At-A-Distance
Course Diary 1999 back |
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Week1 | Week2 | Week3 | Week4 | Week5 | Week6 Sunday October 24th Whew, what a refreshing and energizing weekend. My head cold is subsiding, as I returned to Seattle today after an amazing weekend with the SGC in Cle Elem, Washington. Who would have predicted that this little former church, (now Grange Hall) in the middle of nowhere
would become the site of a Saturday-night-sold-out-everybody-wins- Firstly, Peg, our gracious hostess
put us up in a wonderful wooden house at the foot of a mountain - 4 bedrooms, just enough for close comfort for our 8 person road team. My ultra-personal criteria for excellent lodging was met in almost every room: Great acoustics throughout the house!! During and after the drive to the
venue, I felt sleepy and generally 'asleep.'
At a certain point, I just really wanted to be alone. I really
dislike myself when I get like this... Fortunately, these
moods are relatively rare for me, and they rarely last long. We also noticed that there were five sheaves of wheat neatly arranged on the wall directly above the stage arranged in a semi-circle. These five sheaves were mounted directly above the semi-circle formed by our five matching drum stools. A sign or a coincidence? How long have these been there? And then we hit the stage. What happened?
Thank you again Frank for taking the leap, and driving us to Cle Elem…
* * * Monday October 25th A day with some interesting coincidences and excellent news that I cannot share in this forum despite my excitement… So, one coincidence: my sister Katie emailed me and mentioned that she had heard a new Genesis song on the radio with Peter Gabriel singing. She said she really liked the song. Something about 'carpet
baggers.' * * * Tuesday October 26th Today was a long day with very little "excitement" compared to many of the days of the past few weeks. Today was a "just get some work done" kind of day in almost every respect. No instant gratification. No easy flowing solutions landing at my feet at just the right moment. No exciting phone calls or breakthroughs. It was just a long, long day of hard and largely thankless work. My brief sitting this morning was the only real point of stillness in the entire day. And as soon as the second hand swept past the mark, I was up and running, albeit, at low speed. Having read Frank's AAD posting about sitting being perhaps more valuable than sleep, I was inspired to rise earlier than normal,... but I felt like I paid for this, as I was sleepy and slightly dragging all day. When I was in my 20's it was nothing to stay up late and get up early and spring through the day with energy and ease. Lately, if I do not get a good night's sleep, I am a wreck all day, my thinking is slower, and I am not all there. Age and years of "pelota"-style overextension are catching up with me. Likewise, my brief practice this evening, although still somewhat inspired from the show of the past weekend, was a very low energy affair. When my energy is low during personal practice, I generally focus on slow and gentle left and right and metronome work with an emphasis on release and the use of very little force or pressure. Tonight, my limbs, arms, and fingers felt heavy and immobile when I began, and not much different when I finished. Some days are just this way. I suppose I could have made a superhuman effort to wake up and push myself beyond this state of heaviness. But tonight felt like a time for acceptance rather than pushing. Perhaps after such an energizing weekend after a week of being ill, my body is reminding me to slow down and take my time. So, enough for one day. I will ignore the temptation to keep going, and accept that it is time to turn out the light and go to sleep. * * * Wednesday October 27th "Excitements" were flowing again today - the pace and activity level of a normal "pelota" day is usually quite high, but today felt even higher than normal - like a sprint from beginning to end. For those who don't know, "pelota" was my spanish nickname originally coined by Martin Schwutke at an Argentinean GC course meeting. I believe Martin's full introduction of the blonde gringo was as "Esteban Jota Pelota" but 'pelota' was the only part of the name that really came home with me and stuck. Later back in Seattle, my good friend and guitarist-pal, Tobin Buttram, articulated a new twist in the meaning of this name "pelota" - I believe he used the word somewhat derogatorily in describing my habitual and relentlessness intensity in moving through foolishly long lists of tasks that no sane person would attempt or take on. Tobin once mentioned (in an email) that he operates differently than I do - he stated that he does "not posses the 'pelota' energy." My own refined definition of "Pelota" energy is that it is a mysterious substance that enables one to consider taking obviously impossible tasks or projects. Perhaps Tobin can clarify his definition at some point if he finds himself reading this diary, or if he finds himself compelled to correct my knowingly gross mis-representations of what he said and meant. Or not. He probably has many better things to do. Like working on a new ultra-secret, high-profile, DirectMusic project that I should not even mention. Speaking of DirectMusic, Chanel Summers, Scott Selfon, David Yackley, Brian Thomas, and I presented a DirectMusic overview for the Seattle Composer's Alliance this evening. The highlights: Brian Thomas' use of DirectMusic in a live performance setting, and Scott and David's real-time re-scoring of Hitchcock's "Psycho." Brilliant and fun stuff. I did my standard "dynamic sound-effects" and "dynamic soundscapes" demos. Yawn. I need some new DirectMusic projects to get me working in DX7. Wish I had time to do some DirectMusic circulations with SGC raw material. Next year. In the meantime, for those who don't know, DirectMusic is coming