Uke madness

Well, I think I've gotten over the movie last night. Amazing what eight hours of sleep and some ukulele playing can do for one's attitude. Speaking of ukulele, I've been finding some cool stuff on the web lately and thought I'd share a link. For those who think a Uke is a silly toy, you should check out James Hill, a canadian virtuoso of the instrument. This kid rocks. Listen to Flight of the Bumblebee and prepare to be amazed. Also One Note Samba is another winner.

Hand held cameras, jump cuts, and annoyance...

Okay...I don't often use this blog to rant, but...

We just paid seven and a half hard earned dollars to have one of the most frustrating cinema experiences in recent memory. Yes, we saw The Bourne Supremacy. The movie itself would have been fine IF the fucking director didn't decide to shoot everything with a handheld camera! It was like your head was in a paint shaker for two hours. This is NOT art. I mean, really, is this what they are teaching in film school these days? Crap. Total crap. It's okay to have some of that stuff in the fights and car chases, but for fuck's sake, do we need it from the time he wakes up in the morning right through to the end. No, I say. Boo, I say.

To add insult to paint shaker, the audience was abominable. Talking, laughing, and generally spoiling the movie for the three polite people who just wanted to escape for two hours. You wanna talk? Rent a video and do it at home you bastards. Just leave me out of it.

GRRRRR...

You really do feel like Rome is burning when you experience this stuff.

Hail Caesar, I'm going to bed.

Time, where art thou...

Damn. For someone who is supposed to be cutting down on his workload, I sure seem to keep busy. Blog, I have neglected you and I am sorry. Apologies also to the three people who read this thing.

News...

Big Brothering again
After much hooing and hawing, I have decided to be a Big Brother again. I did it for a year and a half in the Bay Area and found it to be, at turns, very difficult and incredibly rewarding. It taught me an awful lot about myself and a lot about just how messed up some families can be. Suffice to say, there was much work to be done in my empathy department and I was constantly being exposed to problems and drama that I wasn't really prepared for. My "little" was twelve when we were matched. He had waited three years to be matched with a volunteer when he finally got me. THREE years. I often thought of the impact that I could have had on his life if I had been matched with him when he was nine. At twelve, the hooks were already in him and much of our time together felt like damage control. He was basically self parenting because half of the family was addicted and the other half was busy enabling them. Rough. Great kid though. Smart, resourceful and really funny. The good times that we had more than made up for the screaming matches I would often walk in on when I would bring him home. Best thing I learned is that, as much as you want to be Superman, you can't fix everything. You can't stop the addiction, you can't adopt the kid, you can't make him raise his grades. You just have to be there and do the best you can. Be creative and show him new options for every situation that he encounters. You just hope that if you "walk the walk", that he will too. And he did, mostly.

So, after my first experience, I was ready for a little break. We moved to a new state, we needed time to settle and, besides, I had seen enough tragedy for a while. But one day I decided just to call the BBBS office to see what the need for male volunteers was, and it turns out that it was pretty dire. There are currently 98 boys in Durham alone who are languishing on a waiting list. To make matters worse, male volunteers are also on a steady decline. So, that kind of made the decision for me. That, and the fact that I feel like I'm ready again.

My new "little's" name is Alex and we will probably have our first meeting next week. He is eight years old and we like a lot of the same things. Sounds like a great kid and I'm pretty excited about it. It will be interesting to see how this experience stacks up with my first one. In a way, I feel that my first experience was a bit of a trial by fire to prepare me for any situation and now I'll be a much better "Big" this time around. We'll see.

Back at it...

Drove a million miles this week. Our workshop in Vermont was great. Really nice people up there and a pretty drive up Highway 7. We were given the use of an apartment right on Lake Champlain (sp?). Beautiful views. Also, Burlington is a nice town, in the summer at least. It's butt cold for seven months of the year, bearable for three, and really nice for the remaining two. We hit one of the two. After the workshops were over I went thrifting and scored a ton of old sheet music with ukulele arrangements in them. No uke sightings in Burlington proper though. It's a sad town when you can't even find one ukulele. A smudge on the record of an otherwise decent city. Shape up Burlington!

Overdid the teaching this week. Ten hours of workshops on Saturday and Sunday, five hours of privates on Monday followed by a four hour drive to Boston, sleep and then another workshop Tuesday night. After which, I had a massive panic attack due to exhaustion and haven't really recovered fully yet. That shit can just sneak up on you. It's weird.

On the upside, Boston was fun as usual. We got to stay with our friend Marilee, which is always the coolest and she turned me on to a great music shop on Mass. Ave called Sandy's where I bought... (drum roll please!) ...a tenor guitar! Four strings and all monster baby! I've really wanted one of these things since I picked up the uke. I just strung it up today and it sounds great. Check out a pic here. They also had some sweet ukuleles in Sandy's, but, alas, the budget is not unlimited.

