Red in the Face

While it was a great diversion from the other frustrations in my life, I have to admit that I behaved rather badly in this matter of dealing with content scrapers. After reading “What to Do When Someone Steals Your Content,” by Lorelle on WordPress.com, I’m ashamed of myself.

I read most of the article before I realized that I simply don’t have time do those things right now. (And it will take several readings and some note-taking to get all the action steps lined out.) Until I get settled in Phoenix, go through all the information and do everything in a professional manner – which is what I have thus far failed miserably at – I am going to have to accept that I can only do the bare minimum to deal with the content thieves right now and simply endure my indignation and wounded pride.

That’s just the way it is. I can sally forth in defense of intellectual property rights in a month or two, and do so in an a more honorable manner, instead of being such a barbarian about it. Mea culpa. Sometimes I still act like there’s a fire on the other side of the door and I’ve got a halligan in my hands.

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The Red Headed Step Child

The guitar playing deconstruction process continues…

I’ve spent a couple of hours each of the last three days on boiling down scales to their simplest elements. There’s probably some scholarly soul somewhere who has written a brilliant thesis on this and reduced the following meanderings into a few pithy sentences, but keep in mind that I’m a dumb old firefighter and that I am as interested in the process here as much as I am the results. Use my ideas and explorations to go off in your own direction…

Scale Processes
After going over linear major scales (up and down a single string) and thinking in terms of whole step and half step relationships, I went a step further. I started placing the major scale tetrachords on the fretboard, and crossing from string to string. I would start at a random note, then build a major scale from the ground up, trying every possible path from the root, using every fingering I could think of. In other words if I took an A at the fifth fret of the sixth string, I’d work my way through starting with each successive left hand finger – 1, 2, 3, 4 – and figure out all the shifts and crossings I could from each. This worked both up and down the neck and across. (A comment from Miguel de Maria on my “Guitar Scale Meltdown” post pointed out that Dante Rosati has already done this. The link will take you to the diagrams.)

That wasn’t as hard as I thought it might be, as my basic fretboard knowledge is pretty good. My goal is not to learn the fingerboard; my process would be different if that were the case. I want to understand scale layout on the guitar for improvisation and to use scales more efficiently for technical development.

Mr. Spock Looks at Scales
What was bedeviling me was that I felt like there should be more logic and pattern to what I was doing. I thought about the harp. There isn’t an easier instrument for scales than the harp. Set your pedals, then pick your tonic and the six adjacent strings. Cs are red, Fs are blue. Pedal up, flat; middle, natural; down, sharp. Not much to it.

How about the keyboard? That gets a bit more interesting. Once you leave the key of C, you have to know how to progress through the black keys. It’s still very easy to see, though, and each tetrachord leads either ahead through the circle of fifths or back through the circle of fourths. Hmmmm. That got me thinking.

Violin. Tuning. On the violin, since it is tuned in fifths, I can use exactly the same finger pattern from string to string. Start on the G – open, 1, 2, 3 and open, 1, 2, 3 – and you’ve got G major. Start on the D, you’ve got D major, etc. It is extremely easy to transpose in that way, as well. I thought about it some more. I looked at my guitar in it’s stand. “Why aren’t you tuned in fifths?”

Guitar Logic
Silly guitar. Perfect fourths from the low E to the G, then that anomalous major third, then another perfect fourth. What logic was there in that? It does reduce the stretches and shifts that would be necessary, given the size difference between the guitar and the violin, but why not perfect fourths all the way across, a nice, logical symmetry that would make this oh so much simpler? Each pattern would be the same, only moved down one whole step as you went across the fret board string by string. It would be an easy, predictable sweep across and down the neck with straightforward left hand shifts.

Standardized Tuning
I thought back to music history class from decades ago. Lutes had lots of different tunings, and were often retuned for a particular song. Besides, the lute isn’t even really a true ancestor to the guitar. Classical guitarists just repurposed the literature for respectability!

Guitar as we know it is still a fairly young instrument. It wasn’t until the Classical era that the guitar reached its present tuning, and even then changes continued to the standard fretboard length, body size, and internal bracing up until the end of the nineteenth century. Sor, Guiliani and Paganini played with the same standard tuning as you, me, or Andres Segovia. Luis Milan did not.

I really wasn’t in the mood for an exhaustive study of the tunings of the Baroque guitar, however. I was more into imitating Charles Darwin observing Galapagos finches. If I could reason my way back from the adaptation to the reason for it, I could avoid all that nasty digging around in the dusty archives of music pedagogy and pretense.

