new alexander technique experiences

Now that my farewell rant to George W. Bush is over, I can mention a few other recent items...

The biggest thing on my mind lately comes from the Tuning the Air Performance Project retreat in mid-October.

Raft Island

We spent a week at a retreat center on Raft Island, playing guitar, working on our performance chops, and working in large groups along with guitarists from all over North America.

We also had SBC on hand, one of the most super-talented Alexander Technique teachers anywhere. She truly has a gift.

Through the first half of the course, she worked with us while we were seated in the circle playing guitar; she usually comes up behind you while you play, places her hands lightly on your shoulders and back, and then helps you to un-knot habitual tensions and patterns.

During one circle, she had me leaning way out over the right side of my stool. She had noticed that I habitually squinched up the right side of my back whenever I began picking, and as I began letting that go, I became aware of a huge knot in my back, right below my right shoulder blade.

I asked her about it, and she told me that she had noticed this habit on previous occasions when we met; she said I had always habitually held tension in that part of my back, for as long as she had been seeing me on Guitar Craft courses. But, I was only now getting to where I could actually feel the knot. (She also told me that I was almost unrecognizable as the same person after all the Alexander work I had done with Neil Schapera as my teacher in Cincinnati.)

Help! I'm a rock!

As we approached the middle of the course, I could feel that I was unravelling and close to freaking out. I've found Guitar Craft courses to be intense, with little time to chill out, and plenty of psychodrama to deal with; so, I wasn't particularly surprised to find myself several days into the course ready to go on a crying jag every time I heard somebody strike a note. I guess it's just what happens when you begin to wake up a little bit, and you see a little bit of how you are and what you are past the buffers you usually have in place.

The weird part (for me) is when you recognize the approaching emotional overload, but you have no idea exactly when or how it began. I wonder, "Have I always been this way, and I just didn't notice?"

After breakfast, I hid in the bathroom of the dining hall for a while to see if I could get it together.

Later, I became inappropriately angry during a meeting with one of the groups I had been performing with at meals. We had been issued a performance challenge and met it successfully, but now we were slogging; we had little time, the group was briefly noisy and unfocused, and I couldn't "focus my chi" very well.

Igor A. was there helping us out, and he gave me a look. I knew right then I had made a mistake. (I later apologized to the group and everything was cool, but I felt like a heel, and it sucked.)

Then it was time for the Tuning the Air open rehearsal (a large group of the visiting musicians would be observing from the middle of the circle).

Uh...wot's the deal?

There was some weirdness as soon as I walked into the room; my stool was missing from the circle. CG offered a comment in jest ("Ian, we've been talking..."), but the overall tension in the atmosphere of the room was so intense, that I began to wonder if I had been kicked out of the group and delivered the humiliating news in front of a room full of people. I was just about ready to walk out; I had that old chew-your-leg-off-in-order-to-escape feeling percolating through me.

It eventually became clear that they simply couldn't find my stool among all the other hordes of stools in the chapel. But in the meantime I couldn't find my stool, either, and I was thoroughly [sound of lips flapped up and down by right hand index finger].

Eventually, it all got sorted out rehearsal began.

Ian freaks out, but good

I still didn't know all the songs, so I had to sit quietly during a few pieces, which is harder than you might think. SBC went around the circle and worked on us, then went to sit down over near the door.

While I sat and paid attention during "Cultivating the Beat," I began struggling for breath, and I closed my eyes. My back hurt. I was primed for a meltdown.

SBC saw or sensed something, and she came over. She began moving me around on the stool; she pointed out that I was leaning on the guitar, which was in turn leaning on my right leg. And was this how I should be holding the guitar? There was something gently stern in her tone, like "I've been watching this thing in your back slowly ripen. Now it's time. We're going to do this. It's time to let it go, even if you don't quite feel ready..."

She had me lean way out over the edge of the stool again. It felt odd, and I told her so. She said I actually tended to lean way to the left, but now she was going to help me find my center.

Then the knot in my back let go. As the muscles relaxed and lengthened, it felt like the right side of my back was blowing up like a balloon; I had an image of my back as a thin membrane that expanded as air rushed in, as if there were whole areas of my lungs that had been cut off for a long time.

It didn't necessarily hurt, but it felt strange and unpleasant, like "Whoah! My body isn't really supposed to move like that, is it?"; that part of my back felt cartoonishly huge as it opened up, way beyond what felt normal, like my inner sense of bodily proportion and size had been completely out of calibration.

As that tension let go (many years worth of angst stored up in my body), it had to go somewhere. It needed an exit.

I began crying uncontrollably, gushing hot, dripping tears all over my guitar. Time crawled by, and the music all around me just seemed to go on and on and on, even though it was only a few minutes.

An entire section of my back completely realigned, and SBC said it was like I didn't trust my right arm to do its thing when I picked.

After a while, she worked her way outward from that area of my back. My body was putty under her hands, and it felt like she just wiped the tension out of my spine.

Eventually, things settled down, and she brought some paper tissues over. She said she didn't want me to rust my strings prematurely.

CG looked at me. You OK?

I nodded back.

My guitar soundboard was smeared with goop.

All in a day's weirdness

TM and several others later told me this sort of thing was common in circles on courses, and that I shouldn't be embarrassed or worry. They described some other incidents, including an occurrence on a six-week course when one guitarist went through a tension release so huge he fell off his stool and curled up in a ball.

Since then, I find I still hold tension in that area of my back; either it did not all release completely on that occasion, or my habit of tensing that area will take a while to dissipate. It's gotten easier to feel when I'm holding tension there now.

For a while, my right shoulder around my collar bone hurt; I've been told that when you hold tension long enough, not only do you stop feeling it, but the membranes around your muscles eventually change and basically shrink wrap you into whatever shape your holding. Then, when you let the tension go, that connective tissue then has to stretch out and adjust, which can hurt. Everything in your body is connected, and as things re-align, these adjustments radiate and travel outward through your body.

I've always lived very much "in my head," and as time goes on, I'm amazed to learn how intelligent the human body is, how our physical self has its own sort of intelligence, and how it will store all sorts of experiences.

At one time, I was actually a little afraid of Alexander Technique because of this, and avoided exploring it for a few years. On my first Guitar Craft course, I was outside the AT cabin when somebody inside began crying uncontrollably during a private session. It was spooky to listen to somebody going through that kind of release experience; now, I understand that it's not necessarily something fearful to go through, even though it might outwardly appear so.

I once read that Alexander Technique is not concerned, per se, with why someone is physically tensed up any particular way, or how they developed particular physical habits in response to traumas. Insights may arise, but AT is concerned mainly with just letting go of these patterns and moving forward.

The AT eye

I can sometimes look at people on the street now and see all sorts of things written into how they hold themselves and move. I'm not sure what they are exactly, but it's plain that something happened to make these people into pretzels.

I sometimes then try to imagine all the things experienced AT teachers see written in people's bodies.

Energetic contamination

Somebody on the course told me that during a course, SBC often feels like she needs to take several showers throughout the day. All of these hordes of people arrive with all sorts of issues wrapped up in their bodies, and as it lets go underneath her hands, she's right there directly in the path of all this negative energy. It gets all over her.

I think I have at least an inkling of what she experiences.

In the mid 1990s, I had an anxiety attack. I couldn't sleep for three days, and I couldn't seem to get a deep enough breath; usually, when I breathe in, there's a moment during the breath when something clicks in my body, I feel physically satisfied, and then I breathe back out.

In this case, that little satisfied click was not arriving, no matter how deeply I breathed. It couldn't scratch that itch, and it was driving me crazy.

Finally, I went over to see a friend and completely flipped out while sitting on his couch. It felt like a tightly wound spring in my solar plexus was suddenly unwinding and spinning out all at once; as this tension released, I cried uncontrollably.

Afterward, I felt amazing!

I had this incredible feeling that I was spiritually clean.

I later described it (in typical style for me at the time) as a "spiritual orgasm"—an amazing feeling, but the process of getting there was an ordeal, and I don't necessarily recommend it as something to pursue on purpose.

After a few days, the feeling went away, and I returned to the baseline level of habitual angst I existed in at the time.

But I always remembered that incredible clean feeling I had for a while.

The point being that we should try to imagine the opposite of this clean feeling; imagine being an AT teacher on a course several days in, and you're covered with all this negative stuff that has been coming out of the people you're working on—imagine feeling spiritually dirty!

