Irony
I’ve been writing for this blog for a few months now. But I’ll let you in on a little secret. I’ve actually been a journal-er, (not a journalist), for probably eight or nine years off and on.
I was talking to Jenn about music school the other night and it reminded me of the very first thing I ever wrote in a journal all those years ago. It’s amusing to me that I wrote about the following story to remind myself of the ironies that come up in life. As if I would ever forget. Buckle up kids, this is going to be a long ride.
I went to OU for music school my first two years in college. Even though I was a music education major, not, I repeat NOT a music performance major, I still had to take trumpet lessons and act like I really cared about things like embouchures, (how you form your lips) and mouthpieces and warm-up studies and all manner of academic hoo-hah. And all of us trumpet-playing music majors knew each other, obviously. There weren’t that many of us and we all studied with the same teacher, went to each others’ recitals, saw each other in classes, etc.
Now, I can honestly say I really liked about a handful of people I met in my whole music school experience. But there was one guy we all hated- an upperclassman named Ravi S. Rajan. Why did we hate him? Imagine the most pompous, arrogant, know-it-all, suck-up you’ve ever met in your life. Now give him a trumpet and an almost mystical sway over any music faculty with the power to give him a grade and you’ve just imagined someone only half as annoying as Ravi was.
To be fair, Ravi pretty much left me alone. I guess he saved his playing advice for people who weren’t lost causes. But I heard stories from my brothers in arms involving his doling out unasked-for criticism of tone and technique as if he was their guru teacher and not just a student with a couple years on us. And sure, he was a pretty good player and all, but what was so maddening was how the faculty held him up as some sort of great example, like some sort of golden calf. In their eyes he could do no wrong, which is why it was a given that any ensemble he auditioned for, he was in. He certainly had all of them fooled because the only thing we underclassmen learned from him was how to be an asshole. But I digress. Suffice it to say that Ravi was the Golden Boy of Trumpetland.
It was towards the end of my second year. I had probably already decided that I would be leaving that rotten school situation and was just coasting through the rest of the year. The time had come for Ravi’s big senior recital, where you play one of the two or three trumpet concerto chestnuts by Hummel, Haydn and then some contrasting piece and then a final showstopper of a piece before the audience, (usually comprised of other trumpet students), goes home having heard nothing they hadn’t heard hundreds of times before.
Well, Ravi’s recital was different. It felt like one of those gala Hollywood movie premieres. All the big names from the music department were there—faculty and staff and students. There was even a visiting Frenchman expert lecturer there, apparently tipped off that this was to be an evening of music-making of the highest order. And it certainly was well thought-out. To most people, that senior recital was an absolute chore, but Ravi planned it with some flair. Instead of the routine piano accompaniment for all the pieces, Ravi went ahead and paid a string quartet to play a fairly rare Eric Ewazen piece. So, the stage was set to show the true excellence that was possible after four years of training, given a student with such remarkable aptitude and God-given ability as Ravi.
The first piece went well, but from that point on, it was one of the most surreal hours I’ve ever known. Now is the point in my tale when his story turns a little Shakespearean.
Coming out of that horn were some of the most horrifically bad and yet, terrifyingly funny sounds I’ve ever heard come from an instrument wielded by someone this side of sixth grade band class. It was as if he hadn’t been working on those pieces over and over and over for the last semester or even for the last year. There were all sorts of dry-mouthed piccolo trumpet poots and squeaks that in my head today, sound like Harry Dunne on the toilet in Dumb and Dumber.
Oh, it was awful! In music school, you come to expect a certain level of performance at these things where, at the absolute least, the performer has all the notes under their fingers. Beyond that, as a student, you get to where you listen for musical expression and more sophisticated things like that. But not this night. There was nothing sophisticated about what I was hearing. It was all I could do to keep from laughing and crying: laughing at the absurd sounds and the teleological quenching of my jealousy for that kid, but crying at the revelation of my hard heart and my pleasure at the unbearable-ness of the awkward embarrassment. I remember watching the visiting Frenchman’s reaction with every botched passage and note. He winced and frowned like he was taking heavy gunfire.
And through it all, remarkably, Ravi acted cool and calm and unaffected, as if he couldn’t hear the sound of several dead composers rolling in their graves. During each extended rest, he stood there stone-faced, nose in the air like any good orchestral musician should.
