and Igor said that Soviet rock musicians passed it around like a talisman. The recorded sound was amazing, and the guitars had that creamy tube amp "squawk" in spades.

Then we watched a DVD of an early Roxy Music performance and freaked every time the camera cut to Brian Eno in makeup and glam regalia. Brian Ferry crooned about his unfaithful inflatable doll, Phil Manzanera ripped out solos, and Eno ran about turning knobs and twisting sounds into wacky aural shapes.

Later, Igor later told me more about khashi and the history of the Georgian people (I asked him if the Georgians originated from Turkic tribes, but he told me the Georgians originated in the Caucasus Mountain, where they had common ancestors with the Armenians).

It turns out that khashi is a Georgian national institution. After a long night of drinking vodka, revelers crowd into early-morning diners specializing in khashi, and communally obliterate their hangovers. One bowl of khashi, one shot of vodka, and your hangover is cured. The khashi in these establishments has been cooking for six hours beginning at midnight, and Igor first experienced the power of khashi while on tour with a Georgian blues band, back when Georgia was a Soviet republic.

Mmmm...khashi...

Right now, I probably reek of garlic, but I can't tell.

I should mention that Georgian khashi is completely different from that "sticks and twigs" cereal (which may be spelled a little different). Sticks and twigs on the one hand, fatty and gluey on the other. Different worlds.

My body struggled to accomodate this influx of fatty protein, and I found myself awake around 5:00 AM after falling asleep in my clothes. I wasn't tired at all, but I still went back to bed, and now I regret it. I had a chance to get an early start on the day and blew it.

So it goes.

As it was, I got up at noon, stepped out my door, and found the police banging on L's door. She had earlier been upstairs banging on the door of A from Texas, who is studying Chinese, and she howled a series of racial epithets at him through the door.

So he called the police.

She was away when they arrived, although they later picked her up on her way back from the food bank. I ran into her in the hallway, and she went into great detail explaining everything. I asked her questions about her experience when she goes into a manic breakdown, and she told me she becomes psychic and sees spirits and demons. When she's in the grip of this, she says she can't control her emotions, and yet it somehow doesn't hurt her to be in that state.

She understands that her behavior is destructive and alienating to everybody around her, but she can't seem to control it.

L also told me about a former heroin addict roommate who had a bad habit of nodding off into hot pans of grease while she cooked.

In the meantime, she's been served her eviction notice and has a court date set up to fight it. The horrible scene with the eviction sheriff never materialized. We'll see what happens.

I strongly suspect L is way more wiley and calculating than anybody gives her credit for. She rules the basement of this building, and keeps everybody off balance with fear. But is it enough to keep her from being tossed out on the street?

When I got home last night, she was out in the hallway verbally abusing our new neighbors, some tattooed and pierced "ave. rat"/rocker-type guys, and one of their girlfriends.

L told this one guy with plaid pants and a nose ring that his piss smelled like dog or cat piss, which meant that he had AIDS, and that it totally disgusted her. L then told his girlfriend she was a "whore," to get her disgusting self back into her boyfriend's room, and that she "reeks of evil." This girl was definitely not used to this sort of thing, and I could tell she was scared to death as she walked away. (I'm pretty sure I later heard this same girl puking in the bathroom while I was sitting up in the throes of my khashi-powered wakefulness at 5:00 AM.)

However, one of these young guys among the new residents is having none of it. He is not "nice" and has no interest whatsoever in "understanding" her. I can hear it in his voice when he locks horns with her. Something about his attitude and intonation says "bully," and if she remains and tries to hassle him too much, I predict he will not be shy about slapping her around a bit to show her who's boss.

After all, what is she going to do? Call the cops?

At least I won't be bored...

Time to eat and then go practice some guitar.

"whence comes the serpent of delusion?"

Today was my day to sleep way too late, take another nap a little later, and generally feel drained and out of it. I'm paying for being up too late on Friday, getting only four hours of sleep, and then staying up late again on Saturday night after a long day.

Once again, I see that once I am either awake or asleep, I like to stay that way for as long as possible. I'll sleep until I just can't sleep anymore, and then I'll stay awake until I can't see straight and I drop from exhaustion.

All the same Saturday was a good day. After the run of early-morning guitar calisthenics, sitting, and circle meeting, I spent time talking with CF about learning styles. I tend to be so strong in the intellectual aspect that I'm like a blimped up cerebral cortex floating around with a weedy, spindly little body hanging underneath. When I try to teach guitar skills to other people, I tend to go straight for a lot of intellectual explanation, and CF explained that she grasps what we're doing intellectually with no problem, but her body or "somatic self" is not keeping up.

So, I go for the intellectual aspect, even though I can look back and clearly see that I have learned a lot about playing the guitar over the years from watching good guitarists in action. I learned something from watching RF onstage with King Crimson at Bogart's several years ago. Before that, I remember learning from some shredding metal guitarists I saw onstage in the early '90s.

I also had some good practice last night. I broke down one of the triple arpeggio combinations from the calisthenics session and spent some time switching between no-tempo work and the metronome to study how my index finger and pinky were reacting with sympathetic tension at various points in the movements.

Some of these finger reaction signaled angst and tension about the next set of finger moves, and the fingers were "starting" in anticipation. I need to focus on bringing one set of fingerings to completion before allowing the next set. I need to dissipate this tension building up and focus the energy, because this sort of work does generate a lot of energy in the body, and if you're not careful you can waste it in nervous twitching instead of banking it and focusing it to your will.

I have also discovered some weakness in my ring finger on my left hand. This finger wants to lean against the middle finger, and when I get into the hand with attention to find the necessary muscle to move that finger, the muscle is weak and the finger shakes. The shaking also signals "noise" in my nervous system as the habitual signal and the new signal I'm intentionally installing fight it out.