You would have to be pretty dedicated to be in that line of work. Hopefully, AT teachers have some kind of training or strategies for how to deal with this stuff. (Unless, of course, Guitar Craft courses are unusually intense in this way. It may be that in the course of a day-to-day private practice an AT teacher is not exposed to this level and sheer mass of energy.)

OK, I'm done writing now. More later...

goodbye to chimpy

And now, a rant...

A lot has happened since I last posted, not including outward events like the economy and the election of a new President.

Speaking of which, I'm relieved the whole campaign nonsense is over and that America somehow managed to elect someone intelligent. Now let's hope he gets it right, that he survives, and that he's able to pull this country back from the brink of complete disaster. After eight years of George W. Bush, we're in a bad way. I believe Bush is a full-blown sociopath; that man has killed so many innocent around the world, using our money, in our name. He is directly responsible for a small mountain of dead bodies, but I don't believe he cares. Not even the tiniest bit. And he still has a little over two months left in which he and his cronies can loot the Treasury, steal everything that isn't nailed down, and maybe even get us stuck in another pointless war.

Bush supposedly bought several million acres of ranch land in Paraguay, so maybe he's planning to skip the country once he leaves office (and you will leave office, George, so don't get any ideas about calling a State of Emergency and overstaying your welcome). Good riddance.

We'll see you in the dock at the Hague—right alongside Cheney, Wolfowitz, Perle, Dougie Feith, and other members of the PNAC flying monkey brigade who helped get Americans into this mess.

And, finally, could you please explain why you sat there in that Florida classroom while New York City was under attack? Why didn't the Secret Service do their job and drag you out of there to a secure location, like they're supposed to?

No excuses, please. The truth would be nice for a change.

Oh, whatever. Get out of here.

But don't go too far. There may be a prosecutor and a judge in your near future who would like to chat with you about a few things...

my friend, mr. finger

I've found myself practicing hours of Primaries, especially the "anchor" exercises. The anchor exercises require that you keep one finger fretting a note while the other fingers work through various permutations from the First Primary. The anchor exercises help develop release by preventing you from yanking your fingers away from the fretboard, but I'm working on them right now mainly to help with develop finger strength and stretch.

In particular, my left hand ring finger does a strange little dance; when my hand is relaxed, the ring finger likes to lean against the middle finger and then rotate into place when it comes time to fret a note. This rotational movement wastes a lot of motion, so I'm trying to develop a new habitual muscle balance and strength in that ring finger so that it doesn't lean against the middle finger and stays closer to the strings.

A lot of this finger weakness become obvious when I anchor the middle or the ring finger. The ring finger actually shakes and struggles to stay in position against the sympathetic tension triggered by the other fingers moving.

Gradually, I'm figuring out how to let the fingers relax into position, instead of using tension to hold them in place. The tension state of the pinky also has a lot to with how the middle and ring fingers relate to each other.

I seemed to progress well for the first three or four days, but last night, I felt like I could barely play, and that ring finger would not cooperate if I didn't keep my attention on it at all times. On off days like that, you just do your best.

Otherwise, old friends keep coming out of the woodwork lately, people I haven't spoken to for years and years. They tell me about their lives, and it seems like I never knew them at all. Then again, it's also turning out that scattered intuitions in the deep past were on target all along. At the same time, I'm also finding out how oblivious I was, and that some old friends may still be driven to negotiate delicate matters that, as far as I'm concerned, are settled and no longer open to debate.

New information about old mutual friends also arises, and I must work to hold this new information in balance against what I thought I knew, but not rush to judgments. In this sense, it's hard to hold contradictions; we want everything neatly explained and categorized, but life is messy, and few people manifest the same way to all of their acquaintances. If we're not careful, we can fall prey to a "funhouse mirror" effect and mistake the reflection for the thing itself; instead, I guess we should just toss these new bits into the kaleidoscope and marvel at the ever-changing combinations.

Maybe we are all ultimately unknowable ciphers to those around us. And maybe even to ourselves, unless we make some practice of observation without judgment.

gig

I went to the Victory Music open mic with GM and Igor K., and I found it eye-opening to get out and play in front of strangers again. Same as it ever was...

We played only a single circulation in E Phrygian, followed by Where It Goes. The circulation was decent (as always, the best stuff seems to happen when we warm up before a gig), and it ended without a full resolution. GM later said he was worried the circulation would go on too long.

Our performance of Where It Goes was "OK," but not stellar; maybe it would qualify as "honorable." We played it all the way through, and considering this group's modest beginnings, to play Where It Goes all the way through like this in front of an audience was an achievement. We began several months ago playing 1 of 1,000 Regrets and Asturias, and these two pieces were a big challenge for the group. We must have worked our way through some of those "transformative increments."

Stage fright sapped my playing and reduced me down to about 70% of my normal playing capacity. Which means I need to work on these challenging new parts that much more, so that I have a larger margin to draw upon in the future.

Stage fright manifested in the usual symptoms: shaking hands, sweaty palms, and a maddening tendency for my right hand to "dig in" excessively with the pick, as if it had a mind of its own. No surprises.

Early on in the piece, I suddenly felt the group wanted to speed up. A lot. We can usually rehearse the piece competently around 74 bpm, but for this performance we dialed back to about 68 bpm. If we rehearse at a lower tempo like 68 bpm, I almost always hear the group wanting to pull ahead of the metronome.

But here on stage, there was no metronome to keep us back; we only had our dodgy internal clocks and the group pulse or "pocket" that exists mostly by unspoken consensus.

GM later said he considered just running with the urge to speed up, but chose instead to pull back. And I thanked him for having the good sense to pull back.

It's not like there's really any other choice; if we abandon reason and speed up, we're heading for a train wreck. Which isn't the end of the world, but it's never fun.

I wanted to make a good impression, and I cared how we sounded; this is a wrongheaded mindset, in its own way, because you can wind up chasing your tail, and it always seems like the best playing happens when you stop caring how you sound and just play.

And so, in the moment before we pulled back from the brink, I was about ready to panic.

All the same, I look forward to playing in front of audiences as much as possible. I need to get used to dealing with stage fright again. I don't think it's ever going away; I just need to get used to it.

Along these lines, I've heard it said that stage fright is fundamentally an ego problem; you think you should sound good and impress people because you're a good musician (dammit), but if you don't sound good and impress, it reflects badly on you. Please like me! screams the ego.

The audience was supportive; the MC said something about needing to "learn to play the guitar" and said we were a "guitar orchestra."

Aw, shucks...

change in the air

Another Tuning the Air performance tonight, the most consistently powerful so far, at least from my little corner of the larger experience. There have been other performances with larger peaks, sometimes so intense they blow the top of my head off, but this show was on a higher average level from beginning.

The circulations tonight were the best I have ever heard from any group. Every single one was amazing.

We had 32 people in the audience, the largest so far, and word-of-mouth continues to be the best advertising.

Several members of the performance team were surprised at the quality of the show when they realized we were smack dab in the middle of the run. CG later told us over beers that the Middle is not automatically bad; we're just conditioned to think of it that way. The middle is the point when the creative leap takes place, and unfortunately, it's often a turkey, and we tend to focus on that experience.

I guess this means the leap was successful.

The house team is also getting better, and MB so rocked when she acted on a hunch to announce the Open Circle at the end of the show. Well done, MB!

Later, while waiting to turn into the Hi-Life from Market St., TS and MB were rear-ended by Jesus.

School's (Almost) Out

The Technical Writing & Editing Certificate Course at UW is almost over. I've met a lot of great people, and I definitely want to stay in touch.

Another transition in progress for Ian. One job interview under my belt last week, and we'll see what happens.

I'm glad I took the course. It has definitely lifted my skill set as a writer to another level, and I am so much better prepared than when I left Songwriter's Market. Now, I need to take this new "book learnin'" out into the real world; I learned so much, but I'm also at the beginning. I have a lot of ideas about how to build and develop my skills, and I must not allow myself to become complacent or stuck. Keep moving.

Ongoing Guitar Struggles

I'm in a strange spot with guitar playing. I am definitely improving, and I'm finally conquering some of the more difficult guitar parts to "Where It Goes," "Trapiche," and "Eye of the Needle." But the process is slow, so slow. I've been working on some of these pieces for years, and I'm still nowhere close to the skill level of the TTA team. They play some of these pieces at unbelievably fast tempos. And then there are a whole raft of pieces the TTA team has been playing for the last five years or so, and there is almost no overlap with the pieces I have pretty solidly in my fingers. I have doubts that I could ever catch up, especially given how slowly I seem to develop.

