ↇ There was supposed to be a post [here] that I spent about 4 hours working on, Tuesday morning, and into the afternoon.
It was a pretty good one, I thought. I had had a rough 24 hours, but had finally caught a normal "early to bed; early to rise" night of sleep.
Right: Harold is faced with the classic dilemma of fight or flee.
I was up with the sun, well rested, and with a pot of coffee.
The next 5 hours or so were spent embellishing the themes that I had laid out which could be divided into:
A: The South Korean guy who came by the Lilly Pad.
B: I Am Cruel To Harold the cat (ancillary to unleashing the stuffed horse head on a stick against him).
C: An essay on war, with the question posed of: Is the human race a kinder and gentler race because all the conscientious objectors from the Vietnam Era have reproduced a half million times over, while the war mongers who signed up for war fighting and killing, for whatever reasons, took their militant mind-sets to the shallow graves with them.
D: The 5 dollar night, despite the South Korean guy hanging out and shooting video for about 45 minutes (he tipped me first a dollar, and then another one after he felt compelled to after shooting video of about 3 songs and about 3 "interviews" in between) while I played my ass off (to a large degree because I was "on TV").
E: How much I have piled upon my plate with the undertaking of the study of 2 new computer disciplines, the renewal of my learning of the Ethiopian language, which I can hone at The Unique Grocery on Royal Street.
F: I bought another 2-pack of cartridges for my electronic cigarette, for just under 10 bucks, and the first one has lasted me for going on 3 days. The math works out to me probably saving about 18 bucks on each purchase of a 2-pack of them; they come in about a half dozen flavors, with me sticking to the "original" one for now, as I circle my wagons and try to regroup and seek some modicum of stability in my life, and it not being a good time to gamble on some flavor of cartridge that might have me scrambling back to American Spirit cigarettes at 8 bucks a pack...
And, sure, a couple days have gone by while I wondered if I could re-write the 5,000 words, maybe even make them better, while potential new material piles up around me with each experience I live through.
I decided that the most important things, I will remember.
Crash!
I learned a valuable lesson about the FocusWriter application that is a free open-source one available through Ubuntu Linux. The lesson was that it has no autosave function.
After I had taken a well needed rest from typing for 5 hours, I went to do something "completely different," which was to work on Audacity on some music files that are also on the pile of things to do which, when taken together might have me spending the next 12 years on their completion.
Audacity crashed. It crashed so hard that the whole laptop rebooted.
When it came back up, the blog post was no longer in FocusWriter, the free open source application.
I like FocusWriter because of a few features.
Mainly it is the one that produces the sound of an old fashioned typewriter, complete with the zip-thwack!! of the carriage returning to the virtual far left whenever the "enter" key is pressed at the end of a paragraph. I love that, as the tic-tic-tic is very soothing and encourages the "automatic" writing that makes me feel like I am tapped in to some consciousness of a greater scope of my own.
It also allows one to set daily goals as far as how many words one wants to write.
Stephen King puts in something like 9 hours a day "set in concrete," according to his memoir "On Writing." From 9 AM until 6 PM, right after his morning jog and swim, or whatever. Everyone in his life has their own life set in concrete around this schedule, too. I guess when you are the golden goose, then people take very seriously whatever considerations and accommodations they must make to insure a steady production of eggs...
So, I have taken the suggestion of Alex In California about posting something every day, even if it is short. Soon, another 2 gigabytes of data will be added to my government phone (April 10th) and, I think that if I use it a lot more wisely than I did last month, downloading videos of Evel Kneivel jumping over buses on a motorcycle, for example.
I need to let go of the dream. I'm 56 years old, don't own a motorcycle, even, and with each passing year the doubts seem to gain momentum, whispering: What if you just keep putting it off and never wind up breaking the record of 168 feet for a ramp to ramp motorcycle jump? You can do anything you set your mind to, but
you need to take practical steps like trying to get a motorcycle then construct ramps and find a place to practice; some lot nearby a hospital, perhaps...
Twice Bitten
I think I was in denial of the fact that it was the 3 gabapentin pills that Bobby gave to me that led to me being in the mood to be cruel to Harold the cat.
I was smart enough to not take all 3 like I did the last time, but, there is no more likely explanation for why I got mad at Harold and chased him and tried to kick him.
