beautiful, funny, sad & true

I know, I know.  I haven’t written about all of the recording sessions I’ve been doing lately, and I haven’t posted any of the pictures from the day trip RockShowGirl and I took on Thursday.  I’ll get to all that.

In other news, I think I’m catching a summer cold.  This blows.  My throat’s killing me, and I’m coughing all over the place, but I’m NOT going to miss the Butterfly Boucher/Emilie Simon concert on Monday night.  They’re two of my favorites, and no lame-o summer cold is gonna stop me from seeing them.

The good news is that I did have a lovely dream this morning, and here it is.

* * * * *

I’m with a bunch of my friends, and we’re standing in a semi-circle, talking, in a beautiful, grassy park.  It’s a sunny day, and we’re all talking excitedly, and laughing, and having a great time.  We are quite the melting pot of ethnicities, including an older black man in his sixties, a young Japanese guy in his twenties, myself, two white married couples in their early thirties, and an Egyptian woman in her fifties.

I walk away from the group to refill my empty water bottle, and as I walk back, I pass a black couple in their fourties.  The woman gently puts her hand on my shoulder in order to catch my attention.  “I’m really impressed with your circle of friends,” she says.  “You all seem to be having such a lovely time.  Have you known each other long?”

“Actually, we haven’t,” I reply, and smile.  I gesture toward each member of the group in turn, and explain to her how I met each of them, or what I know about them, starting with the older black guy.  “He’s a musician I’ve played with, he’s a student and a writer, I just met them today, they used to live in my old apartment building, and she was in the coffee shop yesterday.”

The woman I’m talking with laughs, and says, “Wow, that’s quite a group.  I’d better let you get back to it.”

“Thanks,” I say.  “I hope to see you again sometime.”

“I’d like that,” she says, “very much.”

We do a sort of one-armed hug, and my hand gets caught in her purse, which is sort of perched on top of her shoulder.  A few things almost fall out, but I catch them.  “Oops,” I say.  “Do you want me to fix that stuff so it won’t fall out?”  She shrugs her shoulder, and everything settles.  “Oh.  Okay.  It looks like everything’s back to normal now.  See you around!”  I shake her husband’s hand and say, “Have a great day.”

I look over to see that my group of friends is starting to walk away and disperse, so I jog over to rejoin them.  We walk out of the park and up an old residential street, where the black man, the Japanese guy and one of the couples go their separate ways.  We all wave goodbye to each other.  The remaining couple, the Egyptian woman, and I walk a bit further up the street, until we come to a hundred-year-old apartment building.  I’ve seen it before, but I’ve never been inside.  It is made up of a handful of units, all in a row, each of which is funky and unusual.  The outside of the building is painted white with dark brown trim, and there are a couple of doors at street level.  The place is old and not particularly clean, but clearly it is well-loved by the people who live there.  It appears to be a kind of collective.  I peer into one of them, and see an open space with high ceilings, dark red wood floors, and a few chairs scattered around.  It looks like a dance studio, only without all the mirrors.  I notice that there’s a loft area for a bedroom, and stairs that go down in the corner, presumably for a living area.  “Wow, this place looks amazing,” I say to the couple.  “Are the other apartments this cool?”

“Yeah,” the wife says.  “They’re all different, though.  Ours is only one story.  This one’s three, and the others are either one or two.”  She points to a hand-drawn map on the wall that is a layout of the building that shows how to get to the door of each unit.   There is a hand-written list of “things to do” (recycling, weeding, touch-up painting, etc.) next to that, with a tenant’s name after each of the tasks.

“I applied for an apartment here a few years ago, actually,” I say, “but I found a cheaper place.  I always wanted to see the inside.”  I look back and forth between the couple and the woman, smiling mischievously.  “Any chance I could see your places?  No pressure.”  The Egyptian woman says, “Sure you can, in a few minutes.”  The wife also agrees, but they want a chance to clean up their place first.  I turn and gesture toward the coffee shop next door.  I ask the Egyptian woman, “Shall we?” and we walk together into the shop.

The inside of the coffee shop is as funky and cool as the apartment building.  Wood floors, dark brown leather chairs, bookshelves, and a battered upright piano decorate the place.  I walk over to the piano and play a few chords, very lightly, with my right hand.  The piano isn’t as sturdy as it looks, and it sways back and forth.  It seems to be there just for show, and isn’t really playable anymore.  I lean it a bit to the side, and the leaning dampens the strings, so the music stops.  I walk away from the piano to the counter, serve myself a cup of coffee from the drip machine, and then go over to sit across from the Egyptian woman in one of the comfortable chairs.

Suddenly some scratchy orchestral music starts to play, from what sounds like an antique phonograph.  I look across the room and see the black woman I’d met in the park, with a very interesting contraption on the table next to her.   I stand up, walk over to her and say, “What a pleasant surprise!  And what an interesting machine!  What is it?”

