Your Moment of Zen

Yes, we actually watch PBS. It's not the majority of our viewing pleasures, but when there's something intriguing, it's usually on Masterpiece Mystery.

If Zen appears confused, he's dealing with a lot.
Though oddly he deals with the stress in a cool manner.
He IS Zen, after all.

Lately we've been into ZEN. No, not the school of Buddhism, but Aurelio Zen, a fictional Italian detective by author Michael Dibdin. There's 11 books by my counting and only the first three have been made into feature length episodes. The BBC axed the series. A brilliant move that sounds like another organization I know. Producers are looking elsewhere. I wish them luck because I want more Zen. Dammit.

Rufus Sewell plays the character without all the macho posturing, swagger or cliched alcoholic spiral crap you see in every American series. In fact, not having read the books to compare, but this character is simply hard to pin down all the way around. He's so understated and that's the ringer.

Italian corruption is so common that Zen is used to being set up for failure, or used to protect those with power, money and dirty secrets. He has learned to deftly navigate these hostile waters and even use them for his own advantage. Still, no matter the victories or the compromises, the sticky nature of dealing with the elite and corrupt gets even stickier.

Then all he has to deal with is his lovelife or his homelife.

Yikes!

Downsize This

The Company Men is a flick starring Ben Affleck, Kevin Costner and Tommy Lee Jones.

 Here's the shorty:

Color me obvious and predictable.

This film tries hard not to be obvious, but you can see the plot points coming like a Wide Load sign on the highway.

The film deals with "downsizing" and the what happens when the shit hits the fan as the economy took its initial downward spiral in the 2000's.

It tries to elicit sympathy when Affleck's character loses his six-figure job with CBX, a company run by Jones and Craig T. Nelson. He slowly loses all the trappings and luxuries of such a salary- his Porsche, country club membership and finally, his home.

Methinks the message is clear within the first 20  minutes:

We are our jobs and losing them is devastating.

Gee, it's a bit hard to muster up sympathy for a guy living as large as that. Losing the house and moving back into his parent's place is the real ringer though. But, despite all this, the big message is pushed into our faces over and again. Affleck refuses to accept his new fate and whines about like a little boy. Moments of humor are so rare because the film insists on staying on its heavy and cumbersome message.

There's a scene between Affleck and his wife (Rosemarie Dewitt) where she grabs his face and reminds him that "You have your family. You have me!" Big hug, cue the tears. It was such a cliche I thought I was watching a high school drama for a second. Again and again, we are hammered by the big message.

Meanwhile Tommy Lee and Craig T are stark contrast to Affleck and the others fate. They get richer, knock boots with their younger co-workers (Jones with Maria Bello. Now, there's real fiction.) and seem to relieve the pressure of falling stock and stock holders' confidence by firing more people. Meanwhile, they have bought a new building for a much larger office. Damn them suits!

The film asks us over and again: are you getting our message?

Chris Cooper is the best in the film. He at least brings some humanity to these cardboard cutout characters.

Overall, I'd say skip this one. It's way too obvious and heavy handed.

Fame Dust: Just Add Radio and Stir

Sure as moonrise, we will get emails and handwritten letters from various parts of our fair state from budding songwriters whose song remains the same:
"I have written a song about West Virginia and I think that your station might like to play it." Then they go on to say, modestly of course, that everyone who has heard it really enjoyed the hell out of it, it looks like a big hit, millions will love it, West Virginians will rally around it, and blah blah blah. Sometimes the subject matter, like the Sago Mine disaster, has a dark turn to it. Still, they promise that it is suitable for the airwaves.

Sometimes their pursuit of this ends with the inclusion of a copy of the song on some unplayable CD. And sometimes it starts with a phone call. That's where the trouble starts for me.

I have tried in the thirteen years of being in the radio biz not to become another jaded asshole who sees his personal failure (in songwriting or whatever) as a means for power over those who might deserve some air time. Music comes first. All those noble and altruistic sounding statements out of the way, there are often good reasons why these songs never make it.

