Crash and Burn, Ah Yes

A hectic week, my people. Two shows and one business luncheon, with just a few hours of precious rest in between. So what are my plans this weekend? I'm glad you asked. These plans involve a couch, melted cheese, chips, and a book.

My piano and I will have several intimate and serious sessions because I have three pieces due Monday and I can barely stumble through two of them. But, I must rest. And melted cheese is the essential ingredient. It is the caulk whereby the inner architect mends the shattered fragments of the shattered soul.

But soon...The Key of A Minor. You will be mine.

Franz Listz was a great pianist--and the Father-in-Law of Richard Wagner--who composed some very beautiful music. Much of this music has been made iconic by some of our favorite Looney Toon cartoons. Who can forget Tom and Jerry or Bugs Bunny frenetically playing the Hungarian Rhapsody Number Two?

I've included an amazing video here: Pianist Sandro Russo playing Listz's arrangement of Shubert's Ave Maria on Listz's own 1869 piano.



It's absolutely lovely, so enjoy it. I've always felt the Ave Maria, in all its forms, transcends its overtly religious connotations and speaks of our heart's yearning for our mother's love and approval--wherever she happens to be. Very few translations of this theme captures this yearning, in my opinion, as well as Schubert's.

Back on Track

There's nothing linear about my thought processes; long ago I faced the truth about the way my mind works. When you climb aboard one of my Inner-soul trains, enjoy the ride--it's going to be a scenic one. The journey from point A to B will be circuitous, convoluted, labyrinthine, and tangential. But, ultimately, it will arrive at the destination.

Along the way, we may stop to sniff several interesting species of flowers, converse with the natives, stop to explore foreign lands, discuss rare and curious ephemera with purveyors of the outre--and will be be better for the experience? Of course not. It's an utter waste of time, and we've chipped away yet another precious fragment from the fragile gem of our lifespan, which could have been better spent serving our fellow man, seeking enlightenment. or embettering our lot in life.

The point being I discuss all manner of things on this so-called "piano blog" other than my progress learning the piano. This is because my mind wanders all over the place, even when I'm concentrating on learning the piano. It's just the way my mind is wired.

However, I perused my past postings and saw I overestimated myself, or rather underestimated life's challenges. I mentioned some weeks ago I thought I would be through with Alfred, Book One by the end of March. My teacher missed several classes, and I've been smoten with a couple of bouts of plague, plus I've actually had to work at my chosen craft as an entertainer, so haven't been able to pursue my latest obsession with my usual heat, so I find I still have about twenty pages or so of good Olde Alfred left to go.

Of course, the material has become much more difficult. Offenbach's Can-Can (the Galoup From his operetta Orpheus in the Underworld) was challenging, as was Brahms' Lullaby. I'm also getting hit with long runs of broken chords-- arpeggios-- for the left hand. The pace is accelerating. We've delved into the 12-bar Blues progression. The pieces are uninspiring but the framework of blues music is recognizable.

It's like when you run on a treadmill and toward the end you lift the incline. The speed remains the same but now you're running up a steeper incline. You can either dig in harder, or slow down. Some days I dig in harder, or if life is particularly distracting--as it often is--I slow down. After all, I have to make a living, and when you're self employed sometimes you have to really scratch. It wouldn't be to my advantage to be a talented piano player who happens to live under the viaduct near the highway.

Yet, the project is achieving its goal. I wanted to stimulate my brain. At my age, learning a completely new skill set is fun and exciting. A an age when most men are looking for the footbll game on the wide-screen and a six-pack of beer, I feel like I'm beginning the second half of my life.

Men With Elaborately Groomed Facial Hair are Dicks

The title says it all. By elaborately groomed facial hair, I include the following: Handlebar mustaches, those bushy-walrus-style things that look like they probably smell like the last meal the wearer ate; mustaches with waxed tips (yes, there are people who still wax the tips of their mustaches, and usually these are the biggest dicks of all); those Admiral-Hornblower combo sideburns-and mustachio deals (for a while rednecks seemed to like these); those prissy beards with the pencil-thin jawlines; goatees with that forked thing under the lower lip (looking good there Mephistopheles, what's the going rate for a human soul these days?)--you know what I mean--anything that takes more than a couple of minutes and the most basic of barbering tools to maintain.

I'm not bellowing about neatly-groomed facial hair. No, this is a sign of good taste and culture. A neatly groomed beard is a very attractive feature. But dig it. A man who spends a lot of time staring at himself while fiddling with his follicles is beyond argument a DICK. He is a narcissist and an arrogant poseur. Don't even try to argue this point; it's irrefutable, self-evident and you can't even provide one exception. This isn't the seventeenth century Lord Huffington; those styles went out long ago and strutting around with waxed tips and curled mustachios is an affectation that says to the world: "Hey everyone: I'm needy. Look at me. I am a Dick."

