Tempus Fugit

blogging under your real name--is it worth it?

2009-05-17T15:55:00.000-07:00

Someone I know told me I had given up on this blog.

Probably true. I don't come around here very often, that's for sure.

More and more, I just feel like the truth can't be told. I can't say what I really think and feel; or, if I do say what's actually on my mind, I'd better make sure my commentary is not attached to my real name.

I hold a lot of unpopular opinions on a wide range of topics. I could hurt a lot of feelings among people who know me personally. Past, present, and future employers might not like things I have to say (the Thought Police are all too often corporate rent-a-cops). There is very little room for carelessness. Bridges burn so easily.

There are places on the Internet where you can supposedly go to keep an online diary and really let it all hang out.

And then I read things about how information analysts can identify supposedly anonymous bloggers by mathematically breaking down and analyzing their writing (this of course assumes they have a sample of writing they know for sure belongs to a particular person).

Pretty scary.

Which means that posting to this blog becomes one of those things I just somehow skip over. If I have to water everything down or "code" it, it loses the charge for me somehow. It's not fun anymore.

Still, there's no hurry. Fools rush in and all that.

ch-ch-changes

2009-01-30T20:44:00.000-08:00

I've been lax about posting to this blog now that I'm working and playing around mainly on Facebook these days. If I can figure out how to sync this to Facebook, then I may post more often.

I may also make another committment to post on a daily basis, maybe do one post every day for 60 days. Something like that, just to re-establish the habit.

I'm enjoying my new job as a technical writer for a music equipment manufacturer. They recently laid off my boss, so things have been hectic, to say the least. The remaining team (myself and one other writer) are making headway, but we have a lot to sort out.

The Daily Grind

Typically, I get up around 6:00am, shower, and then head to the UW campus to catch my bus to the office, located in the northern Suburb of Bothell, WA. Including walking to and from the bus stop, it takes around an hour to get to and from work.

This means I don't have much time left over for other stuff, like blogging and keeping my guitar chops. And learning new music for the upcoming Tuning the Air season.

On performance nights, I have to take the bus all the way from Bothell to Fremont, including one transfer to the typically crowded and cramped 44 bus that runs along 45ths St. On a bad night, the trip might take 2 hours, so I have to leave work way earlier than I would like.

Unfortunately, the tighter schedule means I've had to cut back drastically on any guitar circle involvement outside of Tuning the Air. No more House Circle, even on the weekends. I've missed House Circle meetings with Curt for several weeks. I need that time to cook, clean, and focus on getting my playing together for Tuning the Air.

And I'm not able to be at Fremont Abbey early for stage setup; I enjoyed that work, so I miss it. I don't necessarily get any satisfaction from walking in and finding the staging already completed. I discovered the setup period worked as a grounding ritual for me before a performance, and I noticed the difference before-and-after difference in the quality of my state.

So, I'm in a radically different period now compared to my period of "golden poverty."

I'm so damn tired

The time crunch from working means I'm also usually sleep-deprived and exhausted by the end of the week. I get about 4-6 hours of sleep every night during the week, and the sleep debt accumulates. By the end of the week, I get either cranky or totally loopy.

I should know better, but I never seem to learn.

On the bright side, I've committed to the goal that I shall not hit the "snooze" button in the morning when I get up. In the last two weeks, today was the only day when I allowed myself to snooze in past the alarm

Now I need to work on committing to my bedtime. The habit of staying up overpowers me most nights.

I'm getting into this idea of waking up in the morning and getting stuff done on the weekends, so I need to do something about the sleep deficit if I want to succeed in that aim.

Getting serious about goals and focus

I've also gotten heavily into working on formalized goals and scheduling for my daily life. I've been working mainly out of The Power of Focus, and I've also joined a weekly "Mastermind Group" with my flophouse-mates AR and CW.

For the Mastermind Group, we get together to talk about our goals, work on formalizing and focusing our aims, and holding each other accountable (in a spirit of goodwill).

It's definitely made a difference, but I have a long way to go in confronting my habits.

And in formalizing my dreams and goals in writing, which is harder than it might sound. The question, again and again, is this: "Can you be more specific?"

It's actually difficult.

A lot of this came about from waking up to the fact that my plan of moving to Seattle, going back to school, and getting a new, improved job had worked. I count it as the first time that I had succeeded at achieving an inner-directed goal.

A lot of it had to do with using Nicholas McConnell's Brain Organizer. I had it all written out in that format, and when I went back and looked at it again recently, I realized I had achieved nearly everything I had written out.

Daily blueprint

Lately, one big new change for me is that I sit down and write out a daily blueprint for the coming week, with a complete schedule for each day. So far, my days more-or-less conform to the outline I set out for myself. I read my blueprint the night before, right before I go to sleep.

Related to this, I had a moment on the bus one day; I was watching some high school kids board the bus, and wondered what it would be like to be in high school at this time. Would it be any different?

Then I suddenly realized that my daily blueprint work, as an inner-directed exercise, felt completely different, and had a different texture from my previous life experience. In high school, for example, I had a daily blueprint, but this structure was provided (and imposed) from outside, by other people.

Even on a Guitar Craft course, someone else gives you the daily plan, and you go look on the bulletin board to see what will be happening for that day.

To sit down and pull a structure for my day from inside of myself is altogether different. It's hard to describe. Maybe it's a difference in commitment, or an altogether different test of your commitment.

You're on the hook to yourself, and you find out what is important to you. You find out where you have resistance. Sometimes the resistance surprises me--why can't I seem to follow through sometimes on something that is important to me?

You find out when you're fooling yourself about your commitment to your own dreams.

Alternatively, it may also reveal when you haven't dug deep enough and built a convincing set of aims and goals for yourself.

In the last few years, I've come around to the notion that a real decision is energized by emotion, not just the logical, cerebral decision that "I should do this."

If your decision is not energized with emotion, the "decision" you've made to do something has no force. One success author I've been reading even claims that the energy of emotion added to a decision or formulation of an aim is all-important; he says the emotional charge invokes something like telepathy or download from the universe itself.

In other words, if your heart isn't in it, it won't work.

This little bromide is as cliche as it gets, but it also holds some truth.

However, it does not answer the question of how to actively work with the heart. It doesn't give you the "technology" for invoking the heart's blessing to a decision.

Consider that a work in progress.

Which "I" gets up in the morning?

I experienced a moment this week when I confronted that fact that one Ian goes to bed, but a completely different Ian wakes up the next day.

Ian #1 has aspirations and goals; he's gung-ho about getting up early and attacking the day, about moving things forward.

Ian #2 would sleep until noon, and he likes to hit the "snooze" button three or four times. He's completely forgotten about Ian #1's goals and aspirations.

So, first off, this work of not hitting snooze is kicking my butt. I usually feel awful in the morning. The transition from sleep to waking state is hideous. My brain does not want to let go of the sleeping state (on the other end, my brain usually doesn't want to let go of my waking state the night before, either).

Once I'm awake, everything is fine, but it seems to take about 15 minutes on average to make the transition complete.

Anyway, I've been writing my weekly goals on a dry erase board and posting it on my dresser near my bed.

On the morning in question, I woke up, hit the "alarm off" button and stumbled around for several moments holding my head and shivering in the cold morning air in my room.

I looked up, saw a bunch of squiggly lines on a white thing near my bed and thought, "What the %$^# is that?!"

For about 30 seconds, I literally had no idea what I was looking at. Ian #2 had completely forgotten all that stuff, had never heard of it, had no idea what that stuff was. Nada. Zilch.

Then it all came back.

To see how completely I had forgotten shocked me.

On the bright side, I suddenly new my goals again in detail. I was reminded and back on the case.

I've always heard it's important to have goals and such written down and visible to you as often as possible, and it's true.

Pondering future blogs

For future posts, I'm considering posting my daily blueprint at the beginning, and then writing the usual stuff below, mainly in reaction to the blueprint. Some people blog their detailed, daily schedule, but I've never had the oomph! to sit down and figure out how to do that. I've discovered I don't naturally think and experience my day in that sort of structure.

Most of my blogs and private journaling is about the experiential content of the day (and my response/reaction to that), but I've completely neglected the container of that experiential content.

By posting my daily blueprint, I can see the container, respond based on how my day "tracked" to that planned shape, mull over the deviations, and respond to any material that comes up in response to this comparison process.

A three-fold process. I'm not sure how this would track to notions of active-passive-reconciling.

Something else to ponder, I guess.

Oh, yeah.

Someone accused me of being "cheesy" when I mentioned my recent goal work. Maybe it is cheesy, but I don't think so. I'm seriously interested in how successful people function, I've met a few by this point, and successful people seem universally to apply some kind of structuring process to their lives. Details may vary, but they're more similar than different

I'm interested in becoming successful at whatever I genuinely want to do. I've gotten a taste here and there of what it could be like, and I want more of that.

So call me cheesy.

Some people just build a prison for themselves. Have they ever actually thought about what they want out of life? Have they ever written it down? Ever?

Maybe life kicks them around because they let it.

In this world, to be oppressed or dealt a bad hand is a real factor some people must struggle with. But can't we find that little space where we have some control and can make some kind of active decision for ourselves?

Sometimes we have choices, and we don't even realize it.

I'm not sure what else to say about it, except to get snarky, and there's no point in going there. Who needs it?

Alright, I'm gonna let this one go for the evening...

new alexander technique experiences

2008-11-05T22:52:00.000-08:00

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

2008-11-05T22:13:00.001-08:00

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

2008-08-24T17:49:00.000-07:00

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

2008-07-02T00:30:00.000-07:00

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

2008-06-03T01:22:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-15T13:20:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-02T22:23:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-01T22:59:00.001-07:00

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

2008-03-21T09:56:00.000-07:00

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?

2008-03-17T23:46:00.003-07:00

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

2008-02-28T16:42:00.000-08:00

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!

2008-02-26T22:50:00.001-08:00

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

2008-02-24T14:48:00.000-08:00

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

2008-02-08T21:01:00.000-08:00

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

2008-02-07T16:17:00.000-08:00

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!

2008-02-01T17:40:00.000-08:00

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!

2008-01-21T19:04:00.000-08:00

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!

2008-01-19T14:48:00.000-08:00

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

2008-01-14T14:43:00.000-08:00

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

2008-01-14T12:55:00.000-08:00

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...

bleh

2007-12-18T16:50:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One of those days.

don't trouble your beautiful self

2007-12-16T17:44:00.000-08:00

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

So, I took it out.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, I did.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then he got out the metronome.

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

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

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

Hmmm...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He left me alone.

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

Then I went home.

around and around and around

2007-12-14T22:00:00.001-08:00

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

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

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

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

Whatever.

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

Yeah!

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

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

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

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

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

Good!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

that pesky pinky

2007-12-14T21:26:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

on the in-betweens

2007-12-11T17:28:00.000-08:00

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

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

The house is now so wonderfully quiet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Time to go eat, and then practice...

finally

2007-12-07T18:04:00.001-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She ducked into the room:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But, back to L...

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

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

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

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

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

strange week

2007-11-29T22:15:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No bad vibe was going to survive in this environment.

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

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

lots of guitar playing

2007-11-17T16:10:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is going to take a while.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe my memory is just faulty.

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

the saga continues

2007-11-16T20:22:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mmmm...khashi...

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

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

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

So it goes.

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

So he called the police.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At least I won't be bored...

Time to eat and then go practice some guitar.

"whence comes the serpent of delusion?"

2007-11-11T19:49:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's bound to be a horrible scene.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The house concensus is against her.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And "whence comes the serpent of delusion?"

