Quality Over Quantity

• Easter Sunday Night Off
• A Miracle In My Mailbox
• The Rent Violation Notice Saga cont.
• Advice On Choosing The Ideal Busking Spot

Post written on Easter Sunday, beginning right after I decided to not go out and busk (probably a mistake of biblical proportions) and to stay in, focusing upon quality over quantity.

What I mean is that, to go out to busk when you have great material and are chomping at the bit to perform it, after having learned and run through it at home and gotten it sounding good is something which is good and will pay dividends regardless of the time and season. This should be the horse which is placed in front of the cart.

The cart is everything else -your clothes and equipment, the spot that you hand-picked to play at, etc.

Their order of importance, in my opinion after busking for 11 years is...
A: Acoustics
I played in the entrance of a clothing store in Mobile, Alabama. It was a large, window-lined affair, tailored for displaying half of the store's merchandise to anyone who is on their way into the place, type of thing.

While people were on their way in, though, were one of them to say to another something like: "Oh, that tie would look great with your gray suit," it would reverberate and carry out onto the sidewalk with just the right amount of delay added, and with the bass boosted, due to the 25 foot corridor leading to the recessed doorway being able to reinforce sound waves of that length.

I would have to pore over perhaps the GRE book that I got for 50 cents at the Goodwill Store on Tulane Street, to perhaps locate the applicable mathematical formula to corroborate this, but I would estimate, after thousands of hours of working with digital audio, that the spot in front of that store afforded something close to a 40 millisecond slap-back echo with the "regeneration" set to about 3, along with about a 280 millisecond in decay of reverberation with the "damper" set to 0 or 1.

The damper setting on DAWs often has its settings labelled "soft" and "hard."
It dampens the high frequencies so that a cozy living room which has plush drapes along a wall and plush carpeting with plenty of furniture and other sound absorbing things, to include the bodies that might be populating it would "soften" the sound. This would correspond to a "damp" setting of 10.

A glass case along with a marble floor can be reminisced about by setting it close to zero. Or by turning the knob towards "hard," as hard as the marble the busker is sitting on.

I found the spot after using the day of my arrival in Mobile to walk around the downtown area snapping my fingers, clapping and hooting into various stairwells and other natural auditoriums. The goal is to find the nearest one to where the hubbub will be in say, the middle of a Friday evening.

I could have moved closer to the action in Mobile, but would have sacrificed the acoustics. I think people are more likely to appreciate the acoustics and not mind walking over to where it is also quiet enough for them to think in order to listen. These people are the "high odds of tipping" ones. Even if you are so far away that they just barely become aware that there is a musician, what they do hear faintly will sound good.

B: Bustle. Where there will be the most traffic.
This is B, and certainly not A because a ton of people can all become overwhelmed by the very crowd that they are part of, can be thus "in a rush," and can have a herd mentality and not tip because nobody else is...they must know something...
  
C: Your Clothes.

I have seen a couple, in Mobile I saw them, who were dressed like hobos. They were probably around 20 years old. The guy played a resonator guitar and the girl played the saw, and they both sang in very good harmony.


And they wore hobo outfits, but they were like hobo costumes that might be sewn together for use in a Broadway production that called for hobos in a certain scene. The girl even smeared black make-up on her face to simulate coal soot, like that emitted by steam locomotives that haven't run in a hundred years.
Their overalls had come "ripped and worn" right out of the costume shop, it appeared.

But, they played hobo songs like "A Hobo's Life Is A Hobo's Wife," and they probably made just shy of 100 dollars per hour, by picking their spots, like a grassy area right across a quiet street from a cafe which was hugely popular on, say, a Sunday morning.


People seemed to really want to help support them in "their travels," and almost wouldn't want to hear that the couple stayed in pretty decent hotels and would often arrange rides in cars with people they met.
Other than in special cases like theirs, it is generally best to wear what you always wear, as that will probably project the right idea of what music you are probably about to play.

note: The guy performs as "Stinky Pete," solo and as "Big Joe Puddin'" with the girl as seen and heard in the video above (sitting in front of the same tree where I saw them). This (their entertainment value ) is all you need to be to make just short of 100 dollars an hour if you are in the right place at the right time and have the right costumes.

