How To Say It

How To Say It

I've been listening to some of the Rick Rubin episodes of the Broken Record podcast. Rick has a comfortable approach for me; I can understand a little of how he's created the space for the artists he's worked with to do their work.

I understand as well that there are some folks who wouldn't be able to work with Rick. Nor, probably, listen to an hour+ of his interview of another artist. Not all methods apply. Such is life.

The episodes I've been most fascinated with so far are the, now 4 part series of, John Frusciante interviews. I've only just finished part 2 of that series. I'm having to take my time with them.

I caught myself on Rick's 2nd interview with John over an extended discussion of synesthesia. John experienced this effect fully during an early part of his musical life, though he believes that the feeling is still there to a very subtle, but important, degree.

The part that fascinates me about this isn't the synesthesia itself. It's how Rick first tries to pin John down on it.

And, eventually, how John gets Rick to understand that, even if Rick doesn't have the "visual" synesthesia, Rick does have the same feeling that accompanies it.

The one of realization. Or, recognition. When you see the whole of what you're doing in one go.

That a mechanic sees the inside of an engine before they take it apart shouldn't, doesn't really, surprise most folks. Nor a potter feeling the shape of their vase before their hands touch the clay. What John eventually manages to say in the interview is just this point, really.

That people are fascinated with synesthesia comes, I think, from the realization that some experts don't think of their craft in the way that we would anticipate. It's like discovering that Michelangelo "tasted" his art rather than seeing the painting or feeling the sculpture. It doesn't compute.

Because it doesn't fit the conception we use to understand how others do something. We carry around a general idea from our own experience, but then we stumble across an exception. And it feels like something that should be a bigger deal than it is.

Except with music, the fascination should probably be less than it is. Think about it this way: would you be in any way surprised if Yo-Yo Ma said that he saw an entire score, or significant parts of it, rolling through his mind as he played a piece? Beethoven had to see the notes to write them down, right? Somewhere between the ear and the hand passes a translation from audio to visual. Or tactile if playing.

We have a whole industry devoted to teaching musicians to visualize their music in a very particular way. Little black dots on a page.

In fact, a very important part of later music education is re-teaching students to hear and sing, feel, those notes, rather than just see them. High school level musicians very much know how to see music. Often, seeing instead of hearing is so overdeveloped that it's a stumbling block to their continued development.

They have to learn how to hear it: sight-singing, ear training. In many ways, these disciplines are meant to help the to-this-point much-lauded 1st chair reconnect to their inner 5 year old. Let them pick up the instrument and just hear the music again, without the visual getting in the way.

Then you go on to integrate it. And, hopefully, engage all of your senses as a performer. John just shows that those with synesthesia, those who've learned to integrate that unusual sense into their playing and composing, walk the same path from a different starting point.

I've actually been thinking more lately about AI, machine learning. I set out this morning under the mistaken impression that I'd write something about it. But then Rick and John's conversation intervened in my head. AI just became uninteresting to me for a moment.

... and nope, next day and I still don't have anything to say about AI generators. We've seen this movie before; now there are folks getting theirs gored, that's all. Root hog or die has come for someone else. If I have to, the only thing I'll say is that 15 year olds don't give a shit at all what the old folks say about how they make their art. Nor should they. They'll use the ML algorithms however they want to, and more power to them.

On a completely different note, Kurstin x Grohl continue to have a Hanukkah blast this year. Turning it into a live concert, even. Fantastic.

Stuff I've Been Reading Lately Nov 2022

Stuff I've Been Reading Lately Nov 2022

Aside from the Twitter madness, you mean? Not that I'm on Twitter; I use a web browser to keep up with certain writers who've turned Twitter into a microblog rather than use other sites. As with their many predecessors, Twitter seems to be following a lifecycle that's endemic to internet forums. Rise, coast, dive. Forums are a community exercise, and when they cycle into the Asshole Dominated period they rarely recover. That said, I'm not sure that I know of any examples of forums, public ones anyway, that broke out of this cycle successfully. Facebook, perhaps, but I think that they may be inan unreplicable position due to age group specifics. Who knows at this point?

Brad Delong's Slouching Toward Utopia was a good read, I learned details and emphasis that I wouldn't have otherwise known. I have quibbles, especially I think that Delong does himself a disservice in how he treats 1970-2010 due (likely) to scholar's propriety. I wonder also if, coincidentally, Delong got to 1970 or so and started second guessing the continued utility of his framing device. Still and all well worth it for a good tour of the economic history most immediately foundational to our current era.

Mati Ocha's Terra Incognita and The Transcendent Green. Apocalypse LitRPG books, I liked Mati's voice, character, pacing, and very specific, localized settings. I also like that the inherent power progression problem is also well contained here.

James Haddock's books, Stonecutter's Shadow, Hand Made Mage, and several others. There's a real variety of settings here, some overlap but really this is a writer who's happy to work in similar/same worlds but not beholden to "series" writing if he doesn't want to be. That said, Cast Down World is explicitly labeled as Book One, and that's a setting that I look forward to returning to.

Dave Turner's How To Be Dead series was good... though now I think about it I might have already said that. If I did, it's still a good series!

As I look through the rest of my as-read calendar I don't see any others sticking out. Eh, the To-Be-Read has a T. Kingfisher book I haven't dug into yet, a Joe Hill book with unbent corners... I think that's about enough for now, I've got some stories calling me. Later.

A Mountain Rises Beneath My Feet - M.K. Dreysen 11//20/2022

Random Thoughts

Random Thoughts of a moment

***

A mob of egrets grazing the neighborhood yards is a joy. The decorations they leave on my little car, much less so.

This is one of those occasions that I hear the universe giggle.

***

I've seen so little discussion of the current political noise in reference to that which has gone before. We have few guides, granted, and each generation must learn these things, but we appear to be in a moment where those who know that certain noisemakers and their camp followers have predecessors in both movement and violence are not able to make signal. For every Tucker Carlson there's a G. Gordon Liddy, for every New Right there's a John Birch Society.

I understand why someone Biden's age isn't impressed. But those who should be able to support and teach aren't otherwise around to back him up. At least not vocally or with any kind of reach. Of economists and preachers we have plenty, but thoughtful political scientists can't seem to catch a break.

***

I have reason to think of the album this song opens, Straight on Til Morning by Blues Traveler. 25 years since its release; that year was a big one for me personally. The year I met the lady who's blessed my life since.

What's interesting looking back is that, at the time, if you'd given me a time capsule of later music by Blues Traveler, it's actually this one that my younger self would have told you was more appropriate.

I've been wrong before, I'll be wrong again. Really, the universe giggles at us, and often.

It's Business As Usual Again

when the week starts off reading an article in Science where someone actually dug into how the Hierarchy dominates faculty hiring... forget it. I read it, started to work through how you're better off playing roulette and this big long thing about odds in casino games.

Nah, never mind. Got better things to do with my time, right.