I had been up for 24 hours, had only made about 5 bucks busking the night before; had taken a half of a gabapentin on successive nights, which made my playing more fluid the first 2 nights, but then seemed to ramp me up just a tad too much on the third night so that I was able to play at 190 miles per hour, but was still trying to go 210 mph...type of thing.
Then, I came home and stayed up until well into the day.
Gabapentin Crash
Jacob called about coming over later that day and I had to admit that I wouldn't be in any shape to do much except fall asleep and any kratom shot I might have done would be ineffective and any music I played, like-wise.
But, then Harold the cat went to use his litter box and wound up pooping on the hardwood floor. No big deal because I have plenty of ammonia.
But, how it happened was, he squatted in the box and did his business, but he didn't pinch the "loaf" off and it didn't fall into the box, but was still protruding out of his rectum as he spun around and began to search for the poop with his eyes and nose that he could swear he just eliminated.
This could, and should, have been funny to me. But, in my frame of mind, it made me think that he was more stupid than I might otherwise have thought.
After it fell on the floor, he started to rake non-existent litter towards it, another display of stupidity, and I kind of lost patience with him and, as he was walking away from the poop, as if he was just going to leave it there, I told him to "clean yourself!" which is language that I thought he understood.
He had been pissing me off by seeking attention the whole time he is indoors, crawling on top of any book I might be reading, etc.
He does not ever step on the open and running laptop on the certain table I place it on, though. This was after the one and only time that I had gone ballistic on him after finding him laying on the keyboard with the computer going haywire with the screen doing all kinds of herky-jerky motions, due to the combination of keys he was laying on.
That time, I yelled at him and he ran under the bed. I pulled him out from there and brought him over to the computer and whacked his nose, whereupon he ran back under the bed. He was a kitten and I had just gotten him and so he was extra scared. He was trapped in an apartment with someone who was whacking his nose. He has never again even touched the laptop. One time when I was holding him by the window to show him a thunderstorm outside, in order to change his mind about scratching at the door to go out, and there was a loud clap of thunder, it frightened him enough to cause him to bolt from my arms, jumping in any direction away from the window, but not before taking a quick panic stricken look at the computer table, then recalculating and jumping to the hardwood floor, another 3 feet of free-fall, instead of to that table.
Even startled by a clap of thunder he was more afraid of the computer table than Mother Nature..
So, this time, as he seemed to be walking away from the poop after having raked nothing at all for a minute onto it, I smacked my snare drum and yelled "Harold, clean yourself!!" which has had the intended effect when said in a coaxing tone, while I was dumping a small pile of litter next to his business, so that he could do it himself, so as to not put him out of balance with his instincts, type of thing.
But, the snare shot sent him like an arrow under the bed in the bedroom, where he failed to respond to repeated requests that he clean himself.
So, I lost my cool and went and threw the bed up so hard that it smacked the wall, knocking things over and breaking things. Then I grabbed him by the scuff of his neck and brought him back to the poop.
He was just to frightened to think straight, and I was too addled because of everything to think straight, and it was a bad thing that I wish I could take back. I can understand why some people kill themselves after abusing a person who they love when they really can't understand what had gotten into them and why they did it, and will it ever happen again? Not if they blow their brains out, it won't, type of thing....
I just have been trying to be extra nice to him and have settled the matter on whether I can eat a half tablet of gabapentin to reduce my anxiety and make things flow smoothly, instead of eating 3 at a time like I had done the first time Bobby handed me a handful of the things.
Maybe a guy has to show his cat "who is boss" every once in a while, but I really felt like shit after that.
Harold counts on me as like an oasis of security in a sea of crack-head derelict blacks who don't give a shit about anyone or any thing, and I let him down.
Being white comes with certain responsibilities like showing the rest of the species (and I know that we actually are the same species because the Ethiopians who came from there are fully alive and fully human beautiful people, from whom a lot of what wound up in the Christian dogma had its origins, which proves that the potential exists, and that African Americans are damaged people and maybe beyond hope of redemption.
Warning; the next few paragraphs might be offensive to some.
The following may sound racist, but it is actually "culture-ist."
We had a weapon of mass destruction back in 1945. We could have pressed our hand and brought to world under our order, but we didn't.
We took the high road.
If the shoe had been on the other foot and the Africans had taken whites as slaves; do you think there would have come a black Abraham Lincoln, who would have freed us?
Look around at the boxer short clad asses and the flip flop clad feet being dragged across the ground and see the lines of hatred that have become etched into the faces and peer into the soul-less animal eyes of the black man on the street before you answer...just saying.
