As you may or may not already know, my car’s alternator has been dying a slow, pathetic death over the last two or three months.  Unfortunately, my financial situation over the same period of time has been particularly dire, so the car has pretty much been parked since then.  I’ve used it occasionally to drive to work, or to take myself and the cello to a gig, but other than that I’ve been walking a lot and taking the light-rail train, which is good for the planet, good for my health, and good for gas prices.  But that, as I like to say, is neither here nor there.

Yesterday was payday, and I had finally caught up on my bills enough to be able to take the car in.  J picked me up at work and drove me home to pick it up, but when we arrived and I tried to start it, it was too far gone.  The engine light came on, but the battery was too discharged to start the car.  Curses.  So I called a tow truck, got a jump-start (guess what’s on my Christmas list this year!), and drove to the repair shop named after MythicalKingWithGoldenTouch.  I explained the situation and the symptoms, and they said they’d call once they had the diagnosis.

About an hour later, one of the guys called to tell me that he was unable to start the car, and he asked me how I’d gotten it there.  I told him about the jump-start, but that I’d driven it over normally, and that it started like it always does.  He said he’d keep trying.

Another hour passed, and I got a second phone call to tell me that he was still unable to start the car, and that now he’d have to start checking things out, which would cost an hour of labor of shop time.  “Sure,” I said, “do what you need to do.”

By this time I’m on pins and needles, wondering about my poor little car.  The third phone call came about two hours later.  “I need to show you what’s going on, and I should show you in person.  Can you come down and take a look?”  That sounded ominous, but I couldn’t make it until after work, so I told him to give me the abridged version.  “Your distributor looks like it’s falling apart, and you seem to have an oil leak inside, where the spark plugs are.  Also, I’m worried about your timing belt, which might have slipped.”  Crrrrrrrap.  “So now we’re in a situation called ‘open ticket’, where we have to replace things as we go.  I wanted to show you what’s happening before I started all that.”

Ouch.

These things are all completely unrelated to the problem that I brought the car in for, by the way.  It’s as if it somehow knew where it was, and threw itself on the mercy of the mechanic, saying, “Pleeeeease fix me.  I need you so very badly.”

So I went over after work, and talked to the mechanic, who showed me what was happening, and we worked out a two-part plan.  Part One involves replacing the distributor, alternator, valve cover gasket and spark plugs, and changing the oil.  This comes to over nine hundred dollars.  Part Two involves replacing the timing belt and water pump, and checking out that area of the engine to make sure everything’s the way it should be.  That will be next month, and will cost another five hundred dollars.

Ouch.

The good news is that by Christmas, I’ll have a car that runs like a champ for a long time to come, despite my having survived an almost total cashectomy in the process.

Ouch. This month is gonna hurt.

The other night I was supposed to get together with J, but she had a change of plans, so I scrounged around a bit to see what was happening in town. I called RockShowGirl to tell her about the movie Man on Wire, and how amazing it looked.  She was too exhausted to go out, having spent the last few hours running around town and then cleaning her apartment, so I went from being double-booked to being zero-booked.  The time was 7:22, and the movie started at 7:30.  ‘I can still make it to the movie,’ I thought.  ‘I don’t care if anybody else is free, I’m going.’  I grabbed my sweatshirt and my phone, jumped into the car that I’d borrowed from my neighbor for the evening, and raced over to the movie theater.  I can’t even begin to tell you how glad I am that I did.

The movie was amazing, and I recommend it to all of you.  It’s a documentary about the French guy who walked across a tightrope that he hung (secretly and illegally, I might add) between the towers of the World Trade Center.  There have been many pictures taken of that famous act, but this documentary was based on Phillipe Petit’s book.  The story and the individual characters were all fascinating and intriguing.  It’s really one of the better documentaries I’ve seen in a long time, and I watch a lot of them.  Here’s a trailer:

Incidentally, another of my recent favorite documentaries is Helvetica.  Yes, it’s about the font.  No, it’s not the least bit boring.  It’s about art and design and culture and the ways that they are perceived over time.  Go rent it.  I promise you’ll enjoy it.  But don’t take my word for it; Helvetica is sexy.