And then there is the tendency to keep left hand fretting fingers "firm," even though the pattern has moved on and they should be "light" after releasing the note. I have a lot of "foundation work" in general to get to where I can discern the states and sensations of these muscles and program them with attention and intention.

I have also found one pattern in the series where the best fingering requires that I stretch the pinky out from the overall "center of gravity" of the fingering series. When I find the muscle I need inside my hand, my entire body reacts. It's going to take a lot of no-tempo work, a lot of Alexander Technique "inhibit and direct," to make this reaction settle down into consistent relaxation.

Understandably, I've been able to get around having to use this particular fingering most of the time, and so I've avoided it in practice. No more.

On other fronts, the mentally ill lady in the house, L, is due to be evicted on Tuesday when the Eviction Sheriff shows up in the afternoon. (I had no idea there was a specialized job title for this activity--what kind of person decides their calling in life is to be an "Eviction Sheriff"?)

It's bound to be a horrible scene.

I'm not sure she's competent or that she actually grasps what is about to happen, even though she has received a notice in the mail about it. Her behavior is unchanged.

I want to be there. I don't want to be there. I want to see it. I want to be as far away as possible when this shit goes down.

It's going to be a train wreck. I just know it.

Shortly before I got up on Saturday morning, she was bouncing around in her room screaming, "Stop it! Stop it! Telepath! Get out of my mind!"

Today, W from across the hall and the girl from the second floor prodded L into a mood swing.

L was telling them how she psychically knew their had been child murders in the house, there were ghosts in her room, and a bunch of other stuff that made it clear L is much crazier than I ever suspected--she is way, way out there. Upstairs Girl disagreed with L on her assertion that she was going to stick a needle into Upstairs Girl--only at "the clinic," of course--and test her theory that UG was daughter of D and L, the resident house manager and his wife.

When UG refused to go along with this idea, L became paranoid and screamed at UG not to look L in the eye, and to stay out of her "unit."

"You do not look in my unit without my permission! Get back into your unit! Bitch!"

W and UG retreated upstairs, while L spiralled off into a frenzy of screaming and slamming her door. She also fell into her characteristic tic where she stomps her foot and yells, "HUT! HUT!" at the top of her voice.

A little later, I left my room and stopped by UG's room where she and W were talking about this latest incident. It turns out they have both had mentally ill relatives, and they enjoy "taunting the dog" now and then.

They also both work nights, and L's antics have been keeping them up, especially W, who lives right across the hallway from L.

L has been nice to me, and I've been kind to L. We're on good terms (when we encounter each other), so I feel a little bad about participating in these discussions, but I also understand this good feeling could evaporate in a heartbeat if I say the wrong thing around L. So I avoid her as much as possible. I understand quite well that L is in some psychological orbit out on the edge of the solar system, and so I also believe she is potentially dangerous because of how unstable and unpredictable she has become.

I feel bad for her, but it's also going to be a relief once she is out of the house.

L claims lately that she's attending counseling and is going to get her medication in order. It it's true, she is way too late.

The house concensus is against her.

If L intended to head off her coming personal disaster, she needed to get herself together starting three to six months ago.

I also understand that I have had it easy compared to some of the other residents, especially W. L has been banging on the door when he uses the communal bathroom, flips the light off while he's in the shower, and runs the hot water tap on the sink in her room so his shower goes cold.

I would be in the throes of a nervous breakdown if she had singled me out for that kind of treatment.

As it is, living in close proximity to a disturbed person has affected me. I try to deny it, but there it is.

When it came out in the pow-wow upstairs that I also have the Birdman living on the other side of me--with all of his birds, his weird babbling and screeching, and the reek of bird shit or dead bodies or whatever the hell it is seeping through the wall--several people joke that the landlord should be paying me to live there.

One of the residents spotted the Birdman arguing with a pigeon one day and asking it how it "thought it was someone special." This is the first incident I'm aware of where the Birdman was not keeping his issues in check and in his room behind closed doors (where I'm the only person who has to hear it).

I've also discovered that this one angry, fearful, hateful, vicious old man I encountered on the street one day also lives here. I almost collided with him coming down the stairs following my shower today. I apologized profusely for almost running over him, but he wouldn't look at me and cowered against the wall of the stairwell. Great.

Now I need to get started on some homework and generate some positive life energy...

And "whence comes the serpent of delusion?"

A Japanese Zen Buddhist monk posed this question to the Master of the monastery in 1976.

The Master replied, "Look to your own feet!"

when the man comes around

A visitor arrived this morning to call on our resident lady ("L") stricken with mental illness.

Around noon, I was in my room when I heard somebody leave the bathroom and knock on a door. The door opened and I heard an unfamiliar male voice greet L in compassionate, joyful tones; right away, I knew this was her counselor and that he had finally arrived to check up on her. He just had that tonality to his voice that said, "The doctor is here and everything is under control." A friend of the family is a professional counselor, and I've heard the exact same note in his voice.

It's funny how you can know so much just from hearing a person's voice.

I heard his voice, and right away I thought, "Her counselor is finally here--thank God!"

He went into her room, they closed the door, and talked. I overheard some of their conversation a few minutes later when I left my room for the shower. She was describing her situation to him, and he would verbally "nod" and ask a question now and then. I could tell they knew each other well, that he understood her history and situation, and that she in turn trusted him.

But, this was also the voice of a person who had a lot of power over her, including the power to determine if she could be allowed to remain out in the world, or if she would be returned to captivity in an institution. He was there to suss out the situation and make a decision.

In the brief space of time it took for me to walk from my room to the shower, I heard enough to tell me that the pressure and responsibility that comes with life on the outside of an institution had taken its toll on her. She said something about how everybody and everything out here in the world was "demand, demand, demand..."

Who knows? Maybe she even wants back into the institution, back into a place where life is ordered and safe, where she clearly understands her role, and where she doesn't have to face the pressure of being responsible. Maybe her escalating erratic behavior was somehow meant to bring this about. All she had to do was keep taking her medication, and things would remain more or less stable and under control. Maybe it's hard to keep up with your medication, maybe not. I don't know.