I guess some things just can't be rushed.

In the meantime, I spent Saturday testing myself by recording overdubbed versions of repertoire in ProTools; like I mentioned, my playing is greatly improved, but mastery eludes me by a wide margin. The recordings reveal numerous small stumbles and rhythmic anomalies in parts I already know well, while the new parts I'm learning tend to derail and trainwreck when I hit a snag. These new parts are not quite in the fingers.

I've also lately been pondering the apparent reality that my practicing is dismally unorganized and inconsistent. I never seem to work on the same piece for more than two days at a stretch. If I could work on the same piece every day for several weeks, maybe I could get somewhere. Instead, I bounce around from part to part, just whatever seems to catch my attention on that particular day.

Not quite ready for prime time

Members of the House Circle have occasionally asked why I haven't joined the TTA performance team. They tell me I'm a competent player.

But, the TTA team plays on a higher level than I do. This is plain to me, but maybe not to other members of the House Circle. The House Circle players will eventually understand well enough as they develop.

It seems to me that I would still need to undergo some kind of development process to even be in spitting distance of what the TTA is achieving as guitarists. I don't believe I could walk in and pass an audition. I was on track in my development with the Chicago group, but TTA represents a different line of development way ahead of the Chicago group; when I left the Midwest, the Chicago group was in the early stages of emulating things we had heard were going on in Seattle.

For now, the House Circle seems like what I should be doing here in Seattle, and I'm enjoying the work. The group is stretching and developing, and I enjoy being part of that process.

And things are apparently not all roses and baskets of puppies in the TTA team. No big surprise. AB was extremely unhappy last season; he had seen where he needed to go in his music composition education at Cornish, and he was burning to move on.

There are rumblings; these things happen. That's life.

I sympathize with the wish of some people to deal with a better quality of problem, but all the same, perhaps we should trust the process. Hang in there.

Or maybe some better situation will come along.

Will the Teacher appear?

I sometimes wonder if I will ever find a teacher; Igor A and I were talking during a coffee break on Saturday, and he was extolling Igor K's virtues as a diligent student. I realized during the conversation that I maybe could not be nearly as good of a student; I tend to argue (being a "smart" guy and all), and I confessed this shortcoming to Igor A.

I'm looking forward to the Raft Island Course in October. I'm beginning to feel like I might be ready for something like that. I feel like I need something in my guitar playing, and maybe I will find it there. Or not. Who knows?

mirror, mirror

About two weeks ago, I finally found a cheap full-length mirror and set it up so that I could watch my hands while practicing guitar.

Right away, my right hand speed improved about 10 notches on the metronome; I noticed some kind of subtle tension in my right arm, and just noticing this seemed to help loosen it up. I've gotten a lot out of working with simply noticing body sensations of tension and release, but this mode of sensing is notoriously fragile; it doesn't take long for held muscular tension to be experienced as "normal" and then ignored by the brain. I needed another "channel" of feedback to work with while practicing.

I also immediately noticed some strange things going on in my left hand, specifically that there was some constellation of mini-startles and held tension between my ring finger and my pinky. I then noticed that I was holding tension in the small muscle on the outside edge of my hand that pulls the pinky out to the side. I was holding this tension even when I didn't need to.

In the meantime, I noticed some weakness in the ring finger; when it's not fretting a string, the ring finger likes to lean against the middle finger, and the ring finger then lifts, rotates, and wastes a lot of motion when it moves to press the string down.

But, I found that when I relaxed the muscle related to the pinky, the ring finger shifted away slightly from the middle finger; the two fingers are related, and their habitual tension states are related.

more about the night paul s. ended the argument by blowing a booger onto bob

The night Paul S. ended the argument by blowing a booger onto Bob, I was just a wee lad, aged 17; if I recall, it was a humid summer night at my job as a busboy at the local country club. My cheeks were peach fuzz, and I spent so many of those nights endlessly cruising the streets with my friends, deliberately getting lost on the back roads, as if burning up the miles would end our small town Indiana boredom.

It was the night Paul S. ended the argument by blowing a booger onto Bob, and Bob was upset. Bob was in a state of high dudgeon. He had a chip on his shoulder (which looked a lot like a booger).

"He blew a booger on me!" exclaimed Bob.

It was the night Paul S. ended the argument by blowing a booger onto Bob, and Paul fled to his office upstairs.

The kitchen phone rang.

"Don't answer it!" yelled Bob. "It's him!"

I picked up the receiver, and a nasally voice inquired whether Bob was there in the kitchen.

"I'm not here!" screeched Bob.

I replied that, no, Bob was not there.

"Well take a note, and let him know we have a big order of sauteed boogers coming up!"

A short digression about boogers: boogers may well be the great equalizer. We all get a little booger hanging around now and then.

Even George W. Bush gets boogers now and then; if you think about this, you know it's true. How else could it be?

Perhaps even now, George W. Bush is in the Oval Office admiring a green, gelatinous beauty perched on the tip of his index finger. George considers what to do with it—all options are on the table; Dick Cheney looks on and says, "Yes, it is a beaut, sir."

But, that was now and this is then (or whatever)...

And so...I shall always remember the night Paul S. ended the argument by blowing a booger onto Bob. It was a lesson in life, a peek into the raw underbelly of the human condition, a lesson I have carried across the threshold into manhood, and I shall carry it with me always (the memory, not the booger)...

...my enduring memory of the night Paul S. ended the argument by blowing a booger onto Bob!

busy, busy, busy

I've had a busy couple of weeks with guitar playing, the Alexander Technique session with SBC, getting sick, kicking caffeine (my first abstention in several years, followed by nasty, nasty headaches, and now I seem to be sleeping better), and getting my sitting practice up and running.

After the sitting at CG's this morning in Ballard, I walked to the bus stop and admired the Olympic Mountains looming in the distance and looking massive!

Things I found myself thinking about during the walk:
1. life in dysfunctional rock bands
2. life in the food service industry
3. the night Paul S. ended the argument by blowing a booger onto Bob

When I got home, I felt energetic in spite of three hours of sleep, and I got busy with some urgently needed housecleaning, including finally sorting and filing a pile of papers that had been floating around ever since I moved into my new room. I am now officially completely moved in!

I am now two floors up from all the nastiness and evil in the basement. Now that he's out of range of hearing, sight, and smell, I hardly think about the Birdman at all. Just about everybody has moved out of the basement to get away from him.

And just in time, now that he has the place to himself, he seems to have cleaned up his act somewhat. Most of the reek is gone, and when I saw him in the hallway the other day, he looked like he had actually taken a shower and cleaned the stink off his body.

Does he still babble to himself in his room? I have no idea, but he's probably still nutty as hell. Who knows?

Then a nap, followed by class.

arthur c. clarke, rip

I wonder sometimes what Arthur C. Clarke thought about the real 2001, now almost seven years gone, versus the shiny, clean vision of 2001 he and Stanley Kubrick brought to the big screen. What happened? If Clarke and Kubrick's vision was indeed a real possibility as seen from 1969, then what went wrong? How is it we squandered that possible future?

Instead of space travel with Pan Am, revolving space stations, moon bases, and manned missions to Jupiter, we have poverty, war, incipient economic collapse, and embryonic fascism.

The snakes in suits, the predators among us, appear to be winning; power is everything—screw the future!

What did Clarke think of this as he watched the world from his seat in Sri Lanka?

Fans of Arthur C. Clarke may find this link about the Saturnian moon Iapetus interesting—especially the bit about Clarke receiving a Cassini probe photo of Iapetus, with a note from Carl Sagan that said, "Thinking of you...":
"Moon with a View"

who's that girl?

I recently purchased Photoshop and Illustrator, and I've been going to town.

Here's a little Photoshop weirdness for you...

Back in the early '90s, there was a Lollapalooza tour where Perry Farrell proclaimed there would be a booth where a computer would take your portrait and then change your gender. He promised it would all be some trippy, mind-bending fun.

Sounded pretty cool to me.

When that Lollapalooza tour came to Deer Creek outside Indianapolis, the booth wasn't there anymore. I was disappointed, to say the least.

