music: Jane’s Addiction- Nothing’s Shocking
This has been a week. We had Monday and Tuesday off due the blizzard. Wednesday we went back to school as it snowed even more, and there were hardly any students there. The district superintendant said post facto that he should have closed school on Wednesday, and as some sort of compensation he and the mayor closed school for the rest of the week. We’ll have to make this up at the end of June, which means school until July basically, but I’m trying not to think about that now. So now it’s Thursday, and I’m looking another four day weekend in the face. My inital instinct was to jump online and look for last-minute websaver flights to places better than here. Colorado…$300…Florida…$260…Paris…$240…nah. It would be a little too impulsive and gratuitous to jump a flight for the weekend. Instead I booked tickets to Utah for April vacation. April 15-24: Arches, Canyonlands, Bryce, Zion. Throw tmo (now TiMO?) and the 1ey in the mix, and possible (probable) weekend visit from the Boulder satellite office reps AJM and Parker. That alone is enough to keep my spirits high and hope alive through the dark winter months and all this snow; the south of Utah is one of the coolest places I’ve ever been. Coolest as in best. It’s important to make the distinction these days.
But back to more immediate matters: here I have four days with which to do something, and what’s more I have very little work obligation. I’m already planned out about two weeks ahead of the end of midterm exams. So four days. And like last weekend, like winter break, I’m not quite sure of what to do with myself. I haven’t really had the opportunity to think about my own life that much this year and the two times I did I sort of froze, overwhelmed with the potentials and unfruitful in pursuing the actuals. There are really so many possibilities when work constraints are removed, even temporarily, that I don’t know where to begin. Flight-length trips are out for this weekend, that much I know. Then what? Hang around here, finish up a song I’ve been working on, possibly take in a concert, try to dig up friends here and salvage what I can of my former social life? Or go? More and more I feel like I gotta go. There are friends I haven’t seen for a long time that I’d like to visit in New York City. But I hate New York City.
All this indecision given such a golden opportunity points to a larger problem: lack of movement. Mr. Taus (normally pronounced ‘missa toss’) has been putting in his time and things are good, if not progressing, on that front. I’ve been granted permanent status after less than one year (usually takes three, I guess) and it looks like I’ll get to teach psychology next year. Two big plusses. Fine. Good for missa. Meanwhile, in a house across town, my personal inertia has failed me. Friction and outside forces have slowed David’s life to a near standstill and from here it feels like and incredible amount of force is needed to get things kickstarted again. Pile that on top of the hibernation instinct that comes with all this snow and less daylight and winter and I end up spending time holed up working on music-a song, ironically, about how hard it is to get out of bed in the morning. And typing about it here.
It feels like I’m waiting for something. But what? One of my posts to a craigslist musician ad to come through? The music room downstairs to be insulated and soundproofed? Spring break? The end of the school year? A move to the West Coast? A doctoral program? My childhood was rife with placing these markers in front of me. I could start going here and there once I could drive. I’d be able to do such-and-such once I was in college. Or I’d be able to start this or that once I saved up this much money or got a new job. Now I’m out of college, out of grad school even, with a job and bills and a guitar and a car and a pile of stuff that I own and if I’m lucky 40 more years until I retire. And more recently, a realization: this is it. This. Is. It. This is where I’ve arrived and this is what I’ve got to make work for me, and if I can’t figure out what to do with four days of free time then this is going to be a long and unpleasant 40 years.
It’s approaching noon on Thursday. The insides of my head are ticking. I need to do something this weekend as a demonstration of my own freedom at the very least. The immediate world is under almost four feet of snow, my personal spheres have all but frozen in place, but look! Here is some time. Here is some room for movement. Time to stretch a little.
music: Indigo Girls- 1200 Curfews
We got our annual winter pounding this weekend. Estimates are anywhere between 24 and 38 inches. It was hard to tell exactly because of all the wind, but there is a lot of snow. A lot. The big city was brought to its knees; city and state governments closed down, businesses (save McDonald’s, Starbucks, Anna’s Tacqueria, and the liquor stores) not bothering, school cancelled for two days. Two days! It reminds me of my own freshman year of high school when we had a blizzard the weekend before first semester exams and they were delayed for two days. If this were Wisco, though, we’d be in school today. Boston gets snow, sure, but Boston doesn’t know how to handle it. There’s literally no room to put it all.
