beautiful, funny, sad & true

I think the best thing about living in this building full of musicians is the incredible amount of diversity represented, and the caliber of the musicianship. Right now, the Portland Cello Project is rehearsing upstairs, and I’m sitting down here listening and thoroughly enjoying it.

From the apartment next to mine, I often get to hear the Pete Krebs Gypsy Jazz trio, or the Stolen Sweets (1920’s and 30’s jazz with three-part vocal harmonies).

From the apartment in front of mine, I get to hear classical flute, sometimes in duet with another flute, or with other instruments as well. Sometimes I take my cello over there and participate.

From the apartment upstairs in the front of the building, I get to hear alto sax parts from Vagabond Opera songs, as well as piano playing and singing.

From my apartment, the people in the rest of the building get to hear people like Breanna and Susie, and sometimes Stephanie.

The Portland music community is very well-represented by this one building alone.

In other news, Joan and I went out clothes shopping at a whole bunch of places yesterday. I totally scored:

black hoodie – YAY! The five-month search for a black hoodie is finally over.

two orange thermal T-shirts, each with a different ‘pattern’ of stitching and thickness. Plus, one’s medium-sized and the other is small. And it was $10 for both of them, so why the heck shouldn’t I buy both?

button-up dress shirt from J. Crew. White, green and black pinstripes. If you look from a distance, though, it just looks like a really cool green.

brown corduroy jacket, also from J. Crew. This was the score of the year. It’s a $200 jacket, on clearance for $50, then another 25 percent off, for a total of $35. $35!! For a two hundred-dollar jacket! I can wear it whenever I want to look like a university professor or something. It has patches on the elbows, and it even has a pen pocket inside.

I’m thinking of going on a picture-taking excursion here in a little while, since the weather’s so nice. I’m not going to spend such a beautiful day sitting inside. I did, however, want to fill you in on the clothing ‘scores’, and say how much fun the rest of the weekend has been. Good birthday party on Friday, and good gig on Saturday.

Funny thing about the gig on Saturday was that CellistSkip, who I play with in various incarnations of both Susie’s and Stephanie’s groups, was actually in the audience (first time I’ve ever seen him in the audience) while I played the cello with Susie. She came up to me near the end of our set and said, “Skip just got here. No pressure.” I was a bit nervous at first, with one of the best cellists in town sitting right up front and watching me, but after the first cello song, he smiled and applauded, then ran up and stuffed a couple of dollar bills down behind the tailpiece. It was a hilarious and supportive thing for him to do, and I was completely relaxed after that.

Well, time to get in the shower and out the door to start the day ‘frealz, yo.’

Peace, out.

If you have twenty minutes or so all by yourself, and you’re looking for something to do, I suggest that you watch this video.

It’s an episode of Mushi-shi. It’s beautiful and strange and deep, and I can’t get enough of it.

Online Videos by Veoh.com

And short. Enjoy!

Thank you, Kam!

Yesterday was just. . .a great day. I can’t remember the last time I’ve been able to say that.

I took the day off from work, and slept in until ten-thirty. Around eleven, Breanna and the other two band members came to my place to rehearse. We sounded great and had fun, as per usual, so we drove down to Wilsonville to do the radio show. I was expecting a little pod-cast out of someone’s house, but boy, was I in for a surprise.

It was in a house, it’s true, but once we got inside and went upstairs, we were in a professional radio studio. Couches, chairs, two computers, a satellite uplink, a mixing board, speakers everywhere, and one huge desk. The host, Mitchell, was sixteen years old.

If you didn’t see him, you’d never know that he’s sixteen. He sounds forty. Really deep voice, with complete confidence; he’s a total pro. He told us he’s been doing the show professionally since he was ten. Ten! AND he’s had some of the biggest-name people in country music on his show. It’s not some cheesy little show, either; he’s on XM, and lots of NPR affiliates and commercial stations all across the country. Crazy!

Their house, coincidentally enough, was in the same subdivision of Wilsonville where MostRecentExGirlfriend’s uncle and aunt–who I’m still friends with, and who actually read this blog (Hi, TFG & 9!)–live, so I went over there afterwards. Her uncle was at work, but aunt and I drank tea and talked for almost two hours, and had a tremendous time.

I came home long enough to change my clothes, and then I had to get over to the southeast part of town for one of the play readings. Instead of getting stuck in horrible rush-hour traffic, which is what usually happens, I took a different way, and finally figured out how to avoid all of the busy streets and sneak down through Reed College from the north. Brilliant!

I brought my cello, expecting to play that, but since there was a shortage of guys last night, I actually got invited to read one of the parts. It was SO much fun! The play had excellent dialogue, and it was about three friends who’ve grown up together in Boise. (There were even a few scenes set in a club called Neurolux–where I’ve been and played!–so that was particularly interesting.) One of the friends falls on hard times, and the relationship between the three guys is tested to its core. Very well-written and fun to be a part of. I played the part of the stoner musician. Typecasting, no? Well, minus the stoner part, anyway.

After that, it was time to relax and watch another fine episode of Mushi-shi–one of these days, I’m going to post one of the episodes up here, so you can see it for yourself–and then I went to bed, satisfied from having one of the best days I’ve had in the last few months. I genuinely enjoyed every minute of it.

I am alive and well, just been busy trying to feel better. It’s been an up-and-down few weeks.

This is a month of three different friends’ birthdays–what IS it about Capricorn girls?–and last Friday was the first of them. We went to Lola’s Room for 80’s Night. Even though I’m the worst dancer ever–okay, probably not THE worst, because at least I have a rock-solid sense of rhythm–I love 80’s music, and I had a good time overall. The potential was there for some weirdness, because of whose birthday it was and who showed up as somewhat of a surprise, but it’s been two years now, and we’re all adults, so it was fine.

Shelby and Brian were right behind us in line, which I didn’t even realize until Brian tapped me on the shoulder, so I could turn around and give him a hug. Nice surprise. They were there with a couple of Shelby’s friends, so I took the opportunity to cut a few proverbial rugs with their group too.

Oh, and incidentally, a friend told me of a cool trick to use if you’re not such a hot dancer. If you take your drink out on the floor with you, you don’t have to move around so much. You can just sort of tap your feet and move around a little bit in a rhythmic way, and that’s a perfectly acceptable thing to do. Yay! This means I can go out dancing all the time now!

Can I just take a second to mention that I was comPLETEly hung over the next day? Cause I was. Oh my GAWD. Saturday morning I felt like I’d been hit by a car. No, wait; I think it might actually have been a train. But I rallied around mid-afternoon, and went to spend a little time with MostRecentExGirlfriend. Met her kitten and also got introduced to her neighbor friend, and then we went to get some coffee and talk for a little while. After that, we went to a bead shop (she did more active looking than I did), and then went to her favorite thrift store down the street to look for some cool clothes. The place was huge and great, and she totally scored an armload of great stuff, while I surprisingly came out empty-handed.

I stayed home the rest of the weekend to drink lots of water and non-fermented fruit juice, and to do some of the things I’ve been neglecting, like dishes and laundry (something like five loads of laundry!). While I was doing all that laundry, I started watching an anime series that was new to me called Mushi-shi. Beautiful, dreamy, dark, spiritual and mythological, it was exactly what I was in the mood for, and I watched ten episodes. (SuperUltraMegaKudos to SSF for telling me about that awesome web site where you can watch so much stuff online for free. MUCH better quality than YouTube or GoogleVideos!)

Don’t think for a second that I’m not going to sit here tonight and not watch a whole bunch more episodes, cause that’s exactly what I plan to do, starting right now.