A Defeated Supervillain Clarifies

Listen, I'm a villain, sure,
I've done a few bad things
Killed pizza guys I should've tipped,
Gave girls exploding rings.
I've tortured friends to steal their stuff
And enemies for fun.
But please, don't say I kicked a dog
Cause that's not how I run.

It's true I ran fake charities
To profit off of death
And my polluting factories
Were also selling meth.
I bought your representative
With loot from quacks I flog
But I swear on my mother's grave
I wouldn't hurt a dog!

The explanation's no big deal,
I simply tried to go
From my desk to the oubliette
Where I had stashed my foe
I turned en route to choose a laser
From several in the crypt
The dog was underneath a chair.
My foot just sort of slipped.

Anyway, that's all it was,
I misstepped. Kind of dark.
I didn't know the guy was there
Until I heard him bark.
And now, I know, I'll have to pay
For my crime-laden slog
But be fair when you tell my tale:
I did not kick the dog.

The Big Tent

I've been watching The Mickey Mouse Club for the last couple of days, having stumbled on two six-hour tapes of half-hour editions of the show from the Disney Channel, recorded in 1998. This is a windfall, because the DVD I bought only has about a week of shows from the first week of the first season, cut to oddly different lengths. Disney+ also has the exact same sad, disappointing little package. This is much better. I'm hearing a pair of sisters from Los Angeles singing an upbeat harmony number right now. That's not in the set.

I have no idea when these were originally broadcast, but I think these are the same 1960s cuts we used to watch in the later rerun days of the show. There's some jumping around, but we get a lot of Spin & Marty continuity. The Spin & Marty show dominates, in fact, taking up half or more of each episode. Since each starts with the same theme song followed with a measured daily schtick, there's only time for one act before the serial starts. At the end, the credits seem to reflect each show's contents, which is why I'm guessing they're the 60s rerun. They look like an optical credit roll.

What interested me most after a while was the opening segment that goes by each and every time a show starts. Mickey is tossed on a hoop like firemen catch falling kids with, and celebrated by a cast that consists of Ranger Woodlore, Four Bears (one of whom would be Hubert), Horace Horsecollar, Clarabelle Cow, Minnie Mouse, Daisy Duck, Huey, Dewey, Louie, Goofy, The Three Pigs, Black Pete (aka Peg Leg Pete), and The Big Bad Wolf.

I noticed Pete first, and it's nice to see the company villain allowed to join in the fun, and there's the Wolf as well, cheerfully working that hoop with Mickey in it. But wait. I'd seen the longer version of the opening, and something felt off. I dug it out. It's three minutes long and starts with built-in callouts to the sponsor. Suitable for an hour-long show, maybe! The fanfare is familiar, but then we have some different bits. Pete smiles in a star-shaped cameo early on! The Wolf, on the other hand, is seen tied up, for frogmarching and ritual humiliation in the triumphal Mickey Mouse Club parade! 

The minute-long version is in there too, though, and even in this earliest opener, we have the hoop finale with Pete and Big Bad as cheerful voluntary participants. They have it both ways! I hope B.B. is getting extra pay for being tied up and kicked. That's simple stunt work, right? All cartoon characters can do it, and it pays the bills, and then everybody goes to the cookout. Well, not Ferdinand--ha ha!

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Never Thought This Could Happen To Me

I knew at the time it happened that this was unusual, but as it recedes into the past, I still can't help being impressed at the sheer unlikeliness of it all. 

 

I came home from working at University of Houston one PM to find that someone had nailed a door up over the front window of our two-bedroom ground floor apartment. It turned out that this was because the front window had been breached. It turned out to turn out that we'd been robbed.

By the time I entered the story, the police had already been there. As it will turn out, they already knew who did it, and where they were likely to find them. Then they found them and brought them in. This is because our apartments, about a city block away from The Astrodome, were all on an electronic security system (which I accidentally tripped at least once). Our criminals didn't set it off when they broke in the front window to enter, but in order to easily carry our color TV out, they had to open the door, setting off the alarm.

The alarm, in turn, alerted the security guy for the apartment complex, a policeman under any name, he lived rent-free in return for willingness to check things out. He heard the alarm, saw the act conclude, and followed the perps enough to bring in a description and license.