1. The song is awful.
2. The recording was done in a roadside bathroom.
3. "Uncle Bob," a HAM radio operator cum recording engineer, did the recording.
4. Wacky old dudes with out of tune guitars should restrict their music making pleasures to their basement or front porch.
5. No matter my advice, they aren't listening anyway.

This yahoo called me yesterday. Long story short, he wanted to break into Nashville and the music scene. He had written "country songs, rock songs, all kinds of songs." Not wanting to be the a-hole I had promised myself I would not be, I patiently told him the steps I thought he needed merely to be played on our airwaves.

One thing I told him was to listen (what a concept) to the station you are petitioning to play your musicke.
"That's your homework," I insisted.
"I didn't know I had homework or what it was," he answered reasonably.
"But now you know. Listen to my show and the two others I mentioned to see if your song fits their/my format. Every show has a format."

Methought I was getting through and that my pearls of wisdom were dropping unto open shells. Why do I continue with such naivete at my age?

We then went to the website to check out the email address for me and the place where he could email the man who does a show that features more folk-country than mine does. I soon sensed that despite his proclamation that he had an education, that he was having trouble with finding the stuff on the web. I felt like I was dragging a bag of cinder blocks with Mr. Gonna-be-George-Strait.

After fumbling around for what seemed an eternity, I said, "Send the man an email or just send your disc to the address given." I got tired of Mr. Young-and-Hopeful and wished him and thought the matter over.

Not five minutes later, the woman at the front desk calls me. Sweet jumpsuits of Elvis.

"I got a guy on the phone who wants to know if (host of the folk show) works here."
"No, he sends us his show. He is not an employee."
"OK. I'll tell him."

Mr. Can't-Wait-to-Be-Famous either lied about his computer skills (or even owning one) and doesn't wish to be embarrassed (no blame here), but clearly I wasted my time.

As an aside, I have made the following rules for myself:

1. I will no longer entertain listeners' questions that do not directly pertain to the broadcast.
2. I will screen all those who seek to take up my time with their agendas.
3. I will delete emails that begin with a litany of complaints. I will read no further.
4. No more advice to fame seeking cowboys.

In short, I must protect myself and keep my energy focused and positive.

Today, one of these jackels tried to engage me. This man comes in the guise of "colleague" and "listener," but there is a nasty side to him that bothered me so much that two weeks ago, I vowed never to speak to the man again. The line was drawn and it was held.

I am smiling because I am following my own rules.

One I just followed. :0)

They Made What????

"Hey Sting, I wanna punch you in the face,
but for $122,095.76 I'll tolerate your ass."
Love, Stewart

 "But Andy Summers has a greater visibility, not least because The Police Reunion Tour of 2007-08 played 143 shows to (paying) audiences of 3,300,912 grossing $366,287,279; and a significant proportion of those performances were not in former Soviet republics." ~ RF diary

Seriously, Get a Life

I get lots of emails. Most of them are very nice. Some of them are doozies, baby.

Rhinoceros skin. I suppose that's a common metaphor to say that a person is not overly sensitive or thin- skinned. I am not particularly thick-skinned by any means, but after I calm down from my homicidal state, I can see that these are pathetic cries for attention. I give myself about two hours of down time before I'm rational.

I have learned that to be in radio, you have to toughen up a bit. Or learn to divorce yourself from the job or you will go bat shit crazy.

Classical music listeners (I call them classical Nazis) may be the worst in being rude and condescending in their tone. To believe them, you might think I just stepped off a turnip truck and my best shot at writing my name is an X. And it's not just me that gets this-everyone gets an asshole who wants to show that he/she are far superior to we radio employees. Engineers get special communications from know-it-all blowhards who insist that it's our fault if reception is poor. One idiot actually said, "I am an Audiophile (his caps) with a gifted ear." Please feel free to brag on yourself more, Mr. Hertz.
Classical Nazis want to prove several things:
1. They are critical listeners.
2. They are very educated. More so than you.
3. Absolutely and unequivocally they are unforgiving when any error is made on the air.
4. Most assuredly know they what is good and what is bad music.
5. Wish to prop themselves up higher than you.
6. Feel a compulsion to instruct the ignorant radio host.

