Sunday, July 29, 2012

Saturday Into Sunday, Rain Into Wine


This is a picture of the statue of director John Ford.

If I had grown up living in Portland, Maine, I would've stopped by this statue almost every chance I got in order to sit on one of the stones and have a private chat with him.

Mr. Ford was a Portland Maine native who grew up on the Irish side of the town.

It's kind of neat to see where he used to live. Only a small bit of its original ambience is left, still you can still see some traces of the original ethnic neighborhoods.

This has been a very challenging week. The store has been very busy, and I have been working with colleagues to run our youth camp in the store.

I took time this rainy evening to take a long walk around the Old Port section of the city.

As many of my friends have told me if I don't sit down and spend some time writing music every week I get very, very cranky.

This week has been no exception. Therefore it's been refreshing to walk about the city on a rainy night and see the life of people with more mundane lives, see them spending time out and about enjoying the town.

There are several ideas for pieces of music chasing themselves around inside my poor head. I know I'm going to have to set time aside to tie ideas together. As usual, I'm not really sure how these are going to come out.


As for Mr. Ford, he is the director of one of my favorite all-time motion pictures "The Quiet Man". It features an epic knock down. teeth-busting drag-out fight between John Wayne and Victor McGlaglin.

It also features a wonderful love story between John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara.  It's kind of how I hope things can go.

This movie is probably my favorite romantic movie of all time. My favorite film overall is "The Lion In Winter" because of its historical setting, unbelievably witty dialogue, and painfully honest depiction of a family that puts the fun in dysfunctional on one single Christmas evening when no one gets what they want for Christmas.

So as I walk around the city listening to my feet against the wet pavement, looking at couples enjoying the evening life of the town, I have to wonder what direction my creativity is going to take as I continue down this new path that is opened up.

Maybe at some point I'm going to sit down on one of the stones and have a long, quiet, perhaps mumbled-out-loud conversation with the statue of Mr. Ford.

In the same way my secret garden served as a safe place for me to express my creativity when I was a child, perhaps Mr. Ford may have some words of wisdom to help me now that I am much, much older.

If I have enough brains to listen, perhaps he will have enough patience to talk.

By the way this blog post was dictated using the Mountain Lion operating system on my Mac. I will have to see if this has an effect - either good or bad - on my writing. Please let me know what you think.

Portland, Maine.

Tuesday, July 24, 2012

Lost In a Sea of Metadata

Photo by Jim Alberty
Work with digital photography at any really great level and sooner rather than later you'll run into the concept of metadata.

Information about the pictures, carried by the picture. Things such as camera type, f-stop settings (aperture), date, time, geographic location - all of great use in knowing about the picture but not really part of the picture itself.

I tell my students - or clients - this knowledge is useful because it can lead you to operate your camera more effectively.

Metadata is also a useful tool in when applied personally. 

This blog, the music I write, my friends, loves and dislikes, all can tell me things about myself - they are part of me, perhaps not directly experienced, but they have a telling role in my life, whether I like it or not.

To paraphrase my latest crush, Montaigne, "The only thing I know for sure is that I know nothing - and sometimes I'm not even sure about that".

Such a statement tells so much about reality - or the lack or it - that my breath is stolen.

Photo by Annetta Weatherhead
Carl Jung promoted the concept of metanoia - "changing one's mind", to quote the Greek.

Emotional/psychological trauma can become so intense that the mind breaks down, melts into pieces, which then resolve themselves into new, effective structures that are capable of dealing with torment.

Rather the way I used to melt parts of crayons around a candle set in a bottle - what might have been a useless piece becomes fused and strengthened when melted in a wild bouquet of color.

I wish I had one of those candles now - not that I don't have candles but would like to see such colorful abandon and beauty again.

Driving a friend out to Brunswick to pick up a family dog.

Such a mundane way to spend an early evening, coupled with a pleasant dinner of pasta, al fresco. I arrived home tired - well fed, but tired.

Then, time to finish the logistic work for Summer Camp at the Orchard. The second day was today and everything went supremely well.

Photo by Annetta Weatherhead
This said I was too tired to go dance tonight. I might well have had another panic attack or just been my usual in-human self.  This is metadata about myself that I've just grown to accept.

So now I've taken some moments to sit and think, confirm the metadata that I've learned. There is much more heat, more thought, more metadata, that can be mined and processed into support for my soul - a good bargain.

Good night, sleep well.

Portland, Maine





Monday, July 16, 2012

Quiet Water, Thundering Pulse

It's very hot. My shirt is made for running, supposedly. It breathes well, is bright lime green but has a very close neck opening, my throat feels constricted.  The feeling emphasizes the heat.