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

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

when the man comes around

2007-10-24T15:19:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Time will tell.

Now I'm at Trabant Coffeeshop to do homework.

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

laundry day

2007-10-21T20:34:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But today was fast.

And there were some interesting characters.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

more blahblah about life n stuff n things

2007-10-20T16:34:00.000-07:00

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

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

I couldn't have done it.

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

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

Absolutely insane.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Normal people with conscience do not do these things.

From Political Ponerology by Lobaczewski:

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

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

new blog

2007-10-19T16:16:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And so, what about music?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe things will settle down soon.

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

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

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

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

gigs/stuff

2007-08-06T23:46:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

I need to lighten up. And practice more.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

dropping by

2007-05-06T00:06:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It took a little while to put this in perspective.

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

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

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

Maybe I had a brief brush with a sociopath.

completing the series

2007-03-28T21:03:00.000-07:00

Post 90 of 90.

Rainy day, with a drop in temperature.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Later.

lydian chromatic theory of woof woof blah blah blah

2007-03-27T21:02:00.000-07:00

Post 89 of 90.

Warm day, no jacket required.

Updated the Ohio Guitar Ensemble myspace page.

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

I guess I was a bit intimidated by it all.

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

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

the way forward

2007-03-26T20:58:00.000-07:00

Post 88 of 90.

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

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

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

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

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

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

legs on a snake

2007-03-25T20:49:00.000-07:00

Post 87 of 90.

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

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

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

Now for some ear training and practice.

Three more entries to go...

late practice

2007-03-24T20:48:00.000-07:00

Post 86 of 90.

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

Yeah.

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

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

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

brain dump

2007-03-23T21:15:00.000-07:00

Post 85 of 90.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

rainy day

2007-03-22T21:12:00.000-07:00

Post 84 of 90.

Heavy rain in the afternoon, but no significant chill to accompany it.

Yep, a weather report is the best I can muster today.

Since it occurs to me, the thing I've been doing of naming all of my posts is intentional. What's in a name? Can I find a title that summarizes the mood/feel/vibe of the days experiencing?

danger! danger! don't talk to strangers!

2007-03-21T21:09:00.000-07:00

Post 83 of 90.

I've been pondering, pondering, pondering...

Following the Shimmies & Strings 2 performance, we had a person "hovering" in the vicinity of the performance space while we were tearing down. I don't know who he was. Somebody probably knew him, since I get the impression most of the audience were friends and family of the dancers. I imagine it's rare for complete strangers to wander in from the street, although you never know. I believe the performance was advertised to the public.

But this isn't even the point I'm trying to get at.

I'm not making a judgment about him, since I have almost no information to go on regarding who he was. This one is all about me. (But then, it's always about me, isn't it?)

No, what interests me is the reaction I had to this person's presence on the scene--suspicion, alertness, the feeling that I needed to monitor this person in order to protect the performance space (still operative, I suppose, even in the aftermath, a point of vulnerability I hadn't considered before).

This experience interests me because of my habit/preference to be "invisible" and lurk around at local music shows here in Cincinnati, going on almost ten years now.

Now and then over the years, the odd local scenester will spot me hanging about and doing my lurking-type thing, and I often see and feel a reaction of outright fear. This has baffled me for a long time.

I mean, I'm there to listen and pay attention to the performance. What's the problem? They advertised to the public. Very often there was also a local music close-up piece in the local rag. They want to be "rock stars" and receive the attention and adulation of the masses, right? Shouldn't they be happy that a member of "the public" has arrived to hear their music? But all the same, here they are wigging out because someone they don't already know has shown up! I often wind up feeling like I've crashed someone's private party by mistake.

Maybe this reaction I had to our very own "lurker" was my chance to experience directly the other side of the equation. Maybe this is what the fearful scenesters are experiencing!

So...what do I do with this?

I'm still sort of mulling it over, but one possibility is that I should perhaps make an effort to introduce myself at some point, so they know I'm a real person and not some phantom of their own projected fears. It doesn't need to be much. Just say hello, thank them for the music, tell them my name, and then move on.

The other pole I swing to is along the lines of, "No, dammit! I'm not out to 'join the tribe!' I'm not trying to 'make the scene.' If my presence bothers them, it's their own damn problem! Do you want to be famous or not?! I'm not going to bend over backwards to soothe your stupid fears! Get over it, rock stars! "

So, I don't know. Maybe there are other options. I can experiment a little bit and see.

On another level, I often shy away from meeting "the people behind the music." I can think of at least one incident (about ten years, in fact) where the guy was a jerk, and I couldn't listen to his music ever again afterward with clean ears. It really polluted the whole thing for me. Don't we already know that the music often happens in spite of the people involved? Why meet them at all? I'll just listen!

We'll see.

performance opportunity

2007-03-20T21:04:00.000-07:00

Post 82 of 90.

I've been handed the task of organizing a hootenanny/jam/open mic-type thingy for the various musical talents at work. We have a lot of talented singer-songwriters.

I think I will be expected to contribute musically, so I'm pondering whether I can get up there and make a credible stab at playing some Guitar Craft repertoire in a "solo" format.

Without pitch correction software and unlimited takes on a multi-track, it's a bit too sketchy. I certainly have no idea how I could pull off any of the vocal-based I've written on multi-track and translate/transpose them onto an acoustic guitar. I would be back in the land of amateur strummery, something I've been avoiding like the plague for a long time, and to pick Crafty-style and sing I would need five hands and two brains to pull it off.

I may take in my electric guitar and amp to lay down some soundscape-y sorts of stuff for filler, then maybe play NST acoustic, perhaps with a little looping here and there to help me out. I don't have a Boomerang or Echoplex, though, so it would be the long delay on my Johnson amp with the infinite repeat feature, which is a bit primitive in comparison.

fiddle faddle

2007-03-19T21:07:00.000-07:00

Post 81 of 90.

I got home late and spent the little time I had fiddling with the Strike plug-in in ProTools. I think I've figured out how to step program and how the variety of snare rolls and hi-hat sounds are programmed.

This should be fun!

I think I'm ready to begin programming my own style templates. I just wish there was some way to open Strike as a standalone program so I could spend some time programming a wide variety of beats and patterns without having to have a song template open in ProTools (in large part because of the processing load and the tendency of the program to crash). With Guitar Rig 2, I've enjoyed being able to open it up as a standalone and spend some with the electric guitar doing some sound design.

OS X has been crashing a lot lately! It seems to be happening mainly when either streaming video or opening the visualizer in iTunes. It seems to get caught in a stuttering loop and everything locks up, followed by a "screen of death" telling me to reboot.

This never used to happen.

"sunmusic" rules!

2007-03-18T21:04:00.000-07:00

Post 80 of 90.

I've listened to the recording of Sun Music from the Shimmies & Strings 2 gig, and the more I listen to it, the more I like the piece. It gives me some nice "mind movies," and I'm developing little stories/scenarios to go along with each section. The piece has a nice "poetry" to it.

The iTunes visualizer offered up some nice and wonderfully congruent, sun-like visuals. Fractals flowing with flame and burning atomic granularities.

I think I'm happy with the solo I played on Hope. The phrasing seems to work, there seems to be a common motif I'm working with throughout, and it winds up with a light 4-3 resolution to the 3rd scale degree I find pleasing. The only negatives I notice are a slight tendency to rush, and that while it has some melodic interest and feels internally consistent, it doesn't take into account the need to wrap up and prepare the ear for the circulation that immediately follows.

The "fairy fingers" section of Blockhead is taking on a lovely pointillism in my mind's eye. I can see the notes as pulsating dots.

I've been interested for some time in RF's accounts of "realizing" and/or "recognizing" when he's made a decision about something. Something about how describes this process speaks to me. I find real decisions often do not flow from a rigorous, intellectual logic and definite verbal thought-form--"Hear ye, I thusly do make and proclaim this decision for the next step in my life..."--but seem to originate of their own accord elsewhere, from where I'm not sure.

Or maybe it's more about the various "centres" coming into conjunction. If the "decision" involves only the intellectual centre, but the others are not simultaneously in agreement and in accord, this "decision" hardly goes anywhere at all.

There have definitely been times when I've made an important decision in my life, but I've only realized it myself when I see it reflected back to me from others. In one case, I made what seemed, to me, to be a casual comment. But something about the moment, the look on the other person's face, stuck in my memory, and I only knew I had made a bona fide decision about something from how it affected someone else in that moment. I could look back and see it. And yet I couldn't really trace back to some single moment when the decision had been made. I just know from this incident in conversation with another that the decision had been made and was already in motion.

Ten more diary entries to go...

ear train derailment

2007-03-17T19:06:00.000-07:00

Post 79 of 90.

I became obsessed with ear training and never made it to the guitar today. As a diversion, I went back to the beginning level and this time worked on C with a tenor sax sound. C is still what it is and always has been, just dressed up differently, and it fooled me now and then.

Stanley's is apparently not honoring the (unenforceable) smoking ban in Cincinnati, or may be out of jurisdiction--not sure--so the jacket and clothes I wore last night stink, stink, stink!

I looked at the UW link JT sent me, and the cost in tuition for the program is a little over $4K. I'll need to inquire about out-of-state tuition. I fear I may have to live in Washington State for a year to qualify for in-state. Looks like a good program that might be able to get my foot in the door in the technical writing scene, and help me catch a higher income bracket for a relatively small time investment (9 months).

I sometimes think it would have been so much better if I had been required to pay for my own undergraduate tuition. I learned a lot of worthwhile stuff, but I had no concept of the money involved, and I had no ability to consider the future or whether this investment would get me where I wanted to go, even if I had any specific idea of where I wanted to go or what I wanted to do.

In middle school and high school, my main concerns were whether I could avoid getting beaten up or intimidated in the hallway that day, and whether I could ever finally hit puberty and escape my nerdy self-loathing. I could say this sort of stuff didn't matter in the long run, but pre-occupation with day-to-day survival meant I found it hard to think about the future. It seemed like it would go on forever. If the warped little psychopathic subculture of my peer group in school was anything like the real world, it seemed inconceivable that I could make it to 30 years of age without going crazy or blowing my brains out because of the pressure.

"A career?! What the &%$ are you talking about?! I just want to be left alone! Get me out of this madhouse!!"

jam band heaven

2007-03-16T19:05:00.000-07:00

Post 78 of 90.

I stopped by Stanley's Pub for the first time in a long time to check out that latest happenings in the "jam band" scene.

While I waited at the bar for the music to begin, I chatted up a little hippie girl. I asked her if she was by any chance a belly dancer; she was not, although we both noted the pint of Guinness in her hand and agreed that she was indeed working on her belly.

Both the bands I saw were really good, with some very good players, although by Guitar Craft standards they were doing a lot of things "wrong" with their right hands. One of the guitarists in the first band looked a lot like a young Tom Verlaine of Television, except with a more pointy nose and a receding chin.

All the bands I saw leaned heavily on a James Brown groove for their overall sound, maybe leavened with a bit of a bluesy jazz fusion kind of thing, sort of like a few Derek Trucks Band tracks I've enjoyed over the years, except not nearly as exotic. Having been a latter-day Deadhead, I don't find many jam bands these days making much of a go at melodicism and/or balladry.

The second group had a very good lead guitarist, and they broke up the James Brown groove here and there with some stop-time arrangements and melodic, guitar-lick based "heads." Very good players. This player had the thing of cocking his wrist into an upward posture above the centerline of the forearm, the opposite of the droopy "speed metal wrist" posture.

I have no idea what these groups' names were. They never bothered to stop and say, "Thanks, we are _____________."