Now add to this equation a funny hat, like a beret or derby (and oh, so many do), and you have a Double Dick. If you see this combination, do me a favor: pick up a brick and hurl it with a strong, overhand stroke and the surefire aim of a marksman. Or text me, give me GPS coordinates, and I'll hie me to the spot and do it myself. You see, I'm on a sacred mission.

If this makes your shoes pinch, sorry, and why are you wearing tight shoes anyway, along with your funny hat and elaborately- groomed van Dyke? Are you a TRIPLE-Dick? Now your panties are in a wad. HAH! So you wear panties too. Panties, tight shoes, funny hat, and you spend all your time preening in front of a mirror. You are LOST.

Next week: People who wear brightly-colored vests, ties with cartoon characters, and suspenders with buttons. The Judgment continues.

Ah, Relief

Doc prescribed some prednisone, which seems to be working on this asthma / la Grippe flareup and I'm back in the saddle practicing away. I've about mastered the three practice pieces for this week's assignment (barely in time for tomorrow's session) and they are fairly tough, having ascended to the G-major scale and using plenty of sharps and flats, not to mention just about every chord I've learned so far. My cat rolls on the floor, covering her ears with her paws, howling, but she's a drama queen. It's not that bad.

Still far from 100% though. I have to take frequent rest breaks and if it weren't for powerful Louisiana coffee from CC's I'd probably sleep most of the time. Come to think of it, this isn't very different from my 100%.

Today at 2 PM Great Performances at the Met will air Turandot, the Franco Zifferelli production, which is magnificent. My son and I saw it together on one of my trips to Tennessee and other than the usually spotty transmissio problems the theater seems to be plagues with, it was splendid. I caught the re-broadcast here in Bloomington and it was flawless. Apparently, the Tennessee Regal theater which hosts the Met broadcast always blames sunspots and other natural anomalies but the broadcasts here in Indiana are almost always without interference. Apparently, the laws of nature are optional here. Well, it was only recently that Central Indiana finally agreed to Daylight Savings Time. I suppose we have a compromise: Tennessee agreed to allow the sunpsots, we agreed to allow Evolution. Seems fair to me.

I have a lot of shows this month so I don't know how often I'll post, but will try to keep up with both piano and blog.

Lungs Suck

For over a month now (actually well over a month, more like six weeks) I've been fighting some kind of upper respiratory infection. I've been on two courses of antibiotics with no results. It's turned serious and my doc finally x-rayed my chest and prescribed prednisone. We'll see when happens.

I think what sucks worse of all is that I don't feel like practicing, and when I do, I don't get much out of it. Sickness appears to have kicked my ass.

I hope the prednisone fixes it. More later.

Ah, Practice

Today is Saturday, and as I have no pressing business of any kind, and while I always devote two one-hour blocks of time a day for practice (unless I'm out of town on shows, and a periodic break is good anyway) today I've been doing nothing but devoting all my time and attention to my piano.

I'm not so foolish as to practice the same thing all day though; I would go crazy. I'm working on different things. I've practiced the three practice pieces from Alfred for the week, looked ahead at the next lessons, and worked on my target piece a little, but have also been practicing on refining my fingering techniques and dynamics.

I also dug out my old note-and-interval recognition software and drilled myself on these basic skills.

More fun than a barrel of greased cats.

I stopped counting, but decided to take a look and noticed we are on page 105 0f 143 in the lesson book of Volume One. Now the material is becoming more and more difficult, and we're finishing up with the key of C Major and moving to G Major (which we've actually been toying with for a while now) D Major, F Major and A minor.

More Media Bashing & Further Ranting

Remember when TLC was The Learning Channel? And A&E was Arts & Entertainment?

Alas, I'm old enough to recall those sylvan days of yesteryear, when these programs had educational content and cultural programming. Now, TLC stands for The Lowest Common-denominator and A&E stands for Anomalies & Exhibits--it's become the modern equivalent of the old Sideshow 10-in-one freakshow, with Dog the Bounty Hunter, Little People Big World, The Mermaid Girl, The Lobster Boy (and God help the world if those two marry and spawn the Crawdad Kid) seemingly endless programs about conjoined twins and the men/women who love them, Tattooed people, motorcycle people, Criss Angel, who wasn't even a magician but a rock musician turned universe's biggest douchebag and whose fanbase was apparently too ignorant to know the difference between a good, polished conjurer and a lisping moron who relied on the very-forgiving medium of television magic to cover his lack of even the most basic skill; programs about obese people, addictive people wallowing in their own vomit, people who (Gawd help us) don't dress stylishly.

