unnecessary taxi rides and plusieurs fêtes

It's Monday morning again. After a whirlwind weekend, I'm back, ensconced, in the solitude of the other side of the lake. It's no secret that most Americans, and anyone else for whom the workweek starts on Monday, harbor resentment of the day. [Some Middle Eastern countries begin their workweek on Saturday or Sunday.]

What reason do you need to die? Tell me why.

[I've always hated that song, but now, I've heard it so many times that it just is what it is. It sounds so cheesy and banal, but it's about a girl who went on a shooting spree in 1979, stating afterwards, with no remorse: "I don't like Mondays. This livens up the day."]

But this Monday is not one of those Mondays. I feel unburdened, unhurried - coming off a good weekend in the city. The weekend started with me taking the train into the city. No car, no worries. I walked from the Millennium Station to the bike shop at River East and found Martin working on some bikes. Retrieved "my" bike (one that a roommate left many years ago and that has been passed around as needed) and headed up the lakefront path, fueled by a Chipotle burrito. Tragedy struck. I got a flat tire at around Addison, a full 18 blocks south of my destination in Andersonville. So I walked. And walked, pushing the bike. After quite a while, I started to notice the cold. My phone said it was 14, but it felt a little warmer than that. Finally made it to the "Valentines day means chocolate" party and warmed up.

Saturday morning, I took the bike on a bus - before coffee I should mention - to go teach Tina piano. Got off the bus, got coffee at Caribou - really good coffee - and as soon as I walked out of the door, realized that I had left the bike on the bus. Tragedy. Clear thinking ensued, aided by the coffee. I mulled a few options and decided to track the bike down. Found a taxi and said "There's a bus a mile ahead; I need to catch it." No questions from the taxi driver, and we were off. Finally, after what seemed like 10 minutes, we caught the bus, almost 2.5 miles south of Tina's. Got the bike, loaded in the back of the taxi, and got back to Tina's. A $15 dollar slip of the mind.

At some point I made it back to Darick's with enough time to watch the first two episodes of Lost. I'm ambivalent about getting sucked in, but I want to know more before I decide. Right now, I'm thinking of watching the first season, reading summaries of the second, and maybe watching bits and pieces of the 3rd and 4th.

Then to a drink with a new friend. Then riding my bike - flat fixed at Tina's - from Rogers Park to Skokie for a soirée des crêpes. Through couchsurfing.org, I was invited to this francophone party, organized by some français who teach at the lycée française. Good times. Good food. Good mixture of French and English.

Then, finally at 11, got to a party for Sarah's roomate's birthday. Busy day.


Sunday was more episodes of Lost before my friend Veerle's birthday party. She's Belgian, and when I arrived, just a dozen minutes after the official start time, there were only Europeans there - mostly Belgian. The party turned out to be mostly Euros but from all over, the common language being English. Good times. Good food. It inspired me on my quest to know German better. I think I'm going to be more proactive about it this week.

Speaking of this week, today is my day to set everything in motion. I am finding Mondays to be great for future-thinking and structuring. The rest of the week follows from Monday's thinking. I'm feeling fairly motivated again to work on music for the CD and performances. I think the orchestra project is too little too late. But I'll keep musing over those ideas and let them grow more naturally.

ü

Ultimately, it's all about balance. I was in search of motivation all week, thinking that it was somewhere inside. Instead, I found that it also lies outside. To move forward, I need to balance out the inside and outside. I enjoy creating music for its own sake, but that gets old after a while. So I need to keep my audience in mind, imagining the performance, the moment what's going on in the Self comes out to interact with the Other.

The Übermensch generally gets a bad rap. Nietzsche recognized the inherent danger in the concept and so balanced it out with the idea of eternal return - to prevent against a dangerous slide into nihilism. Nietzsche's concept is more of a thought experiment, imagining that the universe repeats itself in exactly the same way an infinite number of times. Whatever choices you make today (or made yesterday) are permanent for now and for all time. Accepting the burden of this weight requires the strength of a superman.
I don't want to throw the baby out with the bath water. I see the Übermensch as being internally motivated, self-confident and powerful - good, but only when in moderation. But, to prevent against collapsing in on itself, like a black hole, there need to be external factors keeping it balanced. Like performing.

smoldering

Where there's fire, there's heat, but the reverse is not necessarily true. I made a fire tonight, trying to only use two logs and some newspaper. Yes, and some lighter fluid too. Fires like that can start off looking promising but then quickly die down to smoldering logs. There's heat, there's a little smoke, but no flames. I either get some more paper or blow on it, but it's takes a while, without kindling, to convince two thick logs to really catch.

