Piano Tuner   (2017Apr12)

20170413XD-SenOnTheScramble_01Wednesday, April 12, 2017                                              3:17 PM

Chris Farrell has tuned the piano and spring has officially arrived—the sour flatness of a far-too-long winter is broken into shards of light by the bright eagerness of our perfectly-attuned piano. If you don’t see much of Chris lately, it’s because the Danbury WestConn needs him to tune all their pianos, all hundred-something of them, all year ‘round. Also, he’s working up a new website and writing the occasional song for the UN—yeah, that UN. His daughter is also busy—involved in two recent films “The Fits” and “Salero” (I forget if she directed, produced or both) and you can see them on Netflix if you’re looking for the good stuff.

It’s easy to stay humble when my piano tuner plays my piano far better than I ever could—come to think of it, that was also true of old Steve Anderson, who used to tune our old keyboards—I’m just not very good. But I sure sound better on a tuned piano—they practically play themselves.

Improv – Rainy Spring

 

Well, the world is a troublesome place—and it seems we add to its power and convenience at our peril—in this present time, with anonymized global comms, shoddy fissile-material security, jet bombers, and alt-news websites recruiting for terror, bad actors have never had it so good.

Every great thing our technology can do is diluted, polluted by the entrenched interests, especially in fuel-energy. Every great thing our Internet can do is smeared by the insecurity of hacking and phishing—the more we welcome it into our lives, the greater the risks. Every great thing our country meant to do for the world has been consumed by our military-industry complex abroad and the NRA at home. The eternal health crisis of modern drug use has been opaqued and diverted by our blind insistence on ‘criminalizing’ drugs—meanwhile Big Pharma bankrupts families (and promotes drug abuse) selling ‘legal’ drugs by prescription.

 

 

Improv – Thoughtful

None of the misbehavior is new—but the means, the opportunities, and the exploding variety of white-collar crimes, child armies, and gang activities all combines to demonstrate the kind of explosive change the good guys could be enjoying, if we weren’t being snookered into complacency by vested interests and politicians who see their very existence threatened by the possibilities of digital voting and online government transparency—these things will happen over the cold, dead bodies of the establishment’s entitled. And all the while politicians’ll puff up their chests and orate about democracy—and afterwards, a lobbyist will hand them a check for their reelection campaign.

The English had their mad King George—but unlike us, with Trump, they didn’t suffer the shame of having elected him. Trump is the triumph of ignorance and the death of representative government. And the Republicans who use his populist carnival-barking to advance their partisanship are truly “dogs who have caught a car”—up until now, we had the sense to expect them not to govern—but we foolishly made them our governing body, and they don’t know how—they’d lost for so long, they forgot that ‘winning’ wasn’t the actual job.

Thursday, April 13, 2017                                        2:04 PM

Dumber than Dirt   (2017Apr13)

Trust in Trump—to perfectly simulate what a child would do, as president. He just dropped ‘the biggest non-nuke bomb in our arsenal’ on a suspected ISIS site in Afghanistan. Remember Afghanistan? That’s the country we armed in the eighties, so that they could repel the Soviet invaders—and when they did, we lost their phone-number—leaving the Afghanis with a ruin for a country and no post-war aid or support—like we have traditionally given, even to our enemies.

Twenty years later, in 2003, as we prepared to invade, we even joked that we couldn’t bomb Afghanistan ‘back to the stone age’ because they were already there—and there was truth to that. Fifteen years further along, Trump figures that one big bomb oughta do it—what do you think?

I think he’s dumber than the dirt he kicked up. The arms-makers must be drooling at this guy—it cost millions to send that single flight of Tomahawks to Syria—and I bet it wasn’t cheap to drop the world’s biggest bomb, either. At least he saved us the expense of getting congressional approval.

Poor Afghanistan—we love to fight there, but god forbid we help them keep their peace. That’s the trouble with all these trouble-spots—when the firing stops, everyone turns their backs. Why don’t we try fighting to help some of these people—is that too far beneath us? But then, Americans aren’t big on fixing stuff, even in their own country—I think we’re missing an opportunity here—infrastructure is universal—if we started fixing our own, we could globalize—there are plenty of places in the world that need rebuilding. Of course, they’d have to stop shooting first—and so would we.

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Journal Entry   (2017Feb19)

Sunday, February 19, 2017                                               3:28 PM

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I’ve spent the day creating new piano videos for my YouTube channel. These are something a little new—I’ve taken my ‘masterpieces of art’ graphics collection and interleaved them with baby pictures of Sen—so you see one old master, then Sen, then another old master, and so on. The baby watches the videos at naptime, some days, so this will give her something to look at besides herself—and all the paintings are colorful with vivid images (which was why I collected them in the first place).

One of the videos is fairly long—that’s partly because it includes a ‘cover’ of the old Carpenters tune, “Yesterday Once More”, which I play rather freely, for a wonder—and the following improv is about twelve minutes—so, a rare recording in several ways. The other one is shorter, just an improv, and only remarkable in that I chose to name it ‘Toothpick Charlie’, for no reason on earth—it’s a funny name, is all. But I’m satisfied with both performances, making it a good day’s work.

My mom’s not well—the doctors are trying to figure her out but so far the best they can do is a morphine drip. I wish I could travel—I’d take up residence in the bed next to hers—I could use a good morphine drip—and those damn doctors could get around to me once they’ve figured out my mom. Meanwhile, we’re all pretty concerned.

Been doing a lot of reading lately—nothing to write a review about, but passable fare. It’s like that old bumper-sticker about ‘a bad day of fishing vs. a good day of work’—a bad book is still better than your average TV show.

Nothing much else to go on about.

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ttfn.

Ben Carson is No Democrat   (2015Nov12)

Thursday, November 12, 2015                                         4:10 PM

Missouri State University has had some controversy lately, with widely publicized student protests resulting in the resignation of the University’s president. Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson gave his thoughts to Megyn Kelly in a FoxNews interview on Nov. 11, 2015:

“We need to recognize that this is a very dangerous trend. When we get to a point where a majority can say, ‘I don’t like what you’re doing—that’s offensive and therefore I have a right to be violent towards you or to deprive you of rights because I don’t like what you’re doing’, you know, that really goes against the grain of our constitutional rights—and if we don’t see that, we’re in really big trouble right now.”

I’d like to spend a moment unpacking this strange pronouncement because it hurt my ears just to hear someone say it—and I think it deserves to be taken out of the assembly-line of stupid quotes that pass us by each day—and really looked at for the thinking it represents.

Firstly, I want to back-track a bit—when I refer to Carson’s ‘thoughts’ or his ‘thinking’—I’m not entirely sure those are the correct terms—I suspect that Dr. Ben is somewhat delusional. But, beyond that, let’s begin with “We need to recognize that this is a very dangerous trend. When we get to a point where a majority can say, ‘I don’t like what you’re doing’“ –well, that’s called Democracy—and, as our constitutional rights are predicated on an elected body of leaders and representatives, I’d say democracy is kinda constitutional.

When a political party represents the minority, especially as in the case of the GOP, which represents the power elite, they are often put to great pains in finding ways to tell the masses how we should behave—without denying our democratic principles—which they know will upset our feelings. We rarely hear them tell us so baldly how they really feel about majority rule—even when they advocate the new reversals on voting-rights down south.

Carson attempting to dull the pain of his paean against democracy by saying that their decision amounts to “a right to be violent towards you or to deprive you of rights” is a bit of hyperbole, it seems, since asking a college president to resign after he’s offended the entire community is hardly ‘violence’ against him. The whole statement is a masterful example of Republican mirroring-strategy, where the oppressor is called the victim, and the victims are a majority being led astray by shadowy ‘agents of subversion’ that exist only in the conspiracy-nut minds of right-wingers.

Carson concludes with “you know, that really goes against the grain of our constitutional rights—and if we don’t see that, we’re in really big trouble right now.” Now, the decision of the majority sometimes gives us the right to be violent towards someone—as in the case of our many states that still practice executions. Outside of our penal system, it is wrong to be violent—but it is ‘against the law’, not ‘unconstitutional’—as Ben would have it. And that final sentence is pure GOP—i.e., ‘but if you don’t see it my way, you should be very afraid.’

Brain surgeon or not, whenever this man opens his mouth it makes my head hurt—he’s such a dolt. I won’t go into the crowds of mouth-breathers who reverently look up to him as their choice to lead this country—thankfully, I don’t think we’ve gotten ‘to a point where a majority can say’ that—and as long as we remain a democracy, that should keep them from realizing their nightmarish dream.

I played my electric piano for a little while today:

I took some pictures of Fall outside my window today:

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SAM_1937

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And I wrote a bit of poetry the other day:

Tuesday, November 10, 2015        1:43 PM

The Don Quixote Fan Club Theme Song

(Unfinished)

Lovers and heroes and shiny things

Whatever the treasure adventure brings

Lions with faces and ladies with wings

All tales are told when the fall wind sings

You take a sword—I’ve got my bow and arrow

Though the passes be high and the straits be narrow

We’ll battle and tussle and fight our way through—

Whatever adventures adventurers do.

You hop on a charger—I’ll find me a steed

Along the rough road we’ll find else we may need

For nothing can stop us—we ride and we charge

Though troubles be many and monsters be large.

So here’s to our quest

May we all be the best of fellows

Put us to the test

We’ll puff out our chests and bellow

Improv – Two Etudes   (2015Oct29)

Thursday, October 29, 2015                                             3:38 PM

When I listen to other music, I am open-minded and forgiving—if something doesn’t catch my ear at once, I’m willing to give it a chance. When I am feeling very hard-headed and down-to-earth, I can’t enjoy music as much as I otherwise do—engaging one’s critical faculties too completely puts one in the position of ‘finding fault’—and no creative impulse can survive such a negative onslaught.

It only now occurs to me that I always turn my criticism on ‘high’ whenever I judge my own efforts—and in doing so I’m being less fair to myself than I would be to a long-dead stranger—so today I’m having a moratorium on self-doubt and self-criticism. I enjoyed playing this improv on my piano and that’s all there is to that.

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Speaking of being open-minded and forgiving—I just watched Chris Columbus’s “Pixels” on VOD. Liberals doses of ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ are required (and a little THC doesn’t hurt either) but if, like me, you are a fan of Adam Sandler, Kevin James, Josh Gad, Peter Dinklage, and video arcade games—then “Pixels” is funny, and a lot of fun.

First of all—I love movies where the characters start as children and then, through the magic of “30 Years Later…”, we begin the real story of the characters in the present day. It’s a great way to give a story depth, especially something as goofy as “Pixels”. Secondly, I love a movie where no one is inherently evil—childishly stupid, yes—misguided, greedy, not thinking things through, … whatever—yes—and I think this is closer to real life. Reality never seems to have a positive villain—for every issue there are just a lot of sides, a lot of needs, and a lot of pigheadedness—but rarely pure evil.

The good guys win and the guy gets the girl—other features I’m always in favor of. No lengthy wrong-turns into gloom and despair—another plus. Factoid hunters on IMDb point out that many game characters used were derived from post-1982 video games, which belies the film’s premise—but if that was the most unbelievable part of this movie, the world would be a very strange place.

What I enjoyed noticing was all the kid actors’ credits—many of the smaller roles were played by children with last names like Sandler, James, and Covert (one of the producers of the film) and I can only assume that the film’s set was very much a family affair. And if you look closely, you’ll catch a glimpse of the actual Professor Toru Iwatani, inventor of Pac-Man, doing a cameo as a game repairman in an early scene, at the Electric Dream Factory arcade. Good times.

In my walk earlier, I felt a strong regret that I hadn’t brought my camera, so I shot a few snaps out the window to use for today’s video:

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Lyric (2015Oct27)

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Lyric

Void unimaginable, an ocean without a floor or shore

Floating there I wait and see only distance and space

No company to joke with—no more after or before

Floating where eternity dances yet hides its face

With feet that never find a place

And I am small amid the vastness

And I am lost among the stars

And I am never going to see again the green

And I am stuck forever in between

And if I died no one would know it

And if there’s hope no one will show it

I swim

In this vastness

The power of nothingness overwhelming my mind

No chink in the every of everywhere always

No feature or landmark remaining to find

Come speak to me love—(I don’t care what she says)—

Say what you will but please say Yes.

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Face and Bubbles – Collage

Tuesday, October 27, 2015                                               12:10 AM

Post (2015Oct27)

Well, I may have gone a little too dark on this poem—I tried to pull the nose up, at the end—but maybe too little too late. Anyway, the point is that too much solitude is as mentally unhealthy as too little sunlight is physically unhealthy. Love is necessary, or friendship—even simple companionship which, while not as profound, may be easier to come by—I’ll take anything to break that recursive loneliness loop that eventually drives one insane.

The new pictures are made with my new oil pastels—I haven’t quite got the hang of them yet. I’ve always had a problem with color—I tend to use them all. I like prisms and rainbows—I’m very democratic, even inclusive, when it comes to color.

The piano cover of “Autumn In New York” goes well with all the gold and orange leaves outside my window—my voice—maybe not so much. I threw in the other three covers just because. I’m struggling with my improvs lately—I have been trying to make them better for decades, but I feel like I can’t find anything new anymore—we’ll see—maybe I’ll have an epiphany or something. In the meantime, I’m just trying to sound entertaining.

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Bubbles

Tuesday, October 27, 2015                                               10:38 AM

Real Progress   (2015Oct27)

In just a few days, we will have reached the one-year mark on our presidential campaign—I can’t help wondering what the previous twelve months of back and forth were supposed to accomplish, other than to fill air time on cable-news shows and politics-based social media threads. It’s hard to stomach all the focus on ‘who it will be’ without any concern about ‘what will they do’. Yet, with the right-wing, those are the same question—a tea-party candidate will do nothing—except try to keep others from doing anything—that’s their whole agenda.