Then I came to the end of my week and watched this wonderfully done video by the Professor of Rock on YouTube:

Look, I know the story of how Paul Simon screwed Los Lobos. What David Bowie did to Stevie Ray Vaughan. And many other similar tales, movies books plays you name it and there's so many many ways that not just the money screws people, but other artists do as well. Like they've decided that because it happened to them it makes it ok to pass it on.

And look, Mick and Keith signing the rights back to Richard was the right thing to do. Stipulated.

After 22 fucking years of cashing those goddamned checks?

Though there is one hilarious moment in the middle of this week, driving back to the hotel room for a day gig trip and the streaming service spit out Nickelback's Rockstar, which I haven't heard in a good long while. And I still can't help smiling at the one lyric in that song that I've always wondered is what really got them put into such a bad odor with the cognoscenti: I'll get washed-up singers writing all my songs, lip sync 'em every night so I don't get 'em wrong.

No it's not a koan, but it was a giggle in the middle of a long week. Just glad I got back on the plane before Ian started making its way up the coast. My heart and help will be going out to a lot of folks who are hurting, and will be. Stay safe and sane where you can, people.

Bravo

Black Lucy and the Bard is a fun way to spend some time in front of the TV. The Nashville Ballet dancers enjoyed themselves immensely, Rhiannon Giddens and Francesco Turrisi played a terrific accompaniment, and writer Caroline Randall Williams adds to the fun by narrating the whole thing (base on her book Lucy Negro, Redux) from the stage.

definitely worth the attention and time spent from this seat. Thank you all, and PBS for the broadcast.

I Think So Brain, But You Should Wear The Catsuit This Time, It Goes So Well With Your Eyes

Describe What You See

We Will Not See Their Likes Again

And we might hope that this be only due to lack of necessity. To lose both Nichelle Nichols and Bill Russell in the same weekend is too poetic. And far, far too painful.

A Month On The Road And I'll Be Eating From Your Hand

A Month On The Road And I'll Be 'Eating From' Your Hand

Saw this via a Slash post this morning, Aerosmith have put out a video of their concert at the Summit in 1977, basically a Toys In The Attic/Rocks tour with a Draw The Line preview.

The audio here is pretty good for the Summit; we saw them 20-something years later on the Nine Lives Tour (I was a little young for the 1977 tour, and mom couldn't stand the Toxic Twins anyway) and the Summit echoed like mad. We all walked out of there with headaches from the bass return off the back wall.

Toys In The Attic is probably my favorite Aerosmith album, Nine Lives is a favorite of the later albums.

If you've ever wondered how Steven Tyler still has a voice, you'll want to watch this one. Notice that after Back In The Saddle, Steven mostly stays away from the vocal theatrics, except for a few flourishes, until a stretch of Draw The Line in the home stretch. Otherwise, he's pretty clean vocally; they all sound and look great here.

There's a couple of continuity glitches, wardrobe shenanigans (I don't think Tom changed from a white silk shirt in one song, to a t-shirt in the next, then back to the same white silk shirt for the final, for ex) indicating they spliced in a couple of other performances.

I'm curious about Joe's Les Paul set up... but that's his '59, now that I dig around for comparisons online.

On Toys In The Attic, watch for the chorus parts at the end, when Steven walks over and shares his mic with Joe. Joe comes in off the key and doesn't hear it, watch how Steven manages this, first singing into the mic, then singing directly into Joe's ear.

Yes, there's a bottle on the drum stand. Steven grabs a pull just after Back To The Saddle (I think, 1st couple of songs, anyway). Not that I can blame him, no matter how well prepped you are the set intro here is rough on the chords. Otherwise the band's just grooving for an hour, I don't even see cups of beer or other wet supplies out where the gang can grab a quick sip. For a contrast to show why it sticks out to me, see if you can find video from Queen's live set at Montreal, 1981, and you'll see how many cups of both beer and water/soda are laid out. I wonder how Aerosmith were tackling their troubles (which were going to get much worse not long after this) at this point.

Let's see, for me of this performance it's Mamma Kin and Draw The Line for the highlights here, and Sweet Emotion is interesting for some of the ways Steven's playing with rhythm. The whole set is good and tight, and only a little of the "right up to the edge" showing, otherwise everyone's all just right there for each other and sounding good.

Well worth taking an hour to listen to if you're interested in Aerosmith. I think it says somewhere that they'll pull the video in a week, so if you are interested you'd best catch it soon.

****

Yeah, ok, so the official line is "eating from your hand", and I'm sure Steven sings it that way more often than not.

But (ahem spelling deliberately chosen given the realities of search engines) "coming in your hand" is a lot harder to get out of your head if you've ever heard him sing it that way...

Memento Sunday 07/24/2022 by M. K . Dreysen

A Fun Way To Spend An Evening

Last night, Rick Beato popped up with an interview, here of Derek Trucks, which I found to be a very fine way to spend an hour.

A couple of highlights for me. First was Derek's discussion of why he and Susan are releasing their albums currently: One a month, basically, and with a few other twists, I'm not sure so I'll need to check out but I think that there's at least a small window where the album is streamed live, whole, and free? Either way, what I found fascinating was that Derek's reasoning here is entirely artist. There's no "strategy" here, other than the only one that ever matters, i.e. how do I reach the audience.

The other part I found fascinating was Derek's discussion of how he developed his "ear", his listening and vocabulary. Good stuff.

Rick's got some other very, very good interviews as well. One I'd recommend is one that Rick mentions in the Derek Trucks video, it's an interview of Ron Carter, bassist.

But the interview by Rick that I keep thinking about, and fair warning this one runs close to 2 hours, is of Pat Metheny. There's just so much here, I think a lot about what Pat says about the work involved in building an audience. But I also picked up on something about how Pat talks about his music, and also it's something that I then noticed about Ron and Derek's talks: you'll listen a lot and never hear any of them describe what they play in terms of "genre".

Now, I promise you that does not mean they don't know or care that they're playing a jazz standard, or a rock tune, or samba or whatever. I just suspect that genre just isn't something they put any real time or worry thinking about any more: just whether the tune they're writing or playing or recording works. Just the tune, that's all.

So Very Few Survive

So very few survive.

This story by Lisa Whittington-Hill is a very good read. It's a history of the female side of grunge, and how the bands like L7 and Babes In Toyland, among others, fit in to the story that's so rarely told.

Remembering back... I was in the age group of very young musicians that got hit by the Seattle rumors starting in about 1985. Something was happening there. Bam Bam was part of that rumor mill, but none of us ever caught anything other than the name; we did catch The Melvins, though, at least via cassette trades and someone "with family in Seattle sent me this t-shirt and a tape".

L7 cassettes came down at about the same time that Soundgarden's UltramegaOK bootlegs did. And that particular pairing was significant for some of us far from the Emerald City: my best friend at the time, a bass player, asked me if I thought he and I should go up to Seattle and try to break in up there. Just for a summer, throw your guitar in and let's see if we can, you know? (why we didn't came down to a simple problem, two years into high school and he'd already been through rehab once. Given that the other thing we knew of Seattle was heroin, that's what stopped us. That, and I ended up getting marching orders from my mother to move again just a couple weeks later.)

