Colder Moons

Outside the blood moon of popping trees.
Snow at last. Blur of surprised antlers,
past the morning window where I sit to write:
An eight-point stag leaps away from the glass,
snow pawed beside the house, across white drapery past
pines towards the river. At dusk, yearling deer
gavotte circles around the naked maple. Last week
a round moon caught itself in a net of oak branches,
white pearl in a weave of strands ambered in sunset.
Three days later the sun, white-balled by heavy clouds
is caught in a similar net of tree stalks, burned
before dusk. Now all my crackling trees are afire.

Somewhere there's a desert where I want to go,
unfettered by frost's weave or winter's sulk, where
a known quality of silence, more encompassing
than the muffled quilting made by heavy snowfall,
rings off rocks, tastes like brass on the tongue.
Gypsum dust, actinic glare, alkali kiss and sneeze.
Ache for distances so private you can gambol unclothed,
naked to the sky blaze, soaking up boulder-borne heat
as tongue-flicking lizards digest a feast of cacti bees.
Till your ribs runnel with sweat, streaming tan dust away.
Some smug stillness in such indolent glow. Not only a vibrant
basking in shimmer heat of isometric lust.

Colder moons under a blank desert eye. Not a lot to do
when your hands get this cold. Not a lot to say. Ankles crack
like icicles. I hear there's a shortcut across the arroyo,
where wiser angels do not tread. Words spill over the canyon,
all fireweed and fragrance.

Random ideograms of dislocation. Last time outbound,
sunsets to take your breath away, orange translucent purple
green-edged blue teal peach, landscape with a dollop of
desert light. Disconnect, dislocate, decenter. A thread
runs through memory, links every ground you ever camped on.
A surfeit of tent, an excess of fresh air. Brewing sweet tea
over wood coals some cold blue pre-dawn, embrace
a kind of solace. Some things don't need
to be forgiven.

The History of Wind Power in America

What could be a more iconic representation of life on the Great Prairie, life in the open-skied Midwest, life in the American Heartlands, than images of red barns, farm combines out in the fields, and the silhouette of a windmill? Nothing.



American Wind Power Center and Museum, Lubbock, TX

On the Road at Dusk

sudden small towns rear up
explode across the windshield
as dusk softens to vigilance



rural towns, grey days, blue dusk
long quiet highway lined with dead hulks
abandoned farms, lost dreams of survival and refuge



empty buildings full of blue light and ghosts
roofs open to chill bullet rains
on wind dry prairies with no names



silent but for hiss and hum of tires
on tarmac passing, then back to silence
a single croak of phantom grackle

settling in for long winter's night

Route 66 Collage

Snapshots from the road, driving the first couple of days of roadtrip/vacation. These scenes mostly from Illinois and Missouri.

I've driven all of old Route 66 now at least twice, sections of it considerably more than that. It's still a fascinating bit of Americana, both kitsch and brilliant. "Get your kicks on Route 66" still rings true, if not always for the original reasons given in the song. It's still "America's Highway," and will be for a long time, in popular myth and folklore, if not in actual fact.

The ride's only begun. No doubt more collages will follow. After all, I have new tools for making art, on this new roadtrip. So I'm trying new things as I go.

Deer

in my backyard, fresh snow

Saguaro Moon

A classic image from the Southwest of my imagination. A place I will be in reality, just a few days from now.

This is a drawing, rather, a digital painting, I made on my iPad this afternoon, using a sophisticated painting app called ArtRage. I made this painting in about ten or twelve minutes, as I was waiting while the shop installed new tires on my truck, prior to my upcoming roadtrip.

I really like the ArtRage app, which is the most intuitive and flexible painting software I've encountered in years. It provides a wide range of adjustable drawing and painting tools, all customizable and adaptable, along with a range of paper textures, effects, and other illustrative processes. There is even the ability to use a reference photo as tracing paper, or a guide. One can work on several layers, too, so that transparencies can be built up non-destructively. i find myself able to paint and draw things easily and quickly, using a stylus, in this digital domain, that frankly I would not be able to do in the real world. (That's partly because I'm chemically sensitive, or rather allergic, to many traditional artistic materials, including aromatics like turpentine and other agents.)

For this digital painting, I mostly used a flat watercolor brush, paint tube and roller, and a sable brush, changing the color and settings for saturation, etc., several times during the painting. I found the tools easy to figure out, and using the stylus came naturally. I guess teaching myself to draw over the past years has had some benefits, after all.

Songwriting: Making a Demo

Recently I finished composing/writing a new song, for myself to sing at a fundraising event in March, called "The Power of Love." I auditioned the song for two of three artistic staff for the event, but the third person couldn't be at that audition, so I was asked to make a demo version of the song. That's mostly so they know how to program my song within the larger context of the fundraiser concert: where to put it, what it's mood and tone are like, etc.

Well, naturally I said, sure, I'll make a demo. Not having made a studio demo for some few years, nonetheless I was willing. For two reasons: first, to complete the audition process and assure my performance slot for the concert, and also to give myself the pleasure of a new creative challenge in my recording studio.

Now that I seem to be a songwriter as well as a composer, I suppose making demos will become more common for me. And I believe I will keep writing more new songs, now, both to keep up the compositional momentum, and to continue to grow as a writer. Words and music: that's going to be phrase on my new business cards.

I'm about to leave for a month-long roadtrip. It's time for my annual trip to the Southwest and to California, cameras in hand, writing journal nearby. I've been packing for this years' trip, organizing objects in a new system. Since the video camera I will be taking this trip is smaller and lighter than previously, I will be able to walk farther, and take longer hikes, with just a shoulder bag or smaller backpack. My strength during my post-surgery recovery has reached levels unseen for a decade, and I feel up to hiking a mile or two to get a good image. There are trails I know about that I haven't been able to attempt, which I feel able to do now, this year.

One of the bags I packed is my creative arts bag. It has pens and colored pencils, a couple of back-up notebooks for writing in, some drawing and watercolor paper, a few ideas sketched out to work on more later, and a few other things.

I have every intention of writing more song lyrics, or maybe a new art-song for voice and piano, while I'm on the road. As I've written before, it's become obvious to me that I do best when I am always making art, always writing. So the creative arts bag also contains some song lyrics that I wrote last year that I have yet to set to music, and a spiral music composition notebook, for writing music of whatever kind comes forward to be written.

I will probably take along a couple of my more portable musical instruments. Maybe my Stick.

Most definitely my newest musical instrument: my iPad, which is turning out to be a source of great creative possibilities for me. I have lots of photography and video apps on there, but the most useful apps so far have been musical tools. I have already used the iPad as an important computer-music source for an album I recently composed of music for meditation and healing.

All hail Rockmate! All hail GarageBand!

