Novelty? No thanks.

Novelty songs. I generally don't like them. Yet I do like humor in music. Obviously. (see "The Bobs" or my family music)

But just because I end up writing humorous songs sometimes, I don't really listen to humorous songs very much. I love music so much that, even if it's funny, it better have some serious musicality to it, or it'll make me mad. So usually I'm listening to more serious music (from Leonard Cohen to Bach to Rufus Wainwright to...).

I had a roommate my first year of college who loved Fats Waller. Fats is acclaimed as a great piano player and all, but I just couldn't get past the fact that he was yapping all over his songs, like he didn't know when to shut up. Somehow, he crossed the 'humor' line for me, obliterating whatever music was going on with his patter.

Spike Jones? Even as a kid, that kind of humor made me slightly queasy. On a par with Jerry Lewis or the Three Stooges, the "I'll do anything for attention" kind of humor that makes me run the other way.

Weird Al? Yeah, he rubs me the wrong way, too. Then again, every time I think of "Another One Rides the Bus", I smile inwardly. So there's some kind of magic going on. His work, being based on hugely successful melodies, has the advantage of having musical cajones at its core. And, as silly as his lyrics may be, I'd much rather be singing the lyrics to "Like a Surgeon" than the original vapid version.

The Coasters - There was real music there sometimes, some hummable tunes, but the humor wears thin for me. I give them 2 and a half stars.

Zappa - some sublime music, then mixed with such low attempts at humor. A bizarre mixture. Still, his music had integrity, and lifted him above being just a novelty act. And, his championing of 'art music' led me to composers such as Stravinsky, Varese and Stockhausen. I was listening to all kinds of contemporary music in high school, all because Frank said it was cool. I thank him muchly for that. And I find myself humming and singing "Peaches en Regalia" quite often, and it makes me smile. It has no words, it's not trying to be funny, but it's an odd bit of music that just makes me smile.

It's a funny thing, humor and music. I think that, for me, it comes down to music being an essentially emotional art form. Even when it's striving to be detached and un-emotional, the effect it has on me is still an emotional one. And there's a difference between a funny song/lyrics and funny music all by itself. When I think of attempts at making 'funny' instrumental music through the centuries, they all fail. Music can be witty, but not ha-ha funny. Lyrics can be ha-ha, but I can't think of music that achieves that all on its own.

What think you?

Strangers in the Night

Some songs just don't go away. Even when it seems like they should. Even when every fibre of my being screams that a song is no good, I am sometimes drawn, against my will, into an intimate humming relationship with a particular song.

It came to me again this morning, as I did the dishes. I sing it mockingly, as the lyrics are laughable and unworthy of serious consideration. I hate the song. And yet it has been lodged in my gray matter since 1966, and hardly a week goes by that I don't find it wafting through my semi-consciousness.

Oh, there are tons of other bad songs that are hummable and memorable and get stuck in my brain, but usually they have more sinew, more of a self-knowing sense of their own silliness: "The Addams Family", "Sugar Shack", "Yummy Yummy Yummy". Not so "Strangers in the Night." It masquerades as a classic. I hate it for that. And yet, my god, it is so HUMMABLE! I must admit that, somehow, it is a classic. I love the melody, even though it is so lamely predictable. Perhaps this afternoon I'll sit down at the piano and analyze it, try to determine where its magic lies...

But as of right now, this morning, at the kitchen sink, I just put aside the soapy dishes, took off my gloves, and went to the computer. I had to know more about this damnable cursed song. Wikipedia Ho! (as in Westward, Ho!)

Both my fascination with and my revulsion against the song seem vindicated. It was a number one song in 1966, and the title song from Sinatra's most commercially successful album. Apparently, I'm not alone in finding it hummable. According to Wikipedia,'Sinatra despised the song, and called it "a piece of s**t", and "the worst song I ever f***ing heard". Hmm, I'm with Sinatra there.

Who the heck wrote it? Well, Bert Kaempfert is credited with the music, but he probably did not write it. According to Wikipedia: The music was originally recorded by Ivo Robic´ for the music festival in Split, Croatia. Robic´ later sang the song in German ("Fremde in der Nacht", lyrics by Kurt Felitz) and in Croatian language ("Stranci u Noc´i", lyrics by Marija Renota.