So L7 was right there from the beginning, to our ears. Babes In Toyland came a little later, late enough that Nirvana and Alice In Chains had now entered the picture.

Here's the way it used to work. When noise got around of a "new sound", and the major labels started showing up, then what they were really looking for was, as it became, "The Next Nirvana". It's a manufacturing line, they wanted the closest sonic and visual equivalent to knock off of their own studio line, no more no less. If you fit the bill, and were early enough in line, great.

If you didn't, hey tough luck kid, try maybe Chicago, I hear there's a scene coming up there?

If you tried for the brass ring, you knew damned well what you were signing up for. The labels always fucked you, and good. Sure, yeah, Slash could ride around L.A. for two years working a good deal for Guns N' Roses, but could you?

But the labels never defined what the sound actually was. Mainstream success, that they could more or less offer, at least for a short time. Artistic credit? Naw, wrong door kid, try that with the longhair professors down the street.

Which is why Lisa's article is important, of course. Otherwise meaningful stories would be forgotten.

And that takes us up to circa 1995, at least in terms of the immediate swirl following Nirvana blowing up the world. Really, it was that quick, three years and grunge had already morphed fairly away from whatever it had been in the popular imagination.

In my own personal timeline, in that year I suddenly realized that teenagers, especially female teenagers who had an interest in performing music, dj'ing, or a certain type of clubbing, had discovered No Doubt.

And then, a year later, The Craft, and it's fantastic soundtrack, came out. With Letters To Cleo, Juliana Hatfield, Jewel, Heather Nova, and Elastica.

And yes, in between, just like with No Doubt, Garbage came along.

Now, you being a keen scholar of music, will note that these bands are not "grunge" in the sense of L7 and Babes In Toyland. They used what they learned from those who went before, yes, but they had found their own sound, their own niche. And, somewhat uniquely for the time, they'd been encouraged by their labels to do so, rather than being shoved into the pre-made box that the studios had shaped to convenience for the grunge bands.

And, from my observation, these bands and others of their time tapped into what their audiences were after. Here we have that most elusive of popular music goals: the zeitgeist.

So, let's say I and my best friend had done what Dave Grohl did, drop out of school and head off to join the circus in Seattle circa 1988? Where would we have been?

Either desparate to hope to be in the second wave of signing after Soundgarden and Nirvana. Or, after a couple years, maybe still hungry enough to step away and dream our way to a new sound. This is the major label cycle: three years was time enough for the Beatles to record Sgt. Pepper's, The White Album, and Abbey Road. So why are you still playing that same old shit, give me something new?

And look, we've gotten this far into it and you let me get away without even mentioning Hole? I adored Courtney Love and Hole, as musicians. No, I have no comment on her relationship. But as grunge musicians, Courtney and her bandmates have their own place in this story too.

All artistic movements have their histories, and rightly so. I'm very glad that folks like Lisa are tackling this stuff.

I'll add one little oddity that I turn over in my head whenever I think about that era: what was it like to be a teenaged musician who caught onto Iggy and the Stooges, or the New York Dolls, long before even the Ramones were formed.

And then find out about "This New PuNk RoK Craze From Jolly Olde England!"

The reason that comes up for me in this context is that, not long after Kurt Cobain's death, a friend of mine from the day life, some years older and originally from England, told me that their response to grunge was something like "Americans finally have their own punk movement".

I'm still scratching my head over that one. If nothing else, it's a reminder that artistic movements, outside of Arlo Guthrie's classic description, are strange beasts only ever roughly described. And probably for the better, at least in terms of leaving the next one, hopefully, far out of reach of manufacture, rather than discovery.

And No,

And no, I don't actually, or even facetiously, blame Rick for my bout of tinnitus. Well, other than that it makes for a closing bit on that last post.

I had my first temporary tinnitus run when I was about 17, our school jazz band went to a Chick Corea concert in conjunction with our state competition. This was Corea's Elektric Band, with John Patitucci, Frank Gambale, Eric Marienthal, and Dave Weckl, and they were epically loud in the setting we took them in. I noticed the ringing after, but a couple days later it was gone. Even with me being in two different school bands and an outside gig band we didn't admit to because of high school competition rules ;)

My next go round came on when I'd had my run-in with bad grades and a worse relationship in college; as part of getting my life back together, I'd started playing again, working with a local college jazz band three nights a week, an occasional studio gig doing commercials, and going to and sitting in with all my friends in their gigs. It was a lot of fun, and honestly, I didn't even notice how I was damaging my ears again.

Not until I landed a research gig that I needed to graduate, once I'd gone back to school, i.e. the day gig, full time. One by one I had to let go of the music work I'd picked up. And what do you know, when it's quiet more often, you notice that the ringing has now become persistent.

Since then, what usually happens is that the tinnitus fades to a level I can pretty much ignore completely, in terms of volume. Until it flares up, usually due to something like a sinus infection.

Well, I had a sinus infection in late May, brought on by traveling between too many climate zones in a short time frame. No flareup of my ears, though.

Not until now, when I'm dealing with Covid and (thankfully) an otherwise good recovery. That really what did it. Rick's video just happened to coincide, entirely coincidentally, with the point when I noticed it creeping up again.

In the past, patience has usually brought it to a more tolerable level, whether that's my mind adjusting or a true fade I'm not completely able to say. But that's gonna take a while this time, I haven't had it this loud in years.

Such is life, I guess. Take care of yourselves and those around you, space cadets, in the little ways and the big ones.

Protect Your Ears

On the one hand, thank you Rick Beato for discussing this the way you do in this video.

I grew up hearing from my stepfather and grandfather, pro musicians, that I needed to protect my hearing, otherwise I'd end up like them, half deaf, ringing, the whole bit. Of course, they were also both duck hunters who shot without hearing protection, and all the other things they did without keeping their ears safe...

From what I could tell, for many, the dividing line is whether you played live gigs after about the age of 18. Sure, people who played earlier than that, especially those of us who played both school gigs and club gigs early, started having ear trouble earlier, but from what I've seen, for those folks who keep playing, some form of hearing damage is damned near universal. Even among classical musicians, hearing protection just isn't as prevalent as you'd think.

And believe me, an orchestra at full grunt is louder than you'd ever believe, especially sitting the middle of it.

So yeah, for Rick, and the commenters (yes, this is one of the rare posts where you should read the comments), to discuss this is important. Really, yes, just about every musician you know has some level of hearing damage. Just about every soldier, especially if they've served during wartime. Most construction workers, or plant operators, also have some form of damage, usually in those cases a loss of certain frequency regions rather than tinnitus, but the concerns are the same: protect your ears!

Yep, thank you Rick. And also, I hate you for this. I typically go months at a time being able to ignore my own tinnitus. And then some nitwit with a video camera goes on and has a serious and important discussion of their own hearing issues, and here I am listening to the buzz and the ring at 10k, and wondering how long I'll have to go this time before I learn how to tune it out again...