With these two iPad apps, I spent a few hours over the last couple of nights laying down basic tracks for a demo version of "The Power of Love." I have yet to record the vocals; which I'll do tomorrow, as it's late at night as I write now, and I'm too tired to do a good job singing. I will also probably lay down piano and/or classic Hammond B3 organ tracks, just a few bits here and there to give the demo some life and depth. Those also will likely by done with the soft-synths (software-based synthesizers) that I have in my recording studio.

Making a demo is about making a rough recording of a song to give a sense of what the song is about. It's not meant to be a final recorded version, it's not perfected or produced to the same level as an album track. Demos are meant to get people to listen to the song, and see what it's about. When you play a demo for a record label or a producer, it's always at least partly about auditioning your work for them, to entice them to work with you, and release your music as a produced album. Lots of demos never get any further than that, and that's fine. Lots of songwriters produce demos that get their toe in the door, which are then re-recorded.

I am making this demo to present the piece for concert performance later. But it can also serve as an introduction to my new activity as a songwriter. Being a songwriter these days usually means being a singer-songwriter. I don't have a lot of self-confidence as a solo singer. Maybe that will develop over time.

For this demo, I laid down some rhythm guitar tracks first, following the song's chord structure. Then a few fills of guitar lines in places where a short solo might fit. I don't play guitar, and have no real experience on or feel for the instrument. Rockmate was extremely useful for laying down the guitar tracks.

Next I laid down some bass lines, using an upright bass softsynth. I basically played a jazz bass line by hand. I'm a bass player, my first instrument after piano was upright bass, which I began playing in orchestra at age 13. (I was small for my age when I began playing bass, and the instrument dwarfed me for a couple of years.) I chose a jazz bass line, albeit a groove-based rather than freeform line, in part because in my mind "The Power of Love" is not a pop song, but a jazz-inflected folk-rock song. That's how I hear it in my head.

The drum tracks were actually the easiest to do. I basically used the SmartDrums feature in GarageBand, synchronized to the metronome click track I was using for the demo. I used a classic studio drum kit, useful for both jazz and pop music. Again, I programmed the drums to be more of a jazz than rock style, but with a strong backbeat. Once I synced up with the metronome click track, tracking the drums was the easiest of all, for this demo. All I had to do was make little variations in the rhythms, and fills, to keep it sounding organic and live. the software already does this well, but you can also tweak it on the fly, while it's playing, to make the sorts of stylistic and volume changes typical when shifting from the verse to the refrain.

This demo song, which I expect to be able to complete tomorrow, isn't going to be a perfect performance, just a heartfelt one. Demos aren't about perfection, they're about presentation. Of course you do the best that you can, given the time constraints, and in this case given all the other things I need to do before I leave on my upcoming roadtrip. I have no doubt that when I perform the song live in concert, a month or so from now, I will not only perform it better than on this demo, I will know the song better. Self-confidence in performance involves knowing your material really well, everything memorized and internalized. So I plan to take my Stick along in part so I can keep practicing and learning this new song that I've written. First you write it, then you have to learn it well enough to perform it.

And after that, who knows? Maybe more songs. Maybe a whole new writing project. Something to keep me creatively busy for awhile longer.

Sun

the first sun
was the white eye of a grey day

the second sun
was blood on the road

thirds don't come
when you call your cadence

just leave the last sun
under the road's long sigh





boom of angel
eye presence in the lowered sky

continuous exaltation
where nothing is but what burns

long fall towards
ends neither remorse nor winnow

the final sun
was the red eye of departure

Moon

luminous pearl
caught in a net of branches:
waxing moon







amber moon eye
of carnivorous lampfish
raised with fisher's catch

The Books of the Cliffs

incised inscription of dull pen on white black
mind clover mask and trumpet vine ripe with bees
steady crimson face of blood in etching copper knife
long sassafras fade from green to gold ember glisten
this fall, long autumn, when every tree glows as if the first day

unformed soul's preceptor, brilliant stick of lightning
sage of canvas written as flesh, honey and ice
long witness and evocation of fossil bones of owls
sea cliff remnant in breaking stone cliff waves over highway
this road not traveled since the world ended and began

logjam of unshelter, feelings never released into flesh
light of the touch, improbable destiny in orbit in escalade
tones of fire tonguing the waste long cliff fall shades
dancers around confocal firepit shadow cast dancing on stone
in the end ash sage ember gold flakes in a fitful wind

•

This is a newer poem in a form I haven't written in for awhile. It began as a form I invented or developed or discovered, take your pick, over a decade ago, which I used intensively for awhile. They are poems in the series I call the Books. Eventually I was planning to collect the best of these poems into an art book called The Books of Silence. I have some designs and illustrations and Photoshop art already for that project done, but I've never finished it. That might move closer towards being completed soon, as I am getting interested in book design and work again. Some of the first poems in the series can be read here.


Palimpsest 1, in the art style I'm thinking of using for the Books

The thing about writing a series of poems is: How do you know when it's complete? How do you know you won't be writing in that form anymore, or building on that series, or assembling poems in the same form? Where do you stop? Do you stop at all?

I've done several different poem series over the years. In truth, I don't always know when a series is done. I don't actively think about it very often. I just let it happen. When a series is done, or seems to be done, it takes awhile to notice that I haven't written anything in that form or series for awhile. Noticing can take months or years, in some cases. When you first notice, you ask yourself if the series is actually done, or if it's resting. At which point you can wait longer, to see what happens. or you can go ahead and collect everything in the series together, make a chapbook, and declare it done. If more poems in the series appear later, you can always add them in, or do a second series. Sometimes things dangle off the edges of intention. You can try to make your art absolutely symmetrical and managed, but life is messy, and that messiness will show up in your art. Control can be more illusion than reality.

•

Don't ask me to explain these poems. I can talk about the form, but the images and words themselves are somewhat mysterious, even to me. Some of these poems are very strange, even for me. This poem form is fractal in that it has similar language and imagery on multiple scales. It's been compared to haiku, in that each line can be read as like a haiku. Then you add lines into stanzas, and the scale changes but not the style or content. The poems are also cinematic, in the sense that they are often sequences of images that can create parataxis in the reader's mind, or imply a narrative made from pictures. A poetic cinema, to be sure, ironically non-verbal in effect, although made up from word-paintings.

I like what this form does to language. It gets compressed, and often pared down to just the most luminous images. It makes language lean and spare, and to my mind more poetic, precisely because of the compression. Like haiku.

•

There are numerous poems in this form I've not shared anywhere outside of a small circle. Maybe I'll start the gathering process, make that book, and go forward with the development. I'm not sure if I'm done with this series, or form. Maybe another poem will turn up someday. Time will tell.

Performance Empathy

There is a reason I like to play in ensembles, in musical groups, more often than I like to play as a solo artist. It's not that I don't play as a solo musician, but I do prefer working with at least one other musician. It's hard to articulate, but I ran across a good way of thinking about it in the liner notes to a recent CD:

Music is fondly called a universal "language." When we make music and listen to music together, the musical code necessary to this end usually seems self-evident. But how does such a code arise and proliferate? How does dialect or slang emerge from a language? What gives rise to characteristic phrasings, embellishments and rhythmic alloys shared by an entire group of musicians? And how do rules of style take hold? . . .