And, by the way, I know that Lincoln was under enormous pressure and wasn't acting out of pure magnanimity.
Come to think of it, I think the chosen people of God needed to part the Red Sea in order to get away from those beautiful, fully human people...
Many of the colored people at Sacred Heart sit and watch Huey P. Newton and his ilk on video and they are truly waiting for some kind of race war to start. "We are at war with the United States," I have overheard one preaching to a group of them as they drank alcohol together.
That kind of puts the fact that black ladies will reproduce with any number of baby daddy's -the more the merrier- and the fact that black men are taking advantage of white girls who may have been brainwashed by a culture which just wants to market to black folk music, cellphones, cars, jewelry, etc and that erroneously glorifies their materialistic culture, into perspective. They are going to have to build up their numbers before the street fighting starts...
I guess we whites need to apply ourselves to studying sickle-cell anemia and reverse-engineersome sort of deadly virus that will only attack blacks. Just to keep it in a vault somewhere, out of Trump's hands, of course....Maybe we should fight fair, though, and only bring baseball bats to the front lines...to even the playing field...
Be careful what you ask for, Aksin' Jackson, I say.
So, there is the last of my hostility, I hope. Redirected away from Harold the cat
and towards those that should perhaps know better.
I had not slept since returning from busking at about 3 AM, Monday morning, nor during the 24 or so hours before that.
I had only made 5 dollars, but had had the priceless experience of meeting and interesting young man from South Korea, who shot a lot of video of me on his phone, after asking my permission to do so.
I had told about that in about 800 words.
S.P.C.A. -Hole
Right: Utter dejection over having been supplanted by a new pet on a stick...
Then I wrote about my having been cruel to Harold the cat, for something that really wasn’t his fault, because, how can you place blame with a creature that has no will?
As I started to get upset, about losing the post, I remembered one of the more recent mantras that I have fashioned, which goes something like: “Everything is repeatable.”
This is pertinent to music and represented a certain milestone where I stopped believing in any kind of magic in the music making process.
A guitar solo is not a panic stricken flailing of the fingers, done in the hope that the player will stumble upon a great solo; a classic even; and one more precious given that the guitarist can safely say that he could never play that solo again in a million years.
The guy from the band Foreigner once said in a Guitar Player Magazine interview that the solo he played on one of their flagship songs, “Hot Blooded,” he could never play again, because he was just going for it and it had come out like it did.
I read that as the guy does not know what he is doing. As that solo ends, you can actually hear the guy run out of talent, and the last few feeble notes are a desperate attempt to preserve the really cool sounding double-stopped notes that that are the bread and butter of that solo. The last notes contain that are arguably, mistakes. Did he intend to let that string go, or did he fumble it? If he fumbled it on the beat, then it was a happy coincidence for a guy who had run out of ideas.
The point is that, perhaps the whole lesson that I was drawn to New Orleans to learn came from the most accomplished musicians that I met, and was something that, at first annoyed me.
I had always thought of music as a way that a person might rise above his incarnation and channel something from the anti-world or from heaven, or something.
After hearing Tanya Huang play something that might have given me goosebumps, for example, I asked her something pertaining to the song, like: “When you closed your eyes in the middle of your solo, were you being transported through time and space to another dimension; you know, where there were mirrors on the ceilings and pink champagne on ice, or something?
After she had replied in the flattest of emotional tones “I was just trying to play something that would sound good,” my initial thought was that she was perhaps “starving at the banquet of life,” and I felt sorry for her in the sense that it made it sound like she was just a music machine, cranking out phrases acquired through rote learning.
I eventually learned that if you practice enough, then you can crank out musical phrases in the same manner Tanya was talking about. For, if you practice enough, then your practice sessions will actually start sounding good, just due to speed and accuracy.
A lot of the amazing violin runs that Paganini did in his “24 Caprices For Violin,” when seen on paper are just major or minor scales that run through 2 or 3 octaves.
But run they do, at a presto tempo, and when played evenly and fluidly, they sound like the guy is really flying.
It’s impressive. But Paganini, I’m sure, didn’t have to be in just the right mood for tearing through some notes. He could probably wake up in the morning grumpy and having no coffee and, after warming up some, deliver of himself that same crescendo that might put some people in the mind of doing the downhill slalom at 65 miles per hour.
And it is tempting to think a person is religious or close to God in some way if they can play “so beautifully.”
Surely they have seen the Kingdom of God and are bearing witness to it through music.
