A Little Tea Music (03/11/10): I try to get out of the house in the morning so I don't fall asleep and wake up at 3:30 when my daughter gets home from school. Usually I take my laptop to one wi-fi cafe or another, the Asana tea room in downtown Santa Cruz being my top choice because it's mellow and the house music is always interesting. This week, however, it has been very interesting. Today it's Coltrane's A Love Supreme. Yesterday it was The Complete Bitches Brew Sessions. I'm surprised people weren't just showing up, grabbing a chai and making a run for it. I personally couldn't concentrate on anything besides the music. And it's still tough right now with Trane wailing on his tenor. You can't sit back and ignore a masterpiece like this. Either you love it or you hate it. I swear by it.
What was bizarre is that when I picked up my chocolate chip scone and took off for the bus after about an hour of Acid Miles yesterday, the scone tasted like chocolate cheese. I thought I might be hallucinating, but then I realized it had been mingling in the same case as the cheddar & chive scones. Not really a combination I'd recommend. But they're still mingling together here today if you're feeling adventurous.
The Butcher (03/09/10): OK, I admit it. During my most recent job I actually started pulling parts from my own piano to repair the one I was working on. A broken wood/plastic hammer, a dead #72 generator assembly. And since my piano has been torn apart for months, maybe even years now, it was simple enough. I'm not sure whether to feel a sense of guilt or accomplishment, since I know how to replace the parts I swapped out and where to find them. I just didn't have the time to order them. I guess that's tech life. Detachment.
Detachment (02/22/10): As you may know by my references to the Swamis, Ganesha, etc. in the past, I'm into a lot of that Hindu stuff, despite the fact that I was born on the other side of the planet from India. I recently had a reading with a Vedic Astrologer who showed on my chart that I am actually an Aquarius according to Indian moon cycles, not a Scorpio, and that the best places for me to live are along a meridian crossing Seattle, Hawaii and New Zealand. But he also said that moving is not in the chart right now. Which is strange, because I seem to move a lot, but I don't really feel like moving either. The yearly trip to Maui is enough for me.
Taking my chart with me, I showed it to my wife, who got very interested in it. She's the one who put me up to the reading in the first place, after all. And now that we had this information and were totally confused, I went out and bought a book with a CD-ROM containing basic software that does the charting for Western idiots who have no idea what they're doing. We run her chart and find out that she's a real Pisces. Whew. Then we start reading the book (which is what I spent the money on, right?) and found that her energy center is in the Northeast US. Where we moved 4 years ago, and where we're probably moving again this year. "Probably", he writes. LOL.
So when you have a satguru and she is in India most of the time, you rely on her swamis to visit and pass along words of encouragement, tell you about their experiences, and give you their own insights. One swami stopped in on his way back to India from Haiti to give his report to our local ashram, and the concrete conversation headed toward the abstract, as you can imagine with Eastern philosophies like Hinduism and Buddhism. And it landed on the recurring theme: detachment. As the Hokey Pokey says, that's what it's all about. So how the hell are people like us who attach ourselves to our pianos supposed to detach as musicians?????? This is something I still haven't fully come to understand.
But as I look at my future, moving from one small condo to the next as my family tends to do, sometimes at distances of hundreds to thousands of miles, I realize that there's nothing practical about actually remaining attached to a single piano. And as I periodically work on pianos in this side business of mine, I receive the gratification of experiencing "the real thing" while I battle with simulators in my music production projects. But let's face it. Nobody knows the difference in the mix beside Rhodes players.
So this is the week The Big Rhodes becomes The Parts Rhodes, and The Little Rhodes is placed on the horizon as The Big Experiment. I expect to be pulling a hammer out for the piano I'm repairing right now, then disassembling the whole thing into a neatly organized and much more portable stockpile of very nice parts. Almost all of the piano's tone generators are already in a box, so I've got a head start there. And the tonebar mounting springs are bagged and ready to go. I was moving in the right direction all along.
Friends (01/25/10): I have officially adopted TweetDeck as my communication platform tonight after noticing that several professional friends seem to be using it to save time in their lives, which I could definitely stand to do. If anybody out there hasn't already found me, here I am:
The old restoration project is still on hold but also still on the list, with plans to a) install the Vintage Vibe Miracle Mod and b) refinish the entire cabinet as the next 2 big steps. This of course means pulling it out of the closet again, but the convenient thing about the Miracle Mod is that I can remove all the keys from the piano without actually having to move the piano itself in order to do the work. I'll put this thing back together one small step at a time if I need to. At the moment I'm being paid to work on somebody else's piano, though, so you have to set your priorities. His definitely needs more help than mine....
Effort (01/02/10): We spent New Year's Eve at the local Hindu ashram this year, celebrating with the Swamis chanting in Sanskrit, hours of music, and brownies from the bake sale upstairs. One thing everybody was invited to do was to "pick a card" from a bowl full of cardboard hearts, each of which had one word and an Indian symbol on it. I believe the idea was that the word is a message to set your intention for the New Year, or maybe a vision for it. My little girl found "Delight", and my wife's was "Forgiveness". As for me, I got "Effort". It might as well have said "Slack-Ass". The interesting thing about the card is that unlike most others, it was worn around the edges, as if several people had picked it before and thrown it back in. I was the one who kept it. As a reminder.
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