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!"