Time will tell.

Now I'm at Trabant Coffeeshop to do homework.

Tonight is the next meeting of the new circle at Seattle Circle HQ.

laundry day

I've finally completed the process of moving old blog posts into my new blog.

It's amazing how much I accomplish when I really don't want to do homework...

Today was one of those days when I wasn't out of bed until 2:00 PM. When some compelling reason exists, I can get up. No problem. Otherwise, I'll sleep forever.

I said hello to D and L as they cleaned house.

Then I had another burrito breakfast, and listened to the 1969 Boulez version of The Rite of Spring. I could hear the King Crimson connection in the rhythm and the harmony. "Hey, what would it be like if our rock band played stuff like this?"

And then it was laundry time. I loaded up my internal frame backpack and headed out.

DW from from class gave me a call to see about getting together again to study, but now my Wednesdays are booked. And my Mondays are booked with Tuning the Air. And then we obviously both have class on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I think I'm as booked up right now as I can get without also having a job.

My laundry run was fast and efficient this time. Last time, one of my washers didn't spin, so the laundry lady on duty ran it for free through another cycle on another machine, but it ate up a lot of time.

But today was fast.

And there were some interesting characters.

I watched a stooped, disheveled old man meticulously load his immaculately folded and stacked dirty laundry into a washing machine one item at a time, in layers, with a dusting of detergent between each layer. Then he wiped down the top of the machine with an alcohol wipe, which he then folded perfectly and placed on top a stack of similarly folded used wipes. These then went into a folded plastic bag and back into his jacket pocket.

Another rail-thin, balding man, maybe in his late 40s, carried his laundry into the laundromat inside a cardboard box. While I read a book and waited for my laundry to dry, I noticed a pair of yellow latex gloves peaking over the top of the box sitting on the raised counter separating the back-to-back rows of washing machines. Whenever this man had to touch any surface in the laundromat--the handle on a laundry cart, the edge of a drier door--he would go to the box and carefully slip his hand into the yellow gloves, only the hand that would be coming into contact with a surface. And he did it just so, in just such a way that he avoided touching the outside of the gloves.

Then he would go do whatever he had to do--move the cart, open the drier--and come back. And then he would gingerly slip his hand back out of the glove so that the glove was hanging on the edge of the box, ready for its next use.

In the meantime, I read Whitley Strieber's The Path, about the Tarot of Marseilles and its connection to esoteric work. It's funny how Mr. G's ideas seem to pop up everywhere.

JVB's chapter in Archetypes for Writers detailing the Character Facts/nosanthros exercise confuses me. It's one of those things I'm going to have to re-read several times. Some of the things she says imply that you must have (a) noticed something a person/character does, and (b) asked yourself, "Why do they do that?"

But she doesn't explicitly say this is how you should approach it, so her critiques of her students are a bit baffling to me right now.

If this is indeed how you are supposed to approach the exercise, it makes a sort of sense, but I'm not sure yet. I'll go visit her website and see if I can find any clarification.

In either case, I'll try the exercise tonight and see what I get. I'm just a little hung up on the notion of getting it right. I have a hunch the point of the exercise, at least in part, is to get the writer asking these questions, but I don't understand why this point is not clear.

Last night, I heard voices in the bathroom and some banging around, maybe close to midnight. A voice said, "Be careful, dammit! You'll get that stuff everywhere!"

Shortly afterward, I went to fill up my Brita pitcher, and I heard a man groaning through the closed bathroom door (which has "THIS BATHROOM IS FOR TENENTS[sic] ONLY!!" scrawled on the outside in permanent marker). Later, back in my room and on the edge of sleep, I heard this person exit the bathroom and I thought I heard the sounds of the mop bucket being pulled out and used.

I'm pretty sure it was N I heard in there. N is slowly dying of brain cancer and uses a walker to get around, so I had this horrifying scenario in my head of N losing bowel and bladder control, coating the bathroom, and then having to feebly drag out the mop to clean the place up.

I didn't want to look. I didn't want to know.

But, today I found a clean bathroom and a Heineken mini-keg sitting in the trash can. There was a slight whiff of rancid beer, but I'll take that any day over what I had envisioned and feared was going on.

Our female tenant stricken with mental illness has been quiet today.

Right now, I'm in Trabant coffeeshop, once again avoiding homework and succeeding. A folkie female duo from Idaho and a male folk singer from California just finished performing. They were all very good performers, but folkie stuff isn't my bag these days, and I have already forgotten their names.

So make sure you go see them, whoever they were...

more blahblah about life n stuff n things

When I got home last night, I stopped by the room of D and his wife L to find out whether my boxes of clothing had arrived. They had not, but I wound up hanging around to talk and drink a beer.

D and L have been living in and managing the building since 2005, and they described their first several months in the house. It turns out the place was a crackhouse/heroin den when they moved in, and they told some tales that would curl your toes. They are a tough couple of characters, and I respect them for the work they've done to turn this place around.

I couldn't have done it.

D described how the floor of the upstairs bathroom was layered several inches thick with assorted garbage, human waste, and used needles. The walls were spattered with blood and feces.

Various denizens had been defecating in the alleyway, and one character made a habit of tossing his used "rig" out the window into a pile down below. Crackheads were turning tricks in the kitchen. All sorts of strange, drugged people who didn't live there were wandering the hallways.

Absolutely insane.

The surrounding fraternities were unhappy about this, to say the least, especially when junkies ventured out on occasion to steal from the frat houses.

D has been stuck with used needles now and then when cleaning up and pressing garbage bags down in the dumpster. He had to get shots and luckily tested negative for any of the associated nasty bugs.

I thought the place was gross when I first moved in, but this is paradise compared to what they described. If I had arrived and found the situation of two years ago still in progress, I would have turned right around and never gone back.