Likewise, a moderate Republican will do nothing—not for lack of trying, but because of their tea-party brethren. And even a Democrat will get done only as much as the executive office allows—because the House and Senate are still firmly in the hands of the GOP. The only real hope for governmental or legislative action is if the Democrats can find a way to win back those Congressional seats, as well as win the White House. So this presidential campaign obsession is just the usual media focus on the inconsequential. Ben Carson (not to mention Trump) is a scary possibility—but the odds of anyone but white males voting for either one is so low as to make their chances in a general election ‘slim to none’.

The same can be said of Bernie Sanders—he’s got the far-left tied up, but he could never get the majority of the nation’s voters either. That leaves Hillary, whom everyone has assumed will win all along—only she’ll be hobbled by the same GOP congress that bedeviled Obama. Again, the real story—the story that’s being ignored—is whether the Democrats can elect local support, outside of the presidency.

Of course, I could be wrong—we may get a Republican president, if voters are stupid enough—what a hell on earth that would be. Despite Obama’s heroic efforts, we still haven’t dug ourselves out of the hole the last GOP president buried us in. The only good that came out of Bush’s two terms was getting Democrats out to vote—Obama began his terms with a friendly Congress and I’m still confused as to how we managed to screw that up.

Well, not really—the answer is horribly simple. The Democrats, while they have an edge on common sense and American values, are just as dumb, lazy, spineless, and corrupt as the Republicans—both our candidates and we voters. Intellect and transparency can find a place in the Democratic party—which, as I say, gives them something of an edge—but we’re still people, just like the GOP folks. And people are human—with all the failings that implies.

When I look back on all the changes in society, I’m dumbstruck by the incredible progress we’ve made. While we still struggle with racism, at least it has lost its legitimacy in the laws of our land. While we still lack gender equality, we have seen women get access to birth-control, jobs, and inclusion far beyond the Suzy Homemaker mindset of my childhood. While we still have issues with LGBT equality, we have at least progressed beyond the point of considering homosexuality as a crime, or a mental disease. To me, this is the real progress of our country—I could care less about laptops, cellphones, smart-cars, and DNA sequencing, if it doesn’t have the open-minded humanity that an enlightened, modern culture deserves.

Lost In A Space   (2015Oct21)

Monday, October 19, 2015                                               1:42 PM

Lost In A Space

Warm by the woodstove your just-bathed

Body borne on flannel quilt—

Droplets in the cleft above your lip,

Starry-eyed and blushed over,

I bring two steaming mugs

Of hot chocolate and we sip

Around the marshmallows,

Gazing into one another’s eyes.

Outside the other, darker world hurries on.

We hear only crackling from splits of apple wood

In the quiet closeness of our snug little keep.

I kneel and you raise your soft lips to mine

The glow of your bath still softening your arms

And I am lost forever amid the comforts of home.

Monday, July 13, 2015                                             2:39 PM

I don’t know. I have a lot going on inside me—it makes me feel like I have something to write—but there’s just chaos in there, virtually screaming a million things at once, none of it coherent. So, no, not really anything to write.

My body seems to be slowly bouncing back from its long decline—enough so that I begin to feel restless about spending all day every day inside this tiny house. Not that we don’t love our cozy little cabin—but hell, sometimes you have to go out. Now, that wasn’t true—hasn’t been true for many years—I’d focus more on having the energy to get out of bed or make myself a sandwich or take a shower. But before I got sick, it was pretty common—I get bored and frustrated very quickly when I’m in touch with my full capacity.

And I’m sick and tired of retracing my words just to explicate that ‘full capacity’ now does not mean back to my original 35-year-old, healthy, rambunctious self. Take it as given that if I’m talking about a resurgence of my vitality or a sharpening of my senses, I’m only talking relative to my near-death experience and decades-long infirmity. I’ll never be young again. I’ll never have twenty-twenty vision again. My hands will never be steady again. And most of all I’ll never have the ability to get lost in my own thoughts again.

I used to think of that zoned-out state I’d get into while programming code or drawing a picture as a kind of wandering—but it wasn’t. I was taking for granted something that came easily to me—but now I can see it for the very strenuous hacking through the mental jungle that it was. I can feel the effort of thought now—if I heard about effort of thinking in those young days, I refused to believe it. I couldn’t perceive any effort—even though my mind was functioning like gang-busters. I miss that a lot—in the way you can only miss something that you lost without ever having known how valuable it was.

Of course, I also miss it because it was my meal ticket. I used to think that I was lucky to find a job in programming and systems—now it is clear to me that I was never good at anything else, not professionally. My mind started to weaken from illness at about the same time I was considering looking for more challenging coding work. It was very frustrating to lose my super-power, slowly, mysteriously, just as I was trying to move on to even more difficult puzzles. Now I can’t program my way out of a paper bag—which leaves me with a large past life that was headed towards something I can never go back to. So, yeah, I miss that a lot.

My old self is dead. I am alive. It’s a quandary.

Wednesday, October 21, 2015                                         10:29 AM

Fall proceeds apace—others have posted some striking photos of the leaves changing, so I’m gonna pass on taking my own photos of the yard and environs. The urge to photograph things is always there, but I’d rather conserve my energy on the off-chance that I’ll get antsy enough to draw a picture instead.

The endless drone of leaf-blowers gives the Fall a sour strangeness—these people want their mess cleaned up and their lawns bare, and they don’t care how much racket they make getting it done. Who could have imagined that getting an artificial wind to blow would be best accomplished with tiny engines that make a deafening whine and emit grey clouds of diesel soot?

But enough of my seasonal peeves—no more. What matters is the doing—and what am I doing?

Monday, October 19, 2015                                               6:04 PM

Joseph Henry was an American physicist who discovered the principle of electromagnetic induction nearly simultaneously with Michael Faraday, the Englishman who, through the vagaries of history, is known as its sole discoverer. But such quibbles about ‘first-places’ abound in the history of science—Morse was not the first man to send a signal by electrified wire, Edison was not the first man to create a moving picture (or a light-bulb, for that matter)—there are often two stories. One is the closely researched story of who did which step and when, and how it all ‘worked out’ to what we’re familiar with today—and the other story is what we call ‘popular history’, where Ford ‘invented’ the car and Italians ‘invented’ pasta.

It is a little odd that in trying to tell some of the detailed, accurate story, an historian has to set up and knock down several widely-held misapprehensions common in the popular understanding of history. Serious historians must tell the true story while ‘untelling’ the false ones. This can lead to great interest amongst the populace—and some will argue with any history based on the archived records simply because they love the popular version so much better. And some details are just too bothersome to retain—Columbus’s voyage west to the Indies involved five ships—this is well-documented, and even taught in school—but the image of the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria endures.

The only book offered on Amazon.com has a blurb which extols the great achievements and the seminal place that Joseph Henry held in the formation of the United States as a scientific world leader, but such importance is belied by the fact that there is only the one book—a biography. I placed an order for a used copy—I want to see if I can find out why we care so little about a man who was Edison’s Edison.

I’ve also downloaded Cervantes’ “Don Quixote” from the Gutenburg Project’s digital library—I’m thinking of doing a video that combines my readings of passages, my illustrations of the story as images, and my music as soundtrack. The book is enormous—the idea of illustrating every passage, even in rough sketches, would take a younger man than myself—and completing such an audio/video chapter-book is that much more unlikely. But it will give me a project that never ends—and in my mind, they are the only ones worth starting.

I Don’t Flyin’ Give A   (2015Oct17)

Saturday, October 17, 2015                                              1:14 PM

I don’t know—I mean, I know a little, but not enough. I have no confidence—I mean, I have a little, but not enough. I don’t have the strength—well, maybe I could manage one effort, but not over and over. Most importantly, I lack enthusiasm—I can forget the past and enthuse for a moment, but inevitably I remember the past—entropy, illness, betrayal, and indifference—and I feel the enthusiasm melt away, a mist in sunlight.

Was it a wrong turn I took—and if it was, was there any life I could have lived that didn’t come to cynicism, eventually? (Maybe it’s Maybelline—right?) If I could have lived a life that avoided the lessons I’ve learned, would that ignorance have been better? No—I struggled equally hard with a lack of information. People are animals—once I learned not to judge that statement, once I learned just to accept it, I had to stop believing in the ‘but’. “People are animals, but…” But there is no ‘but’. Take away convention and pretense and all that’s left are animals, social animals—but animals just the same.

One divergence we like to point to is the ‘path of least resistance’—a dog will bark and dig from behind a fence, trapped because it cannot move forward; a person will look around and walk away from the fence to take a route around the obstacle. We cite this as a sign of human intelligence. Yet our powerful skills in finding obtuse escape routes seem to fail when we try to deal with society—we bark behind self-imposed fences at things we could easily work around, had we the imagination to walk away from conventions and acceptance.

Such open-mindedness might bring people further away from their animality—but whenever an open-minded person suggests getting away from conventions and acceptance, a close-minded person will jump on the idea and say, “Yes! Let’s start by ejecting morality and inclusion.” The desire to act out among others without consequences is really more animal, not less. A good liberal wants to avoid the strictures of conventions and acceptance, but retain the cooperation and inclusion that are society’s best features—it’s never easy and it’s never simple.

So we see that being a ‘rebel’ is an ambiguous role—breaking the rules encompasses both forward progress and devolution. To be conservative is to consider the whole thing as being too dangerous, too unpredictable—better to just keep things as they are, warts and all. A liberal considers change a necessary risk that it is better to engage with purpose than to strive to avoid. I’ve always considered conservatism as cowardice—but to believe that, I’m implicitly agreeing with conservatives that change is dangerous. It’s really quite a pickle.

Journal Entry   (2015Oct08)

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Thursday, October 08, 2015                                             4:04 PM

Huzzah! I am once again a licensed driver of automobiles. My faithful compendium, Spencer, went out early this morning to top off his gas tank in anticipation of my noon Road Test in Carmel—and he reminded me to bring all my paperwork, which was a good thing. I’m not used to his car, but I’m actually an old hand at driving, so different cars don’t really throw me that badly—and he has a really nice car, too—a Chevy Impala. I forgot to look over my shoulder before pulling out; and I didn’t signal before beginning my parallel parking; but I passed, and that’s the important thing.

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More important, to me, was the fact that I was able to use the bathroom this morning for the first time in several days—it’s quite a relief. I’m on my second day of heavy antibiotics for diverticulitis—things are finally becoming bearable. I’m able to think again, relatively speaking—and for what my usual thinking is worth—so I’m going to share some of the hell I’ve gone through recently.

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I’m tempted to comment on the Republicans in Congress and the Russians in Syria—but this is a journal entry, so no politics today.

Wednesday, October 07, 2015                                         7:16 AM

Pain, And More Pain   (2015Oct07)

For days I felt pain in my abdomen—then yesterday I couldn’t stand it any longer and Claire drove me to the ER in Mt. Kisco. Turns out I have diverticulitis. That may sound bad, but they were talking about ‘blockages’ and ‘surgery’, so it’s actually good news—plus, they didn’t have to admit me—bonus!

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So they put me on a massive antibiotics regimen and liquid diet. It still hurts this morning but at least I’m not wondering if I’m about to die—it’s really quite painful. It reminded me of the ‘good old days’ when I had six months of forty surgical-staples in my abdomen, after my transplant operation.

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People who’ve been sick or in pain can be very dull—for instance, I have no plans today other than to lay around and be glad I’m not having surgery (knock wood). Whenever the antibiotics get my inflammation to die down, I plan to spend that day just enjoying the absence of pain (I should be so lucky). With any luck, I may move my bowels someday soon—it’s a friggin carnival, here at the Dunn house.

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In the meantime, I’m wondering if having something new to write about is all that great—seeing as how it’s all about dysfunction in my ass—not your traditional crowd-pleaser as literary subjects go. Still, being a shut-in makes you crazy for anything to happen, anything to break the stultifying circularity—and if I only counted the positive incidents, I’d have a long wait for that break.

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There was positivity, however—my lovely Bear drove me to the hospital and stayed with me the whole time and drove me home again around midnight, when she had to get up early today, to serve jury-duty in lower Manhattan. It’s times like these that I marvel at how lucky I am to have a wonderful Bear. She’s the greatest. But anyone who has met her knows that.

BTW, All these drawings are my illustrations for my Bear Poems

BTW, All these drawings are my illustrations for my Bear Poems

So much pain over the last week or so—it made it hard for me to think—I have trouble thinking under pressure. I’m posting the improvs, but only as examples of how messed up in the head I was when I played them. I have enough trouble with the piano when I’m feeling myself.

Before I knew about the diverticulitis, I had a bad week—I wrote several posts that I never posted—they were very dark. But since I now know what was going on, I’ll share one of them with you—this was from five days ago:

Friday, October 02, 2015                                         11:32 AM

Pain   (2015Oct02)

After a certain point, you realize that aches and pains have just become a part of your daily life—that each twinge is not a signal that you’re dying, or that you ate poison, or that you need to go to the ER. You reach the conclusion that if you’re not actually sweating in pain, then it doesn’t hurt that bad. And even when it’s sweating-bad, you give it a few minutes—just to make sure it isn’t gas—or a cramp. Pain signals help the body respond to threats and intrusions—but as we age, tiny threats and intrusions become the norm—and the aches and pains stay turned-on pretty much from the time you get out of bed.

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Analgesics are wonderful things—by reducing inflammation of tissue, it reduces pain—and it also reduces the amount of damage, since the longer tissue is inflamed, the worse the damage. I occasionally use ice packs, or heating pads, for my back aches or neck aches. The only pain I have trouble dealing with is headaches—to me, it’s like static on the radio—it makes it hard to think, to read—even watching TV is difficult with a headache. So I use aspirin.

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As a teenager, I was addicted to aspirin for a while—now, if I use aspirin too much, it just makes the headache worse. For years, I used Tylenol and Advil instead—but then my liver doctor told me that was suicidal, so now I’m back to aspirin—and only one at a time—and not every day. Still, I sometimes get unbearable headaches—and I break down and take two aspirin and two Advil. That works most of the time—but it also guarantees that the headache will come back the next day, a kind of boomerang effect. So I do my best to avoid that vicious cycle.

