Back home again after a relaxing and uneventful flight. As I was getting breakfast at the Houston airport:

Cashier: “Excuse me sir, have you heard the funky chicken dance?” sings
Me: “Of course!”
Cashier, turning to scowl at her friend running the register next to her: “I told you I wasn’t making it up!”

Detail of a t-shirt from Chuy’s, Houston.

Lately when people ask “how are you?” if I choose to go beyond a socially-acceptable-yet-intensely-superficial “fine” or the ever-popular “tired” (which is a bit silly as I’m rarely all that tired) I run into… well I’m not exactly sure, but nothing approaching an answer. I’ll often twist the question and answer with what I’m doing, as if that somehow explains the how.

But anyway, how am I? I just can’t get away from the question. Today, I was reading a book which contained the phrase “It’s not what you do, it’s how you do it” and I was once again thrown back onto this. It’s what what I am, but how I am. How am I?

I quiet myself. I ask the question. There is nothing but emptiness, nothing at all.

A bit later there’s a moment of realization; what I mistook for nothing was in fact everything. The answer was, the answer is, the totality of right now. How am I?

Exactly like this.

But, how are you?

I walked into the Taco Cabana this morning, and one of the women who worked there recognized me and greeted me with a huge smile. It’s been over two months since I was last there.

Each time I return I realize that I’ve become more of a New Englander than I thought. There’s a lot about this place that I am so comfortable with; the food, the pace of life, the fact that I can call someone Sir or Ma’am without getting the Evil Eye. But over the decade I’ve been away, Texas and I have drifted apart in some fundamental ways.

I’m off to Houston to spend some time with the parents. So much has happened since October, and in a fundamental way I’m not the same person that I was then, though I’m not sure what that means exactly. A lot of questions and not so many answers.

This might be an indicator of how long I’ve been living in Boston, but despite the winter I’ve been biking around when it’s not terribly icy on the roads. The riding itself isn’t bad at all, though a pair of gloves that don’t invite the wind in through the fingertips with an engraved invitation would be welcomed. I’ve found that as long as both wheels aren’t on ice at the same time, control is maintained. Riding a bit slower is a good idea too.

Handling and wind are one thing; what bothered me yesterday is that my lock kept freezing. When I arrived at my guitar lesson I couldn’t open the lock, and fortunately was able to bring it inside and eventually get the lock to work. Afterwards I rode over to Harvard Square and after a bit of wandering I found myself unable to open the lock upon return to the bike. I’m sure I looked more than a little suspicious hunched over my Langster for 15 minutes as I worked the key until it finally relented. I’m also sure that there’s some deicing fluid available for this express purpose, and I’ll be getting some soon.

I’ve said it before, but riding in this city pins me to the present moment. Most activities invite the mind to wander and stray, but on the saddle all distractions fall away and there’s nothing but where you are.

Yesterday was a drawn out experiment about what happens to liquids as temperatures gradually increase. We slid from snow to hail to sleet to rain just in time for the temperature to drop dramatically overnight leaving some very hard and wicked ice.

Like any storm, as bad as the event is itself, the aftermath is longer and more complex. I spent close to an hour chiseling the truck out from the freeze, and probably would have been working longer had it not been for a compassionate neighbor who helped out with a bit of muscle and the loan of a huge metal shovel.

Now some inconvenience as the snow and ice will turns grey and grimy with dirt and smog, and the future will bring what it may.

Old music fortnight concludes with two bits of Orestes Fragments. This was reviewed by Tom Manoff, and garnered some nice words from George Crumb when he heard it.