This must have been the sort of situation my friend M found herself in when she and her husband made their "let's just pick up and go" move to Seattle about six months ago. M walked into her room and found a bunch of meth addicts tweaking out; she headed back to Cincinnati the very next day.

There's still some weird stuff going on. D found somebody's clean, new heroin rig stashed under a cabinet the other day. We don't yet know to whom it belongs.

So, it appears this place is on the way up.

The mentally ill lady has been served notice that she must leave the premises in ten days.

Today, I got out of bed around 6:35 AM, early enough to eat a small burrito breakfast. The 44 bus to Ballard was on time, but I narrowly missed the 18 bus that would have taken me up 24th to 65th St. and Seattle Circle HQ. No big deal. I'm about 50/50 on catching the 18 bus, and I've learned it only takes about ten minutes for me to walk the distance.

Calisthenics focused on on arpeggios in C Harmonic Minor and C Melodic Minor. The first version revolved around three voices ascending by scale steps, first the lowest note, then the middle, then the high note, then the middle again, etc. (I thought this one was pretty cool, and I'll have to take some time to work on it.) We did the same thing in Melodic Minor, and then Curt and Taylor began breaking down the chords by scale degree. For Melodic Minor, they decided it all made more sense when looked at as four-note chords rather than triads, which is not surprising considering jazz makes heavy use of this scale. The same scale, when viewed from the b3 degree, is also George Russell's Lydian Augmented vertical scale, so there's another jazz connection for you.

I drifted away several times during the sitting, and I would certainly have gotten a good whack from the monk with the stick, if we had one available. As I've noticed on other occasions, something opened up around the 45-minute mark. Around that time I finally seem to settle down and the fog clears up a bit. I've noticed my vision takes on a detailed luminosity.

The high-resolution feeling of sensation I experienced in my right hand one day several years ago has not returned. My sense of my body is vague and approximate in comparison.

Later, while the TTA team rehearsed, CF, Igor K, and I met in the conference room to talk about various aspects of the last Monday's performance, especially the relationship between the performers' entrance and our timing for when we close down the door and merch table. It's not totally seamless yet.

After that, CF and I met to go over the arpeggio shapes from the calisthenics session. I introduced her to no-tempo practice, the "firm" vs. "light" finger, posing, relaxed touch, and so on, so that she could begin programming those arpeggio fingerings in on a deep, relaxed level. Learn to walk before you try to run. At one point I drew an analogy between RF's assertion that an Act of Quality will spread to other areas of your playing, and classical guitarist Jamie Andreas' statement that "practicing one thing is practicing everything."

Say hello to "the bottom of your practice." Shake hands. Take your time getting to know each other.

I thought bassist Chris Fitzgerald's idea about replacing unnecessary muscular tension with "pressure, weight, and balance" (achieved through release) fit in very nicely as well, so we discussed that a little bit.

We didn't have a metronome, but we still went through a rudimentary version of the "play-2-3-touch" method of taking no-tempo work into time, enough at least to get acquainted with the idea.

I need to do a lot more of this stuff myself. Maybe someday I'll even be able to play the GC First Primary.

Oh, yeah. I forgot to mention the other day that I pulled Kenny Werner's Effortless Mastery down off the bookshelf for the first time in quite a while.

And it was a different book from the last time I read it!

My work with Jamie Andreas' no-tempo concepts over an extended period has changed my perception of what Kenny Werner is trying to get across. The two practices describe similar and sometimes overlapping territory, but I can see now that Effortless Mastery is ultimately getting at something quite different. I flipped the book open to Werner's commentary about centering, and realized that he's talking first and foremost about a state of mind. Programming the physical movements at a deep level is part of it, but I realized he isn't focused on how to do that; instead, he is talking about who you are and the quality of your state when you do it. He's talking about intentionally developing an effortless state and then building that into a station.

At one point, he states that if you are properly centered when you practice, the body will figure out what to do and what physical moves are appropriate.

Maybe, maybe not. I've enjoyed having various calisthenic principles to hang my hat on.

I can only conclude he's addressing players who already have a "base" of physical competence to work with, some level of skill they can shape and hone.

Anyway, Igor A gave me ride home through heavy traffic and recounted ghastly tales of Stalinism, especially the black year of 1937 when millions were shot or disappeared by the regime--"pathocracy" in full bloom, as described by Lobaczewski.

Normal people with conscience do not do these things.

From Political Ponerology by Lobaczewski:

"Comparative considerations also led the author to conclude that Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, also known as Stalin, should be included in the list of this particular ponerogenic characteropathy, which developed against the backdrop of perinatal damage to his brain's prefrontal fields. Literature and news about him abounds in indications: brutal, charismatic, snake-charming; issuing of irrevocable decisions; inhuman ruthlessness, pathologic revengefulness directed at anyone who got in his way; and egotistical belief in his own genius on the part of a person whose mind was, in fact, only average. This state explains as well his pyschological dependence on a psychopath like Beria."

Anyway, right now I'm at Trabant coffeeshop, and it's time to move on to other stuff. That's plenty for today.

new blog

This is my first post to this new blog, and I'll begin importing old posts from my Chicago Circle Diary bit by bit over the next few days.

I am currently living in Seattle and attending a Technical Communication certificate course at University of Washington. I worked in book publishing for almost ten years, but being back in school is a big challenge. There are certain aspects of grammar that I was always good at, but I haven't had formal instruction since high school (and the most intensive work I did before that was in 4th grade when my English teacher had the class diagramming sentences like crazy). So I'm having to work at it, which is good from my point of view. I had stagnated at my previous job, and it feels good to be learning again. My aim is to become a better writer, and the analysis we've done of our own writing has spotlighted some of my own writing habits--especially my tendency to write winding, convoluted sentences.