The police, as they told me later, had been watching the criminals (a couple? oh, details) for a while, and when they "caught" the "squeal" as we savvy folk say, they asked the pair's preferred pawnbroker to kindly let them know when they came in with the stuff, and they did, and the cops took them in.

It stood this way for a while. We waited to hear back. We were anxious to have our new TV, which we'd purchased at Target only weeks before, instead of the tiny black and white portable that my sister had imparted to me in the 70s, which was too insignificant to steal. When we realized we would need to prove ownership, I went back to Target and found that the serial number was recorded in a registry they had to keep for thirty days, and since I asked on Day Thirty, they gave it to me so I could prove it was our TV. 

I called and asked if there was something I needed to do, since I wasn't hearing back. Oh, yeah, they said, come on in and get your set. Perhaps that's when I went and got the number. Anyway, I went in, and was treated to the glory of the vast property room (rooms, really) of the Houston PD. The guy who brought me down watched me pick out my comparatively humble set and gestured back at what seemed like three caverns full of consumer bounty: "Any of this other stuff yours?" he asked. Which is why I have all these projection TVs and yachts and things, if you've wondered.

But there it is. Our apartment was violated. They had the crooks before I got home and found out. They got the goods. They got us our TV back. If I'd called sooner, we'd have had it back sooner. There were never any echoes or repurcussions. 

I know! Hard to believe, right?

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Neighbors

One year, early on in our time here, I took Sarah trick-or-treating through the neighborhood. A block from our house, almost parallel with it, was a house that was being rented to a Chinese family. This was their first Halloween in the neighborhood, maybe their first ever, and they were in compliance with the needs of the holiday, having chosen a treat, which they were handing out to costumed kids at the door. These were fruits, the size of a big gumball, wrapped in clear plastic.

To my horror, they were all over the ground, starting just steps from the doorway.

My neighbors were coming to the door, saying their bit, receiving the candy, and then dumping it on the ground. It was thicker than crab apples under the lawn mower.

I took mine, thanked them, and ate it on the spot, for all the difference it made. I never saw any of them around after that, and someone else has lived in the house for quite some time.

My neighbors. I'm still disgusted.

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On The Set

"You don't need an invisible god threatening you with Hell to live a moral life." I said on a social network. "You only have to believe, as I have since youth, that you are the star of your own TV show. Now, if you will pardon me, I have to sing my background music."

As usual, it was true. When I was four and traipsing around the block (and in later days, to neighboring ones), I was The No. Because why not. Somewhere in there, I remember drawing a flashlight on a tiny chalkboard, with "THE" in front of it, and this was a logo for The Flashlight, but I never was The Flashlight, you see. I was The No, and I hum-sung the theme, roughly to the tune of the chorus of The Erie Canal (14 tons).

The No
Is a comin', comin', comin',
The No
Is a comin' to your town
You can always tell your neighbor
You can always tell your friend
That the No's moving pictures
Are never gonna end.

Or maybe aren't a-comin' to an end. I had alternate versions, which is another story. Not sure what The No's essential nature was, apart from being mine. Not sure what The No did, apart from walking around whilst pondering how good I must look from the camera's point of view.

I also did Magic Man one time, for the duration of one iconic pose. Got the shot? One and done! Classic.

Uncle Don vocalized wherever he went. There's a photo of him in a stroller with his mouth joyfully wide to its greatest circle, and he told me "I was probably singing. Maw said I was always singing a little tuneless son, happy as anything." Similar, but not a theme song. Not a TV show (or, considering the exact wording of the song, an endless series of motion pictures*).

Scoff if you will, but it keeps me on the straight and narrow. In keeping with the times, there's barely a shred of the theme music (though it's alluded to frequently when Our Hero goes over or near the ubiquitous Erie Canal, for instance), and the camera work is fashionably wobbly. Once in a while, another character is featured prominently. This never used to happen!

Hey, I know what! Maybe our shows could do a guest thing. Nothing big, just maybe a quick cameo. Those are great for ratings.

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* I remember pretending once, at that age, in that particular yard, that I'd just invented motion pictures, by putting a bunch of slides on a turntable (tangent to the rim) and shining a light through. Even then, I knew that wouldn't quite work, but I also knew on some level that we were kids playing a game, and it wasn't going to have to stand up to scrutiny from the Royal Academy. 