Not true again.
25 Dollar Thursday “You’re good at what you do.”
This creepy feeling existed, surely back in the time of Paganini, who was accused by some of being either possessed by, or in cahoots with, the devil, because no mortal man could otherwise ever play the violin “like that.” This was back in a time when most composers would make “sacred” music by setting bible verses to their music, in order to play it safe.
It would be interesting to do a study upon the history of them to see if there were any who professed atheism at some point in their lives, and then to see what kind of “sacred” music they actually penned.
There was one time, back in 1988, when I endeavored to change the lyrics to “Terrapin Station,” by the Grateful Dead, and present it to the Bethany Baptist Church choir that I sang with most Sunday mornings.That was because I questioned my ability, at the time, to compose an original song which had a chord progression as beautiful as that song.
When the Grateful Dead sang “Terapin!,” the Bethany choir would sing “Kingdom come!,” or something. The rest of it was going to be a patchwork of biblical stuff that rhymed.
But, again, the Paganini and Chopin sheet music shows, in many places, just a lot of regular scales that start low and zoom up into the stratosphere, where a held and vibrated note out of a violin becomes awe inspiring.
They just play them so fast that they become slight of hand artists, in the sense that the hand is quicker than the ear, type of thing...
So, as I continue to improve upon the guitar, my speed has not increased since my twenties, but my ability to know what I had just played and be able to do it again, has.
This is helpful on nights when I am not in the mood to play and my guitar seems to mock me as it leans against a wall in my apartment, a “good time” instrument for a guy who only wants to write a dirge at the time.
Coming Next: Jacob, my friend, is prescribed Prozac by a mental health care professional. Will it sap his desire to be a musician, or will it work like it's supposed to, and just drain his money into the coffers of the mental health care industry? Stay tuned....
It was a pretty good one, I thought. I had had a rough 24 hours, but had finally caught a normal "early to bed; early to rise" night of sleep.
Right: Harold is faced with the classic dilemma of fight or flee.
I was up with the sun, well rested, and with a pot of coffee.
The next 5 hours or so were spent embellishing the themes that I had laid out which could be divided into:
A: The South Korean guy who came by the Lilly Pad.
B: I Am Cruel To Harold the cat (ancillary to unleashing the stuffed horse head on a stick against him).
C: An essay on war, with the question posed of: Is the human race a kinder and gentler race because all the conscientious objectors from the Vietnam Era have reproduced a half million times over, while the war mongers who signed up for war fighting and killing, for whatever reasons, took their militant mind-sets to the shallow graves with them.
D: The 5 dollar night, despite the South Korean guy hanging out and shooting video for about 45 minutes (he tipped me first a dollar, and then another one after he felt compelled to after shooting video of about 3 songs and about 3 "interviews" in between) while I played my ass off (to a large degree because I was "on TV").
E: How much I have piled upon my plate with the undertaking of the study of 2 new computer disciplines, the renewal of my learning of the Ethiopian language, which I can hone at The Unique Grocery on Royal Street.
F: I bought another 2-pack of cartridges for my electronic cigarette, for just under 10 bucks, and the first one has lasted me for going on 3 days. The math works out to me probably saving about 18 bucks on each purchase of a 2-pack of them; they come in about a half dozen flavors, with me sticking to the "original" one for now, as I circle my wagons and try to regroup and seek some modicum of stability in my life, and it not being a good time to gamble on some flavor of cartridge that might have me scrambling back to American Spirit cigarettes at 8 bucks a pack...
And, sure, a couple days have gone by while I wondered if I could re-write the 5,000 words, maybe even make them better, while potential new material piles up around me with each experience I live through.
I decided that the most important things, I will remember.
Crash!
I learned a valuable lesson about the FocusWriter application that is a free open-source one available through Ubuntu Linux. The lesson was that it has no autosave function.
After I had taken a well needed rest from typing for 5 hours, I went to do something "completely different," which was to work on Audacity on some music files that are also on the pile of things to do which, when taken together might have me spending the next 12 years on their completion.
Audacity crashed. It crashed so hard that the whole laptop rebooted.
When it came back up, the blog post was no longer in FocusWriter, the free open source application.
I like FocusWriter because of a few features.
Mainly it is the one that produces the sound of an old fashioned typewriter, complete with the zip-thwack!! of the carriage returning to the virtual far left whenever the "enter" key is pressed at the end of a paragraph. I love that, as the tic-tic-tic is very soothing and encourages the "automatic" writing that makes me feel like I am tapped in to some consciousness of a greater scope of my own.
