beautiful, funny, sad & true

If you cannot understand my argument, and declare, “It’s Greek to me,” you are quoting Shakespeare; if you claim to be more sinned against than sinning, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you recall your salad days, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you act more in sorrow than in anger, if your wish is father to the thought, if your lost property has vanished into thin air, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you have ever refused to budge an inch or suffered from green-eyed jealousy, if you have played fast and loose, if you have been tongue-tied, a tower of strength, hoodwinked or in a pickle, if you have knitted your brows, made a virtue of necessity, insisted on fair play, slept not one wink, stood on ceremony, danced attendance (on your lord and master), laughed yourself into stitches, had short shrift, cold comfort or too much of a good thing, if you have seen better days or lived in a fool’s paradise—why, be that as it may, the more fool you, for it is a foregone conclusion that you are (as good luck would have it) quoting Shakespeare; if you think it is early days and clear out bag and baggage, if you think it is high time and that that is the long and short of it, if you believe that the game is up and that truth will out even if it involves your own flesh and blood, if you lie low till the crack of doom because you suspect foul play, if you have your teeth set on edge (at one fell swoop) without rhyme or reason, then—to give the devil his due—if the truth were known (for surely you have a tongue in your head) you are quoting Shakespeare; even if you bid me good riddance and send me packing, if you wish I was dead as a door-nail, if you think I am an eyesore, a laughing stock, the devil incarnate, a stony-hearted villain, bloody-minded or a blinking idiot, then—by Jove!  O Lord!  Tut, tut!  For goodness’ sake!  What the dickens!  But me no buts—it is all one to me, for you are quoting Shakespeare.

–English journalist Barry Levin, quoted in “The Story of English.” by McCrum, Cran and MacNeil

 

I don’t quite know where to start.

There have been a number of things happening recently, the biggest of which was a musical trip to New England, which included my first trip to New York City, which seems to have changed something in me.  If you’ve never been there before (or even if you have—ha ha), the scale of everything is enormous.  There are people everywhere, from everywhere.  Every place you go is crowded.  You can stand on one street corner for just a few short minutes and you may very well hear people speaking ten or fifteen different languages within that time.  Most impressive of all, however, is the scale of the architecture and infrastructure.  It’s staggeringly huge.  You can start in one part of the city, get on a subway train and ride for an hour, and when you get back up to street level, you find that the buildings are still crammed together as far as the eye can see.  Parts of San Francisco are built up densely like that, but not nearly as tall, and only in small parts of town.  New York goes on and on for miles in all directions.  Somehow it manages not to be overwhelming, though, and I actually found myself energized by the bustle.  Every street seemed to be associated with a song title, or a movie scene.  Here’s a picture from the beautiful West Village.

My goal for NYC was to see as many of the various neighborhoods as I could.  Obviously we spent the majority of our time in Brooklyn, but I had a few days to get out and explore, either on my own or with the help of one of my long-time blogging friends.  A lifelong Brooklynite, she was very familiar with the city, and she was a fantastic tour guide and host.

At some point, I’m going to want to recount the stories and pictures from the rest of the trip, but my head is still buzzing from it all and trying to make sense of everything I saw, and all of the interesting and lovely people I met, so for now you’ll have to settle for some pictures.  You can click on them to make them higher resolution.

I happened to be underneath the Brooklyn Bridge at the same time as this yacht (I think it’s a yacht; I have to confess that I don’t know much about boats, but I DO know that it’s one of the racing ones) was passing by, and another photographer and I were taking full advantage of the situation.  I love this picture, and it’s probably my favorite one from the entire trip.

From there, I walked across the bridge to lower Manhattan, all around the Financial District and to the site of Ground Zero and the new World Trade Center.  Here’s one of the new towers, in a late stage of construction.  I love pictures like this, because once the thing is built, you never get to see it ‘in progress’ ever again.  I feel lucky to have been there to see it and take this picture before it was finished.

This was a sticker I saw on a traffic signal pole in Greenwich Village near the Village Vanguard.  It may be blurry, but the message is clear.  I spent the whole trip with my camera—and indeed my entire brain—in ‘record’ mode.

After going full speed ahead for so long—and I haven’t even started writing about the Louisiana or Bay Area trips yet—I’ve found it a bit difficult to transition back into the ‘normal’ pace of life, whatever that is.  You could call this feeling the Post-Travel Blues.  Joseph Campbell might call these feelings ‘peak experiences’, which is to say that when people are operating at their highest levels of consciousness, the things they experience gain a certain amount of gravitas and significance, and settling into everyday life after times like those can be difficult.  I daresay that Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs would support this theory.

