The Last Hummingbirds Of Summer

You can really tell around here that Fall is nigh...the colors of the trees are starting to peer out from under the green, the air is cool and crisp, and now and then you'll see vast flocks of birds flying overhead, starting their journey south. Our barn swallows are long gone, alas, off to Argentina and presumably Argentinian barns. For a while, I thought all the hummingbirds had split as well...the ones at the nectaries were getting really fat, like flying ping-pong balls, and then they disappeared. Those little guys are really tough, and feisty too...they fight each other for territory, and the nectaries are prime real estate. All Summer you'd see little dogfights as hummingbirds would slam into each other in these tiny turf wars.

These guys are too fierce and independent to migrate in flocks (but just imagine if they did...a cloud of buzzing tiny birds), they go individually on an insane migration, first down to Louisiana, and pretty much non-stop from here in Michigan. That's why they feed so much before leaving...they double their body weight for the trip. Then, they feed up again down south before the final leg of the journey, ALL THE WAY ACROSS THE GULF OF MEXICO!!! That's like 500 miles over open water. Crazy. Then in the Spring they do it all again in reverse.

So I thought my hummingbird watching was over for the season. But just as I was getting ready to pack the feeders up, a new, slimmer bunch of birds started to show up. I've seen this here and down by my folks place too this year...apparently these are the younger, smaller hummers that were getting pushed away from the nectaries earlier. Now they're getting a chance to feed up, hopefully they can get ready before the cold weather hits. They seem to be making up for lost time!

I was out on my upstairs back porch, making a phone call to Cyn, leaning up by the bird feeders, when I heard a buzzing right by my ear...I turned and there was a tiny female ruby-throated hummer, totally ignoring me and taking full advantage of the nectar there, about 2 feet from my head. She and I hung out for quite a while together, and I got a chance to really observe her feeding from a vantage point I'd never had before. Amazing!! Hope that little one makes it safe across the Gulf to sunny Mexico, and back here again next year...

Up From The Deep Water

Once again, swimming in darkness, deep in the downbelow, pressure in my ears, my chest, I can't see to find which way is up. Slowly rising, a little light above, maybe I can make it to the surface before my lungs burst or I just give up and drink in the black water all around. If I do that I'll just sink back and that'll be that, no more struggles, no more pain, no more nothin'. But for some unreasonable reason I keep rising, lighter now, I can start to look around and see bright colored schools of fish swimming beside me, beautiful things. The water becomes transparent, and warmer, and suddenly I break the surface, sputtering, sucking in lungfuls of blessed air, sun on my wet head as I look around. The sea is everywhere, green sea and blue sky. I'm a long way from anywhere, but hey, I can breathe again.

Inspirations (and Intimidations)

I've had a couple of very inspiring (and kind of intimidating) musical moments this past week. The first one was seeing Junior Brown in concert! A good friend and client took Cyn and I to see him at the Ark this weekend. Amazing guitarist! The guy plays everything from Hendrix to Honkytonk to Segovia, all brilliantly...and then switches to his steel guitar and plays that brilliantly. Plus, he has a great singing voice and writes excellent songs. For a while after seeing him I was considering just throwing the guitar out the window and hanging it up. I think that would upset Junior if I did, though, so I won't. But Man! Get you over to YouTube and check him out. Beyond belief.

The other very inspirational event was watching a movie documentary of percussionist Evelyn Glennie called "Touch The Sound". Glennie is a Classical percussionist who does unbelievable improvisatory work, from walls of sound with the Kodo drummers to amazing delicate bits playing with chopsticks on plates, and much more. A very strange and almost mystical thing about her is that she is effectively deaf...her ears register very little sound at all. Somehow she has taught herself to "hear" sound using her whole body, and it seems that the experience is very rich and beautiful to her. The movie is a fabulous experience in itself, a dialog about sound and perception, and a treat to watch. Her duets with guitarist Fred Frith are worth the price of admission, seriously! Easily found at video rental shops and worth the time for anyone who ever enjoys music and sound.

