beautiful, funny, sad & true

When I was about eighteen years old, my friends and I had been writing songs for our first band.  We had about fifteen or twenty songs in various degrees of completion, and we’d been recording demo versions of them on a four-track cassette recorder.  There were lots of other short song ideas, some of which were done with our tongues firmly planted in our cheeks, but we definitely learned a lot about the recording process, and how to make instruments work together in a song.  In retrospect, it’s easy to see that that’s where I learned many of the musical skills I still use today.

What had started as a two-person group had morphed by then into a five-person group, and we felt it was time to make some professional recordings that reflected and showcased our new members.  I went to the phone book, called a studio that seemed promising, and booked some time.  The studio owner and I would turn out to be pretty good friends, but he was also one of the most enigmatic people I’ve ever known.  He has used multiple versions of his name throughout the years of his professional careers, so in the interest of anonymity, I’ll go ahead and refer to him as Enigma from now on.  He was always a jack-of-all-trades, and he dabbled in music, photography, and even acting.  In fact, here’s a recent profile picture from that online movie database.  I suspect this was taken on a film set, but that’s how he used to dress all the time, right down to the bandana.

He owned a small recording studio in CityOfAngels and had recently relocated to Yakima to take care of his aging mother, as well as to live on the cheap for a while.  I don’t mean to paint him in a negative light, or give you the impression that he was in any way a bad guy, because I don’t think he was.  He was just very mysterious, that’s all, and though we knew each other for years, I never felt like I knew him very well.  He seemed to have lots of secrets, and he liked to live off the grid.  He had inherited a bit of money, so he bought a bright red Toyota four-wheel-drive pickup, loaded his camping gear and his two white Siberian huskies, and floated between Yakima, AngelCity, EmeraldCity, and NearestLargeCanadianCity.  He kept his lifestyle simple, so that he could pack up and leave at a moment’s notice.  And he would, too.  He would disappear for months on end, and none of his friends would hear from him.  He’d turn up like nothing happened, with no explanation for his time away.  Everyone suspected that drugs were involved somehow, but he claimed not to use or sell them.  In fact, he was a very health-conscious guy and a long-time vegetarian, well before vegetarianism was de rigeur. I’m not saying that vegetarians aren’t capable of doing drugs—they certainly are—but I spent enough time with him, at all kinds of crazy hours, that I like to think I would’ve noticed anything out of the ordinary.  Who knows.

He met one of my college friends, a beautiful blonde girl, at a party one night, and asked her to be his ‘assistant’, since she already had a boyfriend.  She reluctantly agreed, and she answered phones and kept his books and all sorts of other thankless tasks, while constantly rebuffing his romantic advances.   After a few weeks of working for him, she asked me, “What does he do?  For money?  I don’t do much all day, and he hardly gets any business.  I don’t get it.  Does he sell drugs or something?”

“I don’t think so,” I replied, “but nobody really knows for sure.  He’s so hush-hush about his life.”

She gave me a conspiratorial smirk.  “I think I’m gonna try and find out.  You know, I’ll ‘get close’ to him and stuff.”   I thought the idea was hilariously diabolical, and told her so.  It just might work.  I told her I would do my part to pry information from him too, to the extent that I could, and we both pledged to share whatever we found out about him with the other person.  We both came up empty-handed, and he disappeared from town again.

Enigma was a bit of a conspiracy theorist, and a self-professed ‘huge fan’ of Area 51 and UFO’s and all that.  In fact, in the outskirts of Yakima is a top-secret NSA listening station which can be briefly glimpsed from the freeway up in the hills just north of town.

(photo taken from Creative Suggestions’ Flickr page)

Like I said, it’s a top-secret installation (one of many in the Yakima area), and if you try to drive out there, you’ll be stopped by soldiers in jeeps, with guns.  Enigma called them on the phone more than once, and when they asked who he was and why he was calling, he was shockingly candid.  “Well, I’m a big fan of secret government operations, and I’m an American taxpayer and a concerned citizen, so I was just hoping to find out what you guys are doing out there.”  As if they’re gonna roll out the red carpet for him and invite him on an all-access tour.  “No comment,” he was told, and the connection was terminated.  So he tried driving out there, with similar treatment from the soldiers in the jeeps.  “Turn around and go home,” they told him.

