Today's post

I never know what I'm going to write when I start these things. I get a cup of tea and just start typing.

I'll start with improvisation. Every morning, before I brush my teeth or even have a glass of water, before I'm really awake, I start up the digital recorder and start playing the keyboard, for between five and 45 minutes. Whatever happens is what happens. I try to have some chordal integrity, some melody, and that's it. I'd like to have more mental stuff going on when I improvise, but for now that's it. If I think too much I kill everything creative. It's like fishing - sometimes you don't catch anything, and sometimes you reel in a big fish.

Next - RazorLame.I load the mp3 into RazorLame and convert to WAV. It's really reliable, and it's free.

Then, Adobe Audition. I compress the WAV file (the Classical setting) and run eq on it, save it, and it's done. Back to RazorLame, where I convert it back to mp3, and it's ready for long-term storage and listening.

Today I installed the Amazing Midi program on one of my XP machines. I converted a bunch of the files back to WAV using RazorLame, and used Amazing Midi to convert them to midi sequences. I listened to some of them. They've been quantized, which means that all of the rhythmic grace has been taken out of them. But, the ideas can still be extracted with a music notation program, and developed.

What I haven't done yet is to install Keykit, and use it to run a Markov chain analysis on the midi files. That's next.

And, after that, I need to get ahold of a copy of Sibelius. That's my music notation program of choice. I could load midi sequences, Keykit Markov chains, or hook a keyboard up to the computer to improvise directly and develop any of these into compositions.

I just need to devote a corner of my house to this, and the requisite time. And break out that Samuel Adler orchestration book and start reading it again.

I really want to compose again. I 52 for Chris'sakes. I'm tired of putting this off. I've got no shortage of ideas.

regression

I guess I can only improve my life so much before it starts slipping back. I stopped doing yoga over a week ago, because my back hurts too much. I lost my concentration in one pose, and that was it.

My network studies are getting nowhere fast, because I can't stand not playing music. When I was making a lot of progress, back in '09, I wasn't playing at all, and was unhappy about it. Now I'm playing quite a bit, but not doing networking. Oh well, anyone working on a CCNA has no life, and anyone with a life isn't working on a CCNA, or has a heck of a lot of free time.

What else? I gained three pounds last week. Binging on chocolate Halloween night, eating starchy vegan food Thursday, and eating my work crew's food on Friday. By Sunday it was all over. I'm trying to reform my ways.

And now for the positive stuff. That vegan food Thursday was enjoyed in the presence of Julia Butterfly Hill, the famous activist  who lived in a tree for two years to protest logging in the Pacific Northwest. She came up to visit Denton and various What's Your Tree people, one of whom is my wife, who was there too. This was after a visit to Cardo's farm, which I was able to videotape, and before a talk at an art studio near the Square, which I was also able to do.  Very cool. It'll probably take me six months to edit this project.

JBH has gone so far out of her comfort zone to do something that was important to her, that we are practically defined by our failure to leave our respective zones to make our statement. She has paid in expensive coin for what she believes in, and many of us look rather contemptible by comparison. At least that's my attitude since I had dinner with her.

JBH has gotten into my head in an unusual way. I first made a video of her initial Denton visit back in '07, and it took months to edit. The event itself was wonderful - she spoke at UNT, and the evening was sponsored by UNT, the City of Denton Libraries, and Denton ISD. I had a crew (which is rare for me) and I got three video sources and four audio. It took months to edit, during which time I stared at her and listened to the wisdom she had painfully accululated during two years of isolation atop a redwood tree named Luna.

At first, she seemed very beautiful to me. Sexy, young, graceful, with a long neck, long black hair, and a beautiful streak of grey appearing from the top of her forehead. I'm guessing she was 33 at the time. But the more I listened to her, and absorbed her knowledge of spiritual things, integrity, and her treetop view of the sickness of the world and our society, the more like an ordinary person she looked. Then, after a year had passed, when I'd long abandoned the project (finishing was not an option - I could've spent years on it), and I'd forgetten many of her words, I looked at my edit again, and there she was, beautiful, again.

So here's the kernel of that phenomenon, which someone had to tell me (I can't take credit for this insight) - where you see beauty, there you see your heart's desire. My desire was not for her, but for her wisdom. She seemed beautiful to me because her wisdom made her look that way. Big lesson for me.

At the dinner last week, I didn't talk much with her. I'd spent so much time looking at her in my video editing software that it was almost dissonant to see her in person, in real life. It was hard to make eye contact with her. Oh well, I hope she wasn't put off by me. My wife & kid were really charmed by her, during the evening session, and she was kind and genuine with both of them.

Tenacious Music

I'm back at my favorite haunt, after a full day around the house. Tenacious Root is playing. This band has been around for at least 25 years, and they sound better than ever. I wish they had a sound man though. It's a little boomy for this coffeehouse. My bones of hearing are getting rattled.

I've had two beautiful mornings of improvisation. Yesterday was especially rewarding. I wish I'd recorded it. I'm going to have to get something set up to do that. This morning's improv was informed by a little educational video I watched yesterday, by Allan Holdsworth. He was playing a bunch of beautiful chords, and I tried to do something like that. It wound up sounding a bit like Stravinsky. It was exciting, to be able to work with voice-leading, and then abandon that and play widely spaced chords succeeding each other.

I finished sight-reading the first movement of Beethoven's Op. 31 no. 2, the Tempest piano sonata. Now in the middle of the Adagio. Beethoven's sense of humor is all over the piece. I wonder if the music wasn't funny to him sometimes. Could he have been serious? It's so pompous, and the rhythms are so stilted. He had to have been joking when he wrote this.

Well, I can't hear myself think, what with Tenacious Root playing. Why isn't there a music aesthetic devoted to playing as softly as possible, making the audience strain to hear it? Music that fades away as swiftly as it appears? Ideas that  barely break the audible surface, with an implied existence before the notes that you hear?
Perhaps that music would be best for an opium den :) Really, my idea for a coffeehouse music would be all acoustic. Chamber music for six, maybe. Harpsichord, cello, flute, oboe, violin, and viola.

