For an individual such as myself, the road to transformation is a long and tedious one. Although I adapt well to changes in my environment, it takes eons for me to make the personal, more intimate changes necessary for me to grow and thrive into perpetuity.
I can sum it up like this: If I woke up tomorrow and everything was inside-out-- my room, my neighborhood, the city, the state, the nation, the world --I could go on without batting an eye. But if I woke up one morning and discovered I was in fact a giant insect (like Kafka's protagonist in Metamorphosis) then I figure it would take me some time to get used to it.
Sometime last year, I woke up and found that I was not whom I thought I'd been for at least the past five years. I was someone else entirely. I didn't recognize myself in the mirror. Something had changed. I tried to chalk it up to the ravages of age, but after a while it became clear that this sudden shifting of shapes had nothing to do with outer appearances.
No, instead it was something inside of me that was either born or killed off.
I haven't the slightest clue as to what was the catalyst for such a startling revelation, but I can tell you this: all attempts to explain it here in this blog have been in vain. I've combed the sands of my mind and soul for the past year and cannot put my finger on the defining moment, the impetus for this sweeping renovation of my psyche. I thought I knew what it was, but I have been wrong.
So I tried to catch up to that feeling. I grew out my hair, let my beard thicken, lost some weight, changed a few habits, and conducted myself as if I were not the person whose blog you've been reading for who know how long.
It is comparable to a reptile shedding an old skin.
*/*
I have embraced luck, as I detailed in my last blog entry.
So far it seems to be working. I can't say that I've had incredible fortunes befalling me since I decided to endorse the random postulates of pure chance, but then again shouldn't we all be suspect of any windfalls or rewards that seemingly appear without any reason? It smacks of the devil's work, the instant gratification that comes with the deal; the minute you sell your soul you begin to reap the benefits of that deal.
Well, I didn't sell my soul, so I didn't expect to win the Lotto or pick up a supermodel in a singles bar overnight. But I'm beginning to see the length of this new path I am traveling as the fog clears and the horizon line becomes more visible.
Accompanying this fresh journey into uncharted realms comes an entirely new accessory: control. For the first time in a great while, I feel like I have control over my life and the things in it. Not that I haven't had any control over my life up until recently; rather, I'd been too willing to relinquish control. Nowadays I don't ever entertain the idea of giving up the reins, and ironically it is functioning far smoother than my past attempts to steer and commandeer all those things over which I really have no control: other people, certain circumstances, genetics, transparent pecking orders, injustices, societal ills...
It's as if I have gained more control by accepting the fact that luck plays a far bigger role in the way our lives unfurl than if I'd kept hammering away at my preconceived notions of what is and what should be. The problem with hammering away is that I was a hypocrite, all too willing to say 'fuck it' and not accept responsibility for my actions after whining and moaning about how I am so responsible.
I was trying to have and also eat the proverbial cake.
If I have any advice to give anyone in any part of the world, it's this: make sure you're not trying to have it both ways. That more than anything is most surely the cause of your present misery and unhappiness. If you are trying to fit the square peg into the round hole, or trying to force two objects of equal mass to occupy the same space, you'd better stop right now because it ain't gonna happen.
No way.
You have to make the parts fit. You can't just jam it together artlessly, with no sense of decorum or harmony.
Dissonance is OK if you're a musician and your name happens to be Captain Beefheart or Phillip Glass or Glenn Branca or John Cage or Ornette Coleman. These talents understand noise, and can reproduce that noise at will. It seems random on the surface-- perhaps even a tad unlistenable --but it is tightly constructed and crafted. And if someone hears it and thinks it's a bunch of cacophony, then they have executed their work all too well.
Dissonance, however, is not OK if you are just an ordinary person living an ordinary life. And although I am a musician, I am not always a musician. Sometimes I pay bills or buy groceries. Sometimes I lay in bed with my cats and train them not to gnaw at the speaker wires connected to my stereo. Sometimes I am the funny uncle who plays with his niece and nephew even though he is tired and wants to relax.
In those situations, as well as a million others that occur daily, dissonance is the last quality I want to be present. But you cannot dispel dissonance with an edict or a command. It will not obey your orders, it will not do as you say.
As any musician with perfect pitch can tell you, the only way to get rid of dissonance is to tune your instrument.
*/*
I've been out of tune, off-key, behind the beat and out of the pocket. There was static in the line and something wasn't grounded right. I kept picking up stray radio waves and transmissions.
So I replaced the old strings with new ones, and cleaned the dirt off the neck and the frets. I changed the cables and re-soldered the pickups. I tuned up but I had to let the strings stretch for a bit. After some time, when the strings were acclimated, I changed to an open D tuning and riffed for a while.
My friends bought me some new amplifiers. They sat down with me and showed me some of their songs. I showed them some of mine.
And now a year has passed and I'm finally ready to play out with a whole new repertoire under my arm.
I have been reinventing myself, and it took a lot of time that I didn't think I had the patience to mind. I am not done reinventing myself, of course, but that's OK because at least now I know what it is I'm supposed to be doing.
So, with all that out of the way, I only have one question on my mind now:
Any requests?
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
Friday, February 23, 2007
lucky
This week I came to understand the nature of my life and its twists and turns.
I always figured that "lucky" people were the ones who always made money in Las Vegas, or ended up picking up the hot girls in bars, or ended up inheriting a tidy sum from a distant uncle.
What I've come to realize is that the things I listed above are forms of luck, manifestations (if you will) of different types of fortune.
But to be lucky in the true sense is to be thrown back and forth between the opposing poles of good and bad circumstance, eventually finding the even path and regaining one's balance.
In that regard, I am truly a lucky person. And my good luck is always offset by bad luck, because that's how my life is and always will be.
I am lucky because I have never been out of money, and even though I am not rich on the other hand I've never been destitute.
I am lucky because I have a roof overhead that's cheaper to rent than most and is located in a quiet neighborhood. For what I pay, I have more space than some of my friends who pay more for approximately the same square footage.
I am lucky because, even though I am not in love or involved with anyone right now, it is better to have loved and lost than to not have loved at all. Plus, I know the next time I fall in love it will be meaningful and real, deep and intense. I know this because every time I have ever been in love, it has been all of those things and more.
I am lucky because I have a family that cares for me and would help me out if I were really in a jam. Their love is unconditional, but at the same time it helps that they have never had to shake their heads in disgust at my behavior. For all of my partying and excess and criminal posturing, I am relatively a saint in their eyes. I have never caused them grief or heartache, and they even worry about me because they feel that I am too sensitive and "soft" for this world. But they trust me, and when I am down they are there to help me stand up on my own two feet again.
I am lucky because I get to do what I want to do every day, for the most part. Someone might say, "Well, you can't afford to just buy a plane ticket and fly to Europe" but to that I reply "That's because maybe I really don't want to do it that badly." And that is the truth, because if I really did want to go to Europe, I'd make it happen somehow. If it was that important to me, I'd quit the job and scrounge up the money and just go without thinking of anything else.
I've done it in the past with other things, and I still possess that insane edge, that fearless ability to take the risk and gamble on myself because there is a goal in sight.
And sometimes the gamble doesn't pay off, but more often than not it does pay off.
And that's why I am lucky.
And that's why I am glad to be alive.
Have a great weekend, folks. Watch the Oscars, make love, do whatever it is you have to do. Live your life as if it were the greatest adventure ever experienced.
On that note, here's one of my favorite Dylan tunes, a song that captures the lucky feeling I get when I'm living my life and loving it.
I always figured that "lucky" people were the ones who always made money in Las Vegas, or ended up picking up the hot girls in bars, or ended up inheriting a tidy sum from a distant uncle.
What I've come to realize is that the things I listed above are forms of luck, manifestations (if you will) of different types of fortune.
But to be lucky in the true sense is to be thrown back and forth between the opposing poles of good and bad circumstance, eventually finding the even path and regaining one's balance.
In that regard, I am truly a lucky person. And my good luck is always offset by bad luck, because that's how my life is and always will be.
I am lucky because I have never been out of money, and even though I am not rich on the other hand I've never been destitute.
I am lucky because I have a roof overhead that's cheaper to rent than most and is located in a quiet neighborhood. For what I pay, I have more space than some of my friends who pay more for approximately the same square footage.
I am lucky because, even though I am not in love or involved with anyone right now, it is better to have loved and lost than to not have loved at all. Plus, I know the next time I fall in love it will be meaningful and real, deep and intense. I know this because every time I have ever been in love, it has been all of those things and more.
I am lucky because I have a family that cares for me and would help me out if I were really in a jam. Their love is unconditional, but at the same time it helps that they have never had to shake their heads in disgust at my behavior. For all of my partying and excess and criminal posturing, I am relatively a saint in their eyes. I have never caused them grief or heartache, and they even worry about me because they feel that I am too sensitive and "soft" for this world. But they trust me, and when I am down they are there to help me stand up on my own two feet again.
I am lucky because I get to do what I want to do every day, for the most part. Someone might say, "Well, you can't afford to just buy a plane ticket and fly to Europe" but to that I reply "That's because maybe I really don't want to do it that badly." And that is the truth, because if I really did want to go to Europe, I'd make it happen somehow. If it was that important to me, I'd quit the job and scrounge up the money and just go without thinking of anything else.
I've done it in the past with other things, and I still possess that insane edge, that fearless ability to take the risk and gamble on myself because there is a goal in sight.
And sometimes the gamble doesn't pay off, but more often than not it does pay off.
And that's why I am lucky.
And that's why I am glad to be alive.
Have a great weekend, folks. Watch the Oscars, make love, do whatever it is you have to do. Live your life as if it were the greatest adventure ever experienced.
On that note, here's one of my favorite Dylan tunes, a song that captures the lucky feeling I get when I'm living my life and loving it.
Monday, February 19, 2007
prayer
For the first time in my life, I am crying out for help.
The help I need is in the form of a prayer (or prayers).
I am asking everyone who reads this blog to say a prayer for me. I am hitting a new low in the trajectory of my life and I feel helpless and powerless, unable (or perhaps unwilling) to do anything about it.
Even if you are an atheist or doubt the existence of God or pray to some other deity or don't pray at all, please say one for me.
At this point, I'll take all the help I can get.
*/*
The cocaine problem never went away.
Instead, it took a hiatus. After the new year began I did go sober, and it lasted for quite a while. I went a whole month without buying anything. I was still using occasionally, especially when friends came over and wanted to get their fix of whatever in my apartment. But I was not spending money on it, and that was good.
I was done with the cocaine, and one of the things that kept me away was knowing that the stuff I'd been doing was total crap: cut beyond belief, to the extent that I could no longer bear the symptoms of the "comedown". My nose would burn as if on fire; my teeth and gums would ache and keep me awake when I was trying to sleep; my sinuses were blown out, and I kept blowing weird-looking pink mucus out of my nose for days after each coke binge.
Not wanting to feel so crappy made my decision much easier. I felt my sanity returning and my body was rejuvenating itself. I didn't need pot to fill the void, which was the one thing about sniffing coke that made me somewhat happy.
Then, I met Gerald.
*/*
That last sentence was a bit misleading.
I'd met Gerald years ago, when I was playing in Holly Golightly's band. Gerald was a friend of Ben, aka "Snake", the rhythm guitarist for the group.
Don't let the nickname "Snake" fool you-- Ben is a great guy and an honest man, and the "Snake" handle came about as a joke in a pool hall one night while hanging out with some friends. A stranger who wanted to shoot pool with Ben and his buddy asked if they were sharks, and Ben's friend made-up the name Snake for him, as if to imply that a guy named Snake should not be trusted when it came to playing billiards for money.
Anyway, Gerald came by Snake's house one day a few years ago. The band rehearsed at Snake's spacious mansion in the Santa Susana Pass slightly west of Topanga Canyon because no one ever complained about the noise and there was so much room for us to jam out and store our gear.
Gerald is in his mid-fifties, originally from Boston. He could be someone's dad or uncle if you didn't know him already. He likes to drink but on the surface you'd never know that not only does he like to get high but that he grows his own weed and sells it for relatively cheap.
The day he came over to watch us rehearse, Evan the drummer was late. There was always an excuse or crazy story with Evan, so we were not surprised at all by his tardiness. However, we were getting less and less tolerant of his flaky ways with each passing week.
Out of frustration and boredom, I announced that I would play on the drums until Evan showed up. I already knew my bass lines and didn't need to practice them right then and there. I'm not a very good drummer but I can keep time, and we'd already tried to practice without Evan but the lack of a backbeat made it difficult. Actually, to be honest, the members of the band just couldn't get into it without the drums providing the pulse.
So I sat down on the drum stool and ran through three songs to the best of my limited ability. It wasn't a great practice, but at least the others felt more comfortable with something as opposed to nothing. I was having fun trying to duplicate some of Evan's fills and drum parts, curious to see how long I could hold on before giving up out of exhaustion.
Afterwards, when Evan showed up and we ran through the entire set list, all of us went outside to relax and smoke and drink. Gerald came up to me, his breath reeking of beer, and patted me on the back, his salt-and-pepper mustache bouncing up and down as he complimented my drumming.
"You, kid..." he said, his Bostonian accent cutting sharp edges into his words, "You're a fuckin' genius! You drum better than the other guy! Seriously, no shit. I was totally floored by what you did in there. You just got up, grabbed the sticks, and bashed those fuckers in. You're the soul of this group, I'll tell ya!"
Of course, I was humble... at first. But the accolades kept coming, and I gradually let them sit with me inside my head.
"I try," I said after some time had passed and Gerald's praise had not relented in the slightest. "I'm not the best, but I'm not gonna let things like our drummer being late get in the way of..."
"Fuck that guy! You're the one who's going to go places! Everyone else in this group... they're good, don't get me wrong. But they don't got what you got-- even Ben, bless his soul. I bet you could outplay Ben on the axe any day."
"Well, I wouldn't say that..."
"I know you wouldn't. You're modest, that's why! You don't think you're the shit, but you are. You're the shit. Accept it already!"
Gerald pulled out a joint and gave it to me to light up. "I grew this myself, you know."
I took a pull off of it. "Damn," I coughed, "this is some good shit!"
"Hey, you deserve it, kid. You've got what it takes, I can feel it."
And that's how I met Gerald.
*/*
After that day I saw Gerald whenever he'd come to our shows. But that was near the end of our run as a band, and even though I kept in touch with everyone post-breakup I didn't see Gerald for years.
Then around the end of January I gave Snake a ride out to meet one of his friends in the West Valley. Snake was without a car and had to pay back some money he owed, and he asked me if I could help him.
I picked Snake up and asked if I could use his cel phone to call a friend who asked me to call him later in the evening. The friend told me that he had called the coke dealer we'd been scoring from but he wasn't going to be around until well after midnight. It was five after eight, and he wanted to know if I could go out and meet the guy where he was hanging out since I was already on the road.
"I don't know, man," I said over the phone. "I'm trying not to do it, and that's a long way to drive just for some yay." I used the slang abbreviation for llello, which is Spanish for cocaine.
Snake looked at me and motioned for me to hold the phone. "You're looking for some C?" Another slang term for the white stuff.
"I'm not-- this guy is," I said to Snake, pointing to the cel.
"Gerald's got some."
"Gerald? You mean East Coast Gerald?"
"Yeah. Let me call him. How much does he want?"
"Uh, I dunno... how much will Gerald sell?"
"$60 increments."
"Well, we already pay $40 for the other stuff, but that's because he won't do twenties anymore. How cut is Gerald's stuff?"
"Very pure. Not really cut. It's always the same, it never varies. Mild high, but it won't make you wanna rip your hair out."
I discussed the situation with my friend in the vaguest possible manner, and he agreed to give it a try. if it wasn't good stuff, he reasoned, then he could always call the other guy later on.
"OK, Snake," I said as I hung up the cel and gave it back to him. "Should we hit Gerald up before or after we make this errand?"
Snake laughed. "Actually, he's the one I'm going to see. You're taking me right to him."
"Really?"
"Yeah."
"Will he be cool with me asking?"
"Dude, he loves you. Remember?"
"Yeah, I guess you're right. Well, call him now and ask him if he can have it ready."
That night, I had a taste of Gerald's product, and it was amazing how different his stuff was compared to the other stuff: not hard on the nose, relatively pure, didn't smell like ether or gasoline, wasn't in rock form (it was granulated powder), and when it was all gone I was able to go to sleep!
And the next morning, it was as if I didn't do any at all. No aches and pains, no corroded pink earthworms lodged in my nose, and no burn.
I started buying it again, but from Gerald. I swore off the other shit, the cut shit. There were so many advantages to getting it from Gerald-- no more trips to the 'hood because Gerald lived in a nice suburban part of the Valley; no more long waits because Gerald was on time whenever I called him for an order; no more delays and being put off until the next day either.
I told myself I would only buy on the weekends, and I've pretty much kept up that end of my bargain with myself. But I also told myself that buying from Gerald would help me to wean off of the stuff. I reasoned that since it was the kind of high that I could walk away from and not think about until the weekend came, I could eventually learn to do without it at all.
On that point, I'm beginning to see that I was wrong.
*/*
The coke high, for me, is all about pure ego gratification.
Unlike other drugs, the pleasure comes not from reveling in the side effects. Rather, the pleasure comes from the sense of well-being that overcomes me when I do it. It's as if someone is patting me on the back and commending me for a job well done for a good half an hour. When the drug's effects start to wane, it's as simple as cutting up another line and inhaling it, and voila! I'm back to pretending that my ass is being kissed non-stop.
Other drugs seem to disable the ego, and therein lies their appeal. Marijuana causes euphoria and a sense of well-being, but not to the extent of cocaine. The pot high is more of an id gratification-- you do it because it feels good, not because you feel like you've accomplished anything. The ego is muted when I'm stoned, whereas the ego is overstimulated when I'm tweaking.
Acid, mushrooms, peyote-- those drugs are total ego destroyers. You have to let go of your self-esteem and all of its attachments in order to enjoy them. On the other hand, MDMA (Ecstasy) is like a mix of coke and pot in that it massages the ego but also causes you to surrender to your pleasure principle.