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No Mow I

It's not that I hate to mow the lawn. I do. But I also think it's better to let the stuff grow. We have all this heat, and it was dry for a while, and I didn't want to cut off grass that was shading grass. We shouldn't have these crewcut turf lawns, acre on acre, that can only be serviced by bands of roving lawn guys with no mufflers. Let it grow longer. Let it seed itself. Let different colors of blooms contend.

The back part of the yard is slowly being returned to conditional ferality. With no cross-yard traffic from up the hill, it's less critical to keep a path mowed. I'd hoped that the fireflies might make a comeback here, like the year or two back there when I could see them IN MY OWN YARD. I've left undergrowth to grow under. I've shut off my lights--but that's a drop in a bucket of endlessly illuminated nocturnal existence. The fireflies don't stand a chance, even if the people I live among were to never pour another drop of RoundUp on their pool-table lawns ever again.

Noise is the side-product of it all. If I mow my lawn on Monday, the lawn guys might arrive before I'm done, or they may wait a whole hour before they descend to mow the two yards alongside ours and one of the ones across the street--same service, all three, and I think they HQ in a former firehouse, playing Euchre while they wait for the bell and sliding down a pole to race over here and run their motors. (Actually, I think one of them lives next door, based on the sound of the motor of his pickup, which he starts every morning before eight, and runs for ten minutes or so before getting back into it and pointedly revving it a few times, then he motors off. To the firehouse I mentioned before, which is v. important to my story.)

a day off Twitter

The day is best started in the company of a dog, preferably Murray, who meets the world with fortitude and humor. Be like the dog. Sniff things.

Moving forward with tech plans for the Knickerbocker Ensemble of Rochester (me and Karen and Tony). The mic stand, which would have been the perfect solution, turns out to have been made for a different model of Ultimate keyboard stand, but now I know, so we'll be approaching with Plan A again, a stand and a boom and a mic and an amp so we can stop borrowing Greg's setup, and so we'll have a mic that can get right up to my vocal apparatus for the two or three numbers I sing.

Murray is all, like "Hey, remember that great walk we just took? Good times, man."

Just scored 80 points at "Classic Words" with WIBBLES. I feel powerful.

Some time we'll find out whether the candy shop in Escanaba will let us bring in a jar to fill with Jelly Bellies, so that when I sort them by color, they stay sorted for at least a while.

Passing time in an acceptable fashion now, mostly by playing through a somewhat detailed WIZARD OF OZ anniversay folio, with the entire Munchkinland sequence spelled out for me. Note to self: "If I Were King of the Forest" is about my favorite number in musicals. It's right up there with "Frank Mills."

Murray and I walked again, first around the house (I dealt with the bunny 'hiding' on the hillside by turning us away for half a minute, and it luckily absquatulated.) and then around the block, where I smiled at hearing voices wherever we went--the neighbor behind, new family at 1, then a mom and two young sons. Murray startled the older one by trying to run beside him, and then a car was coming, so conversation resumed when everybody was there. I explained that Murray likes to run when he sees someone else run, because he likes to play. Alexander, the younger of the two, said he'd like to invite Murray to his upcoming birthday party, and he could play games. Not sure that'll happen, but the sweetest thing I've heard today. His mom mentioned my name as they were leaving, so Murray and I are not unknown to folks. Then I got involved in a text message as dogs were hailing us from various places, and we walked a couple of houses before I suddenly realized I'd made the ultimate faux pas in simply walking away from something instead of bagging it. We retraced our steps and I corrected the error. The dogs barked.

added to as the spirit or dog moved me. huge thanks to the five page views!

Hospice Dad

 

Comforted by bed, blankets, and morphine,
He dreams of ninety-eight years.
From cabins to tents to farms to town,
Mastering piano as a performer,
Supporting a family on a musician's pocket
And an entitled sportsman's distractions.
When he wrote of his memories, some time back,
He didn't mention any of us. We were in his life
But we didn't do much to speak of.

