It's the pad on the heel of my palm opposite my thumb on my left hand that's killing me or maybe it's the other way around. I feel a deep stinging, burning sensation that's different than the dull aching bone-weary pain of the carpal tunnel syndrome mofo. I just went upstairs to take some horse-pills of ibuprofen to soothe the savage beast. I'm just getting to the point when I'm getting the boogie woogie down pat with my left hand, and then the joint of my pinky finger starts raising hell, and I have to take a break. After I get it down right I won't be pounding so hard.
It's difficult to tell how much the arthritis is responsible or the carpal tunnel is responsible or whether my constant pounding away at the keyboard is responsible, but most likely it's all three. I don't care. It'll just have to hurt. I think it will back off on it's own ere long, but if it don't, maybe I can turn the pain into pleasure and find something new and different to get excited about. It's been a while. Decades.
The last year in my so-called "sexy sixties" better pick it up if that description is gonna hold no truck with me. I used to have a few perversions I could count on to get me excited, but like all the other wages of sin I paid my pound of flesh for, they went the way of all good things. I don't like doing stuff that hurts. I really worked at it. I had expert mentors, but I was never able to get over the hump with pain. Now, there is nothing left. Pain was my last best hope to experience some sort of physical pleasure. Instead of making me squeal with delight, It's probably gonna be just more of the same.
I did take the left hand work I've been doing another step in the same direction. I'm working at playing the boogie woogie bass run with each hand in turn, and using the other hand to chord the root and the minor seventh. A couple of sources of info I have got me to thinking of labeling the chord structure with the numbers of the scales of each key. In particular when I transpose the boogie woogie and seventh chord to the next key in the circle of fifths.
A friend who visits fairly regular gets angry with me because of the way I approach music. Particularly since I purchased this new keyboard. He hates I practice exercises rather than just get drunk and make merry. He doesn't play music. He don't have a clue what I'm attempting to accomplish by what I'm doing. It's easy enough to forgive him for being irritated and confused. I don't rightly know what I'm doing either. And yet, I do.
I know how to get into a flow and take everybody with me. I know a lotta different ways to accomplish that. I know what it takes for me to get there so the other will follow. I reckon I stumbled into that accidently when I was a kid. What I stumbled into was a deep curiosity about how i could be duped by charismatic people. It's not an intellectual process.
The ritual is what it's not. At first, it had to be intellectually comprehended so my body could be trained to respond to certain moods and feelings in order to enhance them through repetition and redundancy. I had to know in my own person what it took me individually to get into flow. Flow ain't no stranger to nobody. The thing I had to realize was that in a crowd there are as many rituals of flow being followed as there are people. The idea is to get them all synched up (entrained) to the same folkways in the immediacy of now.
In the way I learned it, there has to be a constant to rally around. It can be anything. Fingers tapping on a table. Keys being rattled in one's pocket. Just so it's about the same frequency and at the same beat longer than any of the other ambient sounds. People gonna try to break the monotony to keep from being enslaved to it, but people are basically joiners. You can't let them break your stride. Just keep on keeping on. As if you have a right to be there doing exactly what you're doing without their permission. Soon enow, when they can't fight you, they'll join you, then they'll all j'in in. Why would they not?
We all do it pretty at every chance we get. Birds do it and fly. Bees do it and die. Queens do it and sigh, but I don't do it, and I'll tell you why. I promised my mother that I'd be true. But, I'll tell you what I will do. I'll stay still and let you do it, as long as I don't move, that ain't cheating.
There is a part of the classical story about what happened when Gautama sat under the Bo Tree and received enlightenment that keeps popping back up in my mind. It may be a triviality that could easily be ignored as unimportant to the overall purpose of the metaphor.
I only know this story in a general way. I've never studied it or tried to memorize it. to me it's just an amusing story that a lotta people treasure for their own reasons. I never actually studied Buddhism with the idea of becoming a Buddhist. Why swap dogmas when one is as good as the other? I was a book worm for a long time. I read several versions of the classical Buddha-under-the-Bo Tree-accounts. My version might be all wet. It's just what I remember from a long time ago.
I guess the moment this event that fascinated me happened might have been some sort of test or trial to see if it would get Gautama to abandon his effort to achieve enlightenment and to get up and walk away like practically everyone else who had tried it.