Adding to cocaine's insidious nature is the fact that (now that I am doing cleaner coke) I have more than doubled my intake. Although I can make it through the week and through a work shift without buying or doing any, I overcompensate on the weekends. Many friends and acquaintances have remarked on the amounts I snort when we are all together partying. These people have been doing it for much longer than me, and yet their eyes bulge out and their jaws drop when they see the gaggers I cut for them and myself. They take a look at the size of the lines I have prepared for them and insist on doing only half or a mere fraction. When they are done, I swoop down and finish off what they left on their plate, minutes after sniffing rails the size of my pinkie finger.
One night I did $100 worth straight to my head. By the end of my stash I could no longer get high-- if anything it was making me more tired instead of pepping me up. I told my guests that I was going to go to sleep and that they could stay for as long as they wanted just as long as they locked my door when they left.
I received a phone call less than an hour later from one of the guests, who left shortly after I retired for the night. He wanted to make sure that I was OK and that I hadn't died or gotten sick or choked on my own vomit or something horrible like that. I laughed and reassured them that I was fine, but when I hung up I took a look at myself in the mirror and saw that my face was fatigued and beaten. I looked old, weathered, like I'd aged ten years overnight.
On top of all of that, the shit's expensive. I am not in terrible financial trouble yet, but if I continue down this road I will be. Even at the height of my pot use I was not spending $100 in one sitting. And if I did ever spend $100 on weed, it lasted me for more than just a few hours-- $100 worth of grass could last me for a month if I was frugal with it.
Last week I was so happy because I'd been propositioned by a fellow cokehead and turned him down flat. He wanted to know if I wanted to split some with him and I refused, saying that if I was going to buy any it would be on the weekend. I felt good about not giving in, especially since Valentine's Day was coming and I was being inundated on all sides by love propaganda that usually makes me feel lonely and unwanted.
I held out until Saturday, and then I dropped close to $200 on the clean stuff. It was gone by Sunday morning, and I spent the rest of the day catching up on sleep and wondering how I could just waste my money like that when I have bills to pay, things to take care of and a life to live.
Even though it wasn't the cut stuff that had me using on a daily basis and even though I didn't have a hangover the next day, I still felt like utter shit.
*/*
And that's why I am pleading for your prayers, kind people.
I have not hit rock bottom yet, but I would like to spare myself the pain and embarrassment of losing everything I've worked so hard for over a drug habit.
I now fully understand the plight of every person I've ever met or known who found themselves in my shoes. I must admit, I could never comprehend why coke addicts couldn't exhibit any will power. And now, I cannot even understand my own lack of will power.
I am above this. I know better. I am not stupid. But yet I'm doing stupid things, and I cannot seem to make it stick whenever I tell myself to kick.
It's not over for me, so please keep me in your thoughts and root for me. I may not be able to hear your prayers, but they will reach me somehow.
I can't do it alone. I need to get away from the people who use it, from the people who sell it, from the people who are afraid to lecture me because they don't want to anger me.
I have to stop using it.
I have to.
The help I need is in the form of a prayer (or prayers).
I am asking everyone who reads this blog to say a prayer for me. I am hitting a new low in the trajectory of my life and I feel helpless and powerless, unable (or perhaps unwilling) to do anything about it.
Even if you are an atheist or doubt the existence of God or pray to some other deity or don't pray at all, please say one for me.
At this point, I'll take all the help I can get.
*/*
The cocaine problem never went away.
Instead, it took a hiatus. After the new year began I did go sober, and it lasted for quite a while. I went a whole month without buying anything. I was still using occasionally, especially when friends came over and wanted to get their fix of whatever in my apartment. But I was not spending money on it, and that was good.
I was done with the cocaine, and one of the things that kept me away was knowing that the stuff I'd been doing was total crap: cut beyond belief, to the extent that I could no longer bear the symptoms of the "comedown". My nose would burn as if on fire; my teeth and gums would ache and keep me awake when I was trying to sleep; my sinuses were blown out, and I kept blowing weird-looking pink mucus out of my nose for days after each coke binge.
Not wanting to feel so crappy made my decision much easier. I felt my sanity returning and my body was rejuvenating itself. I didn't need pot to fill the void, which was the one thing about sniffing coke that made me somewhat happy.
Then, I met Gerald.
*/*
That last sentence was a bit misleading.
I'd met Gerald years ago, when I was playing in Holly Golightly's band. Gerald was a friend of Ben, aka "Snake", the rhythm guitarist for the group.
Don't let the nickname "Snake" fool you-- Ben is a great guy and an honest man, and the "Snake" handle came about as a joke in a pool hall one night while hanging out with some friends. A stranger who wanted to shoot pool with Ben and his buddy asked if they were sharks, and Ben's friend made-up the name Snake for him, as if to imply that a guy named Snake should not be trusted when it came to playing billiards for money.
Anyway, Gerald came by Snake's house one day a few years ago. The band rehearsed at Snake's spacious mansion in the Santa Susana Pass slightly west of Topanga Canyon because no one ever complained about the noise and there was so much room for us to jam out and store our gear.
Gerald is in his mid-fifties, originally from Boston. He could be someone's dad or uncle if you didn't know him already. He likes to drink but on the surface you'd never know that not only does he like to get high but that he grows his own weed and sells it for relatively cheap.
The day he came over to watch us rehearse, Evan the drummer was late. There was always an excuse or crazy story with Evan, so we were not surprised at all by his tardiness. However, we were getting less and less tolerant of his flaky ways with each passing week.
Out of frustration and boredom, I announced that I would play on the drums until Evan showed up. I already knew my bass lines and didn't need to practice them right then and there. I'm not a very good drummer but I can keep time, and we'd already tried to practice without Evan but the lack of a backbeat made it difficult. Actually, to be honest, the members of the band just couldn't get into it without the drums providing the pulse.
So I sat down on the drum stool and ran through three songs to the best of my limited ability. It wasn't a great practice, but at least the others felt more comfortable with something as opposed to nothing. I was having fun trying to duplicate some of Evan's fills and drum parts, curious to see how long I could hold on before giving up out of exhaustion.
Afterwards, when Evan showed up and we ran through the entire set list, all of us went outside to relax and smoke and drink. Gerald came up to me, his breath reeking of beer, and patted me on the back, his salt-and-pepper mustache bouncing up and down as he complimented my drumming.
"You, kid..." he said, his Bostonian accent cutting sharp edges into his words, "You're a fuckin' genius! You drum better than the other guy! Seriously, no shit. I was totally floored by what you did in there. You just got up, grabbed the sticks, and bashed those fuckers in. You're the soul of this group, I'll tell ya!"
Of course, I was humble... at first. But the accolades kept coming, and I gradually let them sit with me inside my head.
"I try," I said after some time had passed and Gerald's praise had not relented in the slightest. "I'm not the best, but I'm not gonna let things like our drummer being late get in the way of..."
"Fuck that guy! You're the one who's going to go places! Everyone else in this group... they're good, don't get me wrong. But they don't got what you got-- even Ben, bless his soul. I bet you could outplay Ben on the axe any day."
"Well, I wouldn't say that..."
"I know you wouldn't. You're modest, that's why! You don't think you're the shit, but you are. You're the shit. Accept it already!"
Gerald pulled out a joint and gave it to me to light up. "I grew this myself, you know."
I took a pull off of it. "Damn," I coughed, "this is some good shit!"
"Hey, you deserve it, kid. You've got what it takes, I can feel it."
And that's how I met Gerald.
*/*
After that day I saw Gerald whenever he'd come to our shows. But that was near the end of our run as a band, and even though I kept in touch with everyone post-breakup I didn't see Gerald for years.
Then around the end of January I gave Snake a ride out to meet one of his friends in the West Valley. Snake was without a car and had to pay back some money he owed, and he asked me if I could help him.
I picked Snake up and asked if I could use his cel phone to call a friend who asked me to call him later in the evening. The friend told me that he had called the coke dealer we'd been scoring from but he wasn't going to be around until well after midnight. It was five after eight, and he wanted to know if I could go out and meet the guy where he was hanging out since I was already on the road.
"I don't know, man," I said over the phone. "I'm trying not to do it, and that's a long way to drive just for some yay." I used the slang abbreviation for llello, which is Spanish for cocaine.
Snake looked at me and motioned for me to hold the phone. "You're looking for some C?" Another slang term for the white stuff.
"I'm not-- this guy is," I said to Snake, pointing to the cel.
"Gerald's got some."
"Gerald? You mean East Coast Gerald?"
"Yeah. Let me call him. How much does he want?"
"Uh, I dunno... how much will Gerald sell?"
"$60 increments."
"Well, we already pay $40 for the other stuff, but that's because he won't do twenties anymore. How cut is Gerald's stuff?"
"Very pure. Not really cut. It's always the same, it never varies. Mild high, but it won't make you wanna rip your hair out."
I discussed the situation with my friend in the vaguest possible manner, and he agreed to give it a try. if it wasn't good stuff, he reasoned, then he could always call the other guy later on.
"OK, Snake," I said as I hung up the cel and gave it back to him. "Should we hit Gerald up before or after we make this errand?"
Snake laughed. "Actually, he's the one I'm going to see. You're taking me right to him."
"Really?"
"Yeah."
"Will he be cool with me asking?"
"Dude, he loves you. Remember?"
"Yeah, I guess you're right. Well, call him now and ask him if he can have it ready."
That night, I had a taste of Gerald's product, and it was amazing how different his stuff was compared to the other stuff: not hard on the nose, relatively pure, didn't smell like ether or gasoline, wasn't in rock form (it was granulated powder), and when it was all gone I was able to go to sleep!
And the next morning, it was as if I didn't do any at all. No aches and pains, no corroded pink earthworms lodged in my nose, and no burn.
I started buying it again, but from Gerald. I swore off the other shit, the cut shit. There were so many advantages to getting it from Gerald-- no more trips to the 'hood because Gerald lived in a nice suburban part of the Valley; no more long waits because Gerald was on time whenever I called him for an order; no more delays and being put off until the next day either.
I told myself I would only buy on the weekends, and I've pretty much kept up that end of my bargain with myself. But I also told myself that buying from Gerald would help me to wean off of the stuff. I reasoned that since it was the kind of high that I could walk away from and not think about until the weekend came, I could eventually learn to do without it at all.
On that point, I'm beginning to see that I was wrong.
*/*
The coke high, for me, is all about pure ego gratification.
Unlike other drugs, the pleasure comes not from reveling in the side effects. Rather, the pleasure comes from the sense of well-being that overcomes me when I do it. It's as if someone is patting me on the back and commending me for a job well done for a good half an hour. When the drug's effects start to wane, it's as simple as cutting up another line and inhaling it, and voila! I'm back to pretending that my ass is being kissed non-stop.
Other drugs seem to disable the ego, and therein lies their appeal. Marijuana causes euphoria and a sense of well-being, but not to the extent of cocaine. The pot high is more of an id gratification-- you do it because it feels good, not because you feel like you've accomplished anything. The ego is muted when I'm stoned, whereas the ego is overstimulated when I'm tweaking.
Acid, mushrooms, peyote-- those drugs are total ego destroyers. You have to let go of your self-esteem and all of its attachments in order to enjoy them. On the other hand, MDMA (Ecstasy) is like a mix of coke and pot in that it massages the ego but also causes you to surrender to your pleasure principle.
Adding to cocaine's insidious nature is the fact that (now that I am doing cleaner coke) I have more than doubled my intake. Although I can make it through the week and through a work shift without buying or doing any, I overcompensate on the weekends. Many friends and acquaintances have remarked on the amounts I snort when we are all together partying. These people have been doing it for much longer than me, and yet their eyes bulge out and their jaws drop when they see the gaggers I cut for them and myself. They take a look at the size of the lines I have prepared for them and insist on doing only half or a mere fraction. When they are done, I swoop down and finish off what they left on their plate, minutes after sniffing rails the size of my pinkie finger.
One night I did $100 worth straight to my head. By the end of my stash I could no longer get high-- if anything it was making me more tired instead of pepping me up. I told my guests that I was going to go to sleep and that they could stay for as long as they wanted just as long as they locked my door when they left.
I received a phone call less than an hour later from one of the guests, who left shortly after I retired for the night. He wanted to make sure that I was OK and that I hadn't died or gotten sick or choked on my own vomit or something horrible like that. I laughed and reassured them that I was fine, but when I hung up I took a look at myself in the mirror and saw that my face was fatigued and beaten. I looked old, weathered, like I'd aged ten years overnight.
On top of all of that, the shit's expensive. I am not in terrible financial trouble yet, but if I continue down this road I will be. Even at the height of my pot use I was not spending $100 in one sitting. And if I did ever spend $100 on weed, it lasted me for more than just a few hours-- $100 worth of grass could last me for a month if I was frugal with it.
Last week I was so happy because I'd been propositioned by a fellow cokehead and turned him down flat. He wanted to know if I wanted to split some with him and I refused, saying that if I was going to buy any it would be on the weekend. I felt good about not giving in, especially since Valentine's Day was coming and I was being inundated on all sides by love propaganda that usually makes me feel lonely and unwanted.
I held out until Saturday, and then I dropped close to $200 on the clean stuff. It was gone by Sunday morning, and I spent the rest of the day catching up on sleep and wondering how I could just waste my money like that when I have bills to pay, things to take care of and a life to live.
Even though it wasn't the cut stuff that had me using on a daily basis and even though I didn't have a hangover the next day, I still felt like utter shit.
*/*
And that's why I am pleading for your prayers, kind people.
I have not hit rock bottom yet, but I would like to spare myself the pain and embarrassment of losing everything I've worked so hard for over a drug habit.
I now fully understand the plight of every person I've ever met or known who found themselves in my shoes. I must admit, I could never comprehend why coke addicts couldn't exhibit any will power. And now, I cannot even understand my own lack of will power.
I am above this. I know better. I am not stupid. But yet I'm doing stupid things, and I cannot seem to make it stick whenever I tell myself to kick.
It's not over for me, so please keep me in your thoughts and root for me. I may not be able to hear your prayers, but they will reach me somehow.
I can't do it alone. I need to get away from the people who use it, from the people who sell it, from the people who are afraid to lecture me because they don't want to anger me.
I have to stop using it.
I have to.
Wednesday, February 14, 2007
what is love?
So often in these blog pages I have questioned my own ability to love and be loved.
But I know now that I have the capacity for it.
I recently thought about the beginning of the spring of 2005, the night before Monique was supposed to fly home to Virginia. I was running late en route to the house where she was staying, and by the time I got to her front steps she was smoking a cigarette and waiting for me.
Monique said to me that she was tired, and that she just wanted to get to sleep so she could catch her plane in the morning, and that it was hard enough as it was leaving again without having to get all emotional over it. Then she looked at me and asked if I was upset.
My normal reaction on any ordinary day would've been to swallow, then restrain my hurt as I insist that it's no big deal and that it's OK. But that night, I had to admit that I was upset, because I didn't know if I would ever see her again after that.
But I didn't want to get angry either.
So I smiled, shook my head briefly, looked Monique in the eyes and said, "Yes, I am upset."
She smiled back. We embraced for a long time and shared one more kiss. I bid her adieu and drove home, slightly depressed but grateful for the two weeks we spent together.
The next day, she called me up in the early evening to tell me that she overslept and missed her flight. She re-booked it for a few days later.
We met each other later on and had us a proper going-away celebration that night. And after she finally did leave for real, I wondered if she really missed her flight or if she intentionally stayed behind in order to give me what she figured she might have owed me.
Ultimately, I decided that she didn't owe me anything, and chalked up her delayed departure to circumstance... but I always felt good about speaking my heart to her at that moment. Even if it wasn't the primary motivation behind her re-scheduled trip, I think it might have helped her to accept her situation with more grace at the very least.
It was one of the few times in my life when I did not let my defenses get the best of me. Yes, I was upset-- but the smile was to show her that it really was OK if she had to go and was too exhausted to be with me.
She expected me to pout and sulk. When I didn't, it reaffirmed something for her, and it surprised me that I didn't hesitate to bare my soul so frankly.
Thinking about that moment has made an otherwise lonely Valentine's Day week much more tolerable. I know I have it in me, if I'd only give myself the chance.
I'm calling her tomorrow morning, to let her know that I will be visiting her in a couple of months. I hope she will be glad to hear that.
Happy Valentine's Day, everybody!
But I know now that I have the capacity for it.
I recently thought about the beginning of the spring of 2005, the night before Monique was supposed to fly home to Virginia. I was running late en route to the house where she was staying, and by the time I got to her front steps she was smoking a cigarette and waiting for me.
Monique said to me that she was tired, and that she just wanted to get to sleep so she could catch her plane in the morning, and that it was hard enough as it was leaving again without having to get all emotional over it. Then she looked at me and asked if I was upset.
My normal reaction on any ordinary day would've been to swallow, then restrain my hurt as I insist that it's no big deal and that it's OK. But that night, I had to admit that I was upset, because I didn't know if I would ever see her again after that.
But I didn't want to get angry either.
So I smiled, shook my head briefly, looked Monique in the eyes and said, "Yes, I am upset."
She smiled back. We embraced for a long time and shared one more kiss. I bid her adieu and drove home, slightly depressed but grateful for the two weeks we spent together.
The next day, she called me up in the early evening to tell me that she overslept and missed her flight. She re-booked it for a few days later.
We met each other later on and had us a proper going-away celebration that night. And after she finally did leave for real, I wondered if she really missed her flight or if she intentionally stayed behind in order to give me what she figured she might have owed me.
Ultimately, I decided that she didn't owe me anything, and chalked up her delayed departure to circumstance... but I always felt good about speaking my heart to her at that moment. Even if it wasn't the primary motivation behind her re-scheduled trip, I think it might have helped her to accept her situation with more grace at the very least.
It was one of the few times in my life when I did not let my defenses get the best of me. Yes, I was upset-- but the smile was to show her that it really was OK if she had to go and was too exhausted to be with me.
She expected me to pout and sulk. When I didn't, it reaffirmed something for her, and it surprised me that I didn't hesitate to bare my soul so frankly.
Thinking about that moment has made an otherwise lonely Valentine's Day week much more tolerable. I know I have it in me, if I'd only give myself the chance.
