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. .
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. .
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.
Could they make a dog toy that squeaks in a range only dogs hear?
.
"Turn on notifications or skip for now." For now? For NOW??
.
You can't even buy calling birds nowadays. You can only rent a calling bird plan.
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Today I beat Wordle by not playing.
.
[photos of decorative apples made of alabaster or onyx] I was looking more for a pomme granite.
.
No, I feel okay. I just feel like going outside and eating a bunch of grass is all.
.
Woe is me. Murray now believes 100% that any time I whistle, it means I'm calling him to go out, even if he was just out. So now, any time I'm exuberant enough to whistle, I'm gaslighting my best buddy.
.
Eric Idle's sortabiography has a story of the aftermath of the attack on George and Olivia by that creep. George was lying on a gurney, bleeding, and the new housekeeper reported for work. She looked on, utterly apalled, and George said "So, what do you think of the job so far?"
.
When I buy anything snacky, I take the precaution of figuring out how much fat is in the whole thing. Sometimes unlikely, but always good to know.
Kudos to Dove ice cream bons on that score. I looked at the info, and serving size is THE WHOLE BOX OF, LIKE, TWENTY. Hardcore FTW.
.
I sat in an empty room at a con where I was the event, and suffered the social awkwardness of deciding whether to start talking when someone looked in.
I walked Murray around nine this morning, when the weather indicated some clear before a period of moisture. There were some bits of junk mail here and there that had escaped from a recycling container. (I even know whose, thanks to addressed mail, but that's irrelevant.) After ignoring them for a minute, I picked them up and folded the small stack and jammed it in my back pocket to recycle at home. When I started practicing, I looked out and saw that the one house on the street that still had a piece of that stuff was ours. It was flapping quietly to draw attention to itself and, by association, to denigrate our choices of local politicians to have yard signs for.
I ignored it for a minute. Two minutes. Then after some more minutes I went out and strided to it. Regarded it for a couple of seconds, taking in at a glance the quality of shower stalls being offered, then clapped it up and crumpled it and took it in, gaining exercise and a timely reminder that it was about time to do my teeth and stuff anyway, so there's that. And then I updated my blog, because why not?
Attached is a photo proving that the color folded flyer page is no longer waving at passers-by. And here is an Open Thread, because we here at the New Pals Club Web-Log believe in letting our reader have their say, This is the first in a long tradition, so I gave it a great big number in the tradition of composer Karl Czerny, who wrote a lot of notes on pages but still inflated his apparent output with ever-larger Opus numbers, and why the heck not?
Proof! Select the window pane that does not contain an ad for new shower stalls. IT'S ALL OF THEM!
Anyway, here's your Open Thread. I hope this thing works.
BEDAZZLED, the Faustian comedy feature by Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, delighted me instantly, though I soon started thinking that this part or that part was dated or awkward or embarrassing. Oddly, as time went by and I got older--two things that occurred simultaneously--the awkwardnesses seem to have hit closer to the mark than I knew, and the dated aspect becomes the perfection of a period piece. In short, the good bits keep getting better and the weak ones either do or become unimportant, and what's left is one of my generation's classics.
Dudley Moore, aka Stanley Moon, is a diner cook in love with the unattainable waitress Margaret Spencer (Eleanor Bron, who I remember best from HELP). Stanley is approached by George Spiggot (Peter Cook), who being Lucifer the Lord of the Underworld offers George seven wishes. Seven chances to win the amazing Margaret, and any one of them should do it, right? Stanley lets himself be convinced: his original sin. The movie shows us the relationship between these two men, with Margaret as a pawn We never see her internal world, and most of her time is spent in scenarios concocted by George in order to ruin Stanley's wishes, and her role is akin to that of another castaway playing a part in a dream sequence on Gilligan's Island.
George also manages the seven deadly sins, each personified by an actor. Raquel Welch as Lust lights up the screen with a broad Southern accent. He also takes Stanley with him on some of his rounds, which consist of a series of petty annoyances against people (and perhaps animals), because it's his job, as he explains to Stanley at some length. God makes him do this, in a pretty direct way. It's not George's fault. Nothing ever is. (I knew a George.)
A favorite scene of mine has the two men dressed in white and showing up at an elderly woman's house. George says that they're the Fruney Green Eyewash men, and if she has five bottles of Fruney Green Eyewash in her home, she will win a tidy little prize. Of course she doesn't, but George encourages her to nip to the chemist and bring them back, and he'll pretend they were there all along. After she goes off on her bike, George raids her fridge and eats her raspberries and cream. Stanley complains, but has some too. Anyway, George offers, it's all her fault because she wanted to lie about the eyewash.