So I have a gig tomorrow with my band The Mobsters...will I bring any of this inspiration to the table there? Well, I still don't have Brown's chops or Glennie's sensitivity, but having experienced a little of that kind of artistry sure won't hurt me. Knowing that there are far frontiers to explore, vast horizons to travel toward...music is an endless quest, a toy that keeps changing shape, an infinite journey into yourself and out into everyone else in the universe. And a lot of fun besides!

The Ever-Shorter Attention Span

Is it because we're all just really busy keeping the hamster wheels moving? Our communications with each other keep getting less and less with all this groovy info-sharing tech we've got going. In the Victorian era people's letters to each other were epic...long, beautifully written, insightful and informative, many of them still worth reading even now by strangers to those long gone friends and lovers. The Brownings correspondence was incredible...later, George Bernard Shaw had many epistolary friendships, long ones (like decades of intense communications) with people, some of whom he never met in the flesh. Ol' H.P. Lovecraft, that shy and crazy guy, seemed to communicate much better by letter...not to mention our old pal Vince Van Gaugh and his bro.

These days we seem to only have time for a brief cellphone call, or perhaps a few words in an email, but most of my emails are pretty darn short! We're a rushed race racing towards a future that's unknown, but we're getting there darned fast. Now we have things like Twitter and MySpace's Status Reports...summing up your life in a sentence and broadcasting it out to the world! Perhaps that will save some time, I dunno. I'm supposedly on Twitter (well, I'm supposedly on a lot of things but really I'm mostly lying on the couch reading comics) and I do fill out my Status Report now and then for a laugh, but I just wonder where all this leads. Will we get to where we just put up One Word every day on some site, and have that represent all our communication to our friends and family? Maybe just One Single Letter. "Yes, I think I'll go with 'Q' today, I'm sure 'X' is already taken"...Man, I just can't say. Maybe I'm overreacting a bit...but if you write me a letter I'll sure write you back.

Mink

Another day of rain in Spring...watching the puddles sprinkle themselves full, the little creeks run with fresh water, and my lawn get high as my knees...things are beautiful and lush this time of year. The wetlands are full of frogs singing their courting songs, and full of herons and cranes eating the frogs, and turtles coming out of hibernation to snarf up whatever it is they snarf. The other day I was driving down the dirt roads to my rehearsal at John's house, and I narrowly missed hitting a MINK! I hadn't seen one before in Michigan, but unmistakably a mink. Cyn says she's seen one too by that same swampland, so I'm guessing that there's a little minky community out there. This one had caught a vole or something and was carrying it across the street...presumably to its lair, perhaps to feed its little minklets. Very cool!

I'm aware these days of being pretty bipolar, and that's reflected in these posts I know. It's like being trapped in a black hole in space...the gravity of the hole is very strong. Sometimes I'll make my way out for a while, then get sucked back in. The good thing is that even in the worst of it I have the perspective that there's a better reality that I'll eventually get to. The bad thing is that even when I'm out of it I know that there's that black hole, exerting its gravity, ready to pull me in again. All I can do is try to keep positive as I can, stay healthy and all, and hope for the best (St. John's Wort helps a good bit too). But little things like mink sightings are very helpful for me, they show me a world outside of my head that is amazing, constant and beautiful.

LastFM, MySpace & Fun

Listening to my library of tunes on LastFm.com...what a cool idea for a music site! Type in the bands you like best, and it starts suggesting other bands, which you can accept or deny, and grow your music library fractally in whatever directions you like. Mine seems to have a lot of great obscure Psychedelic Rock (surprise), old R&B, crazy outsider music and eclectic tunes from musicians all over the world. I dig it! Right now the player is kicking out "Silver & Gold", that amazing instrumental from the old Quicksilver band. Cool stuff.

It's nice too, because I'm finding lots of artists I'd never known of before...Finnish rockers, obscure guys from the 60s I missed somehow, South African Mbganga bands...that's fun. And I've been needing some fun! There's times I'm so busy spinning my hamster wheel that I forget what makes me feel good. I'm starting to try to remember though.