I don’t like snow all that much. If I skied I might like snow a little more but I don’t. There aren’t many mountains where I grew up. People in Wisco mostly ski on landfills and I never got down with it. And now that I’m closer to some more legitimite mountains I can’t bring myself to get into another expensive hobby, especially one where you replay a controlled tumble downhill over and over and pay for it. Gravity works. Clearly. No, money and time is better spent on musical instruments. Plus I’d rather strap 50 pounds onto my back and walk up the same mountain all those skiers are falling down. It’s questionable which one is more idiotic.
I also think that I don’t like snow because it means shoveling. I remember attacking our brick walkway back home, chipping off little flakes of red as I hacked through the frozen snow. I had a respite from shoveling during college with no real property that needed my attention, but was back at it with a fury this past winter at the 1-2. Yesterday was epic. We were out back, six strong, digging out of almost three feet of snow. The hardest part was that the wind had blown giant snowdrifts up against the fence at the back ends of our parking lot. At least three of our cars were completely buried, as in you couldn’t see any car at all, and only the top of my car was visible. We got a little help from the plow guy, but then threw our backs into three or four hours of shoveling. All told we probably put in 20 man-hours of work yesterday, but it paid off. We carved out our backyard parking lot and driveway, now a sizeable snow fortress with an eight car capacity and seven-foot walls on every side. Kudos to my housemates, who didn’t stop shoveling even when they felt like quitting, who saw the job to its end, and who were selfless enough to dig out everyone’s car, including JZ and Upstairs Chuck, neither of whom were there to help. Digging out of a blizzard is a test of physical endurance, but it’s also a test of character. Do you just dig yourself out, or do you think of those with whom you share living space? Your neighbors? The work ethic and selflessness at the 1-2 was encouraging. I will say, though, that I’ll be pissed when Jimmy (local pizza joint employee, apparent 1-2 parking lot lesee, and confrontational prick) rolls into our parking lot in his Lincoln Aggrivator as if we dug out a parking space just for him and his big black obscenity of a vehicle. I’ll hand him a shovel and tell him to get to work without much guilt.
So after an epic effort we at the 1-2 are dug out. I can’t speak for the rest of the city, but from what I’ve seen around the neighborhood people are putting in their shovel time. The city is a surreal place with these giant piles of white placed in every and any available free space, but the visual curiosity of it all isn’t enough for me to like it. Snow still means shoveling, and I’m sore today. Sore, dug out, and at such a point where the recounting of the weather occupies the forefront of my mind. Waiting for the thaw…
music: Phish- 11/14/95, Orlando, FL
A drive
beyond the city
around
but not to long to
riot in the night
through fuss and fight
through nothing
live through it all
The three day weekend was, for the most part, spent convalescing. I’m not sure what from. I spent a good amount of time pinballing around the house tweaking this and that, having minutes of focus and purpose, but most was filler. I got some big projects for school out of the way. I played a decent amount of guitar. I started work on a new song, which is now well on its way to completion. By Monday night I was restless and disappointed at how the weekend shook out. Cue tmo, asking coyly if I was interested in going to an open mic. In Gloucester. On a school night. I needed the recklessness of it all more than the content of the trip, so I dragged out the acoustic, bundled up, and headed out.