…
And as I laid in bed that night, sleepless and excited at this newly discovered concept of justice in the universe, I realized that the recital probably put on display exactly what Ravi had practiced the most in his years there—maintaining airs. Amidst that utter failure of technique, that utter failure of musicality, that utter failure…he maintained the air that nothing was wrong. He had become an accomplished actor.
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So Much Depends
William Carlos Williams wrote a poem called “The Red Wheelbarrow” that simply says: “so much depends/ upon/ a red wheel / barrow/ glazed with rain/ water/ beside the white/ chickens.” You leave the poem wondering, “Well,
what exactly depends upon a red wheelbarrow?” In my mind, I imagine the wheelbarrow on a farm as an implement used to support a family and to grow food for a nation, or at least a part of a nation. I like the artistic technique of making something out of (seemingly) nothing-making mountains out of molehills. And requiring your reader to do some of the work involves them in the creative act. For, what is creativity if not making something out of nothing?
Also, in praise of the seemingly insignificant, I want to talk about language today. Here’s the deal, I think so much in language depends upon conceptions in our heads. I think words and speech are kind of tenuously connected to reality. Here’s the example I always think of when I consider how loosey-goosey language is. Compare the following two statements about my Grandpaw:
1) He lived a good life.
2) He lived the good life.
Obviously, there is only one word different in those two sentences. Now, in my conception, these two sentences are saying two different things. I would go so far as to say that, though they are only different by one word, they are actually saying the exact
opposite of each other.
For, in the first one, we’re probably talking about ethics and how my grandpaw behaved. He had a life that was healthy and rightly related with people. That’s what I think of when I hear the words “a good life.” However, contrasted with that is the phrase “the good life,” which, to me, is the stuff of those shows on VH1-The Fabulous life of (insert name of some celebrity) where they talk about how much money famous people spend on designer underwear and Kabbalah water. And in my conception of the world, these are two opposite scenarios-my grandpaw living the years of his life in a correct manner vs. my grandpaw sitting back on the island he owns with a yacht in the background, sipping the finest wines. But did you catch the surprising part? “A good life” vs. “The good life.” “The” vs. “A.” That’s a pretty big difference riding on two insignificant little words. So much depends upon them. I mean, what does the word “a” even mean? Can you define it?
But that’s only half the story, my friends. Language has a verbal component as well. Say those two sentences aloud. “He lived a good life,” vs. “He lived the good life.” If you speak like I do, the only difference between “the” and “a” is a barely perceptible “th”-sound. I guess it would be written “thuh” or “uh.” To me, this shows that in verbal communication, meaning is derived from much more than just the words we say. Inflection is obviously very important. And this has some consequences. If there is a connection between the words we say and reality, shouldn’t it be a 1:1 correspondence? One word per object or idea? But language is not that way.
Take, for instance, the idea of
contranyms-homophones whose two meaning are opposites of each other. The word “bound” can mean “moving” as in “bound for New York,” but it can also mean “prevented from moving,” as in “bound and gagged.”
The point of all this today? Eh, just to say that “so much depends” on what
we make of the words we say.
January 25th
My friends, today is a day of observance for me. It was 18 years ago today that my family moved to Oklahoma City from Savannah, Georgia. January 25, 1988. I think it was a singular event in my life. Sometimes I wonder how differently my life would have turned out if we had stayed there in the city of my birth. And of course, it’s unknowable. But I wonder, who would be my friends right now? What would I be doing for a living? Where would I be living? All of these questions are accompanied by a vague sadness. Something about looking back on childhood memories of people, places and things is accompanied by melancholy for me. Which is not to say that my childhood was bad. I was a pretty happy kid. Might have spent a tad too much time by myself. But I can’t complain.
Thomas Wolfe wrote “you can’t go home again,” and that has been my experience. Every time I go back to Savannah, (which is not often at all); I find that things are never quite as I remember them. The reality of the situation is that “home” doesn’t really exist anymore. It was the product of my perception until fifth grade when we moved. I’ve got a new “home” now.
Like I said, moving half way across the country can’t help but affect you. I’m pretty sure that from that point on, I became the quiet person I am still today. That first day of fifth grade with all new kids and all new everything was nerve-wracking to say the least. I can’t imagine being a parent and leaving your shy little kid to fend for himself for the day. That would break my heart.