Here's what I know:
1. Hosting a show involves a damn sight more than just knowing the music and programming it.
2. College professors do not a good host make. This is radio, not a classroom.
3. Most of these people seem a little off in the head.
4. I don't live and breathe only classical music. That's too limited for my musical imagination and interests.
5. My job doesn't solely define who I am.
6. These pompous jackasses need to get a life and leave me the fuck alone.
This is one of many reasons I enjoy my weekends, vacations and a genuinely look forward to retirement.

I imagine myself staring vacantly at the ocean on some lonely stretch of beach on the Outer Banks. More than slightly blotto from an aged rum, I realize that it's past dinner time. I gather my things and head to my favorite restaurant who I savor fish that hasn't been out of the water more than a few hours. After a satisfying and healthy meal, I head home; ready to play the guitar or watch Netflix. And maybe check my inbox which may be filled with happy, friendly emails from friends who want to come visit my island bungalow.

Maybe, just maybe, I will fill in on weekends at some college public radio station.

Perhaps you've heard of the station?

WFKU.

The Kroger Logic

The granola shuffle where the price stays the same
despite the expiration date coming soon.

I am a granola addict. Yes, I sound all novo-hippie, but this stuff I eat mindlessly. I especially love the toasted almonds. They are like delicious treasures that you must search for through the grains.

Yes, I am a freak.

Months ago, Kroger's got a bunch of this and put it in a cardboard box. The price? As you see it in the picture. At one point, they lowered the price to $3.99- a price I thought much more fair than the current inflated ask.

So, the granola began to sell. Kroger's ups the price and has left it there ever since. I have kept an eye on this product waiting for a price drop and to see how management works.

One big problem, Krogy: the expiration date is this month.

So, rather than sell, they are just shuffling the product around and letting it go stale.

I have never taken a business class in my life, but damn if this makes any sense to me.

In His Own Write

What is running through the mind of the man in the shadows?

"Full of broken thoughts
I can not repair."

"These fragments I have shored against my ruins."

This past Friday, I had a gig (rare for Fridays, trust me) as part of a guitar duet for a private party. My guitar playing wizard-friend was kind enough to hire me. The people who hired us were especially nice and so was their stipend. Thank you.

What's cool about these guitar duet gigs is the creative nature of the warm-up material. We do some pretty spontaneous pieces right before we officially start. It's a good way of getting us in sync and a chance to explore ideas without subjecting the people there to any discordant experimentation.

I launched into "Night in St. Cloud" ( inspired by an Edvard Munch painting), a piece that I started many moons ago and have never finished. It has repeated figures and a chord progression that has been haunting me for years. Recently, it has resurfaced and I have been scribbling on it during my morning coffee-guitar-composing bliss before work. We fooled around with it and the ideas generated on the spot got my creative gears moving.

On Saturday, I went upstairs with the purpose of retrieving summer clothes, but digressed to root around in my music files to see if I could find the original sketch. I didn't find that piece, but what I did sent a shock wave through me. When I came downstairs, I was struggling to find the words to explain this to my wife. She's used to my endless, inarticulate attempts to quantify the unquantifiable: the wild horses of my emotions and the discursive nature of my thinking. This is why perhaps I am a musician because ordinary language fails to deliver meaning in its most vivid sense.

Intense creativity or graphomania?

I knew that I had written and sketched some music over the years, but I had no idea how much. Not only the amount, but there was an almost an eerie graphomania about it. Among the traditional and non traditional scores were these graphic elements involving charting all sorts of pitch, timbre and special playing techniques and resultant quarter tones, etc. I knew I went through a deeply cerebral period, but seeing all this stuff, it was as if I was seeing a side of myself that I never quite knew existed.