I just recently went over 1000 friends on my MySpace account. While nobody sent me a prize, with so many friendlists in the 5 figures these days (!!!), and even though 99% of those people won't ever write me, it did make me think about what I actually have gotten from the MySpace thing. I've met some really fabulous people...folks that I've become good real friends with, that I like to hang out with, be it online or in person. And I've been exposed to all kinds of very cool music, art and poetry done by really creative artists!! (By the way, I'm STILL baffled by people who ban bands from their friend requests...and some of them are band sites themselves! What the heck are you thinking?) Anyhow, thanks to all of you guys for connecting with me, and sharing your work, humor and ideas with me...it's been a gas! Hopefully, much more to come...good things for us all...

New Day (And Possible Concussion)

I'm starting to feel a little better...sometimes it all just gets to you, yknow? But today's an improvement from yesterday, and perhaps tomorrow will be better still. Cyn (bless her heart) was walking me around the yard showing me her plantings...things are gonna be really pretty if all these trees take. We went into the barn to see if the swallows had arrived yet, and I managed to clock myself a real good one on an overhanging beam! Saw stars and everything. Cyn picked me up off the floor and dusted the hay and horsepoop off me, and I seem OK. I looked in the mirror and my eyeballs seem all right, so probably no concussion or anything. But I've got a really stylish lump on my noggin! Maybe it's knocked some sense into me though...I could use that...

No Way Forward

If there's a wall to hit, I hit it a while ago. Somehow I feel drained of any strength. I can manage an outward show of optimism, but inside I don't know if I see a way forward right now. And I feel exibitionistic writing this out in a public blog, too, but there it is...I think all the pressures in my life are finally coming to the fore. I was denying that they were getting under my skin, but I guess I was wrong about that. Perhaps tomorrow will be better, it often is. Hope so.

The Woods Are Lovely

Rushing through my busy and rather stress-filled day, talking to recording clients, cleaning clients, new associates, working on websites, ebay guitar deals, and huge offices to swab out...and driving the dirt road to town, saw the wood lot down the street, still with its dusting of snow protected from the sun by the sheltering trees. A magical place, with the creek running through it and the light through the branches reflecting off the water and snow like a million diamonds. I'm a very lucky person, and I'm glad I can sometimes have moments like that one, to put everything else into perspective.

Bigsby Tremolo

Just got a Bigsby Tremolo put on my new guitar! Mickey managed to set it up in record time...truly he is the Ninja Master of Guitar Techs. For those of you who don't know, the Bigsby is a mechanism that allows you to bend all of your guitar strings up (or down) simultaneously...a whammy bar if you will. If you've heard the Ventures, or any Surf Music, you've heard the sound. I've messed with other tremolos before, but listening to the amazing Johnny A. finally won me over to the world of the Bigsby. If you haven't heard that guy, don't waste any time, go get one of his albums, or go to YouTube and watch him play a little...you'll see what I mean. Of course, a Bigsby sure won't make me into Johnny A., but it's a nice thing to have in the arsenal. Now I just have to mess with it for about 30 years or so...

The Tides Of March

Things are getting soggy around here...we've had about 4 days of straight rain. Sort of reminds me of the Northwest coast! There's a pretty amazing river running through our eastern field, back through some wetlands and over our neighbor's fields, off into the distance...a huge amount of water on the move. Looks pretty crazy, but this often happens. Then for a while the swamps are really swampy, and the frogs all wake up and start their annual Spring Orgy, and we know that the ice and snow are behind us for a bit. Strangely enough, the cats don't seem to want to get out in this stuff.

I've been feeling better and better recently, with more energy and positivity than is usual for my old cynical self, and having a pretty good time all told. Working on new music, spending a little more time in the gym, getting out and seeing friends. After the flu that almost did me in, and the winter that almost did the same, I'm starting to get that Spring vibe. Yeah, it'll freeze tonight, and maybe we'll get buried in snow again for a while, but I sense the warm coming on, and that's a good thing.

The Slowly Spinning Room

The lights go down...music rises from the silence. My head begins to spin. A tumult of sensation overwhelms me, and I'm helplessly off my feet and whirling, whirling through time and space, the lights too bright and the sounds too loud, round and round the maelstrom as I'm tossed ever lower, down into the depths...

