6/30/03

The rewards of time getting all medieval on your ass are so numerous, it's hard to count them all. The spreading midsection, the sag of this and that, the growing wattle beneath one's chin, the gradual deterioration of memory and strength -- ah, it's enough to make you sing. Loudly and off key. Either that or go buy a bright red sports car and blow a wad in the nearest casino, hopefully in the company of someone impressive and encouraging of the polarity of your personal sexual preference.

But the worst of it is that niggling, nagging part of yourself that keeps asking the really stupid question, "What have you done with your life?"

My own midlife drama keeps going on and on, probably in part because I'm resisting the onslaught of my mesoyears and still looking for my Big Showbiz Break. Obviously, I'm thoroughly deranged. But I'm also consistent. What Have I Done With My Life is be an artist, a performer and mostly pretty broke and picturesque. Deciding whether I was blindsided by sleazy commercial forces or bravely held out against the tedium of normal life to follow my dreams may be left as an exercise for the reader, preferably after I'm dead, although I wouldn't mind some semblence of reward now if I've got any coming.

One of the common cliches of the standard commercial musician's industrial biography works on the level of, "John Blah was born in 1971 and began playing guitar at 12. In 1992 his first album Cock on a Dungheap shot up to number 29 on..." I'm always left screaming "So what happened in between there? Just exactly who did he sleep with to get that slice of cheese released?"

The official explanation of those lost years is that John Blah worked very hard and talked to a lot of people and played out a lot and finally achieved the success his towering talent deserved. The usual truth is that John Blah puked around like all his lowlife buddies and happened to sell a gram to the right rich faggot in LA. No matter what they tell you, Horatio Alger this ain't.

The flip side of all this is that no matter what they tell you, there are a buttload of John Blahs who never get a slice of anything released no matter how many grams they sell. One of these days there'll be an old folks home for unsuccessful pop musicians, all gnarly and tattooed and mullet-challenged and crabby about their missed opportunities. All of them still believing that if they'd just made the right move at the right time, move over Mick, here they come. Every shriveled one of them a palpable loooooooser, at least by the judgement of the uberculture.

But just how much a winner or a loser is the average schmoe, rocker or no? What chance do any of us really have to do much of anything in this world except take up space? And how can that be held against us?

We live in a society that marinades us in a perpetual booster bath of the Myth of Self-Made Success. Child or adult, we're earnestly advised to Assume The Position of reaching down to firmly grasp our bootstraps, said advice generally dispensed by the array of trust fund tykes and descendants of Attila whose boots are already elevated and aimed directly at our thusly exposed posteriors. In truth, we're born, we stumble through the world, we die, and almost nothing that happens is really the result of anyone's titanic strategic genius, even if they're Bill Gates.

Not to hear it from them, of course. The bookshelves and lecture podiums of this our native land are crawling like an overripe garbage bucket with the maggot purveyors of How I Became Stinking Rich Through My Own Noble Efforts. Each and every one of these squamous wonders is firmly convinced that they took their destiny in their own strong and nicely tanned hands and bent it to their steely will, conveniently ignoring all the grams they sold along with their family, cool school and slithering golf-course connections. By and large, the straight story of win and lose is that the guys who die firmly grasping the electroplate brass ring just got lucky. Really really really really lucky. And the rest of us didn't.

The popup window for me here is a routine from that swell old gasping wreck of a speedfreak drag queen Saturday Night Live, in which a quartet of nebbishes who walked into the closet door of success proudly display their blackened eyes -- "I invented the pet rock!" "I sued a doctor and won!" -- and then proclaim in split-screen chorus, "America: It's a lottery!"

As I go through life, I'm less and less convinced of the existence of any unambiguous destiny for anyone but an (un)lucky few. Despite our dominant social narrative of carve-your-future, most people don't get what they go for. Even that old standby, career planning -- frick the White House, I just want a decent job -- has become laughably erratic. Lotsa IT grads this year signed up in '99 with dollar signs in their moist, innocent eyes. Oh well.

Sure, there's destiny -- but it's all too often lacking in any dramatic arc worth the observation. Destiny is dull. Destiny is tedious. And in the end, tedious boring people die tedious boring deaths and are forgotten in a week.