In perpetual not-quite-retirement,
Building boats, he found his milieu.
He was popular, part of the conversation.
Then the strokes started subtracting him,
Shock by shock, never finishing the job.
He came back from it each time
Always diminished but still unreeling,
Still unwinding, years of string, floss, threads of past events,
Loosed and spun away from the shrinking core
Until his final bit flakes off on a breeze
And he goes from being more here than gone
To being more gone than here,
Remembered by the ones he forgot.
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To A Scrubbing Pad On Its Last Day

All right, then. I'm bringing you back from the ceramic cup for a special job. You came to us fresh, clean, and ready to work. I remember. You were going to clean the world with your yellow sponge side and your green Scotchbrite scrub layer. You went right to work on the day-to-day work, and sanitized with little effort, and I always rinsed you out carefully and put you back in your optimal spot by the tap. 

Time went by, and yes, there was a limit to how much even careful procedure and aftercare could do to prevent your yellow side from slowly greying and the green side from gradually congealing, all due to the grease that seems to be everywhere. You were finally retired with honor after your excellent work, and put in the cup for the occasional stove top or counter problem, and you were just right for that job as well.

But today, you have a final job, one that you won't come back from. It's inevitable that we are all temporary here, even the plates and knives and people using them, and today you will serve your employers once more in cleaning the trash receptacle itself, which deserves to be at least occasionally in a state of apparent non-repugnance. It's temporary, too. 

With your help, the garbage can will be briefly a representation of its original shade of white, plausibly newish and unwrecked. More, you're giving it an inside cleaning of the lid that it hasn't had in many cycles. Thank you for that.

In a few moments, assuming I forget to run you around the floor in this corner first, I'll deposit you in the trash and put this now-cleaner lid back over it. I do this with respect, and sorrow, and even a twinge of a physical sensation on the same spectrum as discomfort and pain. 

Well done. 

Thank you.

Goodbye.

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Boxing Days

Oh, so how's it going, with the cleaning up of the box room and all that? Well, when Kathryn left here and went home, she'd cleaned the former box room, now the guest/dog room (but not guest dog room: we have limits), and had talked it over and done some things here, and I was going to keep going back to the stuff regularly, building up my muscles of discuration just as I had earlier built up my muscles of acquisition. As we're at the part of the fairy tale where all the characters march past and vanish over the horizon in a line, it turns out I'm the one who has to operate them. (Who said that's only fair? This is because it's mostly my stuff, right? Typical.)

So. On a day to day basis, I've been going back in and deciding, reckoning, a few things at a time, just up to where my brain begins to fill with small white styrofoam pellets and I have to stop. I've freed up a number of boxes, partly through the clever trick of taking the stuff out of them and piling it here and there, but the piles have meanings: There are stay piles, and there are go piles.

And today I took out the low-hanging fruit by cleaning up boxes from places in the box room, and in the dining room, and the angle of the stairs in back, and in the garage. I emptied whatever was left in them (packing junk, mostly, though I discovered that my window fan came with a bug screen, which I promptly attached), then flattened them and cut them up and stacked the pieces in the largest of the boxes. If they leave us that box, as they generally do, it'll be one of the next to go. I keep finding books I know I can get rid of before other books, so they go on a pile for that. I found my harmonicas. I find boxes that are over 50% air. This'll get easier and harder, variously, but I'm in it.

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touching grass

Before he had a chance to spend much time asking for it, I got my inattentive self together and took Murray toward the door for the day's first walk outside. As he so often does, he paused on the threshold to take in the air of the morning. He looked right, left, and forward, then strode across the porch to the grass, where he got on his butt and scooted a straight line long enough for a first down. And then we were off.

The grass needs cutting, as it has since the day after I cut it, three days ago. Every patch that's ever been dug up by utility guys (about the footprint of three or four vans) was subsequently reseeded--they may think they're doing good--with some alien fescue that grows like bamboo as soon as an hour after being leveled through brute force. You can see by the dandelions where we park off-driveway (in plowing season, because the plow guy only feels obligated to plow as far as he can go without plowing a section that's touched anywhere by a part of a car, so we go all the way off the paving). Kathryn says they grow where the ground is too compact, and car parking spots seem to fill that bill. I will obtain a pitchfork and stab the ground there to show it who's boss. The wind blew, as it always does, so there were more pieces of the tree to pick up and pile in the gutter. A solid chunk of trunk was on the ground, solid insofar as being heavy, but it's spongy mush, like every other part of the thing that ever comes down. It's mostly sawdust held together by bark, but a great tree for a little girl and her friends.

