Memphis - Turn, Turn, Turn

green, green blues city
that humidity's got to
be good for something


In the past week, I've been in Denver, El Paso, my hometown Silver City, NM, Tucson, Phoenix, Atlanta (just flying through), and now Memphis for a week. I think I'm going to like it here.

First time to Memphis, I told the cab driver. She was delighted, in a slow, drawly way, and asked me what I'd heard about Memphis. Well, BBQ, blues, and Graceland, I replied, all of which I hope to experience while I'm here.

The first thing I noticed about Memphis was how green it is compared to the Sonora Desert I had left the night before. Then I noticed how friendly everyone is (you can take the girl out of New York...), and then I noticed how I wanted to take my jeans off after a few minutes walking in the midafternoon sun down Beale St. You can wear jeans in 100-degree dry heat; 100-degree humidity, not so comfortable.

Lately, it's been a time to do things other than learn new songs. It's been a time to celebrate marriages, travel, see family, focus on music that's more directly related to work. Turn, turn, turn. I do it when I can (when I have access to a keyboard) and when I need to (when my family is driving me bananas and I need a little music meditation).

Last week:
"We Are the Champions" (who'd have thought an anthem such as this would have diminished chords?! I love you, Freddie Mercury!)

"Turn, Turn, Turn" - because I was contemplating all the things I want to do w/ my life, and how I just can't do them all at once. Thanks for the wee taste of changing meter, Pete Seeger. Turn, turn, turn indeed.

Celebration

Performed by Kool & the Gang
120-122 BPM
Left me wondering: Who wrote the horn parts?

Aaaaaaaaaaahhhh I'm so busy!!! This week is a little extra crazy. It is the first week of my thirties, that must be why.

I wanted to make a relatively big deal out of my birthday this past weekend, since it was the first really scary one. Two problems: 1. my bday weekend was sandwiched between two busy weeks of work, the first of which was in Florida. 2. I am terrible at planning social occasions.

Luckily, Nat (of Nat & Kat) is good at organizing parties. She organized people and places and grocery lists, and dispatched her boyfriend to help me pick up the latter Saturday afternoon before the party. (I like grocery shopping with someone who can help me rationalize buying the family-size bag of Cheetos.) The weather was perfect, and I got to hang out with some of my favorite people, and a good time was had by all.

Weekly Wish - Farewell Songs

I wish there were time for everything. For instance, writing and performing with Nat.

Photo: Farrell Goldsmith

Nat is my opera singer/playwright friend, next-door neighbor, erstwhile writing/cabaret partner, force of nature, Fire Under My Ass (nickname Fuma).  It's been far too long since we've done a creative project together.  We're both too busy with individual projects now to, say, write, self-produce and perform a children's musical about time travel, but a little medley to close her studio's recital might be just the ticket.  I wish Nat and Kat could ride once more on the D.S. al Coda to the past! (You will get that if you were one of the...60 or so people who saw our show.)

So... I'm going to learn "So Long, Farewell" from The Sound of Music, and explore a few other goodbye songs, including the Donny Osmond song "For All We Know".  This is step one in arranging a medley. 

I should note that I decided about this week's wish a couple days ago, and am not choosing this theme because of Bin Laden's death.  While I have great respect for the people who devote their lives to serving the country, and for those who lost loved ones in 9-11, I can't quite bring myself to celebrate a violent death. 

I heard about the president's address via - where else - facebook, and, like many other people in the 20-45 demographic, was glued to my computer screen for the better part of an hour, watching news results as they came up on screen, and waiting impatiently for NPR to switch to live coverage from the White House.  This morning, many of my facebook friends who are parents were wondering "out loud" how to explain it all to their children. 

I'm glad I don't have to figure that one out. 

Just a Glance; or, An Hour at the Met

Finally had a little time to get up through the instrumental section of "Hard Times" today, after exploring Central Park and the Met with my cousin, and meeting her other friends for brunch (complete with mimosas and a dimwitted, surly hostess).  My goal: get through the first three sections of the song without worrying if they were perfect.

Have been getting hung up on perfectionism again, which makes me not want to practice at all, but rather wallow in my belief at how great it would be to be able to play like that, which surely I could do it if I just tried.  I affirmed my hunch that the fills in the second verse are much the same as the second verse, noodled my way through the instrumental section.  I was just finding a stopping point when my cousin returned.

My imperfect but productive session today was inspired, if not by the mimosas, then by our trip to the Met: my cousin and I were both dragged through museums as children - dragged slowly, while our respective parents took in EVERY MORSEL OF INFORMATION in the building.