Aha! So it's some Eastern European hybrid/approximation of American Popular music. That explains it! That's why it feels and is so 'four-square', lacking in the jazzier syncopations and surprising phrasings that an American composer would have naturally put in. And yet the composer hit it spot on, making the stolid repetition of phrases balance near-perfectly. So that, when I'm doing a mindless task, I don't sing "I Got Rhythm" or "Puttin' on the Ritz". Nope. When I go mindless, I go for the gold. "Strangers in the Night".

I Wish I Were a Troubadour

A couple years ago I was in New York and went to Little, Brown & Co. to meet, for the first time, my editor for the book of "Old Mr. Mackle Hackle". I came into her office and she said "Where's your guitar?" A bit surprised, I said that I don't always carry one with me. She said "When Dan Zanes comes in, he always brings an instrument, and gets the whole office singing songs." Wow, that is SO cool. I sure wish I could be like that.

But music for me is more private. I'm a bit shy. Oh, sure, put me on a stage and I lose all inhibitions. A stage is a place of ultimate freedom for me, where my shyness does not interfere. But without a stage I don't know what to do with myself.

Also, I don't remember songs very well, so when someone asks me to sing a song, I truly don't remember them, even the ones I wrote. I have to practice them to have them at hand.

At a concert I gave at the Cafe du Nord in San Francisco some years back, someone in the audience requested a song of mine. I replied that I didn't remember it. They said "But you wrote it!" I replied, "Yeah, well Steinbeck wrote Grapes of Wrath, but it's not like he could just recite it from memory."

The line got a laugh, but I don't think the person believed the truth of it, that I really don't remember songs I've written. Perhaps it's why I don't get tired of my own music! Really, I love so many of my songs, and maybe it's cause they're always a little new to me.

As for just getting up and singing at the drop of a hat, I need some encouragement to perform. Not a lot, but a little nudge from outside of myself. I heard Glen Hansard ,from the movie "Once", interviewed on the radio. He just picked up his guitar one day and started busking on the streets of Dublin. His faith in himself allowed him to just go for it. I've got a lot of faith in myself, and I'm grateful for every ounce of it, but I can't do what Glen did. I admire that. Perhaps I'll have that ability in my next life. If I come back as a snail, be on the lookout for a singing snail on a street corner near you.

 

Haruki Murakami

There's a novelist whose invention and soul and style I am so in love with: Haruki Murakami. His is the kind of writing that I'd like to think I would do if I were a novelist. I rarely fall head-over-heels in love with an artist's work. I SO love when it happens!

Sometimes my love of an artist's work includes awe, in that I can never imagine myself doing what that person is able to do: examples in that category include Ken Kesey, Aaron Copland, Tom Waits. Other times, it is more a feeling of a kindred spirit; that that person is doing exactly what I want to do, and I can even envision myself achieving the same kind of thing: examples include Thelonious Monk, Rufus Wainwright, Haruki Murakami. Not to sound big-headed, it's just that I understand their mode of creativity at a 'friendly' level. I feel comfortable in the presence of their work. And somehow, what they're doing feels like the same kind of thing I'm doing (or imagine myself doing).

So, it was fascinating to read Haruki's recent piece in the New Yorker, in which he spoke some about his life. ("The Running Novelist," The New Yorker, June 9, 2008, p. 72)

He writes of how the idea of becoming a writer came to him in a precise flash. He was at a baseball game, taking in the clouds, the game, just chilling and enjoying, when he suddenly knew that he was going to write. I get a chill from that, because it's a feeling that has happened to me so many times: There's a flash inside my brain, and suddenly I know the next thing I've GOT to do, and I know it deep in my belly. Most people never speak of this, so, uh, I keep it to myself. But Haruki knows the feeling. It's comforting to know there's someone else out there who gets these strange flashes. And it's so cool that it's someone whose work I feel such a deep connection to.

Want to read some Murakami? Start with "Kafka on the Shore". Bloody brilliant.

Top ZZzzs, Listen up!

Want a record that will put you to sleep, but never drive you crazy?

