Strange Days, Stranger Nights

Taking a moment to have a drink and catch up with this blog. We were hit with what would last week have been a serious storm - tonight it's only the precursor to a really, REALLY big storm.

I'm glad to say that I've finished my first new piece since Eckart died. It's a bit of a mash up - but it works well and I rather like it. The orchestration is in the works - but it's fun.

Tomorrow - or later tonight - the REAL storm will hit and we're going to decide if we open late or not. Either way we're going to do it. I love it.

Another reminder of the loss of my friend - besides talking through my fears I would be constantly pestered about my dreams. He was a strong proponent of dream theory; his training as a logotherapist gave him all sorts of interpretive tools to help people use their dreams to delve further into the center of their selves.

So here is the dream from two nights ago.

I remember being invited to Thanksgiving/Christmas dinner at the New England saltbox of a family that were friends of mine. Several musician friends were adult children of the family, the parents were my mentors in theatre and publishing music.

The "kids" had an old boat on the grounds to play in - I remember looking out the window at sunset - and at everyone having fun playing "boat". I helped set the table, opened the wine, made myself useful instead of joining my friends outside. The music from "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory", the Bricusse/Newley version, which is the reason I decided to commit to being a composer, was playing in the background.

I remember being polite and totally detached from the family feeling. Very typical. The Wizard of Oz was playing as well - I remember walking through Woodford's Parks back home and pretending to be in the movies as I walked through the woods and gardens, desperate to keep the magic I was feeling in my head intact so I could leave the park and deal with my life.

My guitarist friend has asked me to help him unload his truck into a downstairs entrance of a building near the old fire station (Station 5) on Boston Ave., where I learned to play pool when I was in First grade.

There was a long electric keyboard being unloaded into the back room space of a school, run by an evangelical church - my guitarist friend was part of the worship band but was something of a "four corner", hired to anchor the band. I set the piano up and crept to listen at the doors of the classrooms, at how disorganized and thoughtless their music lessons were. The rooms were dusty, barely lit.

I exited through the office, the secretaries mortified that I was there - apparently I was a known quantity - or at least my theology was.

It was a sunny Summer day, and I looked up to see all my friends, the accordion player, her sister, the bass player, the violinist, the guitarist, the mentors, all of them in a Sikorski helicopter, turning arabesques in the sky over my head.

They all clearly smiled and cheered at me, waving like they really cared.

And I remember thinking that I had to decide that either they were making fun of me or just being kind and loving. That answering that question was the most important thing in the universe - and that just knowing that decision faced me was enough to make me smile.

And THAT, my dear readers, is why I miss Eckart so much - he would be able to help me figure it out for myself. I suppose I'll have to.

How strange.

Despite the Magic Sometimes the Monsters Come Anyway

So, let's talk about Clarke's Law, little boys and the monsters that drag you away.

Clarke's Law is a law of cultural inequality and it explains a lot of history. It states that "any technology sufficiently advanced will look like magic to less-advanced observer".

This is how Cortez and Pizzaro were able to defeat civilizations outnumbering their soldiers by millions to one. If you think you're dealing with gods and magic then you've put yourself at a disadvantage that may not be recoverable.

That idea of magic is in my life today. Since losing Eckart I've prepared for the moment when his son will ask why his father smoked while in the knowledge it would hurt him - and what does that mean about how his father felt about those around him?

It will be a slightly magical answer - I won't know it, won't understand it.

It is slightly bad magic - the mystery of why he smoked (and we all have things like that in our lives - more on mine in a moment) is part of a bad magic that took him away.

It is countered by good magic - the love and connection that we all shared - still share, though our experience of Eckart is different now - is something we don't understand and can't explain.

So I call it Magic. Like all good stories there is good and bad and sometimes people can learn to harness it and use it in both ways. It's a choice. That's not magic - I hope it's not. It's a choice.