The part I really feel uncertain about involves the world serpent named Ka. The Protestant faith I was exposed to and pretty much believed in as a child never said nothing about not "world serpent". Sure, the snake in the Garden of Eden that tempted Eve, but nothing like what was described as being their for Gautama with those riotous crowds of phantasmagoric spirits showed up and tried to scare the hell outta him. I've seen them suckers. They scary. Real scary. 'Nuff said?
I suspect most people have encountered something somewhere that scared the Bejesus outta them. I sure have. I've sought it out to see what I'd do. It was Gautama's response to the arrival and fierce appearance of these weird goblins that fascinates me. I've felt like I understood why he did what he did a bunch of different times, but ere long, I find myself wondering about it again, and worry about if I truly got his point. Instead of getting up like I probably would have and running all out and at any cost for my life, he merely pointed to the ground as if to say, "I have a right to be here."
What does that mean? Every version I've encountered has been translated in the same way. None of them ever said he actually said anything. They all say he pointed to the ground "as if to say" he had a right to sit under that Bo Tree and seek enlightenment. Why would that answer satisfy those horrific, scary apparitions?
I could be wrong. Somebody might point that out to me in no uncertain terms (or would if I allowed Comments) I got it all wrong. But, I distinctly remember it being said that the world serpent Ka arose behind Gautama and spread his hood over Gautama as if to shield him from the rear. He got his back.
So what made those phantasmagoric creature go back to where they came from? From Gautama insisting he had a right to be there, or that huge damn snake rising up behind him and scaring them off. Sometime I like to think that even Gautama might settle for thinking it was him and his calm gesturing that made those demons go away, when it was actually some force behind him he didn't see, that tacitly did the trick.
Friday, April 25, 2008
Thursday, April 24, 2008
Reframing The Stone
Why gainsay the abysmal stench of my downscale mechanisms? I bear no shame. The balmy ocean breeze wafts past my flared nostrils bearing the sulfurous odour of decaying kelp. It's piled up in wiggly rows along the white beach and marks the highest tide from the last tropical storm that passed by wailing. Until the seaweed lies there in the unrelenting sun covered with black flies and fiddler crabs and rots completely, the picture postcard beaches will smell like rotten eggs, and thereby taint paradise.
Atlantic City, 1971
Sores on lips that run from the brain
that comes from the sky in the form of rain
to start the weeds a'growing.
Bed-a-bye treetops the cradle rocks on.
The children stop talking to ice-cream cones
for the kettle of onions that boiling.
Other times than this are drearier than
the day before the new house burned.
Fortune never deals the players fair.
Yet, the changes are constant,
and drifting thoughts don't apply.
@July, 1971
Edited 4/24/08
_
Atlantic City, 1971
Sores on lips that run from the brain
that comes from the sky in the form of rain
to start the weeds a'growing.
Bed-a-bye treetops the cradle rocks on.
The children stop talking to ice-cream cones
for the kettle of onions that boiling.
Other times than this are drearier than
the day before the new house burned.
Fortune never deals the players fair.
Yet, the changes are constant,
and drifting thoughts don't apply.
@July, 1971
Edited 4/24/08
_
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Surrounded By Oceans
It's amazing to me what playing the scales everyday has wrought. I don't exactly know how to describe what I'm experiencing. I tried to explain yesterday by saying that my fingers seem to be getting to the place where they know where to go better than my head does. I'm still dealing with bottlenecks, but the bottlenecks I'm attempting to open up are now what would be real progress not that long ago. In some manner I'm beginning to get out of my own way.
Today I started playing the chorale part of Beethoven's Ninth. I forget what it's called. It's the part everybody knows and sings to or hums. It's Germany's freaking national anthem. A lovely tune. It evolved from Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, as a lot of classical songs did. I was playing single notes with my left hand. I played the same tune graduating one half-step at a time and played it in all twelve major keys without many serious mistakes. That's what I'm talking about. That's what I expect from playing these scales daily. I expect to be able to play anything I can play by memory in any key major or minor without exception and no dilly-dallying around.
