Yet Another Morning After

All that frenzy--which in my case was not really very frenetic--behind:  I am left to contemplate the curious stocking stuffers, red and green, that my personal Santa left.

The green tea mints I can understand, but I am a little leery of Fois Gras bubble gum, featuring "artificial liver flavor."  I would probably, to the dismay of pretty much everyone I know, savor a bit of real fois gras, but bubble gum?

More delightful is the BIG gift, a very nice electronic keyboard, way more than a piano, something I haven't had intimate access to for nearly 30 years.  When we embarked on this journey to the tropics, like missionaries, we left behind a junky old upright, probably a church basement castaway, that I enjoyed when we lived in the country and no one could hear me play. I used to tune it myself. (Frequently, in the way you might cut your own hair, a constant touching up.)  I have a tuning hammer, a very lovely crafted tool for which I now have absolutely no use. The upright was pretty much the same piece of furniture I grew up with, a player piano with the player guts removed and which my mother painted white in some fit of purity.  At some point in my disastrous childhood piano lesson trajectory, the piano, which I think was my grandmother's, was moved to the basement where I played/practiced so no one could hear me.  I was a terrible pianist.  I liked the playing part, but the practice baffled me.

When I left home and my basement piano, I went through a self-taught ukelele and guitar phase. My college roommate sat on my uke, (perhaps a foreshadowing of my destiny in Hawaii)  and no longer could I play All My Loving, all cute and Paul McCartney, like a primitive and talentless Jake Shimabukuro.  The guitar saw me through a few more folky/hippie years, but really, my first love was the piano.  I had a teacher whose name actually was Ludwig, who allowed us access to his fabulous upright Steinway; I imagined if I had THAT piano at home, instead of the lobotomized player, I would have been more accomplished.  Today I am distressed now that I cannot find my copy of Sonata Pathetique, the most advanced I ever got under Ludwig's tutelage and vague sexual abuse. (The old shaggy white-haired German liked to stroke our backs as we worked through the Sonatas.)  Not that I played it very well. (Although I just found that I can download the score; it looks really scary.  I need to practice.)  Then the old country upright saw me through a free phase, where I discovered that I didn't have to play what was written, I could play what I wanted.  No practice, no sticky stars on the pages of my piano lesson books, I could just play.  It was liberating. (But I sorta missed Ludwig.)

So now, the electronic keyboard.  What I locate for music are my old Methodist and Episcopal Hymnals from 1939 and 1940:  Christmas music to break in the keyboard.  Not just a piano. An organ setting!  A strings setting!  A guitar setting!  Automatic salsa rhythm! What fun!  Like any number of great R&B legends, I start with that good old gospel music. (Although some of it is Handel and Bach.)  I have three volumes of Hours with the Masters (which my friend and I called "Hours with the Monsters") stored somewhere...most of which is dreadful except for the notation for Fur Elise.  It is possible that the Wizard has discarded them somewhere (he finds Mozart too "tinkly" and Beethoven too...piano teacher-ish. Ah, how I miss Herr Ludwig.).   The Wizard urges me to play themes from Scheherazade, for which I can find some beginner-accessible sheet music.  And it is lovely.

So far, though, I am only performing with the earphones, not quite ready to inflict my unpracticed fingering (including my permanently dislocated left pinky) on a listener other than myself.  Still, to me, it sounds pretty good.   I am much less concerned with playing the RIGHT written notes....just notes that sound pretty and expressive.  It's a little like my Chinese painting.  It's all about the doing, not the done.

Un-Selfless in Portland

This probably should have gone with the previous post. Learn to adjust your spirit and then go next door for a manicure.


I bet Alley Pat spun this one more than a few times at WERD:





Of course, if you don't have a self (because the smoke got in your eyes) none of this matters one whit. But you can always check it out:

On the internet no one knows you don't have a self. 

Musical Christmas Spirit

Been trying to catch the Christmas wave, but it's not that easy in Hawaii.  (Well, some waves are, and we've been having some BIG ones.)  The commercial shopping stuff fails to light my candle,  there are no strong seasonal weather cues, except maybe the big waves...so I turn to music.

Amazon just delivered Bob Dylan's Christmas album to my mailbox, so fast, the appearance of which I predicted (like John the Baptist predicting the Messiah) many years ago...just wait, I said, someday he's gonna...and he did.  I think it fits in the baby-boomer nostalgia spectrum somewhere around Polar Express. (If I wasn't deep in a TVB drama, I might watch that movie tonight. I'll save it for Christmas Eve.)

But back to Dylan, hearing all these old classics by someone whose acid laryngytis is even worse than my own is kind of heartwarming. Sometimes he seems to be channeling (some might say ripping off) Leon Redbone.  (Really though, who did what first anyway?) And the packaging of the album (a charity fundraiser) has some funny surprises.  Front image, a kind of Classic Coke-style/Currier and Ives Christmas sleigh ride; back image, three camels (loving it); and inside...a Christmas pinup of Bettie Page (red-bordered silk stockings, a Victoria's Secret image of the '50s)!  The album cover pretty much covers everything Christmas.