Early in the evening, I caught up with JT over the phone. He spotted a technical writing certificate program at University of Washington and sent a link. I'll look at that tomorrow.

welcome to the ides of march

2007-03-15T18:56:00.000-07:00

Post 77 of 90.

The Ides of March are here. Beware!

Hanging out at Lookout Joe, with a phone call to Don to enquire about OGE practice this weekend. Now to some ear training, then a walk, then home to practice.

Following yesterday's rain, the cold has returned. Hazy skies.

After many years of listening "Savoy Truffle" from The White Album, I've finally realized that when George sings, "You'll have to have them all pulled out after the Savoy Truffle...," the "them" he's referring to are your teeth!

The Savoy Truffle must be one hell of a dessert!

slo-mo tempo

2007-03-14T18:54:00.000-07:00

Post 76 of 90.

Rainy day.

I felt disoriented following my day off and kept thinking it was Monday. It felt like a Monday.

Mostly no-tempo practice with the right hand, bringing the pick to the string. Gradual pressure on the string to strike the note is smoother. Some shakiness in my hands afterward when bringing the pick to the next location and touching the string. There are some conflicting signals in my nervous system, I think between my established habit of "going deep" with the pick and the new habit I'm trying to establish of just using the tip.

Today was one of those days with ear training when I couldn't seem to hear much of anything. Spent some time with intentional listening to C and G on the keyboard, then on the guitar, then listening to the C and open G in the opening figure of "Sunmusic."

day off

2007-03-13T18:53:00.000-07:00

Post 75 of 90.

I took the day off from work to run errands and relax.

At home, I ear trained off and on throughout the day. Now to guitar practice.

time change blues

2007-03-12T15:40:00.000-07:00

Post 74 of 90.

Unremarkable day at work.

After work, I went to see 300 in Newport, KY. A total bloodbath and a visual feast.

I had some time to kill before the movie, so I hung out in the B&N Starbucks nearby and read some of Jason Blume's revised book on songwriting. A lot of good stuff in this book. I definitely need to take some time to work on some songwriting inspired by children's rhymes.

Then to some ear training in Absolute Pitch Blaster. I seem to be retaining the sounds. I have some sort of a baseline established.

I had a laugh today when I found some new slang on a message board. The posters were using the term "cop show" to indicate something was really good. "Dood, that was so cop show!"

I think I'm going to have to start using this now for kicks.

"Our Shimmies & Strings gig was so totally cop show, man!"

the long trek

2007-03-11T15:37:00.000-07:00

Post 73 of 90.

I departed Hotel Fleabag about 11am.

The water in the shower was so hard I couldn't seem to rinse completely clean. I feel like I have this layer of schmutz all over me, like I'm a walking bathtub ring.

The drive between Chicago and Indianapolis always seems the longest. I decided to take 290 through downtown Chicago this time, to get a look at the skyline and examine various memories going back to high school marching band trips in the late 80s.

I still remember the feeling I had upon seeing the infamous South Side housing projects for the first time. To my small town eyes and sensibility, they had developed an iconic power over many years as almost mythic vortexes of poverty and despair. All gone now, of course. But it amazed me at the time to see it "in the flesh" and know that real people were living real lives in the shadow of these crumbling buildings.

The mountainous landfill far to the south is still both awe-inspiring and sickening.

I stopped in Broadripple in Indy, and had a dinner at the Egyptian Cafe and Hookah Bar. There was one waitress on duty, also responsible for cooking. She did a good job on the chicken souvlaki, considering she was an avowed vegetarian and claimed she didn't really get how to cook meat.

I sort of miss this area from when I lived there in the mid 90s, but it's also changed a lot, especially in the last 3-4 years.

I read a local, Broadripple community paper while in the restaurant, and it seems as if the powers that be in the community are working to make the area into a walkable "village" sort of community. If my impression is correct, this is a positive step. It won't be long before such a living arrangement will be necessary and will be forced upon a lot of people by circumstances.

A long time ago, I studied a vocabulary course based on exploring the Greek and Latin roots to various words. As I recall, "nostalgia" was a combination of nostrus for "time" and algia, Greek for "pain."

Literally, "the pain of time."

Nostalgia is not a warm, fuzzy sort of feeling at all. It's a painful, hurting sort of feeling. The ancient roots of the word take you close to the heart of what the word means.

This was my day to confront nostalgia and feel the pain of time having passed and wrought changes in all of these places that stood as markers to the flow of my life.

Now to bed.

gig night

2007-03-10T15:34:00.000-08:00

Post 72 of 90.

We had a pretty good gig tonight. The circulations in Hope were finally in the neighborhood of how they're supposed to be executed. The dancers welcomed us into their space this time, and it felt like we were all on the same team and part of the same performance.

At this moment, I am generally happy with how I played. Some slip-ups here and there, but other things played well. The physical adjustment I made beginning on Thursday helped a great deal, although I had to make adjustments on the fly here and there as my body tried to slip back into old, more comfortable habits.

There will be much discussion within the team about this gig, so I'm going to leave it for now.

Scott's wife Ann was kind enough to take some pictures with my camera. Thanks, Ann!

I had a moment on the drive up, only about two miles from home, when a squirrel ran out in front of the car. I drove right over it and heard a thump! underneath the car. I always hate that sick feeling I've had over the years when I've hit an animal, so I was very happy and relieved when I looked in the rear view mirror and saw the squirrel scampering off into woods, still alive. That sound must have been from its tail hitting something underneath the car, and not from a full-blown automotive crushing.

The drive was long, as usual.

Don is driving back tonight, but I'm staying at Hotel Fleabag in Melrose Park. I should give them some slack since they're renovating the place. And it's relatively cheap.

Tomorrow will probably be a long day.

adjustment

2007-03-09T15:32:00.000-08:00

Post 71 of 90.

Last night I adjusted the height of my guitar and worked on getting more of an angle with the neck. My playing immediately jumped up a level in ease and speed. The "fairy fingers" section of Blockhead was suddenly playable, much better than before.

I guess physical relationship to the guitar must have drifted imperceptibly over time from the last time I met with CG and RF. And it always seems to drift toward some arrangement that will allow me to wear the guitar lower (although I've begun to wonder if my strap is perhaps perpetually slipping a little bit). I still want to rock and roll, I guess.

I do have to be careful. If I'm not getting this position exactly right, the edge of the soundboard pinches a vein and cuts off the blood circulation to my arm.

Tonight, I was struggling a bit to find the same feeling of ease I had last night. My body kept wanting to slip back into established habits, but it was still much better.

Early in the evening, I changed strings and cut some new picks from my collection of triangular Fender picks. I scored the plastic with a knife, then used shears to cut the excess plastic, followed by sanding with varying grades of sandpaper to get the surfaces good and smooth. I breathed in a tiny amount of dust while sanding, and it had a peculiar smell and taste. The tips are very sharp, and I found only the tiniest amount of the pick was necessary to get a good note. On the downside, I'm also noticing a scrape! sound when I pick the high G string.

The wear pattern on my old picks shows that I often pick with up to a quarter inch depth on the pick. Way too much, but this habit is going to take a while to address.

practice makes permanent

2007-03-08T21:02:00.000-08:00

Post 70 of 90.

The level of persistent tension in my body when I try to play at faster tempos is frustrating. It seems like no-tempo work has helped a little, but at some point, when you've figured out how to walk, you need to figure out how to run. I still don't quite know how to run. I begin flailing about in all sorts of ways.

I occasionally think about how Jerry Garcia had a pronounced shake in his left hand when fretting chords. At one point, I thought it was due to some kind of drug-induced neurological damage, since it was evident in his movements in his latter twilight years when I was going to Grateful Dead concerts. But then I saw footage of him playing guitar as a young folkie in the early 60s, and the exact same shake was there, so I can only guess he somehow got in that habit when he was first learning to play and it persisted for the rest of his life.

When I saw Richard Lloyd at Southgate House several years ago, I was struck by how the way he held the guitar and physically related to it was exactly the same as when he was a young man in Television in the 70s. I had this experience where the image of the young Richard Lloyd in my mind was transposed onto the middle-aged man standing in front of me in real time. The relationship between them was clear--the small effects of time and ravage had accumulated during an unbroken continuity leading from the young man to the older man--but it was also disorienting. Everything was different, but everything was the same. His playing was masterful, but also clearly an outgrowth or outcropping of habits he had established many years ago as a beginner. His relationship to the guitar was exactly the same, just more so.

Which leads me to a favorite Dwight Eisenhower quote (which I have not fact-checked, but still admire, even if it's a hoax, for its uncanny resemblance to a Zen koan):

"Things are more like they are now than they have been at any time in the past."

Could it be the accumulated neurological-physical-linguistic habits of a person are the person?

I sometimes wonder about this in the context of Alexander Technique and the sort of confrontation you experience with your physical self. And as I write that, I wonder about my choice of "confrontation," as if my physical self is other and is not me, and I must conquer "it."

The way I play guitar now and relate to the instrument is very different from how I used to play. It's not a total discontinuity, I suppose, but when I've occasionally stapped on the strat and slung it low as an experiment, it's like there's a different person and a different way of feeling and experiencing waiting there for me, always present but dormant. He's right there where I left him. He hasn't gone anywhere.

ear confusion

2007-03-07T20:59:00.000-08:00

Post 69 of 90.

My ear is quickly picking up on the G chroma. The G currently in play in Absolute Pitch Blaster is a G4, I think.

Things get confusing as the program switches back and forth and asks me to decide if C or G is present in a certain chord, cluster, or melodic fragment (and sometimes the pitch in question isn't there at all). Sometimes I need to focus and listen for the C, but a G is present and it sticks out to the point where it's actually a distraction. Occasionally the G lights up as it passes by, but I'm supposed to be looking for a C, and I screw up. My ear still also hasn't quite got a handle on the higher octaves of C, C5 and up. I think it tops out at C7, which is so washed out it's almost just a noise rather than a discernible pitch.

When I sit down with the guitar, I make a point of listening to the notes on the guitar to see if I can hear the chroma when it's dressed up in the guitar timbre. Sometimes I can hear it, sometimes I can't. On both the guitar and keyboard (with a piano sound), if I listen to C and G as a harmonic interval, the Perfect 5th relative pitch effect is so strong it pulls my ear up away from the deeper sound of the pitch chroma.

I wish my relative pitch was better. Burge says relative pitch is helpful, in the sense that if your ear is already comfortable on that surface level of sound, it's easier for your ear to dive in deeper to hear the pitch colors underneath. My ear is becoming more alert in general from this work, but relative pitch effects will still fool me now and then. The C melody word (a snippet of Bach melody) lays out a very clear C tonality, so I still hear C very strongly as a root/1/do of a key, so sometimes when there's an arpeggio or melodic fragment that spotlights, for example, A as the root, I'll hear that keynote effect and think I'm hearing C.

When working on Sun Music, I've been trying to direct some of my attention to hear the chroma of that open G, but there's so much other stuff going on with fretting and cross-picking and directing relaxation and so on, I quickly lose track of it. I retain an overall sense of how the notes are unfolding, but individual pitches just kind of wash together.

bursitis?

2007-03-06T20:57:00.000-08:00

Post 68 of 90.

The pain in the joint of my left shoulder has been persistent today. When I put my attention into that joint, I can feel the outlines of a layer of tissue that is irritated.

During my Alexander Technique lesson, NS told me he could feel some increased resistance in that shoulder when he was moving it around. When lifting my shoulder up there was some tightness and pain at the elbow similar to the feeling of pain behind my knees when I haven't been keeping up with my stretching routine.