It also allows one to set daily goals as far as how many words one wants to write.
Stephen King puts in something like 9 hours a day "set in concrete," according to his memoir "On Writing." From 9 AM until 6 PM, right after his morning jog and swim, or whatever. Everyone in his life has their own life set in concrete around this schedule, too. I guess when you are the golden goose, then people take very seriously whatever considerations and accommodations they must make to insure a steady production of eggs...
So, I have taken the suggestion of Alex In California about posting something every day, even if it is short. Soon, another 2 gigabytes of data will be added to my government phone (April 10th) and, I think that if I use it a lot more wisely than I did last month, downloading videos of Evel Kneivel jumping over buses on a motorcycle, for example.
I need to let go of the dream. I'm 56 years old, don't own a motorcycle, even, and with each passing year the doubts seem to gain momentum, whispering: What if you just keep putting it off and never wind up breaking the record of 168 feet for a ramp to ramp motorcycle jump? You can do anything you set your mind to, but
you need to take practical steps like trying to get a motorcycle then construct ramps and find a place to practice; some lot nearby a hospital, perhaps...
Twice Bitten
 |
| ...or flee |
I think I was in denial of the fact that it was the 3 gabapentin pills that Bobby gave to me that led to me being in the mood to be cruel to Harold the cat.
I was smart enough to not take all 3 like I did the last time, but, there is no more likely explanation for why I got mad at Harold and chased him and tried to kick him.
I had been up for 24 hours, had only made about 5 bucks busking the night before; had taken a half of a gabapentin on successive nights, which made my playing more fluid the first 2 nights, but then seemed to ramp me up just a tad too much on the third night so that I was able to play at 190 miles per hour, but was still trying to go 210 mph...type of thing.
Then, I came home and stayed up until well into the day.
Gabapentin Crash
Jacob called about coming over later that day and I had to admit that I wouldn't be in any shape to do much except fall asleep and any kratom shot I might have done would be ineffective and any music I played, like-wise.
But, then Harold the cat went to use his litter box and wound up pooping on the hardwood floor. No big deal because I have plenty of ammonia.
But, how it happened was, he squatted in the box and did his business, but he didn't pinch the "loaf" off and it didn't fall into the box, but was still protruding out of his rectum as he spun around and began to search for the poop with his eyes and nose that he could swear he just eliminated.
This could, and should, have been funny to me. But, in my frame of mind, it made me think that he was more stupid than I might otherwise have thought.
After it fell on the floor, he started to rake non-existent litter towards it, another display of stupidity, and I kind of lost patience with him and, as he was walking away from the poop, as if he was just going to leave it there, I told him to "clean yourself!" which is language that I thought he understood.
He had been pissing me off by seeking attention the whole time he is indoors, crawling on top of any book I might be reading, etc.
He does not ever step on the open and running laptop on the certain table I place it on, though. This was after the one and only time that I had gone ballistic on him after finding him laying on the keyboard with the computer going haywire with the screen doing all kinds of herky-jerky motions, due to the combination of keys he was laying on.
That time, I yelled at him and he ran under the bed. I pulled him out from there and brought him over to the computer and whacked his nose, whereupon he ran back under the bed. He was a kitten and I had just gotten him and so he was extra scared. He was trapped in an apartment with someone who was whacking his nose. He has never again even touched the laptop. One time when I was holding him by the window to show him a thunderstorm outside, in order to change his mind about scratching at the door to go out, and there was a loud clap of thunder, it frightened him enough to cause him to bolt from my arms, jumping in any direction away from the window, but not before taking a quick panic stricken look at the computer table, then recalculating and jumping to the hardwood floor, another 3 feet of free-fall, instead of to that table.
Even startled by a clap of thunder he was more afraid of the computer table than Mother Nature..
So, this time, as he seemed to be walking away from the poop after having raked nothing at all for a minute onto it, I smacked my snare drum and yelled "Harold, clean yourself!!" which has had the intended effect when said in a coaxing tone, while I was dumping a small pile of litter next to his business, so that he could do it himself, so as to not put him out of balance with his instincts, type of thing.
But, the snare shot sent him like an arrow under the bed in the bedroom, where he failed to respond to repeated requests that he clean himself.
So, I lost my cool and went and threw the bed up so hard that it smacked the wall, knocking things over and breaking things. Then I grabbed him by the scuff of his neck and brought him back to the poop.