Sometimes my own bad magic takes me over. I get sudden, overwhelming panic attacks sometimes, especially when I'm dancing with friends. With strangers, no problem (mostly I'm nervous about perceived wardrobe malfunctions).

Most of the time I just accept that that's what's going on in my heart and head, I go for a walk, cry it out, sit and breathe or just stand at look at the stars and it passes.

Most of my friends understand and accept it, give me space and still love me. Some people I know try to take advantage of it - I just watch them bluster and don't expect them to be there in any real way.

And often I'd go to chat with Eckart about it. Sometimes for sympathy, mostly just to acknowledge that I'm wired that way and it's the price, I think, for my creativity.

But tonight the bad magic came. I realized, as I sat in my apartment, just up from Maine Ballroom dance, where I'd just left after a record fast 90 second appearance, I realized that he wasn't there to talk there anymore.

That's a different magic than just losing him, a real blow. It was baking a loaf of bread and having no place to set it to cool, no one to share it with.

So I took a breath and headed back to dance with my friends. Good magic.

I think I'm ready if that young boy wants to talk about his dad now. We are all mysteries in some ways - we don't know what's going on and since we don't have explanations we have to depend on magic in certain ways.

In many others we're very clear and engaged in the science of our lives.

But sometimes it all comes down to magic.

Blizzard Watch/Snow Day

Hello.

Can anyone here me?

Hello.

Oh - there you are.

... and tonight I'm at Geno's - two energetic young ladies, strippers from Portland's home-grown burlesque scene; J.R. himself, on the phone giving out booking info to a band from Boston; myself, getting out of the apartment to see the effects of the storm on my beloved little town.

And it is quite a storm. I awoke this morning and got to the Orchard in good order only to have it shut down at Noon. Since then I've been relaxing and chilling out (strangely) - should be writing music but just too scattered.

That's been the pattern. If you've been following me on Facebook you know that my best friend Eckart passed away suddenly of a heart attack just before Thanksgiving.

Since then I feel I've been off balance in some ways, more connected in others.

It feels like I'm in some kind of artistic limbo, it's become very hard to see any one particular project to completion, at least projects that don't have specific deadlines.

At the same time my enjoyment of my work in the Orchard has gotten more and more intense. I really like working there.

I'm part of a community - actually part of several communities.

Work has friends, new ones and old ones, people I've seen and worked with every day for almost two and a half years. I've never known a group of people this well before, it's very strange. I know personal things, professional things, have given and taken correction and comment and not let my natural feelings of immediate threat take me over.

My connections to the tango community have grown - well, as much as I ever manage to grow in a social group. I still don't get invited to parties and still can wander off into my own deep, almost autistic place when watching dancers. It freaks people out but it's worth it to experience such deep joy in listening, writing and dancing.

And my relationships with Eckart's family have grown.

I have people to talk to and, more importantly, people to listen to.

If all this was just watching what went along and not communicating in two directions then it would be unbearable.

I suppose I need to sit down and apply myself to get music written - I also need to think about where all of it is going, because I know what I'm writing is going in some direction - but what that direction is is totally a mystery.

I like mysteries and am OK with not knowing the final outcome of the things I do.

You get a present.

Is it more fun to look at the pretty wrapping, run the taste of anticipation over your tongue over and over?

Do you like seizing the box, shaking it, pulling the ribbons, ripping the paper?

Is it more about looking at the gift, trying it on?

Or do you get off on writing the thank-you notes?

Or do you do all of then?

Return to the Land Of Autumn

I love taking the train, especially in New England and most especially in Autumn.

I become a voyeur of Nature. The trees gently discard their leaves which fall to the ground with a silky whisper of promise and rich, evocative feelings.

Winter is coming. Bare of leafy constraints the outline of the land is there to take in and there is no denial of either fault or beauty - or the rich melding of both.

So as we race through the bunched suburbs North of Boston the trees alternatively crowd and release the train; a frayed gold curtain opens and closes.

Under every tree, along each curbside, around every building Nature has taken it's sable brush to outline each in gold.