Bits And Pieces - 6-27-2022

Bits and Pieces - 6-27-2022

The last time the Avs hoisted the cup, my wife and I had to call a friend in California to keep up with the game for us, as Tropical Storm Allison had turned our little piece of the world into a bit of a mess. We were desparate for Ray Bourque to lift that thing, and our little cell phones, and a friend on the other end of the line who'd never seen a hockey game in her life, made a very long weekend into something a little more of a good time. Go Avs!

Roe V. Wade. Oy. They've been gunning for it for a long time, and here we are. This will always be a bootleggers and baptists issue: the mouthy ones will always be able to get their daughters and granddaughters abortions when they get pregnant from "the wrong guy". They will always use the threat of enforcement as a means of showing power in small communities. When the pregnancy mortality rate creeps up, they'll turn deaf and mute. And when 3 of the sitting justices are already poised to begin rolling back the other issues the Straight White Life brigade have been sitting on for 50 years, which is where we were in the 90's with abortion, the voices who say "of course we'd never go after those decisions" will sound ever more ridiculous and defensive as they find their reasons to shrug and then support (but only after it's a fait accompli, of course) the next attack.

Our daughter has tested Covid positive, and is miserable. Fortunately, hanging tight here at the house for a couple weeks is doable, which hasn't been the case for a while in terms of schedules. The rest of the house is good so far, but historically it's usually been the case that either her mother or I get whatever bug she does. It's just about 50/50 which of our immune systems turn out to be a better match, so we're both having a graveyard laugh at the moment to see which of us gets it. Everyone's vaccinated, so we've hope at least that it'll be miserable but otherwise just the usual hassle of being sick.

And yes, I'm well aware of the irony that I had to travel for the day gig for the last couple of years, but it's the kid going to college that brings it home. Oy. Such is life sometimes.

As part of the day gig stuff, I've been keeping a gimlet eye on renewable power options. I continue to be cautiously optimistic about the path we're all on, and especially that receptiveness is starting to creep out into the broader mindset. Being someone who's had a secondary (and, to my joy and surprise, now something close to a primary) interest in broader power gen methods for something like fourty years, I've learned to let folks laugh. And now I get to just smile and nod as they slowly start to realize what's coming. It's kind of nice.

Part of my quiet these past few months is that I've had to learn to look at folks like Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch and other working artists, grin and admire and cheer for what they've been able to accomplish over the past few years, even with the struggle, and then turn to myself and say "Not yet, not my current path". Partially for my own mental health reasons, mostly just because I had to take a good hard look at where I am and what I need at the moment.

Speaking of which: now I have to re-think the Quiet mechanism in the original Mage RPG. At the time, I slotted that into one-character games, for the most part, simply because the idea, good as it was, didn't fit automatically into a multi-character party. I'd still call it that; keep an alt ready to go and we'll get back to it. But at the same time, I have to think that, for the sweep of the story that that game wanted to tell, they'd have been at a real loss without it being there.

I still giggle whenever I peruse those areas of physics where Einstein stepped into it. The EPR paradox is the most famous, but there are others like the details and extensions of Brownian motion. What seems to be common for these little comments and episodes is that they're areas where Einstein made a true contribution, but it was a step along the way, not a definitive, comprehensive theory. So, when subsequent developments showed this, Einstein became defensive. Which is both natural and almost cliche; all of us have that tendency, I think, in greater or lesser degree.

But it is quite funny when it's "the genius of our time" who's caught out publically being a bit frustrated that their idea wasn't the be all and end all. And a reminder to try and be a bit more gracious when it happens to me. In fact, one of the hidden benefits of the day gig is that there are more than enough technical areas involved to keep me on my toes and daily reminded of the limits.

Sharp-Etched Laughter

In the first part of my day gig life, I worked in an obscure science and engineering field where some of us carry our arguments with us, quite literally, to our gravestones. There are some tragic stories there, and some funny ones.

One of the funnier ones, the punchline, pithy as it might first appear, deals with our views of what we do and how we're known for it. See, in this particular group of folks, we all know of each other's work, more or less.

We all have a reasonably good idea of what the others are doing from their articles, and then the occasional family meetings where someone gives a poster or a talk or just a conversation over beer. That's the close-held view.

Some of us do better than others at making connections to the broader world. They're the folks who have institutes and big continuing grants or industrial collaborations or whatever. These are the folks to which the awards tend to go, the kind of headlines that outsiders are interested in.

Inside though, recognition comes in much different ways. One of them is when someone retires, and there's occasion for the community to get together and celebrate the life and times of one of our peers.

One of my mentors in this world was a very gentle soul; the only time I saw them get thoroughly and completely pissed off was when they got left off an invitation to travel to a celebratory get together for a colleague who was stepping away from the day-to-day grind.

Now, don't get me wrong. There are those of us who would have been pissed off because we were "important". In this case, though, what chapped my mentor was that they weren't going to get the chance to celebrate our friend.

See, for these sorts of things, what you're being invited to do is dive into our colleague's work, re-discover that element that you connect with, and then come up with a project that incorporates that thread into your own work. Sure, you can just cite a few papers and call it a day, but if you're really looking for a challenge, here's your chance to pick up the ball and run with it, and show how much our colleague's work means to us.

How much they did to make this all possible, and how important they are to what it is we do every day.

It's an ideal, sure, but whenever I've had the honor of an invitation to participate in such celebrations, I've done my damndest to live up to the ideal.

So this morning, I stumbled into looking up old friends via the internet. How are they doing, that sort of thing. Some personal, some professional. In the course of it all, I stumbled into a memorial journal issue, a career celebration for a person who I almost went to work with a fair few years ago, until funding and circumstances intervened.

Oh, cool, thought I. And one of the guest editors was another close connection. But when I started reading the table of contents... oh shit. What kind of everloving clusterfuck is this? Really? You couldn't get off your ass and invite them and them and that one over there? What kind of bullshit...

Reader, it was an accident of how the publisher in question had organized their website. Fortunately, I kept digging, and eventually recovered the full issue, and saw that they really had done the thing properly. Righteously pissed off the whole time, mind, until I finally did get the whole TOC firmly in hand and could calm down on seeing the names I expected to see.

The science-family members who've long followed, competed with, admired and argued over what our colleague and friend has done in their work. That it means something, to us and them and to the many other problems that folks inside and outside our little world are going to be interested in long after we've had our own chance to grind our arguments with each other into granite.

Today, I've moved to a part of the field where publications don't come into it. Still doing the work, and even in the same areas, just definitely in an applications and engineering focus rather than the developmental side. Accidentally, but also because I've never had the kind of social skills needed to build the networks necessary to thrive on the other side of it.

Looking back on my old mentor's hurt from this perspective, these days I think that what I should have done is said, look, the host is a monumental asshole, granted. But let's go anyway. Crash the party. Everyone we care about will get the point.