I definitely felt better following my lesson, although I decided it was better to take a day off from guitar and mostly work on ear training. I mostly just let my left arm lie in my lap and used it as little as possible. My working theory here is that the stiffness was my bodies way of immobilizing the joint to help it heal, so maybe it's better if I don't push it.

sore shoulder

2007-03-05T20:56:00.000-08:00

Post 67 of 90.

The long rehearsal on Saturday really did a number on my left shoulder. I'm not used to playing for five hours at a stretch, and by the end of rehearsal my ability to inhibit and direct had been thoroughly overwhelmed. There's actually some pain in the joint.

the big nada

2007-03-04T20:53:00.000-08:00

Post 66 of 90.

Another day of catching up on sleep and laundry.

I ear trained periodically throughout the day. I'm beginning to get the hang of the G chroma in Absolute Pitch Blaster. I'm pretty much in the same area at this level as I was when I was beginning my work on C many months ago. I frequently found myself forgetting what I was listening for. A lot of the same issues arising, but this time I recognize where I am, and I know there is hope. But it's also discouraging to think I will have at least 10 more opportunities to be in this place before I've completed work on all 12 notes.

I seemed to make the most progress when instead of worrying about what level I was on at the moment or making any effort at all, I just listened, enjoyed the process, and played the game. Any sort of angst or straining just sets you back.

Don mentioned yesterday that my guitar was positioned a lot differently than the others, with the neck lower and more horizontal. He told me I looked comfortable, but comfortable does not equal correct. The most screwy and damaging postures can sometimes be experienced as "comfortable." The position of my right arm resting on the guitar has gradually shifted until it seems like I'm sort of reaching around the guitar from behind. I would actually prefer if the neck of the guitar was a bit more angled. Maybe I'm in need of an adjustment from Curt or someone else on a course.

chicago circle rehearsal

2007-03-03T20:29:00.000-08:00

Post 65 of 90.

Within 20 minutes of being on the road, it began snowing. I wanted to kick myself for not checking the weather forecasts.

Shortly after that, I got a call from Don on the cell phone. He had also run into snow on I70 heading into Indianapolis, and he had just recovered from disaster when his SUV slid completely off the road into the median. He was able to guide the vehicle back on the road and was unscathed, but it was a freaky moment for him. Luckily, nobody else was close enough to be drawn in, nobody was sitting in the median, and he was nowhere near a railing, wall, or bridge abutment.

I465 around Indy was a mess, and the cops were cleaning up numerous wrecks, including one on the ramp where it looked like the cars had collided and then somehow stuck together and spun around so they were facing back down the ramp. It must have just happened, since there were only four or five other cars backed up on the ramp with me.

Once I was on I465 itself, I saw cars here and there crumpled against the walls to the side of the highway. Traffic was slow, but some people were still making risky maneuvers. At one point, I drove faster than was probably safe just to put some distance between myself and rest of this mass of cars.

We met at the the T&A north of Indy around 8:30, about half an hour later than we had planned on. We loaded up Don's SUV and headed out. North of Indianapolis, the weather cleared up and we finally saw some salt trucks on the road (we speculated the storm had caught the highway department by surprise in other parts of the state). There were a few slippery spots here and there, but it wasn't too bad.

Even with the delays, we made it to Adrian's studio right on time at 11 o'clock.

We worked on Loren's "Road Trip" piece, and the work in rehearsal cleared up a lot of things for me. Then we moved to practicing standing up and plugged in in the arc formation we'll be adopting at the gig. Everybody had their feedback busters installed by this point and had found the trick of loosening the low C string slightly to get it into the soundhole.

It was very hard to hear. We were monitoring through the PA mains, and so you were either having your brains blown out by the sonic death ray emanating from the speaker cones, or, if you were off-access to the speaker, you were struggling to hear and discern which plinky, weedy note in the overall mass was yours. During circulations, I found myself falling back on the strategy of watching hands to know for sure when to play. I could hear all the notes being played, but I often couldn't tell without looking who had played it. During ensemble pieces, I could feel my pick against the strings and could feel the notes resonating through the body of the guitar, but I couldn't tell which note coming out of the speakers was mine. Or I just couldn't find my sound at all. Very weird. I twiddled on the preamp, but couldn't get anything dialed in.

The overall sound was often very good. I just couldn't tell which sound within that was mine a lot of the time.

Big free-associative digression...

There's something I've noticed about groups of people, although it's incredibly pronounced in rock bands, where ego and fantasy generally rule the day: very often, issues will remain intractable unless a credible "outside authority" is brought in--usually a producer, sound engineer or some other person with credentials who doesn't give a sh*t at the end of the day whether he's losing status at the high school or not. Once a balance of power or a pecking order is established in a group--and some sort of balance or pecking order will invariably arise in a group of human beings--it is often very difficult for even necessary changes to be implemented. Established politics and alliances constrain action, and few people are selfless or objective enough to get past it.

"Hey, I'm the drummer! Without me, you don't have a band! If you irritate me enough with your stupid suggestions, I will leave and you can waste as much time as you like fruitlessly searching for a replacement..."

"Hey, I'm the singer! Why should I care what the lowly keyboard player thinks? Who cares if he has a degree in music? Heck, I'll ignore his suggestions to the group because he has a degree in music! Besides, my girlfriend has told me I'm the most important one in the group..."

"I'm not going to listen to the guitarist! He stepped on my foot three years ago, the creep! Besides, the guy is clueless about picking up chicks. Would you listen to anything some chump like that had to say?"

Back to our regularly scheduled program...

During our work in the Cloud of Unknowing section of Trapiche, some interesting stuff happened. JN called some chords on the harmonic minor circulation, and we wound up with a lot of notes a half-step apart. It actually created this amazing, clustery avante-garde classical sort of sound, like Varese or something. This continued during a very jagged Cloud of Unknowing improvisation where the dynamics were jumping up and down in the coolest way (I thought). At one point, Don played a tremeloed gliss at the very tip-top of his fretboard, and everybody stopped cold for an instant in unison, as if we had been conducted into it.

As always, the drive back was long.

I ran into the snow again when I got south and east of Indy. I guess this band of bad weather had been hanging there all day between Indianapolis and Shelbyville. It snowed so hard at one point that I was having trouble seeing the road, both because it was buried and because of the wall of snowflakes in front of the headlights cut visibility down to about 15 feet. I don't think I got above 30 mph during the small eternity it took to get through this area.

gig soon

2007-03-02T20:28:00.000-08:00

Post 64 of 90.

The power went out at work today. This has been happening with noticeably greater frequency. Sort of makes you wonder.

The Ides of March will be here soon. Beware!

Now to practice.

transformative increments

2007-03-01T21:06:00.000-08:00

Post 63 of 90.

I just "graduated" in Absolute Pitch Blaster from C identification drills, and now G has been added to the drills. It's a whole new world of weirdness. My decision to work with the exercises regularly throughout the day to keep the sounds fresh in my ear seems to have worked out. Now I need to keep at it.

At some point during the last round of exercises tonight, I recognized that all along I have not quite trusted myself to hear the pitch accurately, even as the tendency of C in all octaves to "light up" and announce itself within my consciousness was growing. Having recognized this aspect, I was able to let go a little bit and relax into a more trusting mindset with myself.

I feel there is something to be learned and remembered deeply here. I think there's also an aspect of self-trust required when performing on the guitar. I had that moment a while back during a performance with Don at Un Mundo when I suddenly had absolute certainty of my picking, and this also I think represents an aspect of trust I need to develop with myself. I need to trust that the things I'm practicing will be there for me when I need it, and a lot of the shaky fear I've experienced when performing is tied to this. On a very deep level, I sometimes play in a very hesitant and shaky way out of not trusting myself and the work I've done on the instrument.

Learning to trust yourself--over just about anything, I suppose--is easier said than done. You have to learn to recognize that feeling of mistrust. Then you also have to know what it feels like to exist in a state of trust. It may well be that the absence of mistrust is not the same thing as actually possessing that trust for yourself.

So I have some yardstick from that performance of what true confidence and self-trust feels like. Just a little flash, but maybe enough to work with.

Now that I've made some progress with the ear training, I'm reminded of the analogy circulating in the Crafty community some time back regarding the difference between simmering and bringing your work to a boil. In this context, I also think of RF's comments that a certain "intensity of application" is necessary, as well as the aphorism that small increments are transformative.

So, I've been hoping to bring both the ear training and my guitar playing to a boil, to find that intensity of application and cross over those remaining small increments to achieve transformation.

Maybe it's possible.

I've also been thinking about David L. Burge's comments in his perfect pitch course about changes of state, that as you work on your ear, in the beginning it's like a block of ice. You keep adding more and more heat, and then suddenly you arrive at the point when just a little more pushes the ice over the threshold so that it changes state and turns into water. I'm looking for that final increment that will cause my ear to unfreeze and wake up. I have a lot more listening to do, but I'm encouraged.

He also made an interesting analogy to laser light, that when a small percentage of the light waves in a laser beam begin to fall into step, that tiny bit spreads and brings the vast remainder into coherence.

Transformative increments.

On some level, I'm actually more interested in aspects of ear training and listening than I am with guitar playing. Or, stated another way, I recognize the futility of enormous physical chops if my ear is asleep. What's the point of attempting to improvise, for instance, if you can't hear and understand the musical language? What kind of conversation and communication is possible?

My key transformative moment in developing this interest occurred circa 1994 or so. I was jamming with a bunch of guys who were all schooled musicians with fusion chops (that they allowed me to jam with them strikes me now as so unbelievably generous it kind of blows my mind). Things were moving along. I had some sense of the key and therefore could apply a scale somewhat by rote, well enough to sound vaguely musical, when suddenly everything changed.

The horn player in the group (a perfect pitch possessor) became enthused, picked up his horn, and jumped in. He went up to the mic and played a note, and in an instant I shifted states and knew what the note was and where it was on the fretboard (the B at the 12th fret, second string in OST). My hand went to the fret and I played the note back at him. He played a short descending run starting on that B. Time seemed to stop. And I found myself suddenly able to hold that run of notes in my mind like a string of pearls--an actual visual representation that I could see inside my mind. I recognized the B and then followed the notes down--whole step, half step, whole step...ah, a mixolydian scale! So I played that back at him. We went on trading licks like this for several long moments.

Then it was over.

The moment had passed, but I knew I wanted to get back there. I came to believe this superhuman ability to hear all these musical details was somewhere inside all along, and somehow the threshold had dropped and made it available to my normally anemic musical connection. Now my job was to find the means to bring all of this subconscious perceptual ability into my regular conscious awareness.

In more Crafty parlance, I had experienced a state, but I would now have to work to earn the station, to make it that level of experience my home. Otherwise, I was just a visitor.

Now I need to get out of here and get the Ovation in my hands. Time to go in search of more of those transformative increments.

One other thing occurs to me before I go regarding the kindness of these "real" musicians in allowing me to play with them and have this experience. It seems to me that small acts of kindness should not be underestimated. For some time, I've had the thought that the real damage in relationships between people often happens in the small moments, but the flip side to that is that small acts of kindness can have a positive impact way beyond their seeming importance in whatever momentary context they are enacted.

There have been small acts of kindness from others that have completely changed my life for the better, and I don't know if any of these people have ever realized the positive impact they had.

And I hope those I've harmed over the years with my own acts of inattention and callousness (or even thoughtless cruelty) can find it within themselves to forgive me.

rock and roll dreams

2007-02-28T21:05:00.000-08:00

Post 62 of 90.