"And what you thought you came for
Is only a shell, a husk of meaning
From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled
If at all."

A famous example of this compulsion.

There are different definitions to graphomania, so to clarify, I mean this from a psychiatric perspective not in the pejorative Kundera sense. As I understand it, graphomania can be an automatic, obsessive desire to scribble meaningless symbols, figures or arcane languages into some kind of journal. This has nothing to do with whether or not one considers oneself an actual "writer," but the writing act is of itself the purpose, the mania, if you will.

There has always been an element of physicality in music for me. The sheer adrenaline fueled muscle movements of some ripping guitar scales or the quiet calm-inducing world of a simple pencil noodling on manuscript paper. There's certainly a tactile and graphic art element to it. Quite intoxicating really.

How obsessed did you become?

While part of all this is explainable- an artist needs his tools and I don't see myself as imbalanced as a whole (although I've had my moments), I can easily step back now and see the manic edge to it all.

You must own one of every kind, right?

When an idea digs roots into my brain, I go to extremes. For example, I didn't just use ordinary pencils. I had to have Dixon Ticonderoga 2/HB soft. I wouldn't go so far as to buy cases of them, but they were plentiful. And no matter how many I had, I worried and thought about buying more. But it didn't stop there as I found myself collecting every brand of pencil that I thought could give me right strength and blackness needed for a clean and legible manuscript. Whenever I was out at a store, a little search down the aisle of the office supplies was essential. My wife would roll her eyes at what she would call my excitement over pens and pencils.



Why, I need all of these, of course. And batches of them. What if I run out?

Then there were mechanical pencils by Pentel: every thickness of lead from the .03 to .09. Even the various varieties of softness of lead. I loved the tiny little leads all snug in their five-sided (?) plastic vessel. You see how cool all that is? Or have I got you shaking your head already?

When I would inevitably lose or misplace one of the Pentels, it would drive me insane. Plus, I hated to loan them to anyone. It felt as personal as loaning someone my guitar. That's not going to happen, amigo. Hands off.

I own a few of these. After all, I may run out!

Then there was the manuscript paper. Some I made, some I bought and every bit of it I kept. I bought manuscript tape-this is like Scotch tape only with a staff on one side. I even contacted a stamp making company to see if a rubber wheel could be manufactured that imitated Stravinsky's staff making tool. I bought journal style, pads, everything. All this stuff kept in a special shoulder bag and transported everywhere just in case inspiration or time opened up. Typical scenario: I would arrange Bach for guitars while my wife would go about her social work business. She'd drop me off and I'd blissfully sit for hours at a restaurant or in the car, as long as composing or arranging was possible.

The Other Stuff

  When I see blank manuscript, I feel a sense of obligation and potential. What music wishes to emerge? What new sounds wish to join the world?  A friend of mine called once referred to "the tyranny of the blank page." What the fuck was he talking about? I couldn't wait to fill up those magnificent lines with notes, beams and all the symbols of notation. I even bought a book about proper notation. At one point, I really knew my stuff and would point out to students the flaws in their scores.

There was a point at which composing was like heroin: I needed it every day. It was my refuge, my solace, the one place where I could take off all masks and leave judgement outside. I could dream anything and shut off skepticism cold. However, this comes at a cost.

The emotional state after baring your soul to music in a room alone does not translate well to the outside world. An author once told me that after hours of writing, he would find it difficult to reconcile the inner world of being excited by his work and the outer realm of his body. The two would be "out of sorts" and it would take some time to realign them, so to speak. After several solitary hours of writing, I would show up for a rehearsal and someone would say, "You've been writing, haven't you?" Or the silence would give rise to, "Are you ok? You're kinda quiet."

The worst was during the five or so weeks of hell before Christmas when all my free time seemed to be taken up by household and yard decorations. Regarding this festive busyness, a friend once dubbed it, "Christmas hell." Besides the domestic front, I was employed by a church and you can just just guess how little composing time I had. The little I could squeeze out was constantly being intruded upon. I was hateful and loathed this time of year.