Tonight's weather is crisp and clear. People outside are dressed up in costumes, walking quickly in the cold. They seem happy. I should join them outside, and I would if I had the energy. I worked out twice today, and did lots of laundry & cooking. 
 Still, I'll be driven out soon enough.

Until next time.

a bit of happiness

I feel good. A week of yoga (all but one day this week) and three dance workouts. Balanced protein & fat for all my meals, and lots of good vitamins - D, C, methylated B12, Folate (I think that's methylated too), and a good antioxidant. I've been working on that 70-lb mark for awhile, and I think I'll hit that tomorrow morning when I do my weekly weigh-in. That'll bring me to my 1991 weight. Time machine! I just hope I continue to behave like my proper, married, 52-year-old self.

My lady is in her hometown for a wedding shower, and my child is at a sleepover. I'm a bachelor tonight! I can do whatever I want. What shall I do? No se. Je ne sais quois.

But for starters I'll sip on this breve - all the caffeine and twice the fat - and wait for the effect to take hold. Then I'm sure I'll come up with an idea.

I'm in the midst of trying to sight-read The Musical Offering. Simply impossible, even for a gifted score reader. Only the first movement is doable, and it was written to reflect an improvisation that Bach performed for King Frederic the Great, when first presented with The King's Theme. After that, there's the 6-part Ricercar - fuhgetaboutit - and the canons are all written as cryptically as possible. I haven't listened to a recording of this in over a year, and it makes me want to try to solve these puzzles. Two clefs at once, or a single clef, and the piece specifies a 4-part canon. Or one of the multiple clefs is upside-down. Even the Trio Sonata is a challenge. The flute & violin parts overlap, and the keyboard part is written in figured bass, which I don't read well - there's another music reading challenge! The figures are so small that even with a magnifying glass, it's hard to tell what they are.

So I set it aside and sight-read the first movement of a Beethoven Piano Sonata. Just bought the volume last night - book 2 of 2 of the complete Sonatas, edited by Schenker, published by Dover. I'm sure it would be tough to play fast, but it was surprisingly playable, and lay under the hands nicely. It's Opus 31, no 1, in G major. The tonality is all over the place - it's in G major, then F major (rock & roll!) , then E minor - A major - D major, then a flurry of diminished chords, then suddenly the 2nd theme is in B major - a distant key. What a guy. What a buzz!

I've been playing steadily for a couple of years now, and it's the limitations that my life imposes on me that's made me stronger on the instrument. I don't have time to compose, or play congas, or Chapman Stick, or do orchestral arrangements, or study couterpoint. I can't even work on repertoire! But, having chosen sight-reading and improvisation, those parts of my musical life are moving forward. There's something sad about this, but sometimes when you choose to really do something, to be committed, there's a sadness about the things you have to give up to get there. Then - you can use that sadness in your music. Maybe it comes out all by itself, anyway.

Post every day, right?

The poetess says to blog every day. Write just to write. OK, perhaps I can indulge in some stream-of-consciousness.Oh! I can write about a dream I had the other night!

In the dream, I was in my persona of campus bum, university-fringe-low-salary-slacker guy who occasionally took a class, but mostly took advantage of the easy environment the University of North Texas provided. In the dream I claimed to be a Computer Science major to someone, but I was really exaggerating that as I hadn't taken a class in years (and in real life was a poor CSCI student).

So here I am, in the dream, wandering around this classroom, getting set to study something or other, early in the morning, before other students were making their way through the building. I was in a large classroom, and had taken my shoes off and was basically making a slobbish display of myself, shocking the prim and proper academics and ambitious graduate students. I had my study materials all over a place I had no right to, and felt kind of self-conscious when others showed up.

But as it happened, students coalesced around me, set up their computers, and began working on music theory lessons. The teacher showed up too, but nothing was happening. No music was being played, no lecture was happening. The students just continued to study. I wandered about the room, where I found lots of electronic keyboards in various states of repair, mostly from the 70s. I remember lusting after some of them, wishing I could take them home. Then I realized I was in a flipped classroom - the students were doing their homework in class, having tackled new material last night. I approached the teacher and asked him to demonstrate the lessons, and he began to give me a very baffling explanation that involved the trajectory of tea leaves in a cup that belonged to Abraham Lincoln the last day of his life, and the very bullet that killed him. At the end of the demonstration he levitated an old-style rife bullet, and then it darted to a handheld device, as if it were producing some sort of tractor beam.

Very strange - but I felt inspired. He had spoken eliptically, poetically, but was using formulas, non-linear equations, and words in combinations I'd never heard before. It was poetry, math, and music, all fused together, like the Glass Bead Game. Two phrases came to me as I woke up - "the book of morning", and "the charmed triangle". I'm no poet, but if I were those would be put in a poem.

Anyway, there was my dream, and this is my blog post.

About that dream programming post...

Well, folks, I didn't exactly manage to quit caffeine, as I said I was going to. Feet of clay.

But, I substituted yoga! Done it for three mornings, going a little farther each day. Feels good, and I'm standing up straighter. I discovered something new - my skeleton-to-fat ratio. Less padding now, greater proportion of bone, and some of these poses hurt a little, lately.

Still, I like it...

Dream programming

I've invented and used this technique for myself, but I'm sure it's not original with me. It's been a wonderful addition to my life, and the fact that I'm not on street corners shouting about this is probably because I'm too old, and too busy. But I've shared it with friends, and those who have tried it have quietly added it to their repertoire of life-coping skills.

Here's the rationale: we're growing,  and changing, all the time. some small subset of that change must come in this 24-hour period we're currently inhabiting, and some of that time will be spent in sleep. When we're awake we're in a more-or-less rational, fixed, sphere of circumstances that limit our possibilities and guide our thoughts and actions, but, when we're sleeping, we're in a world of infinite, irrational, association and possibility. When we wake up in the morning, we're not quite the person we were yesterday. We're either getting stronger or weaker, happier or sadder, better or worse, in whatever set of parameters you may care to name.

So here's the technique: when turning out the lights and laying yourself down before sleep, imagine an environment of infinite possibility, where you can grow or change in any dimension of personal development or ability. Ask yourself to change in no more than three different ways. Do you want to be better with money? Do you have a course of study you're pursuing? Is there a key relationship at work that needs to improve? Do you want to improve your nutrition or your fitness? It could be any three things. Or one thing. Frame your desire in certain, measurable terms, and go to sleep.