I followed up on Don's request to send a pdf of "Tight Muscle Party" to Adrian. I wasn't able to last night because I fell asleep before I could get to it. I laid down fully clothed to "rest my eyes" and the next thing I knew it was 5:00 AM.

In the interim, I had a strange dream where I was an Albert Speer sort of architect character working for some fascist regime. Fascists who were rock fans, that is. I was at a private party featuring a Yes tribute band (including a very tall guy playing bass who looked a lot like Chris Squire). That band finished their set, and then this Goebbels sort of character gave a speech while a Blue Oyster Cult tribute band stood by in the background ready to play (within the dream, I knew they were a Blue Oyster tribute because all of the band members had moustaches). Goebbels had to pause his speech until some people in an adjacent alcove turned off the Rush concert video they had been watching.

exhausted again

2007-02-27T20:57:00.000-08:00

Post 61 of 90.

I was up late again practicing guitar.

I worked on ear training with the new version of Absolute Pitch Blaster throughout the day. Whenever I was due for a break, I would fire it up on the laptop. I'm hoping this will keep things fresh in my ear.

The default speed setting for the melody words is a lot faster on this one. I'm having to slow things down now and then to see if I can hear the C. With really fast melodic examples, the C will sometimes "light up" in my consciousness in the way I've grown accustomed to, and sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes I make mistakes and have to slow the bit way down before the C makes itself known. Sometimes I hear it, but I don't know which exact note in the sequence is announcing itself. It just seems to be "in there somewhere." The same thing often happens with chords. I couldn't tell you which note in the cluster is the C, but I know it's in there somewhere.

Someday, when I move on to other notes and become familiar with their individual chromas, it will be interesting to see if this clears up.

I mentioned this to Chris Aruffo over email, and he reported the same experience. His hypothesis is that the structural/relative pitch aspect of hearing is what will clarify it. The absolute pitch faculty tells you what notes are present, while the structural faculty tells you where they are.

It will be interesting to see.

I do have this sense that once you have a sense for the chroma of all 12 notes, it will be almost impossible to mistake what you're hearing.

When my ear is revved up from working with the program and I sit down to the piano keyboard, I've been amazed at how A and C are so completely different, and I marvel that I could ever have mistaken them for on another. They are nothing alike.

Intensifying perception of the C chroma after a session does seem to spill over, in general, to the other notes as well. A definitely seems to stand out from years and years of hearing guitar music in A. So many rock riffs are in A.

I've been curious to see if that will manifest in NST as well, but I'm not sure so far. A is indeed a handy tonality in NST. "Where It Goes" obviously leans on A quite a bit.

I went ahead and ran through some benchmarking routines in the new program for both absolute pitch and relative pitch (both scale degrees and harmonic intervals all built from a key root), and found I'd improved a lot. I was rated at 83% for spotting C in various clusters and melodic fragments, and I had shown a great deal of relative pitch improvement, even though I don't focus on that nearly as much.

The new chord training program now seems to be based on a key rather than chord types all built off of a single root. This is cool, in that it's now helping me work identifying whether I'm hearing the I, IV or V chord of a key (other chords to come later).

The old program for chord types from a single root is still there in version 4.0 if I want to work on it. In that program, I found right away that I could identify suspensions with almost 100% accuracy, while I had a tough time telling minor and diminished chords apart. I always loved the ambiguity and mystery of suspended chords and felt drawn to them, so I guess this shouldn't surprise me.

ear workouts

2007-02-26T20:56:00.000-08:00

Post 60 of 90.

I've emailed Chris Aruffo for the latest update of Absolute Pitch Blaster, version 5.0.

More right hand work.

slickery

2007-02-25T20:51:00.000-08:00

Post 59 of 90.

I spent the morning drifting in and out of sleep. I felt justified in my decision not to go out last night when I would wake up and hear cars grinding around on the icy country road about an eighth of a mile away.

Laundry, and then I watched a few episodes of Firefly from the complete series DVD set I picked up last week. Great show.

More work on "Intergalactic Boogie," even though we won't be playing it at the performance.

I'm getting to where I can play the opening polyrhythm and then maintain the pulse to enter with the seven note picked sequence, but only at a slow tempo. Much work yet to do, but it's beginning to seem possible that I could play this peace.

When I open with the polyrhythm, it's crucial that the second chord chop in each series of three coincides with a foot tapping on the 1 of the second triplet.

Keeping track of either which beat I'm on in the measure or the number of chords I've played is still beyond me. It seems as if I can instinctively find my way through it by feel, but I need to be able to count it reliably. Otherwise, if I have an off day, the whole thing could crash and burn.

A lot of work on microscopic examination of my picking and fingering using no-tempo practice. The feeling of lightly touching the string with a relaxed pick or finger before allowing pressure is easily lost at even moderate tempos. No unintentional hammer-ons, please!

No-tempo work is not realistic for everything--there is so damn much stuff to learn!--but I am keeping a definite space for this work in my practice. I'm banking on the concept that in-depth work of quality on even very basic things will spread to other areas of my playing, as I've heard described on courses by people who should know.

A while back I came across an article by a double bass player where he talked about the necessity in physically practicing an instrument to replace muscular tension with "pressure, weight, and balance" wherever possible. Something about this resonated with me, and it seemed to me that release was the means to access pressure, weight, and balance.

In no-tempo work on picking, rather than slapping at the string with a tense arm, I'm pursuing this thing of first touching the string with a relaxed pick, and then allowing pressure onto the string from release of the wrist (and perhaps some weight of the forearm--the mass of my hand by itself does not seem to be quite enough to overcome the resistance of the string as it pushes back slightly against pick). Then there's a moment of balance. The pressure of my arm and wrist transmitted through the pick to the string is balanced by the resistance of the string. The entire hand and forearm balances on the string like a tightrope walker.

Then the balance is broken and the pick goes through the string (or rather, it seems that the pick flexes a bit and the string and pick slip past each other).

And now there's the question of what to do with the mass of my hand and arm as it goes flying after dropping through the string. No matter how slow you go, the picking hand and forearm seem to take off like a rocket, especially if you've applying pressure with the thumb to stiffen the pick, which seems to raise the "break point" threshold. I'm still working on what exactly to do with this. Once it's moving, the picking hand and arm have inertia. It takes some time to recover. That mass and velocity has to be directed and counteracted in the "recovery phase."

There's a tendency for my arm to "start" and flail outward if I'm not paying attention.

I've also noticed a tendency on the trip downward for the pick to bury itself into the next string. If I'm going to cross-pick, that velocity must be directed elsewhere. In many cases, it needs to go over the next string, so I'm having to adjust my attitude in the moment of balance so that the resulting movement is directed in a slightly more upward/outward direction. Some of this goes back to having the pick truly perpindicular when it touches the string. There may also be a slight rotational movement in the forearm (clockwise if you're looking down from the headstock). Just the tiniest bit.

I've tried a variation where I immediately take the pick to the next location it needs to be. If I have to cross over the string below for the "return"/up-pick, I direct the resulting velocity of the hand and forearm and use it to help me get the pick where I want it to go. I'm looking for a controlled movement here, so that at the end of the sequence I am once again touching a string with a relaxed hand and pick.

I'm also working on programming in a "default setting" where I'm only using the tiniest bit of the tip of the pick, no more than the width of the string if possible. I have a tendency to "dig in" with the pick, and this definitely slows me down. There may well be times when the music calls for it, but I don't believe it's necessary or appropriate for my default.

In the left hand, I'm working on First Primary variations in no-tempo. When I firm up the relaxed finger and fret the string, I'm moving slowly and working on inhibiting the sympathetic tension and relaxing those other fingers.

There's also a sympathetic reaction in the right hand where it wants to dig down into the strings with the pick in response to happenings in the left hand.

yummy gator

2007-02-24T20:51:00.000-08:00

Post 58 of 90.

I slept in and then went with my parents to see Ghost Rider. Silly movie, but fun.

Afterward, we went to Pappadeux for cajun food, and I had the fried alligator. Very tasty!

Some practice in the evening, and then I called off my plans to go see a local rock show. Freezing rain had arrived and it was already getting slippery outside.

snow on the way

2007-02-23T20:50:00.000-08:00

Post 57 of 90.

Most of the evening was taken up with phone calls and email to Don and the rest of the Chicago team. A big storm front is on the way through. Don and I could make it in the morning and then depart before the snow and ice rolls in, but others would be driving right into the heart of the storm. The area north of I80 is supposed to be clobbered tomorrow.

The decision eventually came together to postpone rehearsal until next weekend. We need to get at least one more rehearsal in together before our performance.

I'm relieved that we won't be tempting fate with the weather.

follow the bouncing ball

2007-02-22T20:46:00.000-08:00

Post 56 of 90.

It was a long day at work. In fact, for whatever reason, it has felt like a very long week. I spent part of the day today thinking it was Friday.

I spent a lot of time last night working on the reverse 3/2 polyrhythm that opens "Intergalactic Boogie Express." I began by working on the entire polyrhythm as a pattern of 6 beats with the chords on 2, 4, and 6. I found this to be playable, and it wasn't too hard to get my foot tapping on the 1 of the 6 pattern.

But, we're eventually aiming for the rest of the piece to have a triplet feel, so I began working on getting this pattern divided in half into patterns of three with the accent every three beats to mark the triplet feel.

To begin working on this, I worked on tapping my foot on 1 and then 4 of the 6 pattern. This turned out to be harder than it seemed. The sub-cycle of physical motion within the initial foot tap, this followed by lifting in preparation for the next tap, became an issue. It was hard to find a regular pattern of motion for the foot tap and to get that synced up to the "strange" feeling of tapping my foot on the 4.

I moved to referring internally to the 4 as "1" of a 3-beat pattern, and for some reason this was easier to get in sync with. I began working on imbuing the "downbeats" with a big accent to get the overall triplet feel going, and I wound up standing up and bouncing my entire body from side to side in sync with that feeling while maintaining the chord hits in the right places. I wanted to get this rhythm into my body, and it seemed to help by exaggerating the accent in this way, as if the "1" of each triplet was a big basketball dropping down to bounce off the floor. I tried walking around, dancing around, whatever I could think of.

It seemed to help. I found myself playing the chord hits in the right places and generally keeping the polyrhythm intact. I'll find out tonight whether I was successful in getting the rhythm into my body to any degree. We'll see if it's any easier.

kuppa kuawfee

2007-02-21T21:14:00.000-08:00

Post 55 of 90.

At the coffeeshop again...

I listened to a track on an old friend's MySpace page. He's gotten a lot better with the rock guitar chops. Sort of like if Greg Ginn were really into Eddie Hazel of P-Funk.

In a moment, I need to walk my Mt. Lookout route and get some exercise. My legs were sore after the walk on Monday.

You would never guess that a little over five years ago I was running approximately 40 miles per week and competing in foot races.

Then it's home to practice, probably emphasizing the "fairy fingers" section of Blockhead. If I can just keep at it, maybe I can finally nail that one and get it up to tempo.

overwhelmed by the stinkies

2007-02-20T21:12:00.000-08:00

Post 54 of 90.

It turns out my Alexander work has helped me regain some flexibility. It's nothing close to how flexible I used to be, but improving. During the table work part of my session this evening, my AT teacher was able to move my legs up way past where they usually are able to flex, and I didn't experience any pain or discomfort. It occurs to me that the pain and tightness I normally experience behind my knees during a stretch is actually due to some other factor than simply having lost flexibility. It may actually be connected more to the flexibility of my calf muscles than it is to my hamstrings, but I'm not totally sure. I've always worked on stretching my calf muscles, so...I don't really know. I'll look into it.