to a PC near you soon. It is already revolutionizing mainstream PC and game audio and music. It may even show up in some surprising major releases next year by world class musicians. After the SCA presentations, I went over to join the SGC quintet for a late rehearsal. And who's dumb-ass idea was it to begin rehearsing at 10pm? Oh,... mine I guess. Sorry. Mistake. Acknowledged. The rehearsal was "checkered" at best - mostly low energy, with drifting attention, lot's of giggles, and I personally entered the "punchy zone" around 10:40 and did not come out until we ended the rehearsal at 11:15. I used the first half-hour as credit toward my daily practice, and this was time and energy well spent. We began with "Cultivating the Beat" to see how it would be to begin this piece cold. Not bad. Generally, dynamics and subtlety disappear when we are not warmed-up. 15 minutes of "Derailed" section work at moderate tempo was both good personal practice and group work. Then, we did make some progress in getting "vulcanization" under our fingers. I am anticipating the pending debut of 'Vulcanization' by this group. This is a very special piece of music: it is a rich toolbox for guitarists to breakthrough barriers in at least four areas: endurance I have been waiting for 12 years to play and hear this piece performed by a competent and musically experienced group. This is the one. Stay tuned. After rehearsal, I came home, checked my mail - exactly one bazillion unread emails. Then I spent a couple of hours working on some new business and finally turned off the light at close to 3am. * * * Thursday October 28th No sitting or guitar playing today. My first day of complete failure, across the board during the AAD course. No excuses except I stayed up too late last night, and my day was full with business, wall-to-wall busy-ness all day, and into the evening. No excuses. Pay to not play. Today = pay. * * * Friday October 29th Another work week full of twists and turns. This morning began ultra-early with a short, but unsettled sitting before I strolled out the door at 7:30am. During my sitting, it was all I could do to stay focused on my body - my mind was working very hard to snap into 'problem solving mode,' a mode which it is in during most of it's normal 'working' hours. This morning, my mind was noisy with anticipation of a series of audio-centric presentations which happened from 9:00-1:00 at MS today. Mine was the first, from 9-10, and even though I was prepared, some kind of low-level survival instinct was kicking in to make sure that when I stood up to speak this morning, that I was firing on all cylinders. Every time I caught myself wandering forward into projection about the event, I had to pull my attention back to my body and to the here and now. At least twice, I felt an extremely strong desire to stand up, and bolt into my day. I resisted, and persisted. But today, this was really hard work. In response to my own resistance, I briefly considered a question: "Is it wrong to ignore or repress the impulses of my body?" I carried this question with me through the day, and over dinner, I had an idea: Perhaps this was my body acting with it's own intelligence. Perhaps the best thing (for the survival of my body) would have been for me to bolt out of there and get on with my day by preparing further for my presentation? But the truth is that I was as prepared as I was going to be. In the end, the only remaining preparation I had to do was to be well-rested and awake enough to turn on my "performer" switch. When I kick into 'performer' mode, there are generally three things I need to be comfortable and successful with in the performance process:
Without these, I am flying blind, and the hazard increases by an order of magnitude or so. By these standards, I was prepared and ready to go. So why was my body so restless and ready to bolt out the door? I still don't know. One might argue that a natural or genius performer just does what they do without considering these three points (needs, inner-awareness, outer-awareness.) Did Jimi Hendrix know or care about what he was doing or how it was affecting his audience? Or did he just do what he does in public without consideration? Performers deliver energy and/or information to an audience. We are high-falutin' dramatic delivery boys. Perhaps I was simply worried about being late for work? * * * Saturday, October 30th Aside from a surprising 7:30am phone call, today had a good beginning to a good day. Following my sleepy but energizing phone call from Argentina, I went back to sleep and continued sleeping in just enough to wake up refreshed, but not so much that I woke up tired. Sometimes, if I sleep too much, waking up seems impossible. This morning, waking up at 10 felt just right. Sitting was easy compared to the day before. I knew Curt was hard at work with the Beginner's Circle while I was sitting, and I felt a slight pang of guilt at leaving him carrying the morning alone. But I was also really happy to have a quiet morning to myself. Practicing at home has always been more difficult for me than practicing out in the world somewhere. So many distractions at 'home.' This is not a place to work. This is a place to retreat and relax. This afternoon, I worked to ignore these, but never quite got settled in before the phone, piles of paper, laundry and practicalities of this place called me away. Also, the acoustics in this beautiful wooden house are somewhat dampened by too much plain old stuff filling up this place. Practicing in Steven Golovnin's empty house a few weeks ago was a strange inverse luxury. No furniture and shelves and books and clothes and paper and boxes and sound absorbing stuff around to dampen out the musical energy. Why do I surround myself with so much stuff? * * * Please visit the seattle guitar circle site for more information about this project.
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