Which is how I've felt all week. I left my focus, my vision for the future, somewhere either at the cottage or in Chicago. The flames have died down, and, although I'm super hot, there's no visible sign of fire. Hot with potential that is. I'm not too worried, just annoyed that I made little, if any, forward progress. Some days, some weeks are like that. I have to remember this weekend that, just as tomorrow begins tonight, next week begins this weekend. I'm going to have a weekend that doesn't take two days to recover from.

I figured out what's missing this week: a goal or deadline. I forgot to think about the near and distant futures at all this week to find a new one. I say a new one, because last weekend was an arrival point if only in my head. Several weeks ago I set the Saturday night party as a deadline to come up with some new stuff. There was a remote possibility that I would play this stuff at the party. Even in the days leading up to last weekend, I kept telling myself it was a possibility - clearly a lie but one that produced results.

New deadlines have arrived, so I should be cooking with gas next week. First, I came up with some new ideas for the orchestra piece, bringing that idea back from the ashes. These ideas are much more manageable than the vague concepts of chaos and order I was attempting to incarnate last go-around. Second, I got word of a little competition, deadline in a couple months.

The album idea doesn't motivate me right now, but if I can remember why it was important to me, I'll resurrect the best tracks and make another push.

Errata: I didn't leave the house today and am forgoing my weekly trip to the Roadhouse. I'm quitting drinking for a little while. I left my yoga mat out all day so that I can do 5 minutes of stretching every break I take. I can touch my toes again and am working on upper body strength so I can do a handstand.

I'm thinking about joining the circus.

No I'm not. Say no to say yes.

Here's a clip from the South Park I linked to last week. You should know that there's a running gag with Jeff Goldblum making crazy associations. But the punchline comes towards the end of the clip. It's only 2 minutes but will give you the idea.

process

The wave of indifference that washed over me yesterday receded throughout the day today, but I still feel a little numb. I realized that my diet hasn't been all that great - not necessarily my food diet, my mental diet. When I first got up here, I was inspired to better myself in all ways, including intellectually. More recently, I think the balance has shifted resulting in some bad habits. Yes, like South Park. It is horrifically funny, but I don't need to watch it every day (or 4 in a row like I did on Saturday on Netflix). Comedy can take up a small portion of my diet, but it's the dessert to more nutritious forms of infotainment. (That's apparently a word.)

Today, I had some coffee, did some writing, and went for a walk. Writing things down is so helpful to purge your mind of them. All those niggling thoughts just want to get out, and once they are, you can focus on more important matters. Unfortunately, while walking, I was bothered by Sarah Palin. The quotes they have from her speeches were just so trite and unhelpful to the national political dialogue. She's more of a comedian delivering one liners about Hopey Changey stuff. It's a distraction to what is more important, just like South Park is to Nietzsche. But the news media, the so-called liberal media, obsesses over her. What they should focus on is how the U.S. has rested on its laurels for too long, getting fat and lazy on the post-war surpluses, how China and the rest of the world has caught up and is overtaking us as we speak. But I hate politics. It doesn't have to be easy, but we should spend all of our mental and emotional energy just making the goddam country work. If we realized that our opinions are just opinions and that compromise is the only way to live in community with other people, then maybe we could set up a system that works pretty well, freeing us to pursue our personal goals.

So I took a walk to the lake, to see how violent it was. I can hear it roaring all the way from the cottage. From the I tried to walk to the edge of the second ridge of ice, but the ice wasn't solid between the first and the second, and my left foot broke through, getting all wet. Fortunately, my boots kept the water out. So I walked back, getting so warm from all the trekking through snow, up and down stairs, that I had to take my coat and hat off. I made a resolution to sweat once every day so that I can avoid that pins and needles sensation that you get when your pores forget how to sweat.


For me, in my creative process, I really think that if I can just get my head into the right space, I can make great things in a short time. If my head is in the wrong place, I can work and work and only come up with stuff I'll despise later and throw out. I'm still not quite in the right space, but I worked on music during the afternoon into the evening. I didn't invent anything but worked on an old piece.

I had more of the soup from yesterday for lunch, and smoked salmon and spinach salad for dinner. Eating well these days. Taking vitamins and acidophilus. To feed my brain, I read some of Also Sprach Zarathustra and did some serious journalling. And now, I just signed up for Netflix so I can watch movies on my computer at will. It's only 9 bucks a month. Now I can be more in control of my own infotainment.

Here's your moment of Zen:

zzz

My day started out ok. I made my bed, neglected any exercise, and had tea instead of coffee. I worked on some writing, mostly on a post about the Wagner adaptation I saw over the weekend. I thought it was well worth seeing despite some structural flaws. About 60% finished, I emailed the theater to see if they had any photos. Really, though, I emailed the woman who was with the media contact with the publicity company. Me writing a review did NOT sparkle with her. Apparently, it's still a "preview" so things might change, making it against the "rules" to write a review of it. She then emailed the guy at the review site and it became a big mess. I just thought they would some buzz; any press is good press. Even though it was a preview, they can't change the important things. I must approach reviewing from a different perspective than most - perhaps less detail oriented, focusing more on the choices made long ago. Like the music being inappropriate. Like the cool shadow puppets and inventive other shit. I really just want people to go and to help make it better, but I don't really care any more. The file will probably fester and rot on my hard drive.