When five musicians play together, ten different paths of communication open up between them—a challenge to deft, accurate interaction and mutual attention. The only way to find and share these paths is with a large degree of empathy, which enables us intuitively to reflect our partners in ourselves, immediately and reflexively. In addition to criticism (the other form of constructive reflection), empathy is a key prerequisite for creative collaborations. It is a co-operative survival strategy, as old as time itself, and thus deeply rooted not only in our thought but in our bodies. That is what makes this gift so valuable and productive for our interaction. Joint phrasing, after all, cannot be captured in notation. It can only be gained through training and patience, through mutual respect and interest, through the ability to resonate with each other.

Then familiar phrases, curious and vivid turns of phrase, verbs of ghost notes and rhythmic punch lines will arise as if by themselves.
—Nik Brätsch, liner notes to album with group RONIN, Llyria

The reason I like to play in ensembles of like-minded, empathic musicians is that I'm addicted to making music the way that Nik Brätsch describes here. It's my favorite way of playing music, in groups of musicians who genuinely listen to and feel and respond with each other. It's almost magical at times, and one of the very best natural highs available. By comparison, many solo gigs, while they are rewarding in other ways, don't challenge me, don't push me as hard. In groups, I play better, I go further, I am challenged to be at the very edge of my game, and to spend as much time as possible "in the zone."

How did I get this way? Well, I can relate to the music that Nik Brätsch's group RONIN makes, and how they do it, and why, because I was for a long time in a very similar group.

I played for twelve years or so in an improvising band called Dangerous Odds with a core group of four musicians accompanying two core performance poets. We played more than one open mic poetry slam gig, and for several years had a monthly radiobroadcast on local community radio.

Dangerous Odds was based around the idea of spontaneously improvised music accompanying poetry performance. We built a specialty of being able to play in all styles of music, being able to change on the instant in response to the poets' words and directions. We never rehearsed, we just got together for gigs and recording sessions. We talked about what we were going to do before a gig, but at a recording session, sometimes we would just point at each other and say "Start something," the music would start, and the chief poet would pick a text that worked with what we were doing and join in. Often no key center was agreed on beforehand, we just dove in, and started playing in the Key Of X. A mood or concept might be agreed on beforehand, in response to a poem, and sometimes a key was chosen in advance. But not always. There were also times when the musicians would just play, without words or texts or poets. We tried to mix it all together for most live gigs.

When I say "all styles of music," I mean it. That includes classical and folk, as well as more typically improvisatory genres such as jazz, fusion, rock, and blues. For example, one evening we were joined by some Irish traditional musicians, and came up with Foggy Foggy Dub. On other occasions we came up with more experimental, soundscape-oriented music, occasionally quite unusual and minimal; for example, Clocks in Chaos. A lot of choices depended on the poem.

In this band I usually took the bass role in the ensemble, letting the flute and viola play melodic functions. I usually played either six-string bass guitar or Chapman Stick. Occasionally one of the poets would perform one of my own poems, too, while I played my musical role. For example, Begging Bowl. In later bands I took more of a melodic role, being a second "guitarist" even though I was playing Stick. For example, as with fUSE.

Dangerous Odds regularly invited guest musicians to sit in, and occasionally guest poets. We were very picky about who we invited, however. It had to be someone we liked, and got along well with. We had all been in bands in the past with overbearing front-row musicians (rock & roll guitarists being the most notorious Big Egos), and we made a point about equality amongst the musicians and poets. This was no one person's band. Our rule was, if you got us the gig, you got to say what you wanted to do; and we all set up various gigs at various times. So each of us was occasionally bandleader-for-one-gig, but not much more than that. As for guest artists, we usually asked them to give some direction as to what they wanted to do. Otherwise it was very equal, very give-and-take.

(Some more samples of pieces by Dangerous Odds can be heard on my Music page on my main website; just scroll down.)

We all learned to listen, to really listen to everything going on all the time, and to respond on the instant. The group became almost telepathic after awhile. Even if we hadn't played together for a month, there was rarely ever any hesitation. It all evolved quite naturally and intuitively. The enforced equality among all the musicians also led to mutual respect, which in turn improved our ability to listen to each other. Sometimes it took one song at the beginning of a recording session before we were all "tuned in" with each other again; but usually only one tune was needed, and for the rest of the night we were telepathic as usual.

As I mentioned earlier, we had all been burned by egotistical guitarists in previous bands; so we only rarely invited guitarists to sit in with us, and they had to be both great players and good friends. We were most often an entirely "guitar free zone." At one memorable gig, for one poem we used drums, keyboards, flute, poet, and three bass guitars. To have three bassists all going at the same time requires a lot of careful listening and respectful playing, and we made it work.

Getting back to the topic of musical empathy, playing for so long in Dangerous Odds spoiled me for playing in other kinds of bands. I got used to playing improvised music near-telepathically with other musicians. It's still my favorite way to make music: improvise together, without any road map, and without a safety net. Totally open and free. Most people, even most jazz musicians, think free jazz means cacophonous noise; but it doesn't have to mean that, it can mean subtle beauty, too. And I also like to improvise on a known pattern, or over a groove, or a set of chord changes. A little bit of structure can take you very far, as for example with 12-bar blues, possibly the most familiar and clichéd chord pattern around but still capable of infinite nuance and revitalizing freshness. It's all in how you approach it.

Spontaneous improvisation is still my favorite way to make music with other musicians. In Dangerous Odds I got addicted to playing with musicians with a high degree of empathy and intuition, and most importantly the ability to listen to each other.

I write composed, notated music, and I still play jazz, rock, the occasional blues, and folk gigs. I write songs to be sung, and I write them both for other people and myself to perform. I write concert music. I create soundscapes for art gallery openings. Even my notated music begins in ideas that all start out as natural improvisations. The music only becomes fixed as I begin to write it down. Even then, I like to leave some breathing room in a notated piece for the performers to be able to make some choices. I like indeterminacy.

Yet there remains something almost magically alive in spontaneously improvised music, where you don't know what's going to happen next, and you have to be alert and aware and Pay Attention at all times. Dangerous Odds spoiled me for more traditional jazz ensembles. I don't really like playing standards from the American Songbook, and so with a few rare exceptions I don't really know or regularly play any standards.

I'm attracted to the more avant-garde edges of improvised music. My favorite record label for over 30 years has been ECM. That is a label filled to the brim with this kind of music, host to many musicians who have influenced both my playing and my thinking. Some of my all-time favorite musicians are ECM recording artists. I still discover new artists through the label, because I trust their choices to be interesting to my ears.