Speaking of raspberries, the deal is that Stanley can end any wish and go back to status quo by blowing a raspberry. George's preferred magic words are "Julie Andrews!" but he can substitute. The scenarios of Stanley's wishes, egged on by George's devilish suggestions, are the formal set pieces of the movie, and they get more and more exacting as Stanley endeavors each time to make THIS one George-proof. Witness ye now my favorite, a self-contained "Ready, Steady, Go!" parody on a show called "Going, Going, Gone!" Stanley has wished for fame, and he has wished to win the heart of the fair Margaret (I love the moment when she's watching Stanley on the stage and is suddenly transfixed by Stanley on the monitor.).
So Stanley goes on, singing a song written by Dudley Moore, and everything goes according to plan for a while.
It's the ultimate (as Dudley could well deliver, and often did) in its field, and its field is NEEDINESS. You will never hear a needier pop song, more baldly delivered. Watch the choreography. Then note the exact opposite of all fo it in the follow-up, also by Dudley, delivered by the guy who just couldn't help being tall and handsome and cold.
(Incidentally, Bongwater covered "Bedazzled," the song, gender-flipped and hilariously camp. Recommended.)
Playing piano at Minicon about 15 years ago. Photo by Tony von Krag.
When you're learning to play a piece--on the piano, in this case--it's helpful to learn the melody by humming or whistling or la-la-la-ing. This piece of advice from my father, a piano teacher, has turned out to be very useful recently. Makes me wish Dad had told me years earlier. Or at all.
As it happens, I got this pointer from my sister, to whom Dad told it decades ago. Dad tried twice to teach me and we apparently came up with a mutual unspoken deal where I'd struggle by myself for years and he'd occasionally offer me a suggestion that would usually prove useful, though not as useful as learning to finger, or acquiring basic harmony knowledge. After I finally started spending my own money for lessons, Mr. Diebel (I expect his proper title was Dr., but I never heard it used or requested) patiently addressed the worst of my deficiencies, ignoring my utter helplessness from his friendship with Dad. Dad once asked him what the main thing was he'd taught me, and Diebel answered by putting five fingers on his arm and saying "One, two, three, four, five." When I came to him, I acquired most notes by moving my hand. When we moved out of state a year or so later, I was about where a second or third-year student might be, provided nobody asked any theory questions, including "what key is this in?"
Fortune and decision brought me to theory. First, I noticed the existence of the Irish jam on Cathy's campus and started going. I tried playing my tiny backpack keyboard, but it was nigh inaudible in the room full of fiddlers and accordionists. I brought my accordion in (never learned the bass notes) and sight-read on that for a while before buying a five-octave keyboard with full-sized keys I could play. That led to a feeling of obligation toward those chord names over the tune sheets we used, and I started filling in, first with just the roots of the chords, then block chords, and finally comping. That's when a light bulb in my head said "You should take theory now, before you graduate." So I took four semesters off my art major and just took the sequence, not even for credit. I had some questions early on which my teacher answered by having me sit in on the aural training class concurrent with the theory cycle.
I figured I knew enough theory from osmosis that I could start the class without a semester of "this is your finger and this is a note," and I was almost wrong but got through it with a simple trick I've mastered of clenching my entire head and keeping it that way until a problem seems to solve itself. The theory homework had the side effect of teaching me legible musical writing, which worked out because I also started writing some pieces of music in the same format we used in the jam. The class and sessions are the best musical education I've received, and I wish I'd done it decades earlier.
I was talking to a couple of friends in the group (dang! I have friends here.) about playing outside the sessions to do other kinds of music. Suddenly, people started getting Covid and parts of society shut down, including all campus activities like ours (mostly peopled by non-college folks). My friend and I exchanged mp3s for a while, then started meeting under extremely careful conditions. After two years and change, we pick up new pieces pretty quickly (the tough ones take longer), often making our own non-virtuoso arrangements for the purpose. That's when Martha mentioned the bit about humming.
Who knows if I could have taken music theory earlier? I had one theoretical sort of class in Georgia but was trying to do math and computers and art. Would I have shrugged it off like my first (and second) lessons? Would Dad's pointer have taken root if he'd told it to me himself? Who sawed Courtney's boat?
I'm taking away from this exactly what I'm getting: a tip that makes it even easier at a time when it's continually getting easier. With any luck, I'll get up to Michigan in the Fall and have a chance to show Dad how my playing is going, and mention that I'm using his tip. There's some baggage lying around that I don't feel like picking up. It'd just slow me down anyway, and nothing in it's of any real value.
For alt-text, see third note below. Picture might enlarge if you click on it. This is as big as I can get it before it takes over the page.