"Mom, I'll be in the gift shop," I would say to my mom after about 55 minutes of well-behaved tedium.

"Mmm-hmm ok honey," she would respond, her eyes not leaving the information plaque she was reading.

Consequently, my cousin and I both evolved brain synapses that fuse after about an hour in any museum.  The attention span we do possess, we prefer to spend by walking at a moderate speed, making cracks about the things we see.  Today, we made up bawdy alternate titles for paintings and decided that the Romans used ornate marble bathtubs which they repurposed as sarcophagi at the end of life (matching lids, half off!).  Sure enough, after an hour, we grew quiet and pensive, our brains turning into culturally overstimulated mush.  Time to get out of there.

You may think that we don't appreciate art.  Other museum visitors who heard us giggling our way through the 19th Century European paintings almost certainly thought so.  I assure you, that's not the case - art adds so much joy and silliness to our lives - why should we have to plod through and take it all so seriously?

Weekly Wish 3/14/11 - ???

Ugh.  I don't know.  I have a headache, and I keep getting sucked in to news coverage of the earthquake plus tsunami plus nuclear potential disaster in Japan.  I awoke Friday to my sister's facebook update that they were ok (she lives in western Japan, far from the quake, but close enough to feel the tremor that caused the tsunami), but that they hadn't heard from my cousin, who recently moved to Sendai to teach English.  Fortunately, my cousin was able to get in touch with her mom and sisters a couple hours after that to let everyone know she's safe.  Shaken up, sleeping (or not sleeping) at the school, but safe.    

Anyway, wishing is the last thing on my mind today, after family members' proximity to natural disasters, how many other people's family members are not ok and safe, and of course the usual din of 10 committee meetings going on in my head at once.  All is underscored by a steady drone of TIRED and CRANKY.     

...I guess I'll go back to Ben Folds.  I don't want to; I'm busy this week and would rather work on this one when I have more time, because I like it.  But I don't feel like breaking my no-two-weeks-in-a-row rule to repeat the Gershwin, and I haven't had time to get my accordion fixed, and I don't feel like starting anything new this week.  So Lullabye it is.  Harumph.    

I wish everything didn't take so much more time than I think it's going to take. 

I wish I didn't have a headache.  

And I wish I could play Lullabye, including the freakin' piano solo, well enough to record it with my buddies.  So there.  

I'm going to dance class now.  Hopefully I'll feel better after.  At least I'll look better.  Though I definitely won't smell better.

Racing the Clock

I hate cleaning.  In fact, I hate any exercise that has to be done over and over but doesn't create progress.  Maintenance.  Yechhh. 

Nevertheless, a certain quality of life has to be maintained... I can get by for months tending to dishes, garbage, and very little else, but people do come over to my house for work.  So let's call today triage-plus, where I'll go the extra mile (ok, the extra 500 yards, then) to make my apartment comfortable. 

I will make it a game, Mary Poppins-style, and since I can't have a spoonful of sugar, I'll make up a game called Racing the Playlist.

BATHROOM
The PLAYLIST: Right as Rain by Adele, Raise Your Glass by Pink, No Sleep Til Brooklyn by the Beastie Boys
10 minutes, 46 seconds

The WINNER: the Playlist. 
At least I finished scrubbing the toilet.

The 4-day Pile o' Dishes

KITCHEN
This one will be a project, so I give myself 28:01 worth of Set Fire to the Rain (Adele), F**k You (Cee Lo Green), Blue Suede Shoes (Elvis), Bad Love - yikes, 28 minutes worth of bad love would not be nice - (Clapton), 1 2 3 4 (Feist), Novocaine/She's a Rebel (Green Day), and Maneater (Hall & Oates).

This room harbors a 4-day mountain of dirty dishes (as in, it would take four days to hike to the top), an archaeologically-interesting fridge, and various other yet-to-be-discovered kitchen detritus.  Triage indeed.  Do I treat the dishes that are about to give me a stroke, the pile of mail that is bleeding out through the stomach, or the gangrenous fridge? 

The WINNER: draw.

I was just dumping the last pile of floor dust into the garbage as Maneater repeated and faded out.  It was a good stopping point.  The gangrenous fridge will have to wait.

So now we're down to the rooms that don't get smelly.
LIVING ROOM 

10 minutes is it for now.  I refuse to do any more. 

The PLAYLIST
All I Wanna Do is Make Love to You (Heart), Sex Machine (James Brown), Wave of Mutilation (the Pixies).  10:01.

...Um, please don't read too much Freudian stuff into that playlist. 