I'm calling her tomorrow morning, to let her know that I will be visiting her in a couple of months. I hope she will be glad to hear that.
Happy Valentine's Day, everybody!
Monday, February 12, 2007
???
I really don't know why, and I don't think trying to explain it would help... but I am happier right now than I have been in a long, long time.
Analyzing and trying to rationalize it only serve to de-mystify it. I have no answers, no solutions, no way of knowing how this happened or why.
All I know is, I'm sharing it with anyone out there who still bothers to read this.
Take care!
Analyzing and trying to rationalize it only serve to de-mystify it. I have no answers, no solutions, no way of knowing how this happened or why.
All I know is, I'm sharing it with anyone out there who still bothers to read this.
Take care!
Tuesday, February 06, 2007
twilight
For my birthday my mother bought me two books: Volumes One and Two of a short collection entitled Richard Matheson's The Twilight Zone Scripts. I felt it was probably the best gift I received for my birthday this year, which is saying a lot because overall this year's proceedings went well.
I always forget how much I love The Twilight Zone. I loved it as a kid and I still love it as an adult. It has a timeless quality, a classic tableau of iconography and imagery attached to its fame and legacy.
A little known fact: Rod Serling, as well as other TZ writers like Charles Beaumont and the aforementioned Matheson, was a huge inspiration on my writing. Rod Serling was an excellent wordsmith whose imagination was rivaled only by those he handpicked to write on his show, like Beaumont and Matheson. His public image (dapper attire, pinched voice, cigarette in hand) overshadows his talent as one of the few Golden Age of Television "teleplaywrights" that ever became prominent.
What is a "teleplaywright", you may be asking yourself? It is exactly what it sounds like: a playwright whose works were written specifically for television. The word "teleplay" is still in use, only nowadays the people who create these teleplays are merely referred to as writers. But in the '50s Rod Serling elevated the art of the teleplay to such a level that he could accurately be labeled a teleplaywright.
Times were much, much different back then: Television was a brand new frontier, and the potential for TV to offer audiences more than just mindless programming was still there. Can you believe during those years, when Serling was cutting his teeth on shows like CBS' Playhouse 90, that once upon a time plays of a theatrical caliber were being broadcast on live television?
How far we have fallen as a race of humans that we cannot conceive of anything like that happening today. Watching a play on TV? Sounds boring, especially to anyone under the age of 40. Plus, with all the fucking commercials blaring at us from our TiVo-powered HDTV sets, who could even enjoy a play being shown on the air anyway? A play is far too intimate for the narrow confines of today's prime-time TV mentality.
If Serling had a drawback, it was his tendency to polemicize. He could get too wordy with his dialogue, and had a tendency to hit people over the head with his messages, whether they were cultural, social or political. Indeed, even his best teleplays for TZ are hopelessly dated and peppered with references to McCarthyism and Castro... not that those points of reference mar the beauty of his words or the potency of his finest creation, a show that lasted for five seasons, won many awards, showcased dozens of talented actors and writers, and has endured throughout the ages thanks to its loyal fan base, of which I am a proud member.
*/*
We all have our favorites, don't we?
The episode that scared the living hell out of you as a youngster, the one that made you laugh, the one you didn't understand fully until you came of age, or the one that mesmerized you because of its surreal set design and lighting...
Yes, we all have our favorites.
Mine is "Eye Of The Beholder": "No change! No change at all!"
A show like TZ is so famous and recognizable that all I have to do is quote one line from the episode and you know which one I'm talking about.
How about "To Serve Man"? "It's a cookbook!"
And of course, "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" starring pre-Star Trek William Shatner: "There's a man out there!"
Then there's the lesser known favorites of mine, the most outstanding in my mind being "The Obsolete Man", a terrific political fable that condemned totalitarianism and fascism with a moral authority that I wish to God still existed in this day and age, when we need it most.
To quote from Serling's introduction to that episode:
"This is not a new world-- it is simply an extension of what began in the old one. It has patterned itself after every dictator who has ever planted the ripping imprint of a boot on the pages of history since the beginning of time. It has refinements, technological advancements, and a more sophisticated approach to the destruction of freedom. But like every one of the superstates that preceded it, it has one iron rule: logic is an enemy and truth is a menace."
Does that ring a bell? Almost sounds like he's talking about our current political climate, doesn't it?
The more things change, the more they stay the same, I guess.
I loved "The Obsolete Man" when I first saw it because it was very Kafka-esque, evoking a claustrophobic vision of a future far more frightening than pig-nosed doctors or gremlins on the wing. Whenever I have the extreme pleasure of watching this episode again, I am moved not only by the gravity of the performances (Fritz Weaver as The Chancellor and Burgess Meredith, better known as the hapless bookworm from the classic TZ episode "Time Enough At Last", playing The Obsolete Man) but also the eloquence of the dialogue. It was written as a teleplay but could easily be performed by two actors on a bare stage anywhere in the free-thinking world.
Ultimately, this episode only revolves around the dynamic between Weaver's cruel autocrat and Meredith's humane librarian, and the episode's resolution remains a strong and searing rebuke of the nihilism that poisons the minds of so many people living in the world today. Unlike other episodes, where the O. Henry-style twist knocks everyone off their feet in the third act, the reversal of fortunes in "The Obsolete Man" hammer home one of the few political statements that Serling ever made that is more relevant today than it was when he first made them.
When The Chancellor realizes that he has been rendered "obsolete" by the very panel he was once a part of, his denials fall upon callous, indifferent ears. As he meets his fate, Serling steps in and delivers the final word:
"The late Chancellor was only partly correct. He was obsolete. But so was the State, the entity he worshipped. Any state, any entity, any ideology that fails to recognize the worth, the dignity, the rights of man... that state is obsolete. A case to be filed under M for mankind in The Twilight Zone."
Where are people like Rod Serling now when we really, really need them?
*/*
I just found out today, while doing some pre-blog research, that Rod Serling suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder for the rest of his life following his tour of duty in the military near the end of WWII.
In other words, Rod Serling lived in his own Twilight Zone.
So did Richard Matheson, for that matter. As evidenced by the two volumes my parents bought me for my birthday, Matheson (in his own words) was an imaginative weirdo, always looking for the strangest angle on everyday things we all take for granted. What would happen if you looked out the window of an airplane and saw a man on the wing? What if a WWI flying ace traveled through time and landed at a modern-day Air Force base? How would you feel if one day you were alone in your office at work and suddenly you heard a man yell out "Cut!" and you turned around and realized that you were right in the middle of a movie set?
Matheson was the creative genius of the three main writers. If Serling was the The Twilight Zone's superego and Charles Beaumont its tortured id, then Matheson was the confident ego, an extremely visceral storyteller with a gift for finding the most far-out concept and making it seem plausible.
And speaking of Beaumont, let's not forget about the dark star of this sci-fi fantasy triumvirate. Beaumont was easily the most fucked-up of the three main writers whose scripts provided the basic structure for the series. Raised by an abusive mother who punished him in bizarre ways such as killing his pets and forcing him to dress up like a girl, Beaumont was a twisted talent whose contributions to the show were populated by world-weary, desperate characters who had already gone to the brink and back, sometimes on some chimerical quest to try and make things right again.
More often than not, Beaumont's characters wanted to die, although sometimes (as in the case of Kevin McCarthy in "Long Live Walter Jameson") they wanted to cheat death as well. Either way, man's mortality was the main focus of Beaumont's best TZ teleplays.
Beaumont not only lived in The Twilight Zone with Serling and Matheson, but he wanted to escape, perhaps more than the others did. When he died in 1967 at the age of 38, due to complications brought on by either Alzheimer's Disease or a continuation of the meningitis he suffered as a young boy, perhaps he finally made that escape.
All this confirms for me that the maxim about writing what you know is not only true, but applies to even the unlikeliest authors in regards to their work. One might be tempted to ask how a science fiction or fantasy writer could possibly write about what he or she knows when what they are writing about is not even real sometimes, but it is plain to see that the personality of a writer automatically injects itself into his work whether he knows it or not. Therefore, even if a writer is inventing imaginary worlds or creating characters that could never exist realistically, it is still a part of them because it sprang from their minds and from their hearts.
Maybe that's why I like The Twilight Zone so much: because I live in The Twilight Zone as well, but only I live on a different block and my rent is much cheaper.
And now, as an added bonus: The final episode that ever aired during the original run of The Twilight Zone, which in actuality was a French short film adaptation of Ambrose Bierce's short story "An Occurrrence At Owl Creek Bridge"...
I always forget how much I love The Twilight Zone. I loved it as a kid and I still love it as an adult. It has a timeless quality, a classic tableau of iconography and imagery attached to its fame and legacy.
A little known fact: Rod Serling, as well as other TZ writers like Charles Beaumont and the aforementioned Matheson, was a huge inspiration on my writing. Rod Serling was an excellent wordsmith whose imagination was rivaled only by those he handpicked to write on his show, like Beaumont and Matheson. His public image (dapper attire, pinched voice, cigarette in hand) overshadows his talent as one of the few Golden Age of Television "teleplaywrights" that ever became prominent.
What is a "teleplaywright", you may be asking yourself? It is exactly what it sounds like: a playwright whose works were written specifically for television. The word "teleplay" is still in use, only nowadays the people who create these teleplays are merely referred to as writers. But in the '50s Rod Serling elevated the art of the teleplay to such a level that he could accurately be labeled a teleplaywright.
Times were much, much different back then: Television was a brand new frontier, and the potential for TV to offer audiences more than just mindless programming was still there. Can you believe during those years, when Serling was cutting his teeth on shows like CBS' Playhouse 90, that once upon a time plays of a theatrical caliber were being broadcast on live television?
How far we have fallen as a race of humans that we cannot conceive of anything like that happening today. Watching a play on TV? Sounds boring, especially to anyone under the age of 40. Plus, with all the fucking commercials blaring at us from our TiVo-powered HDTV sets, who could even enjoy a play being shown on the air anyway? A play is far too intimate for the narrow confines of today's prime-time TV mentality.
If Serling had a drawback, it was his tendency to polemicize. He could get too wordy with his dialogue, and had a tendency to hit people over the head with his messages, whether they were cultural, social or political. Indeed, even his best teleplays for TZ are hopelessly dated and peppered with references to McCarthyism and Castro... not that those points of reference mar the beauty of his words or the potency of his finest creation, a show that lasted for five seasons, won many awards, showcased dozens of talented actors and writers, and has endured throughout the ages thanks to its loyal fan base, of which I am a proud member.
*/*
We all have our favorites, don't we?
The episode that scared the living hell out of you as a youngster, the one that made you laugh, the one you didn't understand fully until you came of age, or the one that mesmerized you because of its surreal set design and lighting...
Yes, we all have our favorites.
Mine is "Eye Of The Beholder": "No change! No change at all!"
A show like TZ is so famous and recognizable that all I have to do is quote one line from the episode and you know which one I'm talking about.
How about "To Serve Man"? "It's a cookbook!"
And of course, "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" starring pre-Star Trek William Shatner: "There's a man out there!"
Then there's the lesser known favorites of mine, the most outstanding in my mind being "The Obsolete Man", a terrific political fable that condemned totalitarianism and fascism with a moral authority that I wish to God still existed in this day and age, when we need it most.
To quote from Serling's introduction to that episode:
"This is not a new world-- it is simply an extension of what began in the old one. It has patterned itself after every dictator who has ever planted the ripping imprint of a boot on the pages of history since the beginning of time. It has refinements, technological advancements, and a more sophisticated approach to the destruction of freedom. But like every one of the superstates that preceded it, it has one iron rule: logic is an enemy and truth is a menace."
Does that ring a bell? Almost sounds like he's talking about our current political climate, doesn't it?
The more things change, the more they stay the same, I guess.
I loved "The Obsolete Man" when I first saw it because it was very Kafka-esque, evoking a claustrophobic vision of a future far more frightening than pig-nosed doctors or gremlins on the wing. Whenever I have the extreme pleasure of watching this episode again, I am moved not only by the gravity of the performances (Fritz Weaver as The Chancellor and Burgess Meredith, better known as the hapless bookworm from the classic TZ episode "Time Enough At Last", playing The Obsolete Man) but also the eloquence of the dialogue. It was written as a teleplay but could easily be performed by two actors on a bare stage anywhere in the free-thinking world.
Ultimately, this episode only revolves around the dynamic between Weaver's cruel autocrat and Meredith's humane librarian, and the episode's resolution remains a strong and searing rebuke of the nihilism that poisons the minds of so many people living in the world today. Unlike other episodes, where the O. Henry-style twist knocks everyone off their feet in the third act, the reversal of fortunes in "The Obsolete Man" hammer home one of the few political statements that Serling ever made that is more relevant today than it was when he first made them.
When The Chancellor realizes that he has been rendered "obsolete" by the very panel he was once a part of, his denials fall upon callous, indifferent ears. As he meets his fate, Serling steps in and delivers the final word:
"The late Chancellor was only partly correct. He was obsolete. But so was the State, the entity he worshipped. Any state, any entity, any ideology that fails to recognize the worth, the dignity, the rights of man... that state is obsolete. A case to be filed under M for mankind in The Twilight Zone."
Where are people like Rod Serling now when we really, really need them?
*/*
I just found out today, while doing some pre-blog research, that Rod Serling suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder for the rest of his life following his tour of duty in the military near the end of WWII.
In other words, Rod Serling lived in his own Twilight Zone.
So did Richard Matheson, for that matter. As evidenced by the two volumes my parents bought me for my birthday, Matheson (in his own words) was an imaginative weirdo, always looking for the strangest angle on everyday things we all take for granted. What would happen if you looked out the window of an airplane and saw a man on the wing? What if a WWI flying ace traveled through time and landed at a modern-day Air Force base? How would you feel if one day you were alone in your office at work and suddenly you heard a man yell out "Cut!" and you turned around and realized that you were right in the middle of a movie set?
Matheson was the creative genius of the three main writers. If Serling was the The Twilight Zone's superego and Charles Beaumont its tortured id, then Matheson was the confident ego, an extremely visceral storyteller with a gift for finding the most far-out concept and making it seem plausible.
And speaking of Beaumont, let's not forget about the dark star of this sci-fi fantasy triumvirate. Beaumont was easily the most fucked-up of the three main writers whose scripts provided the basic structure for the series. Raised by an abusive mother who punished him in bizarre ways such as killing his pets and forcing him to dress up like a girl, Beaumont was a twisted talent whose contributions to the show were populated by world-weary, desperate characters who had already gone to the brink and back, sometimes on some chimerical quest to try and make things right again.
More often than not, Beaumont's characters wanted to die, although sometimes (as in the case of Kevin McCarthy in "Long Live Walter Jameson") they wanted to cheat death as well. Either way, man's mortality was the main focus of Beaumont's best TZ teleplays.
Beaumont not only lived in The Twilight Zone with Serling and Matheson, but he wanted to escape, perhaps more than the others did. When he died in 1967 at the age of 38, due to complications brought on by either Alzheimer's Disease or a continuation of the meningitis he suffered as a young boy, perhaps he finally made that escape.
All this confirms for me that the maxim about writing what you know is not only true, but applies to even the unlikeliest authors in regards to their work. One might be tempted to ask how a science fiction or fantasy writer could possibly write about what he or she knows when what they are writing about is not even real sometimes, but it is plain to see that the personality of a writer automatically injects itself into his work whether he knows it or not. Therefore, even if a writer is inventing imaginary worlds or creating characters that could never exist realistically, it is still a part of them because it sprang from their minds and from their hearts.
Maybe that's why I like The Twilight Zone so much: because I live in The Twilight Zone as well, but only I live on a different block and my rent is much cheaper.
And now, as an added bonus: The final episode that ever aired during the original run of The Twilight Zone, which in actuality was a French short film adaptation of Ambrose Bierce's short story "An Occurrrence At Owl Creek Bridge"...
Wednesday, January 31, 2007
It's never too late to create
I am re-printing an article that I read in the L.A. Times yesterday while eating breakfast. If you'd like to see the actual article, click on the title above and it will take you to the L.A. Times page... but seeing as I have reprinted it for you, that's hardly necessary.
Creativity is not the domain of youth; some innovators get there through trial and error.
By David W. Galenson and Joshua Kotin
January 30, 2007
At 76, Clint Eastwood is making the best films of his career. "Letters from Iwo Jima" has been nominated for four Academy Awards — including best picture and best director. ("Flags of Our Fathers," which Eastwood also directed last year, received two nominations.) New York Times' film critic A.O. Scott recently named him "the greatest living American filmmaker." Such accolades are the latest development in Eastwood's creative ascension. Two years ago, his "Million Dollar Baby" won best picture and best director, a repeat of his success with "Unforgiven" at age 62 — his first Oscar after making movies for more than 20 years.
Sculptor Louise Bourgeois is 95. Later this year, she will be honored with a retrospective at London's Tate Modern museum. Last November, her "Spider," a sculpture she made at the age of 87, sold at auction for more than $4 million, the highest price ever paid for her work and among the highest ever paid for the work of a living sculptor.
Is such creativity in old age rare? Eastwood and Bourgeois often are considered anomalies. Yet such career arcs — gradual improvements culminating in late achievements — account for many of the most important contributions to the arts. That our society does not generally recognize this fact suggests that we're missing a key concept about creativity.
We often presume creativity is the domain of youth, that great artists are young geniuses, brash and brilliant iconoclasts. Arthur Rimbaud, Pablo Picasso, T.S. Eliot, Orson Welles, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Jasper Johns all revolutionized their artistic disciplines in their teens or 20s. (Picasso, for example, created the first cubist paintings at 25, and Welles made "Citizen Kane" at 25.) These artists made dramatic, inspired discoveries based on important new ideas, which they often encapsulated in individual masterpieces.
But there's another path to artistic success, one that doesn't rely on sudden flashes of insight but on the trial-and-error accumulation of knowledge that ultimately leads to novel manifestations of wisdom and judgment. This is Eastwood's and Bourgeois' path — and it was the path for a host of other artists: Titian and Rembrandt, Monet and Rodin, Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier, Mark Twain and Henry James, Robert Frost and Elizabeth Bishop, to name a few. (Twain wrote "Tom Sawyer" at 41 and bettered it with "Huckleberry Finn" at 50; Wright completed Fallingwater at 72 and worked on the Guggenheim Museum until his death at 91.)