Anyway, the details of that first day are locked away and I’ll probably never tell anyone about it. Some things I like to keep just for me.
I just got done reading Anne Lamott’s
Traveling Mercies, which may explain today’s wistfulness and soft underbelly.
The Kindness of Strangers
I think it’s amazing how complete strangers can sometimes affect you in lasting, profound ways.
Let us hearken back, shall we, to the times when I was a working stiff at the music store. For a while, when I first started working there, the store had a policy where you could hear anything in the store just by handing it to an employee. We would skillfully and quickly unwrap CDs and stick them in CD players for customers to sit and listen to on headphones. I always thought it was kind of like being a musical bartender. And just like in a bar people would come in on a Friday night for some diversion. They would sit down with a stack of CDs and not leave for hours. And it only got on my nerves when customers would sit there and shove a CD in my face without bothering to say a word to me. Now that I think about it that was not a good job for my faith in humanity. (It never occurred to me at the time that when we re-wrapped the CDs that people didn’t buy, we were selling “used” product at exorbitant “new” prices.) But I digress.
One day I was at the bar dishing out tunes for people and this one older African American gentleman with graying hair and smart clothing came up to me with a CD in his hand and before he could ask, I looked at the CD and said, “you need to hear that?”
Without missing a beat, he sat down and calmly told me, “We have very few needs in life. This is more of a want.”
I’m telling you, folks, I will not forget that comment or that guy for the rest of my days.
“We have very few needs in life.”
And he is nameless.
On Forming a High School Band
I was never in a high school garage band. The guys that were in bands in high school kind of scared me. They didn’t do well in school and didn’t seem to care about what they looked like. Most of all, I think they drank and went to parties.
So, I can’t speak authoritatively about the aesthetic concerns when forming a band when I was in high school. But I have been kind of amused when I talk to high school age people today about their bands. It seems that all artistic decisions when you’re that age come down to one important choice: does the lead vocalist sing or scream?
Like I said, I don’t know if that was the case when I was in high school over ten years ago. Today, a lot of your choices are made for you when forming a high school band: you will play some sort of hybrid between punk or emo, the balance in either direction being how you identify your “sound,” and you will play with distorted guitar sounds at
all times. Clean guitar is for wusses and Coldplay.
Ki-Adi-Mundi
As you may or may not know, I like words. I like thinking about words and their meanings, origins and development over time. I guess that all started when I took a vocabulary class in college. I remember it was either that or grammar. And I know this will shock some of you and your preconceptions of English majors, but I don’t really like grammar. I think it’s important, but I get no enjoyment from it.
I meant to tell all of you this a few weeks ago, but I forgot or got busy or something. My co-worker Aaron was trying to figure out what character all of his friends would be if we were part of the Star Wars universe. I said I wanted to be the Jedi with the white goatee. I always liked his wise, mystical, yet stern look. Well, Aaron looked up his name. It’s Ki-Adi-Mundi. So there you go.
“Mundi…I’ve seen that before. I think that’s Latin for ‘world,’” I thought to myself while in the bathroom. (Apparently, I do some of my best thinking in there.) And then, another word occurred to me—mundane. “Maybe ‘mundane’ comes from that root. Mundane, everyday things can be ‘worldly’ things.”
Well, I went to m-w.com and guess what? I was right!
So, underneath that word, there’s a whole subtext that could
possibly be going on—namely, a universe divided into at least two parts: “worldly” and “spiritual?” I can’t prove this last extension, but I’m going to be thinking about it. (By the way, wouldn’t a
universe divided in two be a
biverse?)
So, what Star Wars character would
you like to be?
And with that, I think I’ve purged all of the head-spinning musical revelations that I’ve encountered up until now. Everything else I’ve ever heard has been listened to with the likes of The Beatles, Steve Reich, Frank Zappa, Pink Floyd and King Crimson playing in the background of my head. I think it was Aaron Copland, (the composer, not the rock star), who said that we listen to new music with a set of expectations from previous experience. Well, until now I have been discussing the primary artists that form my set of expectations. From here on out, who knows what foolishness I can come up with to talk about? (That’s an awkward sentence.)