Mostly though, unfortunately, the whole ordeal drained me. I distracted myself by hearing the leitmotifs of the cycle and reading some articles about it.

I then made my food for the week: butternut squash, sweet potato soup and rice. Tastes great. Today. Let's see how I feel in a couple days when I'm still eating it.
Around the afternoon, I felt unmotivated and hazy - like I just woke up from a nap. I watched some History channel programs on the Earth and its place in the galaxy to help put me in my place. Apparently our sun has orbited around the center of the galaxy (the massive black hole) only 18 times in billions of years. Then some more tea, and I forced myself to listen through some stuff I did last week, hoping to get inspired. There's some good stuff brewing, but I couldn't bring myself to delve back into it.

Overall, I felt kind of blasé and half-asleep. I blame coffee: I had way too much over the weekend, so I was in mental and physical withdrawal today. I'll get some sleep tonight, but I think I'll have one cup tomorrow. This is a short, short week, so I got to make Wed, Thu, Fri really count.

Now that I'm thinking about the huge black hole at the center of our universe, I can't help but think how wrong the ancient myths are. Christians can use the Sun as a metaphor for God, bringing light to the world. Greeks talked about Apollo. It's amazing how far we've come in our thinking, from seeing the Earth as the center of the universe, to seeing the Sun as the center, to seeing this black hole as the center of our galaxy, which is only one of billions in the universe. Now maybe we'll see how we need both the light and the dark: the Sun keeps us warm, but the black hole keeps our solar system from flying out into intergalactic space.

This is the appropriate South Park episode for this discussion. The Earth gets cancelled.

if it pleases and sparkles, a third post

I know it's been a busy blogging day, but this is one of the most insightful look into how girls make decisions. The rest of the episode explains how good looking kids rely on their looks and never develop character.

writing requires thinking; thinking requires writing

One hand is washing the other, but my hands have gotten dirty over the past few weeks. I've been putting less and less effort into the blog, and it's starting to show; people are starting to talk. And worry. I should set the record straight; I'm feeling really good about things - finding newer and deeper meaning in life; writing better and better music; content - but just haven't been motivated to write blog posts as much. Writing is one of those things, like yoga, that takes some effort to do, but once you do it, your investment pays off dividends. I haven't been doing any reviewing recently - though I could have - I just didn't have the obligation or the motivation to review things I didn't have to. Or, in the case of the Hyde Park salon, the intricacies of the situation were complicated enough that I opted to wallow in the beauty of the flawed gem, dwelling in the contradiction like a warm zen koan. So today, I'm writing like it's my job. Words today; music tomorrow.

It's Monday, the third day of my three-day epic weekend. This morning, I finished Watchmen, yesterday, I saw a theatrical adaptation of Wagner's entire Ring Cycle. What would have taken 20 hours of opera, they condensed into 6, including a 45-minute dinner break and two intermissions. Having given my reaction to Watchmen already, I'm still brewing a reaction to the Wagner, which I'll post as a review (both of the production as a whole and then the music). It's nice to have these Mondays to stop and process. Even though I'm not go-go-going during the week, I still tend to spend most of my productive energy thinking about music, the rest of the time either relaxing or eating. So I'm still trying to find the appropriate time to process. For this weekend, now is that time.

To summarize, for those of you who've missed some episodes, a month ago, I quit everything, cutting myself loose of a handful of jobs, my apartment, and the city to partially move to a house in the woods to focus on my self and my music. I'd been finding that, neck deep in rat race, it's easy to lose focus, hard to keep your eyes on the prize. You learn to be patient, but you forget what you're waiting for. I was headed in too many directions and needed to pick one: Say No to Say Yes. Saying yes to everything is saying no to everything. Keeping all your options open is to forge no path, to stay motionless admiring the landscape of possibilities without exploring any one in particular. Even if it's just a matter of 3 or 4 options, it's still a problem. These days, after over a month of this, I have managed to prune my tree of many unnecessary, distracting options so that it grows taller and straighter. I don't think this necessarily means that you can't change your mind later: once the tree grows tall, you can branch out later. The only other time I've done anything like this was grad school, and now, 5 years later, is the perfect time to refocus. It's turning into a whole-self project: physical, intellectual, emotional, musical, spiritual.