I quit guitar practice early. A family member had apparently been working with caustic chemicals in the basement, and even though I was in a more-or-less sealed room and I couldn't really smell the fumes, they still seemed to have worked their magic and I now have a light head and a thumping sinus headache.

I've been listening to a mix of a recent ProTools recording, and there's something going on still with the bass guitar that is pushing the recording way too far in the 250 to 500 hz range of frequencies, i.e. the "mud" frequencies. It probably goes all the way back to bass amp emulation I chose in the Ampeg modeling plug-in and the sound I dialed in with the mid-range knob that I liked so much and which seemed so thoroughly bitchen at the time.

So now I can't seem to find a level with the bass that "sits" right in the mix. It's either booming out and muddying the whole track or it disappears.

I've generally noticed that I tend to mix with way too much bass. One of my long-time fellow recording enthusiasts seems to do the same thing with his mixes. I need to get used to mixing with a flat eq and not try to compensate that area to make it sound like a stereo with the "loudness" bass boost on. I need to leave some headroom there.

On some systems, this bass/low mid issue doesn't show up at all except as the mix being slightly too "thick," but through iTunes with Bose noise cancellers (and the damn low-mid bump featured in those headphones) it's total mud unless I pull out about 6-8 db in the 250 to 500 hz range with the graphic eq.

I'll remix again some other time when I have some spare time. Guitar practice for Chicago is first on the menu right now.

Taking the trash bin out to the curb tonight was an exercise in ice skating.

I have yet to get comfortable with my part in the "fairy fingers" section of Blockhead. I pick the same "three pattern" in Grossderschau with no problem, but for some reason that work isn't helping me here.

happy presidents day

2007-02-19T21:11:00.000-08:00

Post 53 of 90.

I forgot the workplace was closed in celebration of Presidents Day, and so I showed up to an empty parking lot.

OK, so turning things around, I went to Lookout Joe for some caffeine and a bite to eat, went on a walk (my first bit of real exercise this year), and then ran some errands. My main purchase was a water resistant clock/timer for the shower so I can monitor how long I'm in there. There are plenty of times when I get under the hot water and basically trance out. Having longish hair means I spend more time in the shower than if I had a crew cut, but sometimes I'm zoning out in there for a looong time. I don't have to spend that much time in the shower. I don't want to spend that much time in the shower, so I have to do something about it.

I do like hot showers, though. When I was in college, it seemed like every time my friends came to hang out at my apartment, I had just gotten out of the shower. It got to be an inside joke in that crowd.

"What's going on, man? Hair's kinda wet...let me guess...you just got out of the shower?"

"Well, I ,uh...yeah..."

Now down to practice. My guitar calluses seem to be firming up a bit, finally.

"warsh!"

2007-02-18T21:09:00.000-08:00

Post 52 of 90.

Laundry in progress throughout the day.

I seem to have yet again lost a notebook full of song ideas, both titles and notes about progressions and musical ideas I wanted to try out. Damn!

Dinner in the evening with friends of the family.

We had a long wait in the entryway, and every person who walked in the door seemed completely oblivious to the fact they were letting the door hang open and making us all shiver in the draft. Again and again, someone would shuffle in at the head of a group and then stop within a foot of the open door to make a slack jawed scan of the space while the others piled up in the gap behind them, unable to move forward and unable to close the door.

cleaning up

2007-02-17T12:14:00.000-08:00

Post 51 of 90.

I woke up early thinking I had to go to work, then remembered it was Saturday and I didn't have to be anywhere. I drank a glass of water, watched the snow falling outside, and went back to bed.

Beginning in late afternoon, I finally cleaned up the assorted books, papers, and clothing that had accumulated throughout my bedroom and around the sitting pad. Now that I once again have access to the sitting pad, so perhaps I'll make some more use of it, even though I've taken to sitting in a chair instead of trying to contort myself on the floor. I've lost a lot of flexibility over the last few years.

I had ideas of going into town to see Adrian Belew at Southgate House, but the weather and the ticket price dissuaded me this time. Better to stay home and work on cleaning and music.

trouble in gigland

2007-02-16T00:03:00.000-08:00

Post 50 of 90.

Things got off to a weird start this morning, with repercussions reverberating throughout the rest of the day.

After getting everything packed and ready to go last night, I still managed to get halfway to work before realizing that, of all things, I had run off and forgotten my guitars. I was already running behind, so turning around to get them was out of the question. Unfortunately, music must yield to the reality that I must work.

All the same, I cut out as early as I could justify to myself, raced home to get the guitars, and then got back on the road to Springfield and the Un Mundo Cafe gig.

Then I hit the rush hour traffic jams, including a jam one exit before Springfield due to a car wreck.

All told, this set me behind by at least an hour and a half.

I was in contact with Don on the way up to keep him abreast of developments. In the meantime, things were weird at the Un Mundo Cafe. There had supposedly been some other acts booked to play the show with us, but they either did not show up or never existed.

By this point, it was late enough that we had to wait until the benefit presentation about Cambodia was over before we could play. Once it was time, we dove in and played a short set to the remainder of the audience, some of whom later thanked us for playing and said they liked how we sounded.

One very nice man described us as "jazz." I have no idea why. I can only theorize that "jazz" for some can signify any sort of music that is not recognizably pop or rock and perhaps features some intentional dissonance. But he was being complimentary, so I just thanked him rather then enter some meaningless debate about genre designations.

At one point during a circulation in C Major, I realized I was totally lost, yet I somehow still placed my notes at the correct spot in the circulation. It seemed to take care of itself.

Matt Deane used my spare Ovation with the low, tinny output, so we had him crank his settings up full and adjusted to his levels. I found I had to roll off some bass when my low notes on Asturias boomed and began to feed back, even with the rubber feedback busters in place in the guitar soundholes.

Diana, the coffeeshop manager, gave us some money for playing, even though we protested that we didn't quite feel like our performance merited payment. We still accepted the money when she insisted, but we felt we had to register at least minimal resistance. She's very kind.

I managed to get home just a little bit after midnight.

level three?

2007-02-15T00:01:00.000-08:00

Post 49 of 90.

I get Guitar Craft emails at my work address, and when I saw the Level Three scheduled for October, I immediately thought, "Could this be the one for me?" We'll see if this feeling holds up. I have this idea that it would take the intensity of a Level Three finally to break through with my right hand. Dunno.

Ran all the way to Lawrenceburg over lunch to get my plates renewed, and thankfully, they were fast and efficient at the license branch.

I need to gather up my guitars and equipment tonight before I go to bed, so that I have everything ready for the gig in Springfield tomorrow.

happy valentine's day

2007-02-14T19:38:00.000-08:00

Post 48 of 90.

The office was closed because of the ice and snow. There were power outages in town. I stayed in all day, practiced guitar and worked on recordings.

I went outside briefly in the afternoon to take photos of the ice-encrusted trees and bushes. Every branch, twig, and leaf has a complete coating of ice, and it looks amazing when viewed against the sun.

Practicing Asturias and a few other things I haven't looked at in a while. My muscle memory has deteriorated a bit with these pieces, so I've been practicing with extreme slowness to get my finger movements cleaned up. In the course of doing this, I'm finding previously unnoticed anomalies and extraneous tension. Maybe it was always like this and I'm just now noticing.

ice and snow

2007-02-13T19:39:00.000-08:00

Post 47 of 90.

I ran late this morning out of my desire to avoid driving on slick country backroads. When I finally got on the road, it was pretty much what I expected, although I only had one scary moment on a steep curve. I only exceeded 55 mph on a few occasions once I was on the highway. The office closed early due to the approaching storm.

Time for practice. The amount of music and exercises to practice seems overwhelming. I'm going to work on counting sixes for the intro to Intergalactic Boogie. I've been striving for some time to feel the triplets, but it's still beyond me. I need some other point of entry.

espresso

2007-02-12T19:40:00.000-08:00

Post 46 of 90.

I stopped by the coffeeshop for a cappuccino after work and dallied a bit too long. Now to practice.

musica antiqua

2007-02-11T19:40:00.000-08:00

Post 45 of 90.

I went to see Musica Antiqua play Classical and Medieval music at a Starbucks in Cincinnati. They used period instruments, cheating only slightly by using some amplification. I finally got to meet my MySpace friend Tina in person, and also briefly talked with Christian the percussionist. Very nice people.

During the performance, the barrista on duty loudly brayed into her cell phone about something "Angela" had said, and someone needed to tell Angela something or other or whatever. Clueless.

Back home, I played around with the Strike plugin in ProTools and practiced on the Ovation. This was one of those sessions when the guitar just felt really good in my hands.

ProTools succeeded in crashing OSX three times tonight. Amazing.

I definitely need a more powerful machine.

I've developed a strong suspicion regarding a possible RAM thief, someone who may have had unsupervised access to my laptop for a significant amount of time. But, my recollection is fuzzy and it's one of those things I could never prove.

Who knows?

I'm not prone to being suspicious of my friends and acquaintances, but experience over many years has taught me that "friend" does not always equate to "trustworthy." I rarely place unwarranted and uncritical trust in anybody these days, so on some level it's not even a big deal. It just comes with the territory, I guess. I can't control them. I can only work on myself, and I place my focus on the beam in my own eye.

"No act of kindness will go unpunished."

chicago circle meeting

2007-02-10T19:41:00.000-08:00

Post 44 of 90.

Up late again, and then a long drive to Chicago, but at least the meeting was at 1 pm instead of 9 am, so I got about five hours of sleep instead of two.

We had a particularly nice C major circulation. Don and I talked about it later on the drive back and agreed it had a nice quality. You could tell that everybody on the team was listening and allowing for phrasing with pauses to arise. It didn't feel like the straight major/Ionian mode of C. I'm not sure what it would divulge under analysis, but it felt exotic.

I could tell that the fretboard familiarity work I've been doing, as minimal as it is, has been helping. I've also taken to practicing my C major with a drone, either on the low C string or sustained on the keyboard, to give a more overt context to the major scale degrees.

We also worked on the "zither" exercise tabbed out by Scott, then stumbled our way through Intergalactic Boogie Express, followed by a free improv. During the improv I found myself playing a Dm->Am->C->Dm chordal figure in search of a Dorian tonal envelope for everything else going on. This felt like the appropriate role for me to take at the moment. Some part of me wished to whip out some hot licks, but another part felt the necessity of holding on to this progression. The thought came to me that it was more important to be making music rather than wiggling my fingers as fast as possible. Without some tonal center and flavor in place, I would just be playing the dreaded "gnat notes" that Zappa despised so much.

After about two hours of playing, I found my right hand wanting to collapse. I couldn't figure out why this uncomfortable feeling was arising, and then it occurred to me that the muscles needed to hold the ball of the thumb upright are perhaps not as strong and developed as they could be.

In a C major circulation, what would have to happen to effect a modulation to G major? If it's not done correctly, the raised F# would either just sound like a wrong note (and often does) or else would yield a C Lydian mode, which actually something altogether different from "G major.". I suppose it would have to be leading tone to a line rising to a G, but I don't know how we would get to that without some really big ears. It's rarely going to happen by accident, and if it did, would everybody there be able to recognize what had happened?

As I work on ear training and my ears begin to wake up ever so slightly over time, I find myself realizing how deeply asleep my musical ear really is.

strike!

2007-02-09T19:42:00.000-08:00

Post 44 of 90.

The Strike drum plug-in was waiting for me when I got home, and I wasted no time getting it loaded. Curiously enough, my computer seems to have no problem dealing with the processing load for this plug-in. I practiced guitar while the software loaded, which took a long time.

RAM!!

2007-02-08T19:42:00.000-08:00

Post 43 of 90.