Paul Cézanne is the archetype of this kind of experimental innovator. After failing the entrance exam for the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts, he left Paris frustrated by his inability to compete with the precocious young artists who congregated in the city's cafes. He formulated his artistic goal, of bringing solidity to Impressionism, only after the age of 30, then spent more than three decades in seclusion in his home in Aix, painstakingly developing his mature style trying to represent the beauty of his native Provence. Finally, in his 60s, he created the masterpieces that influenced every important artist of the next generation.
Frost also matured slowly. He dropped out of Dartmouth and then Harvard, and in his late 20s moved to a farm in rural New Hampshire. His poetic goal was to capture what he called the "sound of sense," the words and cadence of his neighbors' speech. He published his most famous poem, "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," at 49.
At 63, Frost reflected that although young people have sudden flashes of insight, "it is later in the dark of life that you see forms, constellations. And it is the constellations that are philosophy."
These two creative life cycles stem from differences in both goals and methods. Conceptual innovators aim to express new ideas or particular emotions. Their confidence and certainty allow them to achieve this quickly, often by radically breaking rules of disciplines they have just entered. In contrast, experimental innovators try to describe what they see or hear. Their careers are quests for styles that capture the complexity and richness of the world they live in.
The cost of ignoring Cézanne's example is tremendous — and not only for the arts. Our society prefers the simplicity and clarity of conceptual innovation in scholarship and business as well. Yet the conceptual Bill Gateses of the business world do not make the experimental Warren Buffetts less important. Recognizing important experimental work can be difficult; these contributions don't always come all at once. Experimental innovators often begin inauspiciously, so it's also dangerously easy to parlay judgments about early work into assumptions about entire careers.
But perhaps the most important lesson is for experimental innovators themselves: Don't give up. There's time to do game-changing work after 30. Great innovators bloom in their 30s (Jackson Pollock), 40s (Virginia Woolf), 50s (Fyodor Dostoevsky), 60s (Cézanne), 70s (Eastwood) and 80s (Bourgeois).
Who knows how many potential Cézannes we are currently losing? What if Eastwood had stopped directing at 52, after the critical failure of "Firefox," his 1982 film about a U.S. fighter pilot who steals a Soviet aircraft equipped with thought-controlled weapons?
DAVID W. GALENSON is an economist at the University of Chicago. JOSHUA KOTIN, a doctoral student in English at the University of Chicago, is editor of the Chicago Review.
Creativity is not the domain of youth; some innovators get there through trial and error.
By David W. Galenson and Joshua Kotin
January 30, 2007
At 76, Clint Eastwood is making the best films of his career. "Letters from Iwo Jima" has been nominated for four Academy Awards — including best picture and best director. ("Flags of Our Fathers," which Eastwood also directed last year, received two nominations.) New York Times' film critic A.O. Scott recently named him "the greatest living American filmmaker." Such accolades are the latest development in Eastwood's creative ascension. Two years ago, his "Million Dollar Baby" won best picture and best director, a repeat of his success with "Unforgiven" at age 62 — his first Oscar after making movies for more than 20 years.
Sculptor Louise Bourgeois is 95. Later this year, she will be honored with a retrospective at London's Tate Modern museum. Last November, her "Spider," a sculpture she made at the age of 87, sold at auction for more than $4 million, the highest price ever paid for her work and among the highest ever paid for the work of a living sculptor.
Is such creativity in old age rare? Eastwood and Bourgeois often are considered anomalies. Yet such career arcs — gradual improvements culminating in late achievements — account for many of the most important contributions to the arts. That our society does not generally recognize this fact suggests that we're missing a key concept about creativity.
We often presume creativity is the domain of youth, that great artists are young geniuses, brash and brilliant iconoclasts. Arthur Rimbaud, Pablo Picasso, T.S. Eliot, Orson Welles, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Jasper Johns all revolutionized their artistic disciplines in their teens or 20s. (Picasso, for example, created the first cubist paintings at 25, and Welles made "Citizen Kane" at 25.) These artists made dramatic, inspired discoveries based on important new ideas, which they often encapsulated in individual masterpieces.
But there's another path to artistic success, one that doesn't rely on sudden flashes of insight but on the trial-and-error accumulation of knowledge that ultimately leads to novel manifestations of wisdom and judgment. This is Eastwood's and Bourgeois' path — and it was the path for a host of other artists: Titian and Rembrandt, Monet and Rodin, Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier, Mark Twain and Henry James, Robert Frost and Elizabeth Bishop, to name a few. (Twain wrote "Tom Sawyer" at 41 and bettered it with "Huckleberry Finn" at 50; Wright completed Fallingwater at 72 and worked on the Guggenheim Museum until his death at 91.)
Paul Cézanne is the archetype of this kind of experimental innovator. After failing the entrance exam for the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts, he left Paris frustrated by his inability to compete with the precocious young artists who congregated in the city's cafes. He formulated his artistic goal, of bringing solidity to Impressionism, only after the age of 30, then spent more than three decades in seclusion in his home in Aix, painstakingly developing his mature style trying to represent the beauty of his native Provence. Finally, in his 60s, he created the masterpieces that influenced every important artist of the next generation.
Frost also matured slowly. He dropped out of Dartmouth and then Harvard, and in his late 20s moved to a farm in rural New Hampshire. His poetic goal was to capture what he called the "sound of sense," the words and cadence of his neighbors' speech. He published his most famous poem, "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," at 49.
At 63, Frost reflected that although young people have sudden flashes of insight, "it is later in the dark of life that you see forms, constellations. And it is the constellations that are philosophy."
These two creative life cycles stem from differences in both goals and methods. Conceptual innovators aim to express new ideas or particular emotions. Their confidence and certainty allow them to achieve this quickly, often by radically breaking rules of disciplines they have just entered. In contrast, experimental innovators try to describe what they see or hear. Their careers are quests for styles that capture the complexity and richness of the world they live in.
The cost of ignoring Cézanne's example is tremendous — and not only for the arts. Our society prefers the simplicity and clarity of conceptual innovation in scholarship and business as well. Yet the conceptual Bill Gateses of the business world do not make the experimental Warren Buffetts less important. Recognizing important experimental work can be difficult; these contributions don't always come all at once. Experimental innovators often begin inauspiciously, so it's also dangerously easy to parlay judgments about early work into assumptions about entire careers.
But perhaps the most important lesson is for experimental innovators themselves: Don't give up. There's time to do game-changing work after 30. Great innovators bloom in their 30s (Jackson Pollock), 40s (Virginia Woolf), 50s (Fyodor Dostoevsky), 60s (Cézanne), 70s (Eastwood) and 80s (Bourgeois).
Who knows how many potential Cézannes we are currently losing? What if Eastwood had stopped directing at 52, after the critical failure of "Firefox," his 1982 film about a U.S. fighter pilot who steals a Soviet aircraft equipped with thought-controlled weapons?
DAVID W. GALENSON is an economist at the University of Chicago. JOSHUA KOTIN, a doctoral student in English at the University of Chicago, is editor of the Chicago Review.
Tuesday, January 30, 2007
My Philosophy: Nine Rules To Live By
1. Never do what is expected of you. God made the world chaotic as a test of your faith. You may as well go with the flow of nature, right? Be disruptive, so long as it is the last thing anyone expects you to do. Be courteous, so long as people expect you to be disruptive. And if your friends start to expect the unexpected from you, fear not: Probability is on your side. There are infinite ways to accommodate chaos but there is a limited number of ways to execute order.
A noteworthy corollary to this: Never expect anything from anybody. Expect the unexpected. If a beautiful woman invites you to her place for a candlelit dinner, the LAST thing you should expect is to get laid. The minute you go in there expecting something, Murphy's Law will take effect and render your entire evening fruitless. Better to accept the aforementioned dinner date fully expecting to play Boggle or some other mundane board game. That way, the sex will feel greater than it would've been had you known what to expect.
2. Always believe everything you hear. There is nothing wrong with investing your imagination into the realms of possibility. I don't feel stupid if someone takes me for a fool or misleads me just to show how 'gullible' I am. Why should I feel stupid about believing that anything is possible?
Besides, a person who pulls your leg to see if you are 'gullible' has actually given you the advantage, unbeknownst to them. For you see, there are two types of people in this world: Those who lie and end up being believed, and those who tell the truth and end up being disbelieved. I'd rather be in the latter camp, because eventually the truth will out. On the other hand, to be in the former camp means the novelty gets lost after two or three times; after a while, one realizes that all they've done is reveal themselves to be liars who cannot be believed. And the advantage to that is knowing they were a liar before they realized it themselves.
3. Amuse yourself endlessly at the expense of others. I am not saying you should be cruel to others. What I am saying is that you shouldn't lose your sense of humor, and as we all know the best kind of humor is at someone else's expense. Limit your number of pranks and leg-pulls to a minimum, lest you suffer the fate I described in the last paragraph. Instead, treat everything around you as if life has suddenly transformed into a scene from a comedic movie. Notice how I didn't say "TV sitcom"-- that's because it is really embarrassing to wait for imaginary laugh tracks around people who aren't in on the joke.
4. Exaggerate everything about yourself. Why exaggerate personal details? Because if you don't write the large legend, then someone else will... and they might choose selectively when it comes to what needs to be exaggerated. Better to be thought a braggadocious self-promoter than a victim of slanderous libel. Plus, it gives your critics something to obsess over: No one but your enemies have the time to sift through what is the fact and the fiction of your life!
5. Shun the spotlight. This may seem contradictory on my part, but when you really examine what I've done with my life you'll begin to see that I rarely ever crave to be the center of attention. That's because being a participant is all that matters, and since I try to get by doing as little as possible (or more than is expected, which goes back to Rule #1) then that means being the center of attention is out of the question. And anyhow, it is easier to pull off these rules (especially #6) if no one really knows who you are.
I make it a point to change my personal appearance up often enough to keep even my own family guessing as to what I look like. My recent beard experiments have proven to be phenomenally successful in this regard; I intend to shave my head and wear glasses sometime later this year.
6. Cultivate mystery. This is the most difficult rule on the list, partly due to the fact that Mystery is a mystery unto itself. How does one cultivate Mystery anyway? And what do I mean by 'cultivating' in the first place?
What I mean is, keep people on their toes: Don't explain everything you do, or better yet give daft explanations for everything; Make liberal use of irony and sarcasm at all opportunities, so that no one will know where your true allegiances lie; and above all, never give a straight answer. Why? Because your enemies will use any accurate information against you, and your friends will think you work for the CIA.
7. Disregard the opinions of others. It sounds harsh, but let's face it-- everybody other than you is wrong about everything regarding you. Now, that doesn't mean you should admit to not giving a rat's ass about what other people think. If you are really good at any of these rules, you can feel contempt for everyone around you without them even knowing. And chances are, you have no idea how little weight others give to your own opinions as well.
8. Laugh as a method of self-defense. This is the easiest rule on the list to live by, because it doesn't take much to laugh at anything. I recommend using it as a method of self-defense because there are so many terrible things in this world that could kill us if not for our ability to scoff in the face of death and tragedy.
9. Always give 'em enough rope. If you are as watchful and diligent as I am, then you already know that anyone who is conspiring against you will eventually ensnare themselves in the very webs they created to ensnare you.
And when I say that others are conspiring, I don't mean to be paranoid. I'm just saying that every day, whether on minuscule or magnificent scales, there are mini-plots being waged against you, sometimes innocently and sometimes with a sinister undercurrent. Maybe that guy across from your cubicle is trying to beat you out for a promotion. Maybe that woman down the hall in your apartment complex wants you to proposition her so that she can make her husband jealous. These are all human emotions and feelings, and most of us NEVER act on them.
But the ones who DO act upon those human animal impulses... Well, they've set themselves up for a big fall in an even bigger way, haven't they? And if you are a true disciple of my Nine Rules, then they won't stand a chance when the time comes to exact some payback. So let them wreak their havoc, for it is a short-lived run for them. And after they've spent their energy on tripping you up, all you need to do is give a little tug on the hanging rope. It will not require much on your part, for they will have already fitted the noose around their own neck.
A noteworthy corollary to this: Never expect anything from anybody. Expect the unexpected. If a beautiful woman invites you to her place for a candlelit dinner, the LAST thing you should expect is to get laid. The minute you go in there expecting something, Murphy's Law will take effect and render your entire evening fruitless. Better to accept the aforementioned dinner date fully expecting to play Boggle or some other mundane board game. That way, the sex will feel greater than it would've been had you known what to expect.
2. Always believe everything you hear. There is nothing wrong with investing your imagination into the realms of possibility. I don't feel stupid if someone takes me for a fool or misleads me just to show how 'gullible' I am. Why should I feel stupid about believing that anything is possible?
Besides, a person who pulls your leg to see if you are 'gullible' has actually given you the advantage, unbeknownst to them. For you see, there are two types of people in this world: Those who lie and end up being believed, and those who tell the truth and end up being disbelieved. I'd rather be in the latter camp, because eventually the truth will out. On the other hand, to be in the former camp means the novelty gets lost after two or three times; after a while, one realizes that all they've done is reveal themselves to be liars who cannot be believed. And the advantage to that is knowing they were a liar before they realized it themselves.
3. Amuse yourself endlessly at the expense of others. I am not saying you should be cruel to others. What I am saying is that you shouldn't lose your sense of humor, and as we all know the best kind of humor is at someone else's expense. Limit your number of pranks and leg-pulls to a minimum, lest you suffer the fate I described in the last paragraph. Instead, treat everything around you as if life has suddenly transformed into a scene from a comedic movie. Notice how I didn't say "TV sitcom"-- that's because it is really embarrassing to wait for imaginary laugh tracks around people who aren't in on the joke.
4. Exaggerate everything about yourself. Why exaggerate personal details? Because if you don't write the large legend, then someone else will... and they might choose selectively when it comes to what needs to be exaggerated. Better to be thought a braggadocious self-promoter than a victim of slanderous libel. Plus, it gives your critics something to obsess over: No one but your enemies have the time to sift through what is the fact and the fiction of your life!
5. Shun the spotlight. This may seem contradictory on my part, but when you really examine what I've done with my life you'll begin to see that I rarely ever crave to be the center of attention. That's because being a participant is all that matters, and since I try to get by doing as little as possible (or more than is expected, which goes back to Rule #1) then that means being the center of attention is out of the question. And anyhow, it is easier to pull off these rules (especially #6) if no one really knows who you are.
I make it a point to change my personal appearance up often enough to keep even my own family guessing as to what I look like. My recent beard experiments have proven to be phenomenally successful in this regard; I intend to shave my head and wear glasses sometime later this year.
6. Cultivate mystery. This is the most difficult rule on the list, partly due to the fact that Mystery is a mystery unto itself. How does one cultivate Mystery anyway? And what do I mean by 'cultivating' in the first place?
What I mean is, keep people on their toes: Don't explain everything you do, or better yet give daft explanations for everything; Make liberal use of irony and sarcasm at all opportunities, so that no one will know where your true allegiances lie; and above all, never give a straight answer. Why? Because your enemies will use any accurate information against you, and your friends will think you work for the CIA.
7. Disregard the opinions of others. It sounds harsh, but let's face it-- everybody other than you is wrong about everything regarding you. Now, that doesn't mean you should admit to not giving a rat's ass about what other people think. If you are really good at any of these rules, you can feel contempt for everyone around you without them even knowing. And chances are, you have no idea how little weight others give to your own opinions as well.
8. Laugh as a method of self-defense. This is the easiest rule on the list to live by, because it doesn't take much to laugh at anything. I recommend using it as a method of self-defense because there are so many terrible things in this world that could kill us if not for our ability to scoff in the face of death and tragedy.
9. Always give 'em enough rope. If you are as watchful and diligent as I am, then you already know that anyone who is conspiring against you will eventually ensnare themselves in the very webs they created to ensnare you.
And when I say that others are conspiring, I don't mean to be paranoid. I'm just saying that every day, whether on minuscule or magnificent scales, there are mini-plots being waged against you, sometimes innocently and sometimes with a sinister undercurrent. Maybe that guy across from your cubicle is trying to beat you out for a promotion. Maybe that woman down the hall in your apartment complex wants you to proposition her so that she can make her husband jealous. These are all human emotions and feelings, and most of us NEVER act on them.
But the ones who DO act upon those human animal impulses... Well, they've set themselves up for a big fall in an even bigger way, haven't they? And if you are a true disciple of my Nine Rules, then they won't stand a chance when the time comes to exact some payback. So let them wreak their havoc, for it is a short-lived run for them. And after they've spent their energy on tripping you up, all you need to do is give a little tug on the hanging rope. It will not require much on your part, for they will have already fitted the noose around their own neck.
Wednesday, January 24, 2007
unattainable
My birthday weekend was fun-filled and eventful.
Friday night I attended Rose's farewell party. She has decided to make the move up north. Apparently, Los Angeles was killing her inside.
I can't tell you how many women I've met in the past five or six years who came to L.A., ran out of steam and high-tailed it back to where they came from, or perhaps another city.
Los Angeles is a tough nut to crack.
I met some of Rose's friends, some of them impossibly beautiful females with "Unattainable" stamped into their foreheads. And yet I think I did alright, now that I am sporting a beard. Something about the facial hair makes me appear to be my actual age, which leads me to believe that there is something about a man who looks younger than his years that women find somehow deceitful or wrong.
I shaved the beard shortly before Christmas, after a full month of letting it grow as thick as I could. I literally watched myself get younger in the mirror as I shaved off the beard section by section. After that, I decided to let it grow again, with minimal trims and grooming.
Surprisingly, people like the beard. True, they can't recognize me at first if they haven't seen me wearing it yet, but once they settle in they are pleased by it. I'm not sure what it is exactly, but I am elated by it because I like to toy with my appearance, and a beard makes me feel as if I am in disguise or have somehow changed my physiognomy significantly.