I'm working with my left hand a lot these days when I'm not playing the scales. Playing the scales doesn't take near as long as they did, so I'm trying to get that boogie woogie thing going with my left hand. I'm using the Circle of Fifths to play the same boogie woogie in all twelve keys and playing the root and minor seventh to accompany with my right hand. It's a slow process.
Another thing is going on as a result of playing the scales. Today when I drove to the Post Office to mail the ISP monthly payment I walked around for about a mile to get some exercise, then I went back to my car, but I didn't crank it up and leave right away, I like to sit in my car and work crossword puzzles in the big parking lots and watch people as they come and go.
When i do that I usually listen to a classical music station that actually plays a lot of music and keeps the chatter down. Oddly enow, they call themselves The Classical Music Station. A perculiar thing happened. At the end of a song they were playing the announcer re-stated the title and composer again, and told what key it was written in, and when he did that I perked up. I knew the key of E Flat Minor. I play it every day.
Then, he announce the next piece he was going to play and told that it was written in A Flat Major. This time i "saw" the entire scale as I practice it on the keyboard. I'm beginning to visualize the 88-key keyboard layout. This was a very exciting moment for me. I don't know if I'll continue to spend all that much time on the piano as my main instrument. If I can complete my visualization of it so that I can use the piano keyboard for reference when I play other instruments, it will have served it's purpose.
I can't foresee how this development will affect how I'll approach playing music in the future. I've only guessed how learning to play the scales and playing them daily will change what I think is possible for me. For one thing I'm beginning to realize it's impossible for me to not have perfect pitch. I don't know how to explain that statement. I write it because of how I play by memory.
I hear what I play before I play it, I've always heard the music in my imagination. I just didn't know where the sounds I hear are on the keyboard. Now, I'm beginning to know where the notes are I've always heard in my psyche. Not just thetically either, but intuitively. i don't know where that's going, but it's okay with me. When I started playing that Beethoven melody in every key, at the end of playing in each key I didn't have to reflect on what the next key was. My fingers automatically went there, and I knew it was right. I looked it up afterward. My fingers were right every single time. I'm already hard to live with, this might make me impossible to be in the same room with.
I'm not joking about being hard to be around. I've had three people tell me so recently. they claim I don't care how I act around them or how I treat them. They say there is nothing they can do about the way I treat them, because I'm the only person they know of that they can talk openly with about what matters to them. if that's true, then it's a one-way deal.
I can get the same response outta anybody I want to. But, I don't. I get the response I get from my friends, and they're about the only people I bother with in person. I'm as stuck with them as they are with me. The world is changing really, really fast now. Does China really only have twelve days of coal left to power their industry? The food shortage deal is on the national news now. Things are gonna get exciting. world wide, and it might be sooner than we think.
Today I started playing the chorale part of Beethoven's Ninth. I forget what it's called. It's the part everybody knows and sings to or hums. It's Germany's freaking national anthem. A lovely tune. It evolved from Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, as a lot of classical songs did. I was playing single notes with my left hand. I played the same tune graduating one half-step at a time and played it in all twelve major keys without many serious mistakes. That's what I'm talking about. That's what I expect from playing these scales daily. I expect to be able to play anything I can play by memory in any key major or minor without exception and no dilly-dallying around.
I'm working with my left hand a lot these days when I'm not playing the scales. Playing the scales doesn't take near as long as they did, so I'm trying to get that boogie woogie thing going with my left hand. I'm using the Circle of Fifths to play the same boogie woogie in all twelve keys and playing the root and minor seventh to accompany with my right hand. It's a slow process.
Another thing is going on as a result of playing the scales. Today when I drove to the Post Office to mail the ISP monthly payment I walked around for about a mile to get some exercise, then I went back to my car, but I didn't crank it up and leave right away, I like to sit in my car and work crossword puzzles in the big parking lots and watch people as they come and go.
When i do that I usually listen to a classical music station that actually plays a lot of music and keeps the chatter down. Oddly enow, they call themselves The Classical Music Station. A perculiar thing happened. At the end of a song they were playing the announcer re-stated the title and composer again, and told what key it was written in, and when he did that I perked up. I knew the key of E Flat Minor. I play it every day.