But now, we have the means of production, comrades!

I took a photo of my 19-year-old self, and morphed things to find out how I would have looked as a 19-year-old girl.

And damn, I'm a cutie!

Guys, if any of you try this, don't be surprised if you find yourself wanting to climb into the photo so you can make out with yourself.

It looks like I would have been one of those pixie-type girls.

Illustrator Stuff
Here's a music-related mandala I've been working on in Illustrator. The original was black & white, and then I got busy with neon stroke effects and color gradients. I want to figure out how to get silvery, iridescent, chrome-like textures, like you see on psychedelic album covers, and I'm definitely on the outskirts of being able to do it. I was able to work up a gold metallic texture for the "AUM" text at the top...

Yogi's proclaim that the "Aum" (or "Om") mantra is the primordial sound from which all other sounds emanate, the ultimate cosmic keynote or do of the cosmic scale.

The symbol in the center is the Tibetan glyph for "Aum."

Something about it fit with my work on the Lydian Chromatic Concept and key-based ear training; there's something mandala-like about how keys, chords, and scales all nest within one another in the Concept, and I find myself overcome with these wheels-within-wheels visualizations of the relationships.

The Circle of 5ths is a long-standing symbol of key relationships, the roundness of it lends itself to a mandala. The C at the top is slightly bigger and has the burst, because in this case C is the vibration from whence arises all the other musical tones via the overtonal vibrations. With the possible exception of the subdominant F, which is the "reciprocal" of the tonic, and in Indian sargam is designated ma, the counterpart to the overtonal, masculine pa of the 5th degree; by "reciprocal," I refer to the process where you sing a note below the tonic—you contain and envelop the tonic, providing a low fundamental vibration it does not intrinsically possess, rather than riding a vibration already present within the tonic.

This means that "horizontal" music, as we understand it in the West, contains a potent feminine energy and is in a state of duality.

As opposed to the unified, "vertical" nature of the Lydian Chromatic Concept, which is a purely overtonal, masculine sort of energy. Strangely enough, the masculine energy of "vertical" music is a passive energy.

Hmmm...

In Harmonic Experience, Mathieu maps the Lydian Mode as entirely overtonal, except for the 6th degree, which he maps as a reciprocal derivation from the 3rd; but, if you were to use a more Pythagorean formula, like George Russell specifies, then it would indeed be completely overtonal.

The differences between these two "maps" of the musical universe are interesting, given that "a map is not the territory," as they say. Mathieu's take on the subdominant 4th degree as a feminine energy below the tonic is intriguing, and it feels right to me, while Russell places the subdominant 4th degree as the most "out" note (except for the b2) on a chain extending upward.

If the Circle of 5ths represents the relationships in an accurate way, it's like the 4th degree is so far out, it circles around and comes up from below.

Very strange.

Then again, the equal-tempered "circle" of the Circle of 5ths is a purposeful, man-made construct; if you stack up 5ths using the overtones, which are slightly sharp, you get a spiral instead of a circle.

So, you can derive a 4th degree, using nothing but the overtones, but it is indeed a distant note, and it would be a definitely different note from a true reciprocal subdominant.

Looks like there are at least two diagrams here that I can busy with in Illustrator to represent my point...

And when I figure out how to do it, I'll post some clips of music I've been working on, so you can hear what I mean.

Anyway, equal temperament allows for perfectly symmetrical note relationships, and I used this mandala to map a few of them out; when you draw out lines to connect the notes of various augmented, diminished, and whole tone structures, the symmetrical nature of those tonal structures is plain to the eye.

Here's one that wasn't Web-optimized, but I still kind of like how the colors converted...

Enjoy!

oodles of doodles

I've been doodling a lot in my class notebooks, and this latest batch was pretty weird, enough to be amusing...

Oh, how the imagination takes over when you're bored in class.

Otherwise, I'm working on my resume and trying to figure out how to get a portfolio together—more a question of what to include, than how to put it together.

I also recently purchased the full Adobe Creative Suite, and I have my work cut out for me when it comes to learning the intricacies. The instructional books at B&N are all super-expensive, so I may go to the Seattle Public Library and check them out instead. I imagine it would be worthwhile to go through more than one.

But, just standing and going through the InDesign instructional books right there in the store, I learned that InDesign can indeed generate indexes and TOCs. I asked about that in the computer lab a couple Thursdays ago, but our main instructor is a FrameMaker guy, and he wasn't sure.

It didn't make sense that Adobe would allow that program to go out the door without an index function of some sort, so I'm glad to have that figured out.

On other fronts, I've been pulling out my copy of Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain and thinking about getting the materials together to pursue that and improve my drawing skills.

I also spent some time in ProTools today trying to find a suitable drumbeat in Strike! to build a little blues composition/jam track. I found the drum pattern I wanted under something called "TeraPop." I have no idea what the name means. The drum pattern itself was more of a Mitch Mitchell groove, and I wound up switching around drum kits and tweaking things to get it to sound right.

So far, I've found it really hard to build sequences in Strike!, especially drum fills. When I trigger the fill to hear how it sounds, the program immediately reverts back to whatever main pattern was played last. Maybe there's some trick I haven't figured out yet.

Later...

whew! busy day!

Today was a stressful day, the culmination of about three days of feverish editing work on a comprehensive technical editing assignment. I feel satisfied that I took the material in a fruitful direction; I don't believe I went too far with my edits, although I may have skated close to the edge here and there.

I both love and hate comprehensive editing.

The worst part of the process is when I'm confronted with a pile of baffling prose that doesn't seem to hang together, and I look at it in horror and think, "What the hell is this?!"

For me, the analytical brain work is the hardest part.

Once I have the piece figured out and I know what to do, the rest is just details and it usually flows.

[Digression: I just had a massive deja vu while writing this piece. My time in Seattle so far has been marked by regular and strong deja vu experiences. I don't really know what it means, but I have long suspected this experience is the universe's way of telling me on the right track and where I'm supposed to be in this life. I sure hope so. It does feel nice to be learning again and making new leaps of understanding in my studies.]

I wound up staying up way too late last night in the computer lab at the undergraduate library. I took a break to blow off steam, began studying Illustrator, Photoshop, HTML, and Flash, and I didn't stop until it was almost 4AM.

I also find myself taking great joy lately in drawing and working with visual material. At one time, I wanted to be a comic book artist, and now I find myself sketching in my notebooks and playing around with Illusrator at every opportunity. I once took formal art lessons in my pre-teens, and it might be nice to dust those skills off again and make something useful out of it.

Maybe I can get around to some regular guitar practice again, too. I'm still playing, and working on useful bits, but my engagement with it is not at a boil like I wish for.

Also, two days ago I picked up Andrea Stolpe's Popular Lyric Writing—10 Steps to Effective Storytelling. The author submitted a manuscript to Writer's Digest Books while I was there, but it didn't work out for WD to pick the book up, which disappointed me. What I saw was eye-opening, and she points out how outer detail and more abstract emotional statements in lyrics have a definite relationship. Her ideas intuitively felt right and true, and I've been waiting for the book to come out for months now.

Finally.

It looks like Tuning the Air will be performing a run at Fremont Abbey. It's going to be a massive challenge to bring this space to life, but it's a promising space and community on so many levels.

There was a funny moment when the performance team ran through a test circulation. JB hit some flat notes here and there; when I looked at her, she shrugged as if to say, "Yeah, I'm out of tune. So what?"

white and headless and on the march

Something about this little tableau struck me as being very Blade Runner. Would-be replicants awaiting completion.

GOODIES FROM THE PHOTO ARCHIVE

I've been scanning in old photos from a box I found when I flew home to see my parents last weekend. Just the choicest cuts, mind you.

My Teenage Car Crash

For instance, here we have a photo from my high school daze, featuring the remains of the Mazda 626LX I totalled my junior year of high school.


It was a dark and stormy night in 1987. I was young and stupid, driving very fast down a curving road. The gutter from the road above opened out onto the road as it went downhill, so I hit this layer of water and took off like the car was on skis. The car flew off the road right before a bridge, over a stream, and hit the shore on the other side.

It knocked me out cold—I'm pretty sure I smashed the steering wheel with my face—but I was mostly unhurt except for a temporary limp and a nasty headache the next day.

I don't remember the moment of impact, and I don't remember being airborne. Instead, I remember bouncing and bumping off the road through a field and seeing the weeds in the headlights.

