Moving past the crap

My past is what it is, and no amount of shuffling the pieces around on the board will change that. I cannot dig those pieces up out of my past and make them go away. Those are the pieces that are on my board. I need to find a way to play those pieces that will allow me to get the shit done that I need to do.

I need to move past the “therefores.” Shitty things happened to me, therefore I am damaged. Shitty things happened to me, and therefore I am strong and resilient. Screw the “therefores,” especially the ones that result in conclusions about myself. Therefore I am A. Therefore I am B. You know what? Fuck “therefore I am.”

“Shitty things happened to me, therefore shitty things happened to me,” is as far as I need to go. My past is damaged, and I need to build a fence around it so that it doesn’t bleed forward and soak into — and fuck up — my future.

My past is damaged, yes. Well guess what, I still need to get shit done — the shit I am going to badly regret not doing because I’ve decided that it’s the shit I was put on this Earth to do.

I also really need to stop swinging my fists at people who haven’t been in my life for twenty years, and hitting the entirely uninvolved people who are standing right next to me in the here and now. Somehow, I have to stop doing that. I don’t know how. I think it involves just not doing it.

It also involves going away for a while and just getting my work done a la Steven Pressfield’s “do the work.”

Down periscope. See you all in a bit.

AGH

I’ve got so much left to do. One thing on SoundCloud, not even in what’s really a final, polished form. A whooooole lot of other pieces still to go into the woodshed for refinement, or what little refinement I can give them since to be blunt, I am not a concert soloist.

This isn’t even step one. This is step 0.0000000001. Step a zillionth.

I’ve got a long row to hoe. I almost wish things were like they were in the very distant past, where the sheet music was the final finished product.

And in other news, I really have to stop swinging my fists at people who haven’t been near me for twenty years, and hitting the perfectly inoffensive people standing next to me in the here and now. The bursts of short-tempered biliousness are beginning to annoy even me.

Choose-your-own-reaction to mass tragedy: a handy guide

At a loss for how to react to terrible tragedy as a result of human brutality? Fear not, simply choose one of the following responses:

[blanket statement about American imperialist cruelty being oh so much worse]

Pro: You think it makes you look enlightened and compassionate.

Con: It doesn’t. It makes you look like a cold prick.

[blanket statement about rounding any subgroup of people up]

Pro: You think it makes you look practical.

Con: It doesn’t. It makes you look like a cold prick.

It’s vitally important to retain the belief that these are the only two valid responses in existence. You may not choose another way to respond, so don’t entertain that idea even for a minute.

Sincere and — more importantly, unqualified — expressions of sympathy are not to be engaged in. Expressions of compassion must always be footnoted to make sure everyone knows which tribe you are a member of, because we all know that allowing the tribalism at the center of your identity to push its way ahead of the unornamented compassion we should all feel for one another is the solution to these sorts of events. Right? Right.

Just bumped a half a C note at the Red Cross. Go do the same.

Audacity book is here, more problem-solving on five sharps

There’s that one annoying bit that I used to clean up with the pedal, and I think I’m going to have to try cleaning it up another way, with a slide on my thumb from the A# to the G#, to keep there from being a noticeable gap between those two notes that I don’t want. Other than, that it’s just slow practice and making sure I pedal properly. There’s some pedaling work that I have to mentally go over in the last section of the piece as well, just to make sure it’s as clean as I can get it. Almost no chords in it though, so no mental ranting at myself for inadvertently rolling them at least.

Also, the book is here, and I plan to poke around in it all this week.

Also here are three cans of the most delicious coffee from Cafe du Monde, and I really look forward to having some this weekend. Probably won’t be as good as I remember with the sunshine and the beignets, but I’ll enjoy it nonetheless. The stuff I bought online was the full-strength stuff, but the coffee I drank when I was actually at Cafe du Monde was the decaf, and it was still the best coffee I ever tasted.

They overdid the powdered sugar on the beignets, though. Way too much — looked like they had dumped a full half-cup of the stuff over the things, and I had the hard luck of wearing a black shirt. By the time I was done eating, I looked like a little kid who had been told to clap the erasers before class. (They were good though, once I scraped the blizzard off the top.)

