Breaking With Convention

Besides having decided to start from the center of the onion, and peel outward, the center of the onion being the highlight of the previous busking experience, with the outermost layer being whatever state of affairs is pressing upon me as I take to the keyboard to post...

I did not go out to busk last night (so much for the core of the onion) having left the Uxi Duxi at probably around 10:20 PM, and was happy that both the Rouses and the Winn-Dixie were open until midnight.

I had $6.90 on me, I remember that.

I bought a huge jar of peanut butter on sale for 4 bucks; I couldn't resist because it is regularly $5.47. I really could live off it for quite a while, especially if it's true that a certain Yogi lived for great lengths of time on one peanut and a half cup of milk every day. [Probably the one who was a guru to Paramahansa Yogananda, since the latter wrote the only book I have ever read which was an autobiography of a yogi.]

Taking the night off from busking always has its consequences, and consequently, I woke up with one dollar on my coffee table, and feeling almost stuffed, after an evening of reading "Centennial," by James A. Michener, interspersed with runs to the cabinet for another tablespoon of peanut butter, mixed with cocoa, coconut oil and a pinch of salt. If I had had a sweetener like honey, I might have finished the whole jar.
Joyous Discoveries

I feel as if I have made a joyous discovery in the fact that I now see that this guy wrote a lot of books. The "Centennial" one that I am reading has 906 pages. This is 32 hours of reading for me.

I determined a long time ago, when I was in jail, that I read somewhere around 28 pages per hour.

This is if a page has 2,400 words on it, which would mean a Charles Dickens or a Henry Fielding, Sir Walter Scott, or even Charlotte Bronte -any of the "most bang for the buck" offerings that come under the genre of "classic literature." The Michener books fall into this category.

A Stephen King novel is, I'm pretty sure, designed to be the size of a brick, even if that would mean putting one word on each page; a real page-turner of a short story that would be.

I think I could knock out almost 70 pages an hour of one of his.

He was the "king" of the books circulating within almost all of the dozen or so jail-blocks that I have ever been housed in, in my life. He, and James Patterson (speaking of one word on each page) pretty much had a monopoly.

I felt kind of bad having my mom send me Charles Dickens novels, with their ability to transport me, excuse the pun, out of the jail and to London, or Paris, for the 80 hours that it would take me to read them, and then to see the book circulate through the block, staying in no other cell for longer than the 5 or so minutes that it took its inmates to read the first sentence, excuse another pun, and determine that they didn't like it.

Is there a correlation between reading Stephen King and running afoul of the law? Marvelous Idea #3: Try to actually get a government grant to conduct such a study.

28 Pages Per Hour

I went to the trouble of measuring how fast I read while in jail (by reading for say, 20 minutes, then multiplying how many pages I read by 3) because I used it as a time passer.

After the whole block had been locked down for the night, and while my cellmate slept, I would sit, wrapped in my blanket, where light was streaming in through the gate, and would set my bookmark ahead the number of pages that I could read before the 5 AM breakfast cart arrived, the lights came up, and the gate popped open. There were mornings when I was on the last paragraph of the last page when that happened.

It was just as good as a clock -something that a lot of inmates couldn't see one of when locked in their cells.

"Hey, does anyone have any idea what time it is?" -most likely uttered by the new guy who had just been thrown in the previous day, and who is counting hours until the morning, when the judge might let him go, rather than days or weeks or months.

[checking what page I'm on] "It's right around 2:20 AM."
"Thanks and, do you know what 'phan-tas-ma-gorical' means?"
"You must have the Dean Koontz one..."
"Yeah."


Hey, some guys excavate a spoonful of concrete from their cell wall, and then convey it to the outside yard, concealed in a pocket that has its bottom cut out, allowing them to scatter it on the ground out there every day; other's count the pages they have to read before breakfast comes, we all had our quirks in there, I guess.

It was good knowing that breakfast and a cup of coffee awaited me when I got to where the bookmark was.

After breakfast, I would exercise, then read some more while the coffee gradually wore off, when I would be tired enough to drift off to sleep, to the din of the other inmates slapping playing cards down on tables, and the drone of the 2 TV's, set to different stations, one white, one colored.

  
But, Joyous Discovery #1 is that, as evident by the picture above, I have literally, excuse another pun, weeks of great reading ahead of me, in the form of all those Michener titles that I haven't read yet.