Enter the Rhumb Line, a small townie bar at the ass-end of the commuter rail far beyond the hype of the big city. The crowd was friendly and accepting, or drunk, or both. The music was predominantly classic rock covers, with some impressive improvisatory moments thrown in for good measure. The open mic was in fact an open jam session, and me there at 10:00pm on a school night, bringing the wrong brush with which to paint. I sat back and took in the scene, keeping mostly to myself, but some time around 11:30 the host of the session points a meaty finger my way. Apparently Shane, the guy who we travelled to meet up with, put my name on the list. He also loaned me his old Strat, an axe that’s been through the war and then some. The frets were almost flush against the fretboard and the action was dangerously low. It, besides all that, was a Strat, and as such has a completely different feel than the ES-335 that I’ve spoiled myself on. Throw an actual crowd of strangers into the mix, a drummer, a bassist, and the host on another guitar, shake. No, puree. I call for a simple funky improv to open: Am7 > D7, nothing too difficult, and I immediately falter on my first riffs. The Strat played sharp and pointy, the clean channel far too choppy, and I ended up fighting with the instrument for the rest of the night instead of using it as a tool. We segued into a fairly standard E-blues jam where I took a stab at a weak solo. The host asked me to sing something, and conjuring back from a far more successful gig in Bellingham, MA, I started Franklin’s Tower. By that point I had already lost my legs. I bumbled through three or four verses, the host ended it, and I turned the borrowed Strat over to Shane. I’d had enough.
This music things is hard enough as it is; doing it in vivo is even harder. But I realized as we were driving home that that is my zone of proximal development. I’m no longer challenged as much by my bedroom solo recitals. I needed to get out there, plug in, completely fall on my face, and stick it out. I needed the reality check to my pride, the humbling, the reminder that I don’t know jack. The challenge, as I saw it, was not a kinesthetic one; I didn’t feel the need to rip off mammoth solos. I’d like to blame the guitar but as a wiser person once said, the tools are only as good as the carpenter. The challenge was and is how to put myself into the proper frame of mind when I know other people are listening. There was a great deal of static and interference last night at the Rhumb Line. I was not clear and directed, and I certainly was not at ease. I made it through, and will live to play another day.
I’ve redoubled my efforts on the music front. I’ve been thinking hard about how to transition to playing in a more public sphere, about my own songwriting, and about some of the more fundamental issues of tonal theory that I’ll need in my bag of tricks. I spent about an hour on Sunday night taking a music lesson. All of this is directed towards a point- I have a jam session/audition scheduled with two guys from the craigslist music board on Thursday.
Musical horizons are expanding as I push outwards. Part of creating art is putting oneself on display publicly. I have tended to lurk in the shadows, produce from behind a curtain and reveal work without standing next to it (blog?) but that’s not so much an option any more. The musical externalizing process is too far along to slow down or reverse now, and despite any stumbling blocks that I may make for myself, there’s only one direction to move. Struggle, progress, and all that.
Slipping
Finding the stream
Living the dream
Feeling the sound
music: Geoff Scott’s Public House- 5/14/02
Saturday morning at the 1-2. I slept way late after an unusually rough week at work and was happy to emerge at 11:30 or so with bathrobe and bedhead. Peet and Tmo were tearing into a muffin, each working on their respective to-do list for the day. Same-old-same-old for weekends in the A.M. Lazy breakfasts are nice, but I miss the feasts that used to unroll at Chowdahaus on Sundays. Something would inevitably be frying in garlic and onion, Peet would be making crepes, the rest of us chopping fruit or preparing heavy cream to be whipped, and there inevitably would be some pretty strong coffee percolating.
I miss coffee. The sense memory of coffee brings back so much about late breakfasts on the weekends, from college all the way up to now. I cut caffeine out of my diet pretty much entirely about five years ago and miss coffee dearly. I’ve tried coffee substitutes: Celestial Seasonings’ Roastaroma, some other carob-based stuff, but none did the trick. Then AJM and I stumbled across Teccino at the Rainbow Grocery in San Francisco (quite possibly the best co-op in the world), I bought some loose teccino from the bulk section, a cloth drawstring bag that served as the strainer, and had my coffee back. After looking for it for weeks back in Boston, Marla brought a can home one night. We now have a steady supply of teccino at the 1-2, and my weekend mornings are much better.