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It’s so different for children—as a child, I didn’t understand what a headache actually was—I almost never got sick, and when I did I’d be so delirious from fever that I hallucinated. Pain is virtually unknown to the young—their bodies work like well-oiled machines, their bones are elastic, and they hardly weigh anything when they fall down. When pain does arrive in a young person’s life, it’s momentous—it can overpower their reason. That’s very different from someone like me, who thinks of pain as a normal part of breathing. It’s another aspect of life that makes it hard for young and old to understand each other.

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If you ask a young person if they want to live forever, they’ll say ‘of course’—but if you ask an old person, they’ll have to think it over. Living forever is nothing unless it includes eternal youth—otherwise, you’re just extending your retirement—and what’s the point of that? I don’t want to live a long time—I want to live healthy for as long as I can. In my case, that’s already a moot point. I’ve been living on the edges of health for years now—and it’s nothing but hard work, fighting off the spells of frustration, rage, and despair that inevitably follow when life has no object beyond breathing.

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In normal life, the bottom line is always a goal—you’re trying to accomplish something—hopefully, maybe even achieve greatness at something. Without access to a job, a career, a car, or a social group—as in my case—without the ability to work or create or achieve, life becomes a battle against oneself. Even staying alive isn’t my job—it’s my doctors’. My only real job is not to kill myself and waste all their hard work. In the meantime, I suffer from an incurable case of ‘idle hands’.

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At the same time, the emptiness of normal lives is revealed to me—nine to five, working for some office manager, getting paid a salary—these thing may allow me to support my family, but what do I get out of it, besides a life of modern slavery? What right do the wealthy owners have to enslave the other 99% in pursuit of manufacturing plastics, selling magazine subscriptions, organizing vacation itineraries, or selling burial insurance? How is it different from Medieval times, when the wealthy owners enslaved everyone to grow food that wasn’t even their own?

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Statistics show that democracy doesn’t respond to the majority of people in the country—it responds to the majority of rich people. Statistically, there’s as much chance of the most-wanted legislation being voted on as the least-wanted legislation—among the whole population. Among the wealthy, democracy does what it’s supposed to do—it enacts what they want most and avoids what they most don’t want—but if it only works for the 1%, then it’s not really democracy, is it?

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Likewise with ‘progress’. The new I-Phone 6s is a wonder—if you have a thousand bucks up front, and hundreds a month to spare. The new Tesla model S is a wonder—if you have $100,000 to spare. Meanwhile, the rest of us get to work nine to five for the privilege of worrying about bills and driving a junker. And that’s if we’re not starving, or homeless, or sending our kids to schools that don’t teach them to read. The United States, in its origin, began a fight with the rich and powerful—I think, here in 2015, we can all agree that we’ve lost that fight. The poor are always with us—and so are the rich. Anyone see a connection there?

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In our war against the rich, we are constantly being diverted with little nothings—molehills built up into mountains for the media to get excited about. They spend all day talking about whether Trump should be president, when it’s so obvious that that asshole belongs in jail, at best. The Koch brothers hold seminars to decide which candidate to pay for, when they should be huddled in their mansions with a torch-lit angry mob outside their windows.

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It’s the old problem—you can’t fix a car while you’re driving it down the highway. We can protest Occupy Wall Street all weekend, but we have to leave and go work for those pigs on Monday morning. We can vote for any candidate we like, but the candidates get pre-selected by those pigs. And the most able among us are not working to beat those pigs, but to join them. And people wonder why I’m so depressed all the time. What a crock.

[Afterword: So, that’s how I’ve been feeling lately. Nothing was easy or comfortable. But I’m on the mend now—and I have a drivers license again (motorists beware!) so I’m a happy man. Have a good day, everybody.]

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The Music Of Love   (2015Oct04)

Sunday, October 04, 2015                                       10:39 PM

The Music Of Love

By sweet columbine and punky woodbine lolls my baby,

Lounges my tiger, languishes my odalisque—she

Wouldn’t stay long but here she is now.

Oh, ripple of water over stones behind the purr—her

Throaty laughter at her own foolishness—she

Makes all nerve ends tingle, every single, ringa-dingle.

Scent of attar of roses and melon-musk sweet

As caramel with sea-salt sauce on vanilla bean ice-cream—her

Eyes have lips have tongue—all light and red and curly sweet—so

Sweet, so sweet—Oh, can I have some? Oh please?

Oh baby.

My sweeting, my darling one—come to me baby.

Wrap your warm soft arms about my neck—don’t

Withhold your sensuous, sinuous charms.

Run with me over the hay and the heather grasses

Your bare feet whisper among the blades

Your hair flies in the wind

Your eyes flash and your laughter rings off the hillsides—so

Sweet, so sweet—Oh, can I have some? Oh please?

Oh baby.

Brahms Day   (2015Sep26)

Saturday, September 26, 2015                                          12:34 PM

Finally, I’ve reached the point where I’m willing to share my progress on the Brahms Opus 117. Here are some details about this special trio of piano intermezzi I’ve pieced together (mostly from Wikipedia.org):

Johannes Brahms

Three Intermezzi

Op. 117

(first published in 1892)

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The book is originally Claire’s (she’ll still play a bit now and then—still better than me—oh, well) so you can see I had the benefit of practice notes left in her margins by the great piano teacher and performer, Muriel Brooks, who taught Claire for years—and even gave me the only ten lessons I ever had. Old Ms. Brooks is notable for the host of young Westchester piano students she helped shepherd towards musical enlightenment—most of us not so cooperative, as you may imagine. Some of Claire’s fingering is also marked in pencil which made things much easier for me.

  1. in Eb major – Andante moderato

 

“Schlaf sanft mein Kind, schlaf sanft und schön!

Mich dauert’s sehr, dich weinen sehn.”

—(Schottisch. Aus Herders Volksliedern)

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[Schlaf sanft mein Kind, schlaf sanft und schön!

Mich dauert’s sehr, dich weinen sehn.]

[(Sleep softly, my child, sleep softly and well!

It breaks my heart to see you weep.)]

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This first intermezzo, so like a lullaby, has such sonorous harmonies, such profound base lines, and so soaring and angelic a recapitulation in the finale that I find it almost too exciting to play. While this is considered a fairly simple piece to perform, as you can hear—even a single wrong note can mar the entire work.

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  1. in Bb minor – Andante non troppo e con molto espressione

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This second piece, my favorite, demands the most of what I lack—an alacrity with the keyboard—though I’ve tried many times, I can never give it the lilting simplicity it requires. This is as close as I can get, so far.

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  1. in C# minor – Andante con moto

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This last, longest, and most difficult of the three is something of a voyage—there are changes of mood, of key, and of texture—it begins with a troll-like dirge but the middle section is the most gymnastic and fragile keyboard sheet-music I’ve ever seen.

I first heard this work on an LP included in a Time-Life boxed set entitled “The Romantic Era” back in the early 1970s. Something about these three intermezzi has led me to listen to this piece again and again—I am haunted by its beauty. In some sense, each of the three is a variation on an old Scotch lullaby. In some papers there is also a tantalizing utterance of Brahms about “cradle songs of my sorrows”, which has often been associated with the set. I always found these pieces too dramatic to be lullabies, with the exception of the first, which does share tones of the famous Brahms’ Lullaby—but who am I to argue with music historians?

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And now, a note in defense of my posting these to the public:

Music belongs to us all. Sure, there are those who excel at performance or composition—and I’m the last person who’d ever disrespect their tremendous talent and skill—but again, music is for everybody. As Judy Garland once sang, “If you feel like singing, sing. (If you can’t sing good, sing soft).” And my version of ‘singing soft’ is to post my piano-playing recordings on YouTube, where other people can listen to them, ignore them, or even complain about them—and I don’t disagree with the complainers. I’m not a gifted musician—I never will be—but I’m in love with music, with the piano, with the music of the great composers.

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And aren’t we all on different levels of ability or skill in just about every endeavor? Isn’t there always someone better, or smarter, or quicker? Even if that isn’t always true, it is true for all of us except one—and that one only in one area of expertise. But we don’t sit about, waiting for only the best to do the things we are not ‘best’ at—we all do what we can, as best we can, at whatever moves us.

Classical music seems exotic to us—so we think of virtuosi as almost sacred (which in some ways they are) and exempt ourselves from attempting what they have already done, better than we ever could. I say no—I say music is for everyone. Listen to the greats—but let yourself sing as well—or play an instrument, or write a song—you have every right—in some ways, you even have a responsibility to have creativity and self-expression be a part of your life.

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When we absent ourselves from the arts we atrophy the most aspirational aspects of our personalities—we are less than we can be, when we eschew the arts—just as we are ignorant when we eschew the sciences, for lack of being ‘geniuses’. In practicing piano, I have always heeded an early piece of advice: Always work on the parts that are the most difficult for you. And I’ve broadened this to include my whole life—for those of us with slender talents, it is just as important, perhaps more so, to make an effort towards creativity; for those of us with trouble learning, it is just as important to read something new, to learn, however slowly, new things. I don’t see adulthood as an end-point, but as a higher level of development towards a better self, an advanced stage of the learning and growing that we sometimes assume is the role of schoolchildren—and ends with childhood.

Plus, I like to share my stuff with my friends and relations who love me and support my meager efforts—just because I made them. And YouTube is free. So there it is—the great Brahms Project—but understand that I hope to post a much better performance next year, or the year after that.

Years ago, I often named my improvs ‘post-Bach’, ‘post-Haydn’, etc.—because I felt that the composers whom I had just sight-read had inspired me somewhat in the improv immediately afterward. But that naming convention led to too many duplicate titles, so I began making up names instead, for mnemonic purposes. Today, however, I return to this convention, in honor of Brahms.

Strong Baby   (2015Sep22)

Tuesday, September 22, 2015                                          6:48 PM

Last night started out good—I’ve become a fan of The Big Bang Theory and it had a season premiere last night—they’re pretty funny. I enjoy the comfort of an established sitcom with a toolkit of running gags and themes—all expositions, settings, and character intros have long since been made and the thing just chugs along—funny, funny, funny.

Had a big meal (Bear makes a mean chicken) maybe too big—I felt like I had to have some coffee. But then I watched TV until 2:30 and my eyes still refused to droop. I didn’t sleep at all last night—I was reading a couple of great sci-fi books—“Appleseed” by John Clute is a book I bought about ten years ago but forgot to read; and “Nexus” by Ramez Naam, which I finished at about  6:30 am—fortunately it’s only the first book of a trilogy, so there’s more. But no more coffee at night for me!

Now here’s a bit of lyric for all you strong babies out there:

Strong Baby

Hard muscle—lean cut—on a stri-king frail.

A hard look—a straight shot—makes my ego bail.

When she looks like a tank made o’doves

I could almost cry.

Talks like the drill sarge o’love—

I could nearly die.

Strong women—make me crazy.

Wo-o-ork it out—don’t be lazy.

Watch those ‘ceps pop—makes me dizzy.

Dat can’t be a woman—is she?

My god—that’s a lot of power.

Think it’s time for my cold shower.

Awe me with that rock of muscle

Tell me I can lose that tussle—please!

Baby—please—it’s too much—

Thoughts so hot they make me blush.

I’m a man with a plan but

A strong, fit woman there’s no man that is better than.

When you tell me I got-to-be nice

Then it’s understood—

No need to-tell-me the same thing twice

You know I’ll be good.

Strong women—make me crazy.

Work all day—make men look lazy.

Legs like trunks of trees of satin,

Eyes the light from stars get fat in,

Smell so sweet it makes me twitchy

And that voice so low and witchy.

Stand there like a tower of power.

Going strong from hour to hour.

Beauty—brains—and all that muscle

Tell me I can lose that tussle—please!

We poor men—fit and strong is supposed to be our thing. When we find strong women attractive, it’s confusing and a little embarrassing—but there’s no better make-up than muscle tone, nothing more youthful than a proud bearing. It’s funny—we talk about over-idealizing one standard of beauty—but that’s just the suits that make corporate decisions about magazine covers and such. For all our fixation on women, we men find attractive a myriad of flavors—tall women, short women, small women, big women, full-figured or skinny, any color hair, any color skin, librarians, firewomen, GI Janes, and nurses.

I find the spirit of a woman shows in her face and bearing—no matter what her outer appearance. You can see a person’s personality, male or female, and I find myself attracted to the spirit rather than the package—I think we all do.

Dy’ever have one of those days where you feel like instead of reaching a peak, you feel off the cliff? With health issues like mine, I often watch myself become more and more energized from day to day—recovering from whatever circumstance blew out my reserves of strength, like bad news or car trouble or just a crazy day. Each day I feel more like myself, more capable, containing more potential to get something done—and today was going to be one of those peak days where I really made a splash in a video, or in writing, or something. Or so it seemed, leading up to it. But today, phht!—nada, nothing, goose-eggs, zippo, kaput. I might as well go back to bed.

Wednesday, September 23rd,  2015                                           10:31 PM

I saw “Pitch Perfect 2” on VOD yesterday—it was okay, but “Pitch Perfect” was one of those movies that caught lightning in a bottle—beyond the premise, the characters, the songs—there was pacing, introspection, coming-of-age notes were hit—it was a perfect movie, in some ways. “Pitch Perfect 2”, I’m sad to report, was more like an extended episode of Glee guest-starring Anna Kendrick and Rebel Wilson. It was so busy hitting all the old themes and adding new material, that it never gelled into a movie. It wasn’t terrible—the songs were nice, Rebel is funny, and I’ve got an age-inappropriate ‘thing’ for Anna Kendrick, so it was watchable, but a let-down, still.

I’m too old for Glee—they sing contemporary songs and mash-ups—which I enjoy, but for me a sing-along uses songs my parents, and even my grandparents, used to sing. If I was a little more dexterous I’d get a job playing karaoke back-up piano—when you’re no virtuoso, it’s great to have voices drowning out the piano-playing. In today’s video of 1940s Song Covers, I even try to sing along myself—but that doesn’t help so much, since it distracts me from the playing—and I’m no Andreas Bocelli, either. I left in a brief interruption, where I’m begging my son to sing along with me—and he, being kinda shy, pretends to have a sore throat—someday I’ll catch him in the right mood.