What If?
Staring at my guitar again, I thought about what fingering diagrams of the scales would look like if I tuned it to E-A-D-G-C-F; I thought about how few guitar players I know use open or alternate tunings and the probable reasons why. (Beyond the fact that it screws up every fingering you’ve already learned, it’s a pain in the neck to keep retuning as the strings try to go back to their old pitches.) Then it hit me. Once again, I was coming at this from the classical tradition. John Dowland’s courtly, virtuosic polyphonic lute compositions were not what the rogues and wenches were dancing to down at the roadside inn in 1602; just as Sor and Guiliani’s masterpieces were not Top 40 hits of 1827.

The rogues and wenches down at the Boar’s Head were probably dancing reels to fiddles and mandolins, while the guitar was just entering puberty in Spain. Mandolin, once you get away from the four or five easiest chords, uses all four left hand fingers across four courses of strings. You couldn’t chord very well on more.

The guitar, however, has lots of open strings in a variety of keys, with fairly easy fingerings – a two finger E minor chord, three finger E major chord. Use those as key centers and branch back to A, D, and G major, and so on. More open strings; more easy fingerings. Duh! Use a capo and you can accompany any singer of a folk song just by knowing a half-dozen chords…

“Classical” Pedigrees
I remembered all the high-falutin’ verbiage I heard over the years about how the guitar was “raised” to the status of a “classical” instrument, the duty for serious players to expand the repertoire and increase the respect for the instrument in the concert halls of the world (Oh, puhleeze! Don’t believe me? Read some of Segovia’s early record jackets…), the prejudices of my teacher and my compatriots about me playing flamenco and folk, the work to get classical guitar programs established and recognized in college music departments, “classical guitar societies,” etc.

Common Folk
All that never phased the hillbillies and highwaymen, gypsies and grunge rockers… You can bang out chords on a guitar and, with a little application, play some pretty mean scale passages, too, whether you’re John Williams or Angel Romero, Al DiMeola, Paco de Lucia, or Eddie Van Halen. And it’s all because of a simple compromise in tuning, an adaptation away from strict regularity or a graphic representation of the scale (like the harp or keyboard) that allows scale, chords, or both, to be played far more easily than if you had a six course mandolin, for instance.

The Red Headed Step Child
I looked at my guitar and laughed. “Well, aren’t you just the red-headed stepchild of the snooty classical world? Even your tuning points to your common, wenchy origins!” I thought about it a bit more. “But, damn, you get the job done!”

The guitar is one of the most popular musical instruments in the world with millions players around the globe, rivalling and even surpassing the traditionally more “respectable” piano and violin. It’s portable and adaptable to just about any style of music; it can scream and wail, or croon a lullaby. And it’s pretty, too. Not bad for a little girl from Andalusia…

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Bruce Lee, Guitar Instructor

“If you follow the classical pattern, you’re understanding the routine, the tradition, the shadow – you are not understanding yourself.” ~ Bruce Lee

I am stripping away everything I thought I knew about playing guitar, using everything I know from every other thing I’ve done in my life, in an effort to pare down to just the essentials. Basics. Fundamentals. The three R’s – Relax, Release, Repeat.

In the midst of this process, I ran across the following quote by Bruce Lee, the famous martial artist.  Lee, in his own way stripped down everything he knew from his years of training in the classic Chinese martial art of Wing Chun, by listening to his own inner knowing and through tireless experiment.

I wish neither to possess nor to be possessed.
I no longer covet paradise.
More important, I no longer fear hell…
The medicine for my suffering
I had within me from the very beginning,
But I did not take it.
My ailment came from within myself,
But I did not observe it.
Until this moment.
Now I see that I will never find the light
Unless, like the candle, I am my own fuel,
Consuming myself.

~ Bruce Lee

For years, I tried to possess the secret of fine playing, pursuing some idea that the answer was outside myself, in teachers, exercises, practice, performance. For many years more, I gave up the pursuit.  When I returned to playing seriously, I started to repeat the same old errors.

In the last few days, I have been discovering something wonderful. I haven’t been doing anything on my lesson materials, none of the pieces, or even working on compás. But in my staying away from the specifics, and dwelling on the fundamentals, I’ve finally understood the spirit of the last few lessons.

“Duende,” “aire,” the soul, the angel of the music – those things cannot be grasped. They arise like a phoenix out of the ashes, as one consumes one’s own preconceived notions, burns away the fears, the worries, and the doubts, and ignites the inner passion that lies at the heart of creativity.