I still remember returning slowly to consciousness and thinking, "God, what an awful dream!" Then I realized where I was. The hood was crumpled up in front of me, and steam was drifting out from the engine comparment.

That was a great car, too. I still miss it sometimes.

Portrait of the Artist as an Irritating Young Man

This is my senior picture from 1989. People tell me I look young now, but they should have seen me back then.


High school sucked. Not much else to say about it.

The"Big Hair Shot" from Ball State

This one comes from an early-1990 road trip I took with my Indiana University dorm friends AP, MM, and WD (the girl pictured on the left) to Ball State in Muncie, Indiana, to party with MM's high school friend MB.


Either AP or MM took this shot in MB's dorm room. I was growing my hair out at the time and fell into this thing where I would hang upside down off my dorm loft with wet hair while 3 or 4 girls would mousse and gel the hell out of it on a quest for Robert Smith follicular elevation.

I enjoyed the attention.

WD was the designated "gel girl" on this occasion, and in the photo, she is examining her handiwork.

The object of the road trip was to go to downtown Muncie and see the Love Cowboys, a regional band surfing the wave of Red Chili Peppers-style funk rock that was taking off at the time. We saw them in some little dive performance space upstairs above a gallery or something in downtown Muncie. (Note: when I mentioned the band's name to someone about two years later, the guy laughed and questioned band's sexual preferences—in his typical fashion designed to paint everybody around him in an unflattering and inferior light. No, the Love Cowboys were not gay to my knowledge. All the same, I can see how the name might not gain traction among homophobic young Midwestern dudes. Then again, the guy I'm talking about was sort of a Moustache—see below—so what do you expect?)

The Love Cowboys were pretty good. The bassist did the snap-and-pop thing on one of those Travis Bean basses with the aluminum necks. I think the guitarist might have been his brother; they both had long, stringy hair and looked almost identical, but I don't know they were actual blood relatives. The vocalist was sort of a non-descript frat-looking sort of guy with a cap, maybe leaning little to the ska side of frat non-fashion.

One big highlight of the show for me was watching WD dance; she had this "dance club" solo move going on that I thought was cool. She looked like she knew what she was doing, while the rest of us just did our best to not look stupid.

My Completely Obvious Crush on WD—but she was MM's girlfriend, so she was out of bounds. I thought WD (and her roommate JT) were both pretty hip. They were into charismatic, artistic pop stars (Bowie, Robert Smith) and all things French, especially French New Wave cinema; WD later had her cut short like a woman who starred in a Godard film, and both WD and JT wore a lot of black. I thought they both reflected a sort of updated "Mod" sensibility common at the time in "alternative" circles in the Midwest, with a little Goth mixed in for good measure. (I actually had a crush on JT at first, but I quickly decided that I like WD better, probably because she was spoken for by my friend and therefore unattainable.)

MM had a similar sensibility, so he and WD were a good match, which I recognized regardless of my own crush on WD. MM later transferred to school in Kansas or Iowa or something—God only knows why—and WD soon after dated a guy who looked like he could have been MM's brother. The two met, and the new guy (who I knew as a distant acquaintance) later said it was a pretty weird scene, and it made him feel incredibly strange to be confronted with this near-doppelganger ex-boyfriend.

I have absolutely no idea what WD is doing now.

MM's Wild and Crazy Friend

MM's friend at Ball State, MB, was a similar kind of guy, but a lot wilder; he dressed in a Mod/Goth sort of way but had cut his hair into a mohawk. He and MM were into Ministry and the WaxTrax stuff going on at the time, maybe because they both came from Valparaiso near Chicago, and MB's claim to fame was that he could be seen in a Ministry live concert video running across the stage and grabbing his crotch (I have no idea whether this is true, and I've never checked).

MB later dated a super-hot Mod/Goth girl named Portia, and the gossip was that they were having out of control sex 3-4 times a day. MM thought the two together were bad karma; MM later drove with them to Chicago, and he joked (I think) that the happy couple were somehow magnetically drawing in hordes of animals to their loathsome deaths beneath the hurtling automobile; MM had never hit so many animals on the road before, or knew of so many animals dying because of one car in such a short stretch.

"What the Hell Happened to You?"

One surprise denizen of the dorm we stayed in was DS, who was one year ahead of me in high school. We had been friends on the Academic Team (how nerdy is that?), but I had lost contact with him. My main memory of him in high school involved being in a car driven by him, with one or two other Academic Team members. He made a risky pass on a state highway, and we missed a head-on collision with another car by mere feet. Everybody in the car was sweating and catatonic for at least a mile afterward.

A year or two later, he looked like a mess; he had a beer gut and was chain smoking. He looked like he had aged about 10 years.

DS's current whereabouts are also unkown.

Death to Moustaches

Anyway, everybody in MB's circle in the dorm was at war with the redneck types down the hall; MB and his gang referred to the rednecks as "moustaches," because of the wispy moustaches such types all seemed to grow, like it was a requirement somewhere (along with having to drink awful swill beer like Budweiser).

"Moustaches" were also all required to own a copy of Steve Miller's Greatest Hits, and it was hilarious later when we saw a Steve Miller live concert video on MTV (when they still showed music videos) and the entire audience was full of Moustaches. Whenever the camera turned to show the audience, the screen showed a sea of drunk young men with the regulation cheesy moustaches, all jumping up and down, eager to be immortalized on video.

Later, after the Love Cowboys show, we piled into a booth in the local Waffle House; we carried on about these "Moustaches" in disparaging terms, and MM later said he heard a couple of middle-age rednecks in a nearby booth grousing about us. MM said one looked at other and said, "Yep, them boys are pissing me off, too!"

let's strap on the happy helmet

I've been writing about a lot of weird, bummer stuff lately, mostly the angst caused by the bizarre habits of my co-tenants in the nasty little boarding house I live in.

So, let's lighten up a bit, eh?

Besides, how can life be a bummer when when a Totally Super Awesome Concert™ is imminent!


Also, I recently spent some time hanging around the UW campus Art Building with my Ohio guitar pal JT.


There's a small student cafe called "Parnassus" tucked away inside the building, and while using the restroom before getting a cappuccino, I discovered this building has some of the most fascinating and artistic bathroom graffiti I've ever seen.


Amazing cosmic knowledge comes to light...


On Monday, I went to Seattle Center House with the Tuning the Air performance team to check out the Theatre 4 space.


Ultimately, the team decided to pass on Theatre 4. The space itself is wonderful, but getting there—up a flight of stairs, up an elevator, down a hallway, and then through a set of fire doors and down yet another even narrower hallway past the building circuit breaker board—proved a bit too much. Parking sucked, too, and there really isn't much ambient foot traffic from which we might harvest new audience members. We would be putting on the show in the evening, and most of the people hanging around the Seattle Center House at the time of night are a bit sketchy.

All the same, I got some nice shots of the Space Needle and other areas of Seattle Center after getting off the 74 bus and wandering around for a while.


I don't know if these arches have an official name, but they looked pretty cool in the evening...


Last Saturday evening, my pals S and AR from the boarding house invited me to a Chinese New Year celebration on campus, sponsored by the Chinese Student Association.

Welcome to the Year of the Rat!

The show featured a wide range of performances, including a traditional Lion Dance (featuring the guys in a long lion costume, sort of like the long dragon costumes most Westerners are aware of), martial arts forms, some Hunan Opera, Chinese classical music, a guy from the Beijing Opera, a drum performance, traditional Mongolian dancers with bowls on their heads, and breakdancing.

Most of my cell phone photos came out blurry, but this one of the Chinese classical musicians is at least semi-OK...


They had some technical difficulties with the sound system, so some of the performers were hampered from struggling to hear themselves and the music. The Hunan Opera performance, in particular, went wrong in a big way; not only were they struggling to intonate, but the male lead kept slipping on the stage. (All the same, I must say we were entertained to the max, and the show went on, as it must...)

I got the impression that even a lot of Chinese find Hunan Opera sort of cheesy and irritating; AR later told me that even native Chinese can't understand the lyrics (he lived in China for a while and is studying at UW), and that regular performances feature a teleprompter for the audience so they can tell what's going on.