And since we’re on the subject of documentaries, I just rented and received Theremin; an Electronic Odyssey.  A friend of mine wrote a play about Leon Theremin, and it inspired me to find out more about the supremely interesting inventor.  His most famous invention is the instrument which bears his name:

You play the theremin by holding each of your hands nearer or farther from each of the corresponding wires to control the volume with your left hand and the pitch with your right.  When you touch the lower loop, the volume drops out completely, and when you bring your hand closer to the vertical wire, the higher the pitch rises.  It looks odd, and it’s very tricky to play.  You’d recognize the sound from about a million science fiction movies and quite a few staggeringly popular songs, including the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations” and the theme from the original series of “Star Trek.”  The most famous person associated with playing the theremin is Clara Rockmore, who was a student and protegé of Leon Theremin himself.  She was the first to play ‘serious’ music on a theremin, with astounding results.  Here she is playing her most widely-acclaimed piece, “The Swan” by Camille Saint-Saëns.

She’s so brilliant.  I could watch that all day.

Well, you now have your homework, and you know what to do, and now I have a favor to ask of you in return.  What are some of your favorite documentaries that you’d like to recommend to me?  Please leave a comment and let me know.

Boy, has this week gotten away from me.  Sorry it’s been such a long time between posts, but this week turned out to be as busy as last week was, but I left off at the Ray LaMontagne show.  The next night, Thursday, I took the train downtown to see a poet who shall remain nameless, because while my two friends and I were very interested in him as a person, we found his poetry to be distant and unapproachable.  In fact, my two companions fell asleep for a while during one of his longer stories.  From there, Tossed In gave me a ride to my next engagement, which was Allanah’s birthday party.  Total blast, but I heard later from Mike that it ended in vomitous tragedy.

Friday night was a slightly odd IrishBand show, which took place at a firemens’ local union hall thingy.  Something like that.  A couple of the members play a sport called hurling, and their team of guys was getting together at the end of the season to have a party and give themselves prizes and awards.  One of the guys is a musician, and is a friend of our band, so he told the guys that since it’s an Irish sport, they should invite an Irish band to play.  So they did, and we did.  My favorite part was watching how Mike would change (or mumble) the more adult lyrics to some of the songs, since there were children present.  In fact, a few of the kids came right up and sat on the steps at the edge of the stage.  A girl who looked like she was about eleven sat right in front of me and watched the cello like a hawk.  (Hawkette?  Hawkess?)  She even made cello motions with her arm at one point.  After we were done with our set, I said,  “Do you play too?  You must.”  She said that she used to, and she’d played for about a year, bu then her cello got broken when it fell over or something, and it was never replaced.  I invited her to play mine, and she accepted.  She sat down and started making sound with the thing right away.  It was very fun to watch.

I actually had the weekend completely free, so I spent the majority of it sleeping, doing laundry, and watching episodes of Six Feet Under.  I hadn’t ever seen it until J loaned me the DVD’s, and now I’m completely hooked on the show.  In fact, we watched a couple of episodes together on Saturday night.  After she left, I watched two more, and then two more the next afternoon.

Monday was supposed to be a recording session with Breanna, but she had to re-schedule because she and Justin weren’t feeling well.  I offered the time slot to IrishBand’s singer instead, because we have a few high-profile gigs coming up, and we’re trying to get some music and promotional material posted on SpaceBelongingToMe by then.  We had dinner first, of pasta with alfredo sauce and smoked salmon, and then Mike recorded a new acoustic guitar track.  I then showed him how to run the recording software, and he manned the computer while I recorded a cello track, an accordion track, and a glockenspiel track.  We still need to add vocals, violin and percussion, but it sounds really great so far.

Last night was the Breeders show here in town, which JBJ and I went to for free, thanks to the tickets provided by the radio station that airs his music show.  We arrived during the second band, and were lucky enough to find a seat in the balcony.  There are only two rows of seats in the entire place, so we were very fortunate.  We weren’t impressed with the band that was playing when we arrived, which is to say that we talked with each other rather than listening to them.  They were called PaperCut or something, or maybe they were the PenguinSomethings band whose name I never knew.  I dunno.  Then the Breeders came out, and they sounded good, but I’m not gonna lie; we found our attention waning during their set as well.  We did get to hear them play “Cannonball”, though, which was really cool, then we decided to leave after listening to a couple more songs.

Tonight I’m home for a bit before meeting RockShowGirl, whose name may sound like one of those clever pseudonymic blogisms that I love so much, but it’s actually a variation on her name from SocialNetworkingSite, so it seemed apropos.  Anyway, she just went through a very strange and sudden break-up last weekend, which she’s still reeling from, so I want to go talk to her and cheer her up.  It seems like a movie might be in order.

Tomorrow’s a Breanna and Justin gig, and then Saturday is an IrishBand gig, so there’s still plenty on my schedule.  Next week may very well be even busier, because CincinnatiFriend is coming for a visit, and then Mom and Stepdad will be staying here the following weekend.

Phew.