I usually don’t have any during the week but a mug full of teccino is perfect on the weekends. The stuff is great-so great that people here have started mixing it into their regular coffee. I can’t really tell the difference taste-wise, but then again I haven’t had real coffee in five years. But there’s no caffeine and it doesn’t taste watered down at all. Teccino is singlehandedly bringing back the joy to my weekend breakfast experience. It’s got that deep, slightly bitter, unmistakable coffee taste. It takes well to milk and sugar. Goes great with cereal, bagels, or muffins. It even makes you have to poop just like coffee. Um. Speaking of. I gotta go.
music: Radiohead- The Bends
I’ve been picking at an idea that’s been bothering me on the education front-it’s a philosophical point that has enormous ramifications as far as how I conduct my own classroom on a day-to-day basis. With the end of the first semester around the corner, I’m driving myself up a wall trying to reconcile this dilemma. Here’s the kernel of it:
There are two major movement being batted around in education circles. The first is the standards movement, which is all about the idea that before kids graduate, they should have to demonstrate skill proficiency and verify a certain degree on content knowledge. Here is where things like the MCAS and No Child Left Behind are spawned. Standards demand that students jump through very specific hoops, and that teachers for the most part are accountable for their students’ success and failure. As in they will be fired if their students fail tests. Standards have resulted in educational decision-making power being shunted from the school and district to more bureaucratic political bodies who have very little interaction with students. Standards feed into the idea of the public school functioning as a homogenizing agent, pushing public education towards an assembly-line mass production of citizens who all are proficient at certain skills and possess certain declarative knowledge. While I think that it’s not an entirely bad thing for students to have certain skills and knowledge before they graduate, the implementation of this ethic is incredibly restrictive. Alternative methods of students demonstrating their understanding and displaying knowledge are not really possible under Standards, nor is an education that does not conform to what society deems to be important and proper. No matter how expansive and enlightening an experience may be, it all comes down to standardized test scores Have those decision makers stopped to consider that it is possible their tests don’t measure anything beyond students’ abilities to take a test?
The standards movement is also hating on me personally. I’m technically not “qualified” to teach my subject under the No Child Left Behind Act, because I don’t have a degree in biology. Standards force conformity on all levels; in students’ content and in teacher’s practice, because in the end nothing matters to those in power except how little Scantron bubbles were filled out.
The second movement, especially in science, is the inquiry movement. This is a more organic stance in which the student is trusted to come up with content-rich questions and use their natural curiosity as a fuel to discover something about their world. Inquiry is grounded in the assumption that students are intrinsically motivated to learn and that the resources necessary for discovery are readily available. I won’t even talk about the resources piece here. This stance also sprouts from research in the fields of cognitive psychology, in which children and infants are compared to scientists in the ways they acquire knowledge about the world around them: developing theories and testing them via experimentation. Indeed, true science models the infant or toddler’s empirical reality, but the sad truth is that at the secondary (and even undergraduate) level, no true science is being done. We are just learning about science. Students are discovering things for themselves for the first time perhaps, but it is very, very rare to find new knowledge about the world being created in high school science classrooms.
Science students are therefore reinventing the wheel under inquiry. They are charged with making discoveries that others have already made. Why assume that given an apple and a tree, each and every student in a given physics class would discover and derive the law of gravitation? Why not just dispense knowledge? The hope, constuctivists say, is that people will remember and intuitively understand content better if they build answers for themselves. Ok. Fine. But actual open-ended inquiry is not really possible in a high school setting. There are not enough resources or time to allow stuents to freely explore and develop their own questions.