Here’s a recipe for the things — the original one made something insane like ten servings, and asked for seventeen thousand pounds 7 freakin cups of flour. I live alone. No way am I making anything that requires 7 cups of flour! I suspect that even halving it is too much, and I may end up getting the box mix from CdM, inglorious though that may be.

Advantages to being a middle-aged artist with a day career

Just a quick observation before I get to bed and awaken tomorrow ready to get back into the woodshed:

It occurs to me that there are more advantages to being an older artist — and having the Dreaded Day Job — than are often stated. Well, a set of advantages in particular that seem to get overlooked, anyhow.

If you are older, and you have had time in business with at least some executive-level responsibilities, you have a better awareness than most starry-eyed kids of what’s needed to get it done. You are aware that in every job, there is the Fun Work and the Crap Work, the exciting visionary stuff and the boring grind part of things. And you don’t get down over the grind — you just do it. You are used to having part of something (at least!) be boring crap that you need to force yourself to look in the face and get over with.

You are used to moving forward despite a distinct lack of Inspiration.

And you are not surprised by this. You don’t regard a bad day — or even a long string of them — as a sign that you should quit. You just gird your loins, put on your Big Person-of-Indeterminate-Gender Pants and get it done.

Voices of insecurity chattering in your head? You set your alarm, get up, and get the hell into work.

Not a morning person? Well too bad, the rest of the world wants you to be one. Set your alarm, and get the hell up.

Feeling stressed? Well, that progress report ain’t gonna write itself. Get the hell to work.

And that sort of don’t-wait-for-inspiration attitude is needed to complete a creative project.

I’m just thinking of how loud the chattering it-won’t-matter-no-one-will-care-anyway voices have gotten in my head lately, the closer I seem to get to things, and how I can still move forward.

Voices chattering telling me that the world won’t give a damn? Well, let them chatter while I buy that sound card.

The Ghost of Garbage Past moaning in my ear? Moan away, I’m going to hook up this thing to my computer in the meantime.

These voices can’t reach out and grab my hand to stop me from clicking on the “place order” link at Amazon to get that shielded cable I need to get a cleaner signal out of the Clav. Let them babble while I get the cable. I’ve spent more than a few nights in sweats worrying about some enormous pile of whatever that I’ve had to get done at work with too little time and too few resources. Compared to that — which sometimes can carry on for quite some time — a niggling voice in my head is effing small potatoes.

And I like my job, and I’ve got those voices. I’m not naive enough to imagine that if I have insecurity or fear related to my job, that that means I should get another one. Nor am I naive enough to imagine that if I have insecurity or fear about my music, that it means I shouldn’t do that, either. You get used to ignoring your fear when your paycheck is on the line. It builds a habit of getting to work no matter what.

And there’s the fact that I can bullet-list a project plan in my head at this point, especially one as dog-simple as putting out a collection of music (dog-simple compared to the crap I balance at work, anyhow). I’ve got the strategic and tactical plans for the whole evolution pretty much planned out, and I’m just going through it step by step by step.

There are a lot of ways in which the maturity *snerk* of middle-age and the experience that comes with almost twenty years in corporate life will make me a better artist, or at least one that realizes that:

1) it’s not all sipping ambrosia with the Muse,
2) the negative voices don’t actually mean very much,
3) it doesn’t matter if I don’t ship, and
4) how to bullet-point the shipping process and actually get it done.

This is another big part of why I think the “Get A Job” attitude is a good one for artists to have. It really helps you negotiate the world in which we live, as opposed to the gauzy Artistic Plane we can all too easily get lost on.

Oh god, a meme

1. WERE YOU NAMED AFTER ANYONE?
My father had a coworker named NAME, so that’s where it came from. He wanted to name the baby when my mom was pregnant with me, and my mom agreed although she privately reserved veto power. He came home and suggested NAME one night, and my mom liked it. They decided to spell it differently when I was in first grade.

2. WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME YOU CRIED?
No idea.

3 DO YOU LIKE YOUR HANDWRITING?
Not at all. If it weren’t for block capital letters, I’d be unable to write at all.

4. WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE LUNCH MEAT?
Hard salami, but I don’t have it often.

5. DO YOU HAVE KIDS?
No.

6. IF YOU WERE ANOTHER PERSON, WOULD YOU BE FRIENDS WITH YOU?
Probably not. I’m a little curmudgeonly if you haven’t noticed. Two people with this short a fuse in a room together is not a good idea.