This second video is more song covers—I would have called it Part II, but these songs aren’t from the 1940s—more like the 1930s thru the 1960s. I guess I just felt like singing today.

And here we have another ‘stitched-together’ improv that is really three different segments from among my cover recordings, when I stopped to take improv-breaks.

I’m running into some confusion lately—my improved piano-playing ability makes me very happy, and I enjoy posting new recordings of pieces that I’ve posted before, but much more listen-able. But even today’s posts, which came out pretty fair—I was tempted to not post them and wait for a better take. I also consider playing pieces many times over before posting a recording—something I am doing now with the Brahms Opus 117. Trouble is, even in my new condition, even when I’ve rehearsed a piece, I’ll still spaz out or stumble over a chord; I’ll still have pages to turn; I’ll still get folks wandering through my recording studio (our living room, that is). So perfection ain’t gonna happen—I post what I get and I hope for better in the future. But it is confusing sometimes. I would like to become a real boy (said Pinocchio the wooden pianist).

Piano Work   (2015Sep20)

Sunday, September 20, 2015                                            4:15 PM

I played the piano for forty-five minutes today—I’m getting so active that I’m letting a bunch of recordings go—I can’t make a video out of everything I play these days—life is too short.

But I did stitch together all the improvising I did between the Brahms and the MacDowell—it came to just over eleven minutes, but it’s actually three different improvs ‘smushed’ together. The final segment has a break where the camera ends one file and starts another—my camera does that every twenty minutes. If I want to be sure of no interruptions, I have to jump up and restart the recording every time I play a separate piece of music.

The MacDowell is very fragile stuff—I tried to keep the phrasing intact while I let the tempo lag, trying to get my shaky hands to settle in to the proper configuration of each chord to be played. He’s such a romantic, he even added little phrases and poems to the titles of his works:

Xper Dunn plays Piano

September 20th, 2015

Three (3) Pieces by Edward MacDowell

from “New England Idyls”, Op. 62

  1. An Old Garden

“Sweet alyssum,

   Moss grown stair,

Rows of Roses,

   Larkspur fair.

 

All old posies,

   Tokens rare

Of love undying

   Linger there.”

from “Sea Pieces”, Op. 55

  1. Nautilus

“A fairy sail and a fairy boat”

from “New England Idyls”, Op. 62

  1. With Sweet Lavender

“From days of yore,

Of lover’s lore,

A faded bow

Of one no more.

 

A treasured store

Of lover’s lore,

Unmeasured woe

For one no more.”

I also played the Brahms Opus 117 again, all three intermezzos, like I do every day—I almost posted today’s, but it still isn’t quite ‘there’ yet.

You Tread On My Dreams   (2015Aug31)

Monday, August 31, 2015                                       1:54 PM

William Butler Yeats (1865 – 1939) is an interesting guy. Considered one of the pillars of twentieth-century poetry, he was born in 1865—much like our twenty-first-century pop stars who were all born in the 1980s—centuries can be a weirdly illogical dividing line. Yeats’ life was a full one—he excelled early on, and it is said that he is one of the few writers who wrote their best work after winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. His poetry is like walking through a dream—he really had a knack.

It always surprises me that a great artist and creator can have such subtleties of expression and nuance of feeling—yet their relations with women are always as confused and complicated as any moron’s. It’s as if women are men’s blind spot—and if you look at the present-day struggle simply to recognize women as equal, you may consider the theory proved. What is our problem?

His poem, “Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven” is a strikingly beautiful bit of writing—it has been quoted in books, movies, and songs galore. One of the most famous musical-setting versions is “Yeats Songs”, for baritone & piano, by Richard Bunger Evans—I’m not crazy about ‘modern’ atonal stuff, but you may enjoy it:

Yeats Songs, for baritone & piano:

The poem also inspires its share of artwork, as well—for example:

http://lacewoodshelties.blogspot.com/2009/03/aedh-wishes-for-clothes-of-heaven.html

Here are the words:

The Cloths of Heaven

Had I the heaven’s embroidered cloths,

Enwrought with golden and silver light,

The blue and the dim and the dark cloths

Of night and light and the half-light;

I would spread the cloths under your feet:

But I, being poor, have only my dreams;

I have spread my dreams under your feet;

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

-W. B. Yeats

Gorgeous imagery, isn’t it? But isn’t Aedh being a little passive-aggressive? Aedh is one of Yeats’ three mythic characters—the others are the Artistic one and the Rational one, but Aedh is a pale, lovelorn victim of La belle dame sans merci—a passive-aggressive take on love if there ever was one. It’s not too far off from a rapist blaming his behavior on the woman’s attractive attire—as if, when men find women attractive, it’s their fault that we suffer when they fail to reciprocate our feelings. It’s as romantic as misogyny gets.

Still, it is romantic, much like when Elton John can’t remember what color eyes a girl has but still ‘loves’ her enough to write her “Your Song” (I won’t get into the details of Bernie Taupin being the lyricist—or of John being gay, for that matter). Much of our romantic-themed media is layered with latent misogyny—perhaps indicative of the confusion men feel when women want to be equals in public but still prefer a more brutish, or brutish-seeming, mate—that this is just the flip side of men’s feelings about the same things never seems to occur to us.

And speaking of gay—I think it’s possible that our emotional problems with the LGBT community are largely based on our tendencies to separate the female from the male—and when we’re struggling to meet public standards of political correctness concerning the ‘weaker sex’, gays make it all just too confusing—like an added complication that breaks our mental backs. It’s just a theory.

Anyway, I feel like I’ve wandered too far from any one topic to ever make a coherent post out of this mess, so why don’t I just offer today’s musical ‘sermon’:

You Tread On My Dreams:

O—and here’s something even weirder from yesterday:

Insecten:

Tweedly-Tweet   (2015Aug30)

Sunday, August 30, 2015                                         2:28 PM

I always knew I was special—and now I have proof. This morning I listened to a great YouTube of Leonard Bernstein conducting the Beethoven Symphony No. 6 (Pastoral) in F, Opus 68.

So maybe I had nature on the brain—but then I went to lie down and listen to myself. It’s not as self-centered as it sounds—I play CDs I’ve burned of my improvs, so that I have something to listen to while I roll cigarettes or watch close-captioned TV on mute or read a book.

I usually play it pretty low volume—just enough to hear it well without it actually striking my eardrums (I’m a sensitive flower) especially if I’m trying to read. By doing this I can hear when a particular improv has a sour note or an ugly passage—any awkwardness of execution, beyond the endemic. It interrupts my thinking—because, like everyone else, I’m used to perfect music coming out of loudspeakers—it’s almost impossible to imagine an album with a sour note on it. Not surprising, since a recording studio is basically a perfection filter that catches any trace of clumsiness and rules it right out—not that there’s anything wrong with that…..

I’m occasionally, pleasantly surprised by a bit of musical soaring that catches my ear in a rare piece—something that makes me proud. These are important for several reasons—one, obviously, it encourages me to continue playing Don Quixote on the keyboard. But I also play them back repeatedly, trying to take note of what I did and why it works and how I might use it in future.

There are, among those rare moments, even rarer instances where the key to what makes a passage striking is the emotional energy—not something I’m famous for, but it shows its head every decade or so. These passages stymy me—how can I transport myself into inspiration once I’ve sat down to play? You might as well ask me to fly.

Anyway, sometimes I listen to myself turned up real loud so I can hear every sound and nuance on the recording, just to make sure I heard everything I did—and whether any background sounds that might ruin the recording show up at high volume. That’s what I was doing today—I had the Bose cranked to 50—and I get to the third track, which is called “Blue Lake”. Now Claire and I have often joked that the birds outside our windows like to sing along with me at the piano—and it did seem kinda eerie sometimes, but I was too busy to pay attention.

Blue Lake:  

26 seconds in you hear a cricket or cicada or something, then after a minute in, you hear a bird chirping along for two minutes or more, with occasional chiming in throughout. But it’s right on the beat—you can even hear it get a little huffy about my messing up the beat (which I do).

So, I jumped up and went to tell Claire about it in the living room—and while we were talking about how strange it was, I felt inspired and began to record today’s improv, while Claire studied on the couch—and after a minute and a half of playing, the darn bird sang along again—but Claire says it was a different bird. There’s some other birds in there, too—although I can’t say whether the crow was doing his own thing or what. Once I heard them chiming in, I started to play to them, looking around the upper register for stuff they might react to—ultimately, this is less a musical piece and more a dialogue with my avian house-hangers. So I guess I have a fan club—boy, do I feel special.

Tweedly-Tweet: 

So that’s my day so far..

Happy Anniversary To Us   (2015Aug29)

Saturday, August 29, 2015                                                12:27 PM

Claire and I have been married thirty-five years today. And as the world has changed quite a bit since August, 1980, so have we—but some things stay the same—I still feel incredibly lucky, Claire still puts up with me, and we are still both happy as clams when we know that our two kids are both fine and dandy. I feel a little guilty, however, since there is only one Bear—and the rest of male-kind has to make do with less-perfect mates—sorry, fellas.

Today’s first video is “Xper Dunn plays Harpsichord on August 29th, 2015 – J. S. Bach’s keyboard transcription of Antonio Vivaldi’s ‘Concerto in D Major’”. As you will hear, it takes me a minute to get me sea legs underneath me in the first movement. The second movement (the slow one, of course) is where I make the least mistakes. And in the third movement, you can hear the computer suddenly make a weird tone, apropos of nothing, which distracts me—while you can also see that I am tiring by this point—just as I’m supposed to be making the last movement all jig-gy and jocular. So, a pretty terrible rendition of one of my favorite pieces of music.

Why, you quite sensibly ask, would I post such a horrible excuse for a performance of a piece I love so much? Well, it’s not about me, really. I learned to love this piece by listening to it over and over again, incessantly, on an LP re-recording of a wax-cylinder master-recording of Wanda Landowska. Wanda Landowska was a legendary harpsichordist and a great proponent of Bach’s enduring legacy to musicians and to music lovers. Even on a scratchy, antique recording, she makes this Bach/Vivaldi piece sound like heaven itself—pure, sweet, perfect, simple. I highly recommend giving it a listen, either before, or in place of, my own awkward attempt:

Back to me—I first came across the sheet music in a library book which I Xeroxed and created my own copy of—years later I would buy a printed copy, which is much easier to sight-read. It tickled me, over the years, to simulate small moments of the beautiful sounds I heard Wanda make—even though I would practice it for years on a piano until I acquired the Yamaha Digital Piano P-95, with the harpsichord setting, that allowed me to make today’s recording. And, as bad as it is, this is by far the best performance I’ve ever made of the Concerto in D—or ever will make, most likely. And when I play this piece, I don’t hear myself making a hash of it—I hear Wanda making it sound like heaven. That’s the trouble with most of my music—I hear what I want to hear, and you poor suckers are stuck with what I actually sound like:

Then again, you’re not going to hear anything like today’s improv anywhere else on the web—at least, I haven’t found it. This leads me to a couple of alternatives—one, the most likely, that I’m a wanna-be New Age musician trying (and failing) to sound like Keith Jarrett or George Winston—while completely overlooking the fact that New Age is no longer new. Or two, that I have succeeded, against all odds, in finding a style that is all my own—which incorporates my failings and what few strengths I may have into a form of music like no other. That would be nice—though it still avoids the question of whether I’m worth listening to.

The Yamaha P-95 once again comes into play today, in that I find touching a ‘piano key’ and hearing weird electronic noises is very refreshing and inspiring to someone who has spent forty years playing an acoustic piano, where a key gives a tone, the same tone, timbre, and texture, always and forever. So, today we hear my usual guff, but rendered into something new by the simple use of a few ‘effects’ buttons—I almost like myself in this:

My mother-in-law dropped off some great blondie brownies—and later I’ve been promised Chinese take-out for dinner (my favorite). I hope you all are having as nice a day as I am.

Music Hath Charms (2015Aug28)

It’s one of those days—I play the piano and sing along with myself—I sing along with the playlist on my PC (somewhere in there I marvel at the inordinate amount of lyrics I’ve somehow memorized over the years—yet still have some point in every song where I have to go ‘uh-la-la-yeah-oh-uh’). So—am I happy as a lark, or am I full of frustration and this is my passive-aggressive way of venting? It’s hard to say.

One thing I’ve noticed about music—if you do it properly, it’s pretty hard work—not that I see it that way—it’s a joy, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy—it takes focus, effort and seven kinds of coordination. They say playing the piano is the equivalent of rowing a boat; playing the violin is the equivalent of lifting weights; and conducting an orchestra is like being in a boxing match—in terms of calories burned, at least. For all I know, music has kept me from wasting away during my sick period—it was the only thing that got me out of bed.

Then again, I don’t exactly look like I frequent the gym. I’ve got a permanent paunch from having a liver transplant—there are certain abs of mine that will never flex again—but that just gives me a good excuse to look like most guys my age, so I guess I shouldn’t complain.

A few nights ago, I wrote:

O, Joy and Rapture! I noticed that some drawings I was sure I had were no longer showing up on my PC—then I remembered I had some back-up files.

Trouble was backup files don’t restore themselves—and I had used Norton 360 software to make them. I figured I was in for a long, hard slog before I ever managed to restore these files but I went on live-chat with Norton Tech Support (didn’t hurt that it was one in the morning) and they set me up with a quick Restore-app download and I’m sitting here typing now because I’m waiting for my 50,000 files to finish restoring—how easy is that?! Sometimes a person gets lucky.

One thing I’ve finally learned from computers—if something is important enough to get on there in the first place, I’ll probably want it again sometime in the future—no files are truly deletable.

That may seem like file-hoarding, but with the proper directory-tree organization–and considering how big today’s hard drives are–you never get into the kinds of problems that plague real hoarders of actual stuff.

Of course, now that I have that stuff restored, I have to go through my backups and de-dupe the files, and move them to the correct sub-directories—there’s a lot of confusion in my mind after a few minutes of that sort of thing, so I’m still not done. But it’s all there—that’s the important thing.

I could listen to the Beach Boys sing “I Can Hear Music” all day long, I swear…. Hey—tomorrow’s Claire and I’s 35th wedding anniversary—cool, right? No wonder I can’t think straight.