I think—and this is me thinking—that when you’re in the upper levels of Self-Actualization and Esteem, it’s hard to be excited about everyday things like homeostasis and excrement.  When you’re traveling, you’re pulled out of the lower realities and pitched into the higher ones, which is what makes travel so exciting.

Incidentally, I just knew that I’d have to mention excrement at some point.  I had to drag this conversation down to my level, didn’t I?  Abraham Maslow, Joseph Campbell, and excrement.  I really should have named this blog High and Low.

Anyway.

There’s more to come on the blogging front, and while I was coming back from the beach this weekend, I thought of a few stories from back in the day that I think will be worth your while, so stay tuned.  Don’t touch that dial or whatever.  We’ll be right back after this important commercial message, courtesy of someone I photographed in Central Park.

So let’s see. . .it’s been a while since I’ve written anything, despite my friend reminding me that I promised—on this very blog—to write more and tell more stories this year.  I’m attempting to hear and obey, and I have a ton of stories, since I went to Louisiana and the Bay Area for gigs recently.  My silence around here definitely isn’t due to a lack of material, it’s due to busy-ness, mixed with inertia, mixed with, um, something else that I can’t quite put my finger on.  It’s created an overwhelming backlog of stories to write about, which is also part of the problem.  I don’t want to dump a ten-thousand-word novella on you, so I’ll have to figure out a way to break up the stories into more manageable lengths.  I’ve had a couple of friends make fun of me recently for posting such gigantic entries.  More often,  however, they’ve made fun of me for not posting anything at all, so there’s that.

Major news on the music front.  My band (which I might call GhostBand for BFS&T’s sake) just finished mastering our CD, after I spent the last few weeks recording the last few parts and then mixing the entire album.  In case you were wondering, mastering is the process by which the ‘master’ CD is created, from which all of the future CD’s will be copied.  It’s the stage of the process in which the songs are officially named, put in album order, and a combination of some technical stuff (equalization, compression and limiting) to make the songs all play at the same volume level and make the individual tracks sound like a coherent collection.  It’s one of the many underlying but crucial steps along the way, and now it’s done.  Mastering is a process that began with vinyl records, because if there was a section of a song that was too loud, or if a sudden low-frequency instrument like a drum or a stand-up bass was too loud, it would make the record skip, or it could damage speakers.  Mastering is a way to smooth everything out, and to eliminate unwanted fluctuations in the overall sound and flow of an album.  CD’s are more forgiving, certainly, but the process is still important, and it really enhances the overall sound.  Our next steps will be to get the thing duplicated (we’re getting a thousand CD’s made), and to design the album cover.  Exciting!  I can’t wait to get this thing released into the world, so that you and everyone else can hear it, love it, and buy it.

We also filmed a video for one of the songs.  Can’t show it yet, because we’re waiting until the album is a bit closer to its release date in August, but it’s done, and it looks amazing.  It showed in a music video screening at the historic Hollywood Theater here in Portland a month or so ago, and that was the first time any of us had seen the finished product.  Our minds were completely blown.  It’s supposed to look (which is to say that it does. . .ha ha) like it was filmed in a night club in 1959.  We all dressed in period clothing, thanks to the costume designer; there are various characters (each with their own miniature stories), dancers, and choreography, and it’s absolutely stunning to watch.  Very distinctive, and it’s all somehow crammed into the framework of a three-minute song.  The filmmakers did a brilliant job.  Okay, okay. . .I CAN share a still from it.  FYI, I’m in the back left, with the vest and red tie, playing the electric guitar.

Pretty swanky, eh?  We used KickStarter to fund this whole process, which is a short way of saying we worked our asses off for an entire month, playing as many gigs as possible, making short promo videos, and generally promoting ourselves in every way we could think of.  And it worked.  We raised enough to pay for the video, and to finish the mastering, duplication and design of the CD.  We also will be paying for the rights to the two cover songs that will be on the album.

At the same time as all this was happening, FrenchSinger and another friend on whose CD I played cello had their own CD release parties a week apart, right before the Louisiana trip, so there was the obligatory flurry of rehearsals and craziness getting ready for those as well.

                                                 

As if that wasn’t enough, there was the photo shoot and KickStarter video for PolishCellist, who is about to start working on her next CD.  Certainly can’t forget about that.  What a hilarious and awesome photo session that was.  And yes, that’s a buffalo-head hat that we’re all wearing.

