Tiny Song #215?, First Version

if you stop worrying about who you want to be,

and be who you already are,

you might find it true,

that there is a way,

that you never noticed before

Andrew Dane live at The Empire Room

Left-Handed Journal: 3 One-Sentence Stories

novel in progress

there is a novel I need to write

though I don't know how it should end

the beginning I'm a little fuzzy on

and the middle I have no idea

but at some point in the story

a woman right around my age

sees a man run from a house

to a car on the corner that pulls away fast

while apple blossom petals

flutter off the roof and the hood

that much I know for sure

Discovering Sun Ra

I watched this documentary last night about Sun Ra.  My middle school son sat down with me and while watching the scene on the rooftop (at 1:40) said, "Oh my God, Mom!  This is exactly like your band.  Oh my God!  Is this what it was like in the eighties??"

"I am moving forward with my music, the universal language, expressing things of value.  And 

if there's some people that want to listen, they are welcome.  I'm just like the birds, they sing.  Those who like it can listen, and those who don't, don't have to."  Sun Ra in the documentary A Joyful Noise

A Note to Elyse About The Cat

This song, for example, I had to listen to a dozen times until I started to like it.  But that's the good thing about tiny songs.  To listen to even the longest one a dozen times takes only sixteen minutes and eight seconds.  Did you know that the man who invented (the security code box where you type in elongated letters and numbers that spy bots can't decipher) felt so guilty about all the time people waste on his invention (an average of something like 6.9 seconds a day) that he invented a way to mine the millions of lost seconds by using the typed responses to translate books.!?  Impossible it seems at first, as does drones, eyeglasses with internet connection, and 3D printers, but how readily it makes sense and no longer shocks me unless I stop to really think about it, which I don't.  I wrote a letter that started off by stating that it's been ages since I've written a letter, a thing I used to do quite often.  A dying art, that's true.  But there are so many others being born.  I always wanted to know what it was like to live in a revolutionary time.

The basket is full, the shoes are at the door. The boys don't mind staying if there's gonna be more.  The hat is lost again.  The book is in the mail.  Won't you stop on by soon, there's something I'd like to show you.  The cat is under the bed.  Dinner's on the table.  I'm packing for warm weather.  I might be gone for a while.

tad neuhaus, guitar

joanna dane, vocals

Crazy People Music™ Method Book: The Black Keys

a) Play every black key once, in any order.

b) Play every black key as many times as you wish, in any order.

c) Place each finger on a different black key. 

Move the fingers randomly to a set tempo. 

Slowly speed up. 

Slowly slow down. 

Keep playing while letting the fingers and the tempo go mushy. 

Transition to playing the black keys with the whole hand using a rolling motion.

Practice everyday.

Never feel obliged to follow the directives.

Be curious instead of critical.

There is no right or wrong, only experience and sensation.

Day of the Kings

January 6, 2014

I don't dare go outside.  There is no need.  The sun shines low, sparkling the ice crystals covering the windows.  Because the wind chill is 50 degrees below zero, school was cancelled and there's rumors that it might be tomorrow too.  It's Andrew birthday so Roseanna in pajamas painted a banner while we waited for Izzy's crepes.  Izzy got frustrated with Roseanna wanting to flip the crepes and then he got frustrated trying to flip the crepes so Roseanna took over and served them with powdered sugar. Andrew waved his hand toward the staircase and started in again about hanging up more old family photos, so I cut him off and said I'll do it for his birthday.

January 7, 2014

Suddenly, I'm so interested in writing again.  Writing what?  I never know until I am writing it.  Not a recommendation.  If you can come at it a different way, do.  I don't keep an immaculate house.  I rarely bake bread any more.  Izzy said we're the type of people who just make the stacks neat when we tidy up.  The boy rearranged his room.  Why did you hang up a bunch of pictures of people we don't even know, Izzy asked.  The girls want to make sushi for lunch.  Before sunrise, we played Quirkle, huddled by the fire after I came home from yoga.  It's twenty degrees below zero and there were more people in my 5:30 a.m. class than there ever have been.  There is no school today for the second day in a row.  You wonder how people survived in teepees, dugouts, and hogans.  I chatted on FB this week with Joseph, one of my former students when I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Central African Republic.  Four days ago, he took refugee along with 15 others at the U.S. Embassy in Bangui where he is a clerk.  His uncle and cousin were assassinated.  The rest of his family is at the airport.  Planes have started to fly out.  He wants to leave, but is afraid of losing his job.  They hear gun fire in the streets.  He has no news from Carnot.

"How are you getting food?"

"They authorized us to eat some MRE.  Meal ready to eat."

And my kids complain when I give them whole wheat bread.

Andrew was a good sport about not getting more for his birthday than some photos hung up on the wall.  Fortunately, the neighbor stopped by with a birthday song on his ukulele and the gift of a new harmonica.* Izzy said it seems like birthdays aren't really that fun when you're an adult.

Joseph in his office at the U.S. Embassy in Bangui looking very much like the young boy
who always sat in the front row at full attention, eager to understand every strange word I said. 

* It sounds like something Mark would do.  And you are right, but not the Mark you are thinking of.

