beautiful, funny, sad & true

First of all, you’ll be glad to know that there’s good news on the car front.  I’ll spare you some of the details, but it boils down to the fact that since the distributor fixed the problem, that means that the timing belt is okay, and that I don’t have to do Part Two of the repair Plan.  Yee haw.  I’m still broke, though, for the time being, but at least I’ll only be broke for a month, instead of clear into the new year.

So that’s good, I guess.

Had a couple of odd experiences at shows this past weekend.  At the Breanna and Justin show, we had our first heckler, of sorts.  He was drunkenly walking from table to table and chatting up the all of the ladies, whether they were with their respective guys or not.  Naturally, this included Breanna as well, which already had him on Justin’s radar screen.  In the middle of our second set, Justin started to play one of his songs, which apparently has a similar chord progression to a classic rock song, because the guy started laughing and singing the classic rock song really loudly.  Justin stopped playing and said, “Do you want to come up here and sing?”

“No, I just blahblah suck blahblah mumble mumble.”

“Y’know what?  I don’t like you very much.”

“I don’t like you either.”  This was a very awkward and tense moment.  No one, including us, had any idea what this guy was likely to do next.

Justin’s honesty and diplomacy kicked in.  “Here’s the thing.  As a musician, you spend your whole life learning how to play the guitar, how to sing, how to write songs.  Then you go and play them for people, and some people really like them.  And that’s great.  Some people don’t like them, and that’s cool too.  Not everybody has to like them.  But if you don’t like it, and you don’t want to be here, then you can go ahead and leave.”

The guy stood up and walked slowly to the front of the stage, looked at Justin angrily for a second, then turned and walked down the stairs and out of the room.  Everyone clapped for Justin, out of a sense of relief and a bit of amazement too, I think.

The rest of the show was stellar after that.  We felt energized and invigorated, and played our best.  Before that, we had some technical problems, and some sound problems, and it was an ‘off’ cello night for me, which I have occasionally.  I even have them sometimes when I play guitar, after all these years.  Incidentally, November 20th (that’s tomorrow) is the anniversary of the day that I got my very first guitar, clear back in 1985.  I’ll let you work out the math on that, and in the meantime, I’ll try to scrounge up a picture.

At the IrishBand show on Saturday, Singer and his girlfriend had an argument. That’s all I’ll say about it, partly because they seem to have worked things out, and partly because both of them are readers of this blog.  All seems to be forgiven, but it did make for an uncomfortable show, and a short one at that.

Singer called me first thing in the morning to ask me if I was still up for our musician friend’s birthday brunch, which I had to confess that I’d forgotten about.  I said yes, I’d love to go, and he and Violinist came and picked me up.  The party was a blast.  We had quiche, and bacon (Singer, a lifelong vegetarian, ate bacon for the first time!), and cheesy potatoes of some sort, and all kinds of muffins and bagels, and fruit, and chai, and the best Bloody Mary I’ve ever had in my entire life.  Violinist even stuck a piece of bacon in his, which looked repulsive, but. . .well, he seemed to enjoy it.  I wished that I had my camera with me, but at least I had my phone, so here’s a picture.

We left around 1:30 and came back to my place to do record some parts (djembe, vocals, and violin) for one of our songs.  Sounds really good so far, but it isn’t quite there yet, so we have some re-recording to do.

In other news, CincinnatiFriend is in town to defend her dissertation.  She’s actually doing that as I’m writing this, and I’m going to go and visit her after I’m done at work.  I’m super excited to see her again.  She moved a year and half ago, and I can’t believe it’s been that long.  I’m taking tomorrow off from work so that we can either go to all of her favorite haunts, or take a little day trip and catch up about everything.

Mom and Stepdad are coming to visit from Yakima on Friday, which should be fun.  They’ll be staying with me, for the first time since I’ve lived here in Portland.  This is the first time that I’ve had the right kind of living space (and the right kind of furniture) to make that possible and enjoyable for all of us.  Wish me luck.  We’re gonna do lots of cooking, and a bit of shopping, and J’s going to get to meet them.  Hopefully CincinnatiFriend and RockShowGirl will get to meet them too.

Should be a great week.  I’ll keep you posted.

