Answer # 47 - A Flapper and a Screamer

A friend's father posited this concept to him, upon his graduation from college:

"Son, there are two types of people in the world - when they jump off a cliff - there are either Flappers or Screamers.  You need to ask yourself, son, are you a Flapper or a Screamer?"

Consider this:  You're standing on the edge of a cliff.  You jump off.  The question is then

Are you a Flapper or a Screamer?

"What the hell was that supposed to mean?!" my friend asked, baffled, aghast.. baffled.

"I..er..."

"I mean, what the hell? Why'd my father ask me that? Why would I be jumping off a cliff?  Is he expecting that I'll be jumping off a cliff? And what damn difference would it make if I flapped or screamed?!"

Adventure Boy and I discussed later.

"I'm a Flapper," I said.  "Definitely a Flapper."

Looking aghast and then bemused, Adventure Boy said, 'You, my dear, are a Screamer.  You are definitely a Screamer."

"I'm am so NOT a Screamer!  I'm a Flapper!  I'd Flap!"

"You'd scream."

"I'd flap!  Possibly I'd scream while I flapped, but there would be flappage!"

He went back to reading.  The book about the guys who did the first winter ascent of Mt. McKinley (Denali) in the dead of winter.  It's his favorite (Minus 148 degrees. Yep.).  He met Dave Johnston, one of the guys on that expedition when we played on Whole Wheat Radio in Talkeetna, as has been enamored since.
Because he's Adventure Boy, he'd do something as insane as climbing a snow-covered iceberg in the middle of winter, with the looming possibility of perilous doom with every pick of the ice ax or whatever the hell you climb with. 

But he's not worried - not of falling thousands of feet to a squishy death - nope!  Because he's a Flapper!  We both know he's a Flapper.  He'd probably flap hard enough to fly.

But I'd flap, too.  I swear, I'd flap.  [Screaming the whole merry way].

Answer #46 - Right. I'd definitely rather be Right.

"It's supposed to snow tonight," I say to Adventure Boy.

"No - there's nothing on the radar."

"But, the lady with the annoying accent on the weather channel just said the weekend's going to be ice, snow, rain, ice, and - tonight, snow," I insist.

"Nope, I just looked at the radar. Nothing." says Adventure Boy, sure of his position in all things meteorological.

(Alarm Rings)

I wake up to new snow on the road outside my window.

"Just a dusting," says Adventure Boy.

"But snow, nonetheless," I chide, sure of my position in all things, period.

"Not snow of any consequence," he assures me.

"Ah, but still, there is powdery white stuff on the car, that is most definitely snow, which I did indicate would be falling."

"Will you be making coffee anytime soon or should I?" he asks, attempting to divert me from verification of my rightness.

"Well, I'd be happy to make the coffee after I go brush the snow off the windshield."

"There's no need," he states, assuredly.

"Oh no, I'd be happy to brush the snow off the windshield.  I'd hate for it to become a hard layer once the ice starts falling."

"No ice is going to fall.  There's nothing on the radar," he says, as he fills the coffee carafe with water.

So I smile, in victory, knowing full well that ice will fall sometime today or tonight, whilst getting my coat and boots on to go brush the snow off the windshield - where he'll be able to see me, clearly, through the kitchen window. Brushing snow off the car, that is.  Though, admittedly, once I get out there, it's cold and I've forgotten to put on gloves, and Adventure Boy is in the warm house, reading email, but I've won, you see, because, AH-HA! there is TOO snow on the windshield, and I know this because my fingers are blue-ish.  But I win!  Because I was right!  And at this point he may be inside drinking a warm cup of coffee and probably he's reading the NY Times on-line while I brush the snow off the car and the dog - and now I can't feel the tip of my nose - but you know what, I was RIGHT!  And there WILL be ice, mark my words!

Would you rather be right, or be happy?, my mother asked me once.


Ha! I win.

Answer # 45 - The Team with the Most Money

Web web web.  It's where we live now.

What's your URL?  Are you on Facebook?  Tweet what you're doing and I'll meet you.  Text me when you get home...

We're narrating our lives now, like I'm narrating my life now.  Soon I'll be leaving the desk and walking into the kitchen, where I may or may not remember why I went in, and then I'll maybe look in the refrigerator and see what's in there, opting not to eat anything because I'm not so much hungry as I am distracted and looking for a nice piece of cheese to tether me to the Earth.

Then I'll pace room to room for a while, trying to draw from the cluttery chaos of my brain exactly what I promised people I'd do today and whether it's conceivable that I can.  Why I promised is rarely taken into consideration because I just don't have that kind of recall.