If I understand correctly, even the monumental asshole would have gotten the joke. See, at that point, they'd gone through some personal challenges that, hear tell, had led them to take a good hard look at life and try a different approach.

Something tells me that they re-read the jokes on the tombstones and realized that the punchline had a different meaning for family than it did for outsiders.

And In This Episode...

And in this episode...

I am, to a first approximation, the same age as the main group of characters in Stranger Things. Dustin, Lucas, Max, El, Mike, Will, and Erica as our younger sister/sidekick/conscience/troublemaker! are so close to my main D&D/friend group of that time that it's more than occasionally painful to watch.

This season's intro of the D&D/Satanic panic brought back even more painful memories. I've been wondering if/when they would tackle the subject. Whatever else, what that time taught me, more than anything, was that there were lines beyond which I couldn't trust some folks. One of my cousins doesn't visit that side, except for a couple of funerals.

Me, I'm reminded of how they behaved when they found us playing a game. Epic shitfit is the least of it. I'd be surprised if they didn't think they "saved" us from a dark path. There have been occasions since where I poke up against the edges, the boundaries of where trust ends, and then I step back and go, "Oh, right."

My wife thinks I'm overly traumatized and paranoid as a result. I try not to say "I told you so" when red flag-raising moments occur.

It was more than a bit odd. It was, for this particular group of folks, the first time I ran into something that I couldn't reason my way around. Or talk my way out of, depending on how you looked at it, I guess. Reason didn't have anything to do with it.

At least I could go home to my mom, and didn't have to put up with it if I didn't want to. Just stay away from the subject on weekends and holidays, pretend the books that had been stolen from me, the ones my mom had paid for and didn't have anything to do with them, never existed.

Don't tell them anything about important parts of my life. There would be other examples of this.

Not that mom's place didn't have its own issues. Abusive stepfathers only being part of that story. But that was a different level, in some ways: baked in from early enough that I just always assumed the next one was a bastard to be avoided. It's just a different impact, I guess, when you're actually cognizant of the trust breach in real time.

Mostly, I like to tell myself this is just poking old scars, running your fingers over them as a reminder. Not a big deal, right? Yes, no.

Maybe so. I could add a few thousand words about current events here. Tying in threads of the world. I won't, though.

I'd rather just bleed a little bit, acknowledge the moment and what it brought to me, then go on and enjoy the rest of the season.

Then, try and remember that horror has more dimensions for the audience than one might ever be able to anticipate.

Soup And A Sandwich?

Story Fragment the 3rd - June 2022 by M. K. Dreysen - Soup and a Sandwich?

Marconia addressed herself to her wineglass as she did her lunch partner, and the Earthview through the magnificent glass wall behind her.

With a little reverance, a little sigh that the glass had to be so modified for the light gravity, and a little humor at the situation. "We've become Ladies Who Lunch."

Yevvie rolled her eyes. "Please tell me you're not going to do that to me." Yevvie pushed aside her bangs, posed theatrically. "I've far too little gray, and no patience at all for the rigors required to sit a beautician's chair..."

Marconia dipped a finger into her water glass and flicked the results across the table. "Drama much?"

The pair watched the drops linger on their long trajectory to the floor. Yevvie would have preferred a table closest to the glass, but while Marconia could appreciate the Earthview, the vast drop to the bottom of the Lunar crater far below the restaurant's floor did her digestion no favors at all.

The waiter glided over with their plates, omelette with salad, tomato soup with half of a pastrami sandwich. Yevvie inhaled the soup's fragrance, eyes closed and her face a tapestry of relaxed enjoyment.

Marconia's own face relaxed her habitual sarcasm at the sight. The week's done then, she thought to herself. "You made the right choice, then?" she said.

"Wonderful," Yevvie replied, but only after the first sip.

There'd been some balancing, Yevvie had almost allowed Marconia to be the one to pick between the onion soup and the tomato.

Dessert was a cup of coffee, a lemon cookie on the one hand and just the barest, thinnest slice of cheese cake on the other. And, and most of all, lingering conversation of nothing much at all.

Marconia won the struggle for this week's check. And then it was time to go, another week's troubles passed on to the crater and the dust surface and the blue marble beyond.

Marconia made it all the way to the subway tunnel before she asked herself... "Should I have told her?"

A Rust Memory?

2nd June 2022 Story Fragment by M. K. Dreysen - A Rust Memory?

"Oh, glory, come to papa."

"You're awfully impressed with this, Oni."

"Janie, come on, you're just as excited, look at it. Big iron..."

I was impressed. The computer, speaking loosely, looked like a giant freezer, sounded like a jet plane, and should have died the good death decades ago.

Yet here it was, still blinking its lights and spinning its rust. The beast and a handful of its obsolete brothers and sisters gave the only lights in the room, an old classroom turned into the computer science departments boneyard.

Our client wanted the data that was bound up in its cavernous innards. The department had unplugged the ancient supercomputer's network, the cards it depended on long since unavailable.

But they'd left the beast plugged in and running the Cave of Wonders on the other side of a glass-filled wall. Must make for good copy when bigwigs came around on tour and needed to see cinema-scale VR projection in the flesh. "Can you pull the drives?"

"Yeah." Oni had tracked down the drive locations we needed. "They're all in one rack bay, you must be living right."

"Something." I bent down to work hardware. Oni had the software side of it, I tracked cables, unscrewed all the screws, and prepped our transport case.

Something pinged off the metal rack, leaving a long silver groove in the blackened steel. "What the hell?"

Oni looked up at me, then his eyes got wide and he pointed behind me, at the big glass window that separated us from the darkened Cave. "Janie..."

I turned and watched a web of cracks spreading across the glass, and the hole that had generated them. "Bullets?"

Another one came through, then, and the poly-glass crackled again, the rack pinging behind me. No other sound, though, just the whipcrack of the bullet when it hit something. Jesus.

"I don't do bullets, Janie," Oni whispered.

"Duck down, Oni. On your back." I helped him pull the keyboard down, and then the beast's service monitor. "You almost finished?"

Too many long breaths, and then "Yep, it's safe to pull."

Unmounted drive, check. The slow rattle of the handle of the door I'd carefully locked behind us, check.

A long reach above the rest of the museum of computing, the only cover between me and the gun? Expose myself long enough to yank the hard drive bay?

Oh, right. Shit.

Spellbreakers?

Working in a somewhat different way, call it practice, call it story fragments, whatever they are here's the first. One purpose here is that I'll do a little daily free writing, then go back and poke at them to see what might jump out and bite me. As ever, these are my original work, copyright M.K. Dreysen, all rights reserved to and by me.

June 2022 Story Fragment by M. K. Dreysen - Spellbreakers?

Randy would rather have used black powder. Drill, pack, wax and fuse, and most of all know that each charge fit the bill.

Dynamite made him nervous. Even in quarter stick sizes, and the stable stuff that didn't leak more fun than he wanted. The client had insisted, though. "We can get it for you, we use it in the mine."

