A Timely Tip

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. 

Left foot. Right foot. Am I there yet? 

Repeat.

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A Window In Time

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?

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* 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."

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FIFTEEN MINUTES

 I've had fifteen minutes of fame. In fact, more. I reckon I had some fame when I was in community theatre, and someone recognized me at a gas station, as having been in that play, so that's a couple of minutes right there. I got a bit of additional fame when Gordon Garb took out a dignified ad in the Westercon program book in 1985, stating that "West Coast fandom welcomes Kip Williams, President and Founder of the New Pals Club, and President of the Kip Williams Clean Plate Club."

 

[image: Steve Purcell color drawing of Sam & Max, with plates. Martin "Bucky Starr" Cameron was feeling like he should do something about a thing, so he bought Purcell some pizza and directed him to create this gorgeous Prismacolor opus in my honor.]

I got some more fame when Dave Sim, Pal #6 of the New Pals Club, saw me for the second time, the first having been when we'd lived in Houston (where I signed him up for New Pals with a hearty "Hi! Let's be Pals!"). This time it was in Virginia, and I was able to give him another mailing in person, and because of that, he used a pair of photos from the event on the back of an issue of Cerebus, which I keep thinking was somewhere near #111. He thoughtfully ID'd me in a caption: "Say, isn't that the famous Kip Williams, founder of the famous New Pals Club?" or something very similar.

Another jolt of fame came via by good friend Harry McCracken, some time in the 90s, when my visage was included to help pad an article on eBay users who collect stuff. I held up a laser disk of NIGHT OF THE HUNTER and moved microscopically this way and that at the behest of the professional photographer Harry engaged, long-distance, to get the pic for PC WORLD, where Harry worked. There's a somewhat famous issue of NEWSWEEK from this time where an American athlete did a victory move in her sports bra. Brandi Chastain, as I have verified, looking good. Anyway, they wanted an advertising supplement for it, and used the PC WORLD article, trimmed down a bit--but still including the memorable pic of me holding the disk, utterly oblivious to the perfect reflection the photographer got me to pose with.

So that's some more fame, there. There was one other time when Harry, by then at TIME, used me for an article he'd written on people quitting Facebook. It was around 2015, and the story was typeset on pages with ads and all, then something big happened in the world that required that exact amount of space, as things will do, and now all that remains is some PDF images of those set and unpublished pages, real in some ways, and in others amounting to little more than a MAD parody of the thing.

I'm not counting every time I've been on a stage as fame, though maybe I should at least count those very gratifying times when circumstances made me into a figure that audiences looked at for their entertainment, and received value for their choice. If I think of any more times I was getting famed, I'll add it in here, but I think I'm up over forty minutes by now.

I wrote, in New Pals, about my first fifteen minutes of fame. The first five were incredible! A thrill ride! The five after that were still okay, though it was starting to be stressful, and I learned too much about a very good friend. I really clung to the last five, but they ticked inexorably away. A minute before it was all over, I found Jesus, who offered me some very sage advice which I don't have time for at the moment. I'd allowed fifteen minutes to write this, and it's about gone.

I once thought it would be grand to have a curtained glass window with a money slot next to it. You put in $5 or whatever, and the curtain would part, and Andy Warhol would be there, just standing. He might glance at you. After fifteen seconds, the curtains would close again. Andy's gone now, but someone could impersonate him, or it could be someone else who has had or is having their fifteen minutes. Manning the booth for a shift would be part of the price you pay for that fame.

Redrafted slightly, and could well be redrafted again, from a promising fruit of the 'fifteen minutes each day' writing exercise with sis Kathryn Morski during a wonderful visit.

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New Phases and Unrelated Matters

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1 New Phase

I'm into a new phase. Where I had been reading at the gym during the hour I'm on the Futile Cycle and the Trudgemaster, I am now listening at the gym. The new storage card on my audio player is so darn big, I loaded hundreds of hours of radio shows (Gunsmoke, Marlowe, Johnny Dollar, Shep, ISIRTA, Hitchhiker, Lux, Lampoon, and anything by Welles seem to make up a lot of it). 

