It is risen

I got me a fresh sheet of virtual paper and I roll it into the carriage...

I think I’ve been sick of typing. I’ve even found it difficult to effectively do e-mail, and that is one of the few ways to reliably get ahold of me. The FaceBook, 2-3 sentences and I’m out, has been de rigeur around here.

It was a really harsh winter around La cerise de chateau, maison du fumeur de detente. So right now forsythia is like the breath of the atman made manifest on earth.

I had a really, tremendously, bad bout of infection that started just before Thanksgiving. For the most part I missed all the holidays. On Thanksgiving itself I was too sick to even walk next door. About a week of 104 fevers. Since then it’s been a long, slow, road back.

I popped into UBU’s one of the very first good days, that was a good thing, getting out, into town, having lunch. Now I have have to pop back and give him back the books I bought as well as a few additional. I find myself in the market to get rid of, in some cases sell, books. That is something I’ve never been good at at all. It feels pretty free to be in a place where I can let a book go deliberately as opposed to losing it.

I’m ready to let more things go.
I have started sorting out anything I don’t have a pretty legitimate claim on to be sent back. I’m watching the hoarders and I don’t want to be there or leave that for someone else to deal with. Keep the precious and let the chaff blow away. That’s the new mantra. There will be a porch sale this year.

It ain't Burroughs but....

“Suddenly I felt bleak, oddly depressed. It took a moment for me to realize that one of Meyer’s recent lectures on international standards of living was all too well remembered.”

“... so divide everything into two hundred million equal parts . Everything in this country that is fabricated. Steel mills, speedboats, cross country power lines, scalpels, watch bands, fish rods, ski poles, plywood, storage batteries, everything. Break it down into basic raw materials and then compute the power requirements and the fossil fuels needed to make everybody’s share in this country. Know what happens if you apply that formula to all the peoples of all the other nations of the world?”
“You come up with a bleak fact Travis. There is not enough material on and in the planet to ever give them what we’re used to. The emerging nations are not going to emerge - not into our pattern at least. Not ever. We’ve hogged it all. Technology won’t come up with a way to crowd the Yangtze River with (sleek, high powered speedboats).
“It was OK Travis, when the world couldn’t see us consuming and consuming. Or hear us. Or taste some of our wares. But communication by cinema, satellite, radio, television tape, these have been like a light coming on slowly, being turned up like a rheostat control in a dark cellar where all of mankind used to live. Now it is blinding bright, cruelly bright. And they can all look over into our corner and see us gorging ourselves and playing with our bright pretty toys. And so they want theirs now. Just like ours, God help them. And what is the only thing we can say? ‘Sorry, You’re a little too late. We used it all up all except what we need to keep our toys in repair and running and to replace them when they wear out. Sorry, but that’s the way it is.’ What comes after that? Barbarism, an interregnum, a new dark ages, and another start a a thousand years from now with a few million people on the planet? Our myth has been that our standard of living would become available to all the peoples of the world. Myths wear thin. We have a visceral appreciation of the truth. That truth, which we don’t dare announce to the world, is what gives us the guilt and shame and the despair. Nobody in the world will ever live as well materially, as we once did. And now as our materialism begins to sicken us, it is precisely what the emerging nations want for themselves. And can never have. Brazil might manage it. But no one else.”
John MacDonald “The Scarlet Ruse” 1973

Oh happy, happy XMAS.

Psuedo-Snobbery

Well, perhaps not so psuedo, it’s actually pretty straight up.
I have been thinking recently about the phrase “pseudo-intellectual”. I have to say that a primary failing in this epithet is that unless it’s hurled at me by, say, a street person or maybe someone who has worked at Ford’s for 20 years straight out of high school or something similar, it loses much veracity. Someone from U-M calling me a pseudo-intellectual is pretty much like me calling someone a heifer.

Secondarily, I think someone who would use it in the pejorative sense has probably just spent too much time in a university town. The kind of place where people are sadly bright enough to level an insult that is pretty much saying “how dare you attempt to think”. Yep, happy enough to reap the financial rewards of the bidness of higher education, all those lovely monies accrued from people attempting, theoretically, to think, (but perhaps, more likely, to be merely trying to guarantee a specific income level if I’m any judge), but if that person doesn’t think like they’re “spozed”* to, they’re really just a mere pseudo-thinker. That is so laughable. If you translate it into that very language, “oh, you are just an incorrigible psuedo-thinker” the ridiculousness and pindickery of it suddenly becomes apparent and I will hazard a guess that the motivation becomes fairly transparent.

So what is it then that qualifies one as having the bona fides? The actual living, breathing, tower of power, pinnacle-ness of intellect? It simply can’t, please tell me you don't, have the unmitigated nerve, to measure it by a degree. Because I’ll have one soon, neither of my house mates has one, and thank God, for once, everyone in the house is naturally smarter, and far kinder, than I am. So that would be an invalid and therefore unsound, argument.

Myself, I actually prefer people who make the attempt, be it ever so feeble, to think.
As well as that thing His Holiness says about how “his religion is kindness?” Yah, I think you could be dumb as dirt and probably be far better off well on, down that road.

So I will herein make a vow: That having racked my brain and not being able to recall any instance where I have called anyone either a pseudo-intellectual or a heifer, I will dearly attempt to continue to not use those two particular, hypocritical, epithets in my future life. However because I am, not so very kind in my heart of hearts, I will probably continue to call a spade a spade, and a snob a snob.

