This weekend I came into possession of an excellent used car from 1997, an American-made automatic with a sexagenarian aura, squeaky brakes, and a functioning cassette-deck. Since taking possession of the car I have driven with slow authority and the smell of old memories wafting from inside the cushions. I have avoided spilling coffee or iced tea or donut crumbs. I have refrained from crumpling burger wrappers to accrue below decks, and have not sworn.
I have not taken the car with me to play Bingo, nor have I taken it bowling, nor have I driven it into a tree or a crowd of pedestrians. I have parked with difficulty and have driven to one diner, where I did not purchase the early bird special but did wonder about teenagers these days.
Having a cassette player at hand again reminded me of the Tupperware container in the basement with the old cassettes, a smattering of four-track recordings (still unplayable), microcassette recordings of an experimental improv band I played a bit part in more than a decade ago, and mix tapes from back in the day. Opening this container offered a living lifeline to a time of great hopes and short attention, and the perfect audio backdrop for a nice afternoon drive at exactly the speed limit (or 5 to 10 miles per hour slower).
I tried the improv cassettes first but couldn't find the thread. A lot of it I found unlistenable. Others moments would verge on coming together. There was a moment where it sounded like we were right on the verge of playing something kind of Lebanese, but we never really found the right scale or mood and instead it became vaguely tribal, following a safer and less descript route, treading melodic water for a few safe minutes. A linear course or sort of commute to work that echoes my current reality now more than anything else. At the time I must have surely thought it was some Pharaoh Sanders-esque journey to interstellar regions. At the time I was under the illusion that the people I knew were destiny and everything we'd make would turn to gold without the slightest effort.
I switched to one of the mixes and started thinking of the friend who'd made it for me 20 years ago, how I couldn't wait to call her to tell her what I'd dug up. I nodded my head to the songs -- which maybe I hadn't understood at the time (or I'd thought they were fine, or whatever) but which suddenly seemed so apt, so perfectly on point, like a time capsule that would know and aptly suit the mood of the person opening it a hundred years later. I really couldn't wait to call her.
The tape flipped sides and a new song started and I realized with cruel certainty that I'd dubbed over at least half of the mix with rehearsal from the same improv group.
It felt a little like getting all drunk and stoned with your best friend to go see the Wu Tung Clan on the last night of summer, only they've cancelled due to a family emergency and have asked Tony Conrad to play in their place, and you're too drunk too leave, too stoned to stay.
Showing posts with label reminisces of my boyhood in wales. Show all posts
Showing posts with label reminisces of my boyhood in wales. Show all posts
8.29.2010
6.23.2009
metronome
I messed up my ears hanging out with guitarists. Nothing angers a guitarist like the keyboard player asking him to turn down. Then I was 30 and half deaf too.
Bands are a good place to learn that god hates you, that only rarely does man understand his fellow man. Most bands are amateur hour, without measure or law, a battle of myopic painters to see who can pitch the most neon onto a canvas too small to share, while the drummer runs forward to smear logs of fresh shit over everything in the manner of an expressive gibbon. Silence and space banished to un-imaginability.
To aid me in my solo project, to be completed by 2025 at the absolute latest, I've procured a hearing aid with a metronome implanted in it. A small remote adjusts volume, tempo, and tone. The presets include Classic (faux pendulum metronome, Digital Madness (treble-bound octaves of any note), and Dom DeLuise (in which the late actor exhorts one to 'prac-tice' repeatedly in a number of time signatures and languages).
The metronome keeps me out of trouble. A sense of time curving, stretching and contracting is a narcotic for me, and prior to the installation I would go to great and reprehensible lengths to achieve it. The metronome is handy late at night, when cartons of ice cream would otherwise go emptied, or at my desk at work, when productivity might slip for a second, or an hour, or a day. It's handy in dull social settings. The metronome adds order, dividing the world into manageable, symmetric packets, provides information I know I can trust as valid and precise.
Early on, my mother and father urged me to success, to earn, if not a position as the conductor of an elite institution such as the All South Jersey Orchestra, then at least a modicum of rhythmic dignity and respectability in whatever profession I chose. Rare to consensus in all else, they insisted on the metronome as a unified voice. Practice is useless without it, Man needeth but food, sleep, and a metronome, etc.