Bed now. More in the morning. It's good to be home.

What the hell?

Of the many otrher blogs that I read, Something Awful is my favorite. Rarely do I crib a link from someone else's blog, but this one is just too fucked up not to share with my 3 faithful readers. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you a new level of weirdness:Badly drawn Dolphin Porn. Enjoy.

Welcome home, see you later!

Dallas was great as usual. Our friend Elaine had just finished choreographing "Swing! The Musical" for Plano repertory theatre, so after the workshop on Saturday, we went to check it out. Elaine's friend Mark gave us a ride from Dallas to Plano. He's a sound designer and musician and was the front man for the experimental jazz/hip hop group MC 900 ft Jesus. Funny guy. Cool guy. It wasn't until we were on our way to the airport with Elaine on Monday that I realized he wrote Killer Inside Me, which was my favorite song on the radio for awhile.

Back to the show...
Swing! The musical, as a show, sucks ass. It's the worst kind of theatrical attempt to cash in on a fad that you have ever seen. No plot, no direction, no nothing. The show has no idea what it is. It's a period piece one minute and a poorly executed, funk inspired, contemporary show the next. It's as if nobody who wrote or produced this show actually knew anything about swing to begin with. The guiding philosophy seems to have been "put them in sparkly costumes and nobody will know the difference." ARGH! I fucking hate broadway. So, basically, Elaine was handed this sow's ass of a show and told to make a silk purse out of it. Which, not surprisingly, she did. Because she's awesome. There were a ton of dance numbers in a lot of different styles and she did an amazing job with all of them. Unfortunately, having great choreography in a show this bad is like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. The end result is still inevitable. But, as I said, great job Elaine!

The workshop we taught went well, I thought. Saturday was a little shaky but I think we brought everything together on Sunday. They say they want us for next year, so we must have done something right. We also had some great food while we were there. There is a Hari Krishna restaurant that is attatched to a temple that has an incredible vegetarian buffett for seven bucks. We went there twice. Next time you're in Dallas, check it out. Can't remember the name, but I'm sure it's the only Hari Krishna restaurant in Dallas. We also stopped by "Wild about Harry's" for some frozen custard on Friday. No matter what we do in Dallas, Harry's is always on the agenda. You have not tasted anything like this. Ever. I guarantee it. I am extremely partial to the coconut, but you really can't lose with any of the flavors.

Got back on Monday and rushed off to my second Improv rehearsal. We were only missing one person this time and the whole thing went pretty well. We worked a lot on openings and two person scenes. Also did some tag outs, which were less successful. All good though. We're really just getting to know each other and it takes awhile to even begin getting any kind of "group mind" thing going. I'm sure we'll get there. Lots of very talented folks in this group.

Also on Monday, the air conditioner man fixed our AC. "Thank you air conditioner man!" And it's a good thing that he got here when he did 'cause it's fucking 96 degrees in the shade this week and I would have killed somebody by now without some kind of artificial refrigeration to keep my homicidal tendencies at bay.

Tomorrow we leave for Vermont and the blog-a-log-a-ding-dong goes on hiatus again for another week.

Cheers.

The BIG D...

In a few hours we'll be taking off for Dallas to do a workshop. We haven't worked in Texas in over a year and it will be great to see all of our friends there. Nice to work too. Sharon and I have looked at the budget and it's not looking so hot, so any work we get is good work these days. Thank goodness people still think we have something to offer. Lindy Hop is economically very different than it was in 1998 during the craze, when every workshop was a sell-out and you had to turn away jobs by the dozen. But for all the monetary upheaval the downturn has caused us, I still like it better now. When the money in anything dries up a bit, it tends to shake loose all of those things that can be detrimental to a scene. Greedy club owners, vicious competition, etc. It's much better now. Just a nice little grass roots thing like it was meant to be. Some people see this as a horrible end to an era, but I see it as more of a balancing of the scene. Everybody who's still in it is there because they care about the dance and that makes for a better community. Texas has a bunch of these folks and it's always nice to see them again.

See you on Monday....

Surrender...

"Faithfulness to the moment and to the present circumstance entails continuous surrender."
-Stephen Nachmanovich from Free Play

Yes. The unwillingness to surrender. I know it well. I think I'm getting better at this part, but there is still much work to be done. I mean, isn't the real reason that we all get irritated with people is that our own unwillingness to surrender under certain circumstances keeps us from having more than one point of view? Example: You're in line at the supermarket and the person in front of you has, seemingly, never used an ATM card in their life and cannot for the life of them figure out how to work the machine. Do you A: Surrender to the moment and figure out a way to be anything but irritated? or B: Do you spend the next five minutes AND the half hour after that thinking "JerK! !@##$%! I'm usually B. Big fucking B. So, if I can't do it under relatively mundane circumstances, how can I hope to do it on the dance floor or on stage? Can't. Because the person I'm now faced with is ten times worse than the ATM guy. It's me. The neocortex me. The annoying bastard in my head who never shuts up. He's the one who keeps me from surrendering. It's not ME, it's HIM!