Collaborative music is more thrilling to me than is solo music. As Nik Brätsch says, empathy is a key prerequisite for creative collaborations. I could not agree more. It is in fact, I would say, the central and most important key.

Visitor from the Wild

Yesterday morning, in the blanched winter sunlight of nearly midday, a long-legged, brush-tailed form loped across the open lawn behind my house, eventually crossing to settle under a stand of trees opposite.

At first I thought it was a fox, for I have seen red fox before in my domain. I have seen fox by the roadside near, in the farm fields, and by the river, and I know that a den of fox was wintered on the island of the river behind my parents' house when I lived there. So seeing a fox is unexceptional, although a rare delight.

But this was big for a fox, and dingy, not the dark red of a fox. More tan, with a hint of red. The large bushy tail was like that of a fox, with a white tip at end, as were the black-furred front legs, but the whole animal was larger, leaner, and longer. And not at all shy. Wary, and alert to its surroundings, but not as shy as most fox I've met before.

Astonished, I jumped for joy and ran for my camera in another room. When the animal had settled down under the trees‚ which took a long time, for it turned many circles, scratched itself, got up to turn again in the way canids do before settling in grass. It's fur was more tan than the red mulch of the bed under the pine trees, but when it was still it blended in well. Cars went by in the distance, and the stand of trees is surrounded by lawn and houses, but I wonder if anyone but I knew it was there.





I believe that it was a youthful, gangly coyote. Not the largest coyote I've ever seen, but larger than most fox. Some of the markings make me think it's a fox, but that face and ears make me think coyote. (If you know better, show me.)

I've seen and heard coyote all over the USA, in my travels. But never one in my backyard. It was obviously on a trek, and resting in the heat of midday, soaking up the sun. Not hungry at the moment, although judging on how lean it was ti was probably half-starved most of the winter. After turning circles and scratching at fleas numerous times, it curled into a ball under the trees quite peacefully, and stayed there for at least an hour or so. I crept with camera in hand out on my porch several times, and shot photos through the window, mostly unobserved.











So it is that wild nature enters our lives, briefly and with astonishment. I look out the window today, in hopes of seeing another coyote, or a fox, or deer, those more usual visitors. I mean wild nature, as embodied in wild animals, neither tamed nor domesticated, and not subject to or aware of the laws of man. The laws of nature are not the laws of man. Of course nature itself is never separate from us. It's a fallacy to believe that we ourselves are not part of "nature," or that "nature" doesn't interact with and interfinger with our daily lives. In large urban centers, peregrine falcons make their nests on skyscraper ledges. A pack of coyotes lives downtown near the Chicago River. Granted, I live in a small town in a rural area, and near me are wild woods surrounding a river, areas kept natural and not "managed" by men. There are swimming holes in the river, and trails along its track, but when I go in those woods I am often quite alone. Except for the wild things. It's good to encounter the wildest of the wild, those beasts never tamed, and never destroyed or tamable. It's good to see a wild coyote in my own backyard. I keep looking out the window where I write, hoping to catch another glimpse, maybe a timeshadow of a flick of a tail, a glimpse of bright golden eye above a narrow snout. Something wild has stepped into the daylight, and spent some time under shelter, then trotted on, with its loping ground-eating stride. It leaves behind a memory that stirs the breast, makes me yearn for wilderness, if only to encounter the wildest of the wild again, however briefly. A brief moment of awakening to the larger reality or the greater world. Right in my own backyard.

Songwriting: The Power of Love

This afternoon I went over to a coffee house I go to sometimes to write. It overlooks the Rock River, and has a nice vibe to the space. Sitting there I started to notate the final draft of a new song. I had finished the words (lyrics) over the weekend, after having struggled with them for several weeks. I had a pretty good idea how I wanted the song to sound, and earlier on had sketched out, as usual, a few musical phrases and chord patterns. This afternoon I sat down and got to work in earnest. I finished the song later, at home. I would have finished it at the coffee shop but I ran out of score paper and had to come home to print out one more score page.

Since I completed the large commissioned work for a concert of new music for Perfect Harmony Men's Chorus in Madison, WI, I have learned that to avoid depression I had better always be working on an artistic project. I can afford no gaps in between projects. I need to always be working on something, and always have something new to get busy on, the very minute some project is completed. I've learned since the surgery last summer that not only can I use art-making as a way of coping with daily and moving forward with life, that also works to well to keep me from falling into the realm of Bad Thoughts. Writing this song was all about keeping myself working, artistically, which does help keep away the Bad Thoughts. It's too easy to fall down that gravity well of dark and brooding worries, otherwise.

Right after I finished the large commission in October, I started to feel depressed. Started to feel worries about the future begin to creep back over me again. I had a few weeks of things getting worse. Then I was commissioned to create a new CD of music for meditation and healing, and produced Darshan. That project was finished just before Xmas 2011, and sent off to the client in time for the holidays. Then I had this new song to work on. The point here is to always have something to work on. Don't let gaps between projects get very big; better yet, don't let them develop at all.

And my attitude about life has mostly been better, as a result. The holidays this season were rough, as bad as I can ever remember them being. A lot of factors contributed to that, not least some plans that feel through, and not least because of some of my other friends also having a really bad time lately. But now the holidays are in the past. Even if it's hard to believe, some days, you have to keep on going as if everything was okay, and that life will go on. You have to make plans, even in the face of desperate worry about your future. You have to act as if life will go on, and everything will be alright, and that life is worth continuing. You have to have that kind of attitude. Otherwise the forces of entropy win.

So, today I finished a song. And that feels really good.

This song was written with the intention to perform it as a fundraiser Cabaret next March. Every spring Perfect Harmony puts on a variety show, a Cabaret, as a fundraiser. This annual event brings in an audience of fans and new friends every spring for dinner and a show. There is usually also a silent auction as another fundraiser, to which I have donated artwork in the past.

I wanted to get this song written now, so that I had time to learn how to perform well. I will off on another roadtrip for awhile this winter—dietary issues, ostomy, and other matters notwithstanding—and I will need to have song memorized and up to performance level by the time I get back.

It's an odd moment that I'm sure many more experienced songwriters feel: that moment when the song isn't yours anymore, but another song you need to learn to be able to play it well. It has its own objective existence, now, and even though you wrote it, it's not "yours" anymore. So you step back, obtain a level of objectivity, and commit to rehearsals as if you learning any other song, rehearsing as though it was a song someone else wrote that you're learning to sing, now. That's just part of the process.

The song's topic is one that has synchronistically been on my mind for several weeks now. Because of some of the problems and situations, and questions about life and its meanings, that have been happening to some of my friends, and to other people I care about. The topic of the song is reflected in its refrain:

The love of power
or the power of love—
which way will you move?
Which one will you choose?