7. DO YOU USE SARCASM A LOT?
Too much, but considerably less than I used to.

8. DO YOU STILL HAVE YOUR TONSILS?
Yes.

9. WOULD YOU BUNGEE JUMP?
No. Skydive yes, bungee jump no. If I’m jumping, it’s because I want to be down there. Hanging upside down from my ankles does not appeal.

10. WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE CEREAL?
Not a fan.

11. DO YOU UNTIE YOUR SHOES WHEN YOU TAKE THEM OFF?
Don’t wear shoes that tie. Mostly clogs and loafers.

12. DO YOU THINK YOU ARE STRONG?
Not even a little bit.

13. WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE ICE CREAM?
Probably Ben and Jerry’s Coffee Heath Bar Crunch. Or Chunky Monkey. Or White Russian. Something I associate with college, when that brand just came out.

14. WHAT IS THE FIRST THING YOU NOTICE ABOUT PEOPLE?
Just overall appearance. Faces, mostly. I can latch onto faces for a long time. How someone walks or moves, too.

15. RED OR PINK?
Red.

16. WHAT IS THE LEAST FAVORITE THING ABOUT YOURSELF?
My flawless ability to annoy and eventually even offend people I like.

17. WHO DO YOU MISS THE MOST?
My dad. My kitties. My uncle.

18. WHAT IS THE TECHNIQUE THAT YOU NEED TO WORK ON THE MOST?
Trills, tremolos, and not rolling chords inadvertently. Probably not how the framers of these questions intended me to answer, but oh well. The correct answer is probably pedaling.

19. WHAT COLOR SHOES ARE YOU WEARING?
Black.

20. WHAT WAS THE LAST THING YOU ATE?
A Hershey’s kiss.

21. WHAT ARE YOU LISTENING TO RIGHT NOW?
Traffic outside.

22. IF YOU WERE A CRAYON, WHAT COLOR WOULD YOU BE?
Very, very dark burgundy.

23. FAVORITE SMELLS?
Fresh air, with a little ocean salt.

24. HOW IMPORTANT ARE YOUR POLITICAL VIEWS TO YOU?
More important than I wish they were. Politics gives me intestinal ulcers.

25. MOUNTAIN HIDEAWAY OR BEACH HOUSE?
Beach house. Mountain hideaways take too long to drive to and ruin your transmission.

26. FAVORITE SPORTS TO WATCH?
Hockey, much to my eternal annoyance. It’s the other thing that gives me intestinal ulcers.

27. HAIR COLOR?
Extremely dark brown, going grey mostly at the temples, which amuses me.

28. EYE COLOR?
Green.

29. DO YOU WEAR CONTACTS?
Used to. Dry eyes nixed that.

30. FAVORITE FOOD?
No idea. Probably a fistfight between kumquats, Stayman Winesap apples, and sushi.

31. SCARY MOVIES OR HAPPY ENDINGS?
Neither. Hate movies.

32. LAST MOVIE YOU WATCHED?
“The Enchanted Island,” which is an opera.

33. WHAT COLOR SHIRT ARE YOU WEARING?
Red. Like, the red in a Crayola 8-pack.

34. SUMMER OR WINTER?
Summer, as long as it’s dry. If it’s humid, then even June 21 at the South Pole beats it by a mile.

35. FAVORITE DESSERT?
Can’t think of one I don’t like. Pecan pie, I suppose.

36. STRENGTH TRAINING OR CARDIO?
Please, this is me we’re talking about here. Walking.

37. COMPUTER OR TELEVISION?
Clearly computer, as I don’t own a TV. Passive cultural sludge pump.

38. WHAT BOOK ARE YOU READING NOW?
Nothing at the moment. Soon to be a book about Audacity.

39. WHAT IS ON YOUR MOUSE PAD?
A corporate logo.

40. FAVORITE SOUND?
My kitty lying on my pillow and purring on a Saturday morning.

41. FAVORITE GENRE OF MUSIC?
I’d say “classical” but that’s 800 years worth of stuff so I need to be more specific. Probably Baroque, late Romantic, and melodic rock. Force me to choose at gunpoint and I’ll say Baroque but my eyelid will twitch.