So that’s the biggest news.  I still have to go through my mountain of pictures from the band-related stuff, and from the trips to Louisiana, California and Washington (the state) with FrenchSinger.  Hopefully, I’ll be able to get some entries posted before my next musical trip, which is in a couple weeks and will take me to New York, Massachusetts (including the town where I was born!), and a dip into New Jersey as well.  Super excited, since I haven’t been back East for quite a long time, and many of these places—notably New York City and Ithaca—I’ve never been to before.

I should mention how grateful I am to have the opportunity to travel, and to play so much great music, and to be in videos, and to have photo shoots.  It’s a huge honor (not to mention expense) to be a part of these various endeavors, and I owe even more thank yous to my friends and collaborators who continue to make it all possible.

More to come.

I had a perfectly normal dream just now. Nothing special, unusual or funny about it whatsoever.

* * * * *

I’m my present adult age, and I’m riding my bike around Eisenhower High School in Yakima, looking for either an English teacher or a football coach because I’ve recently enrolled there. My friends B and C are riding around with me. No one seems to be on campus, but there are these two older guys who are trying to get in too, so they join our little group. We see a secretary through the window, but once we realize that there are no faculty members on campus, the two other guys go their separate ways.

B, C and I ride to the parking lot and see a personalized curb that says, “Don ‘Five Pumps’ Smith” (referring to the number of ‘pumps’ before he had an orgasm) on it in red, white and blue.  His last name isn’t really Smith, but I’m obscuring it because it’s someone—not a friend, incidentally—from my real-life high school class.  Anyway, the three of us laugh at it and continue to ride around. Before long, a blue and white Chevrolet four-wheel-drive pickup pulls into the space, and we ride over to investigate. Donnie ‘Smith’ opens the door, jumps out, and reaches back in to turn off the engine.

“We were wondering whose spot that was,” I say. By way of a response, he removes the gas cap and an extremely loud song starts playing. He replaces the gas cap, which stops the music, but the key is still in the ignition, so that makes a different loud noise. He reaches into the truck, removes the keys from the ignition, puts them in his pocket, and turns back to the three of us.

“What’re you guys doing at the school?” he asks.

“I’m enrolling here to play football,” I tell him, which in real life I never did, outside of our neighborhood.

“Can he do it?” Donnie asks my friend J, who suddenly appears behind me.

“I don’t know,” J says.

“How many goals have you scored?” Donnie asks me. I don’t know why he’s suddenly asking me about soccer rather than football, so I don’t say anything. A somewhat awkward silence follows.

“Well,” J pipes up, “he may not be very strong, but he can go up the middle.”

This bizarre answer seems to satisfy Donnie, who asks J, “Yeah, but how many goals has he scored? Hey, you guys want a ride?” We drop our bikes and eagerly jump in the back of his truck. “I heard your CD,” Donnie says, and I didn’t think you guys’d be into this.” He climbs in, starts the truck, and drives away with us in the back. In less than two minutes’ time, we’re out of town and barreling down a steep, wooded fire road at around seventy miles per hour. The truck is so heavy, and the suspension so high, that the ride is completely smooth, no matter what huge rocks or potholes we encounter along the way. A railroad trestle that crosses over the road forces us to stop and get out of the truck, so we climb up the trestle to continue our journey and find out where the tracks lead. We run along the tracks until they meet with the dirt road again, at which point we climb back down and continue on foot, since we ditched the truck and left our bikes.

We jog along the road until we come to a green and white one-story ranch house next to the point at which the road suddenly comes to a dead end. There are no signs or anything, the road just stops. A woman walks out of the house, talking on a land-line phone attached to the end of a very stretched handset cable. She covers the receiver with her hand and yells to us, in a Southern accent, “Y’all had plenty of warning this was a dead end.”

“We didn’t, actually,” I tell her. “Sorry about that.”

“Well, you might as well come in,” she says. “Y’all want something to eat? I was just having dinner.”

Each of the four of us mumbles his own variation on the theme of, “Well, sure, but we don’t want to put you out,” as she leads us, single-file, to the kitchen and says,”Y’all can figure out some way to pay me later.”

We aren’t quite sure what she means by that, and B and I exchange furtive glances after a quick search of our empty pockets. We slowly file into the kitchen, and I say I need to wash my hands. The woman instantly passes me a bottle of dish soap. I squirt some in my hand and pass the bottle back to her. I reach to turn on the faucet and notice that both sinks are full; one with a dirty pan and the other with hot grease a foot deep, in which are cooking a bunch of fried chicken, some potatoes and carrots, and some doughnuts underneath. I turn to B and say, “This is gonna be amazing,” then turn back to the woman and ask, “Wow, you use real oil to deep-fry all this stuff?”