Then, he announce the next piece he was going to play and told that it was written in A Flat Major. This time i "saw" the entire scale as I practice it on the keyboard. I'm beginning to visualize the 88-key keyboard layout. This was a very exciting moment for me. I don't know if I'll continue to spend all that much time on the piano as my main instrument. If I can complete my visualization of it so that I can use the piano keyboard for reference when I play other instruments, it will have served it's purpose.
I can't foresee how this development will affect how I'll approach playing music in the future. I've only guessed how learning to play the scales and playing them daily will change what I think is possible for me. For one thing I'm beginning to realize it's impossible for me to not have perfect pitch. I don't know how to explain that statement. I write it because of how I play by memory.
I hear what I play before I play it, I've always heard the music in my imagination. I just didn't know where the sounds I hear are on the keyboard. Now, I'm beginning to know where the notes are I've always heard in my psyche. Not just thetically either, but intuitively. i don't know where that's going, but it's okay with me. When I started playing that Beethoven melody in every key, at the end of playing in each key I didn't have to reflect on what the next key was. My fingers automatically went there, and I knew it was right. I looked it up afterward. My fingers were right every single time. I'm already hard to live with, this might make me impossible to be in the same room with.
I'm not joking about being hard to be around. I've had three people tell me so recently. they claim I don't care how I act around them or how I treat them. They say there is nothing they can do about the way I treat them, because I'm the only person they know of that they can talk openly with about what matters to them. if that's true, then it's a one-way deal.
I can get the same response outta anybody I want to. But, I don't. I get the response I get from my friends, and they're about the only people I bother with in person. I'm as stuck with them as they are with me. The world is changing really, really fast now. Does China really only have twelve days of coal left to power their industry? The food shortage deal is on the national news now. Things are gonna get exciting. world wide, and it might be sooner than we think.
Monday, April 21, 2008
The Roll Of The Dice
I've had a good day playing the scales. It's like my fingers are beginning to recognize where they need to go next before I do. I'm hardly doing anything else each day musically but to practice what's difficult for me separate from when i go through the whole kit and caboodle in the evening.
Tonight I stopped working my way through the Circle of Fifths, and played the key of F Major repetitively. First the left hand separately and then the right. When I was more satisfied with the results, I played F Major with both hands until it seemed to flow more smoothly. I'm beginning to get a little bit of intuitive flash about where this is headed. I'm gonna loan my body out and let unembodied spirits use it to play my piano in order to remember the old days through me. Man, they gonna owe me big time when I croak.
There were certain moments back when I traveled a lot with a guitar and a sleeping bag. Those were the luxury items I got to take with me sometime. I'm considered a fair singer, but even I know I was not an accomplished instrumentalist. It did cross my mind occasionally that it would help my repertoire considerably if I could intersperse some solo instrumental licks in between the verses of the songs I wrote to sing. About the best I ever got out of myself, in that regard, was that I could play a few bass runs with my thumb while I strummed chords with the other fingers.
A man who picked me up hitch-hiking on the way from Portland to Pendleton, Oregon asked me to take a drink with him, and then after we did that, he asked me to sing and play the guitar I had with me for him. The whiskey put me in a pretty good mood, and so I sang a couple of the songs I'd written. After a few more slugs off that pint bottle he had hauled out, he began to sing with me. I switched over to singing some familiar songs I thought he might know the words to, and by the time we got to Pendleton we were pretty good friends.
Just before we got there he asked me if I wanted a job singing in a bar where he knew the owner. He kinda laid it out for me so I could make up my mind. The man brought a band in for the week-end, but Sundays through Wednesday he hired a solo act to try to entice his rush hour customers to stay for one more drink before they drove home for the night.
The man paid me $35 a night, all the beer I could drink, and whatever tips I could hustle from the customers. I'd been on the road for months living catch as catch can, and this offer was a windfall for me. My original patron who got me the job in the first place insisted on paying for me a room at an old downtown hotel for a week. I was in hog heaven. The owner liked the way I made money for him, and began slipping me a twenty dollar bill on the side a couple a times a night.
This turned out to be a real opportunity for me to make a name for myself as a singer/songwriter in that part of the country. A couple of guys who were agents came in the bar, heard me sing, made me an offer I couldn't refuse. To cut to the chase, I blew it. Maybe because it seemed too good to be true.