He was just to frightened to think straight, and I was too addled because of everything to think straight, and it was a bad thing that I wish I could take back. I can understand why some people kill themselves after abusing a person who they love when they really can't understand what had gotten into them and why they did it, and will it ever happen again? Not if they blow their brains out, it won't, type of thing....
I just have been trying to be extra nice to him and have settled the matter on whether I can eat a half tablet of gabapentin to reduce my anxiety and make things flow smoothly, instead of eating 3 at a time like I had done the first time Bobby handed me a handful of the things.
Maybe a guy has to show his cat "who is boss" every once in a while, but I really felt like shit after that.
Harold counts on me as like an oasis of security in a sea of crack-head derelict blacks who don't give a shit about anyone or any thing, and I let him down.
Being white comes with certain responsibilities like showing the rest of the species (and I know that we actually are the same species because the Ethiopians who came from there are fully alive and fully human beautiful people, from whom a lot of what wound up in the Christian dogma had its origins, which proves that the potential exists, and that African Americans are damaged people and maybe beyond hope of redemption.
Warning; the next few paragraphs might be offensive to some.
The following may sound racist, but it is actually "culture-ist."
We had a weapon of mass destruction back in 1945. We could have pressed our hand and brought to world under our order, but we didn't.
We took the high road.
If the shoe had been on the other foot and the Africans had taken whites as slaves; do you think there would have come a black Abraham Lincoln, who would have freed us?
Look around at the boxer short clad asses and the flip flop clad feet being dragged across the ground and see the lines of hatred that have become etched into the faces and peer into the soul-less animal eyes of the black man on the street before you answer...just saying.
And, by the way, I know that Lincoln was under enormous pressure and wasn't acting out of pure magnanimity.
Come to think of it, I think the chosen people of God needed to part the Red Sea in order to get away from those beautiful, fully human people...
Many of the colored people at Sacred Heart sit and watch Huey P. Newton and his ilk on video and they are truly waiting for some kind of race war to start. "We are at war with the United States," I have overheard one preaching to a group of them as they drank alcohol together.
That kind of puts the fact that black ladies will reproduce with any number of baby daddy's -the more the merrier- and the fact that black men are taking advantage of white girls who may have been brainwashed by a culture which just wants to market to black folk music, cellphones, cars, jewelry, etc and that erroneously glorifies their materialistic culture, into perspective. They are going to have to build up their numbers before the street fighting starts...
I guess we whites need to apply ourselves to studying sickle-cell anemia and reverse-engineersome sort of deadly virus that will only attack blacks. Just to keep it in a vault somewhere, out of Trump's hands, of course....Maybe we should fight fair, though, and only bring baseball bats to the front lines...to even the playing field...
Be careful what you ask for, Aksin' Jackson, I say.
So, there is the last of my hostility, I hope. Redirected away from Harold the cat
and towards those that should perhaps know better.
I had not slept since returning from busking at about 3 AM, Monday morning, nor during the 24 or so hours before that.
I had only made 5 dollars, but had had the priceless experience of meeting and interesting young man from South Korea, who shot a lot of video of me on his phone, after asking my permission to do so.
I had told about that in about 800 words.
S.P.C.A. -Hole
Right: Utter dejection over having been supplanted by a new pet on a stick...
Then I wrote about my having been cruel to Harold the cat, for something that really wasn’t his fault, because, how can you place blame with a creature that has no will?
As I started to get upset, about losing the post, I remembered one of the more recent mantras that I have fashioned, which goes something like: “Everything is repeatable.”
This is pertinent to music and represented a certain milestone where I stopped believing in any kind of magic in the music making process.
A guitar solo is not a panic stricken flailing of the fingers, done in the hope that the player will stumble upon a great solo; a classic even; and one more precious given that the guitarist can safely say that he could never play that solo again in a million years.
The guy from the band Foreigner once said in a Guitar Player Magazine interview that the solo he played on one of their flagship songs, “Hot Blooded,” he could never play again, because he was just going for it and it had come out like it did.
I read that as the guy does not know what he is doing. As that solo ends, you can actually hear the guy run out of talent, and the last few feeble notes are a desperate attempt to preserve the really cool sounding double-stopped notes that that are the bread and butter of that solo. The last notes contain that are arguably, mistakes. Did he intend to let that string go, or did he fumble it? If he fumbled it on the beat, then it was a happy coincidence for a guy who had run out of ideas.