Like so much else on this blog over the past nine months, one thing turns around and mirrors and symbolizes another. My old post on “It’s Not the Flames That Kill You” takes on new meaning.  One more pass through the fire…

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Guitar Scale Meltdown

After two weeks of hardly practicing at all, I decided I’d better get to the bottom of what was going on. Certainly, there have been a lot of competing demands on my time and I don’t have any pending gigs at the moment. But, I know the kind of sustained effort it takes to get good at music and what I’ve been doing lately was not going to cut it.

I had the little chat with myself, the tough love talk with moi that I figured I needed to hear. Yes, I’d been letting a lot of things interfere with my motivation – chief among them trying to play perfectly and then getting thoroughly discouraged at my lack of progress. OK. I’d also let myself get caught up in distraction and trying to do too many things at once.

The remedy I figured was to renew my practice commitment, accept progress instead of perfection, and get with the focused program again. I know from past experience that the fastest and best way to improve is to combine technical exercises along with all the repertoire work. Good enough. I sat down to spend ten minutes on scales.

An hour later, I’d rememorized all of the Segovia edition major and minor diatonic scales that I used to play 25 years ago and was heading into a second hour of technique practice when I realized what I was doing. Uh oh. Can we say, “obsessive,” boys and girls? I’d just fallen back into the way I’d learned to practice years ago.

What the hell? I know better than this. Argh!

Why play scales? Lots of reasons, but a full hour of them makes no sense. I thought back. I used to play nearly an hour of scales every single day, another hour of arpeggios, plus various other technique exercises, then I’d start on my repertoire… Six hours of practice a day. I got good, very good, but I ended up injured and burned out.

I sat there and listened to my body. My left forearm was tired, my neck and shoulders were tense. Sure, I’d won back some fraction of the skill I’d lost, but to what end? My left hand technique is actually still pretty good. I need a little stretching and strengthening, but not all that much, really. The slop in my string crossings and the lack of coordination between the hands was creating a little bit of noise on the strings, but nothing that couldn’t be fixed with a few sessions of chromatic scales over the course of a few weeks. What was I trying to prove, and to whom?

I looked more deeply. I realized that on some level I was trying to make up for years of feeling like I’d let the music, and myself, down. I’d wasted a gift. And I was trying to get it back through brute force, in the same way that I had lost it.

Wise up, Ari. I thought of all the music lessons I’ve taken over the years and what I’d learned, not just from guitar, but harp and violin, Arnis and Tai Chi, biofeedback and esoteric disciplines. I thought of all the trainings as an EMT and a firefighter that I’d participated in, and all the lessons and trainings that I developed and conducted. Work hard, certainly, but work smart, too.

I read the inside cover of the scale book, where the Great One himself – Segovia – recommends that the student play not one, but two hours, of scales every day. Sadist. Did he really play two hours of scales every day? I doubt it. I’m sure not going to.

I pulled every guitar book off the shelf that had anything about scales in it and started looking for patterns. I had a hunch that I could come up with something far better that would take a fraction of the time. I looked through Richard Iznaola’s technical manual and saw just variations on the same theme. Carl Flesch’s violin method, ditto. Several other more recent works on guitar pedagogy just rehash Segovia’s work, if not his extreme stance on practice. Been there, done that.

My goal: To design a workable personalized system of guitar technical exercises, starting with scales, that gets excellent results in approximately 30 minutes of practice per day, that will work as well for jazz, flamenco, and world music styles, as it does for classical guitar. It must be much more user friendly than Iznaola’s “Kitharologus, The Path to Virtuousity: A Technical Workout Manual for All Guitarists.” (And I called Segovia a sadist!) I do really like Scott Tennant’s work on “Pumping Nylon: The Classical Guitarist’s Technique Handbook,” and will undoubtedly use a lot from it. It’s quite good (especially in how he breaks up the good old Guiliani “120 Right Hand Studies”) but, while he talks about working with scales, he goes a little light on how to apply the left hand in my opinion.

It’s a tall order, but I had a flash of insight as to how to do it and I’ve already managed to condense Segovia’s scales down to half a dozen basics. I also know how I’m going to structure the overall program. I’ll keep you informed…

To be continued

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If Imitation is the Sincerest Form of Flattery, What is Plagiarism?

It was bound to happen. I’ve finally had a post scraped in toto, no link, no attribution. At least this is the first one I know about, anyway. The only way I knew about this one was through a trackback from an embedded link.

It looks to me like the scam is totally automated. There is a bot scarfing up content and spitting it back out verbatim and it’s doubtful that human eyes ever even filter it. I’m hoping that is the case, so my terse comment will pass through the system undeleted. It is currently listed as “awaiting moderation.” Ha! Fat chance.