42. WHAT IS THE FARTHEST YOU HAVE BEEN FROM HOME?
Paris.

43. DO YOU HAVE A SPECIAL TALENT?
Learning languages. I pick them up like most people pick up colds. Mathematics. Same thing, and I consider it an instantiation of the language learning. Probably it all boils down to intuiting grammatical structure.

44. WHERE WERE YOU BORN?
Someplace.

45. WHERE ARE YOU LIVING NOW?
Someplace else.

46. WHAT COLOR IS YOUR HOUSE?
Don’t own one.

47. WHAT COLOR IS YOUR CAR?
Royal blue.

48. DO YOU LIKE ANSWERING 48 QUESTIONS?
Enough to finish.

I’m too crabby lately.

I’ll try to dial it back a bit.

Music and synaesthesia

The Empire of Ice Cream by Jeffrey Ford

A favorite short story of mine — Ford’s books are at Amazon.com. Go buy a couple. You won’t regret it.

Absolute pitch, I don’t have. I can get a song in the right key, and I will become disoriented when it’s not in that key especially if I’m trying to play it, but overall that’s within about a half-step of wiggle room, and I can’t name the notes. For example, I “hear” “La Vie en Rose” in AbM, and “Open Arms” in DbM for some reason. I suspect that it’s due to listening to live versions of both; in the cast of the latter song, I’m fairly sure it’s in D, and they used to move down a half-step when performing live to make it less wearing for Perry. Most bands with high-octane singers step things down a half-step when performing live; the radio rebroadcasts that stations would do when covering concerts were routinely brightened to make up for it.

At any rate, I do not have what I would call absolute pitch. Oddly, I am synaesthetic, but (and here’s where it gets really odd) not about music.

I have no clue why.

I get it with mathematics and languages. Languages have color, taste, and definitely come in small, often faceted, pieces. They will also sometimes have a sheen to them. Mathematics has more texture and scent, with some color. This may have had something to do with why I was a math and language prodigy as a kid — the more sensory channels you have to latch onto information, the more handles there are for you to grip it with. And when those handles are taste and color, they are also very beautiful and encourage the mind to leap forward for more. I think it also has to do with what forms of math and which languages I like best. Fermi-Dirac statistics was always cool, brushed aluminum whereas Bose-Einstein was friable and dingy looking. (I still dislike Bose-Einstein statistics. An unappealing, collapsible mess that leaves grit in my mental carpet.)

Statistical mechanics and thermodynamics continue to smell like nothing at all to me, which is part of why I just don’t attach to them whatsoever. Thermo/stat mech are the only branches of physics/math that I cannot retain in my head for love or money. They are like ghosts — I can see them on the page, but can’t smell a thing, so it’s like my brain doesn’t quite recognize that they are real enough to latch onto. It’s like trying to touch fog. I think it gives me an idea of what normal people feel like when they are made to learn math — instead of gripping whole chunks of knowledge and gorging myself on them, I’m stuck learning one stinking, tiny fact at a time and having to build a coherent structure out of those little pebbles painfully slowly, one bit at a time. Even thinking about it makes me want to crack open an old quantum mechanics textbook.

Oddly, I don’t have it with music either but don’t seem to need it. This seems odd to me given that I tend to consider that music arises where language and math brush up against one another in the brain. At least at the low level of synaesthesia that I have, that leaning-against is just not enough to trigger things more than in the way we all seem to have. The sound is more than enough for me to replace the absence of color, taste, texture, or scent, along with the underlying structure which I adore.

Which brings me to my next point: I also tend to think that most humans are synaesthetic to some extent, but often just don’t think about it. Anytime someone has said that a cello sounds “dark” and a violin “light,” that’s a very mild form of it. When Rachel Barton Pine said that Strads were white wine and Guarneris red, she didn’t have to explain it any further for people to know exactly what she meant. We’re all more metaphorical than we think. As a result, I think that for all but the most intrusive synaesthesia, it’s just not worth thinking too deeply about.

Anyway.