Murray and I made our happy way along trails of scent, passing the home of Lucy, who surprised us by not barking at every window as we went by. Also silent were the Shih Tzus two houses down, whose names I haven't yet learned. Once I know them, I'll say hi to them quietly, just like I do Lucy. Murray and the poop bag and I proceeded down the block. He wanted to sniff a yard with a "sprayed" sign in it, but I urged him across the street, where the black dog and the white dog barked at us from somewhere inside. "They won't poison their pets," I reasoned to Murray.

I kept watching the rise of the hills visible past the end of the block. As we're on a named hill, the ground went down first, then level (Knickerbocker's field), and then rose up again on the other side of the canal. In Colorado growing up, I always knew the mountains were in the west. I noticed this morning that now they're on the east, and they're old Appalachians instead of Rockies, but a hill's a hill, and we have hills. A couple of the lately ubiquitous utility trucks were coming our way, so I walked over to the other side to let them pass, and of course they had to drive right around us. Triumphant at having mildly annoyed men doing their jobs, I turned us for home at the butterfly garden on the tiny island at the corner of our street and itself.

Home again, home again, with Murray in his "anywhere but home" mode. I could close my eyes and know that as long as Murray pulled a hundred eighty degrees against it, I was heading straight home. (Thanks to the Junior Woodchucks of America for this knowledge!) Sighing a final one at the lawn, which I intend to cut today, I dragged my companion to the garage and let him stand and probe the shaggy back yard (where deer hang out and bunnies and groundhogs play and a fox passes through regularly) for a minute and run in to grab a bite and take vitamins. Can't mow a forest of headless dandelion stems on an empty stomach.

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All Quiet on the KW Cleanup [aka pt 2]

 Poking diligently through various boxes and containers, and not getting in deep, but tossing and reboxing. I bought a flat of 15 folding boxes at Staples so we can fill boxes up and dispatch them. First we'll move things out of irregular boxes and into regular ones, giving away the irregular ones first. 

So what did I actually do? Glad you asked! I looked at pens and pencils. There are still a lot in the box, but it won't happen in a day or a session. I know what to watch out for.

Here's how it works with comics: I'll sort along bravely for a while, making the tough decisions and letting the chips fall and getting things ready to go out. THEN my brain starts to fill up with teeny styro particles and it gets to a sort of tipping point where I start to say things like "But this is the only example I have (or the best one) of X, and I should had oughtta..." At this point, if I don't stop sorting and go somewhere else, I'll start taking things OFF the pile I've already chosen to go out. And it works the same way with other things.

So I have thrown out a bunch of pens. I throw out the ones that don't write, though I keep a very few which are extraordinarily novel or which possess great personal beauty. And what are these styro pellets?

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The KW Cleanup, part 1.

 Off she goes. The first sibling to visit us here is headed back to the UP of MI, leaving our house better than she found it. By request! I asked her if she'd help me in organizing and tossing things, and she did, accomplishing some minor miracles and leaving a framework for additional work to be done by, well, I guess, me. Heh. So I intend to carry through on this and, blog willing, blog it.

We started (I was there too!) in the guest room, where she slept (and where Murray is still entitled to use the bed, of course), egging me into sorting, classifying, and discarding enough that the rest went together neatly, leaving the field open for me to ruthlessly scour all the paper and near-paper piles (metaphor: They're in boxes) that constitute the Fanac bulge.

Across the hall, the fearsome box room awaited, and we made some structural changes to the spinal system of metal shelves as to allow for some sorting, so now I can make forays into the closet with all the boxes that I piled in there because they were the kind of stuff that can be quickly sorted and decided upon. I call that "mush." Many of these boxes say MUSH on them. I shall mush them.

I'm attracted to the idea of finite collections, allowed to fit a certain space and combed as needed, like Robert Crumb's 78 shelf. 

Tired of writing. Rest now. Anyway, a new label, hashtag, whatever: KW CLEANUP. More when I think of it. Oh yeah, here's one: planning to use low-impact method of sorting what's visible on top so I don't make a mess when I open a box. No big commitment, no "temporary" pile in the middle of the floor. That sort of thing. 

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the forgotten man

 Way back in time, there were the Memento Mori guys, with their trademark skull-on-a-stick and socko refrain "Remember, you will die." They followed kings and emperors around, supposedly keeping them humble and reminded of their place in the universe.