The absolute best lullaby music, chosen by our son Q himself, is "Wings of Slumber" by the Banana Slug String Band. It's been playing every night for over a year, sometimes more than once in a night, sometimes in the very same room I'm trying to sleep in. They have created a CD that has just the right blend of styles, melodies, off-center phrasing and gentle surprises that add up to the perfect nighttime experience. I'm REALLY hard to please, so, please, take this as the highest of high praise. This is the lullaby CD to get.

Small, eentsy caveat: There's a song somewhere in the middle with a vocal by Laurie Lewis, that when it comes on just seems louder than all the rest. It always jolts me a little. I re-recorded it at minus 6db so it fits in better. If you're putting it on an ipod or some such, you may want to simply drop it from the playlist. It's a nice song, but if sleep is your goal...you get my drift(log).

Evolution of a Musician Part 2

The Listening Years...

Up until February of 1964 (when I was 7), music just didn't really mean much to me. On that particular night, we were at my grandparents house in Los Gatos, California, and me and my sister and maybe some cousins were in front of the TV watching The Wonderful World of Walt Disney. I don't remember what was on that night, it must not have been that great, because when my teenage aunt came into the room and abruptly switched the channel, saying "the Beatles are on!", none of us complained much. Heck, sometimes what was on Ed Sullivan was more fun than what was on Disney...

Then the Beatles came on and I was electrified . I don't recall ever being so excited in my life. I'd had some fun times, some good toys, some fun experiences, but all of a sudden I had a purpose in life. This was something important, something I was meant see, meant to do, it was something powerful, a force.

Thereafter I dreaded my weekly crew cuts with my father. I wanted my own Beatle hair!. That wasn't about to happen (and wouldn't for another 7 years). I received 2 Beatles wigs as presents, and wore them with a mixture of pride and sheepishness (and itchiness) as I sang along with the records every day after school.

I remember my sister Lynn, older by three years, getting our first Beatles LP. "Introducing the Beatles" on VeeJay records. I remember the Beatles fan magazine she had. I remember buying my first Beatles LP, The Beatles Second Album". I earned $0.25 a week as an allowance, for mowing the lawns, washing the car, taking out the trash, and it took 12 weeks to save up to three dollars that an LP cost in those days. For the next few years, all my allowance went towards Beatles LPs.

In the summer of 1964, I was sent to visit with my great aunt and uncle on their cranberry farm in Oregon for two weeks. I got to drive a tractor, fish in the stream for trout with a spool of thread and a bent pin, and ride the zip line across their swimming hole and fall into it on my way across. There was only one other child around there my age, she lived down the road apiece. Her room was covered in Elvis posters. I remember some really heated discussions about who was better; the Beatles or Elvis. When I went into town with my aunt and uncle they asked if there was anything I wanted (perhaps to remember the trip by). A sampler of the famous local cheese? A toy fishing boat? No. I really really wanted "Meet the Beatles". They bought it for me. The stereo version! (Not that I had a use for stereo on our sleep teaching device...).

Around this time we got a piano in our house as a gift for my grandparents. My sister started lessons right away, and she was good. After about a year I took some lessons too. It didn't really excite me, because I didn't sound like the Beatles. I practiced, but listlessly. I performed in the talent show at school, a piece called the Happy Hop Toad. Snoresville, daddy-o. My piano teacher got some Beatles songs "Yesterday" and "Michelle", and simplified them for me, but still, it just wasn't rock 'n roll. Yes, it was the Beatles, but it wasn't rock. After about a year of lessons I quit.

Our neighborhood in Palo Alto butted up against the back of a huge luxury hotel called the Cabana. It was kind of a Caesar's Palace of its time with huge colored fountains in the front featuring armless statues of Greek or Roman origins. Very fancy, very impressive. That was where the Beatles were reported to stay when they came to play San Francisco. I remember spending long summer hours perched dashingly on my stingray style bicycle, hanging out with other Beatles fans at the big wooden gate at the end of that street, which looked onto the back parking lot of the hotel. We all speculated about how the Beatles might arrive. Long string of limousines? Hidden in a laundry van or milk truck? Maybe they'd arrive more royally in a helicopter. So, the sound of an approaching helicopter, the arrival of any delivery van or large car, would send us all to the fence peering over it hoping for a glimpse of our heroes. (Here's a blow-by-blow account of The Beatles' stay in my neighborhood. It turns out that they did indeed exit in a delivery truck, and they used the very exit that we all hung out at.)