What struck me was Hunan Opera's weird combination of strange intonation and ultra-cheesed out Western pop drum beats. It's like they took elements of Western music with absolutely no sense of whether a Westerner would consider it to have any actual aesthetic value, and just threw it in with their own traditions. It had to be totally arbitrary; they could just as easily have chosen something cool, I guess.

This makes me wonder if legit World musicians look at Westerners incorporating tabla beats, sitar, African drumming, and so on into our pop music and think, "Hey, check it out! What crap!"

The intonation of the classical instruments was strange, but also kind of compelling. Most of what I've read indicates a lot of music from the Far East is just-intonated on a Pythagorean formula of stacked 5ths. I've been checking out the Pythagorean 3rd a bit lately, and I think I could get a bit of that energy from the tuning of these instruments.

This music seemed to use mainly pentatonic scales, and I had this weird sense that the music was somehow only a little sideways step from sounding like Celtic music or even Appalachian Bluegrass, especially when the woman playing the hammer dulcimer-like instrument played a solo spot. I kept thinking it would morph into an Irish hammer-dulcimer piece I once heard called "Planxty Fluharty." (A lot of such pieces are called "Planxty Something.")

Maybe all they needed to do was play the same pieces in equal temperament.

In something related, I've been listening to an album of Celtic guitar duos, and there's one piece that starts out in a traditional Breton Celtic tune and then ends with a Bluegrass fiddle melody from the 1920s. You can hear the unequivocal kinship between the two streams of music, but by the end of the track, the music has clearly leapt the Atlantic Ocean to the hollers of Tennessee, and I'm not quite sure what specific musical elements meld together to make that happen, but there it is. My ear knows.

Now. Aren't we all so much happier than before?

at least i'm not bored

So, what's been going on...

A young woman knocked on the front door of the house as I walked past this morning; she was there to look at one of the open rooms (the room that formerly belonged to Crazy Lady L). I went and found D and L, and they led her off to look around.

I seriously doubt she's going to rent that room. D and L have done a great job cleaning up the devastation left behind by the evicted Crazy Lady L, but the bathroom next door stinks. It's reeked of urine for some time now, and at first, most people in the house thought it was because of S becoming incontinent as his brain cancer reached the endgame.

Well, S has passed on--may he rest in peace--and the urine stink both remains and has gotten stronger and more intense over the last few weeks.

In the meantime, D and L's son, M, arrived from Alabama and moved into S's old room (now cleared of all the stuff packed to the rafters--it turns out that S was a world-class pack rat).

I haven't used the basement bathroom for some time now. In fact, I actively avoid going anywhere near it. It's that bad, that wrong.

Anyway, M has figured out in short order that the urine stink comes from the Birdman going in there and pissing all over the toilet, leaving unflushed urine in the bowl to ferment, and probably other stuff that I don't even want to know about. All of this in addition to his habit of rinsing his parakeets' birdcage pans out in the shower.

The Birdman...God, I truly hate the guy...

He must be mentally ill. As long as L and S were in the house, the Birdman could fly under the radar, but people in the house are now catching on to his antics.

One way or another, we are going to get rid of this guy.

In a related development, D and L have been persistently upset over a note somebody left for them about how the bathrooms upstairs next to their room are always nicer and cleaner.

D and L clearly suspect I wrote the note, and whenever I hang out with them and they consume a few beers, they begin asking me questions and making non-sequitur statements apparently designed to trip me up and expose me as the note author. Their suspicion doesn't suprise me, considering I openly criticize the state of the bathroom downstairs and the fact that I routinely vote with my feet and use the bathrooms upstairs by their room (I am after all, allowed to use any bathroom in the house that I choose--they are all supposed to be accessible).

But, I didn't write the note.

And while hanging out last Friday night, they suddenly produced the infamous note and handed it around for examination.

It looked (and read) like it had been scrawled out by a 5-year-old.

All the same, it's a fact that the bathrooms on the top floor are nicer and cleaner. The rooms on that floor are more expensive, and the tenants (I suppose) more civilized in their habits. By the simple fact of proximity, D and L see those bathrooms more often and are inevitably more aware of their general cleanliness. (D refers to the basement as "the dungeon," and he has plainly stated that he avoids going down there, so am I expected to believe that he will have some objective awareness of the basement bathroom's state?)

It's simple logic here, people.

It's also a simple fact of my life that people routinely don't find me believable when I complain about something.

"No, he's exaggerating. He's making it up! It just can't be!"

Well, now that their own son is living down in the dungeon, I am suddenly a lot more credible.

M won't use the bathroom, either. He also routinely goes upstairs. My own behavior suddenly makes a lot more sense to everybody.

Hallelujah!

So, let's get rid of the Birdman, eh?

Caution is needed, though. The guy is weird.

I read an account of a "nightmare neighbor" in Chicago who would creep out and shit in the washing machines.

The situation could go wrong if we're not careful. I'd rather get rid of him without provoking an escalation in his behavior.

More later. Not everything is bad. Some things are very good right now, so stay tuned.

This just happens to be the stuff that is hot on my mind while the keyboard is under my fingers...

fact-burrito theology!

I experienced yet another strange encounter with a Denizen of the Outerworld(tm) yesterday while on my way to class.

On my way across campus in the rain, I stopped by a trash can in Red Square to finish my burrito, and a young man with pinwheel eyes snuck up in my blind spot (as they always seem to do) and launched into a pointless theological discussion--something about how he thought God was in fact female, with supporting documentation from the Bible and this and that, blah blah, woof woof.

Whatever. I could not care less, and I kept looking at my watch.

Eventually, I finished my burrito, thanked him for being a nice guy, and informed that I needed to be on my way.

"But...don't you want to stay and talk about this?"

Not enough to be late for class.

I found myself behaving in a patronizing way toward him, but I couldn't help it. I was trying to go about my business, and he was interrupting me with this...this pile of baffling twaddle!

He seemed offended that I insisted on getting on with my life and going to class, but what was the guy thinking?

"I need to find somebody who will listen to all of my ideas about the gender of God and how it's supported by the Bible. Oh, look...that guy over by the trash can stuffing a burrito into his face in the rain--he'll want to talk to me!"

If he has a theological bone to pick, why doesn't he go hang around a seminary somewhere? Or even a coffeeshop? There are millions of people in coffeeshops across the nation willing to engage in some friendly, idle sophistry at the drop of a hat. I know a few of them personally. Some of them might even care enough about the topic to have a real conversation.

But...out in the rain next to a garbage can, with people who are obviously in a hurry to get somewhere?

...bleeblebleeblebleeble... [sound of lips being flapped with index finger]

fact--cat people vs. dog people!

Posting from Trabant Coffeeshop, while the Trabant Cosmonaut looks on...

Mt. Rainier was visible from the UW campus today, but I couldn't get a decent pic. In person, the mountain looks huge and dominates the land for miles around. Through the lense of my cell phone camera, it was either invisible, or it looked dinky, which is very un-mountain-like, and you don't want to bruise a mountain's pride.


There's the keyboard. Begin typing!

So. Cat people vs. dog people.

I realized yesterday that I am obsessed with the "dog person" mentality. At the B&N down the hill, I found myself poring over the two books on puppy rearing by the Monks of New Sketes.

It must have been something about my week spent watching over Nellie, the little scotty dog, that has me interested in this topic. While dealing with the dog, I found myself having to assume the virtue and purposely exert my dominance over the doggie, like a true dog person does naturally.

It was taxing, but interesting.

Normally, I am a cat person through and through. It's a laid back, "live and let live" sort of mindset, and you accept that you cannot dominate or manipulate a cat.

As a cat person, you understand the value of a good nap in the afternoon.

The cat will get on your lap when it's good and ready, usually only after you ignore it.

Cats are territorial, but as long as you don't intrude or mess with its turf, no problem.

The key phrase I've heard is:
"Dogs have masters; cats have staff."

So, taking on the role of "Master" when dealing with this little doggie was a bit strange. When you walk her, she's always taking off to investigate a scent, and as Master, you must pop the leash and apply a firm "No!"

The New Sketes monks assert that when you apply proper discipline, the dog will ultimately appreciate and respect you for it. They're pack animals after all, and you are the Alpha head of the pack in the dog's world.

This is so alien to a cat person.

And it made me wonder about the dog people out there, and I began to suspect this explicitly dominant/submissive relationship paradigm would color and affect how such a person relates to the world.

