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.
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
Sunday, October 21, 2007
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...
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...
Saturday, October 20, 2007
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.
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.
Friday, October 19, 2007
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...
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...
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