I've enjoyed my recent reading of screenplays, Doc Savage books, and whatever else I could find, but I haven't enjoyed the days when the scale showed me gaining weight back that I'd been keeping off since they sawed out my gallbladder, and I noticed after a couple of days of audio narrative that I seem to be able to keep the heart rate higher and cover more phony miles when I'm not taking info in through my eyeballs.

It took a couple of days to get used to not reading. It helps to not turn my tablet on at all, obviously, but then I start looking at the screens at the front of the gym. Closing my eyes works for that, at least often enough to break the spell. Even with that, I ended up comprehending the last half of some drama about agents (FBI, I guess) getting the last laugh on a mad bomber who killed six redshirts under our hero's command in the backstory. I almost looked at the guide to see what series it was when I got home, but then realized it just didn't matter and never would, so I did other things.

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2 An Unrelated Matter

In an unrelated matter, I got some help with ignoring the voices in my head from a surprising source: the voices. Most of the time, they're no problem—they're entertaining, and a rich source of crazy ideas A, B12, and D3. When I'm playing or practicing piano, though, it gets to be a bit much. As I explained once, it's a little bit like practicing while Robin Williams stands just off to the side, quietly but audibly free associating the whole time. 

I've long been aware that something has been acting as a wall that I regularly would hit while trying to execute some piece of music. I'd be doing fine, then bammo! Mr. Fuckup strikes again! Well. One day I was playing along, and the second internal track was doing its usual distracting thing, and a voice on that track actually said something very much like, "You know, these voices are probably part of what's keeping you from playing better." BINGO.

Having a brain that thinks it can multitask isn't always a bad thing. A while back, I made a big improvement in my playing one day when I noticed that I was mentally sending a directive to one of my hands along the lines of: "Okay, if Right Hand doesn't peg the melody in the part, just outline it in the thumb line." In other words, I was designating imagined entities for specific tasks. So I created an invisible henchman (I should give him a name—he's earned it) and tasked him with always knowing where I should be looking in the score. Looey (there you go) stepped up to his job admirably, and my playing was noticeably better.

So I had this resource, and I needed to figure out how to make it work for me, given that even if I pay close attention to a measure and get it just right, my subsequent thoughts (Got that just right! Oh, if only X was listening right now! It would go a little… like… THIS:…) would take me right off the rails again. 

I ended up with something like the bit in my 1970s Transcendental Meditation™ training where the instructor (Jeff Peckham) said, "From time to time, your mind will want to wander. This is okay. Just gently put it back on the track and resume your meditation." (I dropped Jeff's name up there because I saw a news story a mere handful of years ago about how he was being a gentle thorn in the side of some local movers and shakers, and that made me proud to have briefly been his pupil.) What I decided to do was to put a question foremost in my mind that I would return to again and again, like the protagonist in MEMENTO reading his tattoos in the mirror. That question is "What do I have to be doing RIGHT NOW?" It became my new mantra for practicing. Heck, maybe I should use it for everything, along with my philsophy of life, "Left foot. Right foot. If not there yet, repeat." 

So I use it, and I think it helps that I've been playing with the Irish group now for about three years, and that I'm in my fourth semester of music theory and aural skills. The answer to that question is always a combination of words ("Next comes a chord with A at the bottom and a C# under your middle finger"), and the look of the notes, and the feel under my fingers of how the correct combination will be. It's a description that should include every note to be played (though if one hand knows its part well enough, I can expend most of the energy on the weak one). 

So far, so good. It's like I'd been around 65% of where I felt I should be, and have now gotten up to 80%–85%. When I'm playing something I know intimately, even if I haven't done justice to it in execution, the figure feels even higher.

Thanks, voice. That was useful! I haven't shut you out of my head, because you've been useful to me more than twice, and you're entertaining when I'm mowing the lawn or washing dishes. Also, I probably can't. You're still there when I'm sequentially depressing those keys, but you're not the boss of me, and you're way less distracting. So far, so good.

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