At least the other times sites have swiped my stuff, I’ve at least gotten a byline and a link back. (Some have actually had the gall to post my name as a “contributing writer” or say the post was “written for blahblah site.” Bull Puckey.)

It’s maddening and I don’t know what, if anything, can actually be done about it. Have you had this experience? What did you do? Did it work?

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Gettin’ Down and Dirty in Drupal

Drupal is now installed on my webhost and I have my test bed set up. I’m also in the process of cleaning off an extra hard drive and installing a server on my laptop – Apache, MySQL, PHP – so that I can do a lot of the development locally. Hopefully, I can make any major mistakes there. Working this way also allows me to spend more time on the computer during the monsoons as I can disconnect from the Internet when there’s a thunderstorm, but continue to work on this latest project for as long as my battery holds up. In fact, I’m composing this post offline as there’s a thunderstorm right now, with lots of lightning and heavy rain.

So far, I’m quite impressed with how logically Drupal is setup and how easy it is to find things. I was able to learn my way around the admin interface very quickly. Whew! It’s fun, but there is also a huge amount to learn. This is good for an aging brain, right? Keep learning new things, challenging one’s self. “This will keep you young, Ari.” At least that’s what I keep telling myself…

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Milestones

Sometime in the last few hours, my blog views passed 3,ooo and this post is my 100th post. It also marks the end of a week of learning a lot more about blogging and how to be a better blogger. When I started this venture back in November, it was just to try it out and play around with it, a way to write something totally different than the fantasy novel that I was deeply engaged in during November’s NaNoWriMo and beyond.

A lot has happened in the interim. I’ve learned that blogging can be a lot of fun and a lot of work; that it makes demands for consistency if one wants to gain any kind of readership. I didn’t start out with readership in mind, but that has become more important to me in the last few months as I’ve started to be more regular in my postings and to realize that blogging can be more than just a time-consuming past-time.

This blog has changed focus several times and tends to be about whatever topic I’m most interested in, or is most loudly demanding my attention, at the moment. From letting go of firefighting to rediscovering my music, it has undergone several major revisions in just a few months. It is about to undergo the biggest shift yet.

I’m working behind the scenes to split the various topics into separate blogs so that I can target my postings better, in large part to help me focus the various aspects of my life, but also to move it/them to an independent server where I can do more – upload any file types I like, utilize scripting on the site, and more.

As it has been from the beginning, it continues to be highly experimental and part of a winding, intuitive journey that shows no signs of slowing down anytime soon. Thanks for reading, and I hope that you come back and see how things evolve. And, let me know what you think.

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Week in Review

Luckily, Elmo has stopped his recent middle-of-the-night foolishness of hurtling across the bed like an Olympic track and fielder in training. Ahhh, I’ve finally gotten caught up on sleep! That’s made life a whole lot easier this week, even though between the monsoon thunderstorms, the gig at the Campus Coffee Bean, and just general night-owlishness, I’ve been staying up until about 0200 every night working on the computer. Musician-geek hours. My “workdays” are productive, once I get started.

Posts have been sporadic lately, not so much because of the thunderstorms, though those have played some part, but because I’ve been prepping for the big garage sale (turning my house upside down in the process), laying the groundwork to move my blogs to their own server, plus doing a whole lot of music – gig prep, sounds system refinements, and learning how to record my stuff in Garage Band.

Garage Band is cool! I’ve been able to go directly from my guitar into my computer and work with some of my flamenco pieces, taking them from the Mac audio files to CD and to mp3s. This is a major breakthrough for me and means I can create the new and improved demo for a lot less time and money (no studio fees to someone else) than I had planned, and do frequent updates to my online audio files. With the planned move to another server, I’ll be able to upload mp3s to my little heart’s content and offer them on my blog.

Along with all of that, I’ve gotten serious with my improved exercise program, though I’ve faltered on my diet. No weight loss this week, despite my grand goal of losing six more pounds by August 22. And, I’ve been working with M on a systematic program of developing lucid dreaming. More on those topics to come…

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Another Gig – Another Lesson, or Three

Wednesday night’s gig at “the Bean” (Campus Coffee Bean in Flagstaff) went well. I also learned a couple of things that surprised me a bit.

After a brief bout with the sound system (troubleshooting the vocal mic which wasn’t working properly), I got everything going and had a lot of fun with the gig. Three people I knew showed up and sat right in front, forming a sort of rooting section. It was great being able to play to them, as opposed to the other eight to ten people who were scattered through the room engrossed in their computers or conversations with friends.