The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan
Please allow me one more indulgence in my relating influential artists and albums to you. There was one last album that slapped me upside the noggin, aesthetically-speaking while I was working at the music store: Bob Dylan’s
The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. At that point, I had heard the older, world-weary, gruff-voiced, bluesy Dylan singing in the dark on
Time Out of Mind.
The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan was only his second album, released in 1963, when he was a much younger man. I had heard of Dylan, kind of vaguely in my dad’s conversation here and there growing up and had kind of dismissed him as “parents’ music,” (kind of like I did before listening to The Beatles’
White Album the first time.) I have since come to the conclusion that we ignore the music of the past at our own aesthetic peril.
Can I explain to you the simple beauty of
Freewheelin’? I doubt it, but I’ll try. Coming at this album 40 years after its creation is quite a trip. You see, we live in a musical world of bells and whistles. There is no sound imaginable that can’t be created on a computer and reproduced and tweaked and futzed-with in all kinds of ways. Our musical technology these days allows us to build up great complex castles of sounds and instruments. I think around the time I first heard this album, Cher was on the radio with her robot-voice “Believe” song.
Contrast all of that with the sound of a single guy singing while playing an acoustic guitar- basically, a box of wood with metal strings stretched across it. And in 1963, there wasn’t such a thing as pitch-correction to make Dylan’s voice sound more agreeable. But man! Something about the organic-ness of the sounds on this album made me feel human again. I can hear the grime on the strings, the capo squeaking, the pick striking…It’s such a warm, inviting, REAL sound, like being in the same room.
And what’s interesting to me is to see how far Dylan came from this album to
Time Out of Mind. Obviously, he plugged in at some point, which made people mad. He discovered another simplicity of form separate from the folk music of his hero, Woody Guthrie: that of the twelve-bar blues. He became less a spokesman for a generation of politically disaffected folks, and more a spokesman for himself and the Bob Dylan that hides in all of us. But that’s just the difference between only those two albums. He’s covered a lot of space in between.
It’s not very theoretically sound or “critical method”-savvy for me to say so, but the songs on this album are just hypnotic to me. Plenty of people have talked about Dylan’s social-consciousness and speaking for a generation and all of that. And while I’m interested in these things, I’m just trying to elucidate for you the magic of the sounds and songs on this album. It’s like archaeology hearing this stuff for the first time. When someone digs up the remains of a vase or something in Egypt, they learn a little bit more about life thousands of years ago, but they also have to be simultaneously reminded of where civilization has come since then.
On this particular album you’ve got the social commentary in songs like “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Masters of War,” and “Oxford Town,” unfortunately still relevant and resonant today. You’ve got real poetic metaphor and imagery in songs like “Girl from the North Country” and “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” and a little bit of humor in songs like “Talking World War III Blues” and “Honey Just Allow Me One More Chance,” not to mention the broken-heart cure “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Allright.” It’s actually a pretty varied album, content-wise, but there is definitely an overall vibe to this album that is just so listenable.
Now, let me tell you why I think there is some magic in these sounds: I don’t even usually
like music this simple. A guy and a guitar or a girl and a guitar usually gets boring quick for me. I guess I’m just not sensitive enough or not paying enough attention or paying too much attention. Who knows?
But this album is somehow one of my favorites. It’s been with me driving up and down and around mountains in Yosemite National Park with the windows down and sunroof open to the crisp mountain air. It’s been with me driving down the coast of Northern California in the Redwood Forest in the cool morning when the fog comes rolling up the mountainside from the ocean and gets stuck amidst the trees and their long shadows. This album has kept me company like a friend who only says what I want to hear in the loneliness of Laramie, Wyoming nowhere. Obviously, it’s some of the best traveling music I’ve ever heard, but it also makes you want to sit down at a small table in a small, drafty urban apartment and read poetry to soothe your aching soul.
Man, you guys.
Soooo busy at work lately.
I promise I haven't forgotten about you, my lovelies.
Love,
Mike
Op Zop Too Wah
All right. So, I’ve taken a little break from all of the “influential artists/ albums” talk, but I’ve still got a couple I want to tell you guys about.
So, when I was working at the music store, trudging through some bad times, Adrian Belew, the singer for King Crimson, (for which I had already fallen), released an album called
Op Zop Too Wah. It wasn’t his first solo record, but it was my introduction to his solo stuff. I knew beforehand that Belew was an incredibly talented guitar player, but this album displayed his pop songwriting sensibilities that were kind of understated with his work in the ultra-technical King Crimson.
