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.