radical druid

I've been blogging since fall of 2001.

In that time, I've reformatted my look and feel, changed platforms from Live Journal to Movable Type (then watched as Six Apart bought and merged the two), and experimented with tags, clusters, groups, lists, ratings and advertising. I've Bloggered and Xanga'd and even dipped my toe into Deadjournal. I also ended up with about seven different websites, because it seemed like all the services I needed or wanted [read: all the ways I wanted to be found] were not available in one place, and were not really compatible with each other (i.e., one site had groups and photos, but you couldn't substitute a different blog or synchronize multiple blogs, another site had great networking but poor editing, another had horrible layout and formatting options, but cool calendars, etc.). Two websites, four blogs, MP3 hosting, musicians classifieds listings, MySpace, Launchcast, Pandora. And more, even. As Bugs Bunny once quipped, "the mind boggleth."

One's destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things. - Henry Miller, US author (1891-1980)

My house says to me, “do not leave me, for here dwells your past.” And the road says to me, “Come and follow me, for I am your future.” And I say to both my house and the road, “I have no past, nor have I a future. If I stay here, there is a going in my staying; and if I go there is a staying in my going. Only love and death change all things.” - Kahlil Gibran

So rather than slip even further from the ridiculous to the sublime, this year I've decided to undo some of this deliberate schizophrenia. Rather than try to do everything online, I've decided to simplify. Apply the principle of Occam's razor, so to speak, wherein the simplest approach is more than likely the correct one.

It seems too easy. But it also seems like a vacation I need to take; a landmark I need to visit.

Each time you draw a straight line in the sand --- or as Kabir says, “when you put one foot in front of the other” --- you have defined a course of action, a new direction that leads to an unknown realm, a future where there is no map. Krishnamurti said it was a pathless land, this place where truth waits, longing only to be discovered. The safety of a dwelling place, its warm familiarity, can lull to sleep but yet never fully anesthetize the wanderlust of the wild, searching soul, which beckons us to dare beyond the stoop and forge a fresh road into tomorrow. -- from On Journeys and Destinations, John Litzenberg (2003)

So here goes nothing. Again.

OK, so as of January 4, I've quit smoking. Roughly a 25-year, 2 pack a day habit and now it's done. No patch. No gum. No Wellbutrin XL (which my better half who also quit needed to help her over the first week). I did have a doozy of a cold, though, which qualifies somewhat as cheating --- since I tend to not smoke whenever I have a fever-cough-chest congestion condition and I get them for a week once or twice a year. This one happened to coincide with the smoking cessation date. So sue me.

I'm hoping that the non-smoking, in combination with voice strengthening exercises from Jaime Vendera, will help me recover what has for the last 8 or 9 years been a slowly increasing loss of range (about an octave and a half lost in that time).

I wonder, however, whether it in fact is the smoking that has been the primary factor, or the lack of use. I also wonder about polyps. My cousin had them and had to have them removed, and I've known several other singers who have suffered the same situation.

---
1 month 5 hours 32 minutes smoke-free
1,254 cigarettes not smoked
$238.26 saved
4 days 8 hours 30 minutes life saved

One of the blogs I read pretty regularly is Dave Pollard's How to Save the World. Occasionally, something he writes strikes a particularly resonant chord with me --- like his February 4th gem A Miniature Truth: Becoming Authentically Yourself.

I'll admit, some of these things I've thought and compiled myself over the years. But to see these 9 ideas strung together, in fact, dependent on each other in such a way that in order to accept one as truth, you really have to accept them all, for better or worse, in order to truly understand the implications of each, is a step I'd never taken until reading Dave's post. In summary, these truths are:

1. We do what we must, then we do what's easy, then we do what's fun.

2. Things are the way they are for a reason; if you have any hope to change something, first understand what the reason is.

3. Life's meaning, and an understanding of what needs to be done, emerges, most often, from conversation in community with people you love.

4. Community is born of necessity.

5. To get people to change, first Let Yourself Change, to become a model that shows people personally, one-to-one, a better way to live.

6. You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

7. Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.

8. To be nobody-but-yourself --- in a world that is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else --- means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

9. Our civilization is in its final century.

For more detail, please refer to Dave's blog :)

As always, LunaNina.com | Unconscious Mutterings brings good things to life:

What women want :: respect
Epidemic :: out of control
Taxes :: and death
Hello :: world
Confidential :: pssst
Lights :: action
Summation :: closing
Hard feelings :: none taken
Electric :: mind control electric guitar
Fresh start :: can we start again, please?

Kris Kristofferson has a song called To Beat the Devil. If you haven't listened to the lyrics lately, they're about a recommendation from the devil on the meaninglessness of trying to change the world with your music, and Kris' response to that challenge. The Devil's argument goes like this:

"If you waste your time a-talkin' to the people who don't listen,
"To the things that you are sayin', who do you think's gonna hear.
"And if you should die explainin' how the things that they complain about,
"Are things they could be changin', who do you think's gonna care?"

There were other lonely singers in a world turned deaf and blind,
Who were crucified for what they tried to show.
And their voices have been scattered by the swirling winds of time.
'Cos the truth remains that no-one wants to know.

But I tell you what: that's defeatist thinking. I used to say that in order to change the way people think, you first have to make sure they're thinking. That's a bit of a downer, too. It's a cynic's approach to life. That everything sucks. That there is inevitably a need for either bitter coating on the sugar pills, or sugar coating on the bitter pills. The cynic lives their life believing that human beings, and this must needs include themselves, are intrinsically no damned good. And what, pray tell, is the point of that? Better, I think, to retain at least a little optimism, or at least perserverance and stubborness of purpose, if you can't muster a bit of a smile, so that like Kristofferson, you can say:

And you still can hear me singin' to the people who don't listen,
To the things that I am sayin', prayin' someone's gonna hear.
And I guess I'll die explaining how the things that they complain about,
Are things they could be changin', hopin' someone's gonna care.