This entry is meant to provide context for the next couple of stories I’m going to tell about Enigma, each of which is fairly long in its own right, so I thought it best to break them up and give each one its due, rather than cram them both into one mammoth entry.  Besides, if I think of more stories, then adding them individually is definitely the way to go.  In order to tantalize you, I will say that one story involves an arson fire that destroyed the largest music store in town (Enigma’s second studio was located in the basement), and the other involves Enigma, my bandmates, myself, and a singer getting shot at.

To be continued.

The first part of this entry is kind of gross; I’m not gonna lie about that.  The good news is that it’s also really funny, and it’s about a joke I played on my brother when I was about fifteen years old.

We shared a big bedroom at Dad’s house.  One day, Brother was lying on his bed doing homework, and I was lying on my own bed reading a book.  He got up to take a break, or watch TV or something, and at the same time I got the urge to pass gas.  Being the older brother, it was my natural impulse to walk over and pass gas into his pillow.   I repeated that action as the need arose, and I thought it would be even funnier if I was able to really stink up his pillow as much as possible, so I took my shoes off and rubbed my smelly socks all over it, inside and out.

A few minutes later, Brother walked back into the room, and I was reading on my bed, as if nothing had changed.  He reclined on his bed, with one elbow on the offending pillow, and returned to his studies.  After a few minutes, he sniffed the air and said, “Do you smell something?  It smells weird over here.”

“Hunh,” I said, as casually as possible.  “I don’t notice anything.  Smells fine here.”  My bed was ten feet away from his.

He turned back to his books for a while, but then curiosity got the better of him again.  “No, really,” he said.  “Are you sure you don’t smell anything?  It’s pretty bad.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, shrugging my shoulder.  “I don’t smell anything weird at all.”

He turned back, determined to find the source of the odor.  He sniffed up and down, then got a really strange look on his face as he looked toward his pillow.  That was the moment I’d been waiting for.  As he brought his nose closer and closer, the realization hit him, and I burst into an uncontrollable fit of laughter.

“Gross! What the heck did you do?” he asked, as he pulled off the pillowcase, smelled the pillow itself, and grimaced.

I was still laughing, but I finally pulled myself together enough to give him an answer.  “I might have farted on it a few times.  And I also might have slipped and accidentally rubbed my socks all over it too.  Yeah. . .I might’ve done that.”  I started laughing again.  He did too, as I recall.

A few years ago, I told a girl I was dating about The Pillow Incident, and she was slightly repulsed by it.  She saw the humor, but she also never quite believed that I wouldn’t do that sort of thing again.   I assured her that I wouldn’t, since I was thirty four years old, and she of all people had nothing to worry about.

Why am I telling that story now?  I’m not sure, exactly, but it came up in conversation with a friend the other day, so it had been bopping around in my brain lately, and I figured that I should tell it here too, under the heading of Childhood Stories.  I did learn that I shouldn’t tell that one when I’m on a date.  Not a very sexy story, as it turns out.  Ha ha.

One other funny childhood story (this one’s not gross, don’t worry) that took place in that bedroom was when my brother and I were wrestling one day, and it kept escalating and escalating, like it does sometimes between brothers.  We were joking around, pulling clothes and stuff out of each others’ dressers, and pretty soon we started pulling the blankets off of each others’ beds too.  It was all in fun, as if to say, “So, you wanna start something?  Okay, well, how about THIS?”  We kept one-upping each other, until all of our clothes, blankets, sheets, and mattress pads were strewn around the floor of the big bedroom.  We were laughing like hyenas, and my brother reached for my actual mattress and started to pull it from my bed frame.

That’s when Dad walked in.  He heard the commotion and came over to see what was going on.  His jaw dropped.  “What the hell are you guys doing?” he yelled.  “Clean this crap up now!”  His tone of voice broke the spell of our laughter, and we looked up, somewhat mortified, to see that we had completely destroyed the room.  Our beds were in a gigantic heap in the middle of the floor, and it looked as if a tornado had touched down in our room, but had spared the rest of the house.  He stood and watched us incredulously as we put everything back together.