It's that simple. Doesn't cost any money. Do this and see what happens for you.

If it's a habit you want to change, keep at this for 28 days. The habit should form successfully in that time. It works for me.

Some of the things I've changed recently: I've given up wheat, corn and rice. I took up Jazzercise twice a week. Then, after some months, three times a week. Now, for the last two months, I'm doing it four times a week. Today I'm finishing up a successful renunciation of potatoes and chocolate.

I'm down more than twelve pounds just this month, and 67 pounds in the last 22 months.

But I've also added some daily musical chores with my dream programming, and I'm sure I could do more. I just don't ask for too much at once. So, I do technique at night - scales, three-note arpeggios, and four-note arpeggios. In the morning I improvise, and at lunchtime I sight-read. (All this on piano.)

Renunciations are in some way the easiest - they involve not doing a thing, or not eating something.
Adding skills is a little harder, but is quite doable with dream programming.

Starting today, I want three things. I want to quit caffeine (it spikes blood sugar, which generally retards fat burning), I want to quit watching television (don't have time anymore), and I want to do more Cisco studies (my certification goes away in December). I actually began visualizing these desires last night.

So, do you have to visualize these desires every night? Well, it works for me. Do you have to consciously remember what you wished for the night before? I don't think so, but it helps.

Don't wish for more than three things! I have no proof for this, but my intuition says to limit the number of goals. You have can as many goals as you wish, but do them in sequence, and attain your first goals first before moving forward with your next ones.

Try it and see!

Whatever shall I write about?

Twelve hours of work on Saturday, and eleven on Tuesday. I deserve some time off!

On Saturday I went to a wonderful workshop on wedding and cooporate videos, and learned all kinds of things I never knew. I've been doing video for almost ten years, and I feel like a rank amateur. It's a good feeling though. I know now that I can do some pretty good work, if the conditions and the story are right.

I need to learn:
digital still cameras as video cams
aperture
focal length
exposure
lighting
subplots
inverse proportion of shot length to subplot length - lots of little clips, or a few big ones, while maintaining the length of the subplot.

All of these elements serve to create a story when you can't write the script, or when the point of your video is so obvious that it's hard to avoid cliche. Get the right client, and get to know him/her/them to discover the story. Find the foibles, personal interests, implied virtues of your wedding couple, in-law, or CIO. In the case of corporations, interview lots of people to get the right ones to be in your video. Find out what they do, or what they're interested in, and make subplots out of that.

The edit process was interesting too. They work in successive sequences (in Adobe Premiere Pro CS6), so each successive stage of the project can be returned to. They move subplots around in blocks. They look for a clip that can resolve the main story, or the subplot, or even two subplots at once.

The 80/20 rule is in play here: 80% of the work goes on 20% of the project , namely, the beginning and the end. The middle is important too, as you need to keep the viewers interested, but the beginning has to grab their interest, and the ending has to leave them with something they will remember. And you have to make them want to watch it again, if you can.

The workshop was from 9:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m., but my energy only flagged a little in midafternoon. I drank lots of coffee and kept myself going. I was wiped out on Sunday, but it was worth it.

I attended the event with my boss's boss, who has an enthusiasm for photography, and makes videos with his dslr cam. He showed me how to get from Denton to Arlington in 35 minutes! Take 35E south to George Bush tollway, and go to 30 from there. Wow! I have a new way to visit my sister. I'll have to get a toll tag though.

So I had my benefactor drop me off at the Jupiter House at 10:00 Saturday night, where I met my friend Jim McNeely after a 14-month absence. We talked about family, careers, and chord progressions. I had a great time. He dropped me off around midnight, and that was my Saturday.

blogging again, after a hiatus

I'm having some pleasant solitude again, at my favorite coffeehouse. My friend M has her PhD. I'm down 65 pounds from summer before last. All is well with the world.

All but one thing. My greatest, most-difficult-to-suppress, most neurotic fear has materialized. My daughter has slammed her finger in the car door. I was away when it happened. My wife had to run around the car to her and unlock the door. It must have felt like an eternity for my girl. When they returned I made some apple juice & motrin and gave that to her. I went to the store and bought more of that, plus some ice cream. We got her her favorite meal from Sonic and let her watch TV, although she'd used up her ration for that (2 hrs) already. She spent the evening zoning out.

The injury's not too bad - it caught the tip of her index finger, and it doesn't appear that there's anything broken or hemoraging in there. There's a mark on her fingernail that will slowly grow out as it heals.

We can't protect our children from everything. I've tried, with anticipated terror, to keep her little fingers out of doorjams, watching vigilantly as she gets into the car - the door edges on the car body might as well be highlighted in an augmented reality display as far as my vision is concerned.

Before I was a parent, I once slammed a child's hand in a car door. Fortunately he was very young, and his hands were still mostly cartilage (or at least it seemed that way). He didn't take any lasting hurt.

I might as well be a diffferent person now - the conditioning of being a parent (and of transforming from a pleasure-seeking missile into a hardened silo) makes me think of others instead of myself.

Once, when studying neuroscience (never more than dabbling in it), I read that the study of the nervous system starts with the neuron, but that all the action is in the synapses - the gaps between the neurons. Life is like that - we start with self-involvement, self-nurturing, self-defense, egotistic posturing, preening - but we move on in life, and eventually our lives become all about our relationships with others.

Still, I'm envious of my friends who have remained single and self-involved. They have less conflict, I think. They're all artists of one kind or another. They've been able to accomplish more. Like my friend M, who got her PhD this week. She wrapped up her dissertation in a three-month bout of continuous typing, and began a course in Cisco networking at the same time.

Or my friend BR, who is a hell of a talented composer and a deeply spiritual person. And a physicist with a PhD! And a faculty member at a state university. Now that he has a career though, he's composing less often. But he would never have generated that large body of work, or gotten his advanced degrees, saddled with a family.