That's a question that keeps coming up. I doubt it's limited to just my circle. It's a question that the whole globe is asking itself right now. It's the question that lies behind many political ambitions and social justice crises happening right now in the world at large. It's the question that drives us towards finding spiritual answers to every problem.

The love of power, or the power of love?

Here's the first page, just to give a taste of this song and its format:


(Click on image to see larger version.)

And here are the first two verses and the refrain, as seen on this score page, to give you a taste of what the song's about:

I can see in the dark
it’s where I used to live
that place in the shadows
where everything burns
as the sun falls down
rats chew at the sieve
dark blood on the moon
means the world is done.

The laws of nature
are not the laws of man
and the laws of spirit
means you help who you can
what you send out
is what comes back again
better make love a promise
better stick to the plan.

The love of power
or the power of love—
which way will you move?
which one will you choose?

•

I've become a songwriter without ever intending it. This is the first score of this type that I've written in probably a decade. I've written some jazz charts before, and pieces for bands that I've been part of, in the past. It's interesting to me, to reflect upon the past, and realize that the last time I wrote anything like this was when I used to live in Madison, a decade ago. Obviously, there's some connection between writing music and being involved in the music scene of Madison, WI. I've played the occasional jazz gig since moving back to this area, since I was free to resume my own life after my parents died. A couple of weekends from now, I will be playing live improvised music for an art gallery opening in Madison. And then in March, I'll perform "The Power of Love" for Cabaret. Then in June perfect Harmony will premiere Heartlands, the major commission for chorus and piano that I spent most of 2011 writing. That will be a full concert of my new music.

So obviously Wisconsin has been fertile ground for me, for writing music. I intend to keep up with that. I intend to continue on this path. I intend to make a career of writing music. I intend to keep writing songs, as well as contemporary classical music. I intend to just keep writing, no matter what. It feels both good and intriguing that I am writing in new directions and styles, that I continue to develop diverse musical tools and ideas, that even now I can't predict what I'll write next, only that I intend to keep writing, no matter what.

So Mote It Be.

The Piano Has Been Thinking

Making It New

Scrambling around for something to do to make the new year feel new, feel worthwhile (ah, the joy of putting on a fresh ostomy appliance in the first morning of the new year! such celebration!), I stumble across in my morning reading, sipping my tea, a long interview between Robert Birnbaum and Sven Birkerts. Birkerts, always-thoughtful author of The Gutenberg Elegies, had more than one thing to say that was epiphanic to me.

This is of course the season, just after the calendar adds a number to the year date, to talk explicitly about epiphany. Epiphanies are not always revelations of the unknown: sometimes they are encounters with a formulation or explanation articulated by someone else that seems so true to your own experience that it goes off like a bomb, even retroactively, so that things in your past are reframed in a way that now makes new and more solid sense. In a sense, this other kind of epiphany is when you encounter something that you realize you already knew, all along, on some level, but you hadn't articulated it to yourself quote so clearly, elegantly, or thoroughly; so when you hear it coming from another source, there's a big "Aha!" moment, and part of the moment is your realization that this was something you already knew.

Birnbaum and Birkerts spent a long time talking about reviewing, its changing climate, its current diminution and failures (reminding me in a way of the long conversations between Michael Ventura and James Hillman transcribed in their mind-blowing book We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy—And the World's Getting Worse), and its possibilities.

One moment early in the interview that came across as an epiphany—one of those things I already knew, on some level, but hadn't yet articulated to myself—was in regard to a fundamental aspect of the creative process. They were talking about journalism and book reviews:

•

RB: How do you do with deadlines?

SB: Eschew them (both laugh).

RB: I guess that disqualifies you from journalism.

SB: I could have gone that way. I have done a major life-flip because I’d say the first 15 years of writing was a huge amount of reviewing and most of it was on deadline. I created a discipline-monster who I have since repudiated, or begun to. And I am not sure which leads which, but the stuff that used to arrive effortlessly in terms of the kind of mental structure of a review—it was like butter, I could just sit down and it would all come together. And that very thing has become almost unthinkably difficult for me. Everything in me resists writing the sentence that says, “In the opening of her latest novel…”

RB: Too facile, too banal?

SB: Well, you wear yourself out with your own repetitions. That’s also the basis of any progress in the arts, turning against what you can’t do anymore.

•

Pay attention to that: The basis of any progress in the arts is turning against what you can't do anymore. This makes so much sense to me. It strikes me as the root psychological force behind any avant-garde. All avant-gardes are on some level a rejection of the past, of the status quo, of the existing prevailing winds of artistic fashion, of received wisdom.

As an artist, there are things you have done before—whether they were rote exercises done during your apprenticeship, or whether they are received wisdom about what Art is or should be—that you can't stand to do anymore—you have an almost visceral, gut-level reaction against repeating your old habits and patterns. You wear yourself out with your own repetitions. The notion that the new is always better than the old is at root a Romantic ideal—and keep in mind that the artistic Modernism of the early 20th C. was the full and final flowering of the Romantic period that had begun almost a century before, in terms of its ideas about who makes art and why—and so the various avant-gardes of the early 20th C. were really rejecting the old ways of making art, while not really rejecting the archetypes and stereotypes of the Artist that are part and parcel of the Romantic ideal. (The Solitary Artist, the Starving Artist, the Misunderstood Rebel, etc.)

I've said often that as an artist I don't really ever get bored. And that's true. If something starts to seem stale, I can go do something else. I practice crop rotation between several artforms, as one way of staying fresh. (This past couple of weeks, even though in many ways I've had a personally crappy time, I continued to make art. I'm almost done with a new song, and I did a couple of rounds of papier-maché, and a couple of smaller poems. It's never a vacuum, even when things are bad.) Yet even though I never get bored, I do get tired of repetitions. I've invented at least four new forms for poetry, that I can recall off the top of my head, which I've then used several times for my own poems—until they seem stale, then I go on to invent new ones. (One contention that some formalist poets seem to have with what I do as a poet is not that I occasionally do use forms, but that I don't use existing, inherited, historical forms, like the sonnet: which are, after all, another form of received wisdom. The objection seems to be as much about the act of invention, itself, as it is about any poetic content.)

I am self-aware enough of my worldviews and mindsets to know how they appear in my art—and how they affect the basic assumptions I make about the nature of the Universe, of life, and therefore of art. It is characteristic of me as an artist to not repeat myself. At least, not very often. There are various creative grooves that I return to, for fresh idea-mining, but if you were to closely observe my process, it's often about variations rather than repetitions. This operates on both large and small scales. I am aware of my own preference to not repeat a melody exactly in every verse of a song; there are always a few notes different, in variation. If you listen to live performances of signature songs by familiar recording artists, they usually change the arrangement that was recorded on their album. This is another way of keeping it fresh. I am aware that when I write a poem within one of the forms I've invented, even then it rarely exactly matches its predecessors. My life's experience has led me to be very conscious that nothing ever repeats exactly the same way twice, that change is always active and inevitable, and that most things are ephemeral. One reason I don't like to repeat myself is because life's too short to waste time on repetitions. I periodically turn against what I can't do anymore, what doesn't work for me anymore. I periodically therefore must try new things, or invent them. I suppose it's a form of artistic restlessness, but it's a fertile sort.