Their's would be a world of dominance games and perpetual jostling for their place in the pack. Perhaps they would seek to "pop the leash" on those they seek to dominate, and then expect us to appreciate and love them for their firm correction of our wayward path.

Maybe that's what has baffled me my entire life.

I'm a cat person in a dog person's world.

fact--there is hope!

It snowed a few days ago, and I took a cell phone pic of a snowy University Way and 45th when I stepped out of Trabant Coffeeshop...

Today, I'm posting from Mr. Spot's Chai House in Ballard.

Hope for the House Team Circle

We had a wonderful moment in the house team circle meeting today, a moment when everybody played their notes in time!

At least as individuals.

GM and I were discussing the next exercise variation while the metronome clicked away in the background. While we talked, Igor K played the arpeggio figure under examination, and I noticed that he was dead on to the metronome, with his notes evenly spaced. Igor stopped, and then MB played the figure dead on to the metronome. Then GM played it dead on. Then I played it dead on.

Dang! How did that happen?

Then we played it as a group, and we were all over the place.

So, we now know we can nail it when we play the figure solo. This means we have hope.

All we have to do now is be able to play it dead on as a group. I'm not sure how this will happen. Eventually, if we play together long enough, I suppose it'll happen.

Sleeping on Air

I got an air mattress from my folks, and now I'm sleeping in queen-sized plushness instead of in a sleeping bag on a concrete floor. Progress!

Morning Pages

I've taken up Morning Pages again. I've been struggling with a "stuck" sort of feeling, and I'm hoping this can help. The various practices I adopted from The Artist's Way so many years ago seemed to help. Around 1995, I was in a serious rut. I found that book, began working, and things got better. Who knows?

Granted, my life has been changing at warp speed since I left Cincinnati and moved to Seattle. I have only lived here since September, but it feels like long time.

Although, "feeling stuck" maybe doesn't quite capture it. In a way, it's more about having the strength to hold on and stay in the boat as it flies over the rapids. When things really get going, something in me wants to throw on the brakes and call a time out.

This feeling of "Whoah! Wait a minute there!" and the internal personal resistance that ensues whenever things start to really move may be my own special form of "stuckness." It's one of my personal foibles that I happen to be able to see, sort of, out of the corner of my inner eye.

There are others, but this one has been a persistent gremlin for a long time and will probably always be with me--whether it actually counts as part of "who I am" is another question. I actually experience it as a sort of otherness within myself.

I can begin to see it, but doing something about it is something else entirely, and I'm stubborn.

I've found this manifesting in several ways, lately. I'd rather not get into tiresome details. Just take my word for it.

BR's Challenge

In the TTA meeting today, BR offered us the challenge to look at our guitar playing, pick a specific aspect that we want to improve, and do something about it. It could be something we each know we have to work on, but for whatever reason we have been lazy and haven't gotten around to addressing it. He challenged us to finally do something about this nagging aspect of our guitar playing that has been holding us back.

If we didn't know what thing was, we had the others to help us find it.

I think most people knew immediately what they needed to do. I know I have a list of things, so I better get busy making my list and figuring out specifics.

BR illustrated by telling us about an aspect of his drumming that has nagged at him for 20 years, and that he recently finally saw what it was and decided he would finally do something about it. He had talked to his colleagues in the world of professional drummers about it for years. It was apparently physically uncomfortable enough that it was destroying his enjoyment of drumming, even though as a professional he delivered and made it look and sound good.

Wow...

MB Goes Super Locrian

Later on, MB was gracious enough to hold a Super Locrian figure I've been playing around with, while I tried out a harmony part and a couple of bass lines.

It sounded surprisingly good. I've played these parts as overdubs in ProTools in an effort to see how they sounded together, and they never sounded satisfying like they did today in real time with another guitarist.

What's up with that? The notes are the notes, right? Shouldn't the mathematics of the notes and intervals, at least on some level, add up to the same thing?

Strange.

NST Classical?

Then TB rehearsed some of his NST classical guitar music in preparation for the upcoming CGT show, with the whole team as test audience.

Wow! Again!

I was surprised that he was playing in New Standard Tuning. I had always assumed gut or nylon strings wouldn't be able to hold the tension of the upward-tuned strings without snapping.

So much for assumptions.

Making the Breakthrough

In other areas, I'm pondering what it will take to break into the technical communication field, and I'll be consulting one of my professors. I experienced my break into book publishing as a tough slog, so I want to get it right this time.

Also, in the last few days, I finally admitted or understood that I felt (perhaps mortally) offended over something that happened months and months ago, before I got to Seattle. I've been experiencing a bit of resistance toward a specific task, and I couldn't seem to explain it. Now I know.

On some level, my attitude is, "Yeah, well, so what? Get over it, already. Do what you said you would do." I believe part of this situation involved an unspoken, unconsidered bit of presumption on my part, so it's not like I'm some kind wounded innocent.

But still, "it" resists and throws up roadblocks. What do I have to do to get this heedless, mule-stubborn animal I inhabit to cooperate?

I'm not very kind or forgiving toward "it" sometimes.

Anyway, now that I at least see it, maybe there is hope.

Coriander--Yuck!

Oh, yeah. I've decided I don't much care for the bitter taste of coriander when I make a curry. My bottle of curry powder already has coriander mixed in, so my recipes may be going overboard when they call for adding coriander. Or I'm not cooking it right and allowing it to mellow. Or I happened to get a bad, overly-bitter batch of it.

None of the curries I've had in Indian restaurants have tasted bitter like this.

As it is, it reminds me of nutmeg, and I don't really care for nutmeg most of the time.

Alright, I'm out of here.

lots of guitar practice

I was up at 6:00 AM on Saturday for guitar calisthenics, sitting, and then a House Circle session with CG following breakfast at Vera's (I had the Greek omelette, while BR told tales from his life on the road as a professional drummer with a Big Famous Rock Band). Near the end of the session CG led us into an arrangement of a song from Donnie Darko and broadcast our playing over his iPhone to TM, who is a huge Donnie Darko fan.

The Tuning the Air team was scheduled to check out a possible performance space in Seattle Center, but I didn't feel well and decided to go home.

I felt better after a short nap and did a batch of laundry.

Later, I found myself picking up the guitar and playing over various ideas I've been collecting, including more variations from the G7/B Lydian Augmented +V (Super Locrian) mode I've been playing around with. I found an intriguing variation that layers a diminished triad over an augmented triad, both built off the same root. The same motif also made a pretty cool bass line/riff.

This eventually morphed into work on quieting sympathetic tension in my left hand fingers, as well as work counting "Eye of the Needle" in 13/4.


Then I headed out to the Good Shephard Chapel performance space for the Seattle Improvised Music benefit, featuring about 25 different musicians performing one-minute improvised solos. A lot of these were quite avante-garde, and my favorite was a clarinet player who played a wide range of percussive breath sounds I didn't know were available from the instrument. The program mentioned there are workshops on Saturdays. Maybe I'll take my Ovation to one of these soon and check it out. I would like to get to know more musicians.

On Sunday, I felt inspired to play more guitar. Except for a journey to the Ave for a cappuccino, I played guitar pretty much all day, with breaks now and then to listen to an album of Celtic guitar duets I picked up at the Dusty Strings guitar store in Fremont. Such gorgeous melodies.

This reminds me that I need to resume work on the Dinny McLaughlin fiddle reels transcribed in his autobiography, From Barefoot Days.


I met Dinny about two years ago on my trip to the Inishowen Peninsula in the north of Ireland. Seamus, a friend of the family in Ireland, took us out to hear Dinny perform at a local pub. Later, Seamus called Dinny up, and I wound up over at Dinny's cottage playing NST bits for him, including one of his reels in D Major that I had quickly sat down and learned from the sheet music (1st position at the nut seemed to give the best, most fiddle-like tone).


Dinny was very gracious, and he seemed touched that I had gone to the trouble to learn some of his music.

Back here in Seattle on Sunday night, I took a break from playing guitar to visit the B&N Cafe down the hill and read a book on composing for jazz. I was tempted to buy it, because it had a good collection of melody writing techniques, things I had seen before, but explained in a slightly different way that was insightful and interesting.

I also read a new book on the Beatles. I've been reading a lot of books on the Beatles lately, but I mainly find myself searching around for all of the references to Bob Dylan and their various meetings. The relationship between Dylan and the Beatles fascinates me for some reason. I feel like I'm searching for some kind of insight about what they meant to each other and how they co-existed in the zeitgeist of the time, but I have no idea what that might be.