I watched Hillary Clinton at the DNC meeting on CSPAN this morning—she gave a great speech. She defined the Democratic Party as the party that is concerned with the people—and she castigated the Republicans as out-of-touch. The former Secretary of State said the Republican presidential candidates were “all Trump, but without the pizzaz”—which I found especially apt.

How do the right-wingers rationalize their religiosity in a nation whose watchword has always been ‘separation of church and state’? How do they demonize immigration in a nation that is built upon an alloyed strength forged in a revered melting-pot? How do they maintain their dog-whistles of division in a nation where our progress is measured in the advancement of freedom and equality? It is only by preying on the weakness of will, the ignorance, and the self-love of their followers that the GOP inveigles us away from the true path of America’s future. End of speech.

So, I’ve been experiencing creative doldrums recently—I seem to have nothing musical to say in my recent improvs—it’s all just a bunch of seeking and not a lot of finding. This post, as well—I began it this morning but now it’s quarter to five in the afternoon—and it’s just a patchwork of disconnected ramblings. Anyhow, here’s my latest foray into the depths of the dog days:

It’s a Win-Win (For Me, Anyway)   (2015Aug25)

Wednesday, August 26, 2015                                           4:01 PM

Well, we’ve been confusing two different things for a long time—for so long that it’s become a part of our national character—a lot of us think that good business practice is the same as good governance. So we must not blame Mr. Trump, who simply surfs the wave of public approbation.

I’m reminded of how the ‘modern’ age of machines brought so many sudden changes that some changes in our thinking went a little too mechanistic—into fascism. Fascism seemed reasonable at the time—it had logic and (pretend) science, and modern folk were all about the logic and science and mechanization back in those days.

Opnamedatum: 2010-1-19

Inflating of Nadars air balloon on a field outside the Barrier Utrecht, Amsterdam, September 14, 1865, John D. Brewer, 1865 [Artwork courtesy of the Rijksmuseum Website]

Likewise today we have great changes that influence changes in our thinking—we don’t even need wires today to make a connection, never mind something as arcane as eye-contact. We’re de-centralizing—we’re going Uber. And Americans maintain a firm belief that business will ‘regulate’ itself—although that is only true in terms of fair competition between companies, and has no relevance to the way in which business treats people. Unfair business practices do somehow persist—proving that business regulates itself on the same model as evolution—a bloody, kill-or-be-killed status quo that ends up with the winners becoming alpha predators—and everyone else is the food. The endgame is simply a new monarchy based on ownership rather than bloodlines—if those two things are truly separate.

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Hemelvaart, Jan Punt, 1748 [Artwork courtesy of the Rijksmuseum Website]

Because of technology, we have lost the connection between ourselves and our world—our survival is more dependent upon the economic infrastructure—the stores, banks, office buildings, mines, factories, ports, the housing, highways and airliners—than it ever was on the source material for those sophistries: the crops, water, air, lumber, cattle, and cotton—the stuff that hitherto more visibly either grew from or fed off the Earth.

Opnamedatum: 2012-07-19

Bacchus and Ariadne, Gerard de Lairesse, c. 1680 [Artwork courtesy of the Rijksmuseum Website]

We used to husband our resources, tend our fields, plant and harvest our crops—now we buy stuff. Some guy with a huge machine is doing all the agricultural stuff, somewhere out in that blank breadbasket between the coasts. Except for that one Mr. Greenjeans out in Iowa, the rest of us are working on maintaining our infrastructure—though it should more rightly be considered a superstructure, as it is built upon a natural world that once had a structure of its own—we couldn’t control nature like we do our modern environment, but we didn’t have to maintain it, either.

20150825XD-Rijks_Dolls-house_CloudySky_wBirds_NicolaesPiemont

Dolls-house Ceiling-Painting of a Cloudy Sky with Birds, attributed to Nicolaes Piemont, c. 1690 – c. 1709 [Artwork courtesy of the Rijksmuseum Website]

Progress isn’t addition, it’s a trade-off—you get the new, but you lose the old. And while we are marveling at the brave new cyberworld of our present—where paper is disappearing and robots are working faster and better than the humans they replace—we should give a thought to the tremendous loss that implies. It’s not a question—it’s a given. Worse yet, history tells us that we never appreciate the true value of something until it is gone beyond recall. So, while we know that our loss is enormous, we are still waiting to feel the pain. Some days, it feels lucky to be old.

20150825XD-Rijks_Paradise_Herri_met_de_Bles

Paradise, Herri met de Bles, c. 1541 – c. 1550 [Artwork courtesy of the Rijksmuseum Website]

As I see it, ‘isms’ will always trip you up. Take any Ism to its logical conclusion and you get mayhem—capitalism turns to thievery, democracy turns to mob rule, Christianity becomes a platform for hate and violence. None of our societal systems and structures stand on their own, alone—they all must be leavened with humanity. One sign of our modern progress is that some people are finally trying to turn humanity into ‘humanism’—they may mess it up—people usually do—but at least we recognize that there is something there, something elemental—that outshines any system of government or faith or justice. It is humanity that allows compromise, forgiveness, and tolerance.

20150825XD-Rijks_LossOfFaith_JanToorop

Loss of Faith, Jan Toorop, 1894 [Artwork courtesy of the Rijksmuseum Website]

These are the foundation of freedom and justice—without them, we have only an eye for an eye and the whole world blind—or at least lacking depth-perception. The most singular aspect of humanity is that it isn’t a system of checks and balances—it’s just giving. It’s what we do for infants, for the sick or hungry, for our grandparents and great-grandparents, for anyone we truly feel love for—or even for a stranger—we give, and we don’t look for compensation.

20150825XD-Rijks_Shipyard_AmsterdamAdmiralty_LudolfBakhuysen

The Shipyard of the Amsterdam Admiralty, Ludolf Bakhuysen, 1655 – 1660 [Artwork courtesy of the Rijksmuseum Website]

When I see these crowds at campaign rallies shouting for justice, I want them to stop shouting long enough for someone to tell them that you don’t get justice—you give mercy, and you hope for justice. Laws help keep the injustice to a dull roar, but nothing will ever end injustice but mercy, compassion, and generosity. If you’re fighting for someone else’s rights, you have a shot at being a force for justice, but if you just looking to get your own, Jack—you’re being selfish. Your therapists will tell you that’s a good thing—but your therapist is an idiot. Still, what can your therapist tell you? How do you tell anyone exactly how to be a human being?

20150825XD-Rijks_Val_van_Icarus_HansBol

Val van Icarus, Hans Bol, Anonymous, c. 1550 – c. 1650 [Artwork courtesy of the Rijksmuseum Website]

Thus endeth the lesson, as Sean Connery intones in “The Untouchables”. I’m wearing a T-Shirt today that I’ve had since one summer of the 80s, when our onetime family business, Mal Dunn Associates, threw a pool party, back in the day–pretty good shirts–still looks good:

20150826XD-TheMDA_T_Shirt (5)

I used the above photo, along with my usual pilfering of the Rijksmuseums website’s collection of masterpieces, for the three videos below:

Vive La France   (2015Aug22)

Saturday, August 22, 2015                                                3:51 PM

Instead of Donald Trump or Hillary’s E-Mails, I’d like to obsess about the overpowering of the young Moroccan bullet-train gunman outside of Paris yesterday—let’s spend the rest of the summer talking about that. The main heroes seem to be two US Marines—though without minimizing their heroism, it should be noted that the entire car—British, French, US, whatever—rose as one to beat the crap out of this would-be terrorist.

It reminds me of the heroes of United Airlines Flight 93, who fought the hijackers and died in the crash, sparing whatever Washington, DC target the terrorists had in mind. It is unhappy that people are prepared for this, but it makes me strangely happy to know that they now are. Terrorists be advised—people aren’t just going to sit there anymore.

It is daunting what a lone sicko can accomplish—but it is thrilling to know what a group of right-thinking strangers can do in response. And it’s well past time that terrorists got a little of their own back.

Neither can I contain my pride in our mighty Green Machine—those guys you don’t mess with. And it isn’t every day that we get to see them in their purest form—jumping to the defense of innocent people, without orders or prompting—hell, without a second thought. That’s just too cool. I don’t come from a traditionally military family, but my father was a Marine—he served in Korea—and I have a nephew who’s currently serving (Go James!) so I always feel a touch of pride whenever the United States Marines make the world a better place.

Collaboration   (2015Aug19)

Wednesday, August 19, 2015                                           1:03 PM

Pete came by yesterday—we killed our imaginary audience and made some recordings which I hope no one will mistake for Pete’s fault—if you look closely, you’ll see a very capable drummer trying to be nice to a totally awful piano-player. This mess is completely my responsibility. I almost never play with musicians because musicians, understandably, don’t go looking for half-assed collaborators—but Pete is an exceptionally kind soul and an old friend who is the exception that proves the rule.

FamPh 063

This is a picture of Pete and Spencer back in the day–If you watch Spencer’s walk-through on the video, you’ll see he’s grown some since this picture was taken.

I’ve been thinking about collaboration lately. As I’ve mentioned often in these posts, I think that people may have excellent self-control when the situation demands it but that humanity as a group, as a mob, has no brain and does whatever it does, crazy (or even suicidal) or not. We try to mitigate this with governments and other frameworks for group action—but even these foundations can only influence people en masse to a certain degree.

Take the Drug War as an example—with Prohibition as a historical precedent, we can’t be very surprised that the Drug War has been a complete failure—drug abuse is a part of the human condition. People will seek out recreational drugs just as they seek out alcoholic beverages. After all, life is a struggle and there aren’t that many features that offer unalloyed enjoyment—we can gain peace from our relationships and achievement from our endeavors, but not always—and it’s a struggle, win or lose. But a weekend spree is an easy and affordable escape from the rigors of the work-week and the number of people who choose to do without it will never be unanimous—criminalization simply complicates things.

Collaboration, cooperation,—even democracy—all also run up against the matter of people all being different in many ways. I heard the debate yesterday during the news reports of the first two women who passed the Rangers Training School requirements. As the closet-misogynist debated the moderate-feminist, they both had some confusion about the fact that average men have expected differences from average women, but the best of the best soldiers are exceptional people with above-average abilities, gender notwithstanding. Generalizations about gender roles do not apply when speaking of virtual Supergirls—although, rightly, we ought to take the hint that generalizations about gender all have that flaw to some degree—because we are all different.

Thus individuality and human nature are both obstacles to traditional governments and other organizing frameworks—yet they are both strengths as well. Perhaps our paradigms of organization are at fault. Churchill once opined that ‘Democracy isn’t a perfect form of government—it’s just better than all the others’. And I feel that we have become sophisticated enough to look at democracy (and capitalism, for that matter) and start to face that fact—having found systems that outdo more ancients customs is great—but is it the best we can do?

For that matter, can Democracy and Capitalism coexist without one cancelling the other? We see many examples where capitalism has infringed on the democratic process recently—but there are also times when the force of majority rule outdoes the primacy of property. We aren’t really being honest about this whole subject—we’ve been too busy defending democracy from fascism and capitalism from communism to allow ourselves to question their basic values.

While Democracy and Capitalism fight it out (and while we pretend that they work together) we have a third player—religion, or Christianity, since I’m speaking primarily of the USA. Many conservatives will insist that religion is a bedrock value—in spite of the fact that we are famous for sidelining religion from our governing principles. They’ll put on their blinders and assure us that ‘religious freedom’ was only meant to apply to the different Protestant sects of Christianity—as if that made sense, and full ‘religious freedom’ didn’t.

This is partly a failure to understand history—in much the same way that conservatives insist that our constitutional guarantee of ownership of flintlock rifles translates into prowling the Wal-Mart with semi-automatic weapons. But it is also a failure to understand religion, as a concept. Most people of faith make the mistake of counting their religion as the truth, while all other religions are, at best, to be tolerated. But Truth and Faith are not interchangeable—particularly in the situation where we have allowed for the existence of more than one form of faith.

What the original colonists did was recognize that even a single individual’s unique faith, with or without an established church, may be questioned as to its validity—but it can’t be made illegal. The opposite truth to that premise is that no one religion can be made the legal faith under our government. Basically, we accept that citizens will have whatever faith they may or may not have, but the law will operate separately from any one faith. Anyone who seriously proposes that America become a Christian nation is as much a threat to our way of life as the Communists were in the 1950s—even more so, since the Commies have had their day and faded away. ISIS would be a better example, come to think of it—both parties wish to transform us into a theocracy.

But let me return to collaboration. In science fiction novels, one gets the impression that the human race will expand outward, mimicking our behavior of the exploration era and the pioneering era. One gets used to the idea of the human race having a ‘destiny’—a place or a state that our future selves will eventually reach out to and evolve into. We envision a solar system busy with mining, colonization, exploration, and discovery—our little blue marble, Earth, just a single part of a civilization that calls the Sun its home. We even dream of FTL starships that allow colonization of other stars—a future civilization so vast and varied that imagination can barely envisage its size, never mind its nature.

Our gravity well, however, is no small barrier. If humanity is ever going to go beyond Earth, it will have to involve tremendous collaboration. At this point in modern technology, we will need tremendous collaboration just to survive at all. Where does the motive come from? How do we mobilize our efforts towards the survival of humankind when we have never had to worry about it before? Up until now, we’ve been so sure that the Earth is invulnerable to our attentions that we have never considered it a factor in our decision-making. The whole debate over climate change is really just humanity trying to convince itself that we’ve outgrown that simplicity.

Our systems of government, of commerce, and our cultures have all developed under the mistaken mindset that humanity can do whatever it will—we are slowly coming to grips with the fact that this is no longer true.

Part of our problem is that heretofore we have assumed that the point of life was the afterlife—that we should concentrate on living our own individual lives under the tenets of our faiths because the important part, the afterlife, will be affected by how well we follow the rules while living. No part of human culture actually emphasizes the importance of species survival—‘God’ made us, so naturally we can’t be unmade unless ‘He’ decides to unmake us. Climate change, drought, chemical and oil spills, and nuclear waste make it clear that we can certainly unmake ourselves—there’s nothing religious about it, it’s just a fact.