Tonight, on the other hand, I'm going to try to go to North High, because the kids in the orchestra are protesting at the MCCSC Board Meeting - the man who ascended to the governorship of Indiana has taken it upon himself to ensure that Indiana's rank in the lower echelons of national education stats remains solid by cutting so much money out of education that our heads are spinning. 



He boasts 'money in the coffers.'  Maybe because he's cut so many of our social services and has sold an unnecessary highway renovation to a multinational corporation, and now we'll pay Spain and Australia to drive our new toll road!  Surely he didn't personally make money off that deal.  But it does beg the question -

Who do we root for at World Cup time?!



I guess it can't be the U.S.  But MITCH is going to bring jobs with his coffer money.  All of the jobs akin to shucking fries at MacDonalds, but then again, that's all the workforce will be qualified to do with the education Indiana will soon be providing its children.  So it all works out.



In the narrative of my life, I'm pissed off today.  But proud of the North High Orchestra - and proud of my town for fighting back.

Still can't remember why I walked into the kitchen.

I'll tweet you when I do.

Answer #44 - Art. It's what's for dinner.

I was at Won Sook Kim's house last night.  She's a friend.  She's a painter - the kind of painter that creates a wormhole in space, of sorts, directly to some other universe.  I'll be honest, I just can't stand 'artspeak', and I'm not good at it, so screw it, it's a wormhole, and if that means transcendence, then fine, it's transcendent.  But I can't adequately discuss her brush strokes or the character of the light... I only know that I disappear into her canvases and her world while I'm there, and when I leave, I'm incrementally better than I was when I arrived.

I'm not the first writer to be inspired by her work.  She's got books of poetry on the shelves inspired by her paintings, utlizing her paintings as illustration, etc.



She herself was influenced in a series of paintings by Composer Robert Schumann's Waldszenen (Forest Scenes), which then inspired the piano performance of the work by her sister, soloist Won Mi Kim.



And, of course, she's inspired me - more than once, but most recently in a choral piece for 6 women, based on and titled after a relief sculpture she did called Bending Tree. I'll put it on-line someday...(I will).

I'm influenced by painters, once in a while.  I'm lucky enough to know Won Sook, in person and to be able to be inspired by her on a regular basis - but others long gone can hold sway: Breugel's Icarus (combined w/Auden's Musee Des Beaux Arts) led me to a song


which led Arbutus Cunningham to a story. 

and which led artist Edward Bernstein to a print sculpture

All four pieces entitled 'Icarus.'

So the crux of the biscuit, or rather, the wax in the wing is?

Look around.  It's everywhere.  Art, that is.  The reasons for making it, appreciating it, hating it, loving it... art breeds art - and it's a wormhole to another universe at times - and maybe a key to our human evolution.  Getting caught up in the pretention of what some people can make of it is a bloody waste of time, and an evolutionary dead end.


It's the best of what we are and  maybe our greatest hope. 

 
That and really powerful antibiotics.  But you get the idea.

Answer #43 - D-Minor, the Saddest of all Keys

"Do you think Chocolate Paper Suites is your darkest album to date?", asked the journalist yesterday.

"Uh.. no."

Well, I don't.  I don't think it's particularly dark.  I didn't think Mudshow was, either.

Dark.  Hm...

I don't even think there's a single song that's consistently in minor - although the only one that does cross over into a minor key does, in fact, cross into D-minor, the saddest of all keys.

This may be why the question was asked... But I could argue - "Yeah, it's in D-minor - just the one song - but it's in 5/4! And Surely that makes up for the devastating darkness of D!  Lots of colorful imagery - oranges falling like rain, scarecrows with brambleberry eyes full of butterflies...

From terraces of bone and purple cobblestone, 
the waltzing angels wish on coins and silverfish!"

What's dark about that? There are waltzing angels for God's sake!

Here's dark: 

ERE you but lying cold and dead,

And lights were paling out of the West,

You would come hither, and bend your head,

And I would lay my head on your breast

And you would murmur tender words,

Forgiving me, because you were dead - William Butler Yeats

I could have said.  

 

But I didn't.  I never do until the next day, when I replay the whole event in my head and the reporter isn't on the phone, but rather, is wearing a zoot suit and I'm wearing a feather boa and playing in a piano bar, with one of those long cigarette holders.  And I'm quippy.  God, am I quippy in that boa with a glass of warm bourbon in my hand...

 

Anyway - point is,  

 

What is the fine line that separates a 'dark' song from a 'light' song?