Of course, this means that I will usually tend to find myself allied with an avant-garde, philosophically if not in terms of what my art actually looks like. I've always been allied in spirit to the avant-garde, although I have rarely used self-consciously "avant-gardist" styles or means. I'm not a member of any school or -ism. Neither an Expressionist nor an Existentialist be. I usually find myself in disagreement, sooner or later, with all keepers of artistic ideology. (The classic example was the Surrealists, who began as disruptors of the old way of making art, precisely as Birkerts stipulates, very fresh and original in their approaches to making art—yet ended up being rigidly encoded, with ideological purity enforcement about who was good enough to be a member of the group or not.)

I know that the price of this, as well as the price of not repeating myself, is likely to be a lack of popular or commercial success. Pop music audiences, for example, don't really want innovation, they want repetition. Most intelligentsia like to re-affirm existing (received wisdom) values and truths, and not seek out new territory. We still, as Jean Cocteau once said, tend to judge what is beautiful by what we are already familiar with. It takes time to educate the audience. So be it.

On the other hand, later in their conversation Birnbaum and Birkerts discuss the ongoing contemporary balkanization of popular media, the lack of a centralized critical value-system, the anarchic tendencies of the new publishing media. There is no real Top 40 list of songs in popular music any more, instead there are many genres and sub-genres each going their own way. Birnbaum is as critical of Top Ten lists as I am, and for similar reasons. Many balkanized genres openly ignore the Top 40 nowadays. Even such public praise as winning peer-recognition awards like the Pulitzer or the Oscars comes under scrutiny as meaningless to creativity. Many younger artists simply ignore the entire awards process.

So there is also the possibility, as Birkerts points out, that with all the new niches being created, an artist who might never have gotten published by a large publishing venture, or received much mainstream critical attention (such as myself, or you), can find or create their own niche to fill, and an audience that might be small but loyal. So there's hope even for me (and you).

Just as there are artists who tend to not repeat themselves, there are audiences who do like to be surprised, and enjoy the adventure of not knowing what they'll see next from the artists they like. I too am that sort of fan, and mostly follow artists who veer and migrate, rather than following the straight and narrow. Unpredictability is a positive virtue, in these cases. (Which is why I will always prefer the unpredictable Brian Eno, or the genuinely original Bjork, to the Michael Boltons and Lady Gagas of the pop music world.) Again, my experience has taught me that to embrace chance and change; which you must do, even if you don't want to, as that's how the world turns.

Which brings me around to epiphany again. Epiphany, as I said above, is about revelation, and about realization. It's also about making it new. How do we make it new? Sometimes by discovery. And at other times by refusing to re-enactment the old and familiar. It's an epiphany to realize, for myself, that I have always been inclined towards not repeating myself. It's an epiphany to accept that as being a good and proper way to be, with its many possibilities for the positive uses of restlessness.

Those End of the Year (Reading) Lists

Those bloody end-of-the-year lists. Top Ten lists of the "best" of everything. The annual ratings and beratings and appropriations and dismissals. Lists of good things, bad things, nothing special, personal lists masquerading as definitive critical statements. It's just the annual ritual to make lists. It's the thing people expect of you, expect of each other. It's what expected. It's one of those end-of-the-year rituals that people do without thinking about it overmuch. They just do it.

I'm not very big on just doing something because you've always done it. I'm not big on living life by rote, by habit, without thinking about it very much. I'm not big on not-thinking, on received wisdom that is accepted without being examined first. Ironically, of course, those people who most cling to their opinions as being their own are often those same people who don't really have any ideas of their own, but thrive instead on parroting received wisdom. "Everybody knows. . ." is the phrase that most often precedes a flurry of thoughtless, unexamined opinions.

Most lists are pointless. It's not even that they're predictable, dull, and always the same sort of thing as they were last year. It's that they change nothing. The world doesn't ripple with their passing. So lists, especially Top Ten lists, don't seem very useful. Nothing changes: mostly the status quo is affirmed. (I'm not alone in this opinion.)

Far more interesting are lists of things people have accomplished during the past year, including such lists as Stephen Mills' list of what books he read. That's an appealing idea. It's actually the only idea for an annual list that appeals to me right now.

Yet when I thought of compiling a list of what I've read in 2011, to be honest I was daunted, as it's a huge list. People who know me know that I'm a voracious reader, usually reading more than three books at any given time; I read quickly, and retain most of it. I actually couldn't give you a complete list of what books I read in 2011, because I didn't count or keep track; and to be honest, a couple of months are blurry in my mind, following the surgery at the end of June, when the anaesthesia was still fogging my memory and cognition pretty badly. At the same time, when I was first recovering from the surgery, I wasn't very mobile, and sat around reading a lot for a few weeks. In fact, I had laid in lots of unread books on my sun-porch table, to read as I was moved while recovering. I got through some of those, but not all of them. Well, there's another surgery to get through in the coming year, so it's good to stack on hand for then, as well.

And then there's the long list of books I've re-read, read again, read for the umpteenth time—because as unfashionable as it is in many critical circles I do read for pleasure as well as for edification; so I come back to re-read some books every so often. Every couple of years or so, I re-read two or three of Raymond Chandler's novels. This past year also includes a lot of Virginia Woolf, especially To the Lighthouse, which I've been thinking about a lot this year, as a work of fiction that tells much truth about what it is to be an artist and a person.

I also re-read, as I usually do, some favorite novels in the science fiction and fantasy genres—as problematic as I find the whole literary-critical situation around "genre," especially in the way mainstream "fine art literary fiction" tradition tends to look down its nose at SF, claiming literary quality for itself and denying it to "genre" fiction, which is bloody nonsense—including a couple of SF series by C.J. Cherryh and Chris Claremont. I also read a series new to me, by Jack McDevitt. And some other SF classics that I hadn't actually had the chance to read before, like Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash.

Notable reading this year in poetry has been getting further into Kenneth Rexroth, re-reading Jim Harrison's Letters to Yesenin and In Search of Small Gods, and a few other things. I've found a number of small books by poets I hadn't heard before which I quite enjoyed, for example, Elizabeth Dodd's Archetypal Light and Brendan Galvin's Whirl Is King. There's been more, both critical reading and pleasure reading of actual poetry, as heretical as that seems to be in some quarters nowadays, a list too long to detail without having to spend an hour compiling it. I did re-read a poetry classic, Love Alone by Paul Monette.