The destiny that everyone pays attention to, that grand glorious grinding wheel of Fate that makes rock stars and tragic opera so inneresting, that particular metaphysical force is a luxury of aristocrats and drama queens who have the flex and space to live them out --and for those hapless few who really are destined to move and shake. The rest of us are just spectators.

Pass the popcorn.

6/23/03

And like they say, there's an upside to that and a downside.

The upside is pretty self-evident -- I get and give a lot of enjoyment by being a musician. The downside is a little more complicated, and it generally protrudes its stubbly Forrest Gump-ian head in those giddy little dances of self-expression, jam sessions.

The jam session is a by-gawd wild art event, as devoid of commercial potential as little girls making mud pies in the back yard. The only purpose is pleasure, the only payment is enjoyment. But within this seemingly anarchic structure, a certain amount of hominid hierarchy comes slithering in. Whenever musicians gather to play, there's an inevitable jockeying for position by players of varying caliber. This can go one of two ways: the better musicians compete with each other and leave the more inexperienced in the dust, reducing the festive nature of the occasion to an egotistical cutting contest, or, thankfully more often, the best musicians provide support and encouragement for the less advanced, bringing a sense of unity and entrainment that is both entertaining and educational for them.

But this second case comes at a price: the really good musicians are to an extent reduced to sidemen for the lesser. While the session remains copacetic, the ringer can feel constrained and end up seeking greener pastures. Wise tyros learn to take a break and let the big birds flippity flap their majestic wings now and then, even if it leaves the dodos grounded for the duration of the flight.

There's a weird family resemblance here to the case of the well-organized middle manager who is saddled for whatever reason by a sloven trainwreck of a boss. This of course ain't the same as the jam session -- this is business, we're talking live ammo here. But it's an unfortunate truth of human relations that the race is not always to the swift -- all too often it's to the boss's son. -- and a well-documented method of maintaining a tenuous grip on power and position is to be so thoroughly mucked up that nobody else can tell exactly what it is you're doing. It's left to the secretary or the personal assistant or the office manager to sort through the chaos when something important needs to be out the door by 5 pm.

Whether there is intention at work or not, it seems that more disorderly individuals depend on others to clean up their messes for them. It begins to resemble a paradigm: those who manage by organization will always be servants to those who rule through disorganization. In fact, the compensating management by underlings is what such wielders of confusion and blur are counting on.

Lest I begin to sound like a harried underling meself, lemme hasten to add that there's an equally obhorrent complimentary situation in which a meticulous, highly-focused individual proceeds to grasp as many reins as they can in their own hands for fear that "if I don't do it, it won't get done!", resulting in massive overload for the manager, resentment and bewilderment for coworkers and low tragedy and merriment overall. It might also be noted that the disorganized boss can be beneficial in generating at random new and different methods of organization, which the methodical drone might never discover on their own, and that a punctilious adherence to schedule and format can lead to stagnation and dinosaurian inflexibility. And o' course we all know the value of delegating authority.

More often than not, though, it's the constant cleaning up of someone else's dirty socks that leads to tension, burnout and conflict in social orders. For musicians, constantly wiping the chinny chin chins of drooling amateurs can result in the dreaded Big Dog syndrome, players of skill and experience and depth of expression who waste much of their energy treating one another like rivals for alpha male, with a concomitant loss of productive playing time. In business, snarky subalterns are very nearly a cliche. In my experiences as a temp office worker, I nearly always immediately attracted at least one disgruntled line worker ready and able to unburden themselves on the stupidity and cupidity of their superiors. Bless me, outsider, for I have peeved.

Still, there are worse things lurking in the swamp of disorganization than mere incompetence. The deconstruction of the simple meritocratic arrangement of I-know-more-so-I-lead into the more common crony-politic structure of most hierarchies can push talented workers right off the edge of the social contract field and into the end-zone of sociopathy. Perhaps the supreme evocation of this attitude was performed by Ayn Rand in her monumental fantasy Atlas Shrugged. Her ultimate protagonist of competence (and aficionado of rough sex) John Galt is captured by the whining weasels of a government on the brink of collapse and ordered to address the nation on his plan for its salvation. Galt, who has spent most of his adult life slinking around convincing other competent people to run away and join the circus or something, is handed the microphone with a fanfare sort of like "And Now, John Galt's Plan To Save The Nation!", whereupon he snarls his infamous pull-quote "Get the hell out of my way!"

I dunno about anyone else, but that really doesn't sound like management material to me.