Clearly it's not the color of the key, unless of course that key is D-Minor.  It must have something to do with oranges.  Or possibly humans.  Is it possible that an element of darkness finds its way into a song when humans are involved in the song somehow...?

I'll have to think on this.  In the meanwhile, I'll stay away from D-Minor. And possibly oranges.

 

 

.

Answer #42 - Laissez les bon temps roulez

I lived in Monroe, Louisiana for a time...a while ago.

For a time I drank sweet tea, ate etouffee on a regular basis, traveled back and forth to New Orleans, learned to make a roux and gained an appreciation for Flannery O'Connor that remains unparalleled. I smoked cigarettes on porches in Adirondack chairs and sipped bourbon & crushed mint on ice. It was steamier than anyplace I've ever lived, outside of Seoul.

 And every other house was haunted.  Including mine.

   I also ate more than one of these - King Cakes, that is. It's a  sweet bread/cake with sugar icing and always purple, yellow  and green coloring.  Mardi Gras tradition.  A pink plastic baby is buried in the dough.  It's good luck to get the piece of cake with the little nubbin in it.  The whole concoction is visually surreal and the baby is really just the hard little plastic metaphor for the whole heart of the thing - somewhere, deep in the Mardi Gras memory is the taste of blood, sacrifice - and  

what better way to express our humanity than chomping on a plastic baby?

I know, I know - this is morbid.  And I don't condone chomping on plastic babies, except this time of year, or any other time of year you may be in the vicinity of beautiful NOLA, but the point is, we lost our Pagan sensitibilities some years ago - most likely because, as is our human tendency, the Pagans probably carried the whole 'sacrifice' thing a bit too far, and, after a while, every holiday is a reason for a little blood-letting, and well, the inherent complications are obvious.  Not to mention shortage of virgins.

But oh, something calls from the way back, way back, doesn't it, as my friend Arbutus says?  Something deep in the dark dark memory that whispers to us to dance around those fires, pound on drums, skirt the edges of civilization and roam the woods with abandon, sweaty and wild, eyes fixed on the moon.

In the company of ghosts.  I spent much of my Louisiana time in the company of ghosts, all manner of ghosts.  The song 'The Ghosts of Peach Street' came from that time.  Characters lived and breathed and died in Louisiana that I could never call out of the air.  I spent time in abandoned houses, on the bayous, on the water and surrounded by music nearly every night.  Most of it dark... some of it joyous - but all of it with the knowing of things unseen, and generally unspoken.  I said, at the time, that the Mississippi Delta hung on me like a wet wool overcoat.  Because I wasn't cut out for those blues, and you should know where you are.

But, oh, Mardi Gras!  Now there was a time! Stories were told of Mardi Gras in Sunset, LA - where the men of the town got drunk early in the morning and stole chickens on horseback.  The townsfolk left the chickens out eventually, because otherwise the drunken men would trash the barns and the yards in search of chickens to steal.  In the end, all chickens were brought to the center of town and put in a gigantic chicken gumbo.

I have no doubt that shortly thereafter, plastic babies are chomped.

And tonight I'm snowed in. In Indiana... and though there's no place like home - tonight, just for a time, I'd be in Lousiana, covered in beads and chicken feathers.

Answer #41 - Recycle

Sticks and stones... flying.  I don't know what to make of it lately.

Wind shears of words. Opinion.

Someone will hate what I write. That much is inevitable. Am I'm bound to be effected by it? Good reviews, bad reviews, the reviews written with the sole intent of drawing blood for the sake of a good laugh.  [Come on, who doesn't actually buy into it a little, when it's done well?  The blood-letting, I mean.]  But still, whether confetti falls or lyric sheets are shredded, it's all scraps of paper, really.  In the end.  Just scraps of paper.

I wrote this idea into a song once, about a friend who seemed to be grabbing so hard at public affirmation of his work:  Little scraps of colored paper are falling down on you today - will just one minute in their favor let you dream your pain away?

Someone already hates that line. That much is inevitable.

Someone doesn't.

It's the scraps of paper that concern me lately.  They're like white noise on an old television set - against the backdrop of the occasional 'we interrupt this program..', letting me know that the world's always spinning wildly out of control, and despite my world-saving intentions, time passes, and I still find myself drawn by scraps of paper.  shiny scraps of paper.

I try not to think on it.

I try not to think on it, the way time is moving on
cause when the cows come home - it'll still be gone.
It'll still be gone...

What is the answer?  What to do with all of it?

ah... recycle.  Okay then.