So, weekdays, I'm in Michigan; weekends I'm in Chicago. Last week was a good one, although the blog posts are just so so. I learned a lot about myself, about what I'm looking for at the bottom of the well of music, and ended up coming up with a couple pieces that are big steps forwards down a path I've been trying to hew for a while. It started with an intense conversation with a medical intuitive, who, like a psychoanalyst, shed light on dark rooms I never knew existed. It was époustouflant, mind-blowing, turned my thinking inside out and upside down, leaving me with a great deal of new information that I had to somehow weave together with what I thought I already knew. I came up with some decent ideas early in the week but nothing that I could carry to term and birth. Each week, I start things, polish things, finish things, and edit things. Every day is different, but I tend towards spontaneous creation. When it's good, the other tasks are simpler, manageable.

Friday night, I drove in in another flurry of snow. This time, the roads seemed better but the traffic seemed worse. Or maybe the drivers were just less careful. I saw 2 or 3 cars in the ditch, one I didn't even see until I drove past and its headlights hit the side of my face. I saw 2 or 3 accidents with or without emergency crews. I, though, was appropriately careful and made it without too much delay. I drove straight to a friend's housewarming, which was only a slight shock to my system. I couldn't quite get the small talk juices going and didn't know that many people to begin with. I ended up leaving to join up with Darick.

Darick was going to his friend's show at some place called the Mopery. I had never heard of it, nor had he, but it was in Logan Square, presumably some new bar or club. Neither. It was like a basement but on the second floor. More of a "Space" than a "Venue", it was pretty well packed with hipsters, art students, and punks, all in their early twenties. Very urban and ironic, I felt like someone had brought in New York hipsters from the 70s through today. The music was appropriate for the venue and crowd - to a point. The first person I saw was a girl with a loop pedal, some analog pedals, and a tape deck. The tape deck presumably had some of the beats and other extraneous noises that accompanied her looped and layered moaning and chanting. Like an artist making sound art more than a musician making music. Then there was a band. The band wasn't terrible but it wasn't good. Drums, keys, overly dramatic singer (think Dead Can Dance), and DJ doing some scratching. The DJ part was fun to see again, and it was just good to have on in the background of our conversation. Then Darick's friend went. She was a much more skilled and professional version of the first girl. An artist with a loop pedal looping her voice, random percussion, hammer dulcimer, glasses filled with water. It was a good performance. BUT. By that point, 1 am or so, the hipsters had drunk through their first 40 and were on their second. [Darick had picked up some beer, so we were drinking Maudite. At the very least, we felt superior in our drink of choice.] So the drunks wanted to rock, or punk, out, and were a tough audience for the mostly ambient layers of sounds coming at them. Some in front wanted to fondle her instruments, her decorative elements. Venue is so important.

Saturday, I had brunch with Sarah B and then went back to Darick's. I ended up watching a bunch of South Park on his Netflix and then, wanting something less passive, I saw Watchmen sitting on Darick's shelf. He's been a diehard fan of the book since the early 90s when he read it as a teen. I had only really heard about it through him and knew very little except for his praise. I started in, got addicted, and read about half of the 200 or 300 pages in one sitting. Then, of the 3 parties I had to go to on Saturday, I started with the one at my old apartment, a housewarming for Alan and his roommate. I know Alan - we're friends on FB - and we often end up at the Gallery Cabaret for Sunday night open mic. It was good to meet his roommate and chill as we took turns playing Super Mario 3.

Saturday Party #2 was the release party of The Point magazine. I had been building this party up for a couple weeks in my head - for lost of reasons: musical, intellectual..."social" - and had a really good time. I didn't get to see everyone I wanted to see but saw many others and met some great people. After a band that was good but too loud, the night devolved into a pretty great dance party.

Got back late, did a second amazing parallel parking job, did some South Park, slept till like 9.

Sunday was brunch with Darick and Tim, another illustrative artist, before convincing an exhausted Diana that 6 hours of Wagner's Ring was a good idea. I had already bought a ticket and was committed. The Wagner was amazing. It was a great, interesting, inventive production, pulling out all the stops: Shakespearian acting, puppets, shadow puppets, masks, great lighting. The acting was pretty good but inconsistent. The music was absolutely terrible. Absolutely. There is no depth to my offense at what they did. And yet I still loved the production. What's not to love? It's the epic to end all epics. It's the Teutonic version of the Lord of the Rings. And it's one of those stories that I had heard piecemeal over the years; seeing the whole story in one fell swoop really helped contextualize it. So go SEE it. It was by no means a perfect production, but it was certainly amazing enough to make the 6-hour commitment worth it. I would love to see a slightly more professional version, but they would have to keep all the magic and innovation. The shadow-puppet dragon, the giants, and the "swimming" of the rhinemaiden could not be done any better.

I'm nearing the end of my Monday. Soon I'll go teach Isabel piano and drive to Michigan. Hopefully the snow holds off. In general, I'm feeling confident with the present and optimistic about the future. But I'm also feeling a bit impatient. So I keep working to prune, so that I can nip those distracting thought branches in the bud.