6/16/03

It's decidedly unclear where choice begins and ends in the development and maintainence of personal habits and traits. Some people appear to have no control at all over anything they do, up to and including their bowel functions -- babies come to mind, as do howling imbeciles, Alzheimer's patients and the like. Others seem to gear up the vast assemblage of their intellects and sail through life at the helms of their personal souls like captains courageous aboard the Mayflower. Or the Titanic. Most of us fall somewhere in between, our best intentions all too often bollixed by our baser impulses.

But the actual process of sorting out the intentions and results of individuals is rarely accomplished in a uniform fashion. Certainly there's little sympathy on the part of the victim of a rape with the better nature of his or her violator, with their remorse or intentions or childhood traumas, and in many cases actions do speak a lot louder than explainations. At other times the victims and villains trade places with serpentine ease, like the ongoing sez-you between Palestine and Israel, both sides screaming WHO ARE THE REAL TERRORISTS? like twin children of different mo-fo's.

So there we are, judges sunk in the prejudices and follies endemic to our sept, trying in true blind-beating-the-blind fashion to sort out who's just a sick cowpoke and who's got the bad to the bone part down. All too often motivation is distinguished by familiarity or common worldview, with no better yardstick authorized.

Most commonly, judgement is weighed against those without the means to defend themselves, especially when they're small and weak. It's an unwritten cliche that all children are little lawyers whose motto is "It's NOT FAIR!" But it's also a standard practice to convict kids of the crime of "seeing what they can get away with," installing an entire system of (venal) strategic self-interest in individuals too young to form consonants clearly.

Human judgement itself might be judged a suspect mechanism -- like the binary morality of religious fudamentalists, it has Absolute Good and Evil built right into its firmware, along with the Long Arm (and Heavy Fist) of the Law. And like punishment or whining, it provides a deal more satisfaction to the wielder than the target, not to mention functionality. Pasting a bogeyman mask over the face of a perp doesn't do shite for society, but don't them long black robes look cool!

All this comes to a head in considering the validity of an insanity defense. Many forms of insanity look just like Bob down the block except for that propensity towards, well, whatever it is that's insane about them. Telling the real crazy people from the ones who are just faking is a subject that has sharpened many a pencil and filled many a wallet over the years. In the end, it requires an evaluation of a enigma: the interior life of another human. Or as Pico and Alvarado heckle from the back: P: That's metaphysically absurd, man, how can I know what you hear? A: Yeah, fuck you!

It would be easy to argue (and I have) that attempting to convince people that you're crazy is itself crazy enough to label you crazy in the first place. Or to put it another way, anyone who deliberately kills another person is pretty clearly functionally insane. All willful murderers could cop a mental incompetence plea.

Of course, there's a vast amount of difference between someone who's organically psycho, a classic paranoid schizoid, say, and someone else with a borderline personality and poor impulse control who snuffs their cousin in a heated argument over the color of their toast. Or is there? Like the guy from the concentration camp said, you can't measure someone else's pain. The anguish a child feels stubbing her toe could be just as intense as from having your entire family killed in front of your eyes There's no pain-o-meter to tell.

And at bottom, this is the dilemma. There's no anything-o-meter when it comes to the black box upside your shoulders. We're left once again with the shaky perch and slippery slope of personal narrative. But it would be a fock of a note if psych evaluations were reduced to the equivalent of "So, feeling crazy today, are we?" Good ol McMurphy would have a few quaint responses to that one, sure as sunshine.

Which might be the heart of the matter. Every humane impulse of society seems to require a counterbalancing judicious pause to determine if the object of that impulse is worth the trouble. No matter how abundant the milk of human kindness may be, there are always more than enough eager dairymen ready to churn it into cheese and vend it down at the market to plunder its efficacy. Even if the quality of mercy isn't strained, it's frequently exploited. And if divine mercy is limitless, the resources of the state are not.

Or, to quote once again the old saw, in the next world you get justice, but in this one you're stuck with the law. And there isn't enough to go around, so you'll just have to settle for what you get.