I walk back along the towpath of the old Cumberland/Oxford Canal and I want to get home to write.

Behind me is urban forest, a rail crossing, more woods and bridges across marsh, over dips in the path.  My walking poles make short work of them, supporting me as I push my way over logs, up and down slopes. I step high to keep moving quickly, avoiding roots that seem to jump out to grab my toes and try tossing me face-first into the mouldy earth.

Here on the towpath it's bright, warm. Birds sing off in the trees to my right. Animals move in the tall grass next to the path. I hear rustling, guess the animal as being the size of a small dog, maybe a woodchuck? I don't smell a skunk.

Enough people use this path, with and without bikes that I'm sure animals keep clear and in the cover.

We've not had any real rain, just showers. Jewell Falls more than a mile and a half behind me seemed tired, anemic. The sound two weeks ago was explosive, you could hear it deep in the woods long before you came upon it.

Today its presence was subdued, the water above the bridge (left in the picture shown) was almost milky with the slowness of its flow; previously it had been crystal clear and rushing to plunge.

Still, between the heat and speed of my pace I was quite winded. Sitting by the bridge I felt my pulse wound up to a frenetic clip.

Runners came by, waved as they plunged down the stone stairs beside the falls, across the bridge at their base, turning to vanish into the sun-dappled shadow of the trees.

I pulled out my phone, posted the bridge picture to Facebook, took time to read various blogs, caught up on my email, looked at a spreadsheet I'd structured for the Orchard and suddenly ...

...suddenly ....

... realized how foolish it was to be sitting in such a comfortable place, staring at a phone screen.

I love and appreciate technology, know how to use it. I like how it can enhance my experience and knowledge of life.  Still, it seemed a little silly to be staring at something I could look at anytime I was home.  The scene around me was comfortable and comforting, I was breathing hard for a reason.

I had worked to get there, the feeling was actually quite pleasant.

So the footpath called me back. I knew when it was time to go.

On the towpath I followed a dragonfly. Its body was black as were its wings. Each wing's middle had white stripes and the tips were so light as to be almost translucent.

It became my companion on the towpath for most of my trip back to the car, staying on the bright dirt of the path. I think its vision focussed more on the light part of the scene. I was moving so fast that I began to catch it up.

I felt it was playing with me, almost a game of tag.  I wondered what it could see, what thoughts or images were forming in its head as it flew down the path ahead of me. How did it experience the difference between light and shade? Was it alarmed as the giant in green and orange, clattering with four legs down the path, seemed to chase it?

A few times it sat on the path and I was afraid I would hit it - but it always picked up and flew on.

As we neared the last little bit of forest before the final bridge it suddenly flitted right and into the trees. I was alone again.

For those last steps I tried at accept where the dragonfly had been, tried to fly down the path as it had, tried to feel winds lifting me along, buzzing, almost translucent. Saw the shadow as liquid, different, cooler - the sunlight as airy, richer, warmer.

Counting steps would give you different numbers coming back than going toward.

Maybe I listen best when I just fly.

Portland, Maine

Thursday, July 12, 2012

The First Rule of Italian Driving


I've always liked this scene.

The late, lamented Raúl Julia begins the Gumball Rally - a manic, ho-holds-barred romp from New York to the Queen Mary in Long Beach, CA.

Madness ensues across the continent.

I've always loved manic no-holds-barred romps. Very much not a competitive person - so I say - the ideas of subversive action and gleeful (if harmless) sabotage appeal to me.

I understand rules, appreciate and use them.

I just don't always like them, being more fond of clever than smart.

My rating of ENTP on the Myers-Briggs test - though trending toward introversion rather than extroversion as I age - might explain it.

The interview for my last school job specifically included the comment "You think outside the box, don't you?"

"There's a box?" was my astonished reply.

They should have known what they were getting.

Earlier this evening, after a later-than-usual day at work I met my friend Mistress Selcouth of the Dark Follies for a sorbetto and a friendly chat about the Follies, performance skills in general and all-around people watching.

We also were both drowned out by an army of seagulls screaming as their formation roamed over Danforth Street. I fully expected them to be followed by a Pteranodon, chasing them around the way bluefish chase scrod into the inlets up North - causing massive oxygen die-off and a smell of rotting fish that can rip your nostrils out anywhere from Brunswick to Damariscotta.

As I said I have a high tolerance for ambiguity.

Where was I? Oh yes, sorbetto.

Our conversation ended she went off to the Dogfish Café (see? Fish again...) and I drove to the end of Congress Street - the Eastern Promenade's Casco Bay Monument - and the start point for the Alley Cat Road Race.