That house was really great.  It was owned by family friends who went to our church.  Their aging mother lived in the house for decades, and our friends lived in the house up the hill.  She was in her eighties, and was starting to be unable to live alone anymore.  They wanted someone to live in her house, but they wanted it to be someone they knew.  It was a perfect situation.  They kept the rent low for us, and we happily moved in.

The house is over a hundred years old now, and it used to be the only house on the street.  It’s situated on the old Evergreen Highway in Vancouver, which runs right along the Columbia river.  We used to be able to walk down to the waterfront and play down there.  These days, all of the roads are private, and gated, and so far I’ve been unable to find a way down past the railroad tracks to the river.   Our old house is now surrounded by a group of newly built houses, and the wild, wooded hillside is now a sleepy cul-de-sac like a million others.

Such is the way in America, I suppose.  Open spaces don’t last long, particularly in Portland, where the Urban Growth Boundary is strictly enforced, and space is at a premium.  Vancouver doesn’t have a law like that, so urban sprawl is the order of the day, but this house is in a long-developed residential neighborhood, and we felt lucky to have had the opportunity to live there.

It’s probably worth mentioning that our bedroom at the time of these stories was in the bedroom on the back of the house, on the far left side of the picture.  The layout of the house changed sometimes, too, because at another point, we lived in the upstairs room and could look out over the river and the airport.  We even bought an airport radio and would sit up there for hours with binoculars and a notepad, writing down the names and flight numbers of the planes as they landed and took off.

If you’d told me when I started this entry that it would morph from a disgusting tale of pillow desecration into a nostalgic musing, I might not have believed you.  Yet here we are, and I stand by my choices.  For the record, I solemnly swear not to soil any more pillows, and I won’t tell that story on any more dates.  In fact, if I’m on a date, and you hear me start to launch into it, I hereby give you permission to step in and save me from myself.

2010 has been very strange.  At the beginning of the year, I was still on blogging hiatus, so it took a while to get back up to speed.  Springtime was crazy, with lots of great musical endeavors and memorable trips.  By the summer, both my life and this blog went into overdrive, when I really started writing again, and found my full stride while sharing a bit too much about my childhood.  Suddenly it was October, which is the month of my birth, but this year was also the month of my stepdad’s death, which has sent everything into a tailspin since then.  A surreal trip to Yakima for the funeral was followed by multiple trips to Seattle, both for gigs and for family functions.

There were some standout moments from this last year that didn’t manage to make it into the blog, for various reasons.  For example, here’s a video of a particularly interesting recording session that I was lucky enough to be involved with, albeit in a small way.  A local singer-songwriter, who is also a friend, put the word out on SocialNetwork that she wanted to create a cacaphony of 50 pianos, all playing an F chord at the same time.  I jumped at the chance.  She rented a piano showroom downtown, and my friend and I (and forty eight or so other people) joined in to participate.  I brought my camera to capture a bit of the action.

Another memorable moment from this last year was Trek in the Park.  This theater group gets together every year to re-create a famous episode from the original Star Trek television series.  This year’s was Space Seed, in which we meet the infamous character Khan (who returned in the movie The Wrath of Khan).  It was a very well-done production, with live music and everything. . .and it was all free of charge.  Here’s the climactic fight sequence between Kirk and Khan.

IrishBand released our self-titled EP this year, as well as an amazing animated video that a friend created for us.  I would post that here, but our band name is very unusual, hence the pseudonym.  To celebrate, we went to Port Townsend, Washington (the hometown of three of the band members, and an adopted home away from home for the rest of us) to play a CD release party and catch the Rhododendron Festival and parade and everything.  It’s always a huge party weekend for PT, and this year was the tenth reunion for PT High School, which included Violinist and a bunch of other friends, so I actually went to the reunion barbecue in Chetzemoka Park during the afternoon, since I knew so many of the people there.  (God forbid that I actually go to any of my own class reunions; I haven’t yet.)  I also performed in the parade, in disguise, as an honorary member of Nanda.  I’m the guy with the Mexican wrestling mask, playing the bass, miming along to the dance music that was blaring from the speakers in the back of the truck.