Cheaper, that's really what they were after. Just getting Randy here and doing his thing, that was expensive enough.

Most clients, by the time they needed him they'd already come to the cost they'd paid. Ponying up for Randy to supply his own bang didn't hurt any more than the lives they'd lost.

"Stop," Randy said. To the kid, his apprentice and wow didn't that make Randy feel the weight of age. "Pay attention now, you don't want to crack it."

The seal, and more importantly what was on the other side. The kid set aside her drill bit, dusted granite fragments from the whole, and peered inside.

"See anything?"

She stuck her finger into the hole, felt around. "It's clean."

"How deep?"

She rolled her eyes, then used the stick, a willow stub with a notch cut to the depth needed. "Just right."

Randy held the lantern close enough to verify where her thumb was, flush against the stone and the stick's notch just past. "Yep, ok."

Gwyn moved enough so Randy could slide the quarter stick into place and set his fuse. Then she molded the wax into place to hold the dynamite. "How many more?"

Randy stepped back, lantern high while Gwyn reset for the next hole. "Two more, there at the top. Unless?"

"Unless I feel something shift when I'm drilling, right."

The drill bit wasn't sensitive. Gwyn was, though, and the metal could transmit, just a little, if the seal and what it held looked to weaken early. Randy waited until Gwyn had set herself and was comfortable with the angle before he turned to getting his fuses in order.

First tie the newly set fuse into other live ones, make sure of the loop and bundle, set it aside and clear. And only then pull the next fuse length free. He'd walked the loose fuses down the shaft that morning, each one shifted from one side of the shaft and room to the other as it was set.

He walked up to the surface, tying the new live fuse into the hot bundle as he went. By the time he'd returned to the door and the seal, Gwyn had finished and was set to start on the last hole.

Randy grunted, used the willow rod to check the completed hole's depth. "How'd it feel?"

Gwyn stopped, wiped her forehead and drank a little water from her canteen. "Nothing shifted. Not quite."

"But..."

She pulled the drill bit down and placed a gloved finger on the bit. "Like the bit was binding up. Not stuck, just..."

"Hmm." Three charges set, Randy told himself. Three quarters of a stick of dynamite. Plenty of boom. "Why don't you go ahead and stop."

"You're worried?"

Randy always worried. Spellbreaking could go wrong in only about a hundred and one different ways. And that was just dealing with the explosives and the vagaries of old abandoned ruins and mines.

But the dangers that kept Randy up at night were the ones that happened slowly. As slowly as the reach of a demon through stone, grasping at the first energy source it had gotten close to in who knows how many centuries? That was bad.

Worse was only blowing part of the seal, and then having to come back down here and do it again. "I'll drill, you pack."

"Not worried about rubble?"

Randy laughed. "They've asked to leave it so they can dig for treasure on the other side. Moving a few extra rocks won't hurt them." Besides, the clients had been the ones who'd insisted on using the dynamite because it was cheaper.

Randy ignored the way the drill felt more like he was tapping a glue barrel than hollowing out a piece of Rocky Mountain granite. By the time he'd finished and packed the last stick, Gwyn had the hot fuses ready to go. Randy sipped from his own canteen while he, and Gwyn, verified the coming shot. "Ready?"

"Buy you some coffee?"

"And those sandwiches old lady Mintner put together?"

"Damned straight." Last night's roast beef and day old bread, wrapped up in wax paper with a pickle each.

The spellbreaker and his apprentice set up the plunger, wrapped the master fuse and tightened it down, then counted and waited for the thump and dust cloud, the route that the demon or spirits or whatever the hell else it was that had been sealed below would take on their way to the cleansing clear sunny sky above.

Then they sat down and unwrapped their lunch and waited out the fight between clean air and broken containment.

An Exercise In Political Science Fiction

An Exercise in Political Science Fiction

Given the on-ground political realities, here's one possible place to start. The idea for the law as outlined would be to try and approximate/model some level of possible acceptance in Congress and the public generally, with the goal of building responsibility in proportion to the level of the perceived right.

Be it passed in Congress that:

1. Possession of a firearm or ammunition, in whole or in part, will incur an income tax liability to the possessor in the amount of 100 percent of the average equivalent retail value in the year of acquisition or manufacture of the firearm or ammunition. Written documentation of sale or transfer to another, independent possessor will constitute termination of the tax liability and entitle the possessor to 90 percent of any previously paid tax assessment as a one-time credit against future income taxes. Written and videographic documentation of the destruction or otherwise irreversibly rendering incapable of operation of the firearm or ammunition in question will also constitute termination of the tax liability and entitle the possesor to 100 percent of any previously paid tax assessment as a one-time credit against future income taxes. Failure to pay in the year of acquisition/manufacture will result in a fine of not less than 4 times the current year average equivalent retail value. Written documentation by the Federal Government of transfer, storage, and agent possession of firearms or ammunition through the Department of Defense or the Coast Guard will constitute a 100 percent exemption from this assessment. For other Federal agencies, state and local governments, and other entities typically exempt from income taxes, written documentation of transfer, storage, and agent possession of firearms and ammunition will constitute a 90 percent exemption to the liabilities incurred here. Any and all other persons or entities not otherwise listed here are, for the purposes of this law, considered to be the possessor and thus subject to the liabilities and requirement outlined in this act.

1.b Average value here means the average of 10 retail prices as published by independent third parties. Written documentation by the possessor of 10 acquisition year retail prices will constitute the possessor's attestation to the tax assessment value.

1.c Equivalent means here any firearm capable of firing the same caliber and ammunition type(s) as the firearm in possession. Possessor must also account for whether their firearm is new or used when documenting equivalent relevant firearms. In the case of ammunition, equivalent means ammunition types generally accepted as being used with the same type of firearm. Written documentation by the possessor of the methods used to attest to value, type, and source of acquisition will constitute a positive defense of the assessed value.

1.d Short of total destruction, one example of rendering a firearm incapable of operation would be a museum filling the barrel of the firearm with a full-length plug of metal or other material which would be essentially incapable of being drilled clean without otherwise destroying the firearm's barrel.

2. Game Tag Exemption: The Government will issue annual Game Tags, valid January 1 through December 31 of each calendar year, for purchase at the price of 1000 dollars, indexed to inflation. While valid, the Game Tag, in addition to the possession of a valid state hunting license and a yearly continuing hunter's education requirement outlined below, will be accepted as a valid hunting license in all Federal properties where hunting is allowed, subject to local, state, and Federal game seasons, tags, and bag limit restrictions, in lieu of a local or state issued hunting license or tag. For purposes of travel between the possessor's home state and any Federal hunting property and storage, eating, or processing, the Game Tag will constitute a legal transfer of game taken by the hunter. For purposes of travel between the possessor's home state and any Federal hunting property, the Game Tag will constitute legal transport of firearms and ammunition, subject to safe transport conditions outlined below. Upon expiration, the expired Game Tag entitles the purchaser to a one time tax credit against liabilities in Part 1 of this act in the full value of the purchase price of the Game Tag in the year of issue.