So now we have to turn from our focus on our individual afterlives to the maintenance of the survival of the human genome, and to Gaea—or whatever you choose to call the overall biome of the Earth. For we have two ‘afterlifes’—one is a spiritual belief, the other is our offspring. To reach the first one, we have to be mindful of ethics. To protect the second we will have to begin having ethics as a group—something we’ve never had, and something I have no idea how we’ll ever attain. The alternative is to remain the simple, global mob we’ve always been—and just wait for the lights to go out.

TV, Then and Now   (2015Aug16)

Saturday, August 15, 2015                                       2:38 PM

Technology makes some things ridiculous. Where television programming once seemed an ever-shifting gem flashing first this rainbow facet then that, prisms and beams, swells and clarions of relentlessly changing light and sound, it is now listed on a menu. As of three years ago, iMDB listed over a quarter of a million films—268,000 since 1888. There have been 364 TV programs of 150-300 episodes each, 167 of 300-550 episodes each, 87 of 550-1,000 episodes each, 124 of 1,000-2,500 episodes each, 51 of 2,500-5,000 episodes each, 35 of 5,000-10,000 episodes each and 8 TV programs of over 10,000 episodes each (that’s roughly 101,426 episodes just from the top eight programs). Granted, only the majority of these programs are from the USA and Great Britain—(TV is alive and well the world over and they’re not just streaming the feed from the Great Satan). But that’s still more than a lifetime’s worth of original programming available to the English-speaking audience.

So, proved: there are more TV shows and movies than a single individual could ever watch in a hundred years—why then, in the summer, on the weekend, in the middle of the day, is there absolutely nothing on TV that I haven’t seen a billion times? I would make a federal case out of this—but then I stop and realize that for the younger folks (like our kids) TV is no longer something you let schedule your life—you schedule it. Between On-Demand and Hulu and HBO-Go and who knows what-all else, everything is watchable when you want to watch it—worrying about when something is ‘on the air’ is something only old fogeys like myself are still doing.

Even PBS, which hasn’t the need or the capacity to follow all the latest forms of commercialization, like On Demand, has to make all of its content available on its website—just to make sure it gets seen by anyone under the age of fifty. But then, why shouldn’t they? I myself post whatever my videocamera records, to YouTube, almost daily—doesn’t cost a dime.

In addition to TV programming’s detachment from real-time, there’s the addition of all the ‘unfiltered’ content to be found on YouTube, podcasts, Netflix, Amazon, etc. Commercial interruption is no longer a given. Networks no longer work to give us an overview of our choices—they still push their own stuff during commercial breaks, but now that’s only a fraction of what’s out there. TV Guide, once a weekly magazine found in every household, is online—and even online, TV Guide still harks back to the 90s paradigm of broadcast-plus-cable—it’s impossible to list everything that’s available on every platform. It is easy today to miss out on a great new program, just because there’s no central entity that has an interest in guiding our viewing choices—no one central corporation, or group of corporations, gets a monetary return from driving our preferences or piquing our interest in new shows.

And even if there were such an entity, who would watch their commercials? Between muting them in real time, fast-forwarding past them on ‘On Demand’, and their relative non-existence on digital delivery platforms, commercials have also ceased to be the staple of entertainment they once were. Marshall McLuhan’s ‘global village’ has been decentralized and demonetized. It’s a free-for-all out there.

I do miss the old ‘water-cooler’ atmosphere of the twentieth century—everybody had something to say about last night’s Carson monologue, or SNL skit, or Seinfeld episode. Everybody saw (and more importantly, discussed amongst themselves) Roots, Ken Burn’s Civil War, and other legendary programs that became cultural events simply by existing in the tiny, communal feed that once was shared by every living room screen, like a village bonfire we all virtually sat around. Stranger still, new offerings with the same potential impact are now being produced rather frequently—but their influence is diluted by the fact that they appear in little corners of our modern media landscape—seen by only a sliver of a demographic—rather than being spotlighted by a major network’s primetime.

Complexity, too, dilutes the impact of today’s ‘exposés’—where once we had an annual Jerry Lewis telethon for Muscular Dystrophy, we now have a panoply of documentaries about MS, ALS, AIDS, HPV, HCV, etc. In recent months I have seen a dozen different programs regarding new cures for cancer—genetically tailored, site-specific, cannabis-based, modified viruses—apparently, there will be no ‘cure’ for cancer, but a whole new industry, a whole new category of science, of cancer cures.

And diseases are only one aspect of public interest—racism has come from pure bigotry to the specifics of police brutality, job openings, educational barriers, the culture of ingrained poverty, drug criminalization, and on and on—and that’s just racism as it pertains to one minority. Sexism ranges from equal pay to electing our first female president. Education issues turn from funding to tenure to technique to classroom size, just to name a few of the countless issues. The Middle East has gone from basically the survival of Israel to a pack of different problems being faced by thirty different countries, several religious sects, and the international implications of each Middle East nation’s ties to developed countries either allied with or opposed to the USA. If that’s not complex enough, just add in the global thirst for Middle East petroleum resources.

TV becomes complex at the same time that the world explodes in complexity. None of the people my age or older would have predicted that the average person would be helpless in their daily activities without typing skills—but a keyboard is a far more consistent part of our daily lives than pen and paper ever were. Even space, which used to be a matter of getting to the Moon and safely back again (and maybe Mars) is now a matter of all nine planets and their many moons, the Kuiper belt, geosynchronous surveillance satellites, radio astronomy, space telescopes, space stations, commercial space flight, the search for habitable worlds in far-off solar systems, and more.

Science Fiction has been hit the hardest—what was once good science fiction is now a matter of everyday life—writing that goes beyond the sci-fi-ness of our present reality can result in ‘hard’ sci-fi novels that are so ‘hard’, many readers will complain that they read like physics textbooks. Today’s emphasis is on near-future sci-fi, since it has long become impossible to imagine what our civilization will look like in fifty or a hundred years—just looking at the changes of our last fifty years of reality is enough to send us reeling. Some of William Gibson’s novels don’t necessarily require any future at all, except for a detail here and there—mostly it’s just extrapolations of our present tech, with just a soupçon of accrued infrastructure.

Now, given that, it is especially upsetting to see a group like the Tea Party, or their present incarnation, Trump supporters, being taken seriously. ‘Childish’ is the only word that comes to my mind. These folks want all the advantages of new media, new science, and new technology—but they want all of that to leave their older memes untouched. By rights, they should be called the ‘cognitive dissonance’ party—they want to uphold the myths, morals, and mores of the mid-twentieth century while living in the twenty-first. It’s like an Amish person wanting to drive a Lamborghini—it’s understandable—everyone wants to drive a Lamborghini —but you can’t have it both ways.

The strangest thing about these overgrown children is that they have enough awareness of their basic wrongness that they speak in euphemisms. They know that their beliefs, plainly expressed, would be roundly condemned by the vast majority—but they don’t see that as any indication of wrong thinking. They continue to search for new ways to ‘teach the controversy’ (doubletalk-speak for ‘supporting the ludicrous’) by reacting against seemingly unassailable progressivism.

Take for instance the ‘Black Lives Matter’ campaign. Any idiot will understand that this phrase is shorthand for “Black lives should matter as much as anyone else’s”. Their pretense of being blockheaded enough to misunderstand the phrase as ‘black lives matter more’ is so transparent that it becomes one of those things that make it hard to decide whether to laugh or cry. And that is their most popular weapon nowadays—to leave us so breathless at the profound stupidity of their words that we don’t know where to begin with our rebuttals!

Self Haircut (2015Aug13)

I hate the way you can’t cut your own hair without just buzz-cutting the whole thing. I mean, I could take a stab at styling in the front and sides–but what’s the difference when I can’t see what I’m doing in the back?

Slow Justice   (2015Jul10)

Friday, July 10, 2015                                                8:58 PM

Having heard the news about the Confederate flag being removed from public display—and having just watched the movie “Woman In Gold”, I am struck by just how slow and incomplete justice can be. The movie tells of a story I remember seeing in the news when it happened—and it struck me then how many years the “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer” had been separated from its rightful owners. The Nazis looted the painting from the childhood home of the late Austrian-American, Maria Altmann, in 1938—and it was not returned to her (the last surviving family member) until 2004, 66 years later.

The movie ends with an afterward: over 100,000 pieces of art looted by the Nazis during the war have not yet been returned to their rightful owners. If the movie’s story is anything to go by, that number may remain correct for decades—it’s not easier to right an old wrong, it’s harder.

America still struggles with pockets of institutionalized racism, such as the reports from Ferguson, MO where, for the two years studied, African-Americans accounted for 85 percent of traffic stops, 90 percent of tickets and 93 percent of arrests, where whites were one-third of the population—and that the fines from those traffic tickets provided the bulk of the town’s revenue. Taking down the Confederate flag is an important gesture—but it is sad that the south has taken this long to separate their history from their heritage. Slavery may be the history of the south, but I hope it is not considered their heritage—at least not the average southerner’s.

There’s a naiveté to the evil of the Nazis and the Confederacy—the evil that remains today is less visible. Police persecution, payday loans, and fine collection services are just a few of the more intricate and therefore invisible ways in which we commit modern American bigotry. The convoluted restitution protocols for European victims of Nazi looting are likewise Byzantine to the point of opacity. But our modern world is full to bursting with intricate evils that maintain the status quo, deferring justice wherever the pile of gold is high enough to cast a shadow in which rot can thrive.

This is a downer post, I know, but it’s been a downer day and I can only work with the materials provided. Gustav Klimt’s portrait, ‘Woman In Gold’, is used for my video’s title card, but the other works by Klimt used in the video are just whatever I could steal off the internet—they are not part of the movie’s story—or at least not that I know of. They’re just beautiful, so I stole them.

Transformed By Age Into A Neal Young Song   (2015Jul05)

Sunday, July 05, 2015                                              3:56 PM

I used to resent the loss of clarity that age brings. But lately I’ve just been letting it happen, kind of enjoying the montage of unprompted feelings and memories that swirl around inside me, changing from one moment to the next while I simply sit here.

Fifty-nine years of experiences, of sights, sounds, smells, tastes, actions, feelings—it’s a lot, even with our brains designed to drop several stitches as we go along, retaining only details and prompts instead of the entirety of events. And I’ve reached a tipping point, where the exciting memories of my youth are more vivid than my actual perceptions, here and now.

I couldn’t understand these things when I was younger—I doubt I was supposed to, either. Now that I’m old enough to stop making long-term plans, starting a career or a business would be folly, going back to school would have me wondering just what I’d do with a degree at the ripe old age of three years from now. Even learning for learning’s sake is a bust at this point—having forgotten most of what I’ve learned over the years, I see little point in cramming new stuff in there. Plus I spent two decades learning every new piece of software and hardware that came along—and even if I could still remember any of it, it’s all worthless knowledge about obsolete tech, here in 2015.

No, the coming thing for old folks is to indulge in the philosophical musings that come naturally to someone whose spent fifty, sixty years watching the comic-tragic rushings-about of modern society. The random memories that poke their heads in—the random influx of old passions re-ignited—these moments come and go like flittering birds, chirping of immortality. We can unreel in our minds the conditions that prevent the conditions that prevent the conditions that would ‘fix’ waste and want and anger—we’ve lost the ability to exclaim, “Well, why don’t they just fix it?!” Unfortunately, we know why—human nature creates and enforces the madness of society—we cannot be better than what we are. And—the world is a big place.

Here’s a short improv:

Stewart’s Impending Sign-Off   (2015Jul02)

Wednesday, July 01, 2015                                                11:59 PM

JonStewartOnCC

Wow, I guess I’m a creature of habit—the time-stamp is just one minute off of last night’s time-stamp. But that figures—lately, all work stops for me at 11 PM. I don’t want to miss any of Jon Stewart’s final Daily Show hostings. He’s off in august and that’s like five minutes from now in old-guy time. I’ve enjoyed the political satire of the Daily Show since Craig Kilbourn, i.e. since day one—‘fake news’ was an idea whose time had come, and Claire and I loved to watch it.

But Jon Stewart made it more than just a joke–he turned it into a public service. For seventeen years he’s made us laugh while informing—and while castigating those who deserved it. I’m going to feel a little lost without Jon Stewart saying all the things we all wish we could say to power and to pretense. The foibles and evasions of today’s corporate and political powerbrokers are bad enough—why should they escape without even having to pay the minimal price of public exposure to well-deserved ridicule? I hope Stewart’s replacement is up to filling those shoes.

Yet I have been wondering of late whether Jon Stewart isn’t too much of a good thing. His prey has adapted to the constant lampooning—and worse, we the audience have perhaps taken a Daily Show ‘public flogging’ as sufficient response to politicians who we’d be better off voting against than laughing at.

But that’s the Catch-22 of the Daily Show. It’s the only news program that doesn’t cater to the egos and the agendas of its subjects—making it the straightest-talking infotainment in the whole news line-up. You really can’t not watch it. Fortunately, one of Stewart’s old ‘correspondents’, John Oliver, with Last Week Tonight on HBO, has refined the format’s technique to the point of activism—many of John Oliver’s hashtag-coaxing broadcasts have been followed by headlines the next day—displaying the power of combining Oliver’s immense influence and the might of the Internet.

I’m not really too worried about what comes after the Jon Stewart era. Ever since Will Rogers, Americans have had an appetite for an acidic but humorous observer of the human condition as it manifests itself in current events and personalities. That’s now a vacuum that will always be filled by someone somehow. But Jon Stewart has set the bar pretty darn high.

Now, as for today’s improv video—today was one of those lazy days where I left in some sight-reading without identifying the pieces properly. Some days I just can’t be bothered. But I’ll tell you now, so you’ll know: in the middle of the improv, I play a piano transcription of the aria “I Know That My Redeemer Liveth” from ‘Messiah’ by G. F. Handel. After the improv ends, I play two more pieces: the “Evening Prayer” theme from Englebert Humperdinck’s opera ‘Hansel and Gretel’ –and- the “Largo” from G. F. Handel’s opera ‘Xerxes’. I won’t win any prizes for the sight-reading, but it’s not completely terrible. And the improv came out real nice, I thought. Tell me what you think.