I had the opportunity to see the Oregon Symphony perform many times this last year, with some pretty big-name performers.  Violinists Midori and Hilary Hahn, violinist Pinchas Zukerman and his cellist wife Amanda Forsyth (who, incidentally, gave a cello master class at the Old Church that afternoon, which I also attended, even though I’m far from being a cello master) who performed Brahms’s Double Concerto together, and a number of others.  This month, I have a ticket for pianist Emanuel Ax’s concert, which I’m very much looking forward to.  Yo-Yo Ma performed here a month or so ago, but his concert was sold out in the spring, only a few weeks after tickets went on sale.  Curses.

So it’s been a good year, overall, but I’m really hoping that 2011 is better, or less confusing at the very least.  I have lofty goals for the upcoming year, which include finding a job, finding love and a real relationship, taking care of some things that have been dogging me for a while now, and producing more CD’s.  I have a bit of news on the music front, actually.  A friend of mine hurt her arms a year ago, and has since been unable to play the piano, but that hasn’t stopped her from singing, or from writing lyrics and melodies, or from having tons of ideas.  She e-mailed me at some point to ask what people in her position do in the music business.  I told her I don’t know about ‘the music business’, but I’d love to give the songs a listen, and that maybe I could put music to them.  She sent me some mp3’s, and I instantly felt like I knew where the songs should go.  They felt familiar without being predictable, which is always a good sign.  That was about two months ago, and we already have five or six collaborations in the works.  Pretty awesome and exciting.

In other news, December is the fourth anniversary of this blog, so it seems appropriate to have a little birthday party, no?  Come on, let’s have some sis-boom-bah.

So anyway, on to the Best Of.  Here are the lists of what I consider to the best entries BFS&T has to offer from this past year, which naturally includes a list of the most interesting dreams, as well.  Enjoy!

THE ENTRIES:

SteamCon – the steampunk convention in Seattle in which PolishCellist and I played, and had a total blast doing so

tragedy – the death of Stepdad

struggle – the early aftermath of the death of Stepdad

sitting here thinking about the Holocaust – one of the funniest things I’ve ever heard on the radio

folk festival fun – Portland Folk Festival, starring IrishBand, Dan Bern, Roll Out Cowboy, etc.

I’m kind of an a-hole – see for yourself

birthday present – prostitute schmostitute

the unicorn code – love it, learn it, LIVE IT

no one’s laughing – a peek into our family dynamics

d̩ja vu Рwhat it feels like, and a friend who claims to never have experienced one

the truth is out there – interesting UFO story, I promise

it’s not for shaving – Occam’s Razor, and how it applies to recording music

what if it is? – a very memorable and touching moment from the show Six Feet Under

THE CHILDHOOD STORIES:

shuttlecock

love and curiosity

he ain’t heavy, he’s my brother

the final innocent tryst

synchronicity

THE DREAMS:

lights, camera, dream

festival dream

shape shifters

inimitable and imitable

subconscious and libido

this needs a name

frozen

Just in case this wasn’t enough for your insatiable appetite for blog entries, here’s the Best of BFS&T 2009 entry, for your gluttonous pleasure.

Thanks for being here and reading all this, and for supporting this blog for such a long time now.  I really appreciate it.  I hope we all have an excellent New Year’s Eve, and Day, and that 2011 allows us to learn, and to grow, and to change for the better, a little bit each day.

Happy New Year!

This past weekend I did something for the first time; I attended SteamCon, the steampunk convention in Seattle.  I had only an inkling of an idea what to expect, but I have to tell you that it was amazing.

I found out about it when PolishCellist (her name is unusual and therefore requires a pseudonym for blogging purposes), with whom I play accordion, was asked to perform there.  I’m pretty easily put off by large crowds, but I’m familiar enough with the ideas of steampunk (I have a handful of friends who are super into it), and I’m definitely familiar with the type of circus and cabaret culture with which it shares many similarities and ideologies, so it sounded like it would be, at the very least, an interesting experience.  Plus, we had free all-weekend passes.