Sorry for these many days of absence, and thank you again for reading all of this.  Now it’s time to eat something and figure out what RockShowGirl and I are doing tonight.

Wednesday night I was invited to see Ray LaMontagne with my friend Jeannie, who had an extra ticket.  I’m not super familiar with Ray’s music, but I do have one of his CD’s, and I enjoy it, and I’m certainly not going to pass up a chance to see him live.

We started the night by going to dinner.  We had a few choices for happy hour places, one of which was Kenny & Zuke’s.  We started there, and a quick perusal of the menu revealed that it was a total meat-a-thon.  We asked the waitress what their vegetarian choices were, and she checked over the menu and replied, “Well, there’s. . .an egg-salad sandwich. . .and, uhhh. . .tuna fish. . .?”  We thanked her and decided to go elsewhere.  We walked around the corner to Saucebox, which neither of us had been to before, but we both now agree that for happy hour it’s one of the best deals in town.  We’ll definitely be going back.

The show was awesome.  Leona Naess was the opening act, and she and her band were multi-talented and excellent.  She still seems fairly new to the game, but it’ll be interesting to see where she goes from here, and how she progresses.

Ray and his band took the stage and absolutely owned the audience the entire time, despite hardly saying a word until about three-quarters of the way through the show, when he talked about the sense of relief he felt after the election, and how he felt like partying and celebrating instead of singing his quiet, introspective, sad songs.  It was very endearing and funny.

I wasn’t terribly impressed with his band, though.  They were each good players individually, but it seemed to me that they just sort of plodded through every song, without many dynamic changes.  I would have liked to hear much more from the piano player especially, and the two or three times he finally got to take a solo, the audience really appreciated him.  The guitarist was unexciting (as are the overwhelming majority of rock guitarists), but he was absolutely stellar when he sat down to play the pedal steel.  Don’t know what a pedal steel is?  You’ll recognize the sound, for sure.  Here’s a video.  (No, this isn’t the guy from the show.  I couldn’t find a video of him.)  See if you can figure out what song he’s playing:

I will say, to be fair to Ray’s band, that they are phenomenal at playing quietly and keeping the energy level high while ‘holding back’, if you see what I mean.  A standout song for me was “Shelter”, which I was able to find a video of from his show in NYC a month ago.  Notice the awesome pedal steel solo, too.

So Ray and the band finished up their set and left the stage.  After a couple of minutes, he and the bass player came back out to do a heartbreaking version of the song “Jolene”, which an audience member had been loudly and drunkenly requesting before almost every other song of the night.  Incidentally, he didn’t even yell ‘THANK YOU’ after Ray finally played it, by which I think we were all a bit surprised and disappointed.

After he finished that song, the audience gave him a standing ovation, and then stayed on their feet to put their coats on and leave.  Probably a third of the audience started streaming out of the theater.  I told Jeannie, “That can’t be it.  The house lights aren’t even on yet.”   After a wait of almost ten minutes, the lights came back up and the band walked back out onstage.  The remaining crowd roared, and Jeannie and I took the opportunity to run down to the front.  We sat down in the aisle as he and the piano player started the introductory chords to John Lennon’s “Imagine.”  It was breathtaking, and those were the best two encore songs I’ve ever seen.

Great show, and just another great night in an incredibly full week.  More to come.

OneYearAgo

I won’t spend too much time dwelling on this here, because this not normally a political blog in any way, but suffice it to say that Tuesday’s election made me feel, quite possibly for the first time in my life, proud to call myself an American citizen.

A small group of us (Allanah, Lucy, Mike, Scotty and I) went to a huge radio show/election event at Grand Central Bowl over in southeast Portland, and had the time of our lives.  Every time a new state went Democratic, everyone in the place clapped and cheered.  John McCain’s speech was eloquent and gracious, and everyone was impressed.  That speech, incidentally, was the first time in which I felt I was again watching the John McCain who I actually used to like and respect, who I even considered voting for in previous elections.  It seems to me that he lost his personal focus this time, and he spent the last few months trying to pass himself off as a conservative, which he’s not.  But that’s neither here nor there.

Barack Obama appeared on the screen to wild applause.  Every one of his pauses was punctuated by our cheers and hands raised into the air.  We were surprised to see Jesse Jackson and Oprah Winfrey in the crowd, as spectators.  I think everyone felt a huge sense of relief.  It took me until the next day at work to realize how anxious I’d been lately, because I was able to juxtapose my relaxed feeling with the tension of the previous day.

At the end of the night, our little group of friends did a collective high-five to commemorate the historic moment in our own small way.

Yay.  Here’s to a new country, and to a new world.

OneYearAgo