It's OK with me. I love my family. And I'm progressing on keyboards quite nicely. Improv in the early morning, sight-reading during the day, and technique at night. I love sight-reading too. The better I get, the more unexplainable is the phenomenon. My ego disappears into it, if it's going well. I've begun using a metronome - that's a new dimension in difficulty!

I had a breakthrough in improvisation today. I chose a single mode - F#sixth mode melodic minor, which Dan Hearle loves to call "superlocrian" - locrian with a raised 2nd. In the past I would have written out all of the chords - triads and sevenths, and then progressions in fourths, and stepwise progressions. This time I determined to commit all that to memory, and had quite a wonderful time. My right hand improv was simpler than ever - I just played Somewhere over the Rainbow, and Summertime by Gershwin - but my left hand accompanying patterns were awesome (for me anyway).
So much fun. F#half-diminished to G# half-diminished, with wide voicings, D7 to E7. Bminor7 to E7 to Aminor with a major 7th. C augmented major 7th. It's so good!

There's so many ways to play! Melody in right hand, melody in left. Moving bass lines with chords in right hand. Bass against melody. Melodies in both hands with identical rhythm. Playing four voices at once. I'm going to love exploring them all.

I'm no longer ashamed to play in a tonal manner, which I'd absorbed through my skin in college. That whole Schoenberg thing poisoned the well, although if it hadn't been him it would have been someone else. I've had thirty years to forget the straight-jacket of music school. Still glad I did it, but it never helped me to be truly creative. Only I could do that, and the last lesson I learned - just recently - was that I had to give myself permission to do this. It's easy to not realize it when you're busy with scales, arpeggios, and repertoire. The will to mastery can obscure the goal. One has to let go of egotistic concerns and let the music be the raison d'etre.

Well, time to study networking. I hope M reads this...

Life is so interesting!

Life is so interesting. Everything happens at once! We just have to pay attention.

Yesterday was interesting - the whole family was working on the house & the yard. My lady, despite being sick, felt invigorated by the work. My kid sprayed and scrubbed some chairs. Pool work, picking up branches, dog poop, detritus, etc. Mowing the grass with a manual mower. That last bit is my favorite, but I'm going to have to give it up. It takes four hours to do with that little push, spiral-blade affair, but a powered lawn power would eat it up in 45 minutes. Too bad - it stinks, and tortures my eardrums. But I just don't have the time anymore.

I worked hard, and felt tired, but when it came time to do Jazzercise, I felt like I hadn't worked at all. I came back stronger! Great - consolation of age - I can't get any younger, but I can get thinner and stronger. The instructor nick-named me "Royalicious". Ah, vanity.

By coincidence, my percussion instructor in college nick-named me "Roy Aloysius", so it was a bit of synchronicity.

Then back home, and, with a phone call to my sister-in-law, the evening was done - too pooped to mow any more. That'll have to wait 'till tonight.

R.I.P. Hal David. I'm listening to "I Say a Little Prayer". Try counting it sometime, next time you listen.

Another Friday

Well, I'm at the tail end of sleep deprivation and overwork - I hope. The first is because my wife has been ill, and the second is because there's too much work to do.

My lady has been coughing at night - lots of allergies. She got some meds now that may help, and I'm hopeful. I really could use more sleep.

Video, IT work, distance learning, language labs. It's all piling up. My new boss is supportive, and looking for ways to turn down this firehose of work assignments to a manageable flow. But it's getting more difficult to manage things. Sleep! Blessed sleep!

So I'm taking the afternoon off. I'm substituting an aimless afternoon for purposeful behavior. I went to the $2 cinema, watched five minutes of the new Spiderman movie (the sound wasn't working so I left), wandered about the mall, looked at books, talked to a friend on the phone. Now I'm at my  favorite coffeehouse. Tonight I work on the house, and then grab my family and go to a concert for kids. That'll be fun.

I think it's time to resume network studies. The way out is through. I need to investigate the CCAI, and review my CCNA. I may have to retake the latter, as it expires in December.
My piano playing is getting tantalizing. I'm improving, and I want to play more and more. It's like a little voice is telling me I could be a really good pianist, if I would just practice more and more often. Ah, where's the time? When I prepped for my CCNA (fourteen months), I didn't play at all.
In what little spare time I have, I'm reading The Ego and Its Own by Max Stirner. Something tells me he was young when he wrote it. It's interesting reading though. I'm skeptical some of the more extreme points, and it really glosses over lots of topics, like its references to Greek philosophy, but it's worth a read. I'm just glad I didn't read it when I was young - I would have been influenced in an unbalanced way, I'm sure, like when I read G.B. Shaw's stuff. I'm at a good age to read philosophy now, though.

Fuzzy-headed, muzzy-headed with fatigue. But I like where I am right now – I’m a node on the great web. I’m fixing to drink some Earl Grey tea, which should charge me up a bit.

too much exercise

I did Jazzercise four days in a row - a first for me - and last night I was so tired I could barely sleep. I told my daughter about this, and she thought it didn't make sense. If you're tired you should sleep better, right? I told her that sleep is like other bodily functions - it works better when you're well-rested.

I am not addicted to exercise. I can quit anytime I like!

another Friday night

I had a frustrating monring cleaning the house, a frustrating afternoon editing video, and more-or-less enjoyable hour at the piano. Got the even to myself too. All's well..

I'm on the Three-part Sinfonia #7 by Bach, having plowed through an enourmous (for me) amount of sight-reading this evening. Eight  more and I'm done with the Bach Keyboard Music book! Then, I move on to volume 1 of the International Piano Music Library, which a couple of young beauties gifted me with last year.

Sometimes I try to wonder what's behind the sight-reading phenomenon - all  the tangled strands of rhythm, pitch, fingering, lines, phrasing, that has to happen all in the moment, all at once, and I know I'll never get ahold of it. Just doing the sight-reading will have to suffice. The current challenge is to keep looking ahead, to allow the notes to enter my sight while I'm playing the previous measure - not easy...

I haven't improvised in weeks, and listening to my recorded improvisations makes me want to do more of this. It's exciting, to hear something you did two months ago, off the cuff, and enjoy listening to it.

I'm hanging out in the coffeehouse again. It's not very busy, which is suprising. The Square is loaded with people, and UNT & TWU are about to open their doors.