I was born a lonely singer, and I'm bound to die the same,
But I've got to feed the hunger in my soul.
And if I never have a nickle, I won't ever die ashamed.
'Cos I don't believe that no-one wants to know.

Once again, LunaNina.com | Unconscious Mutterings helps me uncover a little more of the soft white underbelly:

Score :: rank
Luxurious ::sumptuous
Party ::crowd
Limited edition ::short supply
Security :: blanket
Betty :: Boop
Under construction :: work in progress
Pest ::control
Director :: honcho
Express :: delivery

An almost palatable excuse for self-discovery, catered lovingly by LunaNina.com | Unconscious Mutterings:

Passport :: photo
Small world :: after all
Radio :: free transmission
Marine :: band
Wall :: of shame
Wanna be :: your dog
Pigtails :: pippi longstocking
Hyphen :: ated
9.99 :: won't do
Unrated :: unclassified

This is a reprint of a blog entry from 2002:

When in doubt of where to go musically, when questioning one's ability to hear harmonic structures, to find the “in” groove or chord, or if just in need of a general aural cleansing, there is nothing that will substitute for Ornette Coleman.

I first experienced Ornette's harmolodics at Berklee, where often friends and I would spend late nights with the eightfold attack of of Coleman's Free Jazz: A Improvision by the Double Quartet "barrelling forth from the speakers like the Mongol horde” (a quote from my journals at the time). Now, when you want to learn about phrasing, you turn to Miles' Sketches of Spain; when you want close-knit harmony that weaves in and out around the beat, I always like to put on The Gerry Mulligan Songbook; and when needing to hear just how much you can do in just two choruses (and how anything more than that is simply unnecessary, if you do it right), there's nothing like Charlie Parker. Doesn't matter what your instrument is, or what style you think you play. If you want to focus on these aspects of music, here's where the clues are.

But if you want to know the secret of space, to stretch your ears, to cut to the bare bones, there's no substitute for Ornette Coleman. Just like James Brown can teach you, particularly on Love Power Peace (live in Paris, 1971) that there is nothing outside of a groove (or maybe, cosmologically, it's THE groove), Ornette can help you understand just how melodic the entire world is. Ah ... but I digress ...

Did I mention that it makes great headphone music?

Back to my wonderful cup of tea, a darkened room, and that plastic saxophone ...

Here's a poem that I wrote one night in Memphis after listening Ornette and discussing Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein over endless strong coffee ...

Plastic Pocket Harmolodics

(1993)

Run down changeling boots the funk,
improves the shunned extractionary;
"Stove" in traction rips rough, ready,
pocket not for inner sanctums.

Cherry cola coughs surrender:
queasy Compton did the mother,
freaking heat in slumber tumble;
his xray eyelids slip the winking.

Bop, the Bird, the sticky finger ---
fallen anglos sin cojones
open quiet, quick and greasy;
down the town round wound up lounging.

Run down starlings, cop the mutants;
the groove pontificates for Shiva.
Flip the whip trip, banned in Boston,
this Coleman-ation's green and hunchbacked.

Cherry, copper-coated, kicks
mazal tov and "Off the Mutha!"
speaking shit in rumble mumble;
"X" the spot where Malcolm put it.

Stop the word, the slippery jungle,
pent up houses of the holy.
Open skies bleed hard and humble;
Central busts the changes open.

'Tis a puzzlement, via LunaNina.com | Unconscious Mutterings:

Protocol :: rules
Girlfriends ::significant others
Shoulders ::Atlas shrugged
Coming home :: centering
Let it in ::let it go
Honor :: roll
Tyler :: and Tippecanoe, too
Thriller :: chiller
Angela:: Davis
The winner is :: (drum roll)

Prior to Hurricane Katrina, as most of you probably know, I owned a lot of books. Literally thousands. Between Sunny and I, probably tens of thousands.

One of the books I acquired in the months prior to the great water-log of 2005 was a slim volume by jazz pianist Kenny Werner entitled Effortless Mastery: Liberating the Master Musician Within.

I know I wrote about it, and quoted from it, at the time because it made a definite and deep impression on me, particularly with respect to why we as musicians feel it necessary to play at all, and what drives us to maddening attempts at continual perfection (maddening, for the most part, because these attempts are doomed to failures of varying degree).

I recently reacquired the book, and this time when reading through it, I was struck by a correlation between Kenny's philosophy and that line from Saint-Exupery's The Little Prince:

"...what is essential is invisible to the eye."

There are those that tell you that BB King can convey more with one note than most other guitarists can say in five minutes of scale shredding. I myself have said that playing the blues is about speaking the truth by creating each line of melody as you proceed, rather than simply hinting at it by playing circles around it. I think it comes down to that saying, "Life isn't about finding yourself. It is about creating yourself."

In other words, that one note from BB means more because it is in fact the only note that could be played at that time. It's not a suggestion or potential answer, despite BB's humble apology that it goes "...something like this."

A musician has depth because each note they produce has chiaroscuro, something else I've talked about before:

Nothing holds a shape without its shadow,
that place at the edge where the lines are rough,
and sharp defined shapes blur in a limbo
made of innuendo and the small stuff

that, in shades of gray, fills up silent space,
shifting with the slightest movement of light
to redefine the angle of a face,
moving what was once unseen into sight.

Compared to that substance, that space within the jar that makes the jar useful (to paraphrase a Zen parable), the effort from a predominant number of musicians can seem like a cardboard cut-out, an endless parade of meaningless notes, a cacophony of mind-numbing technical exercises ... a lot of "talkin' loud and sayin' nothin'".