I stopped by Micro Center after work and picked up a 1GB RAM chip for my Powerbook. I noticed startup was immediately faster, but the extra memory isn't helping all that much with Amplitube. I can run the Ampeg emulation with no problem, but Amplitube keeps crashing ProTools. I just need a faster processor setup.

cat meets dr. dog -or- "level flea"

2007-02-07T19:44:00.000-08:00

Post 42 of 90.

The Mac AT guy was totally baffled, and so am I. I paid for a full GB of RAM when I first got his laptop--I even went back and checked out the original receipt--and the "About This Mac" window used to clearly show a full 1 GB in the system. Then all of a sudden I lost 256 somewhere. I assumed it was the overheating/logic board problem I had heard about for my run of Powerbooks, but when Julian looked in the RAM slots, he found a 512 chip and 256 chip! I had never felt competent to open it up before, so I never actually examined the chips with my own eyes.

WTF?! So where did my extra RAM go? Did somebody switch out the chips?

There was still some kind of discharge from the cat's left eye today, so I took him down to Lawrenceburg to see the vet. As soon as he realized I was carrying him to his carrier, the struggle began, and he managed to catch a claw on the edge of the carrier door. Then he wailed and cried in the car on the way down.

The receptionist thought I was trying to schedule some walk-in surgery, but eventually we figured out that I was just bringing the cat in to have his eye looked at. The scale registered 18 pounds of cat flesh, and the vet immediately prescribed eye drops. Both eyes were a little irritated and infected, but mostly the left.

The cat struggled and scratched when I picked him up to return him to his carrier, and scrabbled up my coat like he was going to climb on top of my head to get away from the all the scary sounds and smells in the vet's office.

When I got him home, I discovered he had not pooped in his carrier like he usually does when we visit the vet's office. As far as I know, this is a first.

more snow

2007-02-06T19:45:00.000-08:00

Post 41 of 90.

The snow began at lunch time and steadily grew more intense. Don and I agreed to call off our trek to the open mic in Yellow Springs.

I still went to my AT lesson. My teacher let me check the highway traffic cams, and I decided to make the journey home. The last time it snowed this hard, he and his wife insisted I stay the night in their house. This time, it appeared the highway crews were prepared. Traffic was still moving (slowly), and I was able to make it home in under two hours.

I talked to the Mac AT guy at work about my laptop, and he agreed to check it out for me.

more car trouble

2007-02-05T19:45:00.000-08:00

Post 40 of 90.

My 6 month old car died on the way to work today. While in the left lane on Ronald Reagan Highway, the engine just quit out of the blue.

I was going to call a tow truck, but decided to try turning it on, just to see. It started up, and everything seemed fine. I was going to shrug it off and go ahead to work, but then decided it would be better to go ahead and nurse it back to the dealership.

Sure enough, several miles later it died again.

It turns out the "Powertrain Control Module," the little electronic brain regulating the transmission, had died. There was nothing mechanically wrong with it, and just about any car made prior to 1980 or so would still be functioning perfectly well. Let's hear it for computer technology! Luckily, the car is still under warranty.

I had a car over ten years ago that had the same problem, and it behaved exactly the same way. The longer you drove it, the more frequently it would die, until you couldn't restart it at all unless you waited at least an hour. I remember nursing that car back to Bloomington, IN from a wedding in Brown County, and it must have died 15 times until I finally got back. Of course, the scumbags at the Chevy dealership in Bloomington saw fit to try and screw me over and rip me off, probably just because I was a "kid" and they felt they could get away with it. They managed to repair and charge me for everything except the actual problem.

It's a great relief to me that I'm no longer a babyface kid. I rarely face glaring instances of outright contempt and disrespect anymore. [knock on wood]

This car trouble has screwed up my plans to get the cat to the vet in the evening. I had to make up the time I missed from work this morning.

wash day

2007-02-04T19:46:00.000-08:00

Post 39 of 90.

A day of laundry. My "practice" probably more closely resembled "noodling." Very little focus.

I sometimes wish I had the focus (and the time) I had when I was in my early 20s, when I could obsessively practice for hours on end.

OGE rehearsal in Dayton

2007-02-03T19:47:00.000-08:00

Post 38 of 90.

Met with Don and Matt in Dayton and went over the music we intend to play at Un Mundo Cafe on the 16th.

Freezing, freezing cold. I can so understand why old people retire to Florida.

brains...more yummy brains...

2007-02-02T19:47:00.000-08:00

Post 37 of 90.

I was a sleep-deprived zombie all day. In a moment, I'm going to go open up the guitar case and see if I can at least touch my guitar before going to bed. Maybe that simple goal will lead to more, as sometimes happens.

my caffeinated grin

2007-02-01T19:48:00.000-08:00

Post 36 of 90.

Predictably, it's been a long day.

If my current mental state had a sound, it would be the sound of cymbals frying like bacon under too much mastering compression.

But, I'm not going to bed first thing when I get home. I'm going to tough it out and go to bed at a sensible hour rather than crash and wake up in my clothes at 5 am in the morning. I always hate that feeling, and it happens all too often.

I again find myself frantically scanning through news postings and blogs for some kind of information that will make all the churning storm clouds out there in the world click into a recognizable shape. For a good part of the afternoon yesterday, some kind of angst overcame me where I felt in my churning solar plexus that decisions have been made and the world as we know it is in deep shit. I just suddenly knew it, and I had the urge to run out of the office and stand on the corner by the mall with a sign basically saying, "Repent! The End Is Nigh!!" or some such equivalent. I would not and could not offer a remedy. I could only scream out to the bustling herds, saying, "We're in deep shit and you know it! You may not want to, but you do. I know it, you know it, and we 'little people' can't do anything about it, but could you please at least be honest for once and admit that you see it coming?"

So, in my heart I was ready to take to the streets, but what good would it do? The answer to that question has not crystallized for me yet...

I may need to get an iMac to get this recording system really up to speed. I haven't decided yet, but the above is becoming a factor for me, in the sense that I'm wondering if maybe I should go ahead and spend this money while it's available and while this technology is still available. I may as well fiddle while Rome burns, because music makes life worth living and that's what I would rather be doing.

burning of the midnight lamp

2007-01-31T19:49:00.000-08:00

Post 35 of 90

I've done it again. Enthusiasm overcame me, and after having a cappuccino for dinner at Lookout Joe, I zipped home to find my copies of IK Multimedia Total Effects Bundle Upgrade and Guitar Rig 2 waiting for me. Then it was guitar playing followed by the loading and authorizing of software, then on to experimenting with the fxpansion BFD version bundled with Pro Tools. The "humanize" functions are so effective and extreme that you can make it sound like a drummer who doesn't know what he's doing, has no rhythm, and is making mistakes all over the place. Then I dove into Ampeg bass models, including a groovy chorus sound which I laid down over the drum track I had printed to audio. Then some work in Amplitube 2.

All of these programs are CPU hogs. I'll try switching some settings tonight to lift the processing load a little bit while tracking. Since ProTools only records the un-amped sound off the pickups, I can go back later and print the plugin sounds to audio tracks, then deactivate the tracks with plugins to lighten the load. Mixing is definitely going to be a separate step from tracking. On the Roland recorder, a lot of the processing was distributed to soundcards, so I could often run a mix as I tracked. That is not possible with this setup, but it's a disadvantage that I can maybe turn into an advantage. Having to separate mixing could clarify my thinking about it and maybe help me find my way to some more interesting results.

I did have the feeling that maybe something else was going on in the background on the computer. I made the suggested changes to my system, but maybe it wasn't enough.

Also, I've found a 256 buffer setting is something I can cope with in terms of latency. I think my Johnson amp just about the same amount of latency in its A/D conversion. I know this mostly by feel. That amp always gave me a vague feeling of disconnection when I played through it. With a real analog amp I could very clearly sense the circuit's response to what my hands were doing, and it just felt better. Still, I was able to work with it, so this isn't so bad. Even a 512 setting was workable, maybe like having your amp across the room with the slight delay from the sound having to travel through the air.

1024 is no good, though. It's like playing with a pre-fade delay line where the original signal is not present at all in what you're hearing, just the slapback echo.

I also figured out finally how to select audio regions and make some backwards guitar. This is going to be fun!

And now it's almost 4 am.

If I can only pull myself away from the recording console, I'll get some sleep.

digital weirdness

2007-01-30T19:49:00.000-08:00

Post 34 of 90.

While recording a random vocal to ProTools last night to try out the system, I noticed a bizarre anomaly where a k in the vocal track consistently stood out on playback as a conspicuous click sound no matter what compression or processing I put on it. The level isn't clipping, so it doesn't seem to be distortion. Maybe this is the digital characteristic Brian Lucey was talking to me about a while back--he described a lot of digitally recorded sounds as having a click!, click!, click! quality versus the roundness of analog. I thought he was maybe talking about some kind of a thinness or trebly harshness, but this may be what he was referring to.

I also did a few vocal exercises with the keyboard at the end of the evening. I've been doing exercises with Roger Love's "Yogi Bear" sound to help with a high-larynx condition that usually chokes off my tone in the mid and upper areas of my range, and I noticed last night that it's starting to take hold. Now and then, I found I could find my larynx with my attention and intentionally move it back down, and when I did this I could feel the resonance in my throat open up. I actually had something to place "in the mask," and I found myself luxuriating in this sort of massaging vibration in my sinus cavities. It felt good.

The "slow leak" breathing exercise is also beginning to take hold. I used to use way too much pressure, almost as much tension as you would put into a sneeze. It's completely unnecessary to push that hard, not to mention damaging, and it's yet another example of how you can hold massive tension and not even know it. I'm also noticing it in my speaking voice, and when I've been able to relax and let go of it now and then, may speaking voice has suddenly taken on a better resonance. I've previously been simultaneously blasting it out and choking it back, which is a strange combination to have, but there it is.

In 7th grade band in middle school, I had a personal meeting with the band director where he pointed out a strange gulp sound I kept making through my saxophone when I stopped notes. I have a hunch there's a connection here between the two habits, one carried forward into singing and speaking as an adult.

Mr. Morton could be wickedly funny, but also had the capacity for withering sarcasm and an uncompromisingly harsh and angry attitude. You did not want to be on the receiving end of that side of his personality. I feared and hated the man in the way only a kid can experience. He scared me to death, and so it was even more disconcerting to have a personal meeting and find myself confronted with this soft-spoken, mild-mannered person instead of the tyrant with the baton. I found myself in the presence of Jeckyll rather than Hyde, but I felt Mr. Hyde was close at hand if he was needed, and this made me nervous.

I found great pleasure in making music in band class, but I also know in my bones that I got fear mixed in with it during this period, and it's still lurking there.

This incident defines the man in my memory:

One day during class, the school secretary entered the class, handed Mr. Morton a box of band candy (that stuff we would peddle every year to raise funds), and whispered something to him.

He nodded, then looked at us and said, "Danny Kasinger is dead."

Then he tapped the music stand with his baton and it was right back into the piece we were rehearsing.

I knew Danny from 4th grade, but he went to class in one of the different subdivisions of classrooms, and I hadn't seen him for some time. He went to the band class in the following period, so I didn't even know anything had happened.

He had been hit by a car while out selling band candy door to door, and then died in the hospital the next day.

This was some deeply shocking news to me, and I was in a strange haze the rest of the day. When I got home, I went out to play with some of the neighborhood kids, and then, seemingly out of nowhere, I began bawling uncontrollably. I was already a sensitive, emotional sort of kid--"neurotic" also springs to mind as a possible adjective--and therefore considered somewhat suspect, so this was not a good thing to do in front of this particular gang of kids. Not good at all.