I'd noticed a flyer on Geno's Rock Bar - and Raúl Julia's remark leapt into my head like Superman through a brick wall - standing there looking genially into my mind's eye, arms akimbo, a lock of hair over an eye, the dust settling and the clink of an occasional brick breaking the pregnant silence.

Inside my head, of course.

An Alley Cat Road Race is an actual method of staging an in-town bike race. Born from the bike messenger subculture it happens much like a messenger's daily work. Racers go from checkpoint to checkpoint, in the best time and route they can improvise and are only told the location of the next immediate stop.

Some checkpoints may require tasks - obstacles, quizzes, alcoholic consumption - before the next location is revealed.

Participation is valued more than competition (generally).

The race tonight had two checkpoints and a finishing point on the Western Promenade, some 2.5 miles away. From the Casco Bay monument that marked the end of Congress Street rose the punishing slope of Munjoy Hill. The race had a formidable first obstacle.

What it didn't have was participants. They delayed for about 30 nail-gnawing, mosquito-biting minutes (I mean the mosquitoes were doing the biting), but at 9:30 the young organizer looked at the other 3 members and called the race, transforming it on the spot to a tour of the city.

So this particular Alley Cat Race came to naught - if good companionship and a pleasant ride around this old seaport city can be called "naught".

There will be another attempt. After all, the promised beer that was the prize didn't get consumed - as far as I can tell. Perhaps I might even take part in it. I have a nice bike mouldering in the basement, since I walk everywhere now.

We shall see.  Right now I'll not worry myself.

As Franco Bertollini said "What's behind me is not important".

That crash and clink you hear was either a brick or a mirror.

Who can tell?

Portland, Maine

Tuesday, July 10, 2012

Casual Steps, Taken In Earnest


I'm not supposed to be this kind of person.

In late March, visiting my friends in Vermont, the Ferguses, and their Icelandic ponies on Butternut Farm, I was "escorted" up the hill - Butternut Hill, I suppose - behind their house.

I had just arrived and Nancy insisted on a cup of tea - but a "walk" up and around the hill first.

Handed a pair of walking poles, adjusted by Nancy to my height, we took off up the hill. Breathing meant drawing slivers of ice down my throat. I felt the thunder of my heart loud in the complete Winter silence of the woods.

But I noticed things - Nancy kept calling them out to me: sugar maples, tapped and ready to flow, the whirring of a grouse, an owl watching us from a pine tree, the peculiar deadfalls of trees needing to be cleared, variations in the soil, the criss-crossing of old logging trails that would soon be used to exercise Birkir and his other Icelandic expatriates, Nancy's delightful figurative and joking stories.

I noticed things. It made an impression. The same way the the first words you share with someone sets a tone for all further conversations and expectations - this made an impression that had so far never gotten past my skin before that moment.

Oddly, while returning I stopped at the Bean's outlet in North Conway, pricing walking sticks. Just pulled off and walked in like it was the most natural thing in the world.

I'm not supposed to be this kind of person.

Add to these amazifying events my involvement in Argentine Tango. I've danced before, nearly married a dancer once upon a time, years ago, a genuine New York ballerina, who choreographed many of the shows I started out in. Finally learned the basics of jazz tap. Basic, basic ballet.

But tango - the physical sharing of the dance, the elegant expression of writing the music - and the almost psychotic sociology of its practitioners - all speak to a need to express what's going on inside me in a global manner, with all the tools I have to hand - my body seems to be catching up.


I'm not supposed to be this kind of person.


William James, the 19th Century American psychologist and philosopher, was of the opinion that feeling resided in the body at a deep, atavistic level and that our conscious mind, the ape coming late to the evolutionary party, as it were, recognized emotions by observing them in the body's reactions first, then expressing them.

Brain scans show this to be on the right track. Our bodies react first with lizard-brain speed, apprehending something and reacting - then our ape-brains sort it out, label it and express it.  Many paraplegics admit that they have muted emotional lives, the best explanation being that their brains are cut off from their primary source of emotional stimulus.

So the wisdom of the body is immediate and true - or at least, accurate. The brain can also be immediate and true if not trained to hide or obfuscate, whether out of fear or traumatic experience.

I suppose the brain could draw the opposite, more positive, honest conclusion as well, if the circumstances were right.

So perhaps my body is catching up with itself, that parts of me - parts that are just some of many parts of me - are taking over the microphone - in this case, microphones shaped like two walking sticks I bought some months ago - and insisting that I walk two or three miles a day, blast my way up and down Bradbury Mountain, work on simple core exercises, work on basic technique, over and over around the floor, just as I did when studying fencing as a kid, marching when in drum corps.

Technique that serves you so that you don't even think about it when you're performing. "You practice you scales, your chords", said jazz great Dizzy Gillespie," then you forget all that shit and just blow".