Though small in size, I had an enthusiastic listening audience and I played it for all it was worth. They helped me do a little fine-tuning of the mix and gave some good feedback on repertoire and presentation, too. They even helped me carry all the gear out to the PT when it was over! Having friends in the audience (or perhaps I should say, as the audience) made the difficulties of playing as a solo disappear. That was the first lesson…

The second lesson was having their feedback on repertoire. Vocals are where it’s at, as far as they were concerned, with a few flashy flamencoish instrumentals mixed in between. The demographics of the group meant the 60’s songs and my political songs went over well, plus anything that was a contemporary folk/story song. A different group would change that some, but I had enough repertoire to target my song selection to what they were responding to and what I knew they would like. And, I’d have probably sold a CD, if I’d had one with my current solo material, as opposed to the older “Romanza” CD.

The third lesson came from observing my interactions with an interested group. I can’t help slipping into music teacher mode, I’m afraid. Two of my listeners were also guitarists, which I knew from the outset. My patter shifted on three different occasions to details about the music and its technique that I normally wouldn’t have mentioned. I really like relating the little historical details and flourishes about the tunes, their origins, and, especially, anything about flamenco.

All this has got me doing some further reflection on my goals and what I do best. I do like to teach and it pops out even when I don’t intend it to…I got into relating the history of the Irish recruiting songs (“Arthur McBride,” in particular) and couldn’t resist putting in my own contemporary political commentary. “Cold Missouri Waters” went over well, and it gave me the opportunity to talk about how the song is being used in wildland firefighter training. I had to stop myself from going too far into the esoterica of flamenco technique and forms when I played flamenco pieces. That little reminder voice: “You’re here to play the music, Ariel, not teach it.”

It’s all more grist for the mill, more information to process, as I keep refining my goals and correcting my course.

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Too, Too Much Fun

Too, too much fun! All of this focus on compás and rhythm improvement has had an unexpected payoff. I was practicing along on one of the pop tunes for my gig at the Campus Coffee Bean and a flamenco strum slipped in there. It was totally unconscious, and it worked. Cool!

A little while later, I was working some chords up the guitar neck on another tune and, just wondering what it would sound like, I substituted a discordant B chord that is common in flamenco, but rather unusual in a old folk-rock sort of piece. (Bar a B chord at the seventh fret, lift the bar, just placing the first finger on the sixth string, and leave the first two strings open.) That worked, too. Hey, this is fun.

Stuff is clicking in unexpected ways and I’m unconsciously developing a unique sound to my playing. That’s something rather new for a classical guitarist who always tried to play it the “right” way and rarely took any chances with her music.

It does make me wonder where all this is headed, though. How did that uptight, sweet, little paper-trained musician ever find the chutzpah to become a firefighter/EMT/skydiver/river rat, etc.? And now that the harum scarum risktaker has settled down (a bit), will her music get edgier? Seems to be going that direction, anyway.

Well, I’m off to finish loading up for the Campus Coffee Bean gig tonight…

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My Metronome is My Friend, My Metronome is…

Yes, indeed, my Mundobeat metronome has been getting a mean workout the last few days. With clarity in my goals has come a sure sense of what I need to do to reach them. Compás, compás, compás. I’ve been listening to the “Solo Compás” series of CDs (the Soleá in particular, but also to the Bulerías, and Alegrías) every day to ingrain the twelve-beat flamenco rhythms into my skull and my body. I’ve been counting along and tapping my feet. I don’t have the tongue clicks and palmas going yet, but I have charted out the different palmas, the straight rhythms and the contratiempos, and figure that will be a focal point over the next few weeks. I intend to make considerable improvement in my timing by my next lesson. I am determined to no longer be a “typical classical guitarist” with lousy rhythm.

My dance videos are only of Tangos and Sevillanas, so I don’t have a sense of the 12 beat rhythms as they would apply to the baile. That’s a goal for the future, though I suspect if I was further along in my dancing it would help me feel the beat in a much more visceral way. To that end, as silly as it might look to Elmo, I’ve been trying larger motor movements to the CDs as well. Whatever it takes to get the compás out of the gray matter and into my bones and blood.

In his video lesson series, Juan Martín states that you can be a good flamenco guitarist from the very beginning if you pay attention to two things – “compás” and “aire,” the pulse or hearbeat of the music and it’s breath or soul. I’m focusing on the compás, but the funny thing is that in the last few days, I feel that I’m also getting a better handle on “aire,” as if not having a firm grasp of the foundational rhythms was preventing me from getting to the deeper spirit of the music. That makes sense in a way. As usual, I come back to an emergency services metaphor – if the heart’s not beating, breathing isn’t going to be happening for too much longer, either!