It seems clear, now, that these two movements come into direct conflict. On one hand, students are expected to explore what is interesting to them about a given topic and generate knowledge via experiments and possibly research. On the other hand, a specific set of knowledge is expected to be gained by the time they graduate. Through some miracle it’s going to turn out that the topics students choose to explore are the very same ones that will be tested by the State department of education. Inquiry and standards. The two can not coexist. You can’t preach both at once. It’s a lose-lose situation.
If I had to pick one, I would pick inquiry. I do believe that everyone is natually curious about the world around them and given enough access would do a decent job of discovering things for themselves. Unfortunately, the way things are set up in our society and at school, there is no time to fool around and tinker. We Americans feel a burning need to maintain or elevate our current rates of scientific progress, and therefore need to churn out graduates that are ready to assume positions that will promote that progress. To embrace inquiry fully is in some ways to swear off that driving force called the American Dream. I’d personally encourage the slowing of progress wholeheartedly, but I am one in a sea of thousands of jaded, hyperconditioned, institutionalized public school teachers. It’s my first year. I’ve always leaned heavily towards nonconformity. I chose to go to a college with no core requirements, after all. I would be ok with adults not knowing Newton’s laws or the photosynthesis equation (how many remember that stuff anyway?); I’d rather adults have a strong sense of analysis, and a working ability to engage in deductive, logical reasoning. In the extreme stance of inquiry, I’d have to be ok with some adults not being able to read (those that chose not to explore written language would not have to) and I think that I’d be ok with that. If they can fix a car or play a saxophone or calculate escape velocities or paint a picture or contribute to the world in some meaningful way it doesn’t really matter if they can understand Shakespeare’s sonnets. In the same way that it doesn’t really matter if I can fix my car (which I can’t really do), speak French (merci), or play a saxophone (never tried). I think it’s less important for us to have such rigid standards for all students, and more important for us to offer the opportunity for students to explore content of their choosing.
This is all contingent upon one’s idea of the purpose of schooling, which could be as cold as the utilitarian belief that school is a tool used to sort, to disperse people evenly into the workforce. From this perspective, people should realize that not only will some children be left behind, but if we want to keep our society the way it is, some children HAVE TO be left behind. This isn’t talked about too loudly because to admit to it is political sucide, but it’s pretty much true: our society depends heavily on a base of manual labor and service-level jobs. Who with a college degree would subject themselves to factory work or be content waiting tables? And if everyone had a college degree, who would work in the factories? From an economic standpoint, the simple and well-intentioned idea that no child should be left behind is just not feasible without a massive, sweeping restructuring of how our society works. Which, for the record, I would support.
Niether standards nor inquiry are going to go away any time soon and the education battlefield will continue to be a tug-of-war between the two extreme cases of each of these movements. I know this much: asking all of my students to conform to a certain mold is an exercise with very little utility and a lot of headache, and at the same time given the opportunity very few would pursue the acquisition of knowledge from their own intrinsic motivation. I’m currently attempting to cross the streams for the sixty-odd teenagers I have been given this year: a sort of guided inquiry in which I pose a question (almost always with a predetermined answer) and ask them to creatively construct an answer (which had better be correct) using their own previous knowledge (often faulty), limited time and resources, and the awareness that they are being asked to disover something already written in many textbooks. It’s a bit like putting someone in a mind-blowing National Park and telling them that they can go hiking and camp anywhere they want, but they have to stay within one mile and they have to stay on the path and they can’t walk any direction except North. The guided inquiry approach isn’t perfect, but it beats straight lecture.
Even this guided inquiry suffers at the feet of the Standards movement, where all personally constructed knowledge not only has to be “correct,” but it also has to match what will be asked on the standardized tests. How to reconcile this? Do people really need to know this set of content? Will American teenagers, left to their own devices, actually try to discover things for their own sake? Are people stupid enough to believe that you can have standards and inquiry at the same time? What is the real purpose of schooling in our society?