Tonight I set a record - I walked three miles on an in-town course with an average of 15:49 per mile.

I started recording in March - 22:08 per mile.


I'm not supposed to be this kind of person.

But I have a feeling that my body knows who I am better than I do - and that means that "who I am" may not be "who I am supposed to be".

I think I'll go for a walk up Bradbury Mountain in the morning and see what comes.

Portland, Maine

Wednesday, July 4, 2012

The Curse of Vision

There.

Here's a warning I intend to heed from here out:

DO NOT climb Bradbury Mountain in record time (19:20 per mile, if you're asking), go home, clean up, have a burrito then head to tango practica expecting to dance full on.

Actually it took me about 15 minutes of sitting on my own in the corner before I realized I should probably dance while I was there.

One tanda. One.

Then straight into the floor.

When I first heard the music while coming up the stairs I was already struggling with whether I had the energy to handle what has usually been a big, bright, hot room full of people and loud music - fortunately the holiday seems to have cut down the crowd to half normal size.

I seem to remember some people talking to me but I had pretty much left the room when I walked in the door.

What happened was the peculiar (well for others) affect that takes over my consciousness sometimes when I'm watching people dance. I hear the music and see the dancer's motions but superimposed on it is a mesmerizing vision controlled by the music I hear.

It's like watching a double-exposed film and there is (sometimes) a moment when I can choose to follow that vision or stay within the room - and if I'm tired I have no choice, it takes me over and I usually sit like a mannikin, lost to the world or anyone in it.

After a while my own creativity takes over and I'm writing music - or working it out for processing later - in my head and two pieces of music - mental and aural - are perking along together.

At other times when the room and people and noise get to me first I can be overwhelmed by sensing it all. People really frighten me a lot of the time if I'm tired or preoccupied or just feel I'm not in the right place - even wearing the wrong clothes or bringing the wrong food to a potluck dinner.

It's a truly stomach-turning, near vomit-inducing, terrifying feeling, like the room is ganging up on me - which happened when I was a child, in Mrs. Johnstone's music class, of course. I made the mistake of telling my multi-age classmates that I liked "Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day" and they all ganged up on me, chasing me into the corner while Mrs. J was out of the room - one warning from the lookout and suddenly I was alone, cringing at the piano, out of my chair during a teacher absence.

That's the most memorable incident. There were lot's of others.

Today I suspect educators would be able to handle it but back in the Sixties I didn't have a prayer.

So people scare me sometimes. Not always but I have to watch myself. I've been known to sit in a catatonic state in the doorway, or a room, for an entire evening; leave in the middle of a milonga for no good reason (which can be the best of reasons if you pay attention).

But I'm surrounded by friends who know when I'm up my tree, for whatever reason and trust that I'll climb down when I feel the coast is clear. Sometimes it's the same night, sometimes not.

My late friend and confidante Eckart Horn told me during one particularly dangerous time back at the end of my public school teaching days that he knew what was wrong with me.

In his light German accent he said, "You have the curse of vision".

"I beg your pardon?" was my reply.

"When you think of somethink or feel somethink you zee it completely whole and perfect. Your vision is so clear that reality almost cannot compete with it - especially your friends.

"And you cannot communicate it.

"Because you zee vhat can be - what YOU can be - and you know you are not perfectly expressing that vision - you think everyone else sees the same fault - which really isn't a fault.

"You know, you really should believe what you tell my kids - your dreams can come true".

He was right.

I see and feel everything so strongly, people are so clear to me - I can't tell you the number of times my intensity has made people uncomfortable.

I know I can see it happening, probably before they do but, to quote Ray Bradbury, "to a man who's never seen an elephant a bug under the microscope is the most terrifying thing on Earth".

What seems like a bug to most people - or just a regular thing - seems like a huge, big deal to me.

It's been suggested that medication might help but  I don't want to give up the joy and beauty I see in order to escape the fear and pain.

I think, down deep inside, there is a basic safe place that is who I am - really, truly.

I was privileged to be Madeleine L'Engle's guide when she did a quiet day at St. Luke's - about two weeks after her husband, Hugh Grant, had died. While we chatted - she was a delight - I thanked her for writing "A Wrinkle In Time" because it had protected something deep inside me that I could bring out once I had finally cried enough tears.

A hug from Madeleine is something special - she was really Mrs. Whatsit, you know.

So maybe the ice is made of tears - it has to form and crack enough times for all of the life hidden in the ocean below to come to the surface.... and the curse of vision is just me going back to look for something that was already there.

I only know that I am very very lucky to know so many people, so many things, that are worth loving.

And I do, you know. I love you all.


Portland, Maine