Every once in a while it clicks, though. I’ve dropped back to the most elementary levels in Juan Martín’s series, far below what I have considered my normal playing ability, so that I could focus completely on rhythm – no technical challenges, no fancy stuff, just the bare bones of the most basic pieces. I’ve had particularly good luck with both compás and aire in the Tarantos, no doubt because it’s in 4/4 and has a very strong imagery component. In the video, you can practically hear the miners’ hammers striking rock in Martín’s guitar playing. Subtle is not what I need right now; I need “toque de las minas” hitting me over my rather hard head, beating out the compás until I get it right.

My metronome is my friend, my metronome is my friend, my metronome…

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My Time Management Stinks, and So Does My Compás

It’s three in the morning, again. I’m up, just like last night, trying to make progress on my music and writing. In the interim, I made a trip to Phoenix and back (300 miles round-trip, a looong drive) to squeeze in a guitar lesson. I did it on only about three hours sleep, so my concentration was less than stellar during my lesson. Lucky to have videotape… I probably should have just cancelled, but my teacher is going to be on vacation soon and I want to get a bit ahead for that. Besides, it’s part of a promise I made to myself recently to put the music first.

Compás, compás, compás. That’s my downfall lately, not just with my guitar, but life in general. Fuera compás. I seem to have stepped out of sync again, and am working to get back in rhythm. The good thing about the drive to Phoenix and back is that it has a way of clearing my head and bringing what’s really bothering me to the fore. That was certainly the case yesterday.

One thing that emerged very clearly was that my musical goals have been fuzzy at best. Yes, I’ve wanted to learn flamenco since I was a little kid, but that is still quite vague. What do you want to do, Ariel? Solo guitar? Accompany baile? Cante? How does any of this fit with the music I’ve done in the past? With the program I did at the Campus Coffee Bean two weeks ago? With what I want to do in the future? I’m putting considerable time, effort, and money into this venture… What, exactly, am I trying to accomplish? Do I even know?

These were all big questions that occupied my mind driving back up the hill to Flagstaff. It’s probably not a bad thing that I’m way behind where I wanted to be on my promo materials. This realization of my lack of clarity may well negate some of what I had planned. I was still trying to be too many different musicians…the old “Flagstaff shuffle” of play anything and everything to get whatever gig you can, which swiftly leads to mediocrity and encourages my dependency on sight-reading, among other things.

It stung a bit to realize just how much of a beginner I really am these days, how rusty, how out of step. The most important thing of all – to keep the heartbeat of the music going – and I was all over the place. Realizing that was probably the next biggest benefit of the lesson, beyond seeing my lack of focus. Reminded me of the old ambulance days, it did. It was like my teacher hooked up the twelve-lead and showed me the strip: cardiac arrhythmias. My timing stinks.

The safe thing, the easy thing, the usual thing for a has-been classical guitarist attempting to migrate to flamenco to do would be to fall back on the classical background, noodle around with lots of fancy falsetas and fake it. What I want to do is to take the harder path, to get really good at flamenco, accompany baile and cante well, to play in a band/ensemble. Then, the soloing will take care of itself. Time will tell if I’m really up for that journey.

All this thinking has made my head ache, so now it’s off to bed and then back to the practice corner in the morning, after a little sit on the zafu reflecting on all of this. Better yet, maybe I should get out the flamenco dance videos and move my sorry butt to the music. I seem to be able to find the beat with that just fine…

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Analog vs. Digital, Continued

Just for fun, here are a few of my old nature illustrations from back in the mid-eighties:

What a long, strange trip it’s been. I went from being an intern in the Exhibits department at the Museum of Arizona in Flagstaff, where I illustrated a show on cacti (where the Prickly Pear pen and ink drawing with watercolor washes originated), to doing jeep tours and working for a company in Phoenix that produced one-of-a-kind, hand-painted clothing. From there, it was back to the high country, where I got hired by a tiny startup producing interactive visitor information kiosks. They needed someone with artistic skills, but hadn’t had very good luck training geeks to be artists. They decided to find an artist and train her to be a geek.

It worked. I learned to design and program multimedia projects on Commodore Amigas, illustrating visitor guides using a palette of eight colors, four of which were reserved for the background, text and buttons. Everything was done with the most rudimentary of paint programs, using a mouse. The whole thing ended up in a free-standing kiosk with its own Amiga inside, operated by a visitor using a touchscreen.