I guess if I had a girlfriend right now, she might object... or she might like it. It appears that having a beard might lead to me having a girlfriend again.
*/*
I feel like I am finally ready to have a relationship with someone again.
Rose's departure was a bit sad for me, but I think I know now what she meant to me. I was never sure if I was just pining for companionship or if I was really head over heels for her. I feel now that I was just dipping my toes in the water and seeing if I was stable enough to pursue something with all of my heart.
With Rose, I was not 100% ready. But I also know that what I wanted from her was not based in physical attraction. Rather, Rose brought out my desire for romance again. Courtship. Holding hands. Looking into each other's eyes. Deep conversations. Baring souls and sighing.
I showed up late to the party at the Formosa Cafe. There were a lot of people already there. I mingled and hung out with JJ and Mack, the boys from my band. They were the ones who introduced me to Rose, and were also there to wish her a safe trip up north.
I saw her and she smiled and hugged me, wanting to take pictures. She was on her way to drunkenness. I gave her a gift, a kitschy handbag designed like a Chinese takeout box. Inside the box was a volume of modern poetry.
I hung out for a spell and met her friends, the unattainable ones. Foremost out of the lot emerged Jenny, a firebrand of a girl who stood 5'10", aged 24 years, and had done more in one lifetime than you could squeeze out of six others: a pilot, a singer, a dancer, a traveler, a model, an actress, an artist, a trophy girlfriend... she'd been there and done that and been that and done there fifty times over.
And she was talking to me.
I tell you, it's the beard.
However, I made the mistake of leaving the party to go with the Missing Digit boys over to Lava Lounge, where a friend of a friend's band was playing. I don't regret going, though-- as lackluster as the Lounge was compared to the Formosa (possibly informed by the sad revelation that Lava Lounge is closing its doors for good at the end of February) I needed to get out of there and breathe, lest I give in to rheumy emotion and confess to Rose that I thought I might be falling in love with her and that her leaving would render me vulnerable and sullen.
*/*
I ended up returning to Formosa just before 2am.
The population of the party had dwindled. Indeed, Firebrand Jenny had left long ago, and all that was left were a few stragglers.
Rose didn't see me as I walked in. I stood next to her for almost a full five minutes, watching her sway tipsily on her stool as friends hugged her and said goodbye.
Then, as if on cue (it always seems to me like it's on cue) she turned and focused her bleary eyes on me, and she smiled that grinny smile that habitually melted my icy heart.
"Jamessss," she slurred.
"Rose."
"Oh James," she said, as she hugged me long and hard. And when she pulled away, her hands were still on my face and my arms were around her waist. Her fingers massaged the fluffy wool of my jaw.
And we stood like that for a long time.
"I'm going to miss you," I said.
Rose stared at me as if she could kiss me on the lips. "I'm going to miss you too. But I'll see you in April."
"What, are you coming down to visit then?"
"No... JJ and Mack said you guys are going to play up north. Didn't they tell you?"
I paused. I thought about it. Then I replied, "No, they haven't."
"Really?"
"Hey, I'm just the bass player, what do I know?"
She laughed and kissed me on the cheek. And that was the last I saw of her before she left Los Angeles.
The next night, before we did our show at The Whiskey, I asked the boys about April. They laughed and said they had only suggested that they might go up north and play a show around springtime.
"Man, she musta been pretty wasted," Mack said.
I put on a fake smile and said, "Yeah, she really was..."
*/*
I felt lots of love from family and friends this past weekend, so I know that I am loved and that I have people to love in return. But I am craving romantic love now.
I want to come home and be with a girl and talk about our days and sit on the bed and laugh and joke and chat and maybe kiss and hold each other and caress and snuggle and not necessarily have sex but simply be, with each other, comfortable and carefree.
It's been a long time since I had something like that.
Even though it didn't pan out with Rose, I am glad that it brought me around to this fine point of knowing what it is that I want. I am not sure if I would've wanted anything intimate with Rose because it wasn't her looks that had me enthralled. Her smile was intoxicating, yes, but only because of what spawned the smile, not the smile itself.
Her smile stemmed from a positive belief in art and life.
She had me musing like I hadn't mused in who knows how long.
The last time I went through this was with Holly Golightly, shortly before she went back home to Florida. After Holly departed, I met up with Eve again and picked up where we left off, which was followed by an interim where we both dated other people. Then, Eve and I hooked up again and that lasted for a spell, but eventually it fell apart.
And now I'm on the verge of loving again, and this time I know what I want, and I think I know how to get it... but it's going to take patience, time, and a liberal dose of humor.
And as for Rose, I suspect (in hindsight, of course) that maybe she was just waiting for me to make some sort of declarative statement or bold move. It may not be as over as I think. I may still have a chance one day to discover what she has to offer, if I just take my time and not obsess over it.
In the meantime, I will reevaluate myself as I enter into what seems to be a whole new identity, thanks in large part to this growth of facial hair covering the lower part of my face.
Lately I've been getting strange girls to talk to me right out of the blue, without having to say or do anything. Ironically, my feeling has always been that a beard rendered me less desirable, but I guess I have been wrong all along.
I'm sure there's girls who dig the baby face, but maybe I should see where this goes and decide what to do as the tides of fate bat me to and fro.
It'd be nice to take that approach for a change.
Yes, I think I'm ready to have a worthwhile romance again. Everything around me is pointing to this as my next move. Now all I have to do is remember not to take things for granted or assume that it's easy. That's been my problem in the past: Getting too comfy, getting soft and lazy like the inside of an oyster.
Spring is nearing, and I want to be prepared.
Friday night I attended Rose's farewell party. She has decided to make the move up north. Apparently, Los Angeles was killing her inside.
I can't tell you how many women I've met in the past five or six years who came to L.A., ran out of steam and high-tailed it back to where they came from, or perhaps another city.
Los Angeles is a tough nut to crack.
I met some of Rose's friends, some of them impossibly beautiful females with "Unattainable" stamped into their foreheads. And yet I think I did alright, now that I am sporting a beard. Something about the facial hair makes me appear to be my actual age, which leads me to believe that there is something about a man who looks younger than his years that women find somehow deceitful or wrong.
I shaved the beard shortly before Christmas, after a full month of letting it grow as thick as I could. I literally watched myself get younger in the mirror as I shaved off the beard section by section. After that, I decided to let it grow again, with minimal trims and grooming.
Surprisingly, people like the beard. True, they can't recognize me at first if they haven't seen me wearing it yet, but once they settle in they are pleased by it. I'm not sure what it is exactly, but I am elated by it because I like to toy with my appearance, and a beard makes me feel as if I am in disguise or have somehow changed my physiognomy significantly.
I guess if I had a girlfriend right now, she might object... or she might like it. It appears that having a beard might lead to me having a girlfriend again.
*/*
I feel like I am finally ready to have a relationship with someone again.
Rose's departure was a bit sad for me, but I think I know now what she meant to me. I was never sure if I was just pining for companionship or if I was really head over heels for her. I feel now that I was just dipping my toes in the water and seeing if I was stable enough to pursue something with all of my heart.
With Rose, I was not 100% ready. But I also know that what I wanted from her was not based in physical attraction. Rather, Rose brought out my desire for romance again. Courtship. Holding hands. Looking into each other's eyes. Deep conversations. Baring souls and sighing.
I showed up late to the party at the Formosa Cafe. There were a lot of people already there. I mingled and hung out with JJ and Mack, the boys from my band. They were the ones who introduced me to Rose, and were also there to wish her a safe trip up north.
I saw her and she smiled and hugged me, wanting to take pictures. She was on her way to drunkenness. I gave her a gift, a kitschy handbag designed like a Chinese takeout box. Inside the box was a volume of modern poetry.
I hung out for a spell and met her friends, the unattainable ones. Foremost out of the lot emerged Jenny, a firebrand of a girl who stood 5'10", aged 24 years, and had done more in one lifetime than you could squeeze out of six others: a pilot, a singer, a dancer, a traveler, a model, an actress, an artist, a trophy girlfriend... she'd been there and done that and been that and done there fifty times over.
And she was talking to me.
I tell you, it's the beard.
However, I made the mistake of leaving the party to go with the Missing Digit boys over to Lava Lounge, where a friend of a friend's band was playing. I don't regret going, though-- as lackluster as the Lounge was compared to the Formosa (possibly informed by the sad revelation that Lava Lounge is closing its doors for good at the end of February) I needed to get out of there and breathe, lest I give in to rheumy emotion and confess to Rose that I thought I might be falling in love with her and that her leaving would render me vulnerable and sullen.
*/*
I ended up returning to Formosa just before 2am.
The population of the party had dwindled. Indeed, Firebrand Jenny had left long ago, and all that was left were a few stragglers.
Rose didn't see me as I walked in. I stood next to her for almost a full five minutes, watching her sway tipsily on her stool as friends hugged her and said goodbye.
Then, as if on cue (it always seems to me like it's on cue) she turned and focused her bleary eyes on me, and she smiled that grinny smile that habitually melted my icy heart.
"Jamessss," she slurred.
"Rose."
"Oh James," she said, as she hugged me long and hard. And when she pulled away, her hands were still on my face and my arms were around her waist. Her fingers massaged the fluffy wool of my jaw.
And we stood like that for a long time.
"I'm going to miss you," I said.
Rose stared at me as if she could kiss me on the lips. "I'm going to miss you too. But I'll see you in April."
"What, are you coming down to visit then?"
"No... JJ and Mack said you guys are going to play up north. Didn't they tell you?"
I paused. I thought about it. Then I replied, "No, they haven't."
"Really?"
"Hey, I'm just the bass player, what do I know?"
She laughed and kissed me on the cheek. And that was the last I saw of her before she left Los Angeles.
The next night, before we did our show at The Whiskey, I asked the boys about April. They laughed and said they had only suggested that they might go up north and play a show around springtime.
"Man, she musta been pretty wasted," Mack said.
I put on a fake smile and said, "Yeah, she really was..."
*/*
I felt lots of love from family and friends this past weekend, so I know that I am loved and that I have people to love in return. But I am craving romantic love now.
I want to come home and be with a girl and talk about our days and sit on the bed and laugh and joke and chat and maybe kiss and hold each other and caress and snuggle and not necessarily have sex but simply be, with each other, comfortable and carefree.
It's been a long time since I had something like that.
Even though it didn't pan out with Rose, I am glad that it brought me around to this fine point of knowing what it is that I want. I am not sure if I would've wanted anything intimate with Rose because it wasn't her looks that had me enthralled. Her smile was intoxicating, yes, but only because of what spawned the smile, not the smile itself.
Her smile stemmed from a positive belief in art and life.
She had me musing like I hadn't mused in who knows how long.
The last time I went through this was with Holly Golightly, shortly before she went back home to Florida. After Holly departed, I met up with Eve again and picked up where we left off, which was followed by an interim where we both dated other people. Then, Eve and I hooked up again and that lasted for a spell, but eventually it fell apart.
And now I'm on the verge of loving again, and this time I know what I want, and I think I know how to get it... but it's going to take patience, time, and a liberal dose of humor.
And as for Rose, I suspect (in hindsight, of course) that maybe she was just waiting for me to make some sort of declarative statement or bold move. It may not be as over as I think. I may still have a chance one day to discover what she has to offer, if I just take my time and not obsess over it.
In the meantime, I will reevaluate myself as I enter into what seems to be a whole new identity, thanks in large part to this growth of facial hair covering the lower part of my face.
Lately I've been getting strange girls to talk to me right out of the blue, without having to say or do anything. Ironically, my feeling has always been that a beard rendered me less desirable, but I guess I have been wrong all along.
I'm sure there's girls who dig the baby face, but maybe I should see where this goes and decide what to do as the tides of fate bat me to and fro.
It'd be nice to take that approach for a change.
Yes, I think I'm ready to have a worthwhile romance again. Everything around me is pointing to this as my next move. Now all I have to do is remember not to take things for granted or assume that it's easy. That's been my problem in the past: Getting too comfy, getting soft and lazy like the inside of an oyster.
Spring is nearing, and I want to be prepared.
Thursday, January 18, 2007
motown
Ask the average person to listen to a piece of music and pick out the individual parts. Chances are, they will not know the difference between a bass drum and a high-hat, nor will they know which part is the bass line and which part is the guitar (unless it's a guitar solo, to which they will proceed to play air guitar).
Until someone takes the time to point these things out to you, it's all mud, an amorphous mass of melody and harmony to the layman's ears until the smaller sections that comprise a song are dissected.
*/*
As a kid growing up, I loved the music that my parents played on their stereo. They played The Beatles and doo-wop oldies and a lot of Motown-- after all, this was the stuff they grew up on, so it meant more to them than it did to me.
The Motown selections were always upbeat, joyous and danceable. I never thought twice about the songs themselves. All I knew is that they were catchy and hummable, and I often found myself singing along without really knowing about the intricacies of the music.
As a full-grown man and a musician, I find myself time and again revisiting the Motown catalog and discovering a myriad of treasures. There was so much going on beneath the smooth, polished surface of those chestnuts from the Motor City.
*/*
Case in point: "Stop! In The Name Of Love" by The Supremes.
I'll admit right off the bat that The Supremes were not my cup of tea as a young boy. They were a girl group, for Pete's sake! I was more attuned to Smokey Robinson's balladeering romanticism and Marvin Gaye's simmering masculinity than to the uber-femme posturing of Diana Ross, Florence Ballard and Mary Wilson.
Smokey and Marvin spoke directly to my developing male psyche, whereas The Supremes seemed silly, soft and inconsequential.
I liked "I Hear A Symphony" and "Someday We'll Be Together" from them, and that was about it. I paid none of the other tunes no mind: "Baby Love" was annoying; "Where Did Our Love Go?" barely held my attention; "You Can't Hurry Love" and "You Keep Me Hanging On" were covered by Phil Collins and Kim Wilde respectively, so my bias leaned to the more modern versions (I don't count Soft Cell's interpolation of "Where Did Our Love Go?" on the extended single of "Tainted Love" as a cover).
It was about three or four months ago when I realized the true brilliance of "Stop! In The Name Of Love" during an epiphany that drove me into the deepest depths of tunacy heretofore.
I was driving around town late night, feeling sorry for myself and bemoaning my lack of luck concerning the opposite sex. I had the radio tuned to KRTH 101, the classic L.A. oldies station that has been cranking out the hits for over 35 years.
"Stop!" came on, and rather than switch the station I let it play. Something about that ominous organ intro that rallies into action at the song's onset enervated me.
And then I heard the epiphany, the lilting refrain that mesmerized me like the siren song of Greek mythology.
In the background, as Diana Ross sings the line "I watch you walk down the street/ Knowing your other love you'll meet" the other two Supremes are singing "baby baby" and harmonizing like soulful angels watching over the love affair described in the lyrics, a mournful chorus rhapsodizing poetic in time to the music.
In all the years that I have heard this song played, whether on radio stations or in someone's home or on the jukebox of some dive bar, I have never picked up on that small part, which is almost buried in the mix. I've always noticed Florence Ballard and Mary Wilson's more obvious contributions to that song, but never the "baby baby" part.
Ever.
That is, until recently.
*/*
Since then, I have been obsessed with that song, in particular that ghostly backup part that barely existed for me for the past three decades. I can't get that haunting refrain out of my head for the life of me. It is driving me insane.
It is so beautiful and sad, the way their voices glide underneath Ross' lead vocal, lamenting the poor choices of a figurative cad who is about to go off and break the heart of a woman who loves him dearly.
It could be my story. It could be your story.
Shortly after that epiphany, I began to re-investigate the Motown phenomenon, and realized that the other Supremes' presence wasn't the only thing that was taken for granted by the masses.
*/*
When asked about my influences as a bassist, I always cite one man in particular. And every time I drop this man's name, the interrogator pauses and makes a face, trying to figure out if I am pulling their leg or if I am being intentionally obscure.
I reassure them that I am not joking: My favorite bass player of all time is James Jamerson, who played with the Motown house band on nearly every single Motown hit that was released in their heyday.
I first heard the name James Jamerson when I read an L.A. Times book review of Allan Slutksy's book Standing In The Shadows Of Motown in 1989. By that time I was already well-versed and steeped in Motown trivia, so Jamerson's name clicked in my head immediately. Now I knew the name of the guy who played the famous opening notes of The Temptations' "My Girl", as well as countless other hits.
When I started playing bass guitar, I started getting the question of who my influences were. I had to think about it-- Who were my influences anyway?
Sure, I could say what everyone else says and cite Flea from the Chili Peppers, or Les Claypool from Primus. Maybe I could get all jazzy and deep and drop Jaco Pastorius' name as well. But I knew in my heart that my playing was not in the same league as those guys, and if there was any one bass player that entered my mind when I played it would have to be Jamerson.
So I started answering that question with his name, and people screwed their faces at me in response.
*/*
I never read the book Standing In The Shadows Of Motown, but I rented the DVD last week and marveled at the genius and talent of the unsung heroes of Motown: The Funk Brothers, as they were known back in the days jamming out in Studio A, aka "The Snakepit".
Remember the amorphous mass of melody and harmony I mentioned at the beginning of this blog? Well, in the case of Hitsville USA, that mass had a bunch of different names and personalities. Each name and personality lived a life of its own, and some of them died without ever having the kind of fame and recognition reserved for superstars like Stevie Wonder or Marvin Gaye.
The late James Jamerson emerges from the documentary as a forceful and mercurial performer, a true genius who taught himself how to play and elevated the instrument to another level. He wrote the complicated and syncopated bass lines himself, then played them with one finger on a Fender Precision (more commonly known as the P-Bass) with impossibly high action and heavy gauge strings that he never changed (according to his son, James Jr., never changing the strings on the bass "kept the funk in 'em").
My kinship with Jamerson extends to more than just playing the same instrument: We have the same first name; our birthdays are a week apart, and we share the same Zodiac sun sign (Aquarius); I have a P-Bass similar in design to his; we were both auto didactic (self-taught) musicians...
...And, I assume, both of us were fanatically dedicated with finding the perfect notes, capturing the proper pitch and appropriate feel of any given song.