I laid down to rest for awhile today, and thought about the 5th mode melodic minor. I used to recite these modes to myself, over twenty years ago, and while I had my eyes closed I did some of that. But then, it was easier to just see it on the keyboard, which I've been able to automatically visualize since I was 19.  So in G, this mode is spelled G A B C D Eb F G. You get G major & C minor, for instance.
But it's an enormously fertile thing to spell out every triad, seventh, and ninth chord, and start playing  chord progressions. (I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader....)

This is my first blog entry using my iPad. It's really light. Using laptops is going to be pretty old-fashioned soon.

information overload

I don't have his book handy (Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan), but here's a paraphrase:
"In times of information overload, we use pattern recognition. Instead of using verbal learning, we  study configurations."

Brilliant! I have a lot of configurations at work I need to get started on, with a lot of new equipment. If only I could shelve my video projects, which take up a lot of time & energy...

I'll be getting some video assistants in the near future. Good!

The ego and its weight...

Weighed myself this morning. Down 2.8 pounds this week! Wow!

A day in the sun yesterday probably helped, but giving up wheat has been a huge component.

I'm down to my 1994 weight.

So, the challenge is to stop feeling like a smug 13-year-old... :)

after a hiatus

Been busy. had a training event last week, which took a lot of energy to prepare for and set up. I did a presentation on Linux & education, did a tabletop presentation on Cisco Show & Share, and did lots of video work. I'm back on a regular work schedule, so I have to work Fridays again.

So many things are out there, waiting to be learned! McLuhan's philosophy of media, Edubuntu, my new iPad, yoga, psychology, Cisco studies - and I have so little time & energy. I come home and I'm a chef & dishwasher. Rewarding, but exhausting.

My sightreading project is moving ahead, a little each day. I'm on p. 205 out of 310, of the Bach Keyboard Music by Dover. I'm on the last Partita, and the Goldberg Variations are ahead - the rocks in the rapids. Whoever said Bach had easy rhythms? Lots of 32nd notes, with some occasional flurries of 64ths. Hard to count, hard to read. But good for me. Good for my brain and my fingers. And beautiful harmonies. Diminished chords with suspensions, diminished chords over pedal bass, double suspensions (which my music school teachers assured me did not exist back then), and beautiful modulations to neighboring keys. Really creative use of the harmonic & melodic minor scales, and, if you count notes that resolve before the  chord resolves, harmonies as advanced as any composer before, say, 1905. Double trills, dramatic changes in texture and voicing, along with, it must be admitted, some pretty dull movements, which Bach seems to use to "clear the palette", like when Irene Ryan's photo graced the walls of Wayne's World on SNL. Swifter modulations in later movements, when the listener's ear is likely to be tired and could use some extra stimulation. And on and on. I'll never exhaust Bach.

What's next? My twenty-some-odd volumes of the International Piano Library. That'll be harder, because it's more pianistic, and the styles will be all over the place. Oh well, I've got years...

got Friday off!

Wow! What a couple of days! Pleasure button is being pushed a lot. I've been losing weight, people are noticing and commenting, and my ego is preening about it. Gotta watch that. When my ego gets too strong I start to lose perspective, start to take credit, and lose the good stuff I'd gotten. Less ego, more observation!

It didn't stop yesterday. At my exercise session today, I got lots more attention. It's getting rather heady. I'm now at the weight I was when I met my future bride. Wheat was the linchpin... give it up and all else follows. My appetite is a shadow of its former self.

I dropped my daughter off at her day camp, did my exercise, and returned for an impromptu concert. Lots of noise, lots of fun. Then, with my all-day parking pass, I walked around my old neighborhood, looking at places I lived, remembering what if felt like 20 years ago to be me, and realizing how lucky I am to have my wife & daughter - they anchor me, keep my feet on the ground, keep it real for me. Otherwise I'd probably get into all kinds of trouble. Anyway I had a wonderful time walking around, enjoying my endorphins from the exercise, and feeling pretty durned strong for a 52-year-old, and light on my feet.

The death star has landed on Fry St. The Empire has struck back, and little Fry St. was no match for it. But one side of the street remains somewhat intact. The apartments I used to live in, the head shop, the copy shop. Ironically the site of the old Sigma Alpha Mu house is now the Christian Student Center - it sounds like the beginning scenario for a teen slasher movie...

I went to work and worked a little on my Linux & Education project. That was fun. Then I went home and spent time with my dogs, and continued my sight-reading project. I'm reading the entire Dover Bach Keyboard Music book, 350-some-odd pages. I made it to p. 104 today. And I'm reading a little faster, or a little more musically (choose one).

Then my family came home and I made dinner - too much habanero! Sorry. Then I came to the coffee house to blog.

A great day. I was gonna watch Spider Man but so what...

Assumptions, and our maps of the world.

Yesterday my daughter and I were leaving the house, and I was locking up the front door. It was a very bright, hazy day – the kind of day where your eyes are hurting from the light coming at you in all directions at once. I looked at our glass door and saw the neighborhood in reflection – it was quite pleasant – it looked polarized, and not glaring at all. I thought, what if I saw everything like this? I’m sure I would quickly get used to it and think I was seeing reality truly. I would be deluded, in that case. But what about the way I see the world right now? Maybe I’m quite mistaken about the way I see the world, (My Republican friends would readily agree) in proportion to the confidence I impute to my world view.

I read an article from Bruce Sterling’s blog (blog.wired.com/sterling) that mentioned a Kinect hack that created a 3d model of a room from a single Kinect. The program had to make a lot of assumptions about the volume and shape of objects based on a 2d picture, and depth data, in order to make the model. No assumptions, no 3d  model of the world, no matter how simple or small the model, or the space being evaluated.

I remember a video of people talking to U.G. Krishnamurti (a man who thinks that the life of the mind is a colossal waste of time, among other things), and someone mentioned looking at objects and inferring, e.g., the back side of a tree, based on looking at the front side of it. Krishnamurti completely rejected the entire notion. As far as he was concerned, if he wasn’t looking at it, the back side of the tree didn’t exist, because he had nothing but contempt for the human mind and the uses we put it to.