On the creative side, I recently bought a copy of Archetypes for Writers: Using the Power of Your Subconscious, by Jennifer Van Bergen. I'm planning to read it several times before diving into the exercises, but it looks promising. Van Bergen's approach is different from the usual writing books on character, plot, setting, and so on (and having worked at Writer's Digest Books, I own a lot of these books); her philosophy and exercises are more psychological and point toward what she calls a global skill. This global skill comprises several component skills that each have to be learned separately and then integrated.

Van Bergen cites this quote from Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain:

"[G]lobal or whole skills, such as reading, in time become automatic. Basic component skills become completely integrated into the smooth flow of the global skill. But in acquiring any new global skill, the initial learning is often a struggle, first with each component skill, then with the smooth integration of the components."

Van Bergen names this global skill arkhelogy and states that it is actually an ancient human skill. Those who practiced arkhelogy in ages past were called seers, prophets, shamans, etc.

We'll see. I just want to write a compelling story sometime before I die. I've written fiction before, and the books of traditional writing instruction have helped, but something is still missing. If I'm going find the energy to sit for hours and write a story, then it needs to be something compelling that can keep me engaged throughout the process.

I felt a little strange buying this one. I've been buying books on writing for years and years, and I had reached the point where I felt like it had all been said, that every possible angle of the fiction writing process had been explored and dissected. And here I found myself once again picking up a book and thinking, "Ooh, maybe this one has the secret I've been looking for! Maybe this one will finally do it!"

One appealing angle for me is that it offers a deeper way of understanding and connecting with other people. My writing and characters over the years have been shallow; they were variously obviously about me. Now, Van Bergen takes pains to point out that you are ultimately accessing something within yourself when you pursue these exercises, but it's coming from that place where we are all ultimately the same person. Something about that rang true for me. Otherwise, not long ago, I had stopped writing after becoming frustrated with my shallow grasp of other people. Who knows? Maybe I wasn't actually that interested in other people to begin with.

In the end, I don't aspire to be the king of solipsism. This lack of connection bothered me, and I think that's why I have instead pursued music as a way of connecting with other people; in a guitar circle, during a circulation, the connection is immediate and direct. It's instant gratification.

Note: finding this book was an interesting bit of synchronicity for me, and I think that helped persuade me to buy. At the happy hour following the Tuning the Air performance, JB told me about how much she like the remake of 3:10 to Yuma, and that there was something archetypal about it that caught her. I thought this was an interesting comment, and I thought about it off and on for several days afterward. Then I noticed this book on the shelf at Barnes & Noble in University Village. I guess my antenna was primed, and now the holographic universe was serving up its cosmic google results.

And so, what about music?

Here's a brief list of new developments in my musical life:

I finally built a practice journal using my Notebook software. I needed something non-linear where I could track my work on a particular element over time, and this program has a useful feature that allows lists to be collapsed and expanded. My list of ongoing projects remains visible when I collapse my latest notes. I need to keep my current projects present in my mind, and a standard paper notebook wasn't doing the job. I would forget things and then remember days or weeks later, work on them again, forget again, remember days or weeks later, and so on. And I wasn't making progress.

I've begun applying Lydian Chromatic Concept ideas to NST guitar, and I'm collecting little sketch ideas in my tablature notebook. So far, I've been working mostly on a G7 arpeggio with extensions added based on George Russell's seven primary Lydian scales. Right now, the F Lydian Aug, Mode II, and the B Lydian Aug, Mode +V, chordmode alliances are my favorites (Lydian Aug, Mode +V, is also known as "Super Locrian"). These little sketches are very "Crafty" sounding, so it seems the Concept is getting me where I want to go for now.

I'm slowly getting to where I can play the opening "Eye of the Needle" figure while counting and tapping the beat. This is the process:
--I began by reciting the 16th-note "Ta Ke Ti Na" pattern along with the notes as I played.
--Then I added a foot tap on "Ta," and as I went along, I worked on finding my signposts within the pattern where the beat shifted to different notes. I need to keep that pattern tagged to the pulse, so these signposts tell me where I am.
--Then I reduced "Ta Ke Ti Na" to the 8th-note "Ta Ke" recitation.
--Once "Ta Ke" was stable, I began counting the beats: "One...and...two...and...etc."

And it generally worked. I made several passes where I counted the entire 13 beats of the bar.

The next challenge will be to sync this stabilized internal pulse to a pulse outside of myself, such as a metronome. So far, the whole thing unwinds after several beats. But it's possible.

I conclude this was important because of the seemingly universal tendency for groups to speed up when playing this piece. The pattern comes unmoored from the prevailing pulse, and the 4/4 conditioned players want to feel the pulses on the main accents of the pattern. And so they speed up.

For other projects, I'm still working no-tempo on the C section bassline pattern (first five notes) of "Flying Home," and I'm making progress on inhibiting the tendency of the left hand 3rd finger to react sympathetically to the movements of the other fingers.

I've found that I'm having to approach several parts of "Eye of the Needle" no-tempo starting out; I also had to make some decision about which fingering compromises to make here and there. The fingers crowd together on those upper frets, and I had to decide when exactly I was going to make a slight "leap and replace" fingering maneuver on a 15th fret G. Which option was least disruptive to the following notes?

Neither of these have survived an encounter with the metronome, even at 40 bpm with one note every four clicks. Next thing you know, fingers are popping up sympathetically all over the place and I'm twisting up like a pretzel. But, considering these patterns were completely unplayable before, this is progress.

Then there's a whole raft of fingerboard familiarity exercises. I'm working on C Major, but I've decided to add notes by going either direction in the Circle of 5ths, learning the notes that would be altered to access new keys--in this case F (sharp direction, F# to access G Major) and B (flat direction, Bb to access F Major) are next on deck.

At some point, I also plan to learn the "black notes" as a unit--Eb Minor Pentatonic and F# Major Pentatonic.

