My idea of light bedtime reading is something that'll put me to sleep. Nothing like a dull, heavy historical or philosophical treatise to send me off to dreamland. "Without the acceptance of the appearance of the plenum in the realistic idealization of ding-an-sichZZZZZZZZZZZZ..." Works better than hot cocoa and isn't even fattening.
All through the hard frosty winter of 2000, while Sandahbeth slowly retreated from the jaws of death in a soul-crushing nursing home and I feverishly remodeled the house to accommodate wheel chairs, I did nightly battle with a tome the approximate size and weight of a driveway paver, Asimov's Guide to the Bible. This sure cure for insomnia also happened to be one of the few books on the Bible I've found that made any sense. It tries to place Bibical events in the context of the history of the Middle East between 1000 BC and the start of the Common Era. Putting aside the irony of a science fiction writer explicating this stuff, it's not a half-bad effort, and even conducive to a certain proselytizer-stopping erudition. How many Good Book junkies do you know who can accurately identify the Pharaoh that Moses jousted with? And if you're ever in a sadistic mood, ask an up-your-nose Christian: which miracle was in all four of the Gospels? (A: The loaves and the fishes.)
But while its putative purpose of knocking me out was certainly utilitarian enough (ah yes, the intricacies of the Selucid Empire in the waning years of the reign of kingmmgmphZZZZZZZZZZZ), one bit of serious and pretty much irrefutable religious historical information has followed me around, past sleep, past the Winter Of The Great Remod, past even the last of the sheetrock dust cleanup.
And what, you inquire, might that be? Oh, you didn't inquire? Well, read on, anyways.
The other day I found a reference on Folk_Music to an article in İhe Chicago Tribune about "Nice, but..." songs, meaning songs that are musical and all that, but the words go off the high side. For example, they mention my own perennial Male Feminism Awareness Test, Billy Joel's "Just the Way You Are." For years, doing this song in bars, I was beset by the vision of a smart, motivated, curious, intellectually challenging woman chasing a man through a house with a baseball bat screaming "I'll show you how to stay just the way you are!!" Good to see I'm not entirely alone out here. And then there was "Every Step You Take," by the Police, a good old-fashioned pop rock psycho-stalker love ballad. While I doubt that Sting was unintentional in his infusion of Mary Higgins Clark into his Paul McCartney, it's still just a leetle sinister to have the Big Soundtrack Song Of Summer '83 be sung from that point of view.
But there was a curious leadoff to the article: the author describes a Christmas committee reluctantly rejecting "Oh Come Oh Come Emmanuel" for their program, for the PC reason that it could be construed as antisemitic. Why? Because it seems to allude to a Catholic principle that Christianity has superseded Judaism, and all the Jews are now supposed to accept Jesus as the Messiah. Or else get burned, or snubbed really bad, or something.
Now, that's certainly a high-and-mighty attitude on the part of the song, if it's there. But the lyric the article quotes, the first verse of the venerable old hymn, belies the point they're trying to make by having not a single reference to the J word. No mention at all of the carpenter's kid (or rabbi's, by another translation) from Nazareth (aka The Sticks). In fact, it bears a striking resemblance to the sentiments of a 15th century Yiddish song yearning for the Messiah that we do in the klezmer band I'm in. Wishing for the Messiah, complaints of the wretched state of Jews, assertion of faith that Emmanuel is on his way. Same song, different words and music. Though I'm sure the jesu-joy-of-ladedah part shows up in ensuing verses, Emmanuel sounds exactly like a Jewish song up front.
Defensive or sensitive reactions to the contrary, Messiantism wasn't invented by Christians. By their embrace of this doctrine, three or four centuries old by the time of JC according to the authoritative Doctor Asimov, Christians are explicating that they're Jews. Sectarian Jews, breakaway Jews even, but no less a branch of the original tree of Israel than the descendants of the Tribes who weren't carried away during the Babylonian Captivity and evolved into parallel but no less devout variants on Judaism, some of whom linger on to this day, to the embarrassment of hardline Jews everywhere.
So where the heck do Christians get off being antisemitic? I'll never understand these apes. Guys, you can't gang up on the Jews -- you are Jews. Get over it. And by the way -- happy Hanukkah.
As you may have noticed, the Internet is an ocean choked with curious debris. Flotsam and jetsam, driftwood, effluvia and fooie, it's a yardsale out there. But that's why I love it -- like the larger reality of Reality, it possesses that priceless ability to surprise me, to offer unexpected tidbits that reaffirm my disbelief in solipsism. Like, there's no way I could make this up, people...