But if my mother ran an errand and the mood struck him, my dad would quietly lock the swinging bar of the metronome in place and leave me to practice on my own, with my own sense of time. The notes carried me out to sea, into the depths and currents of feeling. When she returned, it always took me by surprise and I would back quickly away from the piano, as if it were a man just knifed in the back.
For a while when I lived on my own, I was happy to do without a metronome. But I see now that that was a foolish waste of time. That a man with his feet on the ground is to be admired and respected, that a man at sea is in trouble, whether he knows it or not.
Bands are a good place to learn that god hates you, that only rarely does man understand his fellow man. Most bands are amateur hour, without measure or law, a battle of myopic painters to see who can pitch the most neon onto a canvas too small to share, while the drummer runs forward to smear logs of fresh shit over everything in the manner of an expressive gibbon. Silence and space banished to un-imaginability.
To aid me in my solo project, to be completed by 2025 at the absolute latest, I've procured a hearing aid with a metronome implanted in it. A small remote adjusts volume, tempo, and tone. The presets include Classic (faux pendulum metronome, Digital Madness (treble-bound octaves of any note), and Dom DeLuise (in which the late actor exhorts one to 'prac-tice' repeatedly in a number of time signatures and languages).
The metronome keeps me out of trouble. A sense of time curving, stretching and contracting is a narcotic for me, and prior to the installation I would go to great and reprehensible lengths to achieve it. The metronome is handy late at night, when cartons of ice cream would otherwise go emptied, or at my desk at work, when productivity might slip for a second, or an hour, or a day. It's handy in dull social settings. The metronome adds order, dividing the world into manageable, symmetric packets, provides information I know I can trust as valid and precise.
Early on, my mother and father urged me to success, to earn, if not a position as the conductor of an elite institution such as the All South Jersey Orchestra, then at least a modicum of rhythmic dignity and respectability in whatever profession I chose. Rare to consensus in all else, they insisted on the metronome as a unified voice. Practice is useless without it, Man needeth but food, sleep, and a metronome, etc.
But if my mother ran an errand and the mood struck him, my dad would quietly lock the swinging bar of the metronome in place and leave me to practice on my own, with my own sense of time. The notes carried me out to sea, into the depths and currents of feeling. When she returned, it always took me by surprise and I would back quickly away from the piano, as if it were a man just knifed in the back.
For a while when I lived on my own, I was happy to do without a metronome. But I see now that that was a foolish waste of time. That a man with his feet on the ground is to be admired and respected, that a man at sea is in trouble, whether he knows it or not.
5.22.2009
house on fire
I have a snow globe, something I got for Christmas when I was 17 from an aunt overseas who'd never acknowledged that I'd grown past 9.
The layout is basic snow globe. There's a two-story 19th century house, with a lamp post and a horse in a small barn off to the back of the lot, surrounded by a couple of other, smaller houses. A few tiny neighbors walking by. The ground snow-covered, and the sidewalks. The streets are just wet--shiny and black.
On the bottom of the globe, under the base, I mean, there's a white button. You shake the globe and push the button and after a few minutes, little plumes of smoke start curling out from the top windows of the house. Eventually tiny flames lick all four sides, bottom up, and then the whole thing's up in flames.
At the last second there's an additional flicker of activity in the house, a man and woman trying to run out, but you can see it's too late.
I'm not sure my aunt knew about the button, but it's possible she'd been baiting me for years, and this was her idea of a sick joke or life lesson.
The layout is basic snow globe. There's a two-story 19th century house, with a lamp post and a horse in a small barn off to the back of the lot, surrounded by a couple of other, smaller houses. A few tiny neighbors walking by. The ground snow-covered, and the sidewalks. The streets are just wet--shiny and black.
On the bottom of the globe, under the base, I mean, there's a white button. You shake the globe and push the button and after a few minutes, little plumes of smoke start curling out from the top windows of the house. Eventually tiny flames lick all four sides, bottom up, and then the whole thing's up in flames.
At the last second there's an additional flicker of activity in the house, a man and woman trying to run out, but you can see it's too late.
I'm not sure my aunt knew about the button, but it's possible she'd been baiting me for years, and this was her idea of a sick joke or life lesson.
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