6/9/03

I wasn't always this way. Back in the day, I lived the pure spiritual organic lifestyle of the hippie street performer and my tastes in audio engineering reflected it. I was a staunch supporter of live recording on analog machines with no effects and minimal editing, the sound equivalent of tofu and rice with boiled vegetables, or maybe (just maybe) an Ansel Adams black and white of the Grand Canyon at dawn. Given of course that we recorded in places like the Cutter Theater, a huge reverberant old converted school building in eastern Washington, the results often trumped the simplicity of the ingredients. Then there was the time we finished an outdoor take and the train whistle came in on key. This was stuff you couldn't get in a studio, we argued. This was real.

Too bad the recorder we used was real too -- real cheap. And the mikes, and all the rest of the battery-pack gimcracks we dragged around with us, along with three cats and a battered PA and a hideous 1947 Kit trailer. We had neither the financial resources nor the security to get even remotely serious with the equipment. It took infirmity, a home address and several legacies for us to do that, and even then we went for a finicky high-maintainence analog multitrack.

As late as ten years ago, high-quality recording was still the domain of vaguely sinister professionals in possession of controlled-climate laboratories of electronic and acoustic rocket science, grudgingly admitting you to their exalted realm on a stringent hourly basis. All else was dross and tinkertoys. Expertise and quality could be measured in dollars and cents, and that was exactly how the prevailing market, record companies and radio stations and the like, evaluated it. If you didn't have a rich mommy or a promoter backing you, you were home alone.

Then, as everyone and Santa knows, along came the digital revolution. The same processes that made the Big Guys a heap o' bucks in the 80's and 90's reselling fans their old record collections reconstituted as 1's and 0's had the temerity to turn around and bite 'em on the ass. Sic 'em, puppy! With its ease of manipulation and zero loss of quality, plus the eager assistance of a whole branch of the music hardware industry, high quality hard drive recording for all blithely rewrote the rulebook for production and promotion of musical products.

(Add a bedtrack here of a military fife-and-drum corps playing "The World Turned Upside Down." I'm sure you can find an mp3 of it on Kazaa.)

While this was ground already cultivated by the consumer-level equipment sold by companies like Tascam and Fostex, computer recording, mp3's, CD-R burners and web-based sales were the accelerants that turned every musician into a vertical monopoly. That was what finally convinced me to go binary: the prospect of having my own record company in my back bedroom.

But assuming the mantle of the Pro Priesthood comes with its own litany and liturgy of previously unexamined orthodoxy. Just because you gots the tools doesn't mean you gots the skillz. Any monkey with a sawsall can claim the title of carpenter, but somewhat fewer have the know-how to put up a building and make it stay. Thus for audio -- there's a pile of difference between good music played in the air and a good record coming out of speakers, and the conversion of one to the other calls for uncommon acuity and experience.

Much of that difference lies in those aforementioned fixes -- removing stray bits of uh and clunk that blow right by on stage but become cloying and annoying heard again and again. Much of what passes for good production, as opposed to good performance or even execution of music, consists of what gets left out of, not in, arrangements, individual tracks, even stylistic variations. It can reach the point that the artist is reduced to a simple tone source, manipulated by the recording engineer as casually as a MIDI module or a sample loop -- to which, ultimately, all sound is reduced within the sublime calculator of digital sequencing.

But that kind of detailed, reductive editing is exactly what sets art apart from life. Every day we are faced with the things of which art are made -- the beautiful sunset, the birdsong, the radiant face and giggle of a child, the squalid, fertile interplay of human affairs. We seldom see them separate from the life surrounding them. But artists takes those same things and selectively reconstitute them in a manner that reflects their own point of view. They remove them from the ordinary, edit out their extraneous features and leave them, sharply contrasted and, uh, artificial for the view of those who don't perceive such things. By doing so, they pass along unique, selective reconstructions of reality, visions which can then be applied to other portions of the world by the recipient. Which is to say, art doesn't imitate life, it iconifies it.

So maybe I'm not so far from my tofu recording legacy as all that. I'm still expressing the pure sonic experiences I sought to capture before, pulling them out of the background of the everyday. It's just that now with all this enhanced capacity I've got so many more options for improvement.

Art: Better Than Reality. Take some home today!

6/2/03

Yeah, right -- and all the girls go for middle aged dudes. Don't forget that, either. Sheesh.

Truth is, I've been having my share of Older Guy moments of late. I'm not sure how I'd avoid them, actually -- they're a biproduct of Good Ol' Charlie Time, that inextricable component of reality that smokes us all like well-stuffed phats. Typically, my reaction is just like everyone else's: What happened? Fifteen minutes ago I was young and cute and strong and and and -- well, shoot.