After the cafe closed, I dropped by QFC for groceries, and headed home to play more guitar.

Next thing I knew it was 2:00 AM. Then to bed.

back in the groove

I'm back.

Short summary of Stuff That Happened Since I Last Posted:

CHRISTMAS

Mom and Dad flew out, and we spent a week in a hotel suite in Bellevue. I had never been to Bellevue before, and I heard it was a nice place. It was indeed clean and tidy, but it was also quintessential American strip mall/parking lagoon hell, which is not quite my bag. There were bus stops, but you would really need a car if you wanted to have a real life there, and I recently divorced my car. So I guess I won't be moving there any time soon.

It's exactly the sort of place that will be totally unlivable once Peak Oil and economic trouble really kicks in, and we may not have to wait much longer.

So, yes, a very nice place...if you like that sort of thing.

We also went out and "saw the sights," including the Space Needle and the science fiction museum. We also made an ill-advised attempt to drive around the Olympic Peninsula in a single day. Everything in this part of the country is much farther apart than it appears on the map, and so we drove long way out, just past Aberdeen.

We had a nice seafood dinner near the Pacific Ocean, then gave up on driving all the way around and came back.

Aberdeen looked quite desolate. Naturally, I found myself trying to imagine Kurt Cobain growing up there. (For some reason, the place reminded me of the little town in Indiana where Gus Grissom, the astronaut, was born and raised.)

We also visited Bainbridge Island, which was also a nice area. I think I would quickly get bored if I attempted to live there, though.

I enjoy my family's company. We always laugh and have a good time. We share a slightly surreal sense of humor and enjoy wordplay.

I'm finally outfitted to cook again, and after New Year's, I got out the Vegan With A Vengeance cookbook and whipped up some spinach curry and scrambled tofu. (I'm not vegan—it's just something I'm dabbling in right now.)

Once I was back in the house and got in the kitchen, I also noticed that all of the lock hinges were bent up (tenants can claim a cabinet and secure it with a padlock). Somebody had come in there and gone through the kitchen trying to force open all of the cabinets, maybe with a crowbar. My lock and latch held, but the would-be thief had broken somebody else's cabinet open. I don't think they took anything, though. The open cabinet was full of rice and cooking oil, and that was it.

So much for all of the amazing valuables that had to be hiding out in the crappy kitchen cabinets of this crappy house. Oh, well.

HOUSE SITTING

I spent a week around New Year's house sitting for some friends, and taking care of their cats, gerbils, and their little scotty dog. I picked up a lot of dog poop, played catch, and did my best to prevent too many dust-ups when one of the cats snuck downstairs into the dog's domain.

I also got sick on New Year's Eve and spent the entire evening laying around feeling out of it. Aches and chills. It was too bad, because I had bought a bottle of Cruzan dark rum, and I was looking forward to busting that open over at TS's party.

Later on, I made a veggie stir fry with lots of coriander, cumin, and pepper, and I swear the spices broke my fever.

THE BUS RIDE FROM HELL™

(Special "Mea Culpa" Note added 2/26/08: to avoid any further misunderstanding—because some misunderstood—I must note that Drunk Guy, Spastic Guy, and Probation Lady were all white. In other words, the Bus Ride From Hell™ was an "equal opportunity" irritating experience. Lefty academic deconstructionists may now commence with, um, deconstructing the unexamined racial biases and implicit power relations of our Eurocentric dominant culture as they colonize our discourse and manifest in the following prose, or whatever.)

To get to the airport, I took a bus from U District, and then transferred downtown to another bus headed toward Seatac. (BTW, I really like Seattle's downtown area—unlike Cincinnati, people actually go downtown in Seattle, and the area looks prosperous and busy.)

I sat near the front of the bus, and I now understand that I must never again sit on the benches near the front, especially if I'm going on a long bus ride. Aggressive drunks and other riff-raff tend to collapse onto the benches near the front, and so if I want to avoid such persons, I should make a point of moving farther to the back so that I'm out of range.

Anyway, first in our lineup...

Drunk Guy

Drunk Guy sat down directly to my left. His nose was running, and he appeared to be drooling. He was relatively well-dressed and yuppie in a North Face sort of way, and I thought he dressed "young" relative to the crinkly droop of his face.

I'm convinced he had been drinking heavily for a long, long time, and that it had prematurely pickled him.

He looked at me and said, "Ahm drung..."

I asked him if he was going to be OK. He seemed to attempt a reply, but was otherwise too drunk to speak. I was sincerely concerned, and my inquiry seemed to immunize me from any direct harassment later on in the bus ride. Thank God.

As the journey wore on, Drunk Guy became unable to control himself and wouldn't shut up despite repeated warnings from the driver.

And even then, it seemed like only about one out of every four impulses to say something actually made it out of his mouth. Sometimes you could tell he wanted to say something, but he was usually too impaired for his vocal mechanism to produce any sound. You could see him try to speak and then give up.

When he did speak, it wasn't clear how it related to anything:

"There ain nuh ole peeble rahdin thiz buzzz..."

"Gheezuz zuvvered ahn tha crozz...!"

Riders sitting right next to him began to openly tell him to shut up. The driver warned him to shut up. New riders would get on and sit down next to him, and you could see it dawn on their faces that they were sitting next to a cretin.

Eventually, the driver stopped the bus and kicked the guy off.

Drunk Guy's last words as he stood at the front of the bus:

"Yall can kizz mah big whaht azzzzz!!"

The Weird Black Kids

The sat across from each other and babbled in a secret language:

"Digga? Zigga? Meligga?" said one.

"Bigga? Gigga? Wigga-Digga?" said the other.

Then they laughed uncontrollably.

The one sitting to my left turned toward me.

"Ya got a quarter?"

"No"

Back to their secret language.

"Wigga? Higga? Digga-Wigga?"

More laughter.

The one across the aisle turned to the man next to him.

"Ya got a quarter?"

"No."

The African couple a few seats over—"African," as in from Nigeria, in Africa—sat and stared at the weird American kids. Of all the people on the bus, these two seemed to be the only ones with any sort of personal presence or sense of dignity. They seemed genuinely shocked.

The Old Toothless Black Guy

He looked at me. Then he looked at me again. I seemed familiar. He rubbed his chin in deep thought and squinted at me through his glasses.

Had he seen me before somewhere? Could he figure it out?

Yeah, maybe he had. I was That Guy. He was sure of it.

"Is you...Michaels?" he asked.

"No."

But he kept looking at me, trying to figure out where he had seen me before. Maybe I was famous.

Yeah, famous people ride the bus all the time.

Spastic Guy

Spastic Guy got on the bus in the deep south side of Seattle, right before the driver kicked off Drunk Guy.

Spastic Guy had an enormous overbite and a strange body odor somewhere between raw cake batter and a rancid latte. When he spoke, he sounded like Goofy speaking with the voice of Donald Duck. He would flap his hands and then suck on the straw poking out of his hot chocolate.

He sat down next to me on the bench and leaned against me with his filthy quilted jacket.

After Drunk Guy left, Spastic Guy kept leaning against me, oblivious. I asked him to please scoot down a little bit, and he shot down the bench like a rocket, squawking and flapping his hands in horror.

The bus driver offered Spastic Guy the opportunity to be kicked off with Drunk Guy.

A crowd of black kids got on the bus and immediately zeroed in on Spastic Guy:

"Look like somebody got Down Syndrome!"

"What's that smell? Smell like somebody been eatin' fried eggs!"

Meanwhile, somebody else burned a joint in the back of the bus.

Probation Lady

Probation Lady talked a lot. About being on probation. And how her "Old Man" was in jail.

She moved to Seattle because it was someplace she could "find an Old Man who would be home on time."

Fun facts I learned about Probation Lady:
1) She was on probation
2) Her "Old Man" was in jail
3) She was going in for surgery on the 7th (outpatient)
4) She couldn't drink or smoke weed because she was on probation (and it sucked)
5) Her "Old Man" was in jail, and he had been transferred upstate
6) She was going in for surgery on the 7th (outpatient)
7) She was on probation
8) Her "Old Man" was in jail, and he had broken probation and was arrested for assault
9) She was on probation, and she was going in for surgery on the 7th (outpatient)

All the best, Probation Lady, wherever you are...