I was at a performance of Lisa Markley’s music yesterday at the Denton Square, and it was very good. Jeffrey Barnes and Paul Slavens were sidemen on the gig, and the whole thing was understated and elegant, and smooth, and satisfying. But my ego was right there, evaluating the sound, putting myself in their place, telling myself that I could do as well, and so forth. But I was also aware of how I was distancing myself from the whole experience by doing this, and I was eventually able to relax and get closer to the event as it existed (not 100%! Never, not with this oversized ego.)

So, what’s the moral of today’s blog? Well, in my self-important little world, it’s that you begin to falsify reality the moment you start trying to make sense of it.

a reasonable life

While washing dishes the other day, my mind drifted over to a memory of an orchestra tour I was on, very long ago. I think this was in '81. It was with the LSU Orchestra, and I took all of my per diem money before we even left and spent it on a copy of Godel Escher Bach. I had very little to no food on the tour. Remembering this I thought, "What an idiot I was! What a fool." I starved on the tour, sitting on a bus hungry, even though I had all these great ideas to read about.

But on reflection, I wouldn't change what I did if I could. I have to live as reasonably as I can at my current stage of life, managing my time and other resources carefully, but I've never thought much of it. As my friend Greg Barnett said, if you do everything reasonably in a life spent pursuing music, all you'll ever become is a reasonably good musician. I've always wanted to be unreasonably good, so a reasonable life was out for me. I developed a certain mad, off-the-wall way of living, and wanted to be possessed by musical inspiration - I wanted my personality to be made complete by a total union of my soul with music, with all the tools and talents at my command. Unreasonable? Yes. Impossible? Well, actually, yes.

Impossible for a young man soon to be saddled with the necessity to work little low-wage jobs to pay the rent and bills. Impossible to realize the ambition of composing, orchestrating, synthesizing, improvising, concertizing. I kept practicing with what little time I had, and I slowly made some progress, but it was maddeningly difficult to work a full-time job and keep up whatever instrumental talent I could muster. It became even more difficult, as I became a husband and then a father.

Many more practical musicians limit their ambitions to a realizable goal, which is fine, but, sometimes, some of these more practical people, well, they smell funny. There's a psychic odor coming off of some of them, and I don't know how else to describe it. Maybe they circumscribed themselves by making their dream too small. Maybe, by taking on a regimen designed to give them mastery, they somehow extinguished inspiration. Maybe they fit themselves too well into the academic environment that paid their bills. Perhaps, by finding a musical job that paid the bills, they grew into those expectations and found themselves unable to rise above their circumstances.

I think I'm describing some of the academic musicians in this exploration of what it is I mean. I genuinely admire many self-employed professional musicians.

I've rarely been unhappy about not being a pro. I've never fallen out of love with music, and inspiration is available to me nearly every day. I've begun improvising at the keyboard, and a whole new world is opening up for me. Simple, beautiful music is coming out of my improv sessions, something that had always escaped me in the past.

So back to that young man on the tour bus. I wouldn't change a thing if I could.

More about unreasonable living, and mistakes made, later. Oh, and huge striving.

I had an episode night before last worth writing about -

I woke up at 3:00 with a terrible coffee withdrawal headache. It was bad. I can't go on drinking coffee - it actually gives me headaches now. So I got up an played my electronic keyboard, using headphones. It was very nice. My headache disappeared while I  played (music therapy!) and I improvised better than ever before (I just discovered improv last week). But by 4:00 it was time to get back to bed - I had to be at work at 7:30. So my headache returned. I didn't know how I was going to get to sleep like this, so I started observing my breathing and used the pain to drive my consciousness deeper, and I found a very spiritual place deep inside myself that I hadn't been in touch with in decades. It was beautiful, and a full justification for spending a life seeking the spiritual in everything. I couldn't keep my concentration though - my mind kept wanting to think about books, movies, and other things - the equivalent of eating candy when I should be eating good food - and I kept drifting back to the surface, where my headache was lying in wait. So, the lack of discipline overcame the revealed state. Too bad. Still, it gives me something to work towards, and showed me the value of a headache. I got up at 4:30, ate an apple, and had a couple of advils, which let me grab a nap before I had to get up at 6:15.

So - spirituality and music in the small hours - not bad for an old man saddled with a full-time job.

Musical ancestors, continued

It's Saturday, I'm at a coffeehouse, just having imbibed a capuccino. Having left you, dear reader, with a cliffhanger during my last blog entry, it seems the least I could do would be to relieve the anticipation, and tell you why my parents hid the musical history of my family from me.

But first, a little more about that family. As I mentioned, Joe Verges was a songwriter. He couldn't read music, but by all accounts he could play the piano well, and, at first, wrote lyrics too. Later he collaborated with lyricists, and had to use the services of musical arrangers and transcriptionists, who, according to Al Rose (the man who started me on this topic), would often write themselves in as co-composers, and grab some of the royalties.

Perhaps the most famous of Joe's songs is Don't Leave me Daddy. It was published in New Orleans as early as 1916, and was a local hit. In 1943, the forces behind the movie For Me and My Gal chose this song to include in a vaudeville number at the beginning of the movie. Load that link below to see Judy Garland singing the chorus to the song, sandwiched between choruses of "Oh You Beautiful Doll":

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iabVthq4JcA

 Joe wrote many songs, and according to my mother, he was "riding high" when this song was made famous all over again. But by this time he would have been 63 or so, and his music would have been really out of style. None of my relatives ever had a good thing to say about him, and here's why: Joe scandalized the family by abandoning his wife and infant son. 

Joe didn't leave his wife and son for another woman, but so that he could continue his career unhindered by them.

The repercussions were immediate. His wife became destitute, and apparently remained so for the rest of her life. His son, Joe Jr., hated his father, and didn't outlive him by many years.

Music got a really bad name in my family.

My father, Daniel Leon, when he expressed interest in the saxophone, was not only forbidden to do so, but his mother, Mozella Gardemal Verges, responded by throwing out her husband's violin (without consulting Mr. Verges Sr. about it). 

And then came the Great Depression. All of the Verges brothers were hit hard, but Leon, my grandfather, who had given up a musical career to pursue the shipping business, and later real estate, made enough money to help his brothers out. So, the story of my musical great-uncles with their hands out for help from Leon continued, no doubt spread by my grandmother.