I’m interested enough in anime and cabaret and stuff that I knew the convention would be full of more than just teenagers dressed like comic book characters, but I have to admit that the wide range of ages was a surprise to me.  Young and old alike roamed the halls and congregated in the lounges and rooms, and the garden area by the pool.  There were whole families, each clearly interested in different aspects of the culture.  If you’re not familiar at all with steampunk, look it up it stems from the idea that the Victorian Age was the height of creativity, and culture, and technology.  There are a myriad of sub-genres within that simple idea, though.  There are people who simply like to dress in Victorian style, and there are people who are fascinated by the elaborate gadgets that were created before electricity was in common usage.  There are people who are interested in cabaret music, and people who are interested in the popular entertainment of the time, such as burlesque and circus acts.  There are people who build weapons using this antiquated technology, and there are people who build elaborate mechanical body parts for themselves.  There are people who are into early flying machines.  There are people who are inspired by the Gothic and vampire novels of the time.  You can see how there’s plenty of room for interpretation, and all can fit under the umbrella of steampunk, albeit some more naturally than others.

The best thing about a convention like that is the people-watching.  Just about everyone was dressed stunningly.  It was interesting to see the lengths to which people would or wouldn’t go.  One girl wore a beautiful blue ‘peacock’ dress, and one guy simply wore a polo shirt and jeans with his aviator goggles.  One guy doctored up an electric guitar, and a husband-and-wife team (who led one of the panel discussions) arrived with an amazing brass electro-mechanical dog that could actually roll under its own power and lift its head, and probably did various other tricks as well.  Its eyes were lit up in blue.

There was an art room, which did double duty as a silent auction.  There were pictures and sculptures, as well as the requisite gadgetry.  The antique bicycles modified into antique motorcycles were particularly well done, I thought, and as a typewriter enthusiast, I love the fact that people have figured out ways to modify them with USB connections, so they can be used with their more modern counterparts.

I feel sorry for the ‘regular’ people who just happened to be staying in those two hotels at the time this was all going on.  It was hilarious to watch and overhear people on their cell phones trying to describe what they were witnessing.  “It’s some sort of convention,” they would say, “or maybe a fashion show. . .”

All I can say is that it was a total blast, and I’m hooked.  I’m into old music, and antiquated technology, and I do love to dress nice.  My usual attire owes more to the 1970’s than to the 1870’s, but there are enough cool places in town (not to mention garage sales) that it wouldn’t be too hard to find clothes.  It would be nice to go to a different meet-up at a turn-of-the-century hotel or club or something, rather than the ultra-modern hotels.  Not that there’s anything wrong with those hotels; it should be noted that they did a tremendous job of hosting the enormous convention.

I think it would be funny and awesome to buy a cheap cello and doctor it up.  I would never do that to the cello I have, but it would be a great experiment on a different instrument.  Maybe a violin would be better, since it’d be a lot cheaper, not to mention easier to carry around as a prop.  Only problem is, I don’t know how to play violin, and I know I’d get tired of constantly having to refuse people when they’d want me to do something with it.  Cello for the win (I accidentally typed ‘wine’ just now), as The Kids Today would say.

Why don’t I have any pictures in this entry, I can feel you asking, after gushing about how amazing and beautiful everything was?  Because I couldn’t find my camera when I was packing.  After I got home, it turned up in the glove compartment of my car, buried under CD’s, where I had left it the other day.  I wanted to punch myself in the face when I saw that it was in the car with me the entire time, and I didn’t even know it.  Curses!

As a little aside, I have to confess that after dressing quasi-Victorian for the weekend, it was really nice to slip into a comfortable sweater and jeans today.

P.S. – If you should ever find yourself passing through the tiny town of Nisqually, Washington (an hour or so south of Seattle), you owe it to yourself to stop in at Norma’s restaurant, for a great time and an amazing burger.  I don’t eat very many burgers, let alone recommend them, so that ought to be a pretty good impetus.  While we’re on the subject, Violetta and The Hop and Vine here in Portland have excellent burgers as well.   Seek ’em out.

P.P.S. – I hate to end this entry talking about burgers, even really delicious ones, so I thought it would be funny to tack on this completely unnecessary paragraph.  I stand by my decision to do that, even though it doesn’t add anything to the blog.

P.P.P.S. – There is no third post script.  Please move along.

P.P.P.P.S. – There’s also not a fourth one.  Sorry.

P.P.P.P.P.S. – There IS, however, a fifth post script, and this is it.  There will not be a sixth, unless I decide to add one later.  Who knows, maybe I will.

P.P.P.P.P.P.S. – Yup, looks like I did add a sixth one.  Okay, now I’m really done.

P.P.P.P.P.P.P.S. – Or AM I?