The maximum screen resolution was 640 x 480 pixels. I look back at these, with no anti-aliasing, no PhotoShop text manipulation, nothing at all like what today’s beginner computer artist has at the flick of a stylus on a tablet, and realize they don’t look like much. For the early 1990’s, though, they were pretty cool.

Pieces from my ancient art portfolio, done for a now-defunct multimedia company…

It was a GREAT BIG DEAL when we went to a palette of 16 colors. I was ecstatic!

From there, it was on to Northern Arizona University, to work as a multimedia developer on educational software projects ranging from foreign language CD-ROMs for elementary school children (in HyperCard!) to very early web-based educational projects (mid-1990’s), like a Grand Canyon geology program for undergrads which utilized a website, companion CD-ROM, plus print materials. Does anyone still remember “Mosaic?” We were so excited when that came out.

Educational multimedia was great work, if you could stand the university bureaucracy. I couldn’t; I burned out. So what did I do? Started playing music again (the duo with the now ex-husband), then firefighting and EMTing, which is about as analog as you can get, and finally ended up back at a keyboard designing websites.

So here I am, with a checkered, and mostly out-of-date, résumé, unable to do the kind of hard, physical work I used to do, and back in love with music. I’ve got the old art tackle box out on my dining room table and artwork propped all over my living room. And, I’ve got a map, of sorts. It’s not quite as direct as dispatch saying, “Township 16N, Range 11E, Section 5, Northwest corner of the Southwest quadrant” and following the smoke, but I have this funny feeling it will eventually get me where I want to go.

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Stunned

I keep making oblique references to a “web of circumstance and connection” that, to me, is a powerful metaphor for the course and conduct of our lives. I’m definitely going to go a little further “out on a strand” in this post. For many years, and long before the advent of the Internet, I’ve worked with impressions of a “web” both in dreams and in various trance states. The impressions are generally either visual or a strange sort of kinesthetic sense, akin to a gut-level flutter of intuition or wordless knowing. There are times “the web” appears as the archetypal “Indra’s Net,” that mythical web of light across a field of stars, at other times it is a tangled, sticky, spider web of karma that I can’t seem to get free of or a pulsing web of information that reveals things past, present or future. Then, there are the times like today when it forms itself into a mandala-like pattern of such stunning beauty and mysterious chaotic order, that there is no response but awe and gratitude.

Something was up, I knew, when I didn’t go to bed until 5:30 this morning. I know good and well that I need to structure this weekend to be ready for several days of hard physical work surveying, starting tomorrow, and still have the Friday night gig ready. It all began with cutting myself a break, having milk and cookies and watching a DVD of “Michael” at 10 o’clock last night. Just what the maggid ordered – a fun little fluff and feel-good of a movie. “All You Need Is Love! Da, da, da, da, da.” Then I started surfing the Net looking for the lyrics to a couple of the songs from the soundtrack. One thing led to another and at three in the morning, from out of left field, all that stuff from my early twenties came pouring out in the previous post. Oh, I knew there were goings on in my unconscious, but I had sense enough to just roll with it.

I finally went to bed and got a few hours sleep. I got up, set about my morning routine, all the while composing another post in my head. I’d realized that a lot of my posts create an impression of me as a very scrappy person and I wanted to clarify that. I can be when necessary, but I’m really more of a lover than a fighter. I had to train myself to fight. The words of the Andy M. Stewart tune, “Lover’s Heart” kept running through my head:

“Now a soldier’s life won’t suit me,

Sweet music is my trade,

For I’d rather melt the hardest heart,

Than pierce it with a blade…”

Right on. I started thinking about the times I’ve fought and the times I’ve backed off, the times I’ve negotiated and the times I’ve run. There was a definite pattern. Back me into a corner on something I believe in, especially if others are in danger, and I will go down fighting. I will attempt reason and persuasion first, but don’t push me to the wall or you will have a knock-down-drag-out with a lioness on your hands. There is a reason for the name. But most times, I see it coming and can find a diplomatic solution or will choose to strategically shift the battle line. Somehow, it’s the handful of fights that have found their way into these posts. I suspect I needed to see the contrast and how I have gotten stronger over the years.