2.a For purposes of this section, safe transport of firearms and ammunition means transport in the conditions required by the Government for public airline travel.

2.b For purposes of this section, total annual bag limits will be those used by the hunter's state regulations for those game species for which the state issues regulations, otherwise the bag limit will be that of the state where the game was taken. Written and photographic or videographic documentation by the hunter of the time and location of the hunt where the game animal was taken will be used as the basis for bag limits and legal possession of the game animal during transfer and in the hunter's home.

2.c For purposes of this section, hunters will participate in at least 3 annual hours of continuing hunter's education, documented in written form, covering at least the populations, status, and extent of Federally recognized game animals, generally recognized best hunting practices, and generally recognized best firearm transport and use practices. Documentation of continuing education will be provided by the hunter to the Government at time of purchase of the Game Tag.

When The Time Comes For Settling Family Business

Now, when, or rather, should the time come, and you'll know when it happens, everybody remember: Mickie and Minnie were at my house that night, we had a thing, it lasted all night long and they slept over on our futon. Vader dj'd, Pluto and our puppies got along famously, it was great.

I Helped Her Out Of A Jam, I Guess

Between my lady love and I...

and then there's Romeo And Juliette

On the other hand, she does roll her eyes when I want to listen to this one...

A Question Going 'Round

A Question Going 'Round

Just saw this in jazz fan circles: what are your top 3 album recommendations for folks who are new to jazz?

I have opinions... and I think I'm going to extend it beyond just jazz. What are my criteria?

1. Easy to listen to and enjoy regardless. It has to stand on its own.

2. Relevant to the music it's representative of. It has to connect to the broader music genre it's a part of.

3. Personally, is it an album you can return to even after you've become old and cynical about the genre?

Ok, then, let's do this. Jazz, Rock 'n Roll, Country, R&B/Soul, Rap/Hip Hop, and Classical. (My list for today, completely arbitrary, your list will and should be different! That's the most wonderful part of having so many recordings, we all can pick our own variation and have a good listen.)

Jazz:

1. Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong: Ella And Louis

2. The Dave Brubeck Quartet: Time Out

3. Duke Ellington and John Coltrane: Duke Ellington And John Coltrane

I think jazz, for a new listener, needs to lead with the best vocalists of the 20th century.

Rock 'n Roll:

1. The Beatles: Revolver

2. Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band: Born In The U.S.A.

3. Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers: Damn The Torpedoes

Yes, I know, I know, Born To Run... This is about a straight run of 4 minute rock songs that never quits and shows a new listener what is possible. Just like I often prefer U2's Boy, but Joshua Tree is more accessible. Answers to different questions.

Country:

1. Ray Charles: Modern Sounds In Country And Western Music

2. Willie Nelson: Redheaded Stranger

3. Lyle Lovett: Joshua Judges Ruth

Country has never really found comfort with the album format; these are the big 3 I think. There are others out there but I'm hard pressed to find any that are more meaningful to the genre as a whole. Dwight Yoakum, Allison Krauss, Roseanne Cash, Garth Brooks (first 2 albums especially) all honorable mentions here.

R&B/Soul:

1. Stevie Wonder: Songs In The Key Of Life

2. Al Green: Let's Stay Together

3. Gladys Knight and the Pips: Neither One Of Us

Oh lord could I go on. Roberta Flack, Earth Wind & Fire, Sly and the Family Stone, P-Funk. Have to put up a list and move on.

Rap/Hip-Hop

1. Fugees: The Score

2. Lauryn Hill: The Miseducation Of Lauryn Hill

3. Outkast: Speakerboxxx/The Love Below

Yeah, I know. I just love the sound of these records. Obviously there's a list of honorable mentions; one really cool one I find fascinating is an album by Branford Marsalis: Buckshot LeFonque.

Classical:

1. Van Cliburn: My Favorite Chopin

2. P.D.Q. Bach: The Intimate P.D.Q. Bach

3. The London Symphony Orchestra: The Planets (there are several here to choose from, any of them work)

More than any other genre here, the list is too long to do anything but generate arguments, so I just went with accessible and, yes, silly.

Oops, almost forgot.

Blues:

1. B.B. King: Live In Cook County Jail

2. Buddy Guy And Junior Wells: Alone And Acoustic

3. The Robert Cray Band: Strong Persuader

A good mapping to past and future here. And one hell of a way to get the butt moving and the blood flowing in Cook County...

Covid testing advance

Wow, now here is something really interesting: a completely open source, lab in a backpack Covid testing kit that costs 51 bucks to put together, and 3.50 per test.

open paper link in PLOS One

3d printing, scavenged parts, and they made sure to test using tap water for the solutions. plus it can run using a car battery, 12V, as power source.

we really do live in the future, don't we?

Damn

Ah, damnit to hell.

R.I.P. Taylor Hawkins.

I sat down to write what I thought would be this entry. Turns out it was more of a diary entry.

Not because of anything other than, really, that when I set my work aside to stew and come back to, I realized I'd written in two ways. One, to work out something I'd been sitting on for most of the past couple decades.

And two, about as circuitously as possible, which meant frankly it bored me just to re-read it. So, important and useful to write and stick in the diary, not so much of interest here.

Ok then, I thought. I'll just take a wandering surf around the web.... yeah, not happening. Because of the general chaos, of course, but also because I ran across something entirely different and separate from the headline events.

And I just couldn't. The story I pieced together didn't have anything to do with me, world events, important artists or writers or really much of anything that would matter to an audience of more than an eclectic handful. It was inside gossip involving players I stumbled across only in the course of following a web's worth of bread crumbs.

And it threw me completely back to the diary entry that was. I'd tried to work my own way, without naming names, through a... not action, a feeling inside a small community long sense lost to memory. A feeling I'd, knowingly, carried around with me for close on thirty years now.

And so I couldn't much write about that, either, could I? Both stories, mine and this flare up that others are dealing with in their place that could only have become known because of the way the internet works... Well mine I could at least keep to myself.

Besides, I like those folks in that long ago group, scattered as they might be these days. Digging up old bone likes that I can best leave safely to the extraordinarily unlikely future digital archaeologists who might need the work.

A Buckaroo Spreading Love...

For reasons of nunya business type, I will keep my mouth shut about a certain crooked bastard and the deeds that will earn him and his cohort their place in hell. On an almost unrelated matter I congratulate Chuck Tingle wholeheartedly. Well played Doctor, well played indeed.

So, What Is The Purpose Of The Blues, Anyway?

So what is the purpose of the blues, anyway?

No silly, not the blues itself. That's like asking what the purpose of haiku is, or sonnets, or romance stories or symphonies or kittens or... On that level, it's too big.

No, what's the purpose of the blues scale? Now that I might be able to understand, if only a little.

First, remember that the "blue notes" have been around far longer than myth and legend tell. Bach knew of the blues, harmonically; take away the written scores and music itself, so far as we know it, has the blues. Built in, as it were.