For Christmas of '65 I got a transistor radio. Wow. All of a sudden I had access to all kinds of music. My favorite station was KYA, a top 40 station out of San Francisco. I went to sleep with this transistor radio every night. There were the dippy songs that were catchy but that I didn't like that much ("Judy in Disguise", "Yummy Yummy Yummy", the soupy songs by The Delphonics ). And then there were the Great Songs. "Dock of the Bay", "Heard it Through the Grapevine", "White Rabbit", "Light My Fire". While the Beatles were number one with me, there was so much more music out there and I was on fire with it all!

Playing The Happy Hop Toad in the talent show was an experience I never wanted to repeat. The next year I had a whole different idea of what I wanted to do for the talent show. I wanted to do a Beatles song. I knew a guy that had paper drum set. I had my two Beatles wigs. And I knew another guy who had whose mother had an actual electric guitar. I had a toy acoustic guitar. None of us knew how to play any of the instruments, but that didn't matter. I knew the words to the song "Help" backwards and forwards and I taught the guys all the words. And we wore the guitars and the wigs while one guy sat at the drums and we just yelled the words to the song. We practiced a lot, I really pushed them hard, and we took it to the talent show.

All the other "rock 'n roll" acts in the Talent Show were lip-synching to records. I was somehow weirdly proud of the fact that we were actually "singing" it live. And, oddly enough, the crowd went wild. A bunch of older kids ( fifth and sixth graders) came up afterwards and said it was really funny. One of the few times in my elementary school years when I was considered cool (if only for an afternoon).

As my tastes in music expanded, I sometimes found myself a little frightened by what I heard. My teenage aunt gave me "Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison", and while I absorbed it, I found the cheering of the prison crowd at the words "I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die" really chilling (still do). The Doors records she leant me were rather spooky. And even the Beatles were getting dark and strange ("There's people standing 'round, who'll screw you in the ground, they'll fill you in with all the sins you've seen.") That was a heavy lyric for a boy growing up in a strict born-again household (more about that subject some other time).

In seventh grade (first-year of junior high school), we were required to do half a year of choir followed by half a year of band. I didn't care for choir. I found it dippy. When it came time for band, however, I really really wanted to play the drums. There were about 10 other boys, all much cooler than me, who also wanted to try out for the drums. I knew I didn't stand a chance against them, so I set my sights on the trumpet instead. And I really kind of liked playing it. But after a few months the teacher told me that my lips were shaped wrong for trumpet playing, and that I should give it up. Discouraged, I gave up playing music again.

Oh, but I still listened and dreamed. Apart from rock music, my aunt gave me the soundtrack to "2001:A Space Odyssey". I saw the movie on my birthday 3 years running (it ran for over 2 years at the Cinerama theatre in San Jose). There is some really wild contemporary art music by Ligeti and others on it that intrigued me. I went to sleep to it every night for a few months.

Then, I went to my first rock concert on May 19, 1968. The Northern California Folk-Rock Festival (lineup was The Doors, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Grateful Dead, The Animals, The Youngbloods, Electric Flag, Jefferson Airplane, Country Joe and the Fish, and Taj Mahal). It was scary (I was only 11, and there were lots of drugs, including bad acid being passed around). It was also a dream come true (just look at that lineup!). It was a marvelous, sunny Woodstock-like experience (before Woodstock, even). But then the headliners, The Doors, began setting up. Dark clouds covered the sky, and by the time Jim Morrison took the stage, the sky was brooding, and the crowd's mood changed. Someone threw a full can of beer over our heads. It hit a guy on a blanket 10 feet in front of us, and his head was bleeding from a nasty cut. Someone threw a cherry bomb that exploded a short ways away. Jim Morrison was spitting on the audience. It was huge, awesome, thrilling, terrifying, and it was exactly where I wanted to be.

As I entered my teenage years, I found more fantastic new music by Led Zeppelin, Crosby, Stills and Nash, Tim Buckley, Jimi Hendrix, Neil Young, Donovan. I spent after-school hours at Pacific Stereo, drooling over component stereo systems. I worked extra jobs and saved, and when I was 13, my older sister and I went in together on a $300 system. (I still have, and use, the amplifier from it)

But I only listened. Playing music seemed impossible. I didn't know how one could become a rock musician, that path was invisible to me. I didn't know that there might be guitar teachers or drum teachers. What I listened to was everything to me, but nothing that I could ever do myself...