For I have folded before. And, I have run. In both cases, I can now see that it was a matter of survival, of living to fight again another a day. Or, more accurately, of living to be able to play music again another day. As I looked back, I really began to wonder how I ever made it through that time between 19 and 26 years of age. The religious confusion was the least of it. A lot of that was searching for some anchor in a world that to my twenty-something self appeared to be totally threatening and out of control. My dad’s stroke and lengthy recovery, a short-lived attempt at marriage with a religious fanatic, the deaths of both of my grandfathers – my life seemed to be one emotional upheaval after another. I kept studying classical guitar, teaching, and building my musical career. I was driven. Music was my anchor. But, underneath it all, the pressure was building.

To set the scene a little better: In 1977, I was living in southern California, where I’d grown up in a little town halfway between the coast with it’s surfers and wanna be yogis, and the inland town where the then current “Grand Dragon” of the Klu Klux Klan lived. (Gives dragons a bad name, that does.) It was a volatile time in a volatile place. The nearby marine base was processing Vietnamese refugees, the “boat people.” And, as San Diego County is on the U.S./Mexico border, illegal immigration is a perennial issue. I lived at a crossroads of growth and agriculture where the Mexican nationals that came across the border in search of work and a better life were pushed into “hobo jungles” in the little canyons wedged between the remaining tomato and strawberry fields and the burgeoning housing tracts. That sort of instability and diversity scares some people, though it’s really the inequities in station and situation that should be the concern.

I was a musician. I hung out with a lot of other musicians, of a wide variety of colors, outlooks and proclivities. Neither was I shy about my feminism. But, unbeknowst to me, one of my students was a klansman. And angry. And violent. (Hmm. I think I was a little redundant there.) I had a little run-in with him and two of his friends. I was lucky; I survived. Another student of mine and his wife, a Japanese American, had an encounter with some other members of that organization, and they were not so lucky. Their bodies were found dumped in a ditch. The murder of an ex-boyfriend was the last bit of violence I could stand. I headed for the hills. I left California to settle in Flagstaff. I let my music slide, telling myself that I was more interested in other things, not admitting the pain that lay underneath my choices.

Looking back, I can understand why I developed stage fright, why John Steinbeck is my hero, why I fled the California I loved and where four generations of my family had been born and raised. What is surprising to me, though, is that it has taken me so long to see something else. I came to the mountains to heal, and I have. I’ve also regained my music. That is what I saw today on the web – the long and winding road to this point of freedom, in all it’s stark pain and terrible beauty. No wonder I haven’t known where I was going…I didn’t understand where I’d been.

I’m still a little stunned by all of it, and quite thankful to be where I am now. It puts my recent trip to Monterey in a new perspective and why I had that funny feeling of wanting to go back to California. It makes a lot more sense of my posts It’s Not the Flames That Kill You and The Night Walk. It also puts the question of whether to sell my house or not into a whole other light. It doesn’t matter. I did what I came here to do. Now, I’m free to do whatever I want, whatever else lies further down that glimmering strand on the web of possibility.

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Song of the Outcasts

“Song of the Outcasts: An Introduction to Flamenco,” by Robin Totton and published by Amadeus Press, is a book/CD combination that gives a very helpful overview of flamenco. (Review by Federico Tovar on http://www.deflamenco.com) I’m learning a lot from it and was pleased to hear the number of cantaoras that are featured in it. In fact, I was so taken with one cut that I am trying to learn the guajira “Hermosisima cubana” as sung by Sensi Martos Tejera, with guitarist Carlos Zárate, from the CD.

There are quite a few others on the CD that I liked, but I decided to go with this one because Sensi is the first cantaora I have heard with a voice that is anything at all like mine. The full letras were available on the net, as well, and the same song (with different performers) is also on Saura’s “Flamenco,” which gives me more material to draw on, particularly since I can see some of the guitar playing on the DVD.

As I am learning from “The Cantaoras” by Chuse (related post), there are three classifications of voices in flamenco cante: voz affillá, the hoarse, rough voice I have always associated with flamenco; voz redonda, wide-ranging and full; and voz naturá, relaxed, natural and expressive. I am not quite clear yet on all the differences between the three, but I know mine is naturá, for sure.

It’s been both fun and frustrating to try and copy Sensi’s melismas. I’ve been working on it for three days and am only now beginning to get about a third of those vocal twists and turns. And that’s just the pitches and most basic rhythms. There’s a whole other world to explore in the tonal shifts, expressivity, and playing with the beat. I haven’t even begun to work on the guitar part, assuming that that will be the easy part. I want to nail the vocal first. This will be an ongoing project, of that I’m sure, but that is part of the fun. I don’t know if I’ll have it presentable for my lesson at the end of the month, but I’m hoping. I’d like to surprise my guitar teacher with it.

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