Andrew's Worried It Won't Get Past Security

More Thoughts About Music

Why is the image I see in the mirror, so different from the image on the photograph?  Which is a more accurate portrait?  And why do I feel so connected to this physical self when I've accepted that we all are manifested from the same sauce of energy.  Sounds like crazy talk.  It's difficult not to be foolish and cheesy and egotistical.  I used to lament that I hadn't become a musician, that I had failed to develop the most passionate art.  I blamed it on classical flute, which ironically is what also opened the door to new music.  New music is old music, very old music, when music was nothing more than people getting together, ancient music that arose as spontaneously as conversation.  My parents didn’t like the Music from Ugandan Jews CD.  It wasn’t professional, they said.  Just some people getting together in the village to sing.  But how much better can it get than that, to be in the heart of the music making, not only in the moment that the notes are produced, but the moment the notes are conceived?  Often, it is not about notes at all.  Often it is about wave or color or story or dance or emotion.  Notes, an artery in the soul of sound.  What about Evelyn Glennie?  Watch Touching the Sound and get back to me.  What about Meredith Monk and Keith Jarrett?  What about Andy Goldsworthy?  (Another must see: Rivers and Tides.  Same director.)  The most beautiful things are revealed.  All improvised, created in the moment for the moment and nothing more.  It takes time to get reacquainted with these types of sounds, having become so attuned to music engineered by industry, we no longer consider village music an art form.  A single listening is not enough.  I must listen three or four or more times until I can allow myself to hear what it actually happening.  How to divorce our ears from the perfection of the recording studio?  How much spontaneous music does anyone ever get to hear these days?  Maybe if you live in a big city where there’s lots of street musicians.  But mostly, musicians are afraid to play what hasn’t been rehearsed many times before, because they are competing with the engineered sound, highly refined and intellectualized and commodified.  Thank goodness for this new music movement, appearing in house concerts from Appleton to Austin, our porch music revolution.  Thank you for sitting on your porch Wednesday evenings when the weather permits and playing live music.  And thank you for spreading the word.  

tad neuhaus, banjo
joanna dane, vocals
emily dickinson, words

A Note for Two Twelve Year Olds

Boys, I hate to break it to you.  But if you can not figure out how to get yourselves some popcorn, then I fear for the future.  Resourcefulness is the best means to survival in troubled times.  And it seems that troubled times are coming.  Best to start practicing now.  And when you get that popcorn made, bring me up a bowl, salted, no butter.

Weekend Plans

Several years ago, after seeing the movie Iris, I bought Iris Murdoch's The Sea, the Sea, but unfortunately dove far enough into the introduction to believe it would be difficult reading, and I put the book down indefinitely. Yesterday, I suggested to my daughter that we sit by the fire and read.  She agreed.  I was afraid she would change her mind if I went in search of one of the dozen books I'm in the middle of, so I plucked The Sea, the Sea from the shelf. I opened to a page in the middle and found a person (a man it turns out) describing what it's like to see a woman he once loved, for the first time after many many years apart.  Last night in bed, starting from the beginning, I discovered it's just a book about an old man who goes to live by the sea and sees a sea monster coiling from the waters outside his door.  Not difficult at all.  At some point he'll meet an old love, I know that for sure. But so far, he is very alone, and insists he enjoys it, out in the middle of nowhere, after a long and illustrious career in the London theatre.

"Mr. Arkwright, do you ever see any very large eels in this vicinity?"

Soon, I'll have to go outside, to get the girls from school.  The temperature is falling. The wind is blowing over trash cans. By Monday there's supposed to be wind chills of 50 below zero. My husband sprained his ankle playing hockey. Tonight we will eat leftovers. The kids have taken up painting. What better time than now to spend the weekend with a crazy man waiting for the next sea creature to emerge.

New Year Composition #2014

1

start small

alternating

discover patterns

2

allowing deviations

flow

finding new patterns

3

kaleidoscope

stumble

add

4

notice

nostalgia

5

add and subtract

until there is 

nothing left

Dispatch from Guatemala #132

In the middle of the wealthy district, we are having breakfast.  It is cold outside and the sky fills with heavy grey clouds.  Several children are swimming in the heated pool.  A little girl is proud she can skip to the music that is playing from hidden speakers.  I am not allowed because I am too old.  A woman wearing a straw hat passes before a window.  She is smiling at nothing.  A man rolls a yellow cart along the cement walkway around the pool.  The wheels rattle to the music.  A. sits and reads the paper. Peter laps up yogurt with a spoon. Eric laughs after a round waitress pours coffee.  "Coffee!" he says incredulous and gleeful.

All day two old people sit in rubber lawn chairs.  The old man makes a gesture with his hand.  The old woman laughs and laughs.  There are three men painting the deck green with long handled brushes. One goes to the water spigot and fills his bucket with water.  His hands are covered in green splotches. We wait for Peter to get off the telephone.  But he doesn't for a long while because he is talking to his girlfriend.  We mill about under the tomb sized chandelier.  We inspect the eccentrically colored flowers in a vase as big as a tub.  A. repeats over and over again, "It's okay to be bored. . . It's okay to be bored," as he paces, waiting for Peter.  A. read that in a book yesterday, a used book he carries under the flap of his jacket.