Opium dream? Satanic attack? Bad NIN concert flashback? Nah, just a really nasty influenza virus that managed to get under my defences and kick my sad butt this week. Worst I've had in a long time...I can understand how epidemics of this stuff carried thousands and thousands off to the underworld, I felt like I got pretty close. I swear I think at one point I saw some guy in Plutonic robes smiling and beckoning me in, but I started swimming towards the surface and got away this time. Now I'm weak like a little kitten, and it all seems like a strange, very painful nightmare...must buy more oranges.

Looking at my folks old editions of encyclopedia, the Britannica and the good ol' World Book, I used to just thumb through those for fun. Now, amazingly, the same amount of information can just sit in a few GB of your hard drive, or even live accessibly out somewhere in cyberspace for instant retrieval. Although somehow I feel I trust Wikipedia less than Britannica, and I know I can't just open it up and read at random the same way (although I must say I use Wiki all the time). It's like I can't really get a charge buying music online the same way I do when I'm in a (now sadly rare) really good music store, I can't wander around the same right-brained way, stumbling into strange and wonderful stuff accidentally...or by hanging around jawing with the hip Record Store Guy. I was one of those once, by the way...not necessarily hip, but a Record Store Guy. I don't miss all of it, but I do miss turning people on to cool music...

Playing music in a state of high fever is an odd experience. You can't really get anything done, but sometimes you get really strange insights. Running through some chord arpeggios and scale sequences while practicing a tune, and suddenly the patterns of "notes available while passing through time" became really clear. I could see the various interlocking scales and chord tones incredibly clearly, and how various choices could lead to different melodic and harmonic outcomes...and how of course that this is only the very first step. The next goal is to completely assimilate those patterns so that there are infinite options...and then, the transcendence of those patterns and into real freedom. If that sounds a bit Metaphysical, it's because I think it really is! Mastering music as a metaphor for the Spiritual journey...yeah, you've heard it before, but hey, it's my cosmology and I'm stickin' with it. But anything can have that metaphorical cosmology I think...what about that Zen butcher? He did his job so perfectly that his knives never got dull, and his focus on his actions was clearer than the monks in the monastery. But I'm stickin' with the music thing, you get shiny guitars and the chicks dig it.

Perhaps I'm still recovering a little...my mind seems to be wandering. Sometimes that's actually a pretty good thing, and I wonder if maybe a little stumbling around in the right side of the brain might not be just the thing in these strange dark pre-Spring weeks. But I'd much rather do it without the incredible sinus and joint pain, thanks!

Dire February

February is a month in Michigan where people are just really hanging on, trying to get through to Spring, still held by the icy teeth of Winter. Some types probably blog more during these periods...I seem to do less. Less is happening. I get to work. I get back. I lie on the couch. Cyn and I try hard not to get in each others way and to respect space, since we work together as well as live together, and that's a kind of weird vibe. I don't get to the studio to work as much as I should, but still practice with the Mobsters when the weather permits...we've had more than a few rehearsals cancelled due to heavy snow. Today may be such a day. A friend who was looking for a bassist with his new group called last week and I went out and played with them...quite a good Power Pop band, but I don't know if I'll really have the time to do it. I need to try to focus on working with this Swing stuff, and with my own original music, and that just may preclude any other projects.

Really I feel like I'm just waiting for the weather to break for good. So ready for it...I'd love to take a walk without freezing something off. Last night the Coyotes were howling again, and I called the barn cats indoors for protection. They ran in pretty quickly, too! I'm sure those Coyotes are hungry and Bitey or Bluto would be a welcome snack. Much as I admire the wild things, I'd like to avoid that.

I'm playing my new guitar quite a bit right now...it's made by Agile, a Korean company. Essentially a Les Paul knockoff, I've had a few Paul players tell me it's a good as many an LP. Sounds great and looks crazy...the top is all white pearlescent pickguard finish. I didn't expect it to sound as good as it does, but there's solid mahogany underneath that, and the pickups, hardware and electronics are surprisingly very high quality. And it's less than a tenth the price of a LP...which makes it possible for this particular starving musician to own one. Watch out, Korea is taking over the world...