Belew was influenced by the Beatles’ songwriting and you can hear it in a lot of his melodies and I think his voice has never sounded better than on this album. I was also intrigued by the fact that he plays just about all of the instruments on his albums. One song in particular that blew my mind was called “I Remember How to Forget.” This was a polyrhythmic song, (meaning it was in at least a couple time signatures at the same time), a technique I first heard with Frank Zappa. I can still hear it in my head: the drum part during the entire song is in 6/8, and during the verses, he sings and plays 4/4 over that and then during the choruses, it’s 5/8 over the 6/8 drum beat. Pretty heady stuff, in theory, but it still managed to
sound like straight-ahead rock, somehow.
I also liked the catchy song “Something to Do” quite a bit. Here are the lyrics:
Something To DoTry to lose your attitude, put it in your bootsor stick it where the sun doesn't shinetry to have a good time, it's something to doI read a good book, buy a pair of shoesmaybe I'm a strange kinda dudebut, hey, maybe it's you, it's something to doI understand unhappinessan excellent plan for a martyr to havebut what is the sense of having regretsit's only just a waste of timeI look at the sky, I walk in the yardstudy little birds with binocularsso, call me a nerd, it's something to doTry a day in the park, play in the dirtor go to the mall if that's what blows up your skirtwhat can it hurt?it's something to doSo, this album is pretty evenly split between hard-charging rock songs, straight-up pop songs, beautifully layered slow songs, and crazy experimental guitar stuff. And another cool thing about the album is the fact that most of the songs segue into each other to make it seem like a cohesive piece of art and not just a collection of songs. This is still one of my favorite albums of all time and it goes on every long road trip with me for cranking during that difficult last hour on the way back.
This is yet another album that I highly recommend, especially for any of you guitar players out there.
When's the New Album Coming Out?
Well, well, well, my lovelies.
I write this little missive today while listening to the final mixes of the forthcoming Grandpa Griffith album entitled
Electric Scooter Holiday Blowout and I must say that I’m quite pleased with this stuff. I’m excited for everyone to get to hear a “best-case scenario” of some of the stuff they’ve heard live for a while as well as some of the little surprises that no one, (or very few) have been privy to.
And of course, listening to this music takes me back to the four days of recording, which were really more like a vacation in Dallas. Just hanging out and
creating amidst a bunch of high tech gear with a producer who seemed to be more excited about our ideas than we were---well, I must say it was probably the best week in my life as a musician.
So, folks, we are one major step closer to the release of the album! We’ve only got mastering and duplication left. I often encounter blank stares when I talk about this process, so let me explain a little bit how it all works.
During the week that we were at the studio, we did what’s called “tracking,” putting down the original parts one at a time, mostly starting with the drums, then the bass and then adding everything on top of that. At the end of this step, all of the instruments are isolated on their own tracks.
The “mixing” process is just adjusting the levels between instruments and vocals and adding effects like delays and reverbs. The result of this process is a 2-track mix of every song that is pretty darn close to a finished product, sound-wise. We are just now done with that part and I think our guy did a wonderful job of mixing to emphasize important stuff and de-emphasize the stuff that should be felt but not necessarily heard. In my opinion, mixing can be as much a creative art as writing the songs.
Then, in “mastering,” final touches are put onto the record. All of the songs are brought up to the same volume and final EQ fixes are made so as to sound as pleasant on the ears as possible. [Did you know that there is a bit of a battle in the music industry involving the mastering process? There are specialty engineers who get paid to only do mastering for projects and they are constantly feeling pressure from artists and record companies to make records as “loud” as possible to compete with what else is on the radio. Unfortunately, in most cases, to make a record as loud as possible requires the engineer to ruin the dynamics and overall sound quality. So, a song that starts with just a voice and acoustic guitar would be just as loud as when the whole band is supposed to come crashing in. This is how dynamics are ruined. Sound quality is usually affected by the introduction of distorted artifacts. Distortion is the sound of rock n’ roll guitar. Not necessarily the sound of vocals. So, in many, many cases, mastering engineers, who used to be known for their “golden ears,” are now forced to “ruin” the sound of records, if they want to make a living, that is. If any of this tech talk interests you, (Ryan), go
here.] Anyway, the result of this process is a master, the sound recording from which copies are made.