Just as a f'rinstence, take Tales of Plush Cthulhu, a HP Lovecraft parody done entirely with stuffie toys:
http://www.logicalcreativity.com/jon/plush/01.html
Or on a happier note, the story of Boilerplate, a Victorian era robot:
http://www.bigredhair.com/boilerplate/
If you're stuck for a word, here's a Random Word Generator:
http://www.fourteenminutes.com/fun/words/index.cgi?start=ob
Wanna build your own A-bomb? Got (most of) the info righcheer:
http://nuketesting.enviroweb.org/hew/
Or maybe you prefer brewing esoteric chemicals:
http://www.rhodium.ws/chemistry/
Or if conspiracy is your thing, how's about the theory that the US tested a nuclear device 30 miles from San Francisco in 1944?
http://www.portchicago.org/
And we got fun, too! The funniest monster-getting-squished-by-falling-rocks cartoons you've never seen:
http://wecomeinpeace.free.fr/
Or All The Instrument Jokes In The World:
http://www.mit.edu/~jcb/jokes/
Or the wit and wisdom of Nasreddin Hodja, the Turkish Hennie Youngman:
http://w1.871.telia.com/~u87109316/intro.htm
Or even the immortal Shel Silverstein's equally immortal Uncle Shelby's ABZ Book:
http://www.banned-width.com/shel/works/playboy/abz/abz.html
And if you're still not satisfied, you can Learn To Play The Jug:
http://www.schnipp.com/jug.htm
But for the fleeting few amongst you still concerned with your souls, there's The Landover Baptist Church: Where The Worthwhile Worship. Unsaved Unwelcome.
http://207.36.66.113/
Whew! I think that's enough for one week...
It's possible that I'm beginning to overdo my recent tendency to collect bands to play in. I'm up to five now. This weekend, four of them had gigs.
My last record was three -- on the same night. That was back in college, and I'll admit to a certain youthful hubris in having cast the I Ching and gotten the reading that included "...in one day he is given audience three times..." But as we all know, college is a galaxy far far away. In the greasy cheesy real world, my current penchant for joining groups is enabled by two circumstances: 1) My real band, Amber Tide, is in semi-retirement and 2) Most of my other ensembles aren't all that serious.
The hobby band is a symptom of the Superbowl Syndrome: one Superbowl Champ, 23 Superbowl Chumps. in our society, we tend to a one-winner many-loser model of distribution, which as has been noted is great for products and lousy for workers. That system extends into the arts, albeit on a commercial rather than esthetic basis. There's no more prevalent cliche in pro music than "loved by the critics, ignored by the market." But music has never been a competitive sport in its essence. It binds social groups together and gives them a common soundtrack. So where do the hoards of musical looooosers go if they have to get crummy day jobs and forget their adolescent Rolling Stone fantasies? Why, straight into hobby bands, o'course. It's almost like being a real musician and doesn't distract from those important matters like the next sales meeting and Junior's soccer tournament, whilst still scratching that ol' tormented artistic soul (or is that just undies?).
But what happens if your hobby tries to eat you? The very factors that make a back door band so rewarding can turn on you like a hungry anaconda if you start to actually play out. And the better the musicians, the greater the pressure to find work, both internal and external. Those were the toothy jaws and extremely muscular alimentary canal that I found myself caught in over the Veteran's Day Holiday (gateway to St. Swiven's Eve).
Friday afternoon saw the arrival of the big white Ford van of Steve and Kristi Nebel, aka Arnie and Red Filucie, two thirds of the redoubtable "Family Entertainment" trio the Filucies. The third member? Myself, "Pappy" Filucie (adopted -- too old to be a son, I was taken in as a father). This is a group with which I have deep and sprawling roots. I've know the Nebels since college, and not only did I sing backup on the very first Filucies recording, "The Longbranch Shuffle," but my sis Pat put in several years as their accordionist and she and my brother Moh wrote songs which they still perform. The group does what can be best described as novelty critter roots music, blues and rock and country and folk songs about polka-ing pigs and tango-ing cows and a seagull equally attracted to rock stardom and hanging out at the dump. S&K invited me to join their little circus a couple years back when S was barely out of surgery and looking mighty peaked, as much as a gesture of friendship as anything else. Fresh from a two month whirlwind tour of England, they were ready to get back to inciting children to undue frolic.