Last weekend, S and I went out to play at North West Folklife, a gala celebration of all things ethnic that had been the site of many of our greatest triumphs on the street. We had no expectations other than to play our stage and look around a little. With the Street Performer Indicator off a few zillion points since the mid-90's, we weren't about to try to sway the tv-addled masses to our peculiar form of enchantment.

But despite our nonintervention resolution, I wasn't prepared for the spectacle of summers past that enveloped me at the gates of Seattle Center like the sight of a sweet svelte girlfriend of old wearing the same size-3 dress on her now-size-14 bod. While Folklife has always had a certain earnest authenticity in its inclusiveness, with Thai royal court music and Native American chant given equal shrift with sea shanties and hackneyed singer-songwriters expostulating over their navels, there's also an element of time-warp that creeps in. Now, surveying the teeming grounds as we plowed towards our stage, it was as if nothing had changed in 30 years -- same marimba bands on the lawn, same naked kids in the fountain, same teenaged jazz combo refining their chops in public, same Native Dancers In Colorful Tribal Costume. Same elephant ears and calzones booths. And the same people, all 30 years older. I'd been transported to the Land of the Turkey-Necked Folkies.

But worse, there was a part of me that yearned for that unchanged quality, that harkened back to sweet soft days of yore, the part that kept me coming back year after year after year like a mindless Capistrano swallow. But that part, far from being my ruling principle, had been reduced by years of caregiving and mortgage-chasing, of life as an adult in a world that gave no quarter, to an atavistic tickle, an aberrant urge as inappropriate as an idle lust for a gleaming sports car or a blue-eyed coed. Suddenly, for what seemed the first time since I'd begun swimming the waters of the festival ocean, I just wasn't interested anymore.

Maybe if they taught kids in grade school that each of us has many people inside, most of them irresponsible wackos, it'd be a better world. Then again, it's hard enough to deal with each other now. Lord knows I have a real lion-tamer's time with myself and myself and myself, let alone anyone(s) else. So who was this glammed-up seeker after out-of-print dreams? Me, of course -- back when I was young and cute and strong and wanted more than anything to be a wandering minstral for a living. Let me amend that -- young and cute and strong and crazy. And a me that has never left, despite all the rest of the me's piled on top of him like old-maid socks in the bottom of the drawer. This wasn't simple nostalgia, this was akin to possession, albeit possession of a particularly puny sort, a very small dog snarling and tugging at my trouser cuff.

That punky puppy had yet to have his day, though. The next morning we spent a very pleasant three hours entertaining at the local farmer's market, a quiet, mellow, encouraging scene of progressive types shopping for organic garlic, stopping to listen while jolly well-scrubbed babies danced to our elegant swing tunes and harmonica boogies -- exactly the sort of things we love the most about sidewalk entertainment, even as sober-faced adults.

Then we went down to perform at the Pike Place Market Street Fair, a mob-scene of tourists and locals and louts and losers and the odd streetnik clotting and surging over the cobbled expanses. You wants remembrance of things past? We gots remembrance of things past. Pike Place triggered every wandering minstral synapse in my cerebral cortex. Nostalgia Doggie worried my shoe. We recruited husky volunteers to hoist S's chair onto the postage stamp stage the Fair provided and played our set.

Afterwards I told S that I felt like the Ghost of Vaudeville Past. Woooooooooo. It's one thing to have a history, but it's quite another to reconcile a free and easy past with a far more constricted present without condemning one or the other, if not to the purgatory of regret, at least to the limbo of times past recall or duties without recourse.

Or not. I plowed this ground years ago in a song, Vaudeville Days: "It's been so long since I left home/I'm on my own now/I live my life in a maze (you wouldn't think to see me)/ but I remember the way that it used to be/ Back in my Vaudeville Days." Apart from a rude parody by my younger brother (what higher praise can there be?), the most cogent comment on that song I ever got was from an older magickal supplies store owner in Berkeley who listened thoughtfully and remarked, "I get it -- we all have a time of golden youth that we remember and feel a yearning for -- we all have Vaudeville Days."

Just another reason to play nice. No matter who we are, we're beset by spirits, greater or lessor, gnawing at our extremities or tugging us this way or that. Be kind to each other -- we all go through it.

Wooooooooooo.