[Edit:  P.P.P.P.P.P.P.P.S. – Here and here are some great pictures (including some of the dog!), many of which are from the fashion show on Saturday, which required a separate $50 ticket to attend.  Also, PolishCellist is in a couple of those pictures.  HINT:  She is without her cello.]

Just got home from a gig in Whitefish, Montana.  First time I’ve ever been there, and I have to start by saying that it’s a supremely beautiful little town.  It was my first gig with ModeratelyFamousBanjoPlayer, and despite the fact that it was very loose and unrehearsed (I’d never even met the drummer before, let alone played with him before), AND despite the fact that Southwest Airlines’ baggage handlers banged up my accordion enough that it needs to be repaired now, AND despite the fact that the stage was a truck trailer which bounced around so much that my acoustic guitar fell off it and got a nice big war wound on it, AND despite the fact that we got up at 5:30 a.m. (Mountain Time, which felt like 4:30 Pacific Time!) this morning to drive back to the airport at Spokane, AND despite the fact that I got stung by a bee (how random is that?) at the rental car place in Spokane. . .it was a triumphant show.

No pictures to speak of, unfortunately, because we were on such a tight schedule the entire time, and we were always either in the car, at the gig, or in the hotel room.  Okay, well, here’s what I mean.  This is Mount St. Helens from the airplane. . .

. . .and here’s ModeratelyFamousBanjoPlayer in his solo set.

After he was done, we all ate dinner (of delicious fish tacos!) and then set up the rest of the equipment for the full-band evening show.  I have to give extra-special thanks to SoundGuyToby, who came through with an accordion for me after I found that mine had been damaged by Southwest Airlines’ rough handling during the flight over.  He absolutely saved the gig for me.  The show would have been accordion-free without Toby.

Oh yeah, and the guitar.  The stage was a truck trailer, which bounced around like crazy while we were playing.  My acoustic guitar was sitting next to the edge of the stage, and and one point it tipped right off and landed directly on the metal bar that connects to the hitch.  So it has a huge wound on it, right on the front corner, in one of the most visible places it could possibly have a wound.  I hope to gawd that it can be fixed.  I’ll never be able to sell it for anything close to what I paid for it now.  SUCKS.  It still plays fine, though, and that’s what counts, but that just sucks.  Combine that with the accordion repair and this one gig is really gonna set me back.

I also need to mention the people we met.  They were sweet, accommodating, friendly, drunken, and a metric ton of fun.  After the show, we got a lot of handshakes and “Oh MAN you guys were great.  Thanks so much for coming all the way out here!  We had a blast. . .”, etc.  We also got invited to quite a few parties afterwards (“There are bikes enough for everyone!”) which we had to respectfully decline, unfortunately.  It seems like a great town, especially if you’re an outdoorsy person.

We got to our hotel rooms around 10:30 p.m., then I took a shower and spent the next four hours watching a TV show I’d never seen before called Ice Road Truckers.  You’d think it would be the most boring show in the world, and maybe it was just my mental and physical state at the time, but I was riveted to that crazy show.  It was surprisingly suspenseful.

Oh yeah.  In the four hours during which I actually slept, I had a horrible dream in which three different friends (each of whom I know in real life) told me either to fuck off or “Y’know what?  Go fuck yourself,” and gave me some very specific reasons why they thought I should do that.  One even went so far as to add, “God, it feels so good to say that!”   It wasn’t the best dream I’ve ever had.

So I napped in the car, and then we flew home.  A very nice couple from Spokane sat next to me on the plane, and the guy was actually from Whitefish, so that was a nice coincidence.  They even gave me a copy of Rolling Stone magazine (“Would you like this?  It’s a good one. . .”) just before we landed.  It’s one of the issues with Barack Obama on the cover.

So that was pretty cool.

I’m just glad to be home.  Usually when I’m traveling, I’m much more ‘in the moment’ than I was this weekend, but it was busy enough, and with all the instrument issues it was stressful enough, that I was emotionally done last night.  I wasn’t bummed out or anything, I just wanted to be home so that I could take care of these things that need to be taken care of, and now I can do just that.

I’m going to start with myself.  First a nap, then a shower, then I’m going to a dinner party with a couple of friends.  I’ll worry about the accordion tomorrow.