Now here is the most frightening aspect of this many-faceted jewel of dazzling delusion: In between this parade of horrors we have entire programs whose premise revolves around people doing their jobs. Okay, some people might have interesting jobs, but selling houses, cooking food, driving trucks, sawing down trees, and draining septic tanks do not rank anywhere near the top of a resume of beguiling professions. But since apparently people (astonishingly enough) watched these content-devoid and cheaply-produced programs, we were offered the ultimate vapid program in an act of dazzling chutzpah that astounded even me, a person who has studied the greatest scams in history: programs consisting of nothing more than people working on their house.

Now listen to me. Listen well. Nobody likes to work on their house. I used to own a house. Activities like hanging wallpaper, sanding floors, digging holes, painting, mowing lawns, laying carpet--involve hard work, You don't want to do it. You pay other people to do it so you can do something interesting. But by Neptune's shinbone, put it on television with snappy music and flashy graphics and for some reason people will watch it.

In brief, the entire program line of both TLC and A&E makes me pull at my already thinning hair and shout at my cat: "Jesus Christ--WHO CARES?"

I'll give you my own experience with TLC. My friend Alain Nu, a very talented performing artist, nailed a contract for four television specials for TLC. He called me, elated over the news. I asked, "Uh, have you seen the programming on TLC lately?" He called me back a few days later, a little less elated. "This used to be the Learning Channel. What happened?" This was the first time I used my "The Lowest Common denominator" reference I think, which you have to admit, is pithy and winsome.

We had high hopes for that special. I was brought on as a creative consultant for that series, along with a few other very creative people, at a wage so low it was appalling. Low budget was the excuse. I basically did it as a favor for my friend and for the experience working for TV. I found myself thrown into one of the most dysfunctional scenarios you can imagine. The production team eviscerated our scripts, for one thing. They sucked the life from them. We wanted to bring emotional content to mentalism. The wanted to appeal to the masses.

Apparently our initial ideas, especially mine, were too "literary" for their conception of the drooling, trailer-park microcephalopods they imagined constituted their audience base. You would not believe the contempt with which they spoke of the television-watching public. The problem was these arrogant bastard's conception of the masses--which means you and me--was of an intelligence so abysmally dull and ignorant it would make a neanderthal seem like Steven Hawking. After working with these rocket-scientists for a while, I later decided the psychological term for this was "projection."

As for the direction team, they were, to put it mildly, insane. Constantly yelling, ordering everyone around, and supplanting our vision with theirs--which was basically a pastiche of David Blaine specials and a hip image which was about fifteen years younger than our star. As far as I could tell, neither the director nor her husband had read a book between them in their combined lives. One day they took our star out clothes shopping and basically transformed him into one of the New Kids on the Block. Here the problem was our star already had a well-established, likable persona of his own and they were not only clueless of this, they didn't even care to take the time to get to know him. They decided their "ideas" --really just bytes they assimilated from every other magic special they ever saw--would be far better than something new and better.

Our star, realizing this Justin-Timberlake-meets-Jackie-Chan ensemble was in no way reflective of his true identity, showed up at the set the next day dressed more sensibly. The director freaked out and began screaming at everyone. This was typical; she had at lest five meltdowns a day. There was constantly a false sense of drama on the set. Everyone associated with TLC were self-important, narcissistic and quick to yell at anyone they thought they could get away with. The creative team basically were reverted to third wheels and treated as hired help. Which I anyway, was not. Not hired help, that is. I was a consultant, and a very necessary one at that. I will tell you that hellcat yelled at me ONCE. I told her privately if she did it once more for any reason, I would not show up ever again. It never happened again, but she was very cold to me after that, which was fine with me.

The whole project was an exercise in incompetency. Entire shoots had to be scrapped because of camera crew malfunctions and other glitches. I was never so glad in my life when this project was over. I realized that somewhere along the line, TLC and A&E had been taken over by new owners, who decided the American public was just too dumb for quality programming. I decided right there that if anyone ever offered me a shot at television, I would refuse them point-blank. No way would I work with television people again.

Now the punchline is that after union fees, insurance, tax deductions and expenses, and other mysterious deductions I couldn't decipher even with my Little Orphan Annie decoder ring, I wound up losing money on this deal. Furthermore, the TLC bookkeeping department made such a mess of their paperwork that the W2s they sent me raised a red flag with the IRS and I was audited. Yes, my accountant said the only reason he could see my return was singled out was those suspicious W2s from TLC. They were a mess.

Hey, maybe I could get a TV series from the whole trip? I don't know. It was very interesting to get a look at the inside of these two stations, which are both owned by the same company if you haven't noticed by now, and see just how they work. In spite of it all, the specials turned out very good and I recommend you watch them if you get a chance.