March 2008 Archives
and still going. Sorry for the lack of posting, but we have had visiters for the past two weeks and have been enjoying our time with them. Unfortunately having fun means no reflection.
Bunny!
I know I keep linking to comics, but it is easier than being creative. We have a show tonight at the circus center at 7:30. That has been sucking the life out us lately.
And by us, I mean me. The F-bomb has asked me to put a disclaimer on this website:
"Mostly she is horrified by the things I say here and wants to remind everyone that, though bound in marriage, we are separate people and whatever jackassery I get myself involved in, she retains the right to distance herself from it."
My grandmother turned 65 today. She has been turning 65 for the past 25 years. She is an Italian lady who had the misfortune of being born on St. Patrick's. Also she gave me my love of doughnuts. I adore my Grandma.
This past week has be rough in clown school. The class had a rough stumble through of our next show and it was very very very rough. The piece the F-Bomb and I have been putting together, called alternately "the Domestic Bit" or "Juggling Babies" where we juggled babies and wrestle over a cell phone was decided to have too intellectual a bent. The note we were given was that it was too abstract so after many painful rehearsals and circular discussions with a director who refuses to direct we have reverted to type and turned the number into a slapstick mess bit where we wrestle over a fistful of pasta and throw water at each other. We are no longer so worried about it's intellectualism. Probably the most galling part of the whole experience was the email the class received where we were told that we had to think of ourselves as independent artists who would have to learn to edit our own work. Which is a slap in the face when we have spent years editing our own work and then decided to enter a program where we thought we were paying for outside attention to the work we are creating. Shame on us then.
Over the weekend we went to Danville, in the east bay, for a Hozac wedding shower. They are friends from Chicago, who are getting married out here. It was great to see Jess and Chris and to remember all the stuff that floats around weddings. I can't wait for the actual wedding in June.
I meant to write about this last week, but things are always escaping me.
Felicity and I were asked to baby sit for our friends who live in Alameda. They are wonderful together people. She is a sociology graduate student and he programs the robots that will eventually kill and eat us all. The F-bomb was a roommate Sarah, the woman, in college and Eric, the robot loving man, went to high school with me and we knew each other from Amnesty International. Because he was from the Lou my mother also taught him and has a framed picture with his name sewn into it hanging in the laundry room. But they are together. Really adult. Both a year younger than me but able to have a baby in a totally responsible sensible way while remaining hip with it Bay Area cool guys. They did however let Felicity and I watch her while they went to a wedding. They told us that she had been sniffling a little during the day but that it probably was not a big deal. Generally, The baby is totally cute, has been sleeping through the night, and is generally a very lovable bundle of flesh. Unfortunately not five minutes after her parents pulled out of the driveway she filled her pants with an epic load of diaper gravy and proceeded to cry until she hosed down the F-bomb exorcist style with her baby vomit.
Surprisingly we did not panic. We managed to clean her up, calm her down and make a night of some of the most stressful baby playing with I have ever experienced. She was not feeling well but wanted to hang out so one minute would be smiling and laughing, but if anything upset her she would freak out. Since we both knew what the culmination of her freaking out was (diaper gravy + baby gravy) and had not brought a change of clothes we tried to keep her as happy as possible.
But it was fun playing house for the weekend and even after the crap and the vomit and the germs and the base physicality of having a baby it is still quite appealing to me. The F-bomb has a habit of running whenever I tell her I am going to put a baby inside her so they day may not be soon. But it is coming.
At one point I had a vision of my future while holding The Baby. I had been singing to her about whatever would pop into my head, including rousing choruses of "Queen of Crap Mountain" and "You're a Pukey Baby Friend", when I realized that the constant chatter that baby's require will eventually mean that I am going to have to start stream of consciously talking to our children. I am scared for our children because the stream of my conscious is usually like a Muppet singing the oeuvre of Sir-Mix-A-Lot. Absurd and mostly obscene.
I need to go to bed. It is gorram late cause of the time change. Damn you Time! Damn You!
Last week at Clown school we spent a lot of time working with music and though I love music it mostly drives me crazy. It may have been the succession of incredibly terrible music teachers I had in grade school or the indignant tones used by cock-punches who know something about music ("can't you tell the movement resolves to C-diminished? No, Diminished! Come on!") but whenever people start talking about how to make music I get bound up and want to hit things. But we had possibly the best music lesson I have ever had during a juggling class. I sputtered and fumed my way through it ("Goddamn it! Why didn't you say bars and measures are the same thing with two different names!") but came out on the other side feeling like I learned something about the blues and how chord structures actually relate to the meaning of a song. It was deeply satisfying. I often juggle to music in order to warm up, but to actually use the structure of the song to build a piece was gratifying and reminded me that music touches something deep and physical. It was kind of like the second best music lesson I ever had. I was taking cello lessons and the teacher was trying to teach me a little about music theory. We were tuning my cello and he would have me bow on one string while tuning the next. The string would be in tune when it would vibrate along with the note I was bowing. I was floored. All the stupid crap about music actually made sense. There were reasons that certain kings of music worked and certain notes had to happen where they did. It no longer mattered if every good boy did fine. One kind of vibration was in harmony with another kind of vibration because their wavelengths were physically and mathematically related to one another. I felt like I understood music on a deeper level.
There was an article in the New Yorker this week about a French dude who studies the way people process numbers in the brain. He talks about this tribe who have no concept of any number greater than five (a hand) and this guy who can't process numbers due to some damage. Apparently there are little bits of our brain that allow us to process quantities of small things and that everything past addition has to be learned and memorized. This affect the way math should be taught, because a lot of math is dependent upon the language that it is learned in. The concept of numbers is the same for all humans (except the brain damaged non-counting guy) but is linguistically different. It is a good article but reminded me that the reason I love Math is that it is an abstract system that is trying to become complete and internally consistent. It strives for Beauty and Harmony in the purely classical sense.
Then in Music class on friday we (or others, not actually me) were talking about how certain phrases were resolved musically. I was completely lost and the F-Bomb had to explain that there are certain structures that our brains respond to and that musical phrases can seem 'incomplete' if one fails to play all the notes in the structure. Our brains are basically wired like Rodger Rabbit; we fucking flip out if we don't hear 'two bits' after 'shave and a haircut'. She then told me the structures don't have to resolve, that good composers will play around with our brains expectation of what is supposed to come next in order to communicate their point. Or if you are improvising you just try to feel around the resolution until it makes sense. Or art. Or something.
So like math, music has a few basic things (notes and chords) that when played together can become complete and internally consistent. They can be beautiful. But is taught by the people who want to break the structure and make it 'free' and expressive and meaningful
btw, the F-Bomb told me that I should have entitled this post Music is Math made by Poets. Or Artists. She apparently has not had enough bad music teachers.