And the final part of the process is “duplication”-making a bunch of copies and printing artwork.
And of that whole process, the first two steps usually prove to be the most time-consuming.
So, hopefully, it won’t be long, my friends!
Individual Vs. Society
I was reading on
Sweet T’s blog about her humorous account of not being able to distinguish between the girls in her classes because they all look alike and it got me to thinking. The last philosophy book I read,
Archetypes of Wisdom, I think it was called, by Douglas Soccio, said that this has been the trend throughout history. He said that society places great pressure on people to all become clones and conform. And I remember the picture that supported it-Britney Spears standing next to Christina Aguilera at some awards show and they might as well have been twins. Individualism is supposedly a thing of the past, he said, and then talked about Kierkegaard’s determination to be an individual.
This all gives me pause today.
1) I’m tempted to say that pop culture and the entertainment media force these images on us: “The Fabulous Life Of…” and pretty much anything on the E! Channel. I’m tempted to say that all of these shows would have us conform to their standards of beauty and success by making us feel bad about our current circumstances. But I think what’s more subversive is advertisers’ attempt to tap into this vestigial idea of “individualism” to sell you something you probably don’t need. I’m thinking in particular of some of the iPod and Napster ads of recent history- where some hip, cartoonish character that looks nothing like I do is shown dancing their way down the street, grooving to THEIR music. The subtext is that, if you buy this product, you will be “expressing your individual tastes.” When in actuality, if you buy their product nothing more than a simple exchange has occurred: your money for their product. But if these manufacturers’ dreams were fulfilled, the result would be a world of clones using their product.
2) I’ve always been told that America is a country of “radical individualists.” We supposedly love the archetype of the cowboy. We supposedly view ourselves as choosers. But Sweet T’s blog today makes me wonder. But are 17-year-old girls the place to look for America’s identity values? Probably not, but I think they might be an excellent reflection of what is being pushed onto all of us.
3) I wonder if the pressure to conform extends into areas other than just how you look or what you buy. Are we pressured to even think a certain way? I’ve always thought that sounded a little paranoid, that we are even dictated how to think. But I guess if our “values” are dictated to us, it would follow that our thoughts are not safe. And of course, standards of behavior are not always of our choosing. We are free to act however we wish in public, but we are not free from the consequences: the horrified looks, resulting fisticuffs, or a night in jail.
4) All of this talk reminds me of Nietzsche’s Übermensch-the “super man” who rises above all of the ordinary and is irresistible, compelling and powerful. Do we have an “Übermensch” today?
That’s enough musing for today. Thanks,
Sweet T, for the mental exercise.
The Sanctity of Conversation
You know, something has occurred to me as of late. I wasn’t born here in Oklahoma. I was born in the Deep South-- Savannah, Georgia and lived there until I was in fifth grade. That’s not was has occurred to me. What
has occurred to me is one area in which I doubt I’ll ever feel “at home” here. Namely, how Oklahomans do conversation around other people.
Let me start by saying one of my huge pet peeves is when people talk to me when I’m on the phone with someone else. It strains my nerves- something about sensory overload. I see myself as one person who can only devote attention to one thing at a time. I would hope that if I’m ever talking to you in person, that you appreciate that my complete focus is on you. To me, that’s just common courtesy. If someone’s going to the trouble of communicating something to me, I, as a listener, should make him or her feel important. I’m pretty sure I learned this from my parents but I’m starting to think that it might be a regional difference of cultures. And I’m finding out that what I thought was “common courtesy” is actually “uncommon.”
I’m noticing more and more a nasty tendency of some people to interrupt me when I’m
clearly engaged in conversation with another person. This goes against everything I’ve ever known. You see, in my book, when you see two people talking, you approach them, stay at a little bit of a distance, and
wait to be acknowledged by one of the conversants. This displays a certain amount of humility in a person, to be able to wait. You don’t make yourself a butt-inski and begin talking to one of the people about something totally unrelated. And if you can tell from a distance that these two people are engaged in something more pressing than idle chitchat, move along. For contrary to what might be in your head, whatever it is that you have to say is not so important that it can’t wait.