Gunnar Music on YouTube

A recent search on Youtube unearthed some interesting uses for my music. None of them with my blessing, so don't think I had anything to do with them. It's a hoot to see where my music ends up.

Ants in my Pants - Some cool and interesting images and juxtapositions going on here:

Here, "Anna" is used to score a montage from the TV series Heroes:

Anna is used for a slide show of stills from the 1964 movie "Angélique, marquise des anges". I don't know the film, don't know exactly what this is about...

And then, you can even put your makeup on to my music:

It's a big, wide world out there, eh?

My Solution to Global Warming

"It's also a great Axe grinder!"

Here's my idea. Some kind of huge pedal-powered flywheel. I mean huge. 6 feet in diameter, one foot in width, made of stone or metal. I'm not a physicist, so I don't know if this is the most efficient way to translate pedal power into electricity, but I think we need to be able to SEE what our work is doing, or we'll get discouraged and give up.

If one were to pedal to charge up a set of batteries, you wouldn't get visceral feedback about what your work is getting you. If you hook up your pedal generator to a TV so that the TV works only while you're pedaling, you can see what it takes to power a TV, but...so much for being a couch potato.

And usually people want to exercise for half an hour in the morning and then get on with their day. If by pedaling you set this giant flywheel in motion you GET it, in a wonderful big way. The flywheel's energy can then be stored in a battery. For use throughout the day or night. There would be gears just like on a bicycle so that when you first start pedaling the gear ratio gets the flywheel going without too much struggle, and as you get faster and faster you can change gears and really get that flywheel moving.

I got this idea while biking around town. When I bicycle up the hill, I'm very aware of how much energy it takes to get my body and the weight of the bicycle up the hill. It's a lot a work. All these cars fly by me, most with just one person at the wheel and no passengers, and our cars are so powerful that the driver really has no sense of how much energy is being expended to lift all that steel and plastic up the hill. As such, my invention is not just about creating or harnessing the energy from an exercise regimen and turn it into electricity, but also about helping people to realize how much energy it takes to run a light bulb or a washing machine or a television set.

While walking the other day, I passed a woman who was blowing leaves with an electric blower. Now, leaf blowers are pretty ridiculous any way you look at. Are they really that much easier to use than a rake? The simplest way of reducing the energy used by leaf blowers is just to stop using them. But this woman's house had a huge solar array on the roof. So, ostensibly, she was just harnessing the power of the sun to blow her leaves around. Much better than using a gas powered leaf blower or electricity from a coal-fired power plant. Still, harnessing the sun's energy is not without its costs (the manufacture of all those silicon solar panels, the chemicals involved, et cetera). I believe that she, and all of us, need to understand how much energy it takes to blow those leaves around. If someone had to pedal a generator like mad so that she could blow leaves around the yard, we'd be back to using rakes in no time.

So I look around my house and I think about the things that I really depend on, or like to use, and the things that are not so important. I really love using the computer, I love having a music studio (which is mostly run by electricity), and it's great to have lights in the evening and the early morning. Whoa yeah, and the dishwasher and the clothes washer - those are really handy. I would love having a huge flywheel that I could spend 30 minutes on each morning and know that it would power my computer for four for five hours. I'd get exercise and I'd feel really good about the energy I was using. I'm pretty sure that even if each member of my family was peddling for two hours a day, we probably still wouldn't make enough energy to totally supply our daily household energy usage. But it would make a dent. And it would show us how precious the energy that we do have really is.

Dancing with Heavy Machinery

Did I say I never get to watch movies? Well, not entirely true. I love movies so much that I generally won't watch them if I can't arrange to sit through a film in its entirety. But some movies (like light comedies) don't suffer too much from being viewed over the course of 2 or more sittings.

So, my wife and I watched a variously inventive and charming film over a couple of nights last week: "Across the Universe". Although I'm a huge fan of the Beatles' music, the film had gotten lukewarm reviews, and I'd had no intention of seeing it. But a friend recommended it so highly that we rolled the Netflix dice and took a chance.