Many answers may appear correct. Please choose the BEST answer, then fill in the corresponding letter on your answer key. Make your marks within the lines provided; any stray marks may be scored improperly. You will be penalized for incorrect responses. Calculators and reference material may not be used. You may begin.
music: STS9- 4/21/02, Champaign, IL
To tune means to bring into harmony. On the most basic level, we have to bring our instrument into harmony with itself…Tuning means to hear. Too many of us allow our eyes to dominate our ears. Try closing your eyes and listening with the ears of a blind person…Beyond tuning the instrument itself, it’s also important for you to be in tune with the insturment. In the same way that singers understand their own voices, learn to understand your guitar…Much more difficult is finding an internal tuning — one that brings body, mind, and spirit into harmony. A player must be clear of internal static such as impatience and frustration; otherwise, the spirit frizzles like a radio slightly off dial. Your sound must have what the Chinese call ch’iyun: a sympathetic vibration of the vital spirit. It is a harmony that speaks from your heart directly to the heart of the listener — an intangible element that enables us to transcend our separateness and feel the greater oneness. When you feel that moment of transcendence, when your spirit is uplifted — that’s what you’re going for.
-Philip Toshio Sudo
I spent almost two hours restringing, tuning, and adjusting the intonation on my guitar this afternoon. Tuning itself is a relatively short practice; adjusting intonation takes much more focus and time. It was a chance to get to know the instrument better, to adjust its sound in a personal and significant way, and allow myself to meditate on the alignment of vibrations that is and will become music. Musicians often rush through tuning, eager to jump into making music. I’m trying to use the practice and discipline of tuning as a way to enter into a receptive mental state before I start to play. It also separates time spent making music from the rest of the day, allows me to set up my dojo, so to speak. I think that the sanctification of musical space is an excellent (and widely followed) practice by musicians of all sorts-it explains candles on the guitar amp, special carpets on which musicians stand, rituals involving setting up rigs, and more broadly, the use of music in religious rites.
I find that on days I am unhappy, discontent, or restless my guitar sounds out of tune no matter what I do. Taking the time to stop everything else and focus on bringing sound into alignment can make a big difference in the quality of my music to follow. I try to use my own ears for this as much as I can; electronic tuners can be helpful but make people too reliant on visual feedback and allows them to stop listening. More than that- electronic tuners allow people to tune without even hearing the note they are playing, which seems self-defeating. Music is more about feel than physical calibration; to really dig into an instrument or music in general it is imperative that one can internalize tone, can hear the tone in their own head before they are able to bring it into actual harmony. This was a lesson learned early: one of Mr. White’s first lessons in high school band was to listen to the reference pitch, then sing the note in your head before you make sound with your instrument. He also used to say something along the lines of the thinking of Mr. Sudo- that if you are playing a scale, then make that scale music. if you are only playing one note, make that note music. It’s harder than it sounds.
Music, above all else, is a discipline of rhythm and harmony. I spent almost two hours bringing my guitar into harmony this afternoon, and in doing so pushed myself into a more centered mind state. It’s a necessary practice. Making time for alignment is important, as is learning how to listen deeply. Both are lessons that ripple through the creation of sound, yes, but also to every other corner of my existence.
music: Simon and Garfunkel- Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, & Thyme
I’m enjoying a quiet moment at the 1-2 right now. Just got home from another fabulous Wednesday night dinner at Chelsea’s and am nursing the end of a nasty head cold. The house, usually a beehive of this and that, is fairly quiet right now and it’s pleasant. Tmo is tapping away on something involving linux in the next room over, Peet is out of town on a business trip (sidnote: is this a sign of the apocalypse??), Claire still at work. There is some motion afoot downstairs but people are lying low, preparing their dens for the oncoming snow and rain due to hit in a couple hours.