Though, by showing up at the Lily Pad with a backpack, I have probably unwittingly become the beneficiary of people who may have tipped me thinking that they were helping out The Homeless. I guess they would prefer not to know that I have an apartment. Or, do I?

Sacred Heart Apartments

It's funny how, when I think back to when I first moved in to Sacred Heart Apartments, and was greeted by a resident named Darren, who congratulated me on having gotten in "You've got a place for the rest of your natural life!" I wasn't totally convinced of that, and had kind of tentatively shaken his extended hand.
(He then skeezed me for a cigarette, and wanted another one before we parted).

Last week, the pest control guy came in, carrying his scuba tank looking spray cannister, and did all of splashing the wall behind the kitchen sink and in the bathroom.

The Two Legged Kind

I told him that I hadn't seen many pests at all.

I then joked that the only ones had been the two legged kind, carrying spray canisters.
He was just entering the kitchen when I said this, and was perhaps trying to think of a comeback when he snapped on the light, looked at the picture of President Trump hanging over my stove (a chicken in every pot) and was staring at it when his reply became: "Oh, that's not very nice..."

Whether or not such a picture is hung as a joke or not is immaterial because closed minded Trump haters have no sense of humor, so it would be lost on them anyways...

The next morning, there was a notice on my door informing me that I was in violation of the lease because: "During a routine pest control visit..." my apartment was found to have "unsanitary conditions" that could "reduce the effectiveness" of the pest control treatment.

My kitchen, I have been keeping clean, lately. I leave it spotlessly wiped down, trash removed, before leaving every night. There was no more than a pizza box on the stove with the hardened crusts from the night before in it, and some oatmeal and maybe other crumbs on the counter.

Darren: "Welcome home, do you have a cigarette?"

There was no foul odor from garbage having sat for more than a day. Even Harold had helped by only knocking a minimal amount of food out of his dish and onto the floor the last time he had eaten.

But, that was enough, apparently.

Of course, I had to surmise that a lot of other residents must have gotten a similar write-up. I have walked by enough places when their doors were open, and have heard enough stories from other residents "I don't think he's swept his floor since he moved in 4 years ago, I'm serious!" types of things to figure that, if my place was unsanitary, what about the ones that the one roach that I did see left due to overcrowding, and urban problems?

So, I went to the office and was informed that, indeed, a lot of people did get the notices.

There is an inspection coming up, and before that a pre-inspection. If I cleaned up my "mess" by the time of the pre-inspection then the violation would be ripped up, said Missy Epperson, the property manager. She is white.

A couple days later, the maintenance guys knocked at my door to do that very pre-inspection.

They had caught me by surprise at 11 AM and I sleepily told them that if they just gave me ten minutes (my place was in no worse condition than usual and was ten minutes from being spotless) I would....

"Oh, no. Don't worry about it. It's cool," said the maintenance guys.
The big one, Terry, held his palm up, as if to tell me I needed say no more. They played it off like they didn't feel like doing the extra work anyways, and well, that everything was cool.

The next day came a notice entitled "Remedy or quit," which gave me 10 days to either remedy "the situation" or turn in my key.
What was "cool" was probably that they were told that if the place wasn't clean for any reason then to come back and they could start trying to get me out and put one of their black friends in my place. No, don't take ten minutes to clean up quickly; we don't want you to do that, type of thing...

The next day was Good Friday, offices closed. Then came the weekend. The ten days ticking down...

There is a noticeable racist attitude among the maintenance workers.
There is a sense that this building should be for black people, and that whites have enough in this world.
I have complained about my heating and air unit several times, which lead to the same guys kicking and shaking it until it came on, and then telling me "There, it's working, just don't touch it," while a steady flow of brand new units, still in the packing materials made their way to other apartments and, in the meantime, I had to "touch" mine after it got to be freezing cold in the place. Then it was back to being broken.