Actually, it feels good to write in this journal again. I think it's easy this time of year to just get torpid and hibernate as much as possible...I know I've done that a lot. But writing kind of gets my internal motor going again, which is important anytime really. Now I've just gotta get out to the studio and finish off those pesky tunes of mine!

Catching My Breath

I took a little break from writing after the holidays...I'd just been a bit overwhelmed and there was so much going on. Now that the social obligations are down to a funky few, and the cookies have all been et (back to the gym for me!), and my folks have been packed off on the plane and delivered to Florida's land of Sunshine & Geezers, I've been relaxing a bit and playing catch-up with everything else in my life. Feels good! It's gonna take a little time to decompress...maybe take a holiday from the holidays...

Playing a lot more too, at least on guitar. The Mobsters band is a good impetus for me to woodshed, and I seem to be leaning into the Swing side of my influences again, which is really fun. Mickey Richard, Guitarist and Luthier Extraordinaire, found and gave me an old old old Doghouse Bass last week. Very Cool! It's gonna need some work, but not too much I think. I'm looking forward to stringing it up and working with that thing, maybe do a little Swing Duet action with Mickey...that would be great.

I also went Tech again and got Band-In-A-Box, a cool and kind of frightening tool. It's a software/MIDI/loops program, and what you do is basically type in your chords and time signature, etc, and then bango! The thing starts pumping out a full arrangement with drums, bass, guitar, horns and more. Scary really, but GREAT for practicing. I'd been just running through the Mobsters swing songs at home by myself, but typing them into BIAB and playing with a full band, much more fun! And strangely I find myself playing LESS notes, and leaving a lot more space. If this tool can help me then I'm gonna use it.

At any rate, hopefully I'm back writing again...who knows, perhaps writing songs again too. I find that creative periods can occasionally be goosed into being, but for the most part they come when they will, and I've got to respect that and enjoy it when it's happening. Right now though, I'm off to work again...

Happy New Year (Or Thereabouts)

A new year in a strange century! The earth shifts, and the people wake to unusual changes in their world each day. New technologies appear and bend our lives and minds into bizarre new places, a bold new President prepares to lead this country into the future and who knows where, new arts and musics and more swarm into view to create beauty, chaos and controversy. And, all the while on a shelf in the shed, Kenny's Little Creatures on display.

As for me, I survived the onslaught of the Holiday Season, although barely. I get bombarded by friends and family who appear as if by magic and hijack any plans I may have made to get stuff done, and I have to kind of go with that and keep my seasonal cheer intact at the same time. I think I did pretty well considering...no fatalities (yet)! And there was indeed some good fun had by all. Although we were hampered a bit by some of the crappiest weather I can remember in the Xmas/New Year's period...we were snowed in a few days, iced in a few days more, and then camped out on my parent's floor for three more days when the windstorms knocked out power for about 30,000 people around these parts. Just glad me Ma & Dad were OK! Basically I just stopped over to our farm during the day, fed the completely demoralised cats and weasel, and turned on the generator to pump out the flooded basement, usually twice a day. Cleaning that is big fun! But that's part of the joy of country living. I'm just really glad to have things working again, and to have things a bit quieter. Now maybe I can get some music done again.

It's true, my upcoming CD has been sidelined by the Holidays, the weather and rehearsals for my new live band, but I've been back dusting off the studio and doing a little polishing of the existing recordings. This should be an interesting one...a little different from the last, with for some reason, a lot more electric piano (well it's just cool) and a good deal of groove-oriented post -beat songs. But as always, I'm not sure what'll happen till I'm done. Maybe it'll end up a Polka CD, I just don't know.

Anyway, a Happy New Year to all, and I hope you are having less travails with life and weather than us. If not, my condolences...please hang in there!

P.S. It's amazing! I wrote this out and the spellchecker only found one misspelled word..."what'll", which I guess isn't even officially a word. Can I be becoming a better speller in my old age? Very strange.