8/30/04

My own family has its share of both musicians and eccentrics (sorry, though, no exciting monsters), but at least on my mom's side it carried a big load of farmers. My grandpa, scion of a line of Scot-Irish-English horticulturists, took a different route, working his way through teacher's college by farming one year, studying the next and so on, and continued to grow tomatoes on proverbial fenceposts and anyplace else he could root them throughout his life, which labors of love probably helped him carry through to 92. My ma also gardened, amassing such grave quantities of zuchinni each summer as to nearly put me off the stuff forever.

I've noted elsewhere my own resounding disfunctionality with raising common vegetables, but that doesn't mean I don't have a close personal relationship with the land. As a very young child, I and my sister would create whole ten-course mud dinners in the hose-softened back yard, and later I and some equally socially retarded classmates in the sixth grade retired to a remote corner of the playground at recess and dug holes into a bank, an enterprise we dubbed "Cave Hill Ville." When my parents picked up a parcel of semiarid land east of San Diego, I immediately set to work with pick and shovel and would disconcert acquaintances of the family out to picnic with us by asking "Do you wanna see my hole?"

Obviously, then, dirt and I are devotees of long standing. Whether it has any connection with the family's collective green thumb or not, I like fooling around with the dust of the earth. Sandahbeth, too, while not nearly as hands-on as I, enjoys having some humus around. Our standard mode of life when we weren't on the road was the tiny house with the big yard. One of the strictures we made in looking for a home to buy was that it should have a bit of ground with it. And of course we got exactly what we had coming: 900 square feet of living space with a half-acre of blackberry-encrusted hillside rolling down to a greenbelt riparian corridor behind, giving us a lovely fetid multi-acre birdsong-enhanced nature walk back yard that we didn't have to pay taxes on. Poifect!

Back in 2000, my brother Bob came to visit and spent late spring and a little summer making war on the immediate blackberry front. Astounded at his affrontery, I pitched in, and together we cleared a good third of the property of excess (by our standards, at least) vegetation. My yard suddenly got much larger. Midsummer, after Bob went home to San Diego, I went back over the slope and grubbed out the humongous leftover blackberry roots, divining their locations from the Judas sprouts crawling up out of the ground.

But then I was faced with a hurdle: How do I keep all this recently-exposed incline from simply galloping merrily down into the creekbed come the first monsoons? Initial investigation wasn't encouraging: the typical commercial supplies were dull and very spendy. I'd managed to uncover the ground for the price of the sweat, and as a die-hard miser (another trait that runs in the family, though I think I've managed to catch up with it) I wasn't about to drop credit on bogus garden timber or ugly cinderblocks, let alone overpriced froofroo "landscape blocks."

My neighbor suggested an alternative: local gravel yards were in constant touch with contractors busting up old cement pavement or digging up dirt for basements and such. Truckloads of these materials daily wended their way to the dump and were available free for the asking, delivered to your door, just as a respite from transfer station fees. I soon came into possession of a vast quantity of dirt and rocks which I proceeded to reinstitute as vaguely Celtic-ruin-esque retaining walls and terraces down my rear incline, with vague plans for a backyard amphitheater for house concerts and neighborhood get-togethers -- no gardens, please.

In the process, I discovered the power of engineering using natural forces. Essentially, building walls involves constructing artifices that successfully mimic the processes of gravity and erosion. A pile of rocks doesn't fall over once it's achieved stability. Thus, building a reliable retaining wall requires the replication of that strength: big rocks at the bottom, gradually sloping back into the hillside, smaller rocks at the top.

What I couldn't manage to emulate was the tenacity of all those coolies building the pyramids. After a certain point, about when I began sleeping sounder at night knowing my house wasn't about to hill-surf the Chickadee Glen Grand Slalom Run to the point of least resistance, I ran out of gas, not to mention dirt. And the rains came. And then somehow I got too busy. Fortunately, where I'd stopped was secure enough not to need more than the occasional mow-and-clip job. I had great fun showing people my hole, uh, yard.

But with the long hot summers we've had of late, a strong craving for more dirt action has been creeping back into me. And just this week Sandahbeth managed to cozen a local contractor out of 12 yards of absolutely lovely fill dirt, happily emulating Devil's Tower in the front yard and just the thing to be shored up with my leftover broken pavement. Mister Spae, your walking papers are here.

The Chickadee Glen Folk and Peculiar Music Microfestival may yet prove to be an attainable dream, barring insurance and zoning issues and such. At the very least, I'll have a backyard that'll get medieval on you. And just think of all the healthy exercise I'll get! No doubt about it -- playing in the dirt is a good thing.

8/23/04

Would you like to play the guitar?
Carry money home in a jar
From a coffeehouse or a bar,
Or would you rather get a job?