I remember one of the black security ladies a couple years ago, when I had gone to the lobby to pick up a turkey that I had won in the annual raffle (which I had been too lazy to even walk down to sign my name on the sheet for this year) giving me a hard stare.

I had also had my name drawn, that year, for one of the other food give aways beating odds of 120 residents to 32 baskets. The odds against winning a turkey were similar.

She stared at me, with her jaw clenched.

"Everything alright?"

She managed to stammer that she just didn't think it was right, (or fair, or whatever) that a resident could win a food basket AND a turkey (when some other residents win nothing, she might have been thinking.

To see a white guy do it must have just smacked of rigging, corruption and racism at the institutional level. They shouldn't even get to live here, for crying out loud, what with all they've got....

So, as it stands today, I have a few days left to remedy the situation.

I told Missy that the pest control guy should allow the resident to snap a picture of exactly what he is talking about and let her decided how "unsanitary" it is.
The problem is the two-faced nature of it. He smiled in my face, despite my joke having bombed, and gave me no indication that it would help matters if I made sure to clean up after Harold immediately after he eats, or something.

The fact that I told him first off that I actually had only seen a couple of roaches the entire 90 days or whatever since he had last come was information that he apparently failed to consider.

The maintenance guys "putting my mind to rest" by telling me not to worry about giving my place a once over, and then running to the manager to draft up the latest paperwork...

There has got to be a name for that. "Two-faced" will have to do for now.

I think I am going to have take advantage of their ignorance and maybe visit the  H.I.R. ("Elevating the urban experience") website and find some name that I can drop.

Me: "Do you know Ed Collins?"

Missy: "Um, I don't know him, I've met him a couple times at our Christmas party. Why?"

"I was wondering. He's in my yoga class.* We wound up talking and he said he works for H.I.R., I was wondering if it's a huge company or if you would know him, that's all....I might be giving his kid guitar lessons.*

*all having been researched through social media, etc... 

Maybe they are just as afraid of me as I am of them...

OK, Now Sunday Night's Post That I Was Too Lazy To
 
I am trying to restore a sense of normalcy to my perception of time.
Last (Saturday), I got to the Lily Pad at about 11:30.

The dearth of milk crates at the Quartermaster continues to be a problem, as there were no crates of any kind.

Across the street, I saw one of the boxes that the candles come in, which are the sole source of illumination in Lafit’s Blacksmith Shop Tavern, if you don’t count the glow from the Slushy machine and the couple sets of flat screen TVs over the bar -a couple of 20th century touches at the oldest bar in America.

The candle boxes are only about 4 inches high, but are very sturdy, having a dozen reinforced cubbyholes that cradle the dozen glasses full of wax and wicks inside. I guess they are designed so that a UPS worker could inadvertently (in her haste to unload x amount of units from a truck in order to keep her job) step right on top of the box and not break any of the glasses.

Look before you leap!!

This means that they make excellent boosters for buskers, but that, due to their height, 3 of them must be stacked up to the height that I have become used to through sitting on milk crates.
I found one more in the trash outside Lafit’s and grabbed a couple pieces of cardboard to supplement them and put me at almost the right height.

As I was fishing for the stuff, I was aware of being stared at by some of the patrons of the bar as they sat in the outside seats and around the outside tables.

If they had been sitting there for at least a half hour, then they had doubtless seen at least one alcoholic skeezer “Bourbon surfing” the same trash cans for things like Hurricane drinks that, after being sampled by somebody and found to be either too strong or too sweet or both, had been tossed into the can and had landed upright enough to have retained their contents.
They aren’t too strong, nor too sweet, for skeezers.