I used to sneak down to the university when the house I shared with two other guys got a bit too public for any solitude. One time, to my utter surprise, my roomie knocked on the practice room door, informing me he had two girls out in the boat and wouldn't I like to join them? I was so entranced by the opportunity to write that I said no. He of course tried a million times to get me to go. The girl I had met earlier was surely cute. Why did I turn this down? Because sometimes solitude and music is all that is needed. A man has a soul as well and this needs nurturing.

One time, after a particularly brutal and unsuccessful attempt to find the right notes during a practice room session, I had to take a break. I was minding my own business when a young girl must have observed what she thought was emotional distress and offered advice, "Cheer up! It's gonna be OK." My face must have said everything. It slips my mind as to what my response was, but even I don't take dry periods that seriously.

 Big Brain, Little Brain

The period of intellectualizing composition was to prove to others and myself that I was intelligent. There was a certain teacher at the university who represented academia for me; something that I have felt both at home and at odds with. Her students would slowly begin to transform into little academicians and at lessons, I would see this process taking hold everywhere. Slowly, this began a hold on me.

I wanted to prove that although I sometimes have the personality better suited to a California surfer, I was capable of understanding music on these "deep" levels. It's funny what trends and zeitgeists you get caught up in. Some of my friends are not as malleable as I am when new ideas seem to be flying around, catching the mind in an interesting way, but I can easily get quite caught up in a group outlook. Eventually, I will reject it, but a disciple I will be until the idea runs its course.

Gee, Arnie, that looks groovy, but can ya dance to it?

The trouble with intellectual music is that it's peer writing. You are not writing to reach an audience, but rather to impress other academics in your field. Eventually the penny dropped and I began to realize the course my writing was taking was going down a dead end. We (the students and I who began our composing passion back in the day) were holding on to Schoenberg and post-serialism with a big dash of John Cage and George Crumb for color.

When I finally came down to earth, I wrote much more simply-something that reflected my emotions rather than trying to impress anyone. Not wanting to fall victim to what an old college professor said about "scores gathering dust in drawers," I wrote for every group I was in: church choir, flute and guitar duet and a bazillion guitar ensemble pieces. I was not going to write string orchestra pieces when I knew damn well that the chance of even hearing a run-through, let alone a performance is impossible. That to me is setting you up for failure (much like mein old prof-fessore).


I became obsessed with being published and after several rejections, I finally achieved that goal. Yes, that's me. Is it everything I expected? No, far fucking from it. That will have to be a separate blog, dear readers.

This is a Happy Ending (but it costs extra)

Eventually, my passion for it abated and I felt that slow re-entry into a relatively normal life. Sometimes it felt like all I was doing was sketching new ideas and never completing pieces. This is the hard part- having a workable, finished product. Everyone has ideas, even stupid ones, but I never wanted to be someone who simply ran their mouth and never took action. I felt that, in this regard, I have been successful.

But on the other hand, I have reconciled myself that "success" is not something in the stars for me. I see the walls of my limitations pretty clearly and I don't think this is being negative on my part. Although I have many ideas, these have to be quality controlled and quite often I follow these diversions until I see that I've gone once again down the old proverbial rabbit hole. My mind is circular in its path and my burden is to fend off the endless possibilities that my mind generates and arrive at what is organic and suits the purpose of the piece. I never suffer from a blank page, but rather, it can be filled with shit. So, shit quality control? Sorta.

Maybe one day, I will begin to try to fathom the endless piles of music upstairs. It does haunt me. I hate the state of chaos and incomplete pieces, which is why I am slowly chiseling away at "Night in Saint Cloud" again. But I come to it with a without a desperate edge, as I have nothing to prove to anyone. I do it for pure pleasure.

That's why I did it in the first place.

"We shall not cease from exploration


And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time."

Amen.