A job is the thing that makes you get out of bed
And work every day until you're dead.
Your back is achin' and your brain is numb
And you just can't wait until the weekend comes.
But if you don't want to starve or beg or rob
You're gonna have to get a job 

Driving back from a fairly responsive, moderately lucrative gig at a county fair this afternoon, one of my bandmates in one of the bands I play with remarked, "Boy, this is a crazy business."

He was probably thinking about the amount of chasing around that goes into even a modest job -- the practice and equipment maintenance and public relations, a welter of discontinuous skillsets that no professional in their right mind would ever consent to -- but I only commented that after all, it was an employment in the throes of monumental change, and that can make anything crazy.

Being of a comparable Certain Age, my stalwart companion in arms and I were both old enough to have witnessed the ratio of live performance to recorded reverse itself. Even in the 50's, the number of live performances still outweighed the amount of media play of music. Now, of course, it's by far the other way around, with the phenomenon of professional live DJ's merely demonstrating the fact.

The automation of music has left the remaining pool of career musicians stuck in a slowly shrinking pool of performance opportunities, competing with each other and gasping for breath. It almost doesn't seem worth the effort anymore, especially given that the chances of success are barely better than for winning the lottery.

All this is of more than academic interest to me. I've been earning the bulk of my living as a miscellaneous musical freejack the last four years, waiting for my wife and musical partner to get well enough to go back to working with her in what I feel is my true calling. But during that time, the business has changed (again) out from under our previous suppositions. The pond has shrunk drastically enough to make even cursory gigging a matter of endless competition and specialization, to the point where I'm really considering other work.

Now, I have another job, one that I'm even beginning to see signs of life in: handyman. I was recently offered a position that two years ago I'd have jumped down the throat of without a second thought: a guy who owns several rental properties needs someone to come in and fixit -- lots of little stuff, maybe a few bigger. Pays about what I pay myself, considering how often I underbid jobs, I keep my independent status, and it's regular as exlax. But it's not two years ago, and in the interim I've put a couple interesting large signatures into my left index fretting finger with power tools and protruding metal extrusions, and I'm getting the idea that handymanning may not be my day job of choice.

Or would you like to play the guitar?
Drive for miles and miles in your car
And pretend that you're a big star?
Or would you rather book the gig?

The agent's the guy who takes his twenty percent.
What he says isn't always what he meant.
He'll clean you out in ways you never thought
Because he's good at business and he knows you're not.
And then he'll sue if you ever make it big
Cause he's the guy who booked the gig.

I've always said there's big opportunities in the music business. Not for musicians, you understand...(badabump). I could replace my current Good Paying Job with some form of musical service (besides recording, which is another desperately competitive field) like sound reinforcement or booking or tour management or the like. Still, I'd likely get a trifle jealous of Joe Blow and his Rockin Robots getting their tour handed to them on a silver platter thanks to yours truly when it shoulda been me (with that real fine chick).

Another bandmate who books for her own group refuses to provide that service for anyone else, to the point of refusing to accept proffered commissions for gigs she can't use and passes on. Her basic argument is that booking is a nasty brutish activity that musicians should develop the ability to do themselves, and that all the time she'd spend getting other people gigs is time she wouldn't spend playing herself, or engaging in all those frivolous extraneous activities musicians indulge in like eating and sleeping.

Or would you like to play the guitar
For a living  -- hardee-har-har!
I'll admit it's kind of bizarre.
Or would you rather be the wife?

The wife is the one who has to rescue our butts.
She's either a saint or else she's nuts.
She gets impatient and she gets annoyed
Cause she's the one who must remain employed.
And by the way if you want to wreck your life
Become a guitar player's wife 

Sandahbeth, bless her chronic degenerative arthritic bones, has always been the booker in our family band. She's willing to put in the time, she's good with telephones, she's persistent, and people always trust women more than men. She hates kissing promoter rump as much as anybody, but because she's willing, she's the goto gal. If and when Amber Tide comes back on line, it'll be because she's pushing the rope to get gigs. This permits the process to be self-moderating: if S is well enough to be finding work, she's well enough (probably) to do it.

However, I'm myself developing a side act as a solo, doing an act I call American Songbook -- your common ordinary standards performed with guitar and rack harp, plus a small high hat, all of which disguised as well as possible as anything but a one man band (I tried calling it a solo ensemble, but that didn't fly, even if it would look good on the grant application). It shows signs of actually working, although I'm not sure why, and I've even made money with it at one pickup restaurant gig. If I got it up to book it myself, at least during such times as S is incapacitated by the forces of entropy, it might be a quarterflash substitute for manipulating dire instruments of construction.

And that would be good, because like my bandmate said when I told him all this, music may be a crazy job, but I've never found one I liked better.

