Music Mumbles Monday

I shall endeavor to make this a semi-regular feature of my correspondence with you, my gentle readers (all 2 of you).  My music mumbles will range topically from (some) rock to traddy Scots-Irish, bluegrass & old-timey, and a little bit of classical - also, don't be shocked at the odd bit of filk, as my profile does list Michael Longcor and Leslie Fish in the favorite singers category.  I'll talk about concerts or sessions I've been to, musicians I like, new CDs I've heard or purchased, or why a certain song or tune does something special for me.  I don't really know a lot about any of the aforementioned types of music, but I know what I like, and I like a lot.  Of course, I can assure you that many times it will be late, especially if I haven't seen anything over the weekend but at least did make it to the weekly (Monday night) session at Fiddler's Hearth, one of my very favorite places to see live music.  One of these decades, I hope I'll even grow the stones to sit in.

So, this week's MMM is a pretty busy one, though I'll try to keep it short since I've already mumbled enough just describing what I'll mumble about.  Recently, I decided that I F**KING HATE JAZZ.  Here's why: on Saturday, Mrs. Disaffected and I went to the  Morris Performing Arts Center's tenth anniversary concert.  The anniversary was of the theater's renovation, not its founding (just in case you wondered), and hence they had a party.  We saw Kennedy's Kitchen play, heard Tuck Langland sing "Modern Major-General" (who knew?), even working some current-events references into the lyrics.  There were over a dozen musicians, most quite agreeable.  Then Danny Lerman [warning, the site plays music, loudly (big shock)] took the stage, and I wanted to run home right away and stuff my head in the oven.  Let me say, in all fairness, that the Morris's sound was crap most of the night.  Everything was boomy and distorted.  We heard a piano-violin duet, and if the piano was playing you couldn't hear the violin.  That sort of thing.  When Art & the Artichokes, a rock group, covered "Born to Run," I couldn't tell if they had any Glockenspiel (-en), and besides that I couldn't hear the geetars, only the bass, the drumkit, and the lead singer, screaming into an already Amplified microphone.  This brings me to Lerman and the microphone bolted into the bell of his saxonphone.  He had a great backing band, but why, WHY, would I - or anyone - want to sit through a 10-minute audio assault consisting of one guy improvising, shrilly and badly, at 120 dB?  Hello, Gitmo?  Screw waterboarding.  This'll make 'em talk if anything will.  So now, I hate jazz.  I thought I liked it.  I really did.  I found Jessy J, Nina Simone, Lady Day & even the banjo stylings of Alison Brown to be quite tasty and palatable.  I bought their records.  I listened in times of trouble and of ease.  I consumed them all and licked my chops.  Nom.  I wanted to find more jazz.  But now, If that crap I heard Saturday night was jazz, I can only approach the genre with fear, loathing, and hate.  Sorry for the negativity, but what's the sunshine without a little rain?  Next MMM, or later at any rate, I'll hold forth on the Euclid Quartet and Peter Miyamoto, who played Sunday in the Raclin auditorium and provided an entirely different experience.

Fluidity Fixed

This photo made me think, in that way that things never follow a straight line through our minds, about a quote from Terry Brooks in his book Sometimes the Magic Works.  He talked about how sometimes to get at what he needed to understand, within his "subterranean" mind, he would sort of go away for a while.  Like during a conversation about something else, or when he was driving.  This had to be a little awkward, leading to comments from his friends about how "Terry's not really all here."  In Terry's mind, though, being not all here was a very good thing, because that meant he got to be somewhere that's not here, he gets to be there.  "There" was the place where the magic happened.  It's the place Henry Miller might have called the "celestial recording room." Many people might take issue with the idea that anything from Mr. Miller's pen had any connection to the celestial realms, but his meaning is clear, and we can take it to be: inspiration is gotten from crossing boundaries, going somewhere, or getting "it" (via begging, supplication, or blackmail) to come here.  So if Terry Brooks were going to be anywhere, why would he not want to be where the magic and the words came from?  This photo put me in mind of Terry (and Henry-san) because it has subverted the fixedness of its subjects via movement, making them strings and streaks instead of points.  Is it not crossing a boundary of sorts, to make the solid mutable, and that which is fixed, mobile?  Now that we've crossed, inspiration must be near.  We only have to be ready with a bucket to catch it.

Forge Thick, Grind Thin

The Eminent Ed Fowler, ABS Master Bladesmith and senior statesman of the hand-forged knifemakers' contingent, takes this phrase as his mantra.  It's an especially good fit for people who want to be writers, and even better for writers like me, who have a neurotic tendency toward editing and proofing. 

I proof everything I read, unless I work very hard at Not Proofing, and I also proof everything I write, while I'm writing it, unless again I try not to.  Makes for a very slow first draft of anything. 

This neurosis also tends to make me hypercritical of most things I read, as if a hastily-scribbled stickynote memo from a manufacturing engineer is actually supposed to make grammatical sense.

Ed's mantra helps me move away from all that.  Very odd, since it overlays everything that writing teachers have been telling me, from junior high all the way up to the awesome Fran Sherwood.  Small wonder it hasn't sunk in yet.  This approach of his works well in bladesmithing, and can be transferred easily to writing. 

Like so:  when making the blade, Ed says, Do Not forge to final dimensions.  Leave yourself some meat on the bone for the finishing operations.  The important thing is to get the rough shape of the thing out there, existing and filling the space it was supposed to fill out. 

The time for agonizing over the placement of commas is during rewrites, when you are honing the razor’s edge of your prose.


After you bring your ..thing, your story, paper, or pattern-welded Zatoichi blade, into existence, once the you have fixed its shape in space the way it was in your imagination, you can pretty it up, take away things that are still a little rough or ugly, do some polishing & tempering. 

I have really started to like this comparison of two dissimilar occupations.  It’s helped me think about both activities in a little different way.  I think it was E.B. White who spoke of decisions made in the the heat of composition.  It might not not be quite as hot as a smith’s forge, but it’s hot enough to mold mutable ideas into new and pleasing shapes. 

And that, I’d say, is pretty hot.