We stuffed our small-but-higher-gas-mileage minivan with PA, instruments, costumes, sandwiches and Filucies and waddled off to an echoy preschool gym in Bellingham. One advantage of hiring the Filucies is that we aim to please children of all ages. Most of the tunes have at least a moment's winking pause for the parents to appreciate, and some, like my own turn as the disfunctional children's show host Uncle Pappy, "that lovable guy with a rubber nose and a soul to match," teeter perilously close to subversive. While a covey of sugar-crazed rugrats shrieked and streaked through our hour set, happily jazzed up on the rhythms and funny voices when they weren't trying to ram my mike down my throat, the parents got periodic amusement from lines like "Oh, I know, I know -- you can't have any fun. The Lexus is in the shop!" Our one-nighter completed, we mini-toured home again, slightly richer and much deafer.
Saturday it was Emerald City Jug Band's turn. This ensemble came into existence because its founder applied to Northwest Folklife with an application based on a band he'd had ten years previously -- and when he got accepted, he had to round up players to fulfill the description. Well, that's one way to do it. After a year and a half, their management style is still somewhat more to the hypnotic consensus side of the spectrum (as opposed to the Little Adolf side), but they score gigs anyway off their raw natural goofiness -- that and the fact that they're one and all crackerjack musicians. I got recruited when their old jug player quit due to excess life and the word went out that they needed "a jug player, preferably a trained brasswind player who also sings and plays digeridu and some other instruments and has an expert working knowledge of early 20th century popular music." You rang?
My status as a nubie limited my participation to one guest shot on trombone, but I also sat merch (a most important function) and generally hung out at the opulent Arts West facility, cool, new and right in the hood. The show, billed as "Folk, Blues and Beyond," also included Deb Seymour and Brian Butler, two local acoustic luminaries. They handily covered the Folk and Blues, respectively, leaving the ECJB to deal with the Beyond with junkyard instrument (and vocal) workouts on standards like "Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out," for which the stubby, rotund Howlin Hobbit forsook his washboard for a ukulele and was rewarded with audience members stuffing dollar bills into his florid cummerbund. They ended with a rip-roaring "Bottle Up and Go" with the audience hollering "Yeah go!", got two encores and a stomping ovation. Out in the lobby, Deb listened and shook her head. "Gad, they're rioting in there. I'm jealous!" She didn't need to be -- she and Brian emptied their CD stocks into the eager hands of the intermission crowd and returned the compliment on their wallets. By the time they let us all go home, the jug-bedazzled fans were too flat to order up any more art. Note to self: whenever possible, be amazing before the first break.
San and I got to bed as early as we could, because Sunday morning Amber Tide got up to play. Down to the Olympia Farmer's Market in sabbath-sparse traffic, with the welcomed rain that'd drummed on the roof all weekend taking an intermission for our benefit. The market is something of a sentimental journey for us -- it reminds us of the classic street fairs and markets of the late 70's where we first met and honed our act. And for all that I enjoy playing with the others, Amber Tide is my first group. We played, the babies danced, and all was merriment. Afterwards we spent market money on high grade foodstuffs, when the vendors let us pay at all. There's no future for us in farmer's markets, but there're tons of presents there.
After a short nap in a rest area coming back, we picked up Martin the keyboardist for the last show of the series with the Klez Katz (wot, no website?). Possibly the best musicians of the bunch, the Katz are certainly the most disorganized. A klezmer ensemble containing a lawyer, a railroad engineer, a radiologist, another lawyer and me isn't likely to have a lot of free time to spend on musical career. I do what I can with PR and demo CD's, but while we score the occasional job through the usual channels (weddings, bar mitzvahs, synagogue functions), my rewards from this act are mostly artistic, letting me blow big fat trombone and learn more about Yiddish diaspora music. This time, however, we got a juicy spot closing KlezFest, a full-blown klezmer spectacular organized by the former head of the late lamented Mazeltones. (My sister played accordion for them, too.)
The act before us was a trio of nationally-known virtuoso players, and the audience gave their spot-perfect and soaringly passionate performance a standing ovation. "Don't worry," I muttered in the green room, "We outnumber them." Fat chance. While we did just fine, our local-guys experience and Tuesday-night rehearsing had been pre-eclypsed by the humongous chops of that death squad of ringers. Nonetheless, I played joyously and took pleasure in the jiggling toddlers in the front row and folk dancers snaking around the aisles alike. Dance music is always best played for dancers. We were heartily applauded and compensated and went home happy and full of backstage cake.
After all that, I was relieved to discover that my latest construction client was happy to take Veteran's Day off, giving me time to rest up from this Perfect Storm weekend. I don't know whether to hope that these boys get more successful or not. But in taking seriously Frost's desire to "...unite/ my avocation and my vocation/ as my two eyes make one in sight," I may be in danger of becoming permanently cockeyed. Oh well, at least I'll have fun. Lexus in the shop or not.