Music became a disreputable pursuit now, as far as my family was concerned.

Here's an anecdote from my mother: around the time Joe died, one of my relatives saw me toddling around at a get-together and said "There goes another Joe Verges!" Apparently I had the same coloriing as Joe - blond hair and blue eyes. Mozella was offended by that remark. Joe was dead, and should stay buried. There were now no more living musicians in the family, and Mozella liked it that way. She had successfully repressed my father's musical development, and probably hoped that the curse of music was extinguished from the Verges line forever.

And the way I and my siblings were raised, this was looking quite likely. Although my sisters played the piano, and my brother sang in musical productions in high school, not a one was truly in love with music. My dad sang with the Esso chorus for a few years, and later played piano duets with his girls, but when Mozella died in '68 he stopped playing. I played the snare and bass drums for a couple of years in my elementary school, Our Lady of Mercy (more on that psychic abbatoir in another blog post). It seemed to me from these experiences that music was something you studied so you could abandon it to pursue other, more practical things.

I was born in 1960, and between 1963 and 1970, some of the most remarkable popular music ever was flooding the airwaves: The Beatles, the Doors, the Who, Cream, the Hollies, the Grass Roots, the Turtles, the Jefferson Airplane, Jimi Hendrix, Janice Joplin, . This did something to me. Then, when my brother got a job about 1970 at McDonald's to pay for a stereo, there was the Allman Brothers, Bob Dylan, Jethro Tull, Crosby Stills, Nash & Young, and, most importantly for me, Yes. Listening to Yes' Fragile album over headphones rewired my brain. I've never recovered from the experience. And what really rocked my world was the soundtrack to the movie Love Story, which my brother and my oldest sister got from the Columbia Record Club. This cassette tape had a piece of music by someone named J.S. Bach, and it was called Harpsichord Concerto in E major. It was actually the last movement of a three-movement piece, transcribed from a violin concerto by Bach himself, although I didn't know any of that. What I did know was that I couldn't get enough of this. I couldn't play it, I couldn't sing it, but it absolutely bewitched my 11-year-old brain. I was in love, and I've never cared about any topic since, and never really wanted to do anything but learn more about music, since that time. (Except, chase girls - that topic definitely got my attention...)

Why then, didn't I start studying music right away? Well, piano seemed like a girly pursuit, so that was out. No guys were playing piano at all in my neighborhood. My brother played drums for a little while at OLOM,  so I figured that was masculine enough for me. Unfortunately, learning drums meant there was no pitch information being taught to me - just rhythm. Not good for a career in music. And drums weren't doing it for me - I've never had the soul of a percussionist. I had wanted for a long time to be a singer, and indeed there was a boy's choir, starting in fourth grade. I had ambitions for that. When I got into fourth grade, they made a rule saying that it started in fifth grade, and when I got into fifth grade, they cancelled the choir altogether. I then could look forward to choir in high school, but when I got to ninth grade, scheduling incompatibilities between my boy's high school and its sister institution for girls made that impossible as well. So, when I got into middle school, I sang in a very mediocre mixed choir at my church, where I again failed to learn to read music.

And then, there was a discussion between my parents and one of their party buddies, Dallas Draper. Dallas conducted the A Capella choir at LSU, and for some reason came to my parents' parties (perhaps there was a connection with the Esso choir). While drinking together one night, my parents mentioned the possibility of their boy Roy studying music to him, and according to my mother, who related the story many years later, Dallas' reply was "There's a lot of folks with music degrees looking for work" or some such response, so, behind my back, with no communication or consultation, a musical career was ruled out for Roy boy. After all, music was dishonorable. Music was disreputable. Just look at the old Vergeses. End of story.

This was why, dear reader, my parents kept my musical ancestry from me. They were afraid that my fascination for music would lead to my destitution.They wanted me to pursue something lucrative that would keep me going, so I could do - what? Marry and raise a family of  unhappy children? I don't know. They didn't talk about it - they didn't say - "Roy I know you love music but please for God's sake study something in college that will get you a good job" - no: there was no communication. Just a cutting off of musical possibilities whenever possible. No communication.

Stay with me, reader, and next time I will communicate with you about my father's attempts to suppress my musical inclinations, just as was done to him by his mother...

Musical ancestors

I'd like to write about a special week in my life - if I remember correctly, it was in late March or early April in 1979, which would become a turning point.

I had played in rock bands in high school, and music was the only thing I cared about, besides girls. My parents tried to make it as difficult as possible for me to play or learn about music, and this continued after my dad died, shortly after I graduated. My mother pressured me to sign up for Zoology studies at LSU, so I caved in and registered for school in the fall. In the emotional void I was experiencing, I did as my siblings had done before me - I moved into a dorm and joined a fraternity. I studied Algebra, Biology, Chemistry, and English, and finished my first semester with a 2.64.

One day the following semester, when I was 18 and living in a fraternity house, I returned from classes and one of the neanderthals there said "Hey Roy! Some old guy turned up here asking for you!" . I was having a really bad week in my second semester, my chemistry classes were killing me, and I just wasn't motivated. In fact I was beginning to fail. I took the phone number the man left and called him. His name was Al Rose and he said he was writing a book about early jazz musicians from New Orleans. How could I help this guy?

He wanted help researching my great-uncles and my grandfather, who were all musicians. What? I knew that my grandfather, Leon, played the violin, because my friend Brien Lundin's grandmother had visited Leon and Mozella Verges decades before (small world) and told me about it in her thick Cajun accent ("Voiges? You any kin to Lay-aw Voiges?"). I didn't know anything about my great-uncles.

Well, the story unfolded. There were four of them: Joe, Alphonse, Leon, and Michael. Joe was the oldest, played piano, and wrote over 600 songs. Alphonse was a ragtime pianist.  Leon was a violinist. Michael was a well-known drummer. They would all make money in vaudeville and silent-movie theatres during their careers. Joe got a song in a Judy Garland movie. Paul Whiteman, the so-called King of Jazz, tried to recruit Michael. A song by Alphonse got preserved in the Library of Congress.