I've been sketchy on ear training with Absolute Pitch Blaster. I let it go long enough that I decided to start C over again, just to reinforce it in my ear once again. I sailed about 2/3 of the way through before it again became challenging. But, I also noticed that my work on G was still there and available, and that (I think) G4 was still sticking out like a sore thumb.

Wednesday night was the first meeting of a new circle at Seattle Circle HQ. GM led us through a Bach circulation, and then we worked on some of the "greatest hits" Guitar Craft pieces.

Otherwise, things just get weirder in the boarding house. One of the residents stopped taking her medication, and now she is wigging out--stomping around, slamming doors, screaming out the window, and getting into shouting matches with nonexistent people. All of this late into the night, sometimes until 6:00 AM.

Here are some fascinating quotes:
--"No demons enter here!"
--"I have no compassion for Satan!"
--"Michael! Take off that wedding dress and get out of my room!"
--"Do you want me to open this door? Do you want to meet me? Are you really sure?" [from inside her closed room as I walk past, then she shouts and punches the door]

I asked D, the resident building manager, what was going on. He told me she was being housed as part of some kind of "halfway house" agreement, and there was a counselor who was supposed to be monitoring this woman. Well, things have clearly gone off the rails. At one point this morning, D attempted to reason with her, but there is nothing and no one there to reason with. I'm afraid D is out of his depth with this one.

She needs professional help. It's not funny. I feel sorry for her, and I don't think she's going to be in the house much longer.

I don't know what happens then. Does she go to an institution? Is she out on the street?

She's also beginning to frighten me now and then. Yesterday, as I came home to rest before class, I found her walking in circles in the alley behind the house. She said somebody was supposed to pick her up, but never showed. As I walked down the steps to the outer door, she moved in right behind me, as close as she could get without pressing right on my backpack, and it made my hair stand on end.

Maybe things will settle down soon.

At least the room is cheap and is within walking distance of campus and other necessities.

Maybe one day I'll write a novel called Boarding House...

I promise future posts won't be so long. I had a lot to catch up on here.

Things seem sketchy now, but "time flies" and very soon we'll move on to the next round of weirdness...

gigs/stuff

The gigs on Friday and Saturday were...interesting.

We played really well and we had several full-blown trainwrecks. "Bicycling" was a prime example. Between the two gigs, two run-throughs of "Bicycling" were really good--I thought the first one we played on Saturday rocked--and then we had one that trainwrecked and another where the wheels nearly came off.

With a lot of this music, especially "Bicycling," I'm finding more and more that if I'm hungry to hear the music and my attention is engaged--if I'm "on"--the music will soar and I'm in the flow. If I have a lot of extraneous thoughts and fears rumbling about in my mind, if I'm only partly there, I'm in trouble.

The second set on Saturday was like this for me. I had a lot of "noise" in my system crowding out the "signal." Something changed during the break, but I'm not sure what.

I also noticed during both gigs that I have a whole level of physical tension related to mistakes and fear of mistakes. I hate mistakes. I hate screwing up the music, even a little bit. I get very angry, at others and at myself. I don't find it funny or cute in the slightest.

I need to lighten up. And practice more.

I noticed this persistent physical tension in the middle of Asturias when I made a small slip-up. I made the mistake, and thought, "OK, you've made your mistake, and now you can stop worrying. It's over." And at that moment I felt the tension leave me and I played the rest of the song without any problem.

I suddenly had permission to be less than perfect, and then found myself playing better as a result.

Also, I had a moment on Saturday where I clearly saw a mistake being passed around the circle in the middle of a piece. I experienced a moment of fearful tension, made a mistake, and then I saw Don pick it up and make a small mistake.

It seemed to me also that what was being transferred was the tension leading to the mistake, like some kind of sympathetic resonance. When we're bound closely together in the circle and in tune, it's like our nervous systems are acting as antennae. We are one unit, and each is individual is a smaller part of a total neurology. We are connected.

There is a phenomenon when playing as an individual--I've heard it referred to as "tension chains"--where a "stress point" in a string of notes will cause excess tension and destabilize the notes that follow. In this case, the stress and excess tension of one player was being passed around the group and destabilizing the other players.

It's then up to other players, I suppose, to individually have the excess capacity to deal with not just their own moments of tension, but also to hold fast and absorb the tension emanating from other players in the circuit.

Conversely, Don suggested to me afterward that confidence and ease can also be passed around the circle. So, I would say we also had some moments of positive entrainment within the group.

Are there any group practice strategies and approached to working on repertoire as a group that could help this along?

dropping by

I'm enduring a forced layoff from the guitar. My guitar strap had slowly been slipping from day to day until it arrived at the point where the edge of the guitar was pinching a nerve on the inside of my right elbow. The ring finger and pinky on my right hand were going numb and tingly, even hurting a bit at the same time, although I suppose the idea of "painful numbness" is a little oxymoronic. It was getting to the point where I could bring my right arm up to playing position--without the guitar strapped on--and the painful numbness would set in.

In the meantime, the track pad on my laptop was doing a number on the fine muscles on the underside of my forearm, so that began to hurt, too. The two were feeding each other.

I'm disappointed, because I was playing every day and getting some good practice in on my right hand picking.

But, I have this idea that I could work on various aspects of my left hand while the right hand is out of action. For it be meaningful, I would need the balancing weight of the right arm present. Maybe I can stuff a pad of some kind under the crook of my right arm for the duration.

In the meantime, I'm practicing on Absolute Pitch Blaster at every opportunity. I estimate I've been through about 400 waves of the little Space Invaders-type aliens. I've been back to the beginning stage of C eight times so far. Whenever I got stuck I would go back to the beginning and open up a new player. As of tonight, I've completed the C level on all eight.

G is definitely making itself felt in my consciousness when doing exercises. Now and then, I find I can cheat a little bit. I might be sketchy on whether C is present, but I hear the G and I'm able to judge from that signpost whether the other notes are laid out tonally around C. If it's a really tight cluster around G, well there you have it. No C possible in that handful of notes.