I put it on the CD player, along with a new Verve jazz Christmas collection, and Vol. Three of Christmas Cocktails (included in the Amazon shipment, shipping three for the price of one, please do not tell me I should have downloaded them). And pulling from the library, our very favorite favorite, Aaron Neville's Soulful Christmas (someone once said to me at a party I was spinning music for, "That's not Christmas music!"). And our second favorite favorite, The Christmas Collection, with a whole lot of versions of The Christmas Song, with deep-throaty jazz saxophones and Hammond organs with Leslie speakers, the kind of music you would hear at 3 a.m. in a really sleazy bar on Christmas Eve/Morning.

Maybe all this music--five albums I might just keep in the CD changer through Epiphany, despite a collection which includes everything from Gregorian chant to medieval Hungarian carols, Handel to Bing Crosby, and every Windham Hell Solstice album ever issued--with a glassbottle of my favorite cheap cabernet, will get me in the mood.  And tomorrow we search for a pre-sacrificed Oregon Noble Fir.  It seems like a chore, but then, so does every ritual until you accomplish it.

So, Bob Dylan singing Little Drummer Boy, how bizarre and lovely, starts the holiday, and will see me through it.  My only quandary will be when it's all over...do I shelve the Dylan CD with the other Zimmie stuff or store it with the Christmas albums?  It doesn't really matter: it'll be available anytime on three iPods and my laptop.  It will be a delight to hear Christmas Blues turn up in a shuffle.

Big Island Energy

Thanksgiving and the birthday came and went and have set the stage for the approaching solstice. The turkey holiday was spent on the Big Island of Hawaii where I did a masterful 20-pound bird for four people. (It was the smallest dose of tryptophan available.) Had so much we brought some home: I am still eating it. We especially enjoyed the pond in front of the house we rented. Not only could we swim in the deceptively deep, clear, 91-degree pond which we shared with fish, crabs and tiny shrimp, but it provided beautiful meditative reflections for contemplation. The whole area was networked with a series of geothermally heated pools which were clear and only slightly salty...brackish sounds yucky, but that's what they were. They were sensitive to the tides. The rocky bottoms were hypnotic.

We were about 30 miles from the ill-fated Kalapana Black Sand Beach and some subdivisions that were destroyed some years ago (1990) when Kilauea restarted its relentless effort to expand the land mass of Southeast Hawaii. In fact, there is a new island forming in the chain, although I will never see it. It is giving geologists and oceanographers a wonderful opportunity to observe the earth as it develops. It's alive: it's not done yet. We went to visit the area and though we couldn't get close enough to see the lava flowing, we did see the evidence of activity. Great steam clouds form where the lava is pouring into the ocean.

And it doesn't take long for things to start to grow in the cooled lava. Here's a noni plant, a Hawaiian medicinal, taking root in the natural asphalt.

We got a lot of frozen turkey past TSA to carry back home to Oahu on the return 45-minute leg of our $543 flight on the pesky little upstart that is held partly responsible for the failure of one of our original island airlines. This airline actually wants to buy the name "Aloha," the 60-year-old brand that is no more. Just one more thing happening that makes me question the conscience of business. Seems to me it's one thing to buy another business, but quite another to buy the name of the business you helped kill.

My Christmas cactus began to bloom on my birthday, another one of those cosmic calendar occurrences.

Later in the week, I went with a friend to hear Ledward Kaapana, a world-class, Grammy-nominated Hawaiian slack-key guitarist who happened to be playing in a coffee shop in Wahiawa, which is a stone's throw from Kolekole pass, through which the first Mitsubishis arrived in Hawaii 67 years ago today. (Now you see their descendants parked, and not necessarily driven by Japanese tourists, at Pearl Harbor Arizona Memorial.)

So, I gathered with the Led Heads to hear this unassuming guitar hero of Hawaii, who celebrated his own 60th birthday in September, playing for a group of about 40 people, including family, friends and fellow musicians. Home from mainland touring, he performs for FREE for friends, and also graciously showcases young talent and proteges. What a thrill it must be for a 13-year-old guitarist or a young singer to perform along with Led. In 1983, when I arrived in Hawaii, I bought one of his first albums after hearing it on the great speakers at the now-defunct Tower Records on Keeaumoku Street. It became a favorite in my slack-key guitar collection as I became a Led Head. I saw Led last when he opened for Bob Dylan about ten years ago in Honolulu. As an afterthought this week, I took the old vinyl album along to the coffee shop and asked him to autograph it. "It must be really old," he said. "Happy Birthday," he wrote, "Jus' press, Ledward Kaapana." Led grew up on the Big Island, not far from the picture up above, in modest means, without electricity, but with a lot of aloha and support. They say his nimble fingers can play anything with strings, and I am proud to have had them inscribe the album for me. I'm not big into celebrity artifacts, but this one is special.

Though we all live scattered about on these tiny islands --Oahu, Maui, Lantau, Cheung Chau, Manhattan, the British Isles -- on Earth (not even the Big Island of the solar system) -- none of us need be isolated because we have music from big hearts like Led, and the internet, so you too can enjoy some of that warm geothermal energy from the Big Island.