This was the first time I had any kind of direct contact in my life with death, and I wound up hating Mr. Morton for being a cold, callous bastard. I hated him and his stupid band candy that had gotten this kid killed.

As an adult, I can see how there might way more to the situation than I could see from my own little corner, but I also think he could have handled it better. Maybe a blunt announcement of the facts was an appropriate response in his view. Maybe that was the best he could legitimately muster in that situation, but I did not (and still don't) think it was even adequate, much less appropriate.

His announcement, to me, smacked of an attitude that said, "Well, the little booger picker is dead. Thought you should know. Instruments ready!"

What can I say? It made an impression on me...

In other quarters, the Ohio Guitar Ensemble page on MySpace has been getting some activity. One new friend, Paul Radelat, is a professional composer and arranger, and he has a webpage devoted to melody writing theory [http://www.123writemelody.com]. I thought he had some interesting ideas about mixing arpeggios with non-chord tones and scale fragments, and I can see some ways I can work this into my guitar practice, especially fretboard familiarity. Arpeggios have always existed in sort of a different category from scales, so for me this suggests how to bridge the two in a way that makes sense to my ear.

time keeps on slipping into the future

2007-01-29T19:51:00.000-08:00

Post 33 of 90.

I realized today that the 25th was the 12th anniversary of a gig I played with my old rock band back in my daze in Bloomington. This performance was hands-down the absolute peak of my guitar playing prior to Guitar Craft.

I've not come close since then to the sort of energy and intensity that defined that gig. I've become a much better guitarist in a lot of ways since that time, but I also often feel like I somehow lost the "mojo" I had then.

Then again, I was a 25 year old post-college slacker kid with time to burn on practicing five to seven hours every day--not necessarily good, efficient practice, but enough to cause me to jump levels now and then. I also wore the guitar way too low and wired in some nasty habits I've since had to struggle to overcome. In retrospect, it's a minor miracle I didn't develop an overuse injury from the pressure I put on my left hand and wrist from trying to fret notes in that low position.

What's funny is that I still wore the guitar a lot higher than S, the bass player, wanted me to. He started the band and had big ideas of being the next Metallica, so he was always trying to make me wear it down by knees, because he thought it of key importance that we had to look like a regulation metal band. It didn't seem to matter to him that I couldn't play in that position, and I didn't put up with it for long. Even at that age, good sense prevailed now and then in my life.

The night before our gig, he played the same venue with another band that at last fulfilled his desire to be textbook late-80s metal. Ironically, he was also the only member who couldn't seem to bang his head in time with the rest of the band. His efforts to draw attention to himself on stage were conspicuous. They mostly stayed "in formation," even the scream-singing frontman, while he leapt about and weaved in and around the other musicians.

The nail that sticks out will be hammered down, especially in the scene surrounding that band, and they eventually ousted him. I met a few of them, and they struck me as being a nasty and petty lot--one of them openly sneered as he shook my hand--exactly the potentially damaging sort of people I've long since learned to avoid like bubonic plague (or maybe ebola or some other ghastly pestilence).

As a side note, this was one of those dopey pay-to-play "battle of the bands" things--the band made up of employees of the venue won the contest, of course. Coincidence? I doubt it.

The last contact any of us had with him was circa 1998 when we got back together at the drummer's house in Bloomington to party and have some fun playing together. DM called him, and after a short, aimless conversation S hung up the phone and went back to watching television preachers.

I sent email to DM today to remind him of the anniversary, and he in turn reminded me that it has been appr. 17 years since his girlfriend at the time brought him over to my dorm room at IU to meet me during my freshman year.

It all seems like yesterday to me, of course. I sometimes feel like I've come unstuck in time.

There's also a barrista I'm friendly with who is 20 years old, married with a kid, and I realized today that she was 3-8 years old during this period that seems like yesterday to me.

Absolutely bizarre.

She also talks about how she feels let down by "Generation X" and how she had looked up to us but we let her down, and so on. I countered that maybe we weren't worthy of being looked up to.

As evidence, I quoted a key phrase from the (alleged) Voice of My Generation: "Oh, well, whatever, never mind..." Remember that? That was us (supposedly). Not an encouraging bit of verbiage to hear from a generation you somehow wish to look up to, eh?

I've noticed before with some acquaintances in their early 50s who went to college together that they remember their college years in the early 70s like it just happened, and that it was still their frame of reference.

But then I'm also finding it strange how some acquintances in their early 20s are listening to music ranging in age from 30 to 40 years right alongside current music.

Then again, I guess it's not strange from the standpoint that it happens usually to be the best music those previous eras produced, the stuff that has lasted.

downtime

2007-01-28T19:51:00.000-08:00

Post 32 of 90.

For the most part, I slept in late and then just puttered around the house.

Later in the evening, I bounced a Roland 1880 mix down to ProTools to remaster and convert to .wav and mp3 files for posting. The .wav file sounded fine, but I had to drop the overall levels a few db when I converted to mp3. The same levels in mp3 format made the cymbals sound like frying bacon. Less headroom in that format, I guess.

This weekend has flown by. I spent all day feeling astonished that it was actually Sunday.

The cat is sick again with some kind of gastro-intestinal upset, maybe a hairball.

ohio rehearsal in dayton

2007-01-27T19:53:00.000-08:00

Post 31 of 90.

Don and I met with Don's son Matt in Dayton to rehearse and prepare for our upcoming performance at Un Mundo Cafe in Springfield, OH.

We went over a preliminary list of songs that allow us to incorporate Matt, either by original design or by alteration:
--Asturias
--Growing Circle
--Hope
--Ananda (Steve Jolemore's piece, not the CGT piece by the same name)
--Punta Patri (our own mutated arrangement)

Matt and I will perform a two-person circulation on Hope, and we seemed to have a good handle on that right off the bat. The double-time circulation is still too ambitious, but who knows?

We also worked on a C major circulation as a lead-in to Ananda. We discussed how by changing a single note in C major (F into F#) you get key of G, and all other notes remain the same. Changing key is a piece of cake if you have the layout of C major on the fingerboard down cold.

That doesn't necessarily describe your humble blogger, by the way. And there's more to making a collection of notes sound like a key than is immediately apparent. I hit a big fat F# in the middle of one run-through of the C major circulation, and it didn't sound like a modulation from C into G. It just sounded like a big fat, out-of-context #4/b5 scale degree (also known as a "wrong note"--I'm just being specific about the exact sound and nature of this wrong note).

For the final three chords, I found myself laying down a ii->V->I cadence in the bass, which sounded really good and gave a nice satisfying feeling of harmonic resolution, even if the other players' notes in the upper voices weren't quite resolving melodically. It might be interesting at the next rehearsal to try for a more Dorian sort of harmonic envelope. Maybe I should play something like A->C->D (vi->I->ii in C or v->bVII->i in D Dorian, depending on how you look at it) in order to imply that tonality?

Matt also got a good start on Where It Goes, always a very fun piece of music. With three guitars, this piece could really start to go somewhere...

On the drive home, I noticed my car has a quirk--the heater phases in and out. One minute I'm getting some heat, the next minute the air gets cold, even though the engine has thoroughly heated up into the proper range. It's like the connection between the engine and the heater is inefficient and I temporarily use up the heat energy when I run the heater full blast. I've noticed before that when I come to a stoplight, the air will go cold, and then when I'm back up to speed the heat returns. Weird. I bought the car in the summer, so I've only noticed this now that cold air has arrived.

once upon a time, in a rehearsal room far, far away...

2007-01-26T19:53:00.000-08:00

Post 30 of 90.

One third of the way...

Today was my day to notice all of the stories I tell myself about my life. The Narrator was constantly chattering, throwing up smoke across the actual field of my real moment-to-moment experience. The little narrative perpetually reeling out is not my life. I am not a character in a book or a movie, although plenty of people enact their lives as if they were.

I've known people who looked to movies and books for permission to enact various scripts in their lives. If some course of action was possible for some fictional character on the page or screen, it was possible for them, and you could witness them processing the narrative to fit themselves and fashion a road to where they wanted to go. They couldn't begin to initiate action in their own lives unless it had been enacted already by someone else outside themselves--original action was impossible. There may be some out there who are initiators, a sort of vanguard who create new narrative possibilities for the rest of us by transgression or innovation, but the rest of us just follow.

It can be dangerous to look in a mirror if you are prone to forget the reflection is just a reflection and nothing more.

But, in my case, I found myself noticing the various states and emotions the ongoing narrative was creating, not all of them good, most of them totally unnecessary and not related to anything happening in the present.

In recent days, I've also been thinking about how I have completely lost interest in ever again being in a rock band, and that I'm losing interest in the rock scene in general. I've not been bothering to go out and see local bands as much as I used to, which was once a prime pursuit.

Once upon a time when I was a little leaguer, I was way into baseball and had the encyclopedic knowledge of players and stats for that era (early '80s), now completely forgotten. Once I could no longer play and participate directly I lost interest. I never got into football as a pursuit, since I couldn't play and participate directly.

So now it would seem I'm staying true to form with my waning interest in the rock scene.

I'm a lot more interested in the writing and recording side of it these days, anyway. I'm getting to the point, too, where I hardly need anybody else to make music in the studio, so why put up with a bunch of drama and fantasy if I don't have to? If I'm more-or-less self-sufficient, what's the point? I can and do collaborate with others--in fact, when it works, I prefer it and have more fun that way--but if it's not working, I'm not locked in and I don't have to pull hair out because one necessary player (necessary in either the political or musical sense, or both) has dug in his heels for some baffling, arbitrary personal reason. And why be in a band if there are no songs already in place to provide the impetus to get out there, and the will isn't there to do the heavy lifting necessary to write some good ones?

Some people can handle collaboration. Some can't. In one of my old bands, whenever we sat down to work on music, we got results. But we also invariably had bruised egos, and a lot of useless nonsense flowed out of this. No wonder so many "grassroots" rock bands have a set of brothers involved. They've usually spent their entire lives up to that point fighting already, so it's not like the situation has changed once they start a band. Anecdotally, they also seem to get a bit farther on average than most other frustrated would-be rock star chumps.

Also, in terms of the band-as-gang-of-young-men paradigm, my old gang is scattered all over the country and no new rock-type gang has arisen to replace it. Besides, a lot of bad rock music has been written and performed in the name of peacocking on a stage with your posse in order to attract females (or display for the ones you already have).

Why add to that?

And if you're going to join a "posse in progress," there is the inevitable question of how to fit yourself into the existing pecking order. This is inevitable in any group, but at least a guitar circle is not quite as much of a "union shop" as a band formed by a gang of guys who have been hanging out since grade school and who really would prefer an unattached male was not sniffing around their turf and upsetting whatever little apple cart they've built to make themselves look impressive to their groupies. If you're already a good musician, that can be even worse in some cases. Also, if you hate being hazed, better stay away unless there is truly something in it for you.

Getting back to narrative, each little group is also often absorbed in the unfolding of their own little story of imminent stardom and glory. Every little gang thinks their story is special.

And very often if you do not at root buy into their little narrative, that can cause even more trouble than if you appear simply to be interested in competing for attention from their groupies.

I also say all of this having been a young would-be rock star twerp with his little group of egotistical pals, and so I have confidence that I know something about the mindset involved here.

A guitar circle is at least a bit more open in concept and design. The better every member is as a musician, the better it is for the whole group. You gain nothing in a circulation by being some sort of gunslinger and withholding help from others.

OK, I like to write, but enough already. I can't seem to stop once I get started.