In regular listening, I'm not hearing C or G jump out at me, but something is happening where I'll hear a note and think, "Hey, I've heard that note before!" In one case, the first violin note of a Stravinsky movement was the exact same note RF opens with on "Heavenly Music Corporation." (I checked.)

I bought the first volume of George Russell's "Lydian Chromatic Concept."

In its most basic outlines, it explains something I'd noticed about the 4th degree of the major scale, that it very strongly contradicts the 1/do of the major scale. It seems to say, "No, wait! I'm the tonic!" And in Russell's musical scheme, this is in fact the case. The 4th degree of the major scale is the "lydian do" and is actually the ultimate vertical root note.

Also, when describing the "chordmodes" Russell starts with a full-blown 13th chord, with every note of the scale stacked by thirds, rather than with triads. And he sharpens the 4th/11th note.

I've played around with #11 chords on keyboards before and found them to have a nice settled sound. Not suprisingly, they're often the cliche closing chord of a jazz piece.

This sharpened 4th/11th is the defining note of the lydian scale, and the most unified vertical expression of a tonality has a sharpened 4th rather than the natural 4th we're used to.

This means the major scale functions as it does in triadic, functional harmony because that 4th degree divides the scale against itself.

--diatonic="dia" meaning "two."

--"diatonic scale"=a scale with two tonics

In studying Mathieu's book, he notes that, in key of C, the 4th degree F never appears in the overtone series. To derive the 4th, you have to go a 5th below C.

This is significant to Russell's work. He cites the Perfect 5th as the ultimate carrier of "tonal gravity." The lower note of a Perfect 5th interval has that root sound, and when you go the Pythagorean route to derive your scale notes, this means tonal gravity runs "downhill" through the 5ths until it gets to the bottom.

Except that, in key of C, you find F at the bottom of the chain of 5ths.

My own ear tells me that the sounding of a Perfect 5th will set up a feeling of a key on the lower note of the interval. I noticed this years ago when I was studying the Burge relative pitch course, and so I can hear what he's talking about.

There's more to this than I have the patience to get into right now, but everything I've studied so far accords quite well with what my ear tells me. And I'm attracted to his notion of a "musical mandala" where every chord progression and tonality is nested within a unity.

He does a very nice analysis of Bach's "Chromatic Fantasy" and shows Bach had a very well-developed vertical sense of tonality. I love this piece, especially Trey Gunn's version from the Robert Fripp String Quintet album. I also like Coltrane's "Giant Steps," and Russell makes a very compelling case for how the two had arrived at a very similar musical consciousness by two very different paths.

And then we get to circulations in "C major" performed in the guitar circle.

I'm not always sure we're circulating in C major. I strongly suspect we are in fact circulating in F lydian sometimes. I rarely hear anything in our little ribbon of notes resembling triadic changes in functional harmony. Not that it couldn't happen. When someone picks up a bass note progression, then it becomes more possible, I suppose.

At our last meeting, we stumbled onto a really nice E phrygian circulation. Somehow or other, we spontaneously began leaning on the E at the 12th fret, second string. Little or nothing was said about it afterward, but it felt to me like our group consciousness had learned something and our collective ears had expanded. As a group we had found something truly new (for us) that we could add to our bag of tricks.

The "Cloud of Unknowing" in "Trapiche" is nominally supposed to be in E phrygian, so I wonder if this new discovery will make itself felt in that piece.

Last Wednesday, I had this experience of doom and alienation like I have not felt for maybe 12 years. It was The Black Hand of Doom(tm), back from the grave to make me feel like it was all hopeless and that I was on the edge of a freakout of some kind. Something had blown the lid off all this existential angst, and while it sucked to have to feel this way, I also found myself questioning whether it was real or not. I don't generally feel like this on a day-to-day basis these days. Was all this stuff lurking in the background the whole time, but I just had it shoved down where I couldn't see it? I don't know. I haven't decided yet.

It might have been sheer exhaustion that brought this on. I was physically unable to get out of bed the next day after staying up into the wee hours for several days in a row, so that probably had something to do with it.

It took a little while to put this in perspective.

On Friday, a pleasant evening of socializing in Mt. Lookout was capped off by some random douchebag fratboy insulting me and asking his buddy, "Hey, who are we going to kill tonight?"

In that moment, I offered no outward reaction or sign that I had even noticed him, but it's been nagging me. It makes me angry and makes me want to hurt the guy.

There is something fundamentally wrong with a person who thinks it acceptable to demean and threaten a complete stranger. No good can come of it.

Maybe I had a brief brush with a sociopath.

completing the series

Post 90 of 90.

Rainy day, with a drop in temperature.

After working on some drum sequence programming in Strike last night, I went upstairs and once again fell asleep fully clothed.

I have some powerful habits in my life. I fool myself if I believe I am actually in control of more than a small sliver of my personal patterns, states, and responses.

I got my email link to Chuck Anderson's The Six Secrets of Guitar Fingerings and took a printout to lunch. I don't believe this material necessarily to be THE six secrets--there are many "secrets" to this topic, with the GC Primaries addressing another dimension this book misses entirely--but it's good stuff nonetheless, and it could help me a great deal with getting some scalar/solo playing under my fingers in NST. I'll also be applying Succession, Completed Flow, Simultaneous Release, Constant Release, etc. as I go through this. Jamie Andreas' ideas about Light/Firm Finger, No-Tempo Practice, Posing, etc. will also be incorporated, along with all of the useful Alexander Technique ideas.

I'm at the coffeeshop, and in a moment, it's time to go home for guitar practice. I've realized I need to be more diligent with making notes about what I'm practicing.

I also need to be less shy about marking up my tablature printouts with notes about fingering and so on.

On the bright side, I'm developing some groovy calluses on the left hand. The pinky especially is firming up nicely.

I think for a while after this, I'm just going to post now and then when I feel the need to do so. After a few weeks, I will probably also look back over these entries and see if anything strikes me as worthy of further comment.