Cause all the monkeys aren't in the zoo.
They can be trained to play guitar too.
Some do a whole lot better than you.
But even if you don't go far
You could be worse off than you are.
At least you're playing your guitar.

--"Would You Like to Play the Guitar" by Pat Donohue 

8/9/04

8/2/04

It's no easy task, I'll say that. While it's clear that some sort of regime change is mandatory for the preservation of a future for America not completely smeared with images of cryptofascist patriotic spectacles and dead civilians of many lands, there's a tendency among our politicians to all look alike in a certain light, usually the green glare of campaign contributions. What future radical historians will surely call the Totally Fucked Election of 2000 goes even further to illustrate a system not only tweedledumb-and-dumbered to dull gray pablum but as sprung as a flophouse mattress. Soft money, smears, attack ads, mountains of lies, inaccurate voter lists, defective voting machines, cryptic ballots -- it all merges into a bad dream of democracy as extreme sport for sociopaths, with the rest of us dragged along for Mister Toad's Wild Ride.

Despite all this, however, I've hit upon a scheme, a modest proposal for the improvement of the American Way Of Voter Fraud guaranteed to not only produce virtually identical results to the current system but also improve tremendously on its social and cultural impact. Can I get an amen? How about a genius grant? Didn't think so.

This crazy contrivance of democracy we laughingly claim to embrace in our country is more or less a descendant of a simple observation from the eternal slaughterhouse of human conflict. From the dire days of old when fierce, hairy warriors with bad breath and unmentionable BO hewed at one another with clumsily crafted, pitifully forged weapons of evisceration and concussion right on up to our own enlightened times, whenever experienced fighters get together to talk shop it's bound to be noted that if a big army fights a little one, the big one wins, durn near every time. Might might not make right, but it durn sure makes dead enemies and lots of 'em.

After a while, this subtle little notion got the attention of great leaders (see also: The Guys With Big Bellies), and sooner or later it was inevitable that one of them would reason thusly: Here we are combing the countryside for able-bodied peasants, slapping them into weskits and chain mail and shipping them off to get whacked by the other team just to try to enforce some border treaty or trade dispute. These guys are a lot more useful tilling crops than they'd ever be fertilizing them, and since everybody knows that the side with the big crowd wins, maybe it would be easier to just, y'know, count heads -- while they're still attached, as it were -- and adjudicate the matter that way.

Wha? Not slaughter each other? Just take a poll? Woh, dude, radical. Practical, though. And a lot less wear and tear on valuable real estate than rape, loot and pillage. So after a certain amount of refinement and R&D and philosophical boilerplate, the concept was adopted, to the joy of soldiers and the despair of weaponeers everywhere.

For a while, one-soldier-one-vote seemed to make sense, even when women and minorities got jiggy and demanded inclusion as well. But every Eden needs its snake, and its wormy apple. The bite that bit back in this case was mass media. The original notion of democratic governance involves giving the general population just enough education to figure out what the issues at issue are about, without their getting enough to start questioning the whole system or anything dangerous like that. But increasingly, privately held news agencies became the most immediately accessible form of information available to the private (first class) citizen not wanting to chew through a mountain of bureaucratic cryptography at the local library. Nowadays, with education starving on the tit and the supremacy of television, the media are durn near the only way the masses and classes find out what's even remotely likely to be happening.

The inevitable result: one-grunt- one-vote has been increasingly replaced by one-dollar- one-vote, and the major political institutions are becoming prizes sold off to the highest bidder. The desire of the various oligarchic factions to grasp the reins of government has subverted and disconnected the entire electoral process, turning the presidential campaign into a relentless ranting circus of take-no-prisoners advertising hype.

Horribly, the process appears to follow Sir Mix-a-lot's Law: Big bank takes little bank. The guy or (rarely) gal who can pony up the most dough generally walks away with the brass ring, and the cool national government that comes with it. It's enough to engender visions of a smoke-filled room somewhere where the principle players in the Big Buyout are discussing whether the elections are really necessary, just like the barons and earls of yore trying to keep the body counts down. Well, wait, boys. Before you stub out those Cubanos, I've got a rubber cigar of my own to light up. Check this stinker out.

Let's assume that the big bucks are the harbinger of success. Fine. So the deal is, instead of pestering poor ol' nearsighted overweight mortgaged-to-breakfast Ma and Pa Murka with all those images of fighter planes and fruited plains and rippling flags and evil foreigners and stuff, let's just hold a by-gawd auction here. All the candidates cough up their best shot of loot and whoever comes up with the most wins. Bu-u-t -- everybody, winner and losers alike, forfeits the cash, and it gets distributed evenly to the poorest quarter of the population. Feed the people, starve the media. Sounds good? You bet!

Now that's democracy in action, bub!