Sherryl’s Gardens (Just To Be Fair) (2015Jun26)

Okay, this time I’m giving credit where credit is due–Sherryls’ got the green thumb. Harlan, however, makes an appearance towards the end of the video (see yesterday’s blog about the Big Tree across the street).

The Cajon Box   (2015Jun25)

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Thursday, June 25, 2015                                          8:01 PM

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My friend Pete came by today. While I was waiting for him I took a few photos of my neighbor Bob’s big tree. My other neighbor Harlan happened to bicycle by and offered the loan of a Cajon—a sort of a box used as a drum—the different sides of the box make different drum sounds. It’s all the rage, or so I’m told. Pete made good use of it—but I’ll let you hear for yourself.

I’ve had a good week. Here are three more videos from earlier.

And here’s some more photos of the big tree.

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The Frustrated Musician   (2015Jun19)

Saturday, June 20, 2015                                           1:12 AM

I’ve been trying to hook up my electronic piano to my PC using a MIDI-to-USB connection, but my Music Studio software isn’t picking up any input from the MIDI port. Maybe I need a new Sound Card—I don’t know. All I know is after hours of wasted time, I had to settle for recording my e-piano’s own playback—so, apologies for the sound quality. In the video, you can see that I dance about as well as I play.

The title graphic is from the Rijksmuseum—it’s a page from a French marionette catalog of the 18th century, I think:

[Gallerie des Modes et Costumes Français, 1786, eee 312: La minaudiere Marinette…, Pierre Charles Baquoy, Esnauts & Rapilly, 1786 (Courtesy of the Rijksmuseum Website)]

The other improv is me trying to reproduce that first improv, but on my usual Mason Hamlin baby grand piano. Thus “Reiterations”….

Also, please check out my new poem:

“Shall We Dance?” by XperDunn

Time To Play   (2015Jun17)

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[“Fighting Peasants”] “Vechtende boeren” by Adriaen Pietersz. van de Venne, 1600 – 1662

Wednesday, June 17, 2015                                               10:12 PM

Things are calm and peaceful—nothing’s wrong—and that’s excellent news. The past three days I’d been feeling pretty homely at the piano, but I couldn’t post it until now because I did a special background movie for the three improvs—”Winter (Amusement on the Ice)” by Adriaen Pietersz. van de Venne, (1625) and “A Musical Party” by  Adriaen Pietersz. van de Venne, (c. 1635 – c. 1645) –source graphics downloaded courtesy of : The Rijksmuseum Website and converted using “Photo to Movie 5.0” (software from LQ Graphics, Inc.).

 

 

 

MusicParty(SMALLER)

 

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Sherryl and Harlan’s Garden   (2015Jun10)

Wednesday, June 10, 2015                                               2:53 PM

 

First off—to be honest, it’s Sherryl’s garden more than it is Harlan’s—I’m pretty sure he confines himself to lawn-mowing, landscaping, and home-repair—Sherryl does the gardening. I only used Harlan’s Gardens because it sounds so nice as a title. Ergo, my humble apologies to Sherryl—but, as she knows, ‘that’s Hollywood’.

I went next door yesterday right after a big June shower—I wanted to get the droplets on the flower petals (which I did) but I also got a lot of wash-out in the whiter flowers—and I hate to lose that delicate detail and end up with a white blotch in its place—but what are you gonna do, right? There’s still a riot of color in these photos—almost like a party in your eyeballs.

Also, there are just a few shots of our own flowers and vegetable boxes towards the end of the clip, so today’s video should not be considered an official ‘documentary’ of Sherryl’s garden—more like a celebration. One of the very last photos is interesting because it is lettuce from a previous year’s box garden that decided to start growing wild in the cracks of our driveway’s asphalt. Nothing stops Life, I guess.

Every one of the 162 photographs were retouched in Corel Photo-Shop, whether it needed it or not (they all needed it)—so I hope you all appreciate how much eye-strain and mouse-clicking I go through trying to make these videos interesting to watch. And here I run into a paradox—when I do these photo-journal, slide-showy videos of pretty pictures, I always make the insert frame of the ‘me performing’ video very small. I do this because I want the photos to be as visible as possible. But then when I’m making the ‘me performing’ video I add all kinds of video effects—because I figure it’s going to be too small to see. That’s the paradox—I like adding video effects gadgets so much that I’m happier when no one is going to see exactly how loopy the video turns out.

As always, however, I put the lion’s share of my efforts into the music itself—and today, as you will hear, I even got some help from a flock of birds. This improv is a little different from my usual, but I was trying something new—I hope you enjoy it.

On a whinier note (and yes I will have some fine cheese with that) my back is killing me, my shoulder is stiff from all the repetitive photoshop-mousing, a headache is just starting that tiny silver hammer-tapping, and I’m awful tired. I sure hope this video lives up to all the effort.

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A Sunny Day (2015Jun05)

Friday, June 05, 2015                                               1:59 PM

 A Sunny Day   

Laughter light and lyrical rides on the birdsong air.

In amber sunshine bumblebees are bumbling here and there.

And pots of tea, and sandwiches of cucumber and salt,

Are laid upon the shining lawn—an emerald without fault.

You can’t hold back the tide of troubles—bother not to try—

Embrace instead the happiness of days when nothing’s wrong

Don’t worry at your worries—better far they far-flung fly

Life is short but summer days luxuriously long.

Laughter bright and beautiful—the butterfly takes wing.

In golden sunlight flowers bloom, and in the breezes swing.

Well, that’s all for today. Here’s videos I haven’t gotten around to sharing with you yet:

Four Squirrelly Videos   (2015May27)

Wednesday, May 27, 2015                                               8:25 PM

Oh–and just for laughs–I wrote a song lyric today, in honor of the season:

Spring Song

When the Spring is really greening

And the dog-flowers start to bloom

I can’t stand this crampy house.

I got to leave this musty room.

Outside, breezes float the pollen

And my nose begins to run

But it’s worth it for the freedom

And the warming of the sun.

Give me a Kleenex, baby

My nose in on the flow

Throw me a Kleenex, baby

I really got to blow.

I’d use my sleeve or spew it out but runny noses make me shout

Give me a Kleenex, baby

My nose in on the flow

Throw me a Kleenex, baby

I really got to blow.

 

Some days ago I threw a bag of birdseed onto the lawn outside the front door. It may not be for everyone, but I enjoy the racket every sunrise and sunset when the birds come to feed—and sing. The squirrels don’t sing much, but they do appreciate a bag of bird seed—boy, do they get chubby when I do this.

Bear suggested I place the video-camera outside the door for awhile and see what I got. That was a great idea—although I had to edit out a terrible amount of passing cars and idling or beeping trucks to get my final, idyllic background-footage. The remaining background sounds are mostly the breeze, the squirrels arguing, and the birds tweeting—I almost posted it all sans music.

Plus, I nearly didn’t post these two ‘cover songs’ videos—they’re terrible. But the squirrel is fun to watch. And the two ‘improvs’ videos are pretty good, for me—so I’m listing them first, in case any of you want to click on a video.

Enjoy, please.

Two Covers Twice and Then Some (2015May10)

Yesterday’s videos are weird — the cover video is of “Brown-Eyed Girl” by Van Morrison, and “Do It Again” by Brian Wilson and Mike Love –I play both songs in the morning and then again in the evening. I had hoped for one to be better than the other, but they are both imperfect in their own way. I’ve been sight-reading out of my weight-class lately, and these recent videos are evidence of that, but there it is, anyhow.

The improv is weird too, though I can’t say exactly why.

The graphic images used are downloaded from the new Metropolitan Museum of Art online collection:

“Prayer in the Mosque”

Artist: Jean-Léon Gérôme (French, Vésoul 1824–1904 Paris) – Date: 1871
Medium: Oil on canvas – Dimensions: 35 x 29 1/2 in. (88.9 x 74.9 cm)
Credit Line: Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Collection, Bequest of Catharine Lorillard Wolfe, 1887
Accession Number: 87.15.130 – On view in Gallery 804
[© 2000–2015 The Metropolitan Museum of Art. All rights reserved.]

“Pygmalion and Galatea”

Artist: Jean-Léon Gérôme (French, Vésoul 1824–1904 Paris) – Date: ca. 1890
Medium: Oil on canvas – Dimensions: 35 x 27 in. (88.9 x 68.6 cm)
Credit Line: Gift of Louis C. Raegner, 1927
Accession Number: 27.200 – Not on view
[© 2000–2015 The Metropolitan Museum of Art. All rights reserved.]

Faith In Outer Space   (2015May03)

Sunday, May 03, 2015                                                       11:40 AM

Freedom of religion is a wonderful thing. It makes it possible for me to abstain from religion without being burnt at the stake or beheaded. That’s a good thing. It makes things better all around, for women, for gays, for children—the judgmental authoritarianism that allows the religious to marginalize women, condemn gays, and abuse children is prevented from becoming part of our legal system. And where such dogma is already infused into society, we have legal recourse to remedy the situation, as with the present argument in the Supreme Court over same-sex marriage.

Those with the notion that religious freedom should allow them to treat others differently, such as denying service to gays, do not understand the difference between religion and law. Belief is a mental phenomenon, not a physical one—where belief informs action, however, things get stickier. You can choose to live your own life as a believer, but imposing those beliefs on others is not ‘freedom’, it is its opposite—ingenuous piety notwithstanding.

Having gone from a civilization wherein religion was a given, to a civilization where religion is optional, we have achieved personal freedom. Those of us entirely without religion are tempted to view this as progress, with the inherent suggestion that religion is obsolete and will, one day, fade away. But believers see religious freedom as an accommodation to the variety of religions rather than as a step away from religion in general.

There’s a difference. We can be proud that human beings are the ‘only race’, the reason that God created the universe—or we can have the pride of a young race that is joining the galactic community by reaching the stars. If the former, we are encouraged to stay in our cradle, this fragile planet with limited resources and time. If the later, we know that we must leave this planet, colonize the solar system and perhaps beyond—or just wait to die out when the planet does. We can condescend to the stay-at-homes by justifying space exploration through its useful by-products, the science and the tech—but the real reason is just that we have to leave.

I can imagine some protest at that statement but be assured that I’m speaking in general terms. We don’t all have to leave—you, personally, don’t have to leave—I’m not expecting to get the opportunity to leave Earth within my lifetime. But eventually some of us have gotta go. Enough people have to populate the solar system to ensure the survival of the race beyond the Earth’s expiration date, whenever that may be.

The end of the Earth may not be coming soon, but it’s coming. We know that now—we know that Earth was once uninhabitable, that it will be again—we know that Earth floats amongst a sea of extinction-level-sized asteroids and meteors, any one of which could ‘hit the jackpot’ at any time. And beyond all the cosmological constraints, we also have to face the fact that our use of planetary resources may reach a tipping point long before any of these lesser probabilities manifest themselves.

We need to start getting our raw materials from further away, someplace where we’re not trying to breathe and drink water and grow food. And the human race could also use a little elbow room—one planet for seven billion people requires a lot of natural resources and a lot of real estate. Our solar system is begging to be colonized and developed. And our planet is begging for a break.

Does religion get in the way of this? Well, religion is authoritarian—it wants to be in charge. And those in charge are uncomfortable with change. Space exploration certainly qualifies as change. You do the math.

However, some changes might benefit us. Earth’s population may not benefit directly—even with the ability to emigrate to space, population growth on the surface wouldn’t change significantly. Overpopulation will eventually bleed this planet dry. But at the same time, a colonized solar system would see population growth as a good thing—and restless young people on Earth would have a frontier to turn to. If we’re going to overpopulate ourselves to death, it seems a small thing to allow some of that excess population to take a stab at perpetuating the species outside of our gravity-well. Think of it as back-up.

20150503XD-Rijk_ExplosionOdSpanishFlagship_BattleOGibraltar_vanWieringen1621

“The Explosion of the Spanish Flagship during the Battle of Gibraltar”  by Cornelis Claesz. van Wieringen, c. 1621    (Courtesy of the Rijksmuseum website)

“The Lines Are Cut”   (2015Mar18)

Wednesday, March 18, 2015                                    2:30 PM

The Lines Are Cut

Reason is a shifty shibboleth.

We read a sharing in each other’s eyes,

But groups of thoughts shared

Is hardly all thoughts agreed upon

And taste or preference also split

The join of we who would cohere.

Distraction, syntax, stumblings all

Trouble all the hawsers thrown

To draw our hulls together.

Eternally we drift, unitary, unconnected.

We long for nightfall, when Nature herself

Will cause our ships to finally,

Briefly bump together.

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I was reading “Alan Turing: Enigma”, the book which “The Imitation Game” is based upon. I’d reached the part where Turing was returning from one of his trips to America in his wartime role as liaison between British and American cryptanalysts. The author describes how the ship carried thousands of servicemen, hundreds of officers—and one civilian. After years of working to uncover the hidden German U-boat wolf-packs that harried the Allied convoys, Turing was in the uncomfortable position of being one of that throng of helpless passengers he had tried to rescue. A boat just like the one he was on had been sunk just two weeks earlier. The Germans had made so many U-boats that even after the Enigma was decoded and their locations were known (with greater accuracy than known by the Nazi high command) their sheer weight of numbers continued the Atlantic sinkings for over a year.

Alan Turing’s difficulties made me ashamed of my petty post from yesterday, where I had boasted of my learning and experience. I should know better than anyone that reason often overturns such peripheral details as learning and experience—I should have been railing against the small-minded arguments of those who don’t even make a decent effort to ‘pierce the veil’. That’s what my ‘rantings’ posts usually do, but I thought focusing on why I had a good grasp of things would be a more positive approach. It didn’t work out that way—if someone else had written yesterday’s post, I would disagree with almost all of it.