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

Late last night, one of my friends sent me an e-mail containing a link to a WebSiteLikeTV video of pictures that were taken at my high school reunion, which happened about a month ago.  Naturally, I gave it a miss, because it’s a well-established fact by now that I hated both high school and the town I grew up in. I have no nostalgia for that time of my life at all.  I think if I could have it surgically excised from my head, I’d sign up for that procedure before you could finish saying, ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.’

Based on the pictures from the event, it looks as if about thirty people attended the reunion, out of a graduating class of around four hundred.  Normally for something like this, I would post a link to the video so that you could experience it too, but believe me when I tell you that in this case I’m doing you a favor by not including it.  I recognized about five people, and only one or maybe two would have been nice to chat with for a while. 

Everyone went bar hopping on both Friday and Saturday night, and then had a picnic in the park on Sunday, which involved all their kids and families, and sounded pretty awful.  Most, it seems, married others from the class and stayed in town.  If that had been my fate, I have no doubt that I would not be alive today.  I feel very fortunate to have escaped Yakima’s event horizon.

[shudder]

Moving on.

In other news, I got a call from my friend Jim, whose studio I’ve been planning to use for both new recording projects starting this month, to tell me that the golf course outside his place is being completely torn up, redesigned, and then rebuilt.  Construction started Monday and will last until spring.  The crews, with their huge earth movers, will be working approximately ten hours per day, six days a week.  This leaves only Sundays for recording purposes.  This is not the end of the world, or the end of either project, but it sure puts a cramp on our collective style.

Work has been extremely stressful this week.  Thank gawd for the play-reading group tonight, a gig with IrishBand tomorrow night, and a gig down in Salem with Breanna ‘n’ Justin on Friday night.   And remember Andrea, who moved to Switzerland right after we finished her CD?  She’s in town this week and next, so I’m going to go see her play a show on Saturday, and hopefully make some time to get some Ethiopian food while she’s here.

Our apartment building is getting a new heating system this week.  The good news is that the people whose apartments are freezing in the winter will no longer have to freeze, the people whose apartments are boiling will no longer have to boil, and the fuel tank which runs out of fuel on the coldest nights of the year will no longer have to be filled.  The bad news is that we’ll each have to pay for our own heat, which we haven’t had to do thus far.  I know; I know.  I shouldn’t complain about that, because we have such a good thing going here.  But it will be a tremendous improvement over the antiquated boiler and heating system.  I’ll miss the central fan, though.  I sure hope they keep that around for the summers.

Hmm.  How to end this entry. . .

Well, here you go. Since we were talking about YouTube (no, I’m not going to include the reunion), here’s a funny video about an Australian oil tanker crash.

Yesterday was my mom’s birthday, and I called her last night.  We talked for a while, and one of the things she mentioned is that she occasionally checks in on my blog to ‘see how things are going.’  My mom reads my blog, and she’s apparently been doing it for some time now.

Great.

With all those posts I’ve written about Satan and feces and third grade memories, not to mention all the copious amounts of premarital sex weird dreams and my judicious but regular smattering of naughty words, she probably thinks that her real baby son must have somehow been swapped in the hospital for this devil’s spawn.

But the most egregious thing of all (for her, anyway) has to be my non-stop trash-talking about Yakima, which is decidedly well-deserved, but she can’t stomach it.  I have a kinda funny story about that, actually, which involves my niece’s favorite TV show, which we all couldn’t help but watch with her while we were at the beach a few weeks ago.

It’s a national show, which you probably haven’t seen, let alone enjoyed, if you’re over the age of ten.  It’s about PrecociousTeenageGirl, and it’s set in Seattle, where Niece lives.  The grandparents on the show even live in Yakima, where one set of Niece’s grandparents live.  The hijinks ensued in one episode when it looked as if PTG was going to be sent to live with her grandparents.  She didn’t want to go, and she kept making all these lame jokes about Yakima and how bad it is (“oh, the sweet smell of Yakima”, et cetera).  I kept waiting for them to actually take her there, and have some scenes set in the town, which I’m sure they would have filmed in Salinas, California instead, anyway.  It has the exact same feel and look as Yakima, except for the fact that Salinas has the brilliant John Steinbeck rooting for it.  Raymond Carver and I are Yakima’s vox populi spokespeople, and we have nothing good to say about the place.