Many skeezers carry one large “fishbowl” container that once held a red colored drink of the same name but into which is now pooled an amalgamation of their surfing discoveries. That way, if any one drink had been used as an improvised ashtray or had been urinated into, it will become diluted by the rest and, once they start sipping it, urine, ashes etc. will all start to taste the same.
There are so few public restrooms in The Quarter (read: none) that even I had, at times, resorted to the trick of peeing into an empty Hand Grenade or Jester container, both of which are equipped with penis sized openings at the top, and long stems which can extend that opening upward behind a loose shirt tail, and which also act as a conduit which the urine will cling to on its journey to the bowl at the bottom of the thing, precluding the chance of anything splashing back, like acid reflux, and getting on the pee-er.
They both -especially the Hand Grenade one- funnel the urine in such a way that it sticks to the inside of the stem and is deposited quietly into the bowl.
Anyone who has ever built a speaker box with a “tuned port” will understand how, due to the foot long length of the tube, it will resonate at a frequency much lower than the sibilant sound of liquid hitting liquid, and will muffle those tell-tale higher frequencies, which might otherwise draw attention to a guy standing in a crowd in a trench coat with a nervous smile on his face.*
(Hey, this is, by some estimates, a “New Orleans Lifestyle” blog, and so I am just kind of trying to get to the meat and potatoes of that here).
*This is not applicable to females, whom perhaps the fishbowl itself was designed for.
So, I endured the stares and the disgusted looks for a few seconds until I found the second candle box, which I removed, before walking over to Lilly’s stoop.
It occurred to me then, that I often feel like I can have a lifetime’s worth of experiences, all within just a few seconds isolated out of a typical day.
Or that any given span of a few seconds can be viewed as part of a holographic, through which my whole life story could be elucidated.
There was a skinny, older black guy at the stoop, whom I knew I would have to treat with kid gloves and not give the sense to that I was encroaching upon his turf, or trying to move off of “my” block.
I was prepared to greet him with news that I had found a couple of candle boxes, and then maybe tell him that I planned to do songs by the band called “Candlebox” all night. And maybe even fabricate something like: “You know that’s how they got their name; they started out playing on the street and used to sit on these same type of boxes, because they’re so sturdy...and they wound up naming the band Candlebox.”
None of that became necessary.
The black guy asked me if I did cocaine, to which I replied that I could do without it.
He wanted to trade some in exchange for me smoking a joint with him.
I lied and told him I didn’t have any.
He was disappointed and added: “Damn, I wanted to get high; this coke is bullshit, it ain’t doin’ anything for me.”
Nice. So he had been trying to trade “bullshit” for any weed I might have had. Typical.
Given this news, he was soon on his way, and I rolled up the last bit of bud that I had and smoked it while tuning up. But not after having had the thought of how much it would have sucked had I not had any bud at that particular time, and how hard it might have been to motivate myself, and how this is not really a good thing, in the grand scheme of things.
For, even though I played pretty hard for about 80 minutes and made 26 bucks, I, once again, hit a wall at that point, and felt that I had given all I had to give, and knocked off at that point.
I got two cans of food for Harold the cat, a Bang energy drink along with a couple refill cartridges for my VUSE nicotine vaporizer, then hit Walgreen’s for a dozen eggs and a gallon of distilled water before riding home while wondering what the gallon of water in the bag might be doing to the dozen eggs in the bag.

Kratom Relief

In the morning, I had almost exactly the amount for an ounce of kratom on my coffee table, and so I figured I would just go and buy one, then return home with only a little bit of change, but with nicotine and cat food, and kratom enough. What more could I want? I thought.
Oh, yeah, weed.
I didn’t leave myself any money for weed and Bobby didn’t answer his door when I went to ask him if I could buy him a box of his favorite Popsicle’s in exchange for some, and so I am ready to go out very soon now to busk without any and already dealing with the thought that is is going to really suck playing straight.
The truth is probably that I am going to have to get over using weed as a crutch to get started playing, or I will be perpetually up against “the 80 minute wall” after the joint wears off.
I suppose the only way to do that will be to suffer through the initial reticence to play, force myself to start, and hope that I get into it so much that pot never crosses my mind...is that a pun?...and that I substitute the high of making good money after playing for much longer each night for it.

I would love to run to the computer lab and post this up, but it is already 10:38 PM and I could be plucking my first note by 11:15 and just maybe catch Lilly on her way back from chaperoning one or both of her daughters home at about that time...