But I have this theory that if I can relate to every situation as practicing improvisation, then the little bastard upstairs will eventually quiet down and may even go to sleep for long periods of time. Now, I've known that for a long time, but the difference between knowing something and putting it in to practice is as huge as something, uh, really huge. So, I'm commiting to push myself in this area for the next thirty days and we'll see what comes of it.

Is it just me or am I starting to sound nuts?

Truth be told...

"Artistic growth is, more than anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfullness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy: only the great artist knows how difficult it is."

- Willa Cather

Some mornings, when I'm feeling a little lost, I'll try to find a quote that I can base my thoughts for the day on. This morning it was the one above. Truth in art. Art and truth. Hell of a thing to think about on a Wednesday when it's 95 degrees out. Perhaps I should base my thoughts for the day on something less challenging like...oatmeal or... socks. But, no, we must press on.

This quote spoke to me because I feel like I spend my life in this pursuit these days. All my activities, in one way or another are geared toward getting away from my concious self and trying to reveal what lies underneath. Music, dance, comedy...all require this kind of truth to be authentic. Authenticity. That's good. Not originality, but authenticity. I gave up trying to do anything new a long time ago and decided to make my focus authenticity, because I believe that innovation is a natural offshoot of authentic being and will naturally occur if you are being truthful in your actions.

Ah, but here's the tricky part. In dance, since I have spent ten years doing it, I feel that I have developed my own style. I am able to express the range of my emotions through my body (on a good day) on a consistent basis. Movement is second nature and if I can banish the inner critic, I find that I am an open conduit for creativity to flow through. My partner, the music, my body, all in synch and in agreement. But in Improv comedy, I'm having trouble. Now, I know that I'm really just a baby in this artform and that to be truly authentic in any pursuit, one must first aquire a skill set that allows the artist to forget about the rules and just "be". Nonetheless, I can't help being frustrated. I've done a lot of inner and outer work on myself to get to a point where improvisation (on the dance floor) is just a normal occurence. One would think that this kind of freedom would naturally flow over in to other creative pursuits, but it doesn't seem to. Or, not much anyway, for me at least. I find that I am right back in my head, experiencing the same kind of "analysis paralysis" I did when I was taking my first steps as a dancer. Argh!

The positive aspect of this is that I have realized what the key is to unlock my creativity, now I just need to learn how to use it in a bunch of different locks.

The Hoosier Hotshots

Since taking up the Ukulele, I have, of course, been scouring the internet for Ukulele sites and generally emersing myself in my newest subculture. God love the internet! The endless resource for bizarre information.

In my travels I ran across this site with clips of the great George Formby (English comedy star and Ukulele virtuoso) and a group I'd never heard of before called the Hoosier Hotshots. These guys are my new favorite band and since viewing "she broke my heart", I have resolved to learn to play a washboard. Love this stuff!

...and I hate Tuesday.

Because, yes fans, the air conditioner has decided to take a powder. It's 92 degrees and fucking miserable. Of course, every air conditioning company in town is dealing with dead air conditioners, so the earliest that we are going to see a technician is Thursday. I guess I'll be hiding in the basement with a bowl of ice and a fan until then.

In other news...I had my first rehearsal with my improv team last night and it went pretty well. I was feeling a little out of sorts so I made some weird choices that didn't really go anywhere, but it was fun anyway. Due to the holiday, half the team was absent, so it gave us a lot of time to work on two person scenes and get individual feedback from our coach, Austin. Who is awesome, by the way. I had dropped in on one of his level 101 classes a couple months ago and had a blast, so I was happy to see that he would be coaching us for this team. He had us work on organic openings a lot last night as well as a bunch of scene work and I felt pretty challenged by the whole class. Improv, like everything, is a lot harder than it looks, further proving the addage that "nothing cool is easy". It's another one of those endless things.

...I don't like Mondays

I used to not like Mondays because it meant the beginning of the work week. But I'm self employed. So Monday means whatever the hell I want it to. Problem is, I still don't like 'em. Worse than Monday is Sunday night. Never have liked 'em. I have gotten "the Sundays" for as long as I can remember. Every Sunday night of my life I have felt an overwhelming sense of dread, or at least hopelessness. There's not really a good reason for this, being that nothing bad has ever really happened on any Monday that I can remember for the last 36 years. So, what is it? I don't know. I'd certainly change it if I could, but I have absolutely no control over it. It just sneaks up and whacks me week after week.