No one makes a big deal out of declaring themselves to be an idiot. But in a weird symmetry, people of intelligence and education can’t claim that they’re smart, either—at least, not without making themselves look stupid. You can’t brag about being smart any more than you can brag about being tall—sure, tall people and smart people might have a clearer view than most people, but that’s just the luck of the draw. And this led me to contemplate the futility of communication, both public and one-on-one. It’s too bad we use the same system to express our feelings and share our information—they get in each other’s way.

But, anyway, the result of all this moping was a poem, or rather a first line and an idea for a poem came into my head. I’ve never learned to write and think as clearly at a keyboard-and-screen as when I’m writing with pen-and-paper—I only type my poems into my “digital storage unit” afterward. The finished product is displayed above.

On my way to the workstation, I passed the piano—so, I stopped and recorded a piano improvisation along the way. I’ve named it after the poem—they certainly share a frame-of-mind, so why not?

Me n’ Serge n’ Niko (2014Aug03)

 

 

Now, I’m adding two more (I’m too lazy to create a new post–and it’s all from the same day, anyhow)…

 

 

“Publishing Piano Improvs on YouTube” (2014Aug03)

1,414 videos posted to date

1,414 videos posted to date

[ Original published online May 1st, 2014 by Mike Cook, Pro Drummer  –on Tumblr ]

Dear Mike:

You probably thought I spaced out on your request, but I’ve actually given it some thought nearly every day since you suggested it. I had some false starts, and some technical glitches, but I wanted to show you what I have so far. Please let me know what you think—

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Thursday, April 17, 2014  5:32 PM –thru- Friday, April 18, 2014  6:18 AM

The Story of My Video-Making Video

Mike, a percussionist friend emailed me in February saying, “I was wondering if you would be interested in sharing your knowledge for composing piano pieces and recording them.” I agreed to try and make a quick video, an off-the-cuff, how-to video in which I imagined myself both talking and playing examples at the piano, etc.—nothing to it, I thought.

So then I turned on my camcorder and tried to talk extemporaneously about music, music-making, and the ins and outs of creating a video to be posted on YouTube (or wherever).

A Playlist of the complete session...

A Playlist of the complete session…

First, I started talking about the technical steps of shooting a video, uploading it to a hard drive, using special software to edit and polish the video, insert titles, credits, etc. Then it occurred to me that shooting, producing, and posting a video is no technical marvel nowadays—and was probably the last thing most people would want or need to learn. I should be talking about making my music.

But where to begin? Well, starting forty-something years ago, I had a roughly two-month period of actual piano lessons from a well-known pianist and subsequent piano-teacher, Muriel Brooks—she taught me how to read sheet music, she taught me the basics of fingering, the shape of the hand, touch, ornamental figures, sharps, flats, double-flats, naturals, key signatures, tempos, dynamics, phrasing, and so on. I began with scales and some Bach Preludes. She had bad news for me—and lots of it.

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Firstly, fifteen years of age is way too late to begin piano. Single digits are required, the smaller the better. Worse yet, my fingers were stubby—making them too wide to go between the raised black keys (something one must be able to do). Lastly—and this one I figured out for myself—piano requires a discipline that I never had. So I quit my lessons—they were expensive, and wasting her time and mine—as with school, in which the only books I didn’t read were books that were assigned reading—the only time I didn’t play piano was when I thought about my obligation to practice every day. I’m contrary that way—I can’t explain it, but there it is.

So from then on, I continued to play the Bach pieces, but not the scales—I was never going to slide up and down a given key-signature’s scale with the grace of swans gliding across a mirror-smooth lake—that stuff is for virtuosi, not for the musical hoi-polloi like me. And fifty years on, I still can only play a scale unevenly and slowly. I also had problems with my left hand—I hardly noticed I had one before the piano—I am right-handed with a vengeance. Piano requires the player to send his or her left hand, without looking, to a far-down bass note—this, to me, was like trying to land a Tomcat on an aircraft carrier at night. This has improved with time, but will never be the unconscious motion of a capable pianist—and it saddens me especially because the ‘walking bass’ is one of my favorite things about jazz and rag-time piano.

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The other thing that came to me right from the beginning was a desire to improvise. Once I realized that I could play chords and bass-notes in a one-four-five progression, I began to do that, over and over. And over—no one who lived with me back then could bear the sound of me banging on the same chords day after day. I was playing (and enjoying it) but I wasn’t listening to myself. I tried to put new chords in; I tried to play in a key other than C major—it was slow going. Then came cassette recorders—suddenly I could hear myself—and I did not like what I heard. Thus began my long journey towards listen-ability—an unfinished journey still—but one I will never stop traveling.

At the time, Keith Jarrett’s “Live At Köln” album was released, I happened to hear it—and I knew what I wanted to do with the piano. Subsequently I was also enamored with George Winston’s earlier LPs. I was, then, not aware that Keith Jarrett was tripping his brains out at Köln, or that George Winston wasn’t exactly improvising his performances. And it doesn’t really matter now, either, now that I know—their sound was what I was working towards, not their techniques (although, of course, the two are usually one and inseparable).

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And there was another, more basic, drive behind my piano playing—I decided that, if I couldn’t be good at it, I could at least be original. So my improvs have only one iron-clad rule—they can’t sound like any other musician’s music—they would be ugly and clumsy, but they would be different from anything you’d ever heard. In that sense I succeeded long ago—nobody sounds like me—but I’m still working on that listen-ability factor.

In a world that has gone copyright-crazy, I am a producer of original content—no small thing—and if I could get anyone to listen to it, I’d be in like Flynn. That is the only discernible value my YouTube videos possess—but I don’t use it—I post everything into the ‘Public Commons’ part of YouTube, which means anyone can use them without threat of lawsuit. I should be so lucky that someone thought my music worth ‘stealing’.

April Fools  Improv No. 2

April Fools Improv No. 2

I thought I’d address this aspect of my videos—I’d make quick cuts of me doing Vanna White’s arm-wave at my huge sheet-music collection, then my huge CD collection, then my huge LP collection (which, nevertheless, would have represented only a tenth of the LPs I once owned). I would explain how I had spent most of my adult life with classical-music radio stations playing in my office, in my living room, in my bedroom. As a tween, I became a consummate ‘stacker’—I could load a record-player with more LPs at once than anyone else I knew—this allowed up to two-hours-plus of hands-free music listening.

I studied music for a while, music theory, that is. I sang tenor in both high school and college choir. I have loved music all my life—but I did nothing but listen to it until Junior High School. That’s when I discovered the piano. The piano makes me happy—and boy, what a shot in the arm to music appreciation—no one can listen to and marvel at a great performance half so well as one who has tried to play the instrument. I thought Glenn Gould was very nice to listen to—but after I started taking lessons, his recordings practically made my head explode.

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And it goes beyond that—even violin, which I have never played—and which I didn’t care to listen to as a solo instrument up until that time—just the knowledge that someone’s fingers are teasing these exacting sounds from an instrument changes the experience beyond imagining. I used to feel sorry for people who avoided classical music—the idea that they would exclude centuries of great music from their lives seemed terribly sad to me.

Nowadays, I save my pity for people who have never played music. As solely a listener, I had already grown to love the sound of music—to have it explode into an even greater thrill as a consequence of taking a stab at it myself, that was without question the greatest thing life had to offer—and the average adult spends his or her whole life missing out on that—it’s just unbearably sad. The stats for youngsters aren’t much better—unless you count Rock-Star Hero, that video game with the guitar-shaped controller.

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So, long story short, I know music. And the advantage to that is in knowing when I’m playing something that someone else has already done. They say that twelve tones is a surprisingly small number of notes, considering that every song, symphony, or Mario Bros. background-track is comprised of nothing else but these twelve tones. But it should be remembered that this is only true of the Western Cultural music of Europe and the Americas. In the Orient there are instruments that allow for quarter-tones—which is why we Americans always perceive it as somewhat ‘twangy’.

Anyway, the point is that I was uniquely qualified to recognize bits and pieces of other people’s music whenever they came up, throughout my ongoing thrashing amongst the old eighty-eight (that’s slang for a piano—88 keys to a keyboard, you know). And as lackluster as my sound may be, it is no one else’s music re-hashed—or perhaps I should say it is all of music re-hashed—as the Beatles lyric says, “There’s nothing you can do that can’t be done. Nothing you can sing that can’t be sung…”

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There are things I always do the same—I almost always play octaves with my left hand (if I can’t be left-handed deftly, I might as well give those notes power and substance). And I rarely play anything other than major and minor triads with my right hand. As the years pass, I make forays into melody, and base-lines—but I always come back to my comfort zone. For me the playing is a meditation—any time it becomes too much about making good music, it takes me out of my musings. In a way, my improvs are just extended lullabies, whispering comfort to my tautly-strung nerves.

You may understand by this point that any description of my video-posting ‘process’ is a matter of too much to say—and yet nothing much to say at all. How shall I describe how to make up your own music as you go along? You just do. There are some rules, I suppose, but not good rules in a musical sense—allow yourself to be bad, allow yourself to be repetitious, allow yourself to change tempo at will, to change key at will, and most of all, don’t listen too closely—it makes you more likely to play recognizable tunes (it’s that pattern-recognition thing our brains are so good at—it works against the piano-improviser’s best interests).

Happy

Happy

Finally, as with so many things in life, if you’re not having a good time, you’re doing it wrong. My piano playing technique is customized for a player without an audience—I could count the number of times I’ve played in front of other people on one hand. And stage-fright is no help when one is trying to plumb nirvana with a push-button music machine.

So, I finally realized that I needed a script—improvising music is one thing, improvising an explanation is quite another. Here I am now, writing this rough draft of my talking points—but there’s no hurry. My faithful old camcorder decided a few days ago that it would only shoot out-of-focus pictures and videos from now on—the audio recording is still good, so I’m okay with it—but I can’t keep posting blurry videos to YouTube, no matter what kind of music I’m making. The new camcorder is due tomorrow, so the world will not end just yet.

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Two as One (2014Aug02)

When I record my piano-playing, there’s usually an improv at the beginning, and another improv at the end–but I count them as one sitting, so I post them all as a single work. For some reason they always sound better if I reverse their order, which is cheating, yeah, but so is taking out all the bad sight-reading that goes in between, so mix nox. In this recording I have inserted some candid footage of deer in our yard today (just a minute or two) in between the two improvs, which is why this one is so long…

 

Two Versions of Sunday (2014Jul29)

Happy Birthday to Ethel Louise Dunn! (my sainted mother) who has just moved from her home on the outer shore of Hilton Head Island to a smaller place near the bridge…

BTW–if anyone knows of a buyer looking for a place on Hilton Head, please let me know! (She has been unable to sell her old place, so far.)

http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/4-Benty-Ct-Hilton-Head-SC-29928/68787378_zpid/

click Photo to link to Open Listing (Zillow)

 

Today’s offering is unusual–I have produced two versions of the same improv – “Sunday At The Hop”.

This first one has been modified (and the one below it is unchanged from the original recording):

 

Don’t be fooled by the weird Title Card–I made this ‘As-Is’ version after I’d created the ‘Modified’ one, so I just applied the ‘psychedelic’-color-effect to the existing card…

 

 

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Seascapes, Bombast, and Russian Folk (2014Jul24)

Seascapes

I’ve made a study of ‘watery’ type music–a sort of mental collection (maybe because it’s my favorite type of sound image). I’m a big fan of Handel’s “Water Music” suites (and his “Music for the Royal Fireworks”–which was also performed on the same barges, upon the Thames). I once had a CD of solid surf recording for 55 minutes –guaranteed sleep aid–I wonder where it went?

Regardless, the following five pieces are my top picks for ‘oceanic coloring’ in music:

Apparently, the makers of “Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World” (2003) felt the same way I did about this piece–parts of it seem to be virtually the sound of the sea.

Ralph Vaughan-Williams – Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis (1910)

(Skip ahead to 02:30 in the following recording)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAtx578yaZ8

This Rachmaninov piece has been ‘borrowed’ by Eric Carmen for “Never Gonna Fall In Love Again” (’76) and by Barry Manilow for “If I Should Love Again” (’81). But it is so iconically romantic and lush that I have always thought of it as a sea voyage.

Sergei Rachmaninov – Symphony No. 2 Op. 27 III. Adagio

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNRxHyZDU-Q

 

I defy anyone to listen to this famous bit of Brahms and not feel the deck roll beneath their feet.

Johannes Brahms: Symphony No.3 – Mvmt. 3  (starts at 22:33 in the following recording)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XK4NcLcUH9o

And then there’s this gem–liquid, flowing, tidal, surging–It’s pretty oceanic, to me.

Jan Sibelius – Symphony No.2 – Mvmt. 4: Finale  (Starts at 29:52 in the following recording)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPd9znWgGLk

And one last bit of Sibelius–an excerpt from his 5th Symphony (Skip to time-mark 20:00 or so–the ending of the 3rd movmt leading into an unbelievable last mvmt!)

The above is a comment I put on a thread RE: Katchaturian’s “Spartacus”, the Adagio, of course (although I’ve learned to enjoy most of the entire suite, over time) which is undeniably gorgeous and very ‘seascape-y’. Why do I spend an hour preparing such an ‘essay’ of a comment for the one or two people that might actually read it (strangers, however)? What else am I going to do?

Anyway, speaking of music, I have here a new Improv and a selection of Russian Folk songs:

Click to Play: Bombastico II

Click to Play:
Bombastico II

 

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Click to Play Russian Folk Songs

 

Good evening, all.

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Rip Tide (2014Jul21)

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My new camera has been going gangbusters–but then my PC’s harddrive bit the dust! Five or six days without access to my programs and websites (like this one). This backlog was tremendous, but I’m nearly there–soon I’ll be living in the present again.

First off, there was a righteous jam session with my friend (and professional drummer) Pete Cianflone–

A Playlist of the complete session...

A Playlist of the complete session…

Then I had some hummingbird footage I lucked into from our garden–

 

Then I did some silly improvs–

and some silly song covers-

There’s some other stuff left over, but I didn’t have the peace of mind to do any writing or poetry or drawing (I get out of sorts when my system is down), so this will do for now.

Should I add some stills? Yeah, why not?:

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ttfn!