The point is that, perhaps the whole lesson that I was drawn to New Orleans to learn came from the most accomplished musicians that I met, and was something that, at first annoyed me.
I had always thought of music as a way that a person might rise above his incarnation and channel something from the anti-world or from heaven, or something.
After hearing Tanya Huang play something that might have given me goosebumps, for example, I asked her something pertaining to the song, like: “When you closed your eyes in the middle of your solo, were you being transported through time and space to another dimension; you know, where there were mirrors on the ceilings and pink champagne on ice, or something?
After she had replied in the flattest of emotional tones “I was just trying to play something that would sound good,” my initial thought was that she was perhaps “starving at the banquet of life,” and I felt sorry for her in the sense that it made it sound like she was just a music machine, cranking out phrases acquired through rote learning.
I eventually learned that if you practice enough, then you can crank out musical phrases in the same manner Tanya was talking about. For, if you practice enough, then your practice sessions will actually start sounding good, just due to speed and accuracy.
A lot of the amazing violin runs that Paganini did in his “24 Caprices For Violin,” when seen on paper are just major or minor scales that run through 2 or 3 octaves.
But run they do, at a presto tempo, and when played evenly and fluidly, they sound like the guy is really flying.
It’s impressive. But Paganini, I’m sure, didn’t have to be in just the right mood for tearing through some notes. He could probably wake up in the morning grumpy and having no coffee and, after warming up some, deliver of himself that same crescendo that might put some people in the mind of doing the downhill slalom at 65 miles per hour.
And it is tempting to think a person is religious or close to God in some way if they can play “so beautifully.”
Surely they have seen the Kingdom of God and are bearing witness to it through music.
Not true again.
25 Dollar Thursday “You’re good at what you do.”
This creepy feeling existed, surely back in the time of Paganini, who was accused by some of being either possessed by, or in cahoots with, the devil, because no mortal man could otherwise ever play the violin “like that.” This was back in a time when most composers would make “sacred” music by setting bible verses to their music, in order to play it safe.
It would be interesting to do a study upon the history of them to see if there were any who professed atheism at some point in their lives, and then to see what kind of “sacred” music they actually penned.
There was one time, back in 1988, when I endeavored to change the lyrics to “Terrapin Station,” by the Grateful Dead, and present it to the Bethany Baptist Church choir that I sang with most Sunday mornings.That was because I questioned my ability, at the time, to compose an original song which had a chord progression as beautiful as that song.
When the Grateful Dead sang “Terapin!,” the Bethany choir would sing “Kingdom come!,” or something. The rest of it was going to be a patchwork of biblical stuff that rhymed.
But, again, the Paganini and Chopin sheet music shows, in many places, just a lot of regular scales that start low and zoom up into the stratosphere, where a held and vibrated note out of a violin becomes awe inspiring.
They just play them so fast that they become slight of hand artists, in the sense that the hand is quicker than the ear, type of thing...
So, as I continue to improve upon the guitar, my speed has not increased since my twenties, but my ability to know what I had just played and be able to do it again, has.
This is helpful on nights when I am not in the mood to play and my guitar seems to mock me as it leans against a wall in my apartment, a “good time” instrument for a guy who only wants to write a dirge at the time.
Coming Next: Jacob, my friend, is prescribed Prozac by a mental health care professional. Will it sap his desire to be a musician, or will it work like it's supposed to, and just drain his money into the coffers of the mental health care industry? Stay tuned....
I with you on not being a racist, but I am certainly a culture-ist. In fact there was an article about this in something like "Instauration" magazine
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instauration
Which I used to actually subscribe to in the late 80s because I was quite the racist then, or at least tried to be. An article said that "however white people are, compared to black people, Asians are to white people". The author went on to cite examples, say a lazy city full of broken stuff and desperate people in Africa, a healthy all or mostly white city in the US or Europe, where the people are displaying more intelligence and energy, but then you take an Asian city and the people are even more energetic, smarter, more law-abiding, etc.
And indeed, where I am, I've found I far prefer to shop at Asian markets because there's just about zero chance my bike will get messed with when it's locked up outside, I won't be hassled for spare change, etc.
And you don't see what we in the US think of as "black" behavior in black people who've come here from Africa on their own ticket, as it were, and set up stores etc. And, lower-class whites act this "black" way too. Having kids by a different dad for each kid, dropping out of high school, into drugs, stealing things, violent, etc.