I had started to read "Hawaii," and found it fascinating, a third of the way through it, when I lost my copy of it -might have left it at Leslie Thompson's in my haste to get out of his house, and away from him- and the "Centennial" one that I am reading now, my second of his, is just as interesting. I am learning a lot about American History, too.

Marvelous Idea #2:

I could draw cartoons, like perhaps a Saint looking guy squeezing the guts out of a cartoon falcon, and then try to sell my designs to the guys who run the tattoo parlor on Carollton Street.

I pick up their "snipes" a lot, since they seem to come out and half smoke American Spirit non menthols, then demonstrate an ability to flick them onto the side of the road in front of the place in such a way that they go out, and I have talked to them a few times.

I joked about them putting a tattoo of my upper arm on my upper arm, and making it so life-like that nobody would be able to tell it was a tattoo "the vein will be the biggest challenge..." and then a bit more seriously, about them tattooing sheet music on my upper arm that I can then practice playing until I have it mastered. "Bach, probably..."

"It would have to be something good that you wouldn't get sick of hearing..."
"Bach..."

The matter will be whether they, as artists (with pride) do all of their own drawings, or not.

It seems to me that a lot of people would bring drawings to the place, wanting to get exactly whatever it is, put on their body. But, maybe the artist hate it when they do that...why come to a particular artist when any decent one can trace out and copy a cartoon? type of thing...

I suppose that they could hang my cartoons on some kind of demonstration wall, and if anyone wanted one put on their arm ("Oh, that's funny!!") or something, I could get maybe a ten dollar "commission" on each one. Based upon the honesty system, I guess.

Just another idea...

Other than that, it is a Tuesday night, I am broke, and my spotlight is pretty dim right now as, the batteries that Bobby had given me had faded pretty fast the last time I went out, and then I had forgotten to set a couple bucks aside, instead buying a huge jar of peanut butter, an energy drink and a can of cat food.

"Embrace uncertainty..." -Eckhart Tolle

This could mean daylight busking, and that would mean going out into a temperature that "feels like 105º" tomorrow, and playing somewhere.

The stuff in the studio is getting better, in a weird way. It involves myself being able to detach myself more from what I'm doing, and bring my recording studio experience a little more in line with what I do when at the Lilly Pad -just being another person hanging around listening to the music, that I just happen to be making but am not trying to take "credit" for.

Just cash (rim-shot).

I'll have to be patient and not put the cart in front of the horse.

The cart is my need to make, fifty dollars would be nice.

And the horse is the urge to make an artistic statement, without concern over receiving any remuneration for it.

The Scardino Sessions

Jacob Scardino has gone silent.

When I had been over to his studio, it had not been an optimal situation.
I was playing guitar and singing and playing harmonica, and he was recording it, planning upon adding voices to it later, using his synthesizer and/or drum kit.

I knew this was going to be hard for him, because my rhythm might not have been rock steady.

I can't help but think that he ran into those difficulties and lost interest in "the project."

If we get together again, I figure that we should play at the same time, with him on synthesizer and myself on guitar. The idea would be to just try to fall into some good grooves and get good recordings of them, regulated by a metronome beat.

Then we each could go to work separately, loading the mp3 of the whole jam on track one of Audacity, then adding parts.

Since my parts would be in time with the same metronome, we could mix and match them when we next got together.

This is how the song "Pressure," which is credited to the group Queen, "featuring" David Bowie, was recorded.

Bowie and Freddie Mercury took turns going into the vocal booth, putting on the headphones and singing along with the musical track, making up melodies as they went. That is what accounts for the part towards the end when they are both singing somewhat different melodies, but ones that mesh together, because they both started with the "Pressure, coming down on you; coming down on me..." melody, and then embellished from there.

So, Jacob and I need to just jam away for an hour, trying to make the guitar and keyboards fall into different grooves along the way.
At one point, he might play a chord progression on the keyboard that I would comp along to, then vice-versa.

Then, he could sing over it in his studio, maybe adding synthesized horn parts, while I sing over it in my own, maybe adding extra guitars and harmonicas.

Then, as a second phase, I could listen back to the thing, with the extra parts that he added, and then re-do my extra parts, tailoring them more to that, while he was doing the same to the original plus my original extra parts. It could be interesting, and I will have to text him with the idea soon.