They were a high-status item, so much so that the sort-of-royal sorts began to adopt their own MM guys, and even some upstart tradesmen. It was one of these tradesmen who, after a few days of being reminded, declared (in his own idiom) that these guys were a real downer.

His innovation was to get a Memento Mori guy with some entertainment value. First, he selected a young man who displayed creativity and ingenuity in how he flipped and juggled the little skull when he wasn't doing anything else.

One day, the young MMer cracked a joke about a business associate who had just left the room. The reaction from his boss was wholeheartedly positive, and Shecky (the lad's true name is lost to history, but this is the agreed-upon reference name) expanded.

Shecky made fun of everyone but his master, and one day he ventured to make it unanimous. In a miasmic moment (they didn't know about viruses), the target of his jape roared with laughter, and the people went all in for jesters.

At the royal level, things were slower to change. For a generation or so, most rulers had one of each. After a while, pfennig-pinching advisors questioned feeding two mouths in very similar roles. Once it was suggested that the jester could handle both parts, it was over.

Today, I salute the anonymous Memento Mori guys, and point out that to a man, they all died. Now, that's commitment.

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haiku

It was a fine day.

Then the wind started blowing.

Then the wind was white.

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noirku

Each unique design

Smashed unseen by my wipers.

 Tough night for snowflakes. 

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13'11"

 The piece of music that did more than any other to make me a Classical Head instead of a Rock Head (though I play both as well as I can) was Rhapsody in Blue, and the performance that put it in my heart was Gershwin's own expressive piano roll.

Fifty, fifty-one years ago, I came across a set of LPs that Dad had of reproducing roll performances by Gershwin, Ravel, Prokofieff, and other legends of the keyboard. Gershwin's roll represented the composer's choices for tempo and other things, as well as his phenomenal skill.

Somewhat impressively, he sat down and overdubbed part of the roll, covering the thickest parts of the score, matching the tempos and keeping the live feeling. As a bonus, it has sections that aren't included in the solo piano score published by Warners. I was to learn why later.

I can tell you now, though. Everybody loved this piece, but they also felt like it could be cut at will without losing anything. Leonard Bernstein, in a tribute that feels patronizing, says it's just wonderful how we can cut this and that from it, and it's still enough, right?

And cut they do, possibly because Gershwin was eager enough to get the piece recorded that he agreed to set it down on a single disk, even if that meant cutting between a third and a half out and joining the bits with fillers that I hope came from the composer, at least.

For reasons of time (Whiteman had announced a concert piece premiere that Gershwin hadn't agreed to), Whiteman had the composer provide a two-piano (partial) sketch that Ferde Grofe would then orchestrate for the concert. This worked out, and Whiteman decided that, therefore...

...he, Paul Whiteman, was henceforward entitled to have his guy touch up and abridge every concert work Gershwin wrote, but that's another story, and he seems to have cut it out after a while, but not until making an 'alternate' Concerto in F at two thirds the length.

Anyway, I started 'working' on the piece while still in high school, and have subjected any number of ears to the work in progress over the years. As my technique has improved, I am finally where I can believe I'll be able to overcome all the wrong stuff I taught myself...

...and be able to simply sit down and play the whole thing when I want to hear it. Last night, I traversed the score of the familiar blue-cover version published by Warner, reaching the end without disaster. And PARTS OF IT WERE GOOD. I plan to improve what I can do. Here's hope.

More Technique: Piano Stuff.

Photo by Baron Dave, 2005. I had hands then, too! Taken at Minicon.

So much of the time I spend learning a piece now appears, in the cold light of decades of days, to be time spent figuring out how it should sound. Even as I built a pretty good facility for sightreading whatever didn't scare me off at second glance, I still had to deal with the ingrained presence of Mister Fuckup.

Mister Fuckup lives in my head, with some other entities we don't need to discuss now, and his sole joy in life is making me play the next wrong note. (He moonlights as a typing coach, by the way.) Even as I improved my playing and gained some welcome certainty over the easier notes, Mister F still reigned unchecked. My own personal Muse of Failure, living on the road between Intention and Execution, his specialty was finding the moment of confidence after playing three things right in a row and starting to believe I'd make it to the end unscathed. Implacable, non-negotiable.