ReplyDeleteThe vast majority of homeless people around here are white and frankly, they're scum. They have the same dead eyes, the creased-in wrinkles of anger, tattoos, and the times I've gotten talking with one, they seem to all be afflicted with far-right politics. They think Trump is great. And if they can't find anyone else to fight with and steal from, well, they've got each other! So all night, when some are living in the parking lot here, they argue and fight all night.
And it's all culture. Japanese people are not different in any meaningful biological way, but the culture is just very, very different and perfected over thousands of years (and still not perfect but doing pretty well).
ReplyDeleteWhat's funny is, studying Jodo Shinshu Buddhism as I am, while white Christians have taken great care to try to convince the world that Jesus was a Northern European guy, while Buddhists do put "Oriental" eyes on their statures of Buddha, they take care to show he had curly hair. And they acknowledge that he was from India, and know the Indian/Sanskrit terms for things, so we follow Amithaba Budda but we call him Amida etc.
It's a culture that thinks back 1000s of years, like it was last week. The Jews do this also, this being Jewish year 5779 or something. When you're in a culture where you're getting lessons in ethics just about every hour of every day from birth, well, you're a lot less likely to end up covered with tattoos, hooked on drugs, estranged from family, homeless, etc.
I'm cutting this up into pieces because if I put it in one post, Blogger *will* trash it.
ReplyDeleteAnd so we end up with the kind of situation I grew up and lived with as a young adult in Hawaii, where lots of people will not rent to you, will not employ you, etc if you're white. It's simply because whites are more trouble. In the same way a lot of people consider blacks to be trouble, more likely to steal, trash the place, be late on rent, etc., whites are more likely to be trouble than Asians.
It really does work out that way too. The most well-meaning white person will still have some catastrophe that's hard to solve because white families don't stick together or help each other out. The most well-meaning white person will be more likely to have drug problems because some drugs like pot are being normalized, and even things like heroin are romanticized in white culture. And tattoos are becoming normalized now, although in Asian cultures they're a sign of being low class.
And I plan to retire to Hawaii because it's where my memories are, so what am I, as a white person, to do?
The first and essential thing I need to do is follow some way of thinking that gets rid of the anger I feel about things that happened there. In white culture, if you're thwarted at something, or held back, the correct way to react is anger. That's just built in. My father was a pretty nice guy, but I remember on day we kids had left our tricycles in the driveway when Dad had to go to work, again. So he drove right over the things. This is considered the right and proper thing to do, in white culture.
ReplyDeleteIn Asian culture, putting the trikes away would have been taught as a built-in part of the fun of riding them. There's probably have been a song we'd sing as we did it, too. You just get taught these things from youngest age, so that it's unthinkable to not do them the proper way. It makes for everyone being happy. Dad's happy, Mom's happy, we kids are happy ... I have a feeling 1960s trikes were sturdy enough that there was some damage to the car, at least a scuff or dent on the bumper that Dad had to look at and be annoyed all over again. Of course the trikes had to be replaced, so that's a cost. And Mom just had to harangue us about it a few times. So, everyone was unhappy, like we savored the misery.
So, this anger and this resentment, has to go. One way is to think, to calculate, how things might have been the way they are. Reason things out.
The other way is to follow Jodo Shinshu Buddhism. It's an extremely popular sect in Japan, and in Hawaii. To really study it, and learn it, and live under its precepts. It's not difficult to do but it's a real shift of gears from white western culture.
ReplyDeleteIt's especially turning out not to be difficult for me, having a large temple a short distance away, but also the people are so darned nice.
When I move back to Hawaii in 5 - 8 years, I will have studied it and lived it for that period of time, and probably have people to look up when I get there, because there's a lot of interchange of people from Hawaii to here and back. Reverend Sakamoto grew up in Mo'ili'ili for instance. And Al, the guy who's invited me to karaoke at the 4th Street Bowl, grew up in Kalihi.
I'll have 5 - 8 years of practice done on the shakuhachi because it's very good for my health to play this thing.
I'll have 5 - 8 years of learning to sing and play the uke, and hopefully have enough savings that I can just do nothing for a year or two. Then I can just do music for my day-to-day money, and go fishing whenever I like.
I can do this if I live humbly, aiming always to be thankful and not angry. But there are a lot of people who are in lovely places like Hawaii or New Orleans who are miserable and angry, as you and I both know. So simply being in these places is not a solution.