Well, at least I have my first rehearsal with the incubator team at Dirty South Improv to look forward to tonight. I've missed 2 rehearsals already, so I'm a little nervous, but I like the other people who have been cast so it should be fun.

ID4...

The fourth of July. I damned near forgot until I checked my email. Another excuse for the country to get blotto and wave the flag around. Haven't we been doing that non-stop for the last three years anyway? Seems like it.

It's hard to get behind a celebration of victory over our oppressors when we are doing so much oppressing at the moment. I was fornunate enough to see Farenheit 9/11 in New York over the weekend and came away with an even bigger loathing for this administration than I came in with. And that's saying something. I think everyone should get out and see this movie, regardless of your political views. I think it's Moore's best so far.Sure, it's filled with a lot of Michael Moore's agenda and there are some stupid Moore stunts (reading the patriot act to congress from an ice cream truck), but at least someone is doing something. Which is more than you can say for the people who are sitting around bashing the film because it has an agenda. Duh! It's Michael Moore! Of course it has an agenda. You wanna make a documentary type film with less propaganda? Have at it! "Rise, Fat Ass, from your comfy chair and go forth and make unbiased documentaries!"

It will be interesting to see if box office = ballot box in November.

Anyway, happy 4th of July, I guess. Drive safely.

Midnight blogging...

The only time when serious writing gets done. Right? Right.

Actually, just a couple of plugs for today. Too tired to come up with original thoughts.

1. Eddie Izzard. Parenthetically, it's pronounced Izzard, like retard. Not Izzard, like lizard. Funny. Very funny. We just rented "Dress to Kill" which is a live show of his filmed in San Francisco in 1998. Highly recommended. Laughed our asses off. Some of his stuff is a little derivative but all of it is great. Also we bought Circle from the itunes music store and found it to be f**king hilarious as well.

2. Marlon Brando. Gotta do it. On the Waterfront and Godfather definitely. The Wild One and Apocalypse Now as your backup plan.

Back to actual blogging tomorrow

Front page news...

Further proving the theory that good things can happen to bad people, two of my radio pieces are being featured as "editor's picks" on the front page of Public Radio Exchange this week. AND, they've both been licensed already. Go figure.

Music off the beaten path...

Every year when I leave Ashokan I am reminded of how much great music is available and how little of it actually gets listened to. Not surprising, really, considering that most people are of the opinion that Brittany Spears and Clay Aitken are actually artists. That notwithstanding, I hereby offer you a list of my musician homies who are producing some music that is both adventurous and really pleasant to listen to. Buy their records. They are nice people and have families that need to eat.

1. Will Patton- Jazz mandolin player extrodinaire (that's right, I said "Jazz Mandolin") Now, I'm not a very "bluegrassy" kind of guy and have always approached the mandolin with a due sense of exhortion and dread, but this guy rocks. Some jazz, some samba, some other stuff. I like both records he has available, but the first is my favorite.

2. Tom Mitchell - My favorite guitar player and one hell of a vocalist. Tom has toured extensively with Dan Hicks and his Hot Licks and has fronted many of his own bands. My favorite album of his is Monday Morning Blues Check it out. Also, he has an album available with the incredible fiddle player Kevin Wimmer called Double Scotch. Get 'em while they last.

3. Lucky Foster and James Mason - Another guitar/fiddle duo that is currently making me very happy. Their new record Sweet Baboo is the perfect mix of laid back vocals and instrumental standards. Your girlfriend will love this record. "You're an Education in Yourself" is my favorite song of the moment.

4. Laurel Masse - Willowy chanteuse that will make your heart melt. President of the "bad girls who sing good society".:-) Check her out here.

So, fire up the iPod and give your ears a present. You won't regret it.

Ashokan and Storm King

More pics of Ashokan and Storm King

Trippin'...

Home again. Relieved to be back although it's tough that Sharon won't get back until tomorrow. Meanwhile, I blog.

A little about our trip up to Ashokan. We decided to do it in two days which allowed us to take some back roads and stop wherever we wanted to, which was nice. On the first day we decided to stop in Harrisburg, Pa (the capitol) and have some dinner. It was a very pleasant little city and had some cool stuff happening. Downtown is on a river so we decided to take a stroll after dinner and relax. Really nice after driving all day. Being the dumbass that I am, I left the camera in the car, so you'll have to use your imaginations about Harrisburg. It's probably just how you'd imagine it anyway. Except without the midgets. Sicko!

Second day we stopped at Storm King Art Center, which was amazing. It is 500 acres devoted to sculpture just outside New Paltz, NY. I could have spent about three days just wandering the grounds. Beautiful setting for art. They have really done a terrific job with the park. BTW, this is where Andy Goldsworthy was commissioned to build the serpentine wall which is featured in the film Rivers and Tides. Here is a shot of Sharon inside a sculpture by Isamu Noguchi. More photos to come.