Later.

lydian chromatic theory of woof woof blah blah blah

Post 89 of 90.

Warm day, no jacket required.

Updated the Ohio Guitar Ensemble myspace page.

I chickened out on ordering George Russell's first volume about his Lydian Chromatic theory of music. I found myself reading the forums, and it seems like there's a whole new world of nomenclature to learn there, in addition to the standard system we have that already confuses the hell out of most people.

I guess I was a bit intimidated by it all.

Whether I could hear it is a whole other question, too. Without some connection to what you hear, it's hopeless.

I had my eye on Chuck Anderson's The Six Secrets of Guitar Fingerings for a while, and so ordered that instead. They'll also be sending a link to an ebook version, which is cool. I don't have to wait.

the way forward

Post 88 of 90.

I think you could say I'm in the process of backfilling and confirming details for a decision that has pretty much already been made. This will probably be ongoing for a little while yet, but not too long.

I felt confident enough in my own deliberations to share details with close family members, and they concurred that it seemed like a promising course of action.

This was an important step for me, but it also felt crucial that I practice containment for some time prior and keep my own counsel for a while before mentioning anything.

Some preliminary groundwork may now commence. It will be a while yet before I'm at the point of no return, but the clock is indeed ticking and dates on a calendar have been penciled in.

Time will yet tell whether this part of my own personal life-unfolding can successfully cope with events in the larger outside world, or whether my timing is off (this being the first year of the sixth seven-year cycle of my life).

In relation to this, a lot of anger arrived today, too. All at once, I recognized that events, decisions, and circumstances from long ago, extending back into early adolescence, had done a lot more damage to my personal integrity and ability to function in the world as a human being than I had ever imagined possible. Some powerful patterns and habits of thought, feeling, and action.

legs on a snake

Post 87 of 90.

I think I'm going to have to make a project of re-learning how to solo at some point. I'm not quite at a point with this technique where I can play how I want, and my old way of doing it has now atrophied to where it's almost useless. I'm right in between somewhere. I'm also still learning how to "hear" things in NST, better than before, but not quite to where I feel like I can just take off on an adventure across the fretboard and make it work.

A day in town to get a cappuccino, relax, and go for a walk. I'm checking into a coffeeshop in the Northside area as an occasional alternate to Lookout Joe for weekend cappuccino runs so that I don't have to drive so far. Sitwell's is a lot closer, but their cappuccinos have never quite convinced me (and they've never quite been the same since they moved down the street to their current location).

We'll see. If the one I've heard about in Northside is the same one I've driven past on occasion, it's kind of small and potentially crowded if I go at the wrong time (smaller than Lookout Joe).

Now for some ear training and practice.

Three more entries to go...

late practice

Post 86 of 90.

I spent the bulk of this evening going over alternate guitar parts to pieces I already know, including Intergalactic Boogie Express and Eye of the Needle. For EotN, my aim was to work on playing these alternate parts while tapping my foot at the same time. Very difficult. I had been talking to the team about this over email and felt like I needed to get my hands dirty with it, even if I won't be playing those parts in performance. My hunch about things wanting to speed up on the tags to the main figures to EotN seemed to confirm itself. I was tapping my foot, but I felt uncertain which note of each tag would need to coincide with a foot tap. Because of this uncertainty, it was like that part of the figure was detaching itself and floating free in time, only to then rush to get to the next iteration where a feeling of rhythmic security was waiting.

Yeah.

I also looked at some ideas for some solo picking this coming Friday at the workplace lunch jam/performance thing.

No rehearsal with Don today. I called Don last night to discuss it. Matt would be unavailable to work, and with all the traveling to Chicago, I'm a bit burned out on the driving thing. I've put a lot of miles on my car in this pursuit, and right now it would just be nice to sit it out for a bit until the next step makes itself clearer.

Speaking of which, we also discussed possibilities for laying a groundwork for the entire team to come to this area to perform. This might necessitate some "fractalized" team-within-the-team performing as a prelude. Other members of the team in Illinois and Wisconsin would be driving a long way, and I feel like it would really need to be worth their while for them to make the sacrifice to come down here. There's much more of a base emerging in Chicago for playing out, while things in the Dayton-Cincinnati are perpetually on the edge without ever quite getting there.

brain dump

Post 85 of 90.

I found myself in need of a major brain dump today, and this entails writing longhand in a notebook with a pen. Something about using a pen for this exercise connects you to the physicality of who you are while you simultaneously pour out thought, and I think I filled up about six pages, all various rantings, ravings, and obsessions that have been rumbling about in my mind.

There was a sense of pressure and necessity to this. It was all stuff I cannot tell anybody else without repercussions, and none of it was appropriate for this space. But, I've been doing this exercise for years and found it valuable. It originated in the Artist's Way work I began in earnest in 1995, and which I still revisit today. I must credit the work I did with this in the period immediately following with helping me gather myself together. I had been self-destructing and thrashing about in the dark, like blindly crawling on my hands and knees through a cramped, pitch-black tunnel miles underground, with no promise that I would ever reach the surface again. That was the feeling and flavor of it.

I'm convinced I burned through some major karma in the first 1/3 or so of my life.

I'm tempted now and then to gather up all of these notebooks and burn them. I rarely go back and read them, and I would pity anybody who would take it upon themselves to wade through the up-chucked sewage of my mind.

If I did build a bonfire and burn all of them, I'm not sure whether it would be a loss, a liberation, some combination, or something else entirely.

I don't feel the same way about the recorded artifacts I've made over the years. I am occasionally shocked by moments of musical insight or invention when I go back and listen. Some little idea I threw down onto tape over ten years may have been beyond my ability to develop a little further at that time, but now I would know what to do with it. And my ear has improved so that I could actually figure out what I was doing!

I'm still listening to the Sun Music recording from Shimmies & Strings 2 a lot.