The 1-2 has been a great place to live this fall. I’m finding myself spending a lot of time around the house, partly because I’m a homebody by nature, partly because I’m often too tired to get up and out and do something after a day of work, but partly because it’s a good place to hang out. There’s almost always something going on, some new cooking or bike building or carpentry or music project, but there’s also enough room to find a corner and read quietly or take a nap. Eight people stretched over two floors and the basement works well. What’s more, the cooperation and interaction between housemates works surprisingly well. Last snowfall five of us shoveled the driveway on five different occasions without asking each other about it. The dishes, usually a contentious point in the domestic scene, have been cleaned and put away pretty well. Tmo put up a shelf with hanging hooks for pots and pans which is an excellent functional addition to the kitchen. We have the potential to be loud, especially the musicians in the house, but all things considered are pretty respectful of the racket. Or not…i’m not sure as I’m ususally the one making the most noise. I’d like to think it’s good noise though.
The thing I’m most excited about is Matt’s project in the basement: the music room. We cleared the basement out of 30 years worth of scrap metal, old doors, and broken appliances this fall and Matt’s been busy singlehandedly building a full-fledged room in that space. Laying palletes for the floor, framing the walls, hanging huge double doors, and eventually soundproofing and drywalling. He’s been working like a madman and I feel bad that I haven’t had the time or wherewithall to jump downstairs and help out, because I will surely benefit from the work in the coming months. He’s turning the basement, once unusable and functionless, into music space. The room is the future 12 Curtis Recording Studio and Rehearsal Space. That completion will open up some more space down there for a bike repair center (Peet and Marla are building a fleet of bikes, or building bikes and taking them apart again-I can’t tell which) and workshop (for whatever Ron and tmo dream up). The music room is what I’m most excited about. The room will also lend a sense of legitimacy to the whole music thing; when the space is finished and available I’ll probably throw up a musicians wanted ad on craigslist to see if I can’t really get things going.
Thank the Maker for the 1-2. Besides countering my seemingly natural tendency towards solitude, it’s a social outlet. This is the year of not really having much of a life of my own, so it’s nice to come home to such a sociable place. I couldn’t imagine living in my horrorshow apartment from last year, full of door-closers, alcoholics, shady black curtains, completely unused common space, and $2000 phone bills. It’s nice to share food. It’s nice to set up a house computer network. It’s nice to turn the basement into usable space. It’s nice to add and tweak this and that, throw a plastic “carpet” in the bathroom, turn an old mushroom crate into a sponge-holder, put up a poster or picture, make this place a home.
music: New Monsoon- 5/22/04, Harper’s Ferry, Boston, MA
Of all the things I’ve tried in my life, writing good music is one of the hardest. I’m not yet sure if it’s good or bad that songwriting is so difficult, but I’ve been trying to develop the seed of an idea planted some time last month and it’s not going anywhere. Glad to have gotten all that sappy campfire type stuff documented over the course of this past week, but now that I want to move on with it I am stymied. Held up by an infinitely frustrating lack of creativity on-demand. Winter break was the time to push on that and now winter break is over and all that stuff I do for myself will have to take a backseat to 65 teenagers.
Whether or not he’s had enough, David has to make way. Here comes Mr. Taus, ready (or not) for action when that buzzer rings at 6:00 AM. Mere minutes away. I’ve successfully whittled down the things that need David’s attention to grocery shopping (a seemingly unsolvable problem), a therm-a-rest that doesn’t stay inflated, and some screwy intonation issues on the Gibson. Doesn’t help that I’m starting to get sick either. So it goes. The week out of time has ended; back to the way things normally are. I’m due for a good long think on how to 1) extract the most amount of pleasure from my daily activities as I can and 2) maintain space and time for myself in the midst of it all but for now the prudent thing to do is to sleep hard, deep, and furious. And Mr. Taus is nothing if not prudent.
music: Martin Sexton- 9/14/01, Woodstock, NY
New Year’s, if nothing else, is an opportunity to pause and take stock of one’s life and how the events of the past calendar year have affected life. It’s a seemingly straightforward task, but is a tall order for he who is overly reflective. Iit’s sometimes nice not to be afforded the time to do all that year-in-review work. Equally as important is an excuse to seek out those who are important to one’s life. This year, meeting up with some of my oldest friends in Philadelphia accomplished both these points.