Firstly, I was very impressed, sometimes jaw-droppingly so, with the re-imagining of the Beatles's music. "I Want to Hold Your Hand" had always struck me as insipid faux-teenage puppy-love kind of stuff, with a melody that just wasn't their best. In the film it's done as a heart-wrenching ballad, and the lyrics, when divorced from the original bouncy beat, have a beautiful yearning in them that I'd never recognized before. There were many such moments in the film, where the depth of the Beatles music is revealed by audacious and brilliant arrangements.

Secondly, the visuals were often stunning (directed by Julie Taymor, of Lion King fame). The legendary puppet street-theatre troupe Bread and Puppet is used, and there was choreography that was grounded in the drama, not pasted on as it is so often in musicals. It reminded me very much of the work of ISO, the dance troupe that The Bobs did shows with in the 80's. As the film rolled on, more and more of the choreography was SO brilliant, in a way that I have never seen outside of ISO. I was beaming to see such great work. And when the credits rolled by, why, surprise! - the Choreographer was indeed Danny Ezralow, from ISO. I'm so glad that some of his work has made it to the big screen, in such a fine way.

I searched for youtube examples of his work - there are some, but I would say just see "Across the Universe". It's not a perfect movie, but it is full of beauty.

And, 2 other members of ISO, Jamey Hampton and Ashley Roland, have their own dance company called BODYVOX (in Portland, OR). They, too, have that powerful, witty ISO style that is so unique. I highly recommend catching them in Portland or on tour. And, they do happen to have a couple of youtube videos that are worth watching. They are short films, featuring dancing with heavy machinery. Do take a moment to watch:)

 

 

TV shows that are better than movies?

We've been watching a lot of TV lately. Well, not TV, not stuff that comes on a cable or over the airwaves, but shows we're renting from Netflix. We miss watching full-length movies, but by the time Q goes to bed we're exhausted, and need just a mere 25 minutes of chill out time before we're ready to hit the hay. And I'm sorry, but life is just too darn short to spend any of it watching commercials :) So, TV shows on DVD have been a godsend for us.

Some favorites we've been watching?

Slings and Arrows. Wow. This is truly better than just about any movie out there. The writing is so real, the cast is so true, it's so funny and so heartbreaking at the same time. It's from Canada, so chances are you've never even heard of it, but I'm telling you, this is the real deal. Rent it NOW! What's it about? Oh, golly, it's too much to encapsulate - Read about it on Netflix, for goshsakes! But it is kind of a "Waiting for Guffman" thing set at a Shakespearean theatre company.

Freaks and Geeks. So many great shows seem doomed to early extinction. This one focuses on high school years, and is one of the best explorations of the reality of high school I've seen. The parents are rather 2-dimensional, but the kids are very real. Funny and true.

WonderFalls. Only one season, so if you fall in love with it, know that it's doomed to end too soon. The heroine is a marvelously mixed-up college grad who has taken a deadening job in a souvenir shop at Niagara Falls, as a place to kind of 'drop out', only to find that various souvenirs 'talk' to her and convince her to do things which complicate her life terribly. Kind of like Joan of Arc, only funny. Or maybe Joan of Arc was funny, but this is funny in a different way.

Arrested Development. Best thing I've found on U.S. TV. A mixture of humor - reminds me of what Woody Allen would be doing if he hadn't gotten so darn serious. If you haven't seen it, give it a try. Better than so many movies (really!).

The Office. This is a funny series, but it can make you squirm uncomfortably. So, be forewarned, it may not be for you. If you've EVER worked in an office, however, you should be required to see it. (NB, I found the British series to be too acidic for my tastes - I just couldn't handle that much copper in my mouth. The U.S. version is somewhat lighter)

Sorry, gotta go. Time for more TV.

Crowing, crowing...gone

Goodbye, little crow...

On the ides of May, I found the little crow dead. The parents had already gotten the news, and though they still hung around in the trees for a couple of days, they no longer cawed or circled overhead. I missed their fierce protectiveness. I picked up the crow with a plastic bag, it was so very light. It's gone now.