Just listen to what James is doing on "Stop! In The Name Of Love", for example. He's not playing it straight-- he's putting English on it, making it swing and tapping out percussive flourishes that sneak by your subconscious in the most subliminal ways imaginable.
His genius was that you never noticed it.
*/*
What I don't possess in skill or technique, I make up for by having a good ear and knowing what to play in relation to the rhythm and the melody.
I describe the instrumental sections of the modern pop music combo as follows:
The voice and melody can be represented by the head, where the mouth is located. It is synonymous with the face, which is the first thing most people identify with when they see a group or a solo performer. Looks play a huge part in how music is received.
The guitar and/or keyboard parts are represented by the torso, which is not only attached to the arms but also makes up the main body or frame of a song. This is the heart of a tune, synonymous with the chest.
The drums are the legs of a song, making it move and propel forward, upon which the melodies stand. The tempo is synonymous with the pace of the legs, whether they are walking or running.
And the bass? The bass is the ass. The booty. The lower region. The "bottom end", so to speak. A good bass line will make you shake your booty uncontrollably. The late James Brown knew it, and so does any bass player worth their salt.
Where does the funk from your body emanate? From your ass, of course. Where does the funk come from musically? From the bass, silly.
All of my bass lines come not only from my heart but out of my ass as well.
*/*
One last thing before I go.
I never set out to play the bass.
No one ever sets out to play the bass. In fact, I've only known two people in my entire life who wanted to play the bass: my good friend and former band mate Clay Sails, and a kid who lent me his bass guitar shortly after high school. In both cases, they literally traded the bass for bigger and better things.
I was playing in a band and we didn't have a bassist. Since the other guitarist in the group was far superior to me on the six-string, it was decided that I be the bass player. Fair enough, I supposed, but none of us owned a bass and I had no money to go out and buy one.
An underclassman from my high school volunteered to let me borrow his bass and amplifier (both manufactured by Peavey) until I got one of my own. He barely played it, and although he had aspirations to be a musician, his true passion was cinema.
I never gave the bass back to that kid. It's not like I stole it, though: He would call me from time to time and ask for it back, and I'd say, "Sure man, come down here and take it" because I had no car of my own. But he never got back to me or demanded it back with any hurry.
Finally, I sold the bass one day after having it for two years. The kid never asked me about it, even during the few times when I ran into him again at a concert or a party.
I ended up buying an imitation Rickenbacker from Clay Sails, who was focusing more on guitar and piano. I owned that fake Rick for almost a decade before it was stolen from a friend's home.
These days I play the P-Bass, which was loaned to me by another friend. The P-Bass was just sitting in his garage, and when the fake Rick got robbed he lent me the guitar with no problem. He has never asked me for any money in return.
As for the kid who got me on the track to playing bass all those years ago... He's a movie director now. His major motion picture debut, an animated feature, opened last summer to rave reviews and made lots of money. I intend to rent the DVD just so I can hear his voice on the Commentary.
I wonder if he would've gotten into music more had I given it back to him, or if the bass would've collected dust in his room. Would I even be playing the bass today if not for him loaning it to me? If I had given it back, would I have gone out and bought another one for myself? Would he have neglected his movie dreams and become a first-class bassist par excellence?
It's hard to say. All I know is, he's happy, and so am I. And if I ever run into him again, I'm going to thank him with all of my heart for inadvertently introducing me to something that saved my life... as well as apologize for never giving it back.
Until someone takes the time to point these things out to you, it's all mud, an amorphous mass of melody and harmony to the layman's ears until the smaller sections that comprise a song are dissected.
*/*
As a kid growing up, I loved the music that my parents played on their stereo. They played The Beatles and doo-wop oldies and a lot of Motown-- after all, this was the stuff they grew up on, so it meant more to them than it did to me.
The Motown selections were always upbeat, joyous and danceable. I never thought twice about the songs themselves. All I knew is that they were catchy and hummable, and I often found myself singing along without really knowing about the intricacies of the music.
As a full-grown man and a musician, I find myself time and again revisiting the Motown catalog and discovering a myriad of treasures. There was so much going on beneath the smooth, polished surface of those chestnuts from the Motor City.
*/*
Case in point: "Stop! In The Name Of Love" by The Supremes.
I'll admit right off the bat that The Supremes were not my cup of tea as a young boy. They were a girl group, for Pete's sake! I was more attuned to Smokey Robinson's balladeering romanticism and Marvin Gaye's simmering masculinity than to the uber-femme posturing of Diana Ross, Florence Ballard and Mary Wilson.
Smokey and Marvin spoke directly to my developing male psyche, whereas The Supremes seemed silly, soft and inconsequential.
I liked "I Hear A Symphony" and "Someday We'll Be Together" from them, and that was about it. I paid none of the other tunes no mind: "Baby Love" was annoying; "Where Did Our Love Go?" barely held my attention; "You Can't Hurry Love" and "You Keep Me Hanging On" were covered by Phil Collins and Kim Wilde respectively, so my bias leaned to the more modern versions (I don't count Soft Cell's interpolation of "Where Did Our Love Go?" on the extended single of "Tainted Love" as a cover).
It was about three or four months ago when I realized the true brilliance of "Stop! In The Name Of Love" during an epiphany that drove me into the deepest depths of tunacy heretofore.
I was driving around town late night, feeling sorry for myself and bemoaning my lack of luck concerning the opposite sex. I had the radio tuned to KRTH 101, the classic L.A. oldies station that has been cranking out the hits for over 35 years.
"Stop!" came on, and rather than switch the station I let it play. Something about that ominous organ intro that rallies into action at the song's onset enervated me.
And then I heard the epiphany, the lilting refrain that mesmerized me like the siren song of Greek mythology.
In the background, as Diana Ross sings the line "I watch you walk down the street/ Knowing your other love you'll meet" the other two Supremes are singing "baby baby" and harmonizing like soulful angels watching over the love affair described in the lyrics, a mournful chorus rhapsodizing poetic in time to the music.
In all the years that I have heard this song played, whether on radio stations or in someone's home or on the jukebox of some dive bar, I have never picked up on that small part, which is almost buried in the mix. I've always noticed Florence Ballard and Mary Wilson's more obvious contributions to that song, but never the "baby baby" part.
Ever.
That is, until recently.
*/*
Since then, I have been obsessed with that song, in particular that ghostly backup part that barely existed for me for the past three decades. I can't get that haunting refrain out of my head for the life of me. It is driving me insane.
It is so beautiful and sad, the way their voices glide underneath Ross' lead vocal, lamenting the poor choices of a figurative cad who is about to go off and break the heart of a woman who loves him dearly.
It could be my story. It could be your story.
Shortly after that epiphany, I began to re-investigate the Motown phenomenon, and realized that the other Supremes' presence wasn't the only thing that was taken for granted by the masses.
*/*
When asked about my influences as a bassist, I always cite one man in particular. And every time I drop this man's name, the interrogator pauses and makes a face, trying to figure out if I am pulling their leg or if I am being intentionally obscure.
I reassure them that I am not joking: My favorite bass player of all time is James Jamerson, who played with the Motown house band on nearly every single Motown hit that was released in their heyday.
I first heard the name James Jamerson when I read an L.A. Times book review of Allan Slutksy's book Standing In The Shadows Of Motown in 1989. By that time I was already well-versed and steeped in Motown trivia, so Jamerson's name clicked in my head immediately. Now I knew the name of the guy who played the famous opening notes of The Temptations' "My Girl", as well as countless other hits.
When I started playing bass guitar, I started getting the question of who my influences were. I had to think about it-- Who were my influences anyway?
Sure, I could say what everyone else says and cite Flea from the Chili Peppers, or Les Claypool from Primus. Maybe I could get all jazzy and deep and drop Jaco Pastorius' name as well. But I knew in my heart that my playing was not in the same league as those guys, and if there was any one bass player that entered my mind when I played it would have to be Jamerson.
So I started answering that question with his name, and people screwed their faces at me in response.
*/*
I never read the book Standing In The Shadows Of Motown, but I rented the DVD last week and marveled at the genius and talent of the unsung heroes of Motown: The Funk Brothers, as they were known back in the days jamming out in Studio A, aka "The Snakepit".
Remember the amorphous mass of melody and harmony I mentioned at the beginning of this blog? Well, in the case of Hitsville USA, that mass had a bunch of different names and personalities. Each name and personality lived a life of its own, and some of them died without ever having the kind of fame and recognition reserved for superstars like Stevie Wonder or Marvin Gaye.
The late James Jamerson emerges from the documentary as a forceful and mercurial performer, a true genius who taught himself how to play and elevated the instrument to another level. He wrote the complicated and syncopated bass lines himself, then played them with one finger on a Fender Precision (more commonly known as the P-Bass) with impossibly high action and heavy gauge strings that he never changed (according to his son, James Jr., never changing the strings on the bass "kept the funk in 'em").
My kinship with Jamerson extends to more than just playing the same instrument: We have the same first name; our birthdays are a week apart, and we share the same Zodiac sun sign (Aquarius); I have a P-Bass similar in design to his; we were both auto didactic (self-taught) musicians...
...And, I assume, both of us were fanatically dedicated with finding the perfect notes, capturing the proper pitch and appropriate feel of any given song.
Just listen to what James is doing on "Stop! In The Name Of Love", for example. He's not playing it straight-- he's putting English on it, making it swing and tapping out percussive flourishes that sneak by your subconscious in the most subliminal ways imaginable.
His genius was that you never noticed it.
*/*
What I don't possess in skill or technique, I make up for by having a good ear and knowing what to play in relation to the rhythm and the melody.
I describe the instrumental sections of the modern pop music combo as follows:
The voice and melody can be represented by the head, where the mouth is located. It is synonymous with the face, which is the first thing most people identify with when they see a group or a solo performer. Looks play a huge part in how music is received.
The guitar and/or keyboard parts are represented by the torso, which is not only attached to the arms but also makes up the main body or frame of a song. This is the heart of a tune, synonymous with the chest.
The drums are the legs of a song, making it move and propel forward, upon which the melodies stand. The tempo is synonymous with the pace of the legs, whether they are walking or running.
And the bass? The bass is the ass. The booty. The lower region. The "bottom end", so to speak. A good bass line will make you shake your booty uncontrollably. The late James Brown knew it, and so does any bass player worth their salt.
Where does the funk from your body emanate? From your ass, of course. Where does the funk come from musically? From the bass, silly.
All of my bass lines come not only from my heart but out of my ass as well.
*/*
One last thing before I go.
I never set out to play the bass.
No one ever sets out to play the bass. In fact, I've only known two people in my entire life who wanted to play the bass: my good friend and former band mate Clay Sails, and a kid who lent me his bass guitar shortly after high school. In both cases, they literally traded the bass for bigger and better things.
I was playing in a band and we didn't have a bassist. Since the other guitarist in the group was far superior to me on the six-string, it was decided that I be the bass player. Fair enough, I supposed, but none of us owned a bass and I had no money to go out and buy one.
An underclassman from my high school volunteered to let me borrow his bass and amplifier (both manufactured by Peavey) until I got one of my own. He barely played it, and although he had aspirations to be a musician, his true passion was cinema.
I never gave the bass back to that kid. It's not like I stole it, though: He would call me from time to time and ask for it back, and I'd say, "Sure man, come down here and take it" because I had no car of my own. But he never got back to me or demanded it back with any hurry.
Finally, I sold the bass one day after having it for two years. The kid never asked me about it, even during the few times when I ran into him again at a concert or a party.
I ended up buying an imitation Rickenbacker from Clay Sails, who was focusing more on guitar and piano. I owned that fake Rick for almost a decade before it was stolen from a friend's home.
These days I play the P-Bass, which was loaned to me by another friend. The P-Bass was just sitting in his garage, and when the fake Rick got robbed he lent me the guitar with no problem. He has never asked me for any money in return.
As for the kid who got me on the track to playing bass all those years ago... He's a movie director now. His major motion picture debut, an animated feature, opened last summer to rave reviews and made lots of money. I intend to rent the DVD just so I can hear his voice on the Commentary.
I wonder if he would've gotten into music more had I given it back to him, or if the bass would've collected dust in his room. Would I even be playing the bass today if not for him loaning it to me? If I had given it back, would I have gone out and bought another one for myself? Would he have neglected his movie dreams and become a first-class bassist par excellence?
It's hard to say. All I know is, he's happy, and so am I. And if I ever run into him again, I'm going to thank him with all of my heart for inadvertently introducing me to something that saved my life... as well as apologize for never giving it back.
Tuesday, January 16, 2007
writing
It is a dark time right now.
Our President wants to send more troops to Iraq, as if that would help. Our pop cultural heroes keep dying off, reminding us of our own mortality. The villains seem to win or get away unscathed, shuffling off from this mortal coil without having to answer for their crimes.
People are writing less, blogging less. Even myself. I took some time off from blogging last year because I thought I needed to, but I discovered I was wrong.
I like to write. I like to blog. I don't do it for money, or so that I can attract advertisers and generate whore-cash. I don't write to get published, and I don't write to convince the world of my point of view.
I write because it is in me. It has always been in me. And if it is in me, then it needs to come out and get into you.
I gave up on chastising the lazy bloggers and the fairweather writers a long time ago. I don't care anymore if I post rambling blog entries and get zero comments. I don't give a shit if you like what I have to say or not.
I'm going to keep writing, and I'm not going to give up.
*/*
Writing is the only thing at which I am good.
That is to say, writing is the only thing that makes me feel like a true Master.
There will always be more skilled bassists, or more talented artists, or people with funnier stories or far more advanced conversational techniques. There will always be men more handsome than me, or more rugged than me, or more sensitive than me. There will always be someone just a little bit better than me in general.
But when it comes to writing, no one is better than me. That is because no one can write like me, and my writing resembles nobody else's prose.
The great ones are only great because they are widely distributed and read. But I can write better than Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Bukowski.
Wanna know why? Wanna know what's behind my ballsy reasoning?
Because those guys are dead, and I'm still here.
Their words remain, and their words are inspirational and eternal and classic. Their words and their works are enduring pieces of art that stretch into infinity and elevate their ranking damn near sainthood.
But they're dead, and I'm still here. And as far as other living writers go, I'm better than the whole lot of 'em.
That is the attitude one must have when approaching the blank page or the typewriter or the computer keyboard. Otherwise, you shouldn't be writing at all.
*/*
Blood spills in a foreign land. Over here, on the homefront, people are acquiescing left and right, settling for less, throwing the fight, taking dives and accepting bribes.
I don't blame them. They have no choice. They have nothing to fight for, they have no dreams left. The world has plundered their souls and taken all it can take. They have nothing left to offer up in the way of sacrifice.
They live in the real world, where rents can't be be paid and jobs are lost. They live in the material world, where money and bullshit walk hand in hand like a lovestruck couple unaware of their apparent mental illnesses. They live in the physical world where ideas have no weight and currency and therefore serve no purpose...
...and yet they wonder why things are slowly turning insane around them.
I live inside my head. I like living there-- it is preferable to this ugly realm that everyone else seems bound to, this prison for the unimaginative and feeble.
Call me a dreamer. Go ahead. I don't care. We just celebrated the life and death of a dreamer yesterday, so I don't mind it at all. To be in the company of people like MLK or John Lennon is fine with me.
They're dead, but their words live on.
Tell me, people of Earth: When you die, are your words going to live on, or are you taking them with you into the grave?
I know where my words will be-- spinning into eternity!
*/*
I am no longer disappointed by everyone's refusal to realize their own true potentials.
The way I see it, their insistence on bowing down before their insatiable gods and demons is an advantage for me.
What they disinherit-- the kingdom of heaven, peace and prosperity --is all mine for the taking. I have no competition. No one is trying to beat me to it.
I can take my time, or I can rush headlong into the thick of it.
I have choices.
Tell me, people of Earth: What choice do you have when you've thrown in the towel and resigned yourself to defeat so early in the game?
Answer: None. You have no choices when you let the world win.
I'll tell you what: I may not be making any money off of this writing thing, but I feel like I am a wealthy man anyway.
*/*
One of these days I'll get it right. One of these days I'll string the right amount of letters together and form some magic sentence that will unlock the mysteries of the universe and bring happiness and joy to all who are literate and lucky enough to read it.
Until then, I'm going to keep on writing, and I'm not going to stop.
What are you going to do until then?
Our President wants to send more troops to Iraq, as if that would help. Our pop cultural heroes keep dying off, reminding us of our own mortality. The villains seem to win or get away unscathed, shuffling off from this mortal coil without having to answer for their crimes.
People are writing less, blogging less. Even myself. I took some time off from blogging last year because I thought I needed to, but I discovered I was wrong.
I like to write. I like to blog. I don't do it for money, or so that I can attract advertisers and generate whore-cash. I don't write to get published, and I don't write to convince the world of my point of view.
I write because it is in me. It has always been in me. And if it is in me, then it needs to come out and get into you.
I gave up on chastising the lazy bloggers and the fairweather writers a long time ago. I don't care anymore if I post rambling blog entries and get zero comments. I don't give a shit if you like what I have to say or not.
I'm going to keep writing, and I'm not going to give up.
*/*
Writing is the only thing at which I am good.
That is to say, writing is the only thing that makes me feel like a true Master.
There will always be more skilled bassists, or more talented artists, or people with funnier stories or far more advanced conversational techniques. There will always be men more handsome than me, or more rugged than me, or more sensitive than me. There will always be someone just a little bit better than me in general.
But when it comes to writing, no one is better than me. That is because no one can write like me, and my writing resembles nobody else's prose.
The great ones are only great because they are widely distributed and read. But I can write better than Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Bukowski.
Wanna know why? Wanna know what's behind my ballsy reasoning?
Because those guys are dead, and I'm still here.
Their words remain, and their words are inspirational and eternal and classic. Their words and their works are enduring pieces of art that stretch into infinity and elevate their ranking damn near sainthood.
But they're dead, and I'm still here. And as far as other living writers go, I'm better than the whole lot of 'em.
That is the attitude one must have when approaching the blank page or the typewriter or the computer keyboard. Otherwise, you shouldn't be writing at all.