* “The Way It Spozed To Be” James Herndon

Sleep Tight

I have what they call in the biz, fairly good sleep hygiene. Well ok, there are few knots. I wake up too much during the night and I do “stuff” in bed other than sleep. But when it comes to waking up, I’m a champ. I almost always wake up within a 45 minute span right around 7 am. No matter how late I went to bed (up till 3am anyway) or how drunk I got last night. That’s right baby, I got smashed last night. Woke right up at 7. Took a couple ibuprofen and I’m now having my cuppa tay.

See, really, at heart, I’m a big old drunk. It’s just that now I only let that girl out every four years or so. I love getting drunk. I’m not so fond of the three to four days it now takes me to recover when I get as drunk as I can though. Which is why last night was a total baby drunk (despite the seeming enormity of 17 glasses of champagne and a shot of fantastic vodka). As soon as I realized I was smashed I went home and made myself puke. In the old days it would have been time to start really drinking.

I never had such a penchant for drink until I used it to get off a much worse habit. Then I really hit my stride. I think what is so appealing about it is, that all the other drugs make me think really, really, hard. Alcohol makes me really, really stupid. When you live with a crazy busy, chattering, incessant, monkey mind it is really fun to essentially flip a switch and turn it off occasionally.

When I’m drunk I turn into Brother Martin. This is what the Rom traditionally called their dancing bears. I am slightly obsessed with Brother Martin, he shows up in my songs and poetry on a semi-regular basis. That’s because he is me and I am him. Along with spiders he’s one of my totemic folk.
Here’s a piece of a piece about him:

Brother Martin waltzes on the boulevard
Brother Martin waltzes gathering a crowd
for shiny, careless, pennies wrested from the mob
Brother Martin dances to the cymbalom.

If you think about it, blogging is totally a Brother Martin-ish thing to do.

On laziness and creativity

Yummy, porch sitting whilst a thunderstorm carouses. Here is why I wanted this laptop, so I could hang out on the porch in the all too brief summer of Michigan and play.
One of my most favoured and all too decadent activities is to lay on the couch out here, play solitaire or psuedo-intellectual blog lurker, and just lean over to flip the burgers.

So, I was reading someone's latest entry and they were questioning the ”how to” of song writing.
I thought that rather than respond in their comments thus taking up a ton of their personal space and time, that I would discourse here, as it was something I would’ve addressed eventually anyway.

It’s been really exciting to have found someone that I can write well with. It took a long time as I never thought to define what I was actually seeking when I first started out. I was then mostly, just viewing myself as a singer. I didn't actually believe I could be a "real" songwriter. It turns out that that was stupid, because I’m not that great of a singer, and have really only vastly improved over the last 5-6 years. In spite of having been born with a decent voice, singing, for me, has become a means to an end. The end being able to put my writing to music. Which, it seems, is one of the only ways to get heard if you are not fond of, or suited to, the new word salad, poetry slam type of performance art. I am vastly unsuited to that, by writing style, temperament and probably, sadly, age.

When I first started writing with “real musicians” I was overawed and naive about what a singer/lyricist means. I thus believed what people thrust upon me, that as the two former, in addition to being a female, I was on the bottom on the pyramid. The mere canary. Throw fat girl into that mix, and I emerged with a fairly serious inferiority complex. I think this is potentially why I sometimes preen just a tiny bit too much when I’m cranking out some decent stuff.

During my years with Skinflower I put out a few good songs, I did a lot of vocal arrangement. I wrote a few songs with a few other folks, writing to their music. Sometimes sizing something I had already written to fit. It seemed OK but it really wasn’t.
I realized later that I was constantly having to try to fit preconceptions of what was cool. And not surprisingly I couldn't seem to get the juices flowing at any constant rate for any length of time. I feel I was viewed in a patronizing, owner/ master fashion and was severely critiqued constantly.

I started writing with Oliver, everything was different. He handed me about 200 hundred songs and lyric ideas, then left it primarily up to me. So over the years I’ve been able to just listen to a bunch of different music he’s written and work on whichever tune grabs me at that very moment. Sometimes he’s been taken aback at my completely changing the idea and meaning of something. Sometimes we’ve had to argue for several days about whether he’s going to write me a hook or not. We’ve had creative differences, absolutely. The real difference though, has been that if there is an issue, it’s actually about what’s best for the song itself. Not whether the words are creepy and/or sarcastic enough for the misanthropic guitar player. Or whether the wannabe hipster gets it or not.

I also feel that maturity has really redefined what I think is important enough to write about. Not that we don’t write some goofy stuff. I’d just like to think that the humour is broader and more subtle. Now, since I've had the opportunity to find my very own voice, I can write fairly easily to other peoples music as well. I had also recently worked with another composer and we had written some positively stunning pieces. Unfortunately Junk reared its ugly head and he’s no longer in my life. Very sad, I hate that shit with a passion.

Which brings us to another facet of the creative process that I’ve been debating with some of my much younger musician friends recently. Drugs and creativity. My stance is that the whole “it’s a really necessary part”, is pure bunk, hogwash and myth. Probably perpetuated by Junkies and drunks who seem to love nothing more than taking people down with them.
My view is that time spent pursuing drugs is time lost to creativity, time spent attempting to reach “just the right buzz” is time that could be spent practicing scales while you wait for the muse to show up. I feel that the Kurt Cobains, Billie Holidays and such would have been able to bless our existence at least equally and probably far better without. I don’t believe drugs illuminated them, other than for an evanescent moment or two. And those few moments are swallowed whole by the years of misery.
And I say this from the perspective of someone who is pretty sure they know of what they speak.

Wow, sure like the feel of my favourite soapboxes, I might get mighty comfortable up there, I could probably just go right ahead and take a nap.