An amazing couple of weeks. On May 1 I was out jogging, and about 25 minutes into my jog I had a brief zzzt, a blip where I lost consciousness. I remember turning my head to the right as I came to a cross street to check for traffic, and then the briefest moment of 'static', and when I came to I felt like I'd missed a moment of life. Very strange feeling. Heck, I'm wired differently from most people, my fibromyalgia sends electricity shooting up and down my body from time to time, my thoughts are often a little out of left field, but this was a totally new sensation.

Anyway, I kept jogging, but the same thing happened again. So I walked the rest of the way home, felt light-headed. For a few days felt kind of dizzy, so I went to the doctor. She listened to my heart, sounded fine. She explained what it probably was, an electrical misfiring of the heart. Then she had an EKG machine rolled in, just to check and see if everything was okay.

NOT, apparently. She said it looked like I'd had a heart attack. Whoa. But I always take everything with a grain of salt (metaphorically speaking only- I've got to watch my blood pressure!), so I chilled on the freak-out, left that all to her. She was freaked, I'll tell you. So I was sent for a bunch more testing. Carotid artery free and clear, stress test checked out normal, cardiologist says it doesn't look like a heart attack, looks like I'm fine. Whatever happened while jogging was just 'something'. Nothing to worry about.

Okay. I'm cool. Still, it was a couple of weeks of uncertainty. And much of that time I had crows cawing and swooping at me. Enough to give a guy a heart attack!

I'm Crowing

I've had a few days of being hectored and cawed at by nervous, anxious parental crows. Their fledgling disappeared the day after it was found here, and the Mom and Dad have kept a hawk-like watch on me ever since. They think I stole it.

Whenever I go near the windows of the studio, they Kraw out a loud alarm. When I cross the yard, they swoop down from the redwood tree where they're keeping watch. But their baby was, until today, nowhere to be seen. I searched the yard for the stray feathers that cats and other crow-eaters leave behind after a meal, but there were none. Still, the chances of the little crow's survival seemed dim, as the parents still seemed to think I had it hidden away somewhere.

Then, this morning as I came home from Choir, the fledgling was in the road in front of my house. I tried to shoo it to safety, but its parents came swooping when I threatened to get near it. I was heartened to find it alive - I was starting to feel really bad being yelled at by crows all day long for the kidnapping of their child. Now they could see their young one was alive, and would leave me alone.

Not so fast. The fledge found its way back to my backyard - it can fly well enough to get over fences, but still not so well to return to its 75-foot high nest. Now its been in the backyard for a few hours, and it caws in its little crow voice, and its parents caw back from their redwood tree, and I have to cover my head and run for it every time I leave the studio - the parents are VERY protective now.

Sheesh. Life with crow.

Crows in my yard

This morning there's a pair of crows cawing raucously all around my studio. Here's why...

As I was about to open the door to my back stoop yesterday morning, I noticed a small crow sitting there. On the doormat. A strange sight. I considered if it might have hurt itself, but there were no windows it would have crashed into, and it's an odd area for a bird to land in. But when I opened the door, the crow merely blinked, looked at me, and apparently wasn't about to move.

My first thought was "Sick bird? West Nile Virus?", so I called their hotline. They told me that unless the bird was dead, they weren't interested. They told me to call back if it died, and they'd be happy to help. Well...uh, okay.

I'd seen injured birds perk up and fly away, so I decided to give it a few hours and see what happened. Maybe as the sun moved onto the stoop, the warmth would help the bird.

A couple hours later, the bird had moved just enough to get itself out of the sun and into the shade. I went up to it to say hello and to see if I could determine any obvious injury, but a loud cawing went up from the surrounding trees, and a couple of crows came swooping over, so I retreated.

I called the local Animal Control to see what they could do. Almost immediately a guy came out, armed with a net, a box and some gloves. I led him to the back yard, and as he picked up the small crow, the 2 vigilant crows from the trees swooped around us. "Get under cover", he said, "they might peck at you."

He examined the bird, and found no injuries. He explained it was a fledge, and he quickly spotted the nest it came from, in a very tall tree a few hundred feet away. He said that often Crow fledglings didn't make it far on their first flight, and sometimes took a day or two to finally get the strength and gumption to fly back up to the nest. There was a risk of the young crow being eaten by a cat or some such, but that risk was better than taking the fledge somewhere 'safe', as the handling by humans would imprint it and doom its ultimate survival chances. So, he told me to leave the young crow alone, and that it should be off and flying in a couple of days. Sure, I'm cool with that.