The first partial victory against Fuckup was when I noticed one day that I was talking to my hands, as if they were individuals with wills of their own. And maybe they are. Anyway, I was embarking on a tough passage, and I beamed a thought like "And if Righty fluffs the melody up there, Lefty, you're doubling it anyway, so lean on it and we'll get through this," and then I caught myself doing it and realized that as long as I was making up entities, I should concoct an invisible henchman whose only job is to keep my place in the score (I had just done the crushing job of deducing that losing my place was a drawback. Offstage.) and threaten it with dire things if it didn't keep a running spot tally for my eyes to return to. 

And what do you know? It worked. My playing improved more quickly than usual for a while. I'd injured Mister F.

In many ways, it's good to have a brain you can take out and play with sometimes. With a number of little hacks and kludges, I began to get fairly reliable within my level. I even began to notice some things about my playing that went back to the very fundamentals of playing.

Remembering about Dad's advice, via Martha, to know what the passage is supposed to sound like before trying to play it makes me think of the long times I would spend trying to make a piece of music match what I heard in my head when that aural image was overly vague or otherwise just plain wrong to start with. 

I not only increased how much I'd work on each hand by itself (oh yeah, we're talking piano here), but made it a point when needed to dissect one hand's part for a measure, even playing it with both hands until I had the sequence of notes and rests down in my head. Has this made a difference? No, I've cunningly spent all these paragraphs saying it didn't, ell oh ell, aitch aitch oh kay, ess aay ess. Of course it made a difference!

It turns out that subjecting myself to continuous cognitive dissonance by looking at the right notes while thinking the wrong ones can wear you out, and stopping it is a relief, even if you don't replace it with anything. If you replace it with something, though, may I recommend mentally shouting out the name of the note when you see it in notation instead of trying to cultivate the Blind Zen Archer bit. It turns out that successful blind Zen archers were remarkable because most of them failed and found something better to shoot for and are now faintly embarrassed by the whole archery phase, to be honest, and they have a ukulele right here.

Getting back to me, however, I'm passing along my advice to myself: Figure out the real melody as soon as possible. It's never too late, luckily, to start working toward it and away from the broken version of a tune I'd substituted. When temptation strikes to keep the wrong one, I can refer to a mental image of something my best piano teacher, Mr. Diebel, said about a very similar topic. 

"Write your own damn music."

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Technique: volume on the piano

 A thing about piano playing is that, much like the Earth and everything on it, the sound is constantly dying. When you hear a piano player, you're riding the Relativity Express, and they are running it. 

This manifested itself to me as a dissatisfaction with the tone, that I couldn't keep things smooth enough, and it developed over the source of many thought balloons that if you want to stay the same volume on a piano, you can play each note at the same volume as the previous one started, or you can play each new note at the same volume that the previous one had attained when the next one was played. A sliding scale.

The first of these does seem to keep your melodic line prominent (usually emphasizing the top line), as each new note is a tiny tad more loud than the preceding. This can give an impression of increasing volume. It can bother my ear some, it turns out.

The other solution has me playing a little softer as I go through a phrase (provided I'm not directed to get louder on it), with what seems like a more coherent stream of sound. It's like ending a piece with some repeated chords: If it's not saying to get louder on them, I like to strike each a tiny bit softer, so as not to be louder than the existing envelope of sound that it's being opened in. 

A net effect is that phrases go softer in the absence of any other written directions, This leads to a more ongoing ebb and flow of dynamics, instead of "just playing." Other dynamics still apply, just as a driver continues to pay attention to his location within a lane, even as the road twists. 

Well, it makes sense to me, because I'm a sensitive creative artist, or something. I'll try and post more of this sort of thing, including art and productivity tips, under the "Technique" umbrella.

surprisingly, this was not originally a Twitter tweet stream.
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Middle-aged Man, Made of Meat

Pino rose reluctantly from dreams of magic. His joints seemed to creak, and he remembered the amazing year in which he was born, fresh, a wooden puppet. His joints rattled then, instead of aching.

What if he'd never changed? Would he still feel ancient on this morning? Wood can last an amazingly long time, but it's not eternal. What if a finger had broken off, and been replaced by unenchanted wood? Would it feel like him? Would it be him, if he was replaced entirely, piece by piece? Tantalizing, to think of living forever, a mended, patched life, replacing himself piece by piece, not knowing if he was still the same individual.

About like now, he reflected. Darn near the same. He chuckled at this, took up his axe, and whistled as he went outside to work.

 

originally a tweet

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