I read a lot of non-fiction. I get a lot out of good creative nonfiction writing, on the level of John McPhee and Barry Lopez. This year I read a couple of Michael Pollan's books on botany and our human interaction with it. I re-read some Henry Petroski, who is one of my favorite creative nonfiction writers, taking delight in the things that people make and unmake. One of my favorite reads this year was Annie Proulx' Bird Cloud, her memoir about her home in rural Wyoming, which she built on land full of wildlife and beauty. I enjoy reading writer's books on writing, both memoirs of life and of writing; it's not that writers make better or more self-aware critics of writing, but when they speak as artists talking about art, it often leads to insights about creativity itself.

There's more, of course, but I'll stop there. Needless to say, reading is a continuous activity in these parts. I don't apologize, though, for being well-read. It adds a lot of layers to living. And makes life more interesting.

Darshan

Soon after I completed Heartlands, the large choral commission I've been working on of throughout most of 2011, I was commissioned to make a CD of music for meditation, yoga practice, Reiki sessions, and other healing work. A friend's mother had been using my CD Trance for some time, and had given it some praise, so I was commissioned to make a new CD as a gift. I worked on this project in my recording studio for about a month, and completed the CD just before Xmas 2011. It's entirely instrumental music, prominently featuring shakuhachi, and Tibetan and Japanese meditation bells.

This year I plan to finally figure out how to market more of my music online, including this new CD as well as some older CDs. Here's the title track as a taste of things to come:

Darshan    

—AD, shakuhachi, computer music instruments



The musical soundscape was created in part by using some music apps on my new iPad. I got the iPad after completing Heartlands. I can see that for me the iPad is going to be a fantastic creative tool, both for music and photography, and likely in ways I haven't even thought of yet. The other cool thing about the iPad is that finally computer design and technology is approaching what I've wanted for years, after becoming a Star Trek fan. Design follows art in the best way possible.

"Darshan" is a Sanskrit word that means "see" or "seeing." In Hindu usage it refers to beholding the gods, or God, directly, and can also refer to those annual festivals when images of the gods are taken out of the temples and paraded through the streets for all to see. There is an implication that what we see also sees us: a mystical truth not limited to Hinduism, but found in most mystical traditions. As the great Medieval Christian mystic Meister Eckhart said, "The eye with which I see God is the eye with which God sees me."

"Darshan" in Indian philosophy also is used to describe worldviews and mindsets, the distinctive in which a systematized philosophy looks at things, including its exegesis of sacred texts. Yoga itself is considered a darshan. Yoga is a form of kinesthetic meditation, after all, like walking meditation or the highest levels of some martial arts.

So, Darshan is about the seeing the divine, the encounter with the divine. One realizes in the encounter that one is not separate from the divine, but all are part of the One. And one realizes that one's actions are not other than the will of the divine, which after all is made of all beings and what they will.



The blessing of doing this smaller commissioned piece of music is that it filled the gap between the completion of the writing of Heartlands, and the beginning of the rehearsal process. I have learned, as never before, that I need to always have something to work on. And the past few weeks have been very stressful, even dire and desperate at times. Multiple stressors all came home to roost at the same time. (Including having to change my dietary regimen (again!) just before the winter holiday season. The good news is that the new, even more restrictive dietary regimen is in fact effective, and I have made real progress losing weight this past week or so, for the first time ever since the surgery last summer.)

The wisdom of artistic perseverance is to make sure you are always working on multiple projects, and that as soon as you finish one, you start another. Don't wait. Dive right in. Never leave a gap in between projects, because a gap between projects is the door by which depression and despair can enter. It's not about doing make-work to keep yourself preoccupied or distracted: this is real work, not make-work. It's about knowing that I stay more grounded and focused when I have a big creative project of some kind to occupy my attention. It's a way of channelling one's energy in the best way, and preventing those inner voices of panic and depression form gaining a toe-hold. It helps with being able to cope with the day-to-day.

Therefore, as I completed the Darshan CD, I began writing a new song, maybe to become a new set of songs, for myself to sing and play. One of these will probably get premiered at a fundraiser in March. The style is more loose and jazz-pop-rock than formal. I'm still working on the lyrics, but after several false starts, the pattern fell into place, and progress has been made. All I anticipate needing to notate finally is melody-and-words, with chord symbols for the chord changes. I'll write lead sheets, in other words, instead of fully realized charts.

Then I'll do my best to learn to sing the song and play Stick at the same time.

I feel like my Stick playing is revitalized, as I wrote about after seeing Tony Levin in concert a couple of months ago, which I felt gave me permission to go my own way as a player; even to play simply and cleanly, and not need to become another solo Stick artist who can play anything. I have my limits, and I'm okay with them. Practice is what it takes to stretch them, that's all.

Swept the Garden

From a life long past a wave came:
a silent monk sweeping the dirt
in the garden path beyond the zendo,
ragged broom, black robes, shaven head,
sweep, sweep, as leaves fall all around,
a breeze stirs the dust and black maples,
swish, swish, the only sound
is the leaves and the broom on the path.

From a trail of tears a sigh came:
the breath of a child letting go,
in the end, and falling, a long corridor
in a dark building full of whispers,
while before his henchmen a warlord
stands calm and still, yellow demon mask
reposing where he does not smile,
prepared for anything, a looming
nightmare that terrified me as a boy.

From a day gone still a voice came:
whisper of wound and cave, myself
as a child, a youth, a man, all three
at once, the eldest holding the youngest
against fear, all painted with ochre and dirt
before a wet shelter ditch where youngest
self once hid to spare the storm,
now held in love as we watch the lightning
this time with joy and trepidation.

From future lands a boy came:
fragile, sturdy, running to the summer sea,
backlit by waves of particled scintillant light,
roar of surf the roar of white light dying,
roar of road and wreck and jail,
and under the roar a silence a block of crystal
a leap into light, last echo of cathedral voice
ring chanting sacred prayer for who are lost,
prayer of ancient monk who once

swept the garden.

Golden Waves

For those moments when you wish you were Elsewhere. . . .









. . . find a Doorway in the sunset, and go

Gratitudes 2011

I'm struggling with feeling gratitude, here at the end of a very harsh and bloody year, at the end of a long decade of things always getting worse rather than better. I'm at the point where I have doubts things ever will get better. Some things are getting better for some of my friends—and for one or two, abysmally worse. I just want 2011, the Year Of Hell, to be over at this point.

Christmas was good in that I spent it with a couple of close friends, but otherwise I just wasn't in the spirit of things. Life has looked bleak for a long time, and things keep happening that seem designed to break you. Call my Christmas mood, if you need a marker, somewhere in the middle of A Christmas Carol, neither the sentiment or joy of the ending, nor the bitter comedy of the beginning. A dark time in the middle of the story, that's all.

I just want the world to stop getting more vicious and fascist and bitter, cease its plummet down the steep incline of the black hole of self-destruction, pick itself up, and turn things around. Of course, it's people who make up the world—kanjo,the warriors are the castle—so it's up to us to turn things around for the better, and make a finer world. You. Me. Everyone you know. Everyone you care about. The responsibility and the task and the blessings are all of ours.