“That’s right,” she replies. We all stare aimlessly at the sink full of food for a while, and that’s when I wake up.

When I was in sixth grade, one of the crazes in that myopic little world was for everyone in the class to have a small stuffed Garfield doll.  Guys had them, girls had them, everybody had them.  We didn’t play with them, per se, the thing was just to have one in your desk.  Incidentally, my mom told me a few months ago that with the release of the new Garfield movie, the little stuffed dolls were becoming a craze with kids again, thirty years later.   I never saw THAT one coming.

A more universal craze of the time was the Rubik’s Cube, a maddening brain teaser of a toy that took the country, and indeed the world, by storm when it was released in 1980.  You know, one of these:

I was hooked on it too, and even bought a book on how to solve it.  You start by solving one side, then another, and it all sort of comes into place that way.  The book was full of these arcane strings of formulas with acronyms like, “F L U2 R2”, which stand for Front, Left, Upper 2, Right 2, etc.  Some people just gave in and pulled their cubes apart in order to ‘solve’ them, and some people pulled the stickers off and moved them into place, which I think would be a prohibitive amount of work, and it would make the stickers look crappy once they were back on.  But I digress.

I learned to solve the Cube in record speed.  When they would have national competitions on TV, like this one, from the show That’s Incredible. . .

. . .I would always beat them ‘by a large margin’, as my brother used to say.  I wondered how they got to be on TV and everything, when it took them an eternity—like forty-five seconds!—to solve it.  My hat’s off to you if you sat through that entire piece of crap video, by the way.  The episode of the show is staggeringly boring, and the video ends before we even get to find out who wins the contest.  What a letdown!

The world record for solving the Cube was seven seconds, and I could only whittle my time down to around eight.  When I was in New Hampshire visiting my grandparents, one of their neighbors, upon meeting the eleven-year-old me, handed over his scrambled Rubik’s Cube and said, “If you can solve this, you’re a better man than I am.”  Little did he know what he was in for.  I whipped it around and handed it back to him a few seconds later, completely solved.  He gave me a stunned look, and was actually a bit angry and petulant about the whole thing—although he tried to hide it—which I found hilarious.  I got the feeling he didn’t particularly care for kids, and he wanted to give me something to keep me occupied and out of the way of the adults.  I had my secret skill, however, which foiled his little plan.

In the interest of full disclosure, I was telling a friend about this story on the phone today and afterwards said, “This is probably a blog story.”

“It’s totally a blog story,” he replied.  “You should call it ‘Eight Seconds.’  You can start it like this.”  He lowered his voice in imitation of a melodramatic TV announcer.  “Eight seconds.  That’s not the length of time I can stay on a bull, or the amount of time before I have an orgasm, that’s how long it took me to solve the Rubik’s Cube.”

We both laughed, and then he had to get off the phone and return to work, as did I.  I liked his suggestion for the name, but I obviously took some liberty with (i.e., completely disregarded) his other suggestions.

In the interest of even more disclosure (is that possible, after proclaiming the last disclosure ‘full’?), unlike my skill at playing Ms. Pac-Man, which hasn’t ever really dwindled over the intervening decades, my ability to solve the Cube has completely evaporated.  Sad, I know, but it’s the kind of skill you have to use, or else you lose.  I might still have my old Cube in a box somewhere at one of my parents’ houses.  Amazing how little of that childhood stuff actually survived, and also amazing are the things we adults WISH had survived.  My brother and I do still have a bunch of our original Star Wars action figures, and my little Yoda one is the mascot for my recording projects, to remind me and the people working with me, “Do, or do not; there is no ‘try.’ “  More than anything, I wish I had my collection of toy cars.  I have a couple of them, but most of them got given away, or lost, or given to Goodwill, or just. . .vanished.  I also wish I had my collection of cassettes from childhood through high school.  My brother and I made tons of cassettes in which we acted out skits, or made up songs, or just recorded ourselves talking and playing with our friends, being our dorky selves.  Those are my favorites.  I still have a couple of them, but we made tons, and they don’t seem to have survived.  The ones that have survived are worthy of their own separate blog entries.

By way of the television industry calls a ‘teaser,’ I’ll tell you that my favorite of the tapes, which has been safely stored away from almost thirty years until I recently copied it onto my computer and digitized the audio, is entitled, “One in a Million,” and it’s quite possibly the best thing ever.  If my brother will agree to it, I’ll write the story out and post the audio on here.  If he doesn’t, then I’ll have to just tell the story minus the audio, which will still be entertaining.

There is more to come.