In time, I know, this trim will vanish, covered in snow or digested into the soil as a painter does who covers a perfectly good oil painting in white in order to begin again, hoping for a better result.

Unlike I, who blanks a score that isn't working for a new start that has no gaurentee of success, Nature knows that what she does is perfect now - and that what she does next will be the same.

In my life I have no such gaurentee - so I try, very hard, to love the process of living, to bring myself to laugh, even when I am most misunderstood or face my greatest loss.

Even in my moment of death, when my leaves finally fall and leave the beauty or faults of my life bare - even then I hope I will laugh as well as mourn, feeling the full measure of joy and sorrow, the same way I struggle to feel them both now.

I love Autumn.




-- Post From My iPad

A Road I've travelled before

Traveling by train, from Portland to Washington.

I'm going to the Rally To Restore Sanity, tomorrow, in DC. There isplenty I could say about the politics of the moment and, at some point, I'll do just that

But, right at the moment, my mind is taken with the journey, watching the late Autumn trees of New England, seeing the show they've put on for a thousand, thousand years.

I love travelling by train, especially on this trip. Typing on my iPad, listening to Pandora radio on my iPhone (my Piazzola channel, which, for some joyous reason, is playing McCoy Tyner ...)

The Sun sets, the train is full, almost everyone heading to a Celtics game ocurring directly over the train station at the Boston Garden.

The landscape changes to an urban quilt, inlaid with trees, all new, all grown in the last hundred years. Few of the giants from a century or more are present, I am looking at the gentrification of the remains of a third Industrial Revolution.

Look with an inquisitive eye at the stonework of bridges and embankments .... you see where old paralell tracks lay when commuter trains carried the commercial lifeblood of Boston.

I suppose it still does, but these are fingertip capillaries compared to the femoral pulse of earlier days.

The light has changed. We are now running paralell to the Charles, making our approach to North Station. Rich, late afternoon light against the elevated highways of Boston.

Time for the next stage.

-- Post From My iPad

Location:Main St,Wilmington,United States

More Than I Deserve

Very often no good deed goes unpunished. This is a rule I've seen at work in all sorts of contexts - though, strangely, not at the Orchard.

With that said, I'm always kind of tickled when I'm proven a liar.

So now, at twilight at the end of a fairly busy day I'm pleased to be enjoying a glass of Chianti, courtesy of the owner of Enzo, the pizza/wine bar that is the scene of so many of the blog posts I've written over the last few months.

The Sun is just getting done with setting - people wander by on Congress Street in couples, stopping to look in and watch me as I look out.

Recursive observation.

I helped the owner with a new device today and am pleased to report that I figured out a fairly esoteric mail problem for him.

So it was interesting to stop by and chat about their continuing router problem. Hopefully I helped and the result, for good or ill, is that I got a piece of pizza, salad, San Pellegrino water and the Chianti for free.

Sometimes just being a part of the mix - as opposed to observing from my usual catalytic point of view - is a lot of fun and worth the effort it takes.

Sometimes.


-- Post From My iPad

Transition States and Activation Energy

I helped someone set up a blog today - it was really fun to see that person see their work - even only a few words and a blurry pic shot with the iSight camera on board the iMac.

Like several people I know I spend a lot of time as a catalyst, allowing events and actions to happen but not being changed myself.

Well, maybe not totally - you can't stand around happy people too long without having your soul expanded in some way.

Strangely, the opposite is not always true - hanging around sad people won't always shrink your spirit - our natural drive is to be happy in some way and we'll find a way to do it.

I think that's why there were survivors of the Jonestown Massacre.

There are times when my sadness gets to be so great that if I had a gun and thought I could stand the noise I'd blow my brains out. But since guns are generally a very noisy proposition and I don't have any brains anyway I usually just bull my way through to the other side.

Besides which catalysts are an important part of the world and fulfill themselves by being the cause but not being a part of.

I guess that's just how it is.


-- Post From My iPad

Location:Congress St,Portland,United States