Now, I say that this might be a regional phenomenon because I never had this problem when I was a kid growing up in Savannah. And I know what you’re probably thinking, it’s happened my whole life and I’m just now realizing it. That could very well be. And I hope for the sake of Oklahomans that it is true. Otherwise, the children I talked to when I was a kid in Georgia were more adept at polite conversation than some of the adults I know now. But the people of the south
do have a reputation for being laid-back and courteous…
So, if it really is a regional phenomenon that people from the Deep South respect the sanctity of polite conversation more than people here in Oklahoma, what is the cause? I wonder. Put on your thinking caps, people. I’ll expect an answer in my box no later than 3:00 today.
So, all of you interrupters out there, you know who you are. Maybe you ought to make a little resolution for the New Year. Something along the lines of:
“I resolve in the New Year to not interrupt Mike when he’s trying to hold a conversation with someone else. God knows it’s hard enough for him already. I resolve to wait my turn.”
As a side note, at the end of my senior year in high school I was nominated for the award “Most Polite.” And I would have won it too, if it weren’t for that bastard Kareem Graham.
For a Good Time...
...
Come see Grandpa Griffith at Galileo's this Friday night 1/6/06.It's terribly busy up here at work today, leaving me very little time to compose, so I thought I would leave you a little behind-the-scenes nicety. Here is the self-promoting manifesto I wrote a couple years ago to give our press kit a little beefing up. (You can tell its age based on the albums I was listening to.)
The Grandpa Griffith Manifesto
If you buy one album this year, it should be Fountains of Wayne’s
Welcome Interstate Managers. If you buy two albums this year, you should also pick up Sixpence None the Richer’s
Divine Discontent now, since you probably didn’t when it came out. If you’re looking for a third album to round out your collection, may I suggest the Grandpa Griffith album
Jay? It’s loaded with thirteen tracks of insanely catchy songs that run the gamut of genres, from pop to pap, rock to schlock. Interestingly, the band’s overall aesthetic transcends genre classification by being hyper-inclusive. Never mind the kitchen sink, this band indeed throws it all in there, including the pipes that connect to the kitchen sink.
And did I mention it’s catchy? These boys must lock themselves into some secret underground lab with white coats and test tubes, analyzing the music of the last two hundred years- performing normative studies on the relationships between melody, harmony, tempo, key, theme and “attitude,” to come up with some of this stuff.
Now, some sucka MCs might front on the band and try to pigeonhole them as some kind of novelty act along the lines of Ray Stevens or Weird Al. To that, they would probably say, “Sure. But we’re also The Beatles’ ‘Yellow Submarine.’ We’re Queen’s ‘Bicycle Race.’ We’re Elton John’s ‘Crocodile Rock.’ We exalt the laughable absurdity of rock and roll in particular and pop music in general.”
Grandpa Griffith creates music in expectation of a hidden pop culture kingdom that is yet to come. Unlike the revered Martin Luther King, Jr.; there are no sweet dreams for these boys, for they are kept up at night with a plaguing vision of what could be—a vision of a popular culture where the pretty people sit on the bench. The moaning mass of the consuming public is no longer kept down by the hopeless chains and anchors of the glossy, flashy music industry-which feeds them food which does not satiate.
Oh, it’s a glorious kingdom, my brothers and sisters- a kingdom where you’re allowed to laugh at the pompous sneers of chest-beating nihilists and self-important indie-rock poseurs who mope their way to the bank and violently split up the spoils of the pillaged working man’s hard-earned money like so many hungry, cannibal-jackals. No longer are you forced to stare blankly at the countless magazine covers around the world that advertise the youthful, plastic-faced “entertainers” of the day, the puppets of the horrible trend-producing machine, and hopelessly wish that you looked like them.
This band of visionaries works diligently to bring about this new culture of, (dare I say the F-word?) FUN. Gasp! Shriek! Oh, the horror!
Indeed, they are determined to make you remember the last time you laughed at something other than your fellow man’s misfortunes.
But make no mistake, this fun stuff is serious business. That’s why they are committed to delivering their message to as many as will listen-by recording their music onto compact discs and performing said music in public-in front of crowds of people, no less!
Prepare ye the way for the Grandpa! Make straight the paths!
For they are ushering in the new kingdom!
Viva la revolucion!
Copyright 2003 Michael Stutzman