But, what about that old devil itself, the blues scale? Flat the third, flat the fifth, flat the seventh, but keep the major third and major fifth and lose the major seventh. So, counting both notes of the octave, that's nine notes, as opposed to eight.

Pretty much the first true jazz improv class you get handed this. And, when you, I, ask what to do with it, you get told "Use it to solo the changes."

The blues changes. Four bars of the I, two of the IV, two more of the I. Then one bar on V, one bar on IV, and we turn around with one of I and one of V before starting it all over again. Or, at the end maybe we turn that last V to resolve on the I. V-IV-I-V.

In G, the I is G, the IV is C, and the V is D.

They tell you, the G blues scale lets you solo or compose a melody over all of these chords, the I the IV and the V, using just the nine notes of the blues scale. How does that make sense?

Well, if we flat the seventh of G, that's F (and we ditch the F sharp entirely). F natural is just the fourth of C, but it's the minor third of D.

If we flat the third of G, that's B flat (but we can keep the B itself, too). B flat is now the flat seventh of C, and it's now the minor sixth of D.

And finally, flat the fifth (or raise the fourth) of G (keep both the fourth and the fifth), that's C sharp. C sharp is the flat 9 of C, and it's the major seventh of D. Odd that last, because the V is almost always the V7, i.e. the flat/dominant seventh if we're keeping diatonic, but hold that thought.

Good lord, what have we done? I mean, it makes sense, once you hear it. Please, at this point, these harmonies are so embedded in our ears that we don't even have to think about it.

But now we are thinking about it. Look again at the V-IV-I-V, the final four bars of the sequence.

One trick the blues scale tells us we can do? Just play D-minor (the relative form) over the whole sequence. So (in D minor for the moment), emphasize the root (D) in the first bar, the flat seventh (C) in the second, the fourth (G) in the third, then back to the D and we're home.

And in the middle? That F natural tells us we're moving, and where, doesn't it? Hold it between bars one and two, and we're moving from the flat third of the V to the fourth of the IV. Or the B flat, from the minor sixth of V to the flat seventh of IV, similarly.

F natural, too, hold that over from the IV to the I and we're moving from the fourth of IV to the seventh of I. Bring in now the B flat and carry that to the last bar V and we're moving from the flat third of I to the flat sixth of V.

Ok, so it's a map. We could play chord tones only. An awful lot of melodies do just that.

Why the chromatic notes, then? Movement. They're signals, really. Ways of getting the ear from here to there in an interesting way.

It also hints at one more step we can do. Look at that C sharp again. Flat fifth of the I, flat ninth of the IV, major seventh of the D.

Look at the changes again in explicitly jazz terms: unless explicitly stated otherwise, they're always V7-IV7-I7-V7 in a jazz chart. So, C natural in the V, B flat in the IV, F natural in the I, flat sevenths the whole way through.

The flat ninth of D is E flat. Which is the flat third of C, and the flat sixth of G. Huh.

D minor 9, G minor 9. Hmm. Include the A flat (i.e, the flat ninth of G, the I) and we get C minor 9. v9, iv9, i9 in other notation. Take the hint the blues gives us, and now we have three minor 9 scales we can use to move around with.

Ok, that's a lot. But just remember that the chord tones need to hang around; melodies are hard enough to hold in your head as it is.

This looks for all the world like what we're really saying, then, is that if you keep chord tones anchoring, you can pretty much move between them however you want. And that is, for sure, what we're saying if we're playing jazz.

But look again at the way, say, B.B. King uses his "blue" notes. Emotively. Powerfully. The melodies are chordally driven, melodic, rhythmic, but then harmonically the King hits you between the ears with a flat sixth (13th if he's playing or singing way up there). Not randomly, purposefully. He's moving somewhere, sure.

But there, in that moment, sonically you're hanging forever in the blue between, in that space where the heart is forever lost. So yeah.

Maybe we have come back to the purpose of the blues.

One fool, a hill of my own making, assembly in progress

One fool, a hill of my own making, assembly in progress

I feel like I should be returning here to tell of deep, dark secrets. Of how I've spent the past few doing dangerous things, learning of intimate and disturbing knowledge.

Mostly, I've been reorganizing myself. That's the start of the year, right? That's what we do when we turn to resolutions. Or, as I said here a few months ago, in my case examining more generally how I spend my time.

Reading habits, music habits, writing habits. My day gig takes its share of time, a great deal of it what might be termed prep work. That's a lot of reading.

I'd like to say I'm a great note taker. I can't though, I've always had a poor habit. But my journals have been getting a bit more of a workout than they had been. Just like my feet have. I've put in a few miles walking lately.

More prep work, that. For the days ahead and behind, for the time I'd like to see. I found myself thanking Flea the other day.

I read his biography last year, though fair warning, that particular book is not what you might think. Oh, there's the musician's story, but only up to a certain point. Flea has a bit of the Zen fool's view of how he wants his story to unfold.

He makes a statement of purpose there along his way. Regarding the groove. Bassists, drummers, rhythm players know what he means.

Friday, I was about a mile into a cold walk around one of our little town parks when I hear a groove. Side effect, really, I thought at first, of a little bit more guitar practice lately.

A moment of rhythm that I'd bring back to Friday's guitar moments. A beat that resonated with my walk.

And washed away thoughts of the day gig, and this writing thing, and all those moments that rise up and demand you think of them now damnit. Like you can do something about them now, other than let them take over the circuit and drown out the world and the moment you're actually in.

It wasn't so much clarity, as just... a groove. A sound a noise and then the walk. There's a little duck pond, the park's along a creek and when they built the park, they cut out a little pond and retaining wall next to the creek.

It was cold except where the sun gave such a brief respite there. The ducks waved their tales at me, and the couple of other folks out braving the temperatures of the walk.

Shorts and a hoodie just barely did it. I felt a bit like the other shorebirds,white feathers and long thin orange legs and hooked beaks they the twenty of them sorted through the grass with. They ambled down to the water as I passed and bothered whatever lunch swam there.

What then does it mean to miss the forest for the trees? I made a late walk Wednesday evening, late enough that the sun chased its way to elsewhere while the softball teams did work, one kid shagging flys just about hit the back fence whenever she wanted to, a good level swing with an easy pull to left field just as pure as could be.

I never notice when it looks easy. Just the hard parts, the way the garbage cans don't get taken away because the guys never came back down our half of the street, or the way the fence always seems to need a repair just when there's something else to do.

Work days and days I can't get to the keyboard and days where I have to ask myself if I've ever even seen a guitar why can't my fingers find this shit anymore?

It never feels easy.

Until it does. For some random reason a few hundred words get up there on the sccreen and they look kind of good, don't they? Kind of like the way that pattern felt under my fingers, the little arpeggiated passage that ran chromatic through only one simple shift and then another.

Nobody notices? Ok. But I will be nobody today and someday, I say it, feel it, sing it, write it, play it.