Spaetzle with Chard and Pork Gravy

Ingredients:
1 cup all-purpose flour
1/4 cup milk
2 eggs
1 tsp garam masala

2 cups pork stock — I get it from when I make pork loins in the crock pot, but you can buy stock if you like, or use beef stock if you don’t do pork
2 Tbsp flour to thicken it

1/2 a medium white onion, chopped
2 Tbsp olive oil
1 container of fresh sliced mushrooms — one of those boxes that you can get at the supermarket in the produce aisle
1 bundle of chard, collard greens, turnip greens or some kind of dark, slightly bitter green — washed, stem and center vein removed, and cut into pieces about the side of your hand

Don’t use canned anything if you can at all avoid it. Canned vegetables are gorilla phlegm. I’m serious.

Directions:
Directions for the spaetzle can be found here. Drain them and set them aside in a bowl while you do the following, and toss it occasionally to keep them from sticking to each other.

Heat up the pork stock in a small saucepan and whisk the 2 Tbsp of flour in it to thicken it up. A good way to do this and not get lumps is to mash up the flour in a teacup with a few tablespoons of stock until you have a smooth paste, then add the paste to the rest of the stock in the saucepan and moosh it up.

Get the biggest frying pan you have (no, bigger) with deep sides, and saute the chopped onion in the olive oil on medium heat. When it’s tender, add the mushrooms and saute them. When they’re tender, add the chard, stir the whole thing up, and let it fry for a few minutes.

Add the spaetzle. Stir it up so that the spaetzle is on the bottom and covered with the mushrooms and chard; that helps it saute a bit.

After about two minutes of idle stirring and sizzling, add the thickened pork stock and stir. Let this heat together for about a minute, stirring.

Turn off the heat, dump some into a bowl, and chow down.

Yummy Spaetzle and Chard being sauted in pork jus with onions and mushrooms

This also saves and re-heats for lunch again really well. And you could probably stretch meat nicely with it. I might throw in some shredded pork or even, despite the fact that it’s made with pork gravy, a piece of shredded baked chicken breast.

Cables, computer, gear, writing, recording, yadda yadda …

I put an external sound card in my cart at Amazon and will see what I can do about picking up a shielded cable.

This shit is annoying. I like computers, and even I think this is annoying. Well, I like basic coding and learning to use programs. I’m not intimidated by computers, thankfully. But I do not like hardware. My interest level dies the minute we’re talking about anything electronic that can be dropped on your foot. If a mechanism doesn’t have gears, pulleys, pistons, and stuff I can actually see moving, I lose interest. And at that, I’m endlessly grateful that I have the ease and comfort with computers and the Internet that I do. A lot of musicians tend not to — certainly in my age cohort — and my technical background keeps me from being frightened of all of it.

I think that the technical abilities that I have that will stand me in the best stead as a musician are that I know Illustrator and Photoshop and am better with them than many graphic artists. All of the graphic work that I will need to support this rigmarole will be done by me; I need pay no one else. All of the publicity and media contact garbage that I need to do I can also do myself without cutting a single check. All of the website/blog maintenance I need to do I can do myself. I’m very fortunate to have the skills to be a shop-unto-myself. I am also lucky to play an instrument that requires relatively little post-production. The only things I do not know about are the bureaucratic junk behind it all — what unions I may need or want to join as a musician, what paperwork I need to keep straight so the government doesn’t shave me bald on April 15th, the paperwork required to perform live should I ever decide that I’m going to, that sort of thing.

But I still get a reflexive burst of petulance when I’m forced to concern myself with gear of any kind. I would be a terrible guitarist. They love that stuff.

I’m also starting to realize that I should have concerned myself with it a lot earlier. I had a (typical classical, I think) vision of writing a full compilation worth of music, and then woodshedding it piece by piece and recording the whole thing. Probably comes from those days when I’d have complete albums of composers’ work propped in front of me as if the compositions had all come into being as a single large block of work.

What I wish I had done now is piffled around with whatchamacallits and framizams and reversing the polarity of the neutron flow much earlier so that I could have recorded each piece as I finished it. That’s the best time to get a piece recorded, when it’s still for the most part coming naturally to your hands. Now, I have to go back and re-learn eight pieces anew — about thirty pages of sheet! — and record the stupid things. I should have bitten the bullet on the technical junk much earlier.

Hopefully now that I am making myself untangle this, I will be able to write/record more quickly in the future because I won’t have this idiotic backlog of completed pieces building up anymore. We’ll see how that goes.