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.
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