This morning, I wondered if the young crow had already made its way home. As I opened my back door to go to my studio, however, loud and very close Crow Caws attacked my ears. I backed into the house. They were being very vigilant. I put on a hat, let them swoop out of sight, and dashed under the shade trees to my studio door. As I type, the Mom and Dad crows continue to caw. I can't see the fledge anywhere from my windows, but I suppose the parents are making a noise to urge their young one to fly. Crows never sounded so sweet!

45's were sleazy, mp3s are...?

Early on (like, when I was 10 years old) I had a moral judgment against 45 singles. They were a ripoff (LPs had a much better song-per-dollar ratio); they were a shallow glimpse into an artist's work (way too short); they were the sound-bites of their day. I don't know how my little 10-year old brain came to this judgment, but there it was.

This is odd, as I loved AM radio at the time, and AM radio is nothing but 3 minute songs, all artfully done, all hugely appreciated by me.

I suppose part of the distinction is that radio goes on and on. A song is played in a context - a context of other hits songs, a dj with a personality, advertisements, weather reports, etc. When you put a 45 on a record player, it begins playing, and 2 or 3 minutes later it's over. That's it. Empty silence. The song feels small and cheap when it's laid bare like that. An LP included and embraced the song with others, all by the same artist, in a large canvas of sound that went on and on... (for 15 minutes). I Loved, and still Love, an album of songs.

Okay, and there was one other thing that made me dislike 45s. When I was an immensely shy 11 year old, I'd somehow managed to land a girlfriend while in summer school. We went on a double-date to this guy's house. He had a make-out room in his garage, with a record player that played a stack of 45s. The music was dumb, it was make-out music intended to make girls somehow melt. But I was frozen in fear-of-kissing-a-girl land, and the sound of this gawdawful music along with my cold-sweat fear made my stomach turn. I loved music too much to have it used in such a way. It was sleazy. Cheap. Tawdry, even.

But, like I say, my general dislike of 45's predated that experience.

Another 45 vs. LP experience involved discovering the one-hit-wonder phenomenon. A hit song of '70 was "Spirit in the Sky" by Norman Greenbaum. I liked it. Still like it. A friend of mine had the LP which contained the song, and one day at his house he put it on. Bad LP. One good song on the whole thing. I didn't know that there were artists who made such good and bad music at the same time. I was used to the Beatles, the Doors, Led Zeppelin - people who made good LPs.

So, what about mp3s? Are they the 45 singles of today?

Being a lover of albums of songs, the playlist "revolution" that we're currently in is not my bag. I still love to hear a group of songs by an artist, all of a high caliber of artistic integrity, in an album format. One-hit wonders are okay, but just okay. But mp3s are not sleazy. Unlike a 45, they offer good value for the money. And, it's so easy to put them in a playlist and surround them with other good stuff .It's like having your very own jukebox. Which, I must admit, I did rather like when I was a lad (even if they offered very poor value for the money).

Music Doesn't Smell

Don't know why this crossed my mind, or if it's even true, but it seems to me that music doesn't smell. For such a powerful, visceral, emotional art form, that's a strange thing. But I think it's true.

Name me a music that smells - cause I can't think of one.

Oh, there's music that stinks out loud, but I'm not talking about judgments of taste.

I go to a museum, somehow a painting has a smell to it. Sculpture? I can smell it. Pencil shavings, charcoal, they all have an olfactory component.

Theatre - I can smell the actors.

Movies - well, there's popcorn isn't there?

Poetry, books, that musty smell, that inky smell.

Various musical instruments have their smell. Woodwinds, brass have metallic smells, their cases have slight moisture in them, slightly mildewed. Guitars, violins, etc., they've all got that old wood musk, old varnish tang to them. Pianos with their polish and their wool felt smells. The musicians themselves? Sure, they smell.

But once the music is in the air, the notes themselves don't carry the smell. The notes are super-fresh, clean, devoid of smell. It's not bad. It's just profoundly curious.

Profoundly curious to me :)