One day in 1969, I was taking photography as an 8th-grade elective for a semester. I had the use of Mom's Kodak Bantam, which used 828 film (eight exposures? EIGHT?). It occurred to me that I could take a picture of the view from our living room window and save it forever!
That's probably Mark standing on what they called "a treehouse," wood nailed up in squared-off shapes. There's Roxy, their pony, visible behind the doghouse of Lady, the least fortunate collie ever, trust me. There's the swingset and the full-size tree they put in there.
There's the back yard where the boys would drive the "old" pickup around and around when they were too young to go on the road.* There's acres of pasture** where cattle sometimes grazed, and I found one of our cats dead.
There's the first leg up the hill, and the notch where we'd first spy the glint of our yellow bus coming around the mountain. We knew exactly how much time we had to get to the end of our gravel driveway. There's Spring Canyon Dam. The Swimming Gorilla. Horsetooth Mountain.
Confession: I had to fix the negative, which was torn clear down into Horsetooth, and the image there now is something I did in Photoshop to make it less glaring.
And there's our huge sky, always a canvas for extravagant white clouds that passed from the west and north mostly. One day I realized why: No trees, huh. How about that.
Special bonus: the lighter rectangle floating behind Mark shows the reflection in the glass of the kitchen window on the east side of the house. Hello, little window!
So, darn. It really worked, and it still works. I wish to award myself a point. Where's the chalk?
_______________ * Footnote: When I worked for RMFRES in 1980, I had occasion to visit the photo department at CO State U, and they had an aerial shot that must have been from right about 1969. You could clearly see the oval track in their back yard. rrr-RRRRR-rrrr!
** Feetnote: I referred to exactly this sort of terrain recently in a reminiscence of stepping out of a car in like 2004 onto ground like that and feeling like I was FINALLY HOME again, because the bottoms of my feet felt right at last.
*** ALT TEXT for the photo! I can't find a way to do it here, but here's what I used for alt-text at Twitter, where most of this originally appeared earlier this morn... afternoon.
"A black and white view looking west at the Front Range foothills of northern Colorado. In the near ground, scraggly trees, the neighbor's fence, a doghouse, a pony's back visible above the doghouse, a garage with a kid standing on a homemade construction of some sort at the south end. Acres and acres of mostly bare prairie with a long-unlived-in house visible just before the first hill. Spring Canyon Dam connects two hills, holding in Horsetooth Reservoir (named for the notch-shaped hill 3/4 of the way across the hilltops). Clothesline. Swingset."
We used to have a canister which might have originally held potato chips, but which was about 8" across, making it suitable for a stack of 45s and kiddie 78s. At a point in my life at which I had less control, I turned left and they turned right, and I never saw or heard them again, but my mind's ear provides replays of them, nestled in with the ringing.
One of the more peculiar of these kiddie disks was on the flip side of "Tattle-Tale Duck" ("Tattle-tale, tattle-tale, quackity-quack! / He tattles in front and he wiggles in back! / So watch your step, / You're out of luck / If you get caught by the tattle-tale duck!"), with the mild title "Ducks On Parade."
It doesn't seem to be online. I checked, but you check as well. Sometimes I miss things.
Unlike most of the songs I'd hear in this enigmatic stack of clues to the greater world (such things would come my way, and I'd puzzle over their meaning as I labored to get the words right) this one had no lyrics. It was a pure instrumental, and if I'm any judge, it was made up on the spot. The instrumentation eludes my mental track, but the underall obbligato was a rhythmic quacking sound. Not a real quack, but a quacking sound. Not to put too fine a point on it, it was obviously a toy duck of the sort Lucy Van Pelt might have pulled around in a desultory fashion in a 50s Peanuts strip. And I'm not sticking my neck out very far by boldly asserting that someone had a wheeled duck toy and put it on one of the turntables in the studio and held it while the table turned, producing a quasi-quack-quack track.
And heck, that's really the interesting bit, right there. The melody is a series of tentative beginnings of phrases.
(repeat a note higher; keep fumfering with it, and eventually back out more or less the same way)
It didn't have to be long. A 5" 78 record isn't good for much more than a minute, if that. So I guess either someone was screwing around with the ducky and the producer said "Let's record it," or else they were sitting around desperate for one more side that day, and the guy at the turntable said "How about this?" and put the duck on, and then the piano guy made up this tune, and eleven minutes later, they'd recorded it and mastered it and gone out for drugs.
You'll let me know if you find it, won't you? I haven't heard it in over fifty years. I mean, outside of my head. Also, if you happen upon it, I'd really like a copy (even just audio) of the ~1970 ad for Clearasil or Noxzema that has the obnoxious "I am an Acne Pimple!" song that haunts my inner ear, where it threatens to overturn my balance. .