If all options were equally accessible, I’d be deep in the backcountry, well off pavement, pitching camp and cooking a simple meal over a fire with a handful of friends. Instead I found msyelf in the middle of a very large city bouncing from bar to club to bar along with thousands of other young professionals. I became lost in the sea of humanity, just one of thousands of guys with untucked collar shirts and jeans. Definitely not my thing but because of my company I managed to have a good time of it. I was lucky to be with some of my oldest friends (oldest as in we’ve known each other the longest). It’s an amazing thing to spend time with my friends from growing up. Because we are so entwined in each others’ personal development we have no troubles falling into a familiar comfort with one another. I feel no stress or obligation to be someone or do something with them; just sharing time and space is enough. I habitually and purposefully keep my attention on the path ahead of me day-to-day, but on occasions that allow me to turn an ear back I realize how important these people are to not only my growing up but to my current life. An illustration: I knew I didn’t really own clothes appropriate to the night’s activities (Carhartts and yard-sale plaid shirts probably wouldn’t cut it for a night on the town for NYE) and brought some of my work clothes as fallback, but secretly counted on scavenging from my friends. R. somehow foresaw this predicament of mine and brought an extra outfit thinking I’d need something to wear out. Neither one of us said anything about not having or bringing extra clothes, but it didn’t need to be said. It’s like that when you’ve known someone for over 20 years. Post-midnight calls from my old college roommates was the icing on the cake.
Philadelphia itself was an impressive place to me. I thought the street scene on Market Street after bar time was excellent: thousands of festive souls all enjoying the unseasonably warm weather, laughing, singing, carrying on, and talking with one another. Talking with one another! Complete strangers…never in Boston (short of the Red Sox winning the World Series). It was a great moment in time and I was glad to be a part of it. Never mind that this hubbub all took place in the Old City, just blocks away from a National Park. Philly’s neighborhoods are great as well-very distinct and colorful. We strolled through the Italian Market today and grabbed a Cheesesteak. It’s amazing how residential the city’s center is. Houses and apartments are very interspersed with historical landmarks, important government buildings (I spent the night less than a block away from the US Mint), and commerical centers. As downtowns go, Philadelphia is really a great setup.
I decided to return today despite the great change of scenery and great company. For one, the D.C. contingency of our party cleared out this afternoon. More to the point, the knowledge that I’d have to make the transition back to Mr. Taus weighed heavily on my conscience. The drive down and back, it turned out, was a worthwhile exercise in and of itself. Driving for distance has become something I’ve grown quite good at after our marathon driving this summer and as I was heading down to Philly I realized how much I missed the postmodern meditation of driving long hours on the Interstate System. The stretch I ran is perhaps the most developed in the country, with streetlight and strip mall being the rule, not the exception, but there were pockets enough on I-91 and I-84 to give me the illusion of driving through the more sparse landscapes not found on the Eastern Seaboard. Despite tackling some of the worst roads in the country I was also able to get some good thinking time in and clear my head of a lot of cobwebs. The freedom that the road affords is enough to put the routines and trappings of life in perspective, and despite falling into that distinctly American trap of sucking down over a tank of gas and shelling out over $20 in tolls I felt better about things just knowing I could do something like get up and go to Philadelphia if I wanted. And I did.
I made it back to Boston in just under 5 hours this evening. I had a good stretch of time on the road tonight to let thoughts simmer and glide in and out, time enough to reflect on the past year even after celebrating with some of my oldest friends. I hurtled through cities under darkness, shedding the previous year in the process and letting the dust settle enough to start the next, one singular life in a grey steel box gliding past countless others, content to find some sort of clarity in the jouney itself, hoping that upon returning home there will be strength, resolve, and room to begin the business of the next year.