She gestures toward it and waves her hand in a motion for me to have a closer look.  I move my head down near it, and see that it is, in fact, very similar to a phonograph.  Instead of the big horn speaker, however, it has a beautiful wooden box with the speakers built into the sides, and it has a record-like mechanism that spins, with a needle in the record to create the background orchestra score, but there’s an intricate mechanism on top of the spinning record, made of gold, that plays a small grooved piece of wood (a tongue depressor or popsicle stick) by sliding it back and forth like a violin bow across an electrical pickup or some such thing, in order to create a violin sound.  “That’s absolutely ingenious,” I tell the woman, “and so fragile-looking.”

“I’ve had this since I was a little girl, but it’s older than I am,” she says.  “It belonged to my mother, and she got it when she was a little girl.”

“It’s beautiful; I love it,” I say.  “I’ve never seen anything like it before.”

I straighten up and walk back to where the Egyptian woman is sitting.  “Well, are you ready?”  I ask her.  “Thanks so much for letting me see your place.  I really appreciate it.”  She stands up, and we walk out the door together, back into the warm sun.  We turn to go inside, and that’s when I wake up.

I had a dream last night in which someone told me, “If you loved your body, you wouldn’t poison it.”

Interesting.

Saturday morning, after a train wreck of a gig in Renton with my friend BT, and having stayed up until four o’clock in the morning the night before, I got up and nine o’clock and drove up to my brother’s house.  I got to see Niece #2 for the first time, and she’s almost five months old.  She was very quiet and smiley, and she instantly grabbed both my thumb and pinky finger in her tiny hands, which seemed to surprise everyone.  “She never does that with us,” they said.

It was great to see them.  The last couple of times I’ve been up in Seattle, they had been in Portland, so our paths hadn’t crossed.  We do talk on the phone regularly, but it’s not the same, especially when a new baby is involved.  We went for brunch at a delicious Mexican restaurant called Azul, then went back to the house and just kinda hung out for a while.  They were packing for a trip, so I just stayed downstairs and played with Niece 1 and Niece 2 while Nephew was upstairs sleeping.

We all went our separate ways around 1:30, and since I had no agenda for the rest of the day, I decided to take a rest from driving and go sit in a park for a while.  Naturally I had to drive for quite a while to get to the park, but the plan was set.  I headed down to GasWorks Park, in the Fremont district.  That’s the short version of the story.  The long version is that there were two or three large festivals in Seattle that day, and traffic was nightmarish.  I also took a wrong turn and ended up going across the short bridge to Eastlake (I think. . .?) and hung out in a tiny little park along Lake Union for a while, exploring and walking through the neighborhood a bit before driving back across the bridge to Wallingford, which is a neighborhood that I could quite easily see myself living in.  By the time I got to GasWorks Park, I was ready to relax.  There was some sort of folk arts festival happening, so I was glad to have gotten there early enough to check it all out.

Naturally, I had my camera with me, and I was very glad I did.  There were lots of colorful costumes, great gypsy klezmer music, naked people (some painted, others not), belly dancers. . .

(Can I just take a minute here to say that the naked dancing guy had a surprisingly gigantic scrotum?  I rarely feel the need to mention things like that (mostly cause I don’t see many scrota!), but I mean, jeez.  You’d find it worth mentioning too, if you’d seen it.  I’m just saying.  The security guy finally made him wear pants, which he grudgingly put on, but kept pulling them down as low as they would go, showing fully half of his ass and barely concealing him in the front.  Yeesh.  Anyway. . .I don’t want to devote too much time to scrota; I feel that I’ve done enough already.  Moving on.)

. . .and, of course, the gas works itself.  This is one of the weirdest parks anywhere, and it’s in one of the most beautiful settings in all of Seattle.   It’s slightly sinister, utterly fascinating, and endlessly photogenic.

I seem to remember signs posted around the park that said things like, ‘Wash Your Hands After Touching Grass’ and ‘Do Not Lie On Grass; Please Use Blankets’ and things like that, but I couldn’t find any of those this time.   The city must have cleaned the place up a bit more since the last time I was there.  It’s been a few years.

Anyway,  the day was lovely, and I was glad to have had the extra time to spend in such a leisurely way.  I love Seattle, and every time I go, I toy with the idea of moving there.   Here’s the view from the park.  If you click on it, you’ll see that it’s full-size so that you can really get a sense of it.  It’d be amazing after dark too.

I don’t know that I’ll actually move there.  I have good things going for me here (not to mention extremely cheap rent), but I do love it, and I always come back and look at apartments on ListByCraig in various neighborhoods, trying to decide which area would suit me.

Le Sigh.  Je t’aime, EmeraldCity.

Friday afternoon, I drove up to Seattle (actually, it was Renton, which is the suburb most famous for being the resting place of Jimi Hendrix) to play a gig with my friend BT.   It was at a venue I was not familiar with, so when I drove into the parking lot, I was surprised to find that it was a small ‘British-style’ pub that was located next to the Department of Licensing in a strip mall.  Veeeery rock and roll.