*/*
Blood spills in a foreign land. Over here, on the homefront, people are acquiescing left and right, settling for less, throwing the fight, taking dives and accepting bribes.
I don't blame them. They have no choice. They have nothing to fight for, they have no dreams left. The world has plundered their souls and taken all it can take. They have nothing left to offer up in the way of sacrifice.
They live in the real world, where rents can't be be paid and jobs are lost. They live in the material world, where money and bullshit walk hand in hand like a lovestruck couple unaware of their apparent mental illnesses. They live in the physical world where ideas have no weight and currency and therefore serve no purpose...
...and yet they wonder why things are slowly turning insane around them.
I live inside my head. I like living there-- it is preferable to this ugly realm that everyone else seems bound to, this prison for the unimaginative and feeble.
Call me a dreamer. Go ahead. I don't care. We just celebrated the life and death of a dreamer yesterday, so I don't mind it at all. To be in the company of people like MLK or John Lennon is fine with me.
They're dead, but their words live on.
Tell me, people of Earth: When you die, are your words going to live on, or are you taking them with you into the grave?
I know where my words will be-- spinning into eternity!
*/*
I am no longer disappointed by everyone's refusal to realize their own true potentials.
The way I see it, their insistence on bowing down before their insatiable gods and demons is an advantage for me.
What they disinherit-- the kingdom of heaven, peace and prosperity --is all mine for the taking. I have no competition. No one is trying to beat me to it.
I can take my time, or I can rush headlong into the thick of it.
I have choices.
Tell me, people of Earth: What choice do you have when you've thrown in the towel and resigned yourself to defeat so early in the game?
Answer: None. You have no choices when you let the world win.
I'll tell you what: I may not be making any money off of this writing thing, but I feel like I am a wealthy man anyway.
*/*
One of these days I'll get it right. One of these days I'll string the right amount of letters together and form some magic sentence that will unlock the mysteries of the universe and bring happiness and joy to all who are literate and lucky enough to read it.
Until then, I'm going to keep on writing, and I'm not going to stop.
What are you going to do until then?
Friday, January 12, 2007
college
From time to time, all of us have our doubts about the paths we chose to take in our lives.
It's normal to contemplate what could have been. Hell, I do it all the time. In fact, this past year has been one long revaluation of every decision I've made in the past 15 or 16 years!
But I always manage to bounce back and "stay the course", so to speak. My will to carry on refuses to allow those innermost fears and doubts gnaw at me for very long.
However, I've been thinking lately: What if I put my stubborn pride aside and truly reflect on my past as if every decision I've made has been totally wrong?
What would I conclude?
Hmmmm...
*/*
Let's start with my decision to not go to college.
This is is tricky, because I did try to go to a community college. But I only enrolled in two classes, Criminal Law and Broadcasting. I received an Incomplete in one and a Withdrawal in the other.
The reason I didn't continue, I tell myself, is because I wanted to be a working stiff and I'd had enough of book learning. I wanted to experience life and earn a paycheck and I couldn't wait to do four years of college.
But the fact is, I could've applied for scholarships... and I probably would've garnered a few based upon my ethnicity alone. But I tell myself that I didn't think it was fair that I had a shot at a university when so many non-minority students with the same GPA as me were denied.
I also like to tell myself that right now I'd be up to my scalp in debt, or that the minute I finished college I would've encountered the Quarterlife Crisis that I hear so much about.
And finally, I have always trotted out that old sawhorse about going back to college anytime I want but not right now because I'm doing so much and learning vital skills at my job.
There is some truth in all of these rationalizations, but I wonder if I could've lived the life I lived in my early twenties and still received a quality education.
You may be wondering why I didn't finish those two classes. It's simple, really: I was carpooling with my good friend Sharky, who is known for his tardiness in all aspects of life. I hesitate to blame him for my continual lateness during that semester, because it was my choice to go along with his idea of the both of us going to the same community college. I could've gone to the local college and taken a bus every day, but I let myself be persuaded to tag along with Sharky... who is still taking college courses to this day, I might add.
Ultimately, I just didn't want to go to college. I figured that I'd learn things in the workplace and get experience I couldn't gather from classes. In that respect, I was correct-- I don't think I'd be as seasoned as I am with audio editing, for example, if I'd completed that Broadcasting class.
But then again, if I'd gotten some type of degree, maybe I'd be making more money right now. And maybe I would've met more people that I most likely would not have met. I probably would've gotten laid a lot more too.
It's something to consider.
*/*
The left side of my brain reasons that I had just as many doubts about going to college as I had about not going. Truthfully, I probably had more fears and anxieties about going than not going, because there is a lot of pressure being put upon the average college student in their first year.
I had no pressure from my parents, that's for sure. If they were ever disappointed in my decision to not go, they never voiced it. Shit, they didn't even have money saved up for me in case I did want to go, so it's apparent that they trusted me to make that decision on my own. I don't think they ever expected me to go off to college, to be perfectly frank.
Would they have supported me if I had gone? Maybe. But at the time both sides of my immediate family (split by divorce, of course) were not in any real position to help me financially. They might have suggested I pay for it myself and live at home while attending, but I don't think they would have (or could have) gone beyond that.
They're all doing great now, so if I were eighteen years old again I think college would seem more attainable, more realistic.
But then there's that self-destructive, devil-may-care side of me that would've shirked my responsibilities and squandered my opportunities by not taking it seriously or changing majors mid-term or pursuing dead-end career paths simply because everyone else said it would be beneficial.
And let's not forget that I definitely would've used college as a method of making up for an adolescence that was only begininng to build up juvenile steam in my Senior year. I wanted to par-tay, and I'm certain that I would've neglected my studies in order to hit up the keggers and the social events.
I think I would've folded beneath the weight of exams, living as an adult for the first time, wanting to be creative, looking to have fun, and thinking about long-term goals vs. short-term gain... or at least that's what I tell myself.
*/*
Last but not least, there is the issue of whether college would've been unnecessary or redundant, given my enrollment in Magnet schools from the time I was in second grade until I graduated from high school.
Indeed, many of my peers who went on to colleges and universities would remark to me later on that the first two years of college were basically rehashes of what we learned in our Humanities CORE program. Our high school curriculum was definitely college prep material, and I can't help but wonder if it would've seemed all too easy if I'd gone on to college.
Maybe I would've gotten bored and dropped out anyway. Or maybe it would've challenged me in ways that I cannot imagine. Maybe I would've found a niche for myself that I hadn't counted on, or maybe I would've soldiered on with single-minded concentration by focusing on one supreme goal, whatever that might've been.
And that's the bottom line right there, when you think about it: "Whatever that might've been..." I could go on and on thinking about the infinite possibilities, but none of the tangents I could conjure would get me any closer to knowing if it was a mistake to not go to college.
I often state that, for me, college would've been a disaster, but I don't begrudge anyone for applying themselves to it. I think there is a hint of resentment and envy inherent in that train of thought. It's as if I wrote off something that could've improved me or altered me irrevocably, merely because I was afraid of what might happen if I finished college.
What was I afraid of happening? Perhaps I feared that college would be too hard, that I wasn't smart enough or disciplined enough to hack it. Then again, maybe I was terrified of the notion of watching life pass me by yet again as I buried my nose in books and delayed the gratification of adulthood for another four years.
My half-assed foray into attending classes served as an excuse to not bother trying. Two wasted courses were enough for me to claim that I'd given it a try and it didn't work out. I've been riding the momentum of that claim for the longest time.
And yet, after all these years I am still conflicted over it. I think it is due to not knowing if I really wanted to go to college or not. I sometimes feel like I just dismissed it as sour grapes, but then again I don't feel a burning desire to do all the necessary things it takes to enroll.
I suppose I did the right thing for me at the time. I don't regret not going, but let's say that I had gone: Would I have regretted going? You never really hear people say they regret going to college. They might say it was a waste of time at the very worst, or that their degree is useless... but you never hear people say they regretted it.
There's that Butthole Surfers song where a voice says, "It's better to regret something you have done than to regret something you haven't done!" But that gets followed by the same man asking his son to scream "SATAN! SATAN! SATAN!" at his mother the next time he sees her, so that's not much help to me.
Still, I can't say I know for a fact that my life would be any different had I gone. At least now I can face up to the fears that motivated me to avoid it altogether. For whatever reasons I had for discouraging myself from higher learning, I am content knowing that the path I did take was exciting and challenging in its own way, and it has taken me this long to even entertain the notion that I made a bad move.
In the end, I'm here, I'm alive, I'm happy as I can be... Why ponder what may or may not have been my fate?
In my next post, I think I'll pontificate on my writing and the decisions I made regarding its place in my life.
It's normal to contemplate what could have been. Hell, I do it all the time. In fact, this past year has been one long revaluation of every decision I've made in the past 15 or 16 years!
But I always manage to bounce back and "stay the course", so to speak. My will to carry on refuses to allow those innermost fears and doubts gnaw at me for very long.
However, I've been thinking lately: What if I put my stubborn pride aside and truly reflect on my past as if every decision I've made has been totally wrong?
What would I conclude?
Hmmmm...
*/*
Let's start with my decision to not go to college.
This is is tricky, because I did try to go to a community college. But I only enrolled in two classes, Criminal Law and Broadcasting. I received an Incomplete in one and a Withdrawal in the other.
The reason I didn't continue, I tell myself, is because I wanted to be a working stiff and I'd had enough of book learning. I wanted to experience life and earn a paycheck and I couldn't wait to do four years of college.
But the fact is, I could've applied for scholarships... and I probably would've garnered a few based upon my ethnicity alone. But I tell myself that I didn't think it was fair that I had a shot at a university when so many non-minority students with the same GPA as me were denied.
I also like to tell myself that right now I'd be up to my scalp in debt, or that the minute I finished college I would've encountered the Quarterlife Crisis that I hear so much about.
And finally, I have always trotted out that old sawhorse about going back to college anytime I want but not right now because I'm doing so much and learning vital skills at my job.
There is some truth in all of these rationalizations, but I wonder if I could've lived the life I lived in my early twenties and still received a quality education.
You may be wondering why I didn't finish those two classes. It's simple, really: I was carpooling with my good friend Sharky, who is known for his tardiness in all aspects of life. I hesitate to blame him for my continual lateness during that semester, because it was my choice to go along with his idea of the both of us going to the same community college. I could've gone to the local college and taken a bus every day, but I let myself be persuaded to tag along with Sharky... who is still taking college courses to this day, I might add.
Ultimately, I just didn't want to go to college. I figured that I'd learn things in the workplace and get experience I couldn't gather from classes. In that respect, I was correct-- I don't think I'd be as seasoned as I am with audio editing, for example, if I'd completed that Broadcasting class.
But then again, if I'd gotten some type of degree, maybe I'd be making more money right now. And maybe I would've met more people that I most likely would not have met. I probably would've gotten laid a lot more too.
It's something to consider.
*/*
The left side of my brain reasons that I had just as many doubts about going to college as I had about not going. Truthfully, I probably had more fears and anxieties about going than not going, because there is a lot of pressure being put upon the average college student in their first year.
I had no pressure from my parents, that's for sure. If they were ever disappointed in my decision to not go, they never voiced it. Shit, they didn't even have money saved up for me in case I did want to go, so it's apparent that they trusted me to make that decision on my own. I don't think they ever expected me to go off to college, to be perfectly frank.
Would they have supported me if I had gone? Maybe. But at the time both sides of my immediate family (split by divorce, of course) were not in any real position to help me financially. They might have suggested I pay for it myself and live at home while attending, but I don't think they would have (or could have) gone beyond that.
They're all doing great now, so if I were eighteen years old again I think college would seem more attainable, more realistic.
But then there's that self-destructive, devil-may-care side of me that would've shirked my responsibilities and squandered my opportunities by not taking it seriously or changing majors mid-term or pursuing dead-end career paths simply because everyone else said it would be beneficial.
And let's not forget that I definitely would've used college as a method of making up for an adolescence that was only begininng to build up juvenile steam in my Senior year. I wanted to par-tay, and I'm certain that I would've neglected my studies in order to hit up the keggers and the social events.
I think I would've folded beneath the weight of exams, living as an adult for the first time, wanting to be creative, looking to have fun, and thinking about long-term goals vs. short-term gain... or at least that's what I tell myself.
*/*
Last but not least, there is the issue of whether college would've been unnecessary or redundant, given my enrollment in Magnet schools from the time I was in second grade until I graduated from high school.
Indeed, many of my peers who went on to colleges and universities would remark to me later on that the first two years of college were basically rehashes of what we learned in our Humanities CORE program. Our high school curriculum was definitely college prep material, and I can't help but wonder if it would've seemed all too easy if I'd gone on to college.
Maybe I would've gotten bored and dropped out anyway. Or maybe it would've challenged me in ways that I cannot imagine. Maybe I would've found a niche for myself that I hadn't counted on, or maybe I would've soldiered on with single-minded concentration by focusing on one supreme goal, whatever that might've been.
And that's the bottom line right there, when you think about it: "Whatever that might've been..." I could go on and on thinking about the infinite possibilities, but none of the tangents I could conjure would get me any closer to knowing if it was a mistake to not go to college.
I often state that, for me, college would've been a disaster, but I don't begrudge anyone for applying themselves to it. I think there is a hint of resentment and envy inherent in that train of thought. It's as if I wrote off something that could've improved me or altered me irrevocably, merely because I was afraid of what might happen if I finished college.
What was I afraid of happening? Perhaps I feared that college would be too hard, that I wasn't smart enough or disciplined enough to hack it. Then again, maybe I was terrified of the notion of watching life pass me by yet again as I buried my nose in books and delayed the gratification of adulthood for another four years.
My half-assed foray into attending classes served as an excuse to not bother trying. Two wasted courses were enough for me to claim that I'd given it a try and it didn't work out. I've been riding the momentum of that claim for the longest time.
And yet, after all these years I am still conflicted over it. I think it is due to not knowing if I really wanted to go to college or not. I sometimes feel like I just dismissed it as sour grapes, but then again I don't feel a burning desire to do all the necessary things it takes to enroll.
I suppose I did the right thing for me at the time. I don't regret not going, but let's say that I had gone: Would I have regretted going? You never really hear people say they regret going to college. They might say it was a waste of time at the very worst, or that their degree is useless... but you never hear people say they regretted it.
There's that Butthole Surfers song where a voice says, "It's better to regret something you have done than to regret something you haven't done!" But that gets followed by the same man asking his son to scream "SATAN! SATAN! SATAN!" at his mother the next time he sees her, so that's not much help to me.
Still, I can't say I know for a fact that my life would be any different had I gone. At least now I can face up to the fears that motivated me to avoid it altogether. For whatever reasons I had for discouraging myself from higher learning, I am content knowing that the path I did take was exciting and challenging in its own way, and it has taken me this long to even entertain the notion that I made a bad move.
In the end, I'm here, I'm alive, I'm happy as I can be... Why ponder what may or may not have been my fate?
In my next post, I think I'll pontificate on my writing and the decisions I made regarding its place in my life.
Tuesday, January 09, 2007
mope
The song: "Girlfriend In A Coma", written by Morrissey/Marr and performed by The Smiths.
The video: This was the first Smiths video that I ever saw on MTV. I never knew what Morrissey looked like, because I never owned any Smiths albums prior to seeing this. All of my school friends adored them but it took some time before I caught on, and then by the time I even knew what they looked like they had broken up and that was it.
It is probably my all-time favorite Smiths song, because it is both hilarious and sad... plus it is very short and catchy, the way all perfect pop songs should be.
I have no idea what movie is superimposed over Morrissey, but I'm sure a nice thorough Google search will reveal that for me.
Enjoy.
The video: This was the first Smiths video that I ever saw on MTV. I never knew what Morrissey looked like, because I never owned any Smiths albums prior to seeing this. All of my school friends adored them but it took some time before I caught on, and then by the time I even knew what they looked like they had broken up and that was it.
It is probably my all-time favorite Smiths song, because it is both hilarious and sad... plus it is very short and catchy, the way all perfect pop songs should be.
I have no idea what movie is superimposed over Morrissey, but I'm sure a nice thorough Google search will reveal that for me.
Enjoy.
Monday, January 08, 2007
sick
The song: "While My Guitar Gently Weeps", written by the late George Harrison and originally recorded by The Beatles.
The event: The 2004 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame ceremonies.
The skinny motherfucker playing some mean-ass guitar: Prince, playing some of the best six-string slinging I've ever heard from him. I've been meaning to get a load of this when I first heard about his blistering solo during the traditional all-star git jam that happens at the end of the event, but I only got around to finding the clip on YouTube recently.
Enjoy.
The event: The 2004 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame ceremonies.
The skinny motherfucker playing some mean-ass guitar: Prince, playing some of the best six-string slinging I've ever heard from him. I've been meaning to get a load of this when I first heard about his blistering solo during the traditional all-star git jam that happens at the end of the event, but I only got around to finding the clip on YouTube recently.
Enjoy.
Friday, January 05, 2007
believe
Happy New Year!
Good news: I am clean and sober for the first time in 15 years.
OK, so I smoked some pot on New Year's Eve and washed it back with a Newcastle. But it wasn't my pot-- I haven't bought any weed for my own consumption in over a month. And the Newcastle was a freebie from the bartender with whom I am friends... I tipped her, of course, but the beer itself cost me nothing.
I haven't had any cocaine since last Saturday, and my dealer announced that he is no longer selling small bags, which is good for me since that's all I seemed to purchase.
I still smoke cigarettes though. That one is going to be tough, because I am truly addicted to nicotine.
Still, it feels good to be drug-free. I am not expecting to go cold turkey, but I know that my partaking has gone down in general ever since I made an earnest effort to quit smoking pot, which has always been my greatest love.
Once I cut down on the herb, everything else seemed to fall into place. And if I smoke it every now and then, that's fine-- I was sick of doing it all day every day. Every once in a while is the way it should be.
By the way: I don't consider these to be resolutions. The late Charles Bukowski's headstone is engraved with the words "Don't Try", which means that there is only doing and not doing-- there is no such thing as "try".
New Year's resolutions are nothing but a bunch of tries. But what I've done with myself... that's a bunch of dos and don'ts.