I got mixed up with a waitress who worked at the coffee shop of the old downtown hotel. It turned out that she had just been released from prison for cutting up her old boyfriend. When she started obsessing on my whereabouts every moment I wasn't in her sight, I knew I had to run for my life.
That's happened a lot with me. I must have a blind spot. It may be that I'm the male counterpart to this type of woman, and they keep thinking they've met their soul mate. I don't particular like that part of me some women find interesting. How could I possibly love it in them?
On the other hand, in my natal astrology chart, in the Seventh house of partners, where the Moon resides exalted in Taurus, and conjoined within the same degree with the planet Uranus, all the interpretation books I ever studied claimed a person with this configuration in their nativity would be attracted to unusual, eccentric partners who would act more as a nurturer than a lover to me.
What a drag, man. I'm don't believe I"m that kind of person. The oracle might be right. It might be what I actually need. I just can't stand the manner in which I have to conduct myself to satisfy their need in that way. I'd rather do without.
Tonight I stopped working my way through the Circle of Fifths, and played the key of F Major repetitively. First the left hand separately and then the right. When I was more satisfied with the results, I played F Major with both hands until it seemed to flow more smoothly. I'm beginning to get a little bit of intuitive flash about where this is headed. I'm gonna loan my body out and let unembodied spirits use it to play my piano in order to remember the old days through me. Man, they gonna owe me big time when I croak.
There were certain moments back when I traveled a lot with a guitar and a sleeping bag. Those were the luxury items I got to take with me sometime. I'm considered a fair singer, but even I know I was not an accomplished instrumentalist. It did cross my mind occasionally that it would help my repertoire considerably if I could intersperse some solo instrumental licks in between the verses of the songs I wrote to sing. About the best I ever got out of myself, in that regard, was that I could play a few bass runs with my thumb while I strummed chords with the other fingers.
A man who picked me up hitch-hiking on the way from Portland to Pendleton, Oregon asked me to take a drink with him, and then after we did that, he asked me to sing and play the guitar I had with me for him. The whiskey put me in a pretty good mood, and so I sang a couple of the songs I'd written. After a few more slugs off that pint bottle he had hauled out, he began to sing with me. I switched over to singing some familiar songs I thought he might know the words to, and by the time we got to Pendleton we were pretty good friends.
Just before we got there he asked me if I wanted a job singing in a bar where he knew the owner. He kinda laid it out for me so I could make up my mind. The man brought a band in for the week-end, but Sundays through Wednesday he hired a solo act to try to entice his rush hour customers to stay for one more drink before they drove home for the night.
The man paid me $35 a night, all the beer I could drink, and whatever tips I could hustle from the customers. I'd been on the road for months living catch as catch can, and this offer was a windfall for me. My original patron who got me the job in the first place insisted on paying for me a room at an old downtown hotel for a week. I was in hog heaven. The owner liked the way I made money for him, and began slipping me a twenty dollar bill on the side a couple a times a night.
This turned out to be a real opportunity for me to make a name for myself as a singer/songwriter in that part of the country. A couple of guys who were agents came in the bar, heard me sing, made me an offer I couldn't refuse. To cut to the chase, I blew it. Maybe because it seemed too good to be true.
I got mixed up with a waitress who worked at the coffee shop of the old downtown hotel. It turned out that she had just been released from prison for cutting up her old boyfriend. When she started obsessing on my whereabouts every moment I wasn't in her sight, I knew I had to run for my life.
That's happened a lot with me. I must have a blind spot. It may be that I'm the male counterpart to this type of woman, and they keep thinking they've met their soul mate. I don't particular like that part of me some women find interesting. How could I possibly love it in them?
On the other hand, in my natal astrology chart, in the Seventh house of partners, where the Moon resides exalted in Taurus, and conjoined within the same degree with the planet Uranus, all the interpretation books I ever studied claimed a person with this configuration in their nativity would be attracted to unusual, eccentric partners who would act more as a nurturer than a lover to me.
What a drag, man. I'm don't believe I"m that kind of person. The oracle might be right. It might be what I actually need. I just can't stand the manner in which I have to conduct myself to satisfy their need in that way. I'd rather do without.