After all the heaviness lately, it’s time to get BFS&T back on track, and get some levity around here again.  Who among us doesn’t like levity?

I had a dream the other day in which I was having dinner with my Chinese-American girlfriend and her family.  She and her teenaged sister were both very Americanized, but her parents were not, and they spoke very little English.  We were spending the evening at an upscale Chinese restaurant in downtown Seattle, and a waitress was placing some miniature bowls on the table and making a rather elaborate show of gracefully spooning tiny ladels of seafood stew into each one.  We watched her closely, fascinated, and we each took turns sniffing the delicious stew and commenting on it as our respective bowls would appear at our places.

Somehow the subject of dopamine came up (you know, like it does), and I was trying to explain to my girlfriend’s dad about the various functionalities it has on the brain.  He was having a tough time understanding me, and I was having a tough time simplifying the terminology enough to get the ideas across, but we were both engaged in the conversation, and we were trying to communicate with each other as best we could.  At one point, I attempted to use the seafood stew as a visual aide, but even that was unsuccessful, so we finally agreed to just drop the subject of dopamine altogether and move on to something else.  “It’s really interesting, though,” I finished, a bit disappointed at having to give up on such a good topic.

Given the conversational choice between dopamine, politics, and religion, I’m gonna choose dopamine every time, even (and I daresay especially) on a dinner date with my girlfriend’s family, their tenuous grasp on the English language notwithstanding.

The other day, I had a funny memory from my college years that I can’t believe I haven’t told here before.

One afternoon, I saw a female friend of mine walking across CollegeCampus and thought it would be funny if I surprised her.  I snuck up behind her, put my arm around both of her shoulders and said, “Don’t try anything stupid, and no one will get hurt.”  She stopped walking, turned around, and gave me a gentle but penetrating stare that let me know that this was not an okay thing to do.  That’s the moment in which I realized it wasn’t my friend at all.

You see, there was a student at our school who could have been my friend’s absolute doppelganger.  Both of them were the same height and build, had the same color/length/style of hair, and both wore the same kind of classy, neo-hippie clothing.  From the front, they looked like they could be long-lost sisters, but from behind, they looked exactly the same, which I had to find out the hard way.

The Doppelganger stood and stared at me as I removed my arm from her shoulders and apologized profusely.  “I’m SO sorry,” I told her.  “You look exactly like a friend of mine.  Don’t worry,  no one’s going to get hurt.”  I stepped back a pace.

To my amazement and relief, she gave me a little smile and said, “Yeah, I know.  I’ve seen her around, actually.”

“Thank God,” I said.  “You could’ve easily elbowed me in the ribs, or the groin, and you’d have totally been within your rights to do that.  I’m glad you didn’t, but you certainly could have.  Sorry, again.”

“That’s okay.”  She smiled and turned back in the direction she’d been walking before I accosted her.

A couple of friends and I went to see the documentary film Mellodrama last night, which was all about my favorite musical instruments, the Chamberlin and Mellotron.

When you press a key on one of these instruments, it plays a tape of a cello (or a flute, or an orchestra, or various other instruments) playing the note you want to play.  They were invented with the idea that organists could play the sounds of the orchestra in their homes, but they quickly found their way into recording studios and rock bands, who liked their haunting, ethereal sounds.

The most famous example of a Mellotron sound is the flute at the beginning of Strawberry Fields Forever. . .

. . .but there are countless other famous examples, like the flutes in “Stairway to Heaven” and the lush string parts in “Nights in White Satin” by the Moody Blues.  It’s all over the Fiona Apple albums, as well as Aimee Mann, Micheal Penn, Led Zeppelin, Crowded House, and. . .well, maybe you should go ahead and check out this playlist on Rhapsody.  Listen to the music around the vocals, and the way the instruments interact.  If you hear things that sound like flutes, or lush orchestras, or solo cellos and violins, or vibraphones, it’s probably a keyboard instrument like this instead.

I wish I was lucky enough to own a real Chamberlin, but for now I’m content to have the sample CD from Mellotron Archives, which gives me a ‘best of’ collection of the most widely used sounds, without the expense and hassle of owning a famously unreliable and cantankerous instrument.  Those sounds continue to be my not-so-secret weapons on many of the songs I produce and play on.  This documentary is a fascinating look behind the scenes of a very interesting set of instruments, which was the first incarnation of the idea of sampling as we know it today.

Whether you’re a musician yourself, or simply a music fan who likes to know how music sounds the way it does, this will offer you some great insights into one of the most influential instruments out there.  Lots of well-known people are in the film, including Jon Brion, Brian Wilson, Michael Penn, Patrick Warren, Brian Kehew, Matthew Sweet, and many others.  I urge you to track the film down and watch it.

I’ll be buying it on DVD.

Earlier today, I heard someone mention the phrase, “We only use ten percent of our brains,” and that got me thinking of a number of reasons why that statement isn’t true.  First of all, most human beings are very highly evolved, and every part of our bodies (with the possible exception of the coccyx) has a specific function and purpose.  Things that don’t serve any purpose get evolutionarily ‘weeded out’, you might say, and tens of thousands of years of that process have left us pretty dang streamlined.

Different brain functions are handled by different sections of the brain, so while at this very second you may be using only ten percent of yours by watching television, or by having sex, or by reading this blog, you’ll be using different parts of it to know where your limbs are (without looking), or to recognize your childrens’ faces, or to simply keep your balance, or to recognize subtle social cues, or to play the cello.  You’ll have used your entire brain in just a few minutes without even, dare I say, thinking about it.

Where did the ten-percent myth originate, and why does it persist?  According to Barry Beyerstein, it seems to be a skewed modern outgrowth of an idea put forth by Victorian-era psychologist William James, who was fond of saying that people rarely achieve more than a small amount of their potential.  From there, the idea spread into the public vernacular, where it somehow morphed into ‘ten percent of their potential’, and then into ten percent of the brain.  Once that meme spread out across the world, it never really went away, despite the enormous scientific and technological breakthroughs on the subject during the intervening decades.

I love to find out about the modern discoveries that prove how ‘plastic’ and changeable the brain is, especially following a brain injury.  If you lose your sight, for example, your brain will learn to process things you TOUCH with the visual cortex.  A friend of mine used to have a little blind cat who knew her way around the entire house, could walk right over to you wherever you were, could jump to window sills (and even knew which window sills had decorative stuff in them she needed to avoid, or were sills that she was unable to jump to), and could even climb up and down the fire escape without ever missing a step.  My own cat, who had normal vision, wouldn’t go near the steps of the fire escape because she could see how steep the angle was, and how high up our third-floor apartment really was, and it was all too much for her.  The blind cat would run up and down without a care in the world.  She had the place completely mapped out in her brain, and knew exactly where everything was.

The ten-percent theory seems to rank up there with other misinformed phrases like ‘sweat like a pig’ and ‘eat like a bird.’  Pigs don’t sweat, which is why they lie around in the mud to keep cool, and birds have to eat twice their own weight every day in order to have enough energy for all that flying.  My favorite thing to say, when someone says they eat like a bird, is, “Oh, really?  Twice your own weight every day?  Or do you mean you peck at the food on your plate, without using your hands or utensils?”

The good news, possibly the most heartening of all about the brain theory, is that if you DO only use ten percent of your brain, but you use it to think about THE Brain, that should bump you up to at least a good fifteen or twenty percent right there.

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

déja vu – what 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!