beautiful, funny, sad & true

Still in the middle of another CrazyWeek.  It’s been non-stop, full of recording (both with IrishBand and with Breanna), a really late but super-fun gig with IrishBand, and then tonight I’m going to watch my friend John play a gig, as he opens for a songwriter whose CD I love but who I’ve never seen play before, and a band who I’ve heard are good but I’ve not heard them at all yet.  Should be a good time, all around.

Slightly dark and stormy times in other ways.  Work’s been ‘teh’ stressful lately; so much so that Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday were almost unbearable.  Suffice it to say that I’m glad they’re over.  Financial times have been really tough too, for almost five months now.  Car problems and other problems have really been plaguing me lately, all at the same time.  I actually had to swallow my pride and borrow some money from a family member a week and a half ago.   There’s light at the end of the tunnel, but it’s still definitely a tunnel.

The first big storms of the year are rolling in as I’m writing this.  It’s pouring rain today, and the wind is actually whistling through the windows, which is extremely rare in my sheltered apartment.  There are sirens blaring through my neighborhood, coming from what sounds like an ambulance.   Portland may get hit with snow this weekend, which is pretty rare, and absolutely grinds the town to a halt when it does come.  I have an important gig on Sunday (playing drums in a wedding reception band, which will be a total blast) in the West Hills.  Luckily, my little Honda is great in the snow, and I have chains too, just in case the weather really takes a turn for the worse.  I’m sure I won’t need them, though, and I’m going to go on record and say that I don’t think it’s going to end up snowing after all.

Guess we’ll find out.

Heading back to work now. . .

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.

Five years ago today, Elliott Smith died.

It was officially considered a suicide, but the possibility of ‘foul play’ was never really ruled out.  I’m here today to pay a small tribute to someone whose music has moved me more than almost any other.

Although he had been living in L.A. for many years, those of us from Portland will always consider him one of our own, because Portland plays a large part in his songs, and there are a multitude of locations and references to the time he spent living here.  He wrote very dark and honest songs, in a way that very few other people are brave enough to do.  He’s most famous, probably, for his music being featured prominently in the movie Goodwill Hunting, and that early-to-middle period of his songwriting is my favorite.

The album “XO” was the first one that I bought.  I heard the song Waltz #2 (XO) on the radio, but didn’t catch the name of the artist.  The next time I heard it was about a month later, in Seattle.  I was in the back seat of a car, riding around with two of my friends, and the song came on.  I said, “I love this song. . .turn it up; I need to know who this is.”  That afternoon, I drove straight to a record store in the University District and picked it up.  I will always remember driving around Seattle in my little green Toyota truck, with the windows down, listening to that CD.

Elliott recorded many of his early songs and albums at Jackpot! Studios here in Portland, and his piano was at the studio for years after he had moved away, but it has since been donated to the Experience Music Project museum in Seattle.  At the time he died, the band I was in (listen to the songs “Please Let Me”, “Shadow” and “Windows Down”) was in the process of recording our album at Jackpot, and all of the piano tracks were recorded on that piano.  It was a haunting and surreal honor to be playing it, even moreso in retrospect.

Here’s one of Elliott’s earliest songs, “The Biggest Lie”, the video for which was filmed the day after he died.  The location is the Solutions Wall in a neighborhood of L.A., which was the backdrop for Elliott’s album “Figure 8.”

Miss you, Elliott.  This planet isn’t quite the same without you on it.

OneYearAgo

This week is Banned Books Week, according to the American Library Association, and here’s a list of some of the most popular ones.  I’ve read about half of the books on the list, and among them are some of my favorites, including Catcher in the Rye, Of Mice and Men, To Kill a Mockingbird, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Lord of the Rings, and A Clockwork Orange.

Of particular interest (to me, anyway) was the inclusion of Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, thanks in part to my beloved alma mater, the Yakima School District:

Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison

Excerpts banned in Butler, PA (1975); removed from the high school English reading list in St. Francis, WI (1975). Retained in the Yakima, WA schools (1994) after a five-month dispute over what advanced high school students should read in the classroom. Two parents raised concerns about profanity and images of violence and sexuality in the book and requested that it be removed from the reading list.

Thanks, Yakima.  That must be why we had to suffer through forgettably crappy books like Silas Marner and Billy Budd instead of ‘real’ books that people read everywhere else.  When my English teacher (God rest her soul, assuming that she’s dead) assigned us Silas Marner, she said, “You’re not going to like this book, but that’s what we’re going to read.”

I was the quietest, shyest (shiest?) person in human history back then, but I raised my hand, and she motioned for me to speak.

“I love to read, and there are a lot of books out there.  Isn’t there something else with a similar message that maybe we would enjoy?”

“I’m sure there is, but we’re going to read this.”

That happened in my sophomore year of high school, and that’s the point at which I officially gave up.  Coincidentally enough, I got my first electric guitar not long after that.  I thank GreatSpirit every day that I already loved to read, because the vast majority of the people I knew in Yakima actually hated reading due to the so-called learning environment we had in our schools.  I, on the other hand, had my life saved by books, and it breaks my heart to know that people all over the country are trying at this very moment to deprive kids of that experience.

That being said, I have to go on record and say that a ban is sometimes the best thing that could possibly happen to a creative work, because it creates a controversy, and then people will buy the work just to see what all the fuss is about.  I worked in a record store at the time 2 Live Crew’s Nasty As They Wanna Be came out, and our dusty copies sat on the shelf for months until it got banned, and then we couldn’t order copies fast enough to fulfill the overwhelming demand for it.  Those guys are multi-millionaires by now, but I’m positive that they’d be just another group of obscure hip hop also-ran’s without the ban.

I think Oscar Wilde was correct with his famous line from The Picture of Dorian Gray, “There is only thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is NOT being talked about.”

Suffice it to say that when I write a book, I give you permission to ban it.  In fact, I encourage you to ban it.  I want it to cause so much controversy that I have to go into hiding for years, like Salman Rushdie and J. D. Salinger did.

And now, I have some reading to do.  The first book on my list is Invisible Man.

OneYearAgo