I'm having a hard time, after the Year Of Hell, finding much to be grateful for. Of course, I could start with the big and obvious one: I'm grateful to still be alive. In the past two years, as the chronic illness I had (mostly unknowlngly) suffered from for two decades deepened and worsened, I almost died a couple of times, I had some near-death experiences, and in the surgery that culminated as well as arrested the long slide, I genuinely felt like I had died and been reborn. Only now my body doesn't know what the rules are anymore, the old blueprints don't seem to work, and I keep stumbling over unexpected and unplanned changes. Things I used to like my body no longer likes, or tolerates. My diet has become so restricted that most days eating is not the pleasure it used to be. I end up breaking dietary rules simply because I can't stand going on. It's not about discipline or willpower—if health was subject to power of will alone, there wouldn't exist a billion-dollar industry supporting cures that don't work. It's sometimes about endurance, about doing everything right and still nothing works. Then what do you do? You can keep practicing the ascetic self-denial of self-flagellation, or you can live in denial, or you can fall into despair. Are there other choices? Nothing off-the-shelf does any good. Some nights you wonder why you've bothered.

For the first time in years, I find myself questioning my own practice of writing gratitudes. I find myself often unwilling to show up at the gratitudes dojo for practice, because it just feels like slogging through meaningless sludge. Wisdom both conventional and unconventional suggest that's just when you need to keep going, that maybe the very next repetition will be the one that turns things around—if you stop at 99 when it takes 100 repetitions, of course you won't see the end result. But many days it feels like you passed 100 a long way back, and still nothing has changed.

It's also true that lots of more shallow pundits in the self-development movement use the guilt-tactic of blaming the victim to motivate. Have you ever noticed that the entire weight-loss industry is based on the language of scarcity, and uses language that is uniformly negative and self-punishing? It's no wonder people suffer from abysmal self-esteem. Who wouldn't, when told again that they're "failures" unless they "lose." Look at the words: that's a double negative that leads not to a positive.

I guess I'm grateful I'm still alive. Most days, anyway. Some days, it's hard to get up enough strength to care.

I am grateful, genuinely, for the support of friends and family through all this, even when it's been tough love rather than emotional support. I struggle mightily with being grateful for the bad advice that comes from good friends, sometimes: well-intentioned, but not really helpful because not really taking into account the entire constellation of choices and challenges facing me. One big piece of clichéd conventional wisdom I've been confronted with since my surgery is that if people haven't been through it, they often really do not get it. They can empathize, and support you, and mean well, and love you—and, still, sometimes they don't really get it. That's a truth I've never liked to face, since I am someone who has experienced the power of imagination and empathy to connect. But I guess it really is true, at least sometimes.

I'm finding it hard to be grateful to some friends, therefore, who mean well but really don't get it. I don't want to be a cur, and tell them to their faces that they don't get it. I don't want to seem surly or ungrateful. I do know that it's possible to be grateful for someone's well-meant intentions to help you, on the level that they obviously care for and worry about you, and still not want to hear their advice. I'm sorry, sometimes it's just not helpful.

The event and process I feel the greatest gratitude for, this past year, is being commissioned to write music. Getting paid to exercise my creativity. That has meant more to me than almost anything else. It has turned my attitude around for months, by giving me something to do other than brood on my misfortune, or engage in a self-pity party. I am also grateful for one lesson learned from having successfully completed the new music commission: Always have another project to engage in right away. Don't allow yourself any down time.

It's when you stop and have nothing to do that the bad voices start to manifest again in the back of your mind.

So begins my churlish and wounded little heart, and scarred belly still worried about its future, to discover gratitude. I do have big things to be grateful for this year—and there are no doubt smaller, simpler things as well, if I can but examine myself to tweezer them out of stasis—yet I find myself not wanting to do this. I have been too wounded, in some cases literally, to feel confident of my own spiritual ambitions anymore. I am too uncertain of outcomes. Another big lesson, this year, wisdom that cements another common spiritual law that you already knew, but now you really Know For Sure (and for which I am grateful): There are no guarantees. Life is uncertain, and not always user-friendly. Any of this could all come to a brutal end, at any moment. Do not take lie too seriously, but don't take it for granted, either. Enjoy what you have while it endures. There may be more, but you can't count on that, so don't take this moment for granted. And don't be cheap about it, either.

Maybe I'll have more to say soon, more gratitudes to write out. I'm really struggling with this. I just want this awful, awful year of bad things to be done with. Gods bless us all that the coming year is a better one, a finer one, a kinder one.

Tannenbaum 2011

(Click on images for larger versions.)

Heartlands Concert Poster

(Click on image for larger version.)

This is the official concert poster for the premiere, next summer, of Heartlands, the new music I was commissioned to write, and have been writing all year. The commission has amounted to a full concert's worth of music (a whole CD), around 70 or 80 minutes of new music, and will be premiered in June 2012. The music was commissioned for the Fifteenth Anniversary Concert of Perfect Harmony Men's Chorus, the gay and gay-affirming men's chorus of Madison, WI. The piece will be premiered in Madison, then performed again in Milwaukee.

Then we will take part of the concert's worth of music and perform it in Denver, CO, in July 2012, as part of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance of Choruses (GALA) convention that happens every four years. The GALA convention is a chance for choruses to get together, perform for each other, feature new music, and network both musically and socially. It's a huge celebration of music, of life, and of joy. A lot of people will hear my new music at GALA, and I hope that Heartlands will be performed again, and that I'll get more commissioned work from this exposure.

I hope all of my friends who are able to attend one of the concerts will do so.

•

I made this poster early, using one of my own photos of rural south central Wisconsin, so that it would be available for marketing and fundraising. The poster is tabloid size (11x17) with versions to be used as postcards for mailing, and also smaller concert flyers.

The music score is currently being engraved and typeset in music software, and I am almost done proofreading. I plan to publish the score in book form later this spring or summer, and will use the poster illustration and typography to make it have a consistent look and feel. That's about branding, in graphic design: consistent visual imagery and style, and consistent typography, that create an identify, a recognizable logo and image for an event or person or business. Making this poster early means we can brand the concert early, and begin marketing campaigns and future fundraising mailings immediately. I have also made a letterhead and identity system for Heartlands and for the Fifteenth Anniversary Concert season.

I'm very satisfied with this poster. The idea was to emphasize the horizontal lines, the big sky, the open spaces of the land. I chose to do it in B&W for the evocative tone, and converted the photograph to a mezzotint to give it a classic antiqued look. The poster will probably be printed on colored paper; off-white or pale sepia, to give it a sense of being rooted, solid, and tied to the land. A vintage look, if you prefer, like some poster you might discover in a barn or farmhouse, both old and new.

Not quite winter, but nearly, nearly