*/*
I owe some of my new found sobriety to Rose, whom I mentioned in my recent Las Vegas mini-epic posts.
I've only known Rose for about five months, but in that short time she has been nothing but wonderful in helping me find my way during the second half of 2006, a period where I felt like I'd lost my direction and sense of self.
Rose and I are not a couple. Rather, she has been quite possibly the purest muse I've had in many a year. I won't lie, though: I did like her right off the bat, but after a while I found myself wondering what about her held my fascination so raptly.
I think the answer lies in my unwillingness to rebound in the wake of my break-up with Eve. It would've been easier to just throw myself into something else. And even if I'd felt that Rose felt the same way as me (which, to be honest, I am not sure nor do I care to find out) I think that finding an immediate substitute for Eve would've been disastrous, considering that I was still trying to find myself again.
Plus, Rose had a "boyfriend" who lived out of state, a situation I (correctly) predicted would lead to no avail for her.
Rose broke up with said boyfriend shortly after Halloween, when she sang the Columbia and Magenta parts during Missing Digits' live interpretation of "Time Warp" from The Rocky Horror Picture Show. I didn't hear from her for a while after that, and she cut back on her My Space access during that time.
Then, she re-emerged and started contacting me again. We made plans to go see the Rene Magritte exhibit at LACMA in December.
We went and ate breakfast at Swinger's in Hollywood, where she regaled me with the news of her relationship's end. I should've been happy-- now I had my chance to win her heart and woo her off her feet, right?
However, I had already decided by that time that, whatever it was I saw in her, it had nothing to do with wanting to date again. No, it had more to do with hearing things from a fresh perspective, and Rose was up to that task.
So when she went on about her reasons for terminating her affair with her out-of-state man, I paid it mind merely on the surface. Deep down, I did not want to know, just as I was sure she did not need to know about my cocaine binges, my borderline bipolar episodes, and my past girlfriends.
I was just happy to be in the company of a smart, cute, sensible girl who (after two and a half months of asking her out and having her straddle the fence with me) finally sought me out for my companionship.
We had a lot of fun that day, and then she told me that she was leaving Los Angeles because she was not happy here and she felt she could pursue a more meaningful existence in the northern part of California.
I saw this coming a mile away, and encouraged her to follow her bliss. Rose is like many girls I've met in the past five or six years: dissatisfied with her position and her place (to quote the great Bob Dylan), and disturbed by L.A.'s tendency to eat sensitive people alive.
Normally, news like this would cause me to sulk and possibly attempt to persuade said girl to stay despite her obvious interest in relocating. But this time around, I did the opposite and cheered her for her initiative.
Rose smiled when I told her not to give up, and the reason she smiled is because I explained to her that, when I was feeling like I could not continue to play in Missing Digits or pursue my own dreams, she was the one who told me not to quit.
Genuine reciprocity can sometimes be more romantic and sweet than holding hands or exchanging goo-goo eyes... and let's face it-- I was not ready for anything more than what we were sharing that day.
Rose has taught me a lot of lessons without even trying. The recent one that I'm about to mention qualifies as one of the biggest lessons I've learned not only this year but in my entire life as well.
*/*
She called me up and asked me what I had planned for New Year's Eve. I told her I might go and hang out with Big JJ at the nightclub where he works the door. She then invited me to go to her friend's house for a small party, and then maybe afterwards we could go to the club and grab a few drinks before calling it a night.
I agreed to that plan. Then, before I was about to get off the phone, I casually mentioned that I'd seen Jackass Number Two on DVD earlier in the day.
Rose paused and said, "Why is everyone in my life telling me this information? It seems like anyone I talk to these days has seen this movie and feels the need to inform me of it."
I sensed irritation in her voice, but rather than drop the subject I instead tried to explain its appeal. "In every man, there's a 15 year-old boy trying to break out."
"Yeah, but that's why you play in a rock band," she said.
"I thought it was funny. You can tell the Jackass guys are getting more creative with their stunts and--"
>click<
The phone went dead. I didn't assume that she had hung up on me, but when I called her back not once or twice but three times and got no answer, I suddenly wondered if she'd been so offended by my exaltation of Johnny Knoxville and company that she cut me off mid-sentence.
I didn't think Rose would be the type to do that, but it made no sense for the phone line to just cut off like that... and calling her back three times to listen to the line ring endlessly only made me more anxious.
I could've tried her cel phone, but my phone line has been on Toll Restriction since I refused to pay the long distance portion of my bill (long story, don't ask) and so I knew I would not be able to call her on that line.
So I waited.
She didn't call me back.
I got worried. I started to think about all the girls who never gave me an explanation for their dismissal of me. I wondered if Rose was worth knowing if she was so quick to judge me like that.
I snorted a gram of cocaine to my head, which only increased my paranoia. I stayed up all night hoping to hear the phone ring.
Before I finally went to sleep, I fired off an apologetic e-mail, hoping that I could reach her that way. I wasn't mad at her at all. If anything, I felt like I'd opened my big mouth once again and ruined everything with my inability to shut the fuck up.
The next morning, I resolved to go out to the club by myself. I did not want to go to her friend's party if she was upset at me. The rejection felt all too real. This past year was rife with rejection, not just from the likes of Eve but other individuals as well. Most of them didn't even give me the benefit of an explanation-- they just turned on me and didn't look back.
So when the eve of the New Year was upon me, I was determined not to let it get me down. I was ready to go out and get drunk and forget that I was seemingly repulsive to every female on the face of the planet.
Right before I left the apartment, I received a phone call. It was from Rose. But I did not pick it up-- I let it ring as I headed out the door. I did not want to know what she had to say to me.
I wound up at the club and talked with Big JJ and saw an incredible all-Asian punk band. I received a beer from the bartender and smoked some weed in the parking lot with JJ's girlfriend Carrie. I even ran into some friends whom I had invited to the club, seeing as they had no plans of their own for the New Year.
Then, just as we were about to go get some food at IHOP, Rose and her friends showed up. I walked over to her, a little out of my gourd and weary for the wear.
"Hey!" she said, smiling. "I called you. What happened?"
"Hi... I didn't hear back from you."
"I know, my power went out in my apartment and I couldn't use the phone because it's a portable, and my cel wasn't charged up."
"Ohhhh..." It all started to make sense.
"Why didn't you come to the party? I gave you directions and everything."
"I... I... I didn't think you wanted me to come."
"What? Are you crazy? Of course I wanted you to come."
I started to feel really stupid for flaking on her, so I changed the subject. "How was the party?"
"It was OK-- it would've been better if you'd shown up. Here, I have something for you."
She pulled out of her petticoat a small rectangle wrapped in paper. It was a gift.
"I got you a little something for Christmas and I wanted to give it to you tonight."
I was speechless. Unable to think properly, I proceeded to open the gift.
Rose talked as I unwrapped it. "Remember at LACMA when you were sketching in your notepad and that woman came up to you and started talking to you about art? And remember how I sat down and talked with the both of you but she just wanted to talk to you instead? And remember how you were kind enough to include me in the conversation anyway, even though she had her eyes on you? Well, I was thinking about that when I found this gift in Venice, and I wrote a little quote in there that reminded me of you."
Her gift to me was a small, portable sketch book. On the first page, in clear red handwritten print, was the following quote:
"To believe is to be strong. Doubt cramps energy. Belief is power. Only so far as a man believes strongly, mightily, can he act cheerfully, or do any thing that is worth the doing." --Frederick W. Robertson
And I laughed to myself when I read the words "Doubt cramps energy" and I looked at her and said, "Thank you. I have a gift for you too, at home. I can go get it if you want."
Rose laughed. "I think you'd better not worry about that. You look trashed. Get some coffee in you, sweetie. Happy New Year."
We hugged for what seemed like an eternity. I promised her I'd be back after getting some joe in my gullet, but she didn't take my tipsy words seriously. By the time I'd returned to the club, she had gone home.
*/*
We sorted the whole mess out, and eventually I gave her my gift: a book of Picasso's sketches, with accompanying slides.
I am going to miss her when she is gone, but we still have some time left before she makes the move up north. For her birthday, she is having a party... and this time I will not give in to my silly fears and wild anxieties.
This time, I will take her advice and be strong by believing in something. She reminded me of that only a few hours after the start of 2007, and so it is only appropriate that I take her up on that.
2006 was a bad year for me, but if I had to single out one event as being good, it would have to be meeting Rose for the first time. She gave me confidence when I had none, and she and I have shared a lot of love and warmth and encouragement.
We have the power to believe, and that's enough to get by on, isn't it?
Happy New Year, everyone...
Good news: I am clean and sober for the first time in 15 years.
OK, so I smoked some pot on New Year's Eve and washed it back with a Newcastle. But it wasn't my pot-- I haven't bought any weed for my own consumption in over a month. And the Newcastle was a freebie from the bartender with whom I am friends... I tipped her, of course, but the beer itself cost me nothing.
I haven't had any cocaine since last Saturday, and my dealer announced that he is no longer selling small bags, which is good for me since that's all I seemed to purchase.
I still smoke cigarettes though. That one is going to be tough, because I am truly addicted to nicotine.
Still, it feels good to be drug-free. I am not expecting to go cold turkey, but I know that my partaking has gone down in general ever since I made an earnest effort to quit smoking pot, which has always been my greatest love.
Once I cut down on the herb, everything else seemed to fall into place. And if I smoke it every now and then, that's fine-- I was sick of doing it all day every day. Every once in a while is the way it should be.
By the way: I don't consider these to be resolutions. The late Charles Bukowski's headstone is engraved with the words "Don't Try", which means that there is only doing and not doing-- there is no such thing as "try".
New Year's resolutions are nothing but a bunch of tries. But what I've done with myself... that's a bunch of dos and don'ts.
*/*
I owe some of my new found sobriety to Rose, whom I mentioned in my recent Las Vegas mini-epic posts.
I've only known Rose for about five months, but in that short time she has been nothing but wonderful in helping me find my way during the second half of 2006, a period where I felt like I'd lost my direction and sense of self.
Rose and I are not a couple. Rather, she has been quite possibly the purest muse I've had in many a year. I won't lie, though: I did like her right off the bat, but after a while I found myself wondering what about her held my fascination so raptly.
I think the answer lies in my unwillingness to rebound in the wake of my break-up with Eve. It would've been easier to just throw myself into something else. And even if I'd felt that Rose felt the same way as me (which, to be honest, I am not sure nor do I care to find out) I think that finding an immediate substitute for Eve would've been disastrous, considering that I was still trying to find myself again.
Plus, Rose had a "boyfriend" who lived out of state, a situation I (correctly) predicted would lead to no avail for her.
Rose broke up with said boyfriend shortly after Halloween, when she sang the Columbia and Magenta parts during Missing Digits' live interpretation of "Time Warp" from The Rocky Horror Picture Show. I didn't hear from her for a while after that, and she cut back on her My Space access during that time.
Then, she re-emerged and started contacting me again. We made plans to go see the Rene Magritte exhibit at LACMA in December.
We went and ate breakfast at Swinger's in Hollywood, where she regaled me with the news of her relationship's end. I should've been happy-- now I had my chance to win her heart and woo her off her feet, right?
However, I had already decided by that time that, whatever it was I saw in her, it had nothing to do with wanting to date again. No, it had more to do with hearing things from a fresh perspective, and Rose was up to that task.
So when she went on about her reasons for terminating her affair with her out-of-state man, I paid it mind merely on the surface. Deep down, I did not want to know, just as I was sure she did not need to know about my cocaine binges, my borderline bipolar episodes, and my past girlfriends.
I was just happy to be in the company of a smart, cute, sensible girl who (after two and a half months of asking her out and having her straddle the fence with me) finally sought me out for my companionship.
We had a lot of fun that day, and then she told me that she was leaving Los Angeles because she was not happy here and she felt she could pursue a more meaningful existence in the northern part of California.
I saw this coming a mile away, and encouraged her to follow her bliss. Rose is like many girls I've met in the past five or six years: dissatisfied with her position and her place (to quote the great Bob Dylan), and disturbed by L.A.'s tendency to eat sensitive people alive.
Normally, news like this would cause me to sulk and possibly attempt to persuade said girl to stay despite her obvious interest in relocating. But this time around, I did the opposite and cheered her for her initiative.
Rose smiled when I told her not to give up, and the reason she smiled is because I explained to her that, when I was feeling like I could not continue to play in Missing Digits or pursue my own dreams, she was the one who told me not to quit.
Genuine reciprocity can sometimes be more romantic and sweet than holding hands or exchanging goo-goo eyes... and let's face it-- I was not ready for anything more than what we were sharing that day.
Rose has taught me a lot of lessons without even trying. The recent one that I'm about to mention qualifies as one of the biggest lessons I've learned not only this year but in my entire life as well.
*/*
She called me up and asked me what I had planned for New Year's Eve. I told her I might go and hang out with Big JJ at the nightclub where he works the door. She then invited me to go to her friend's house for a small party, and then maybe afterwards we could go to the club and grab a few drinks before calling it a night.
I agreed to that plan. Then, before I was about to get off the phone, I casually mentioned that I'd seen Jackass Number Two on DVD earlier in the day.
Rose paused and said, "Why is everyone in my life telling me this information? It seems like anyone I talk to these days has seen this movie and feels the need to inform me of it."
I sensed irritation in her voice, but rather than drop the subject I instead tried to explain its appeal. "In every man, there's a 15 year-old boy trying to break out."
"Yeah, but that's why you play in a rock band," she said.
"I thought it was funny. You can tell the Jackass guys are getting more creative with their stunts and--"
>click<
The phone went dead. I didn't assume that she had hung up on me, but when I called her back not once or twice but three times and got no answer, I suddenly wondered if she'd been so offended by my exaltation of Johnny Knoxville and company that she cut me off mid-sentence.
I didn't think Rose would be the type to do that, but it made no sense for the phone line to just cut off like that... and calling her back three times to listen to the line ring endlessly only made me more anxious.
I could've tried her cel phone, but my phone line has been on Toll Restriction since I refused to pay the long distance portion of my bill (long story, don't ask) and so I knew I would not be able to call her on that line.
So I waited.
She didn't call me back.
I got worried. I started to think about all the girls who never gave me an explanation for their dismissal of me. I wondered if Rose was worth knowing if she was so quick to judge me like that.
I snorted a gram of cocaine to my head, which only increased my paranoia. I stayed up all night hoping to hear the phone ring.
Before I finally went to sleep, I fired off an apologetic e-mail, hoping that I could reach her that way. I wasn't mad at her at all. If anything, I felt like I'd opened my big mouth once again and ruined everything with my inability to shut the fuck up.
The next morning, I resolved to go out to the club by myself. I did not want to go to her friend's party if she was upset at me. The rejection felt all too real. This past year was rife with rejection, not just from the likes of Eve but other individuals as well. Most of them didn't even give me the benefit of an explanation-- they just turned on me and didn't look back.
So when the eve of the New Year was upon me, I was determined not to let it get me down. I was ready to go out and get drunk and forget that I was seemingly repulsive to every female on the face of the planet.
Right before I left the apartment, I received a phone call. It was from Rose. But I did not pick it up-- I let it ring as I headed out the door. I did not want to know what she had to say to me.
I wound up at the club and talked with Big JJ and saw an incredible all-Asian punk band. I received a beer from the bartender and smoked some weed in the parking lot with JJ's girlfriend Carrie. I even ran into some friends whom I had invited to the club, seeing as they had no plans of their own for the New Year.
Then, just as we were about to go get some food at IHOP, Rose and her friends showed up. I walked over to her, a little out of my gourd and weary for the wear.
"Hey!" she said, smiling. "I called you. What happened?"
"Hi... I didn't hear back from you."
"I know, my power went out in my apartment and I couldn't use the phone because it's a portable, and my cel wasn't charged up."
"Ohhhh..." It all started to make sense.
"Why didn't you come to the party? I gave you directions and everything."
"I... I... I didn't think you wanted me to come."
"What? Are you crazy? Of course I wanted you to come."
I started to feel really stupid for flaking on her, so I changed the subject. "How was the party?"
"It was OK-- it would've been better if you'd shown up. Here, I have something for you."
She pulled out of her petticoat a small rectangle wrapped in paper. It was a gift.
"I got you a little something for Christmas and I wanted to give it to you tonight."
I was speechless. Unable to think properly, I proceeded to open the gift.
Rose talked as I unwrapped it. "Remember at LACMA when you were sketching in your notepad and that woman came up to you and started talking to you about art? And remember how I sat down and talked with the both of you but she just wanted to talk to you instead? And remember how you were kind enough to include me in the conversation anyway, even though she had her eyes on you? Well, I was thinking about that when I found this gift in Venice, and I wrote a little quote in there that reminded me of you."
Her gift to me was a small, portable sketch book. On the first page, in clear red handwritten print, was the following quote:
"To believe is to be strong. Doubt cramps energy. Belief is power. Only so far as a man believes strongly, mightily, can he act cheerfully, or do any thing that is worth the doing." --Frederick W. Robertson
And I laughed to myself when I read the words "Doubt cramps energy" and I looked at her and said, "Thank you. I have a gift for you too, at home. I can go get it if you want."
Rose laughed. "I think you'd better not worry about that. You look trashed. Get some coffee in you, sweetie. Happy New Year."
We hugged for what seemed like an eternity. I promised her I'd be back after getting some joe in my gullet, but she didn't take my tipsy words seriously. By the time I'd returned to the club, she had gone home.
*/*
We sorted the whole mess out, and eventually I gave her my gift: a book of Picasso's sketches, with accompanying slides.
I am going to miss her when she is gone, but we still have some time left before she makes the move up north. For her birthday, she is having a party... and this time I will not give in to my silly fears and wild anxieties.
This time, I will take her advice and be strong by believing in something. She reminded me of that only a few hours after the start of 2007, and so it is only appropriate that I take her up on that.
2006 was a bad year for me, but if I had to single out one event as being good, it would have to be meeting Rose for the first time. She gave me confidence when I had none, and she and I have shared a lot of love and warmth and encouragement.
We have the power to believe, and that's enough to get by on, isn't it?
Happy New Year, everyone...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)