Wow! This news was electrifying to me. Right when I was not wanting to go on, and feeling like I'd lost my way, suddenly I was the heir to a disposessed throne - part of an honorable lineage of men who'd devoted their lives to music.

I immediately dropped all my classes but one, just to stay in school, and marched over to the LSU Music School.

More on this story later, where I reveal just why my parents kept all this from me.

Some creative advice from Pythea: post every day, and keep 'em short. OK - I can try that.

Today was a day off work. I spent it doing errands, and kept coming home between trips to be with my dogs. I did a Jazzercise class, which made me feel really good after, although I felt like I was crashing a party, as I was the only man there. In the evening, I met my family at a yogurt place, and the kid played video games while B & I plotted out a family vacation, to North Carolina, which we decided we couldn't afford. We may revisit the thing again, with KOA's & packed lunches instead of hotel rooms and restaurants, and see how that adds up. Later I worked on the pool, which is rather Sisyphian, since it keeps turning green and needs brushing and other treatments.

Tomorrow, my family is celebrating Father's Day by loading us into a hotel for the evening, with swimming pool, restaurant, and videos on demand! That should be fun.

Tonight my daughter wrote a hip-hop song, which she sang for B & me while dancing, complete with cool costuming and lights. There was a three-level stage, made with her trundle bed and the floor, and she used it all in her choreography. Jumping down, and down, and up, and up, and running her fingers around the brim of her hat while striking a pose.Wow! What a creative soul there! Who needs music school when you've got inspiraton?

She got into choir for next year. She's hungry for glory. She wants to be one of the top five singers in her group. I answered by telling her that she needed to start taking care of her voice, and stop screaming and doing all the other abusive things she does with her vocal cords.  She answered that bit of fatherly advice with an ear-splitting shriek.

Musical stuff: I sight-read selections from a Bach partita in A, and played all twelve harmonic major scales. First time for me - I'd been thinking about the scale but had never played them all. Lots of interesting chords to follow.

How's that for short? If I had more time, as the man said, I could write a shorter blog...

first post

Now that blogging is going out of existence (at least as a cutting-edge form of self-expression), I thought I'd join up. It's the height of egoism to think that I'd have anything to share that would be written in any kind of worthwhile, erudite way - I know: I've kept diaries, and, re-reading them, cringed at the immaturity, self-importance, and egoism there on every page. I'm sure I've got more of the same coming.

But as a journal of day-to-day life, it may be useful for me to write, if not for anyone to read. And, as a husband and father, I'm seasoned, conditioned, tamed. I know the value of an hour now. And little moments of freedom are exquisite in the moment of experiencing them.

Just today, I visited a coffeehouse for half an hour, where I got steamed milk with amaretto (my stomach gets irritated by caffeine - either a mark of old age, or a sign of being in touch with my body - I'll leave it up to the reader to decide) and took a seat. I pulled up a document on Matlab's implementation of neural networks. Joy! To have to freedom to direct my mind here, simply because I decided to. Not for any commercial consideration, or acting in concert with my family, or my job. The dog was off the leash. My mind breathed freely for awhile.

While I was there I noticed young people, having their conversations about music, just as I used to.(It was all so important! Back then I might end a friendship based on someone's musical tastes.) One girl was talking to a young man across their table, and her hand was poised on her lap in piano position, as if she constantly had to be in musical character. The young man said "You were thinking about Fleetwood Mac" and she laughed. She's very beautiful, and he's kind of shlubby, not too much so - if he took care of himself instead of devoting all his time to sedentary musical activities and a sit-down job, he'd look good enough to compel her romantic sensibilities. He probably wishes he could, but doesn't have a clue that that sandwich he's eating is giving him a gluten sensitivity that's interfering with his fat metabolism. And he should know that being in love with music is going to make it harder for him to get a partner. Screamingly obvious to me, and he's blind to it all. He probably thinks he's inventing all of this as he goes along - moving to Denton to study music, and compelled to spend time with women. Compelled to work to pay the bills. Compelled to sleep to keep himself together.
It can get hard to smile after enough years of this kind of frustration.

And he doesn't realize, that, if he marries, things get harder and more frustrating, but in a different and unimagined way. Musical barriers yield themselves to years of technical acquisition, but there's no time to play or compose, or rehearse or perform, because the wife asserts her needs, and those needs cost the musical husband everything he ever sought to accomplish.

***********************************************************************

I had a very beautiful start to the day. The house was dark, it was 5:05, and I decided to play my electronic keyboard that used to belong to my nephew. It's got two stuck keys, from when my daughter got frustrated and smashed the keyboard with her little fists. And the action is incredibly light, which I don't prefer, but with good technique it doesn't matter. I was thinking of something I'd read by Sidney Lanier, the 19th-c American poet, that if poetry is like a painting to be viewed by sunlight, then music is like a painting to viewed by moonlight. That's a good thought to begin the day with, as I moved through my darkened house with a copy of A Dozen A Day, a volume of very simple piano music. I couldn't read it in the dark, but, I thought, I could let the notes that I couldn't read suggest music to me that I could play, and it all turned out very beautifully. I played an Alberti bass on the chords C major, Aflat augmented, and F minor, and in the right hand I played the C harmonic major scale (look it up on Wikipedia if you aren't familiar with it: it's rich in harmonic implications). I found that as I directed my mind to hold the left-hand accompanying pattern together, I freed up my right hand to come with musical ideas that my conscious mind could never have dreamed up. More than thirty years after my first piano lessons, I found a way to improvise! I could never have thought my way into this - I had to feel my way in. And for all the simplicity of the left hand, it was a very instructive time for me. I kept the sound light and consistent by imagining that there was a string suspending my left arm, and kept my left hand in view - if I began looking at what my right hand was doing, the left would mess up the pattern, and the right hand would stop being creative. It was as if God was giving me a lesson in improvisation, and piano playing, at the same time. I felt like Vladimir Horowitz and Bill Evans, rolled up into one human being playing.

When I stopped, it was 5:55, and time to wake up my wife. Time to feed to dogs and let them out into the yard. Time to check the weather, and shave, and take a shower, dress, and greet my incredible daughter as she wakes up.

I can feel my musical ancestors, my great-uncles, smiling.