I left my bass in the car and walked inside to check the place out and say hi to BT.  He was there, naturally, getting the PA system all set up.  The drummer was also there, and it was my first time meeting him, since he was a fill-in guy that night as well.  In fact, it was BT’s first time playing a gig with him, which can be very telling about someone’s personality.

Usually during set-up, especially between new people, there’s a lot of conversation and chit-chat about all kinds of things, but this time there was a noticeable lack of conversation, with BT over on one side of the stage, turned away and working on something, and Drummer sort of sitting behind his kit, adjusting his cymbals and whatnot.  It was weird.  I broke the ice by asking the drummer about his drum kit, which was a beautiful, custom-made kit that was much too large for such a small place.  He had about a million different cymbals, too, which were sprawled out everywhere and left precious little room for BT and me.   I moved my monitor and microphone as far forward as I could, in order that I wouldn’t have two cymbals a foot from my head.

Finally it was time to start, and it turned out that the drummer didn’t have a good ‘feel’ at all.  I’m a competent enough bass player and musician that I can lock in with anybody, and I could not lock in with this guy.  His timing wasn’t solid, and he put in lots of unnecessary flourishes throughout every song.  Yeesh.

When we took a break, Drummer went to talk with a couple of his friends, and BT and I went outside to enjoy the cool breeze.  He told me that the first thing out of Drummer’s mouth when he arrived was, “You set everything up wrong.  It needs to be further over.”  He told me that he’d talked with Drummer about how much gear to bring, and Drummer assured him that he’d keep it small.  Drummer also brought this weird headphone mixer and effect thingy and tried to plug it in, and got angry with BT for not knowing how to use it.  This all went down right before I showed up, which explains the air of tension onstage.

Rule One of being a for-hire musician; never bite the hand that feeds you.  You don’t walk in and insult the person who hired you, and you certainly don’t want to be snippy with them if they don’t know how to use your personal equipment.  If you do decide to do those things, however, you’d better be a good enough player that your musicianship alone will hopefully redeem your behavior, because if you’re not, you won’t be called again, and worse yet, you will earn yourself a bad reputation around town.

Drummers are particularly prone to this sort of bravado.  This guy also grew up in Los Angeles, and he had what I like to call the L.A. Self-Promotion Syndrome.  Everyone I’ve ever met from L.A. has a particular way of talking about him- or herself.  They always seem to be trying to put themselves ahead of others, or to drop a name in just the right way; you get the idea.  It’s very peculiar and specific.  So you can imagine what a bravado-prone drummer, who’s also from L.A., is like.   Ugh.

We slogged through about four hours’ worth of songs, and I think three songs sounded good in that whole span of time.  We just had to laugh, but after a while, BT’s laugh reminded me of a sheet pulled over broken glass (a very memorable image from a very un-memorable Ayn Rand book).  There were three or four times we actually had to stop a song because it sounded so bad.  We got through the night, though, and at two-thirty in the morning, we finally got everything packed up and out of there.  Drummer gave me his business card and went on his way.  BT actually had a gig scheduled with him for the next day.  I don’t envy BT.  I crashed in his extra bedroom, in my sleeping bag on the floor, for about four hours, and then woke up at nine to meet my brother and his family for breakfast.  That’s a story for the next entry.

The thing that made this particular gig bearable, though, was a guy in the audience.  He requested songs like “Cocaine” and walked in front of the stage drunkenly appreciating us when we played his requests.  Then he started requesting songs by Sublime, which none of us knew.  “I’m from Long Beach,” he said, about fourteen times.  “I usually listen to gangsta rap, but after I saw Sublime, it made me realize that you guys [meaning musicians in general] can really play.”

“Well thanks, man,” BT said diplomatically.  “We’d sure play some Sublime if we knew any.  I’ll try and learn some for you by next time.”

“I’m from Long Beach,” the guy repeated, with significance.

“That’s cool,” Drummer said.  “I’m from L.A. too.”

“Yeah, man, so you know.  Sublime, man.  That’s where they’re from too.  You guys sure you don’t know any Sublime?”

This conversation happened three different times.  And for the record, why is someone who ‘normally listens to gangsta rap’ hanging out in an English-style bar, anyway?  Hilarious.

I’m really glad none of our friends were there to see that show.  The bar owner guy said, “Hey, guys, sorry there aren’t more people here for you.  Usually Friday nights are pretty crazy around here.   I don’t know what’s going on.”

“That’s okay,” I said, laughing and casting a glance over toward BT.  “Tonight that’s probably a good thing, at least as far as we’re concerned.”

Every once in a while you have gigs that just don’t work out.  It’s totally normal.  I look back on that show as being fun, though, if only for reasons other than it was supposed to have.  It certainly wasn’t stressful or anything.  We just laughed our way through train wreck after train wreck, which has its own special form of appeal.