The WINNER: the Playlist. 
AUGHGHGHHGHH!!! 

BEDROOM:
Much of my living room cleaning involved throwing handbags of various sizes into my bedroom, where I will now put them in a pile and deal with the more urgent piles of dirty laundry.  Again, 10 minutes.  But let's pick songs whose titles hint a little less at S&M, shall we?

The PLAYLIST
Roxanne (the Police) and Love For Sale (Ella Fitzgerald).  Guess I'll exchange S&M for prostitution and try to get the thing over with in 9 minutes, 7 seconds. 

The WINNER: me!

I didn't make my bed, but that seems a fruitless exercise for a time-poor single lady, and I finished ten seconds before Ella was done mournfully plying her wares on the 9th scale degree. 

End note to belabor my point about pointlessness, and salute all the people in the world who do this FOR OTHER PEOPLE WITHOUT PAY (moms etc. - belated thanks, mom): when I cleaned out my bag from yesterday, I found my dirty lunch dishes.  Dammit!!! I HATE CLEANING!!!!!

The Valley of the Shadow

mmm... cake... ...*sigh*

Ash Wednesday yesterday, which means two things: I played a show at a gay bar last night with ashes on my forehead (Brandon, the show's host, is a preacher's kid and a big Sandi Patty fan), and I am once again about to discover how my mind messes with me when I try not to eat sweets, aka The Valley of the Shadow of Lent. 

It's nice to have a low-stakes environment in which to practice... I don't know what I'm practicing.  Not getting to have everything I want, I guess.  This happens all the time in real life, but the Lent thing is under my control: I'm avoiding a food category I really like but which is bad for me (in moderation, you say?  My inner cookie monster knows not moderation.) - it's my choice to give up sweets, and it's only for a clearly defined period of time. 

I'm steeling myself for my mind and body to mess with me.  There will be cravings.  I will be desperate for a cookie when what I really want is a nap or a day off or a boyfriend (cookies are easier to get, and more convenient).  I will rationalize that this is a dumb thing to do when I've got so many other things on my mind, that I need my mental energy and self-discipline for my career, and that I'm not a very religious person anyway so why bother... and other things that I won't recognize as mental chatter until after the fact. 

There's a lot of mental chatter when I play, too, and tuning it out is a skill that is as important to my playing as any scale or etude.  I've gotten better at it, so maybe that's why I'm sort of excited to see how I do this year.  Last year was a miserable failure on the Lenten discipline front, but last year I was going through a break-up.  I kinda had to cut myself a little slack when a kid I played for gave me two zip-locs full of homemade rugelach two weeks before Easter. 

Speaking of self-forgiveness, I've already (!) screwed up this year, when last night I took a shot to celebrate the birthday of one of the singers.   I wasn't tempted, I just forgot, until I was sucking on the sugary lemon after the shot.  Oops. 

It's gonna be a long six weeks!

"What We Play Is Life."

Astronomical Clock, Prague

-Louis Armstrong

I was talking to a friend this week, promising to get her some project material soon, really really soon!  She nodded and said, "In the fullness of time."   

Heh.  I forget that time has its own fullness when I'm not trying to cram it with my own.  Not a concept that comes naturally to me, this baby steps thing.  

No Weekly Wish this week, because I needed my scant practice time for other priorities.  I was cranky about it, but I took one look at my schedule last weekend and realized it just wasn't going to happen.  The week turned out to be even busier than expected: last-minute work, and a pianist whose maternity leave I'm covering had her baby early (not too early, though, they're fine!). 

I didn't make a wish.  No one died.  I did the best I could with the time I had. 

Hey, I think I just stumbled upon my epitaph (this entry is becoming oddly morbid... I don't mean it...).

I hope it's a long time before I need an epitaph - I have a music to learn, cookies to eat - but I like it as an intention.  I'm going to do best I can with the time I have.  Way less stressful than frantically trying to do everything. 

The time I have: getting steadier, and my tempos are more accurate.  I'm familiar with more repertoire (thanks, last year!), which takes out the guesswork.  But also - remember last year when I was talking about habits and rhythm?  Like it or not, you perform with your practice habits, and life habits sneak in there too.  Now that I'm not trying (quite) so hard to be twelve places at once, it's showing up in my playing. 

Recording with Brooke tomorrow.  We postponed it a day because I didn't have time to practice.  My perfectionist nag is telling me I should have managed my time better,  not let personal worries get the better of me as they did yesterday.  I'm flipping that side a nonchalant L.H. 3-finger and signing off to practice a little "Black Coffee".