But that’s neither here nor there.

I found that episode surreal and hilarious.  No wonder it’s Niece’s favorite show; the writers practically frickin’ wrote it for her, and set it in the two places she knows best in the world.  I couldn’t stop cracking up at the irony of the situation, so between my incredulous laughter and the show’s cloying laugh track in response to every generic joke, my mom got angry and had to go upstairs to get away from it all.

I couldn’t tear myself away from the stupid show, and I actually watched the thing in its entirety. You’ll be glad to know that PTG did not, in fact, get sent to live in Yakima, because GenXGuardian (her older brother?) came through in the end to prove that despite his slacker appearance, he really was quite the responsible young gentleman when it came to raising her.  Awww.  Wipe my tears and cue the organist.

I suppose I don’t have a real reason to feel weird about my mom reading all this.  She knows (pretty much) what I’m like, this is all real stuff, and I feel like it’s a good representation of me, slightly-glossed-over warts and all.

But it still does feel weird.  I’m sure you understand.

Last week was super busy, so now I finally have a spare moment to sit, and process, and also to get you up to speed.

Wednesday night was the first play-reading group we’ve had since Tossed In tossed in the towel on leading the group. A handful of us have been persistent about keeping the group going, and after about two months, we finally managed to make it happen. We read the script for the movie My Dinner With Andre.

It was an amazing evening. A few of us were die-hard fans of the movie, and knew our favorite parts almost by heart, and a few of us had never seen or heard of the movie, so it made for a particularly interesting discussion. I really should say ‘discussions’, because we stopped many times along the way to switch to different readers, and to discuss the section that we’d just finished reading.

A couple of us had our favorite sections that we really wanted to read. I read Andre’s section about the Little Prince and about how New York is the new model for concentration camps, and Matt read Wally’s introduction, his argument near the end, and his ending monologue. We all discussed different ideas for staging this work as a play, and the various ways we could bring the various scenes to life, while still retaining the feel of a dinner. It was an amazing evening, and a passionate discussion all the way around.

Afterwards, Matt, Lindsay and I went to Squeez for a drink. I really should say ‘another drink’, because we’d already had plenty at the reading. We shared some quesadillas and continued the discussion about the play and about various other things.

Matt was too shy to want his picture taken that night. I tried to surreptitiously snap a picture of him and Lindsay while they were at the bar ordering, but the picture didn’t come out. Not that these did especially well, but the other ones are even worse, I promise you. I love the colors inside Squeez. It’s just a really cool, comfortable place to meet with your friends.

Oh, and for the record, I’m lucky enough to have found a very special copy of the script for MDWA. . .it was autographed in 1982, by both Andre Gregory and Wallace Shawn, AND it’s inscribed to someone here in Portland. A bunch of years ago, I went looking for the script, and finally found it at HugestBookseller. I decided to wait, however, and felt that another one would turn up, despite the fact that I had already been fruitlessly searching for it for years. No matter, I had a hunch.

The next day I went to Powell’s (even though I’d checked there countless times before) and sure enough, I was rewarded with this:

Talk about synchronicity. . .which fits in perfectly with the themes of the script, too. The autograph picture I left at higher resolution, so you can read what they wrote. I love it.

I first saw the movie when I lived in Yakima, at the age of twenty-four, and was mesmerized by it. I instantly went and tried to find out as much as I could about both of the guys, and all of the references they made to actors, directors, books, plays. . .everything. Jerzy Grotowski, The Master and Maragarita, The Little Prince, I couldn’t wait to understand what they were talking about. For the record, not a single one of my friends shared my enthusiasm for this movie. I raved about it, and even made a few people watch it, but they got bored and gave up after a few minutes. (I think this has something to do with the adage, ‘You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.’)

Anyway, it’s one of my all-time favorites, and it also introduced me to the Little Prince, which to this day I re-read every year or two, and I’ve probably had to buy ten or twelve copies of it over the years, because I’ve loaned so many out and never gotten them back. That’s okay, in this instance, because the story is so beautiful that I want everyone to read it, and I hope that they get as much out of it as I have.

And I have my friends Wally and Andre to thank for it.