Orestes Fragments has an interesting historical and personal back story, and the process I used in composing was more fastidious than usual. I’m not going to go detail on either point here, but I leave open the potential for future blathering. I will say that this used to be a string quartet, and I’m relieved I reorchestrated it. For now, here are two of the 5 movements, which are around a minute each:

Orestes Fragments I - You wild goddesses who dart across the skies (download)

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Orestes Fragments IV - Vengeance (download)

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I’ve shared a sampling of some of my older, more traditional music, over the past two weeks. Taken as a body, you can hear the colors and gestures I’m fond of, many which are still present in some form today. It’s been fun to pull out the oldies from the archive and let them live again, even if for a moment, as I doubt any of these pieces will ever again be performed. Thank you for your ears.

Previous posts in old music fortnight:
Harpooner
With A Fox
Ostrogoths On Parade
Woodwind
We Used To Be Friends

I’m in a remarkably good mood today, for no particular reason. There’s a beautiful sky, and life and potential is in everything. My self extends beyond my skin. I know this is all here all the time, but sometimes, like the sun, it’s behind a cloud.

As such I’m not sure why the idea of nasty emotional fights has arisen, but it’s a good time to handle it; right now it feels like a harmless little toy, even though in the midst of things it’s entirely different. It’s horrible, terrifying, and we can lash out with everything we have when we’re pushed to the edge. And wow, do we have a lot to lash out with.

There’s a moment when an argument moves from trying to communicate to wanting to just stop the hurting. We ball up, or hope to attack and by landing a crushing blow, make it stop. We just want to be happy, right? We drag out the fortifications, drag out of the weapons, the things we know can hurt the most efficiently.

This means that we’ve been storing up these moments, these examples of failure, storing them up just in case we might need to use them. We save the sharp knives for those close to us, and the sharpest for ourselves. And over time, our collection grows larger.

This is seriously dumb, but totally human, and we do it over and over again. After it blows over, it’s not so bad, but there’s always some lasting damage. “How can someone who loves me so much be so horrible to me?” Another knife in the drawer, lest we lose the emotional arms race next time.

There’s got to be a way out of this, and maybe noticing that we do it is the first step. We’re all capable of amazing things, good and bad, but if we don’t see them they will always elude us, like the sun behind a cloud.

Old music fortnight nears its end; one more on Wednesday. I hope you’ve been enjoying this trip down memory lane.

Today’s piece is a 1998 chamber piece entitled Queequeg (listen to an excerpt here). It’s named after one of the harpooners from Melville’s Moby Dick, and was intended to be part of a set of four pieces for each of the harpooners. I did complete and have a performance of the second, Tashtego, which I feel was one of the best things I did during this period, but both the recording and the score have been lost.

Queequeg is a mix of exotic, fierce, and gentle, full of strident attacks and jagged rhythms, haunting lullabies and rolling ostinatos.

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And how much did you pay for your rock and roll t-shirt
that proves you were there, that you heard of them first?

— Cake, Rock & Roll Lifestyle

One of the talks given during sesshin was on the tendency to look at experiences as things we can collect; I was reminded of it as V and I went shopping in Harvard Square this afternoon, the world exploding with marketing and advertising.

Past experiences we hold in the museum of our minds like a closet full of snow-globes, and future experiences we’d like to have, as if we’ve got a registry at the Crate & Barrel or are on a scavenger hunt. If only we collect enough items on the checklist, we’ll be satisfied and happy, right? Once we label an experience as “collectable” we might cast off everything around it as unimportant, and lose touch with ourselves and the world as we flit between memories and dreams. And there’s a tendency to be preparing experiences for the deep freeze, even as they happen.

How do we proceed? Can we throw away our checklists and meet the world with openness and curiosity? I have so many more questions than answers, but the doubt is soothing.

Old music fortnight continues! If I can remember correctly, I wrote Green Eggs And Ham (listen to an excerpt here) on a dare in 1996. The whole thing is done in the style of early 80s Philip Glass (unlike the late 70s Beavis & Butthead parody), and was an absolute blast to perform. This recording is from my senior composition recital, and if you listen very hard indeed, you can hear me conducting.

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Everything that we come across in the course of a day, if we are aware, can teach us.