Tag Archives: music

October 14, 2016 · 3:51 pm

The Car Radio Keeps Me Alive

Today I had to deliver my daughter, the Princess, to her high school in the rain.  It is hard enough make the circuitous trip to the west in order to go south and then east again through all the construction and roadwork going on with stupid people who are somehow allowed to drive a car and carry a gun in Texas even though they don’t know what a turn signal is for or that a speed limit sign shows the maximum rather than the minimum speed you should go at every red stoplight and corner without there being rain to obscure vision and make the mangled pavement slick.  You have to be able to concentrate and perform like a virtuoso while driving to make it there alive.  I would simply not be able to do it without the car radio.

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Driving the family car in Texas

The radio keeps me calm and gives my brain the power it needs to overcome obstacles.  The jump across the river with the man-eating fish in it alone requires an energized brain and a cool head.  I listen to oldies on the radio with KLUV in the mornings.  It is how my children have come to love Don Henley and the Eagles as much as I do.

For the last seven years of my teaching career, I had to learn the hard way that music is critical to driving well, and driving well is the only way to stay alive on the mean streets of Dallas.  I had a morning commute of 40 minutes, 30 miles, and 45 stoplights one way to my teaching job in Garland.  I drove it starting at six in the morning to avoid traffic.  But after school, I often had to labor for three hours through rush hour traffic on the way back home.  I learned to switch the station to 101.1, the classical music station.  Listening to Mozart and Beethoven not only makes you smarter, it makes you calmer.  Calm enough not to get out of your car at the stop light and beat the guy in the car ahead of you with the detached bumper of your car that he knocked off while cutting in front of you because he was in the wrong lane to make the turn he needed to make and didn’t realize until 15 minutes into the wait for the red light to change enough times that our cars actually had a chance to make it through the intersection.  Yes, that is a run-on sentence about road rage.  And road rage is real.  But in real life I didn’t beat him to death because of Mendelssohn playing on the car radio.  It only played out that way in my head while the radio soothed my brain and prevented my hair from catching fire.

I owe my life and sanity to the car radio many times over.  And I am resigned to the notion that I will probably need it many times more before the curtain closes the last time.

 

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April 29, 2016 · 11:49 am

Synesthesia (Part Two; The Color of Music)

Okay, so on the synesthesia tests I didn’t score as a synesthete on the music/color test.  But I was extremely synesthetic on the tests for color/months/days of the week.  I was a little over the mark on letter/number/colors synesthesia too, but it was more a problem with manipulating the color-selector device when I don’t have a mouse to use on my laptop.  The test for music did not test the way I see colors with music.  They wanted me to respond to what color each individual note seemed to be, and that isn’t even close to the way I experience it.  For me, the perfect description of how synesthesia works for me is Bach’s Tocata and Fugue in D minor as it is depicted in Fantasia.

I was shocked when I first saw it.  The colors are wrong for this piece, but the visual experience is almost exactly how I experience music, especially wordless instrumental music.  The only problem with this piece is that the overall color schemes are wrong.  But this comes about because every synesthete sees the colors differently.  And I have no doubt that at least one of the artists who created this had synesthesia.  If there were more reds, yellows, and magenta in the opening and more indigo contrasted with silver later, this interpretation would be perfect.

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Music synesthetically works in two directions for me.  The picture above, called The Wings of Imagination, makes me think of La Mer by Claude Debussy.

If you listen to the piece, don’t look at the YouTube illustration, look at my picture if you want to see the music the way I do.  The following song, Don’t Worry, Be Happy, is a multicolored song that I can best express with the colors in the picture I call Rainbow Peacock.

Rainbow peacock

The full range of primary colors together in one picture, or one song, always means completeness, fullness, and happiness to me.  If there is absence of one or more of the basic colors from the color wheel, the mood and emotion present in the song or picture is altered to something other than happiness.  The Firebird Suite by Igor Stravinsky goes from the indigo and navy blue of fear and confusion to instances of angry red and feverish orange.  It would look something like this in the theater of my imagination;

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And one of my favorite instrumental pieces of all times, Prelude to the Afternoon of the Faun by Claude Debussy, is full of melancholy and sexual tension, deeply felt vibrations in the depths of my stomach, and would look like my picture Sleeping Beauty with its teal and blue melancholia juxtaposed with candle-lit yellows and wood brown mixed feelings of joy and anxiety.

Beauty

Now, if you have waded through all of this goofy color-and-music analysis from a source whose sanity is questionable at best, you probably have no earthly idea what any of it has to do with anything.  But if you have that aha!-moment and see it all clearly too, then I suspect you probably are a synesthete too.  Poor you.  It is not a treatable condition.  But it is also not a burden.  Learn to enjoy it.  It resonates in your very soul.

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January 11, 2016 · 4:02 pm

Morning Has Broken

Today is off to a miserable start.  I heard on the radio that David Bowie has died.  Ziggy Stardust… the Goblin King… The Man Who Fell to Earth… the Thin White Duke…is gone.  And even though since high school in the 1970’s I have never been quite sure how I felt about his music, I wept.  The man was a musical maker of lyrical poetry.  He could make you feel really really terrible… but he always made you feel.  And he made me depressed as he led me through the Labyrinth… but he also made me soar… on the wings of a barn owl.  It was about facing the darkness and finding your way.   Finding the way out.  Singing the Little Drummer Boy with Bing Crosby, but not actually singing it… making peace on Earth instead.  Sometimes things are just so weirdly beautiful it hurts.

I dropped my daughter off at her middle school, and then Jody Dean & the Morning Team played this on the radio.

I wept again.  Darkness is my old friend…  I have lived with and through depression after depression.  My own… my wife’s… my children’s…  And it is a miracle I have lived this long without succumbing to the Darkness.  It took Robin Williams.  It took Ernest Hemingway.  But somehow, the Goblin King always goaded me onward, to find the answer at the end of the Labyrinth.  “You… you have no power over me.”  And then I am okay once again.

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I captured the dawn once again this morning.  Once again I failed to truly ensnare the subtle reds and pinks and purples that were actually there.  But there it is, anyhow.  The morning has broken.  The blackbird has spoken.  The morning is new.

My heart is still sore this morning.  The dog didn’t help when she spilled the trash to get at the napkins with bacon grease on them.  We may have a dog-skin rug as a doormat later today.  But David Bowie left so many words and ideas behind to comfort me.  Is he one of those “neon gods we made”?  Of course he is.  But as the owl flutters off in the closing credits, we can take comfort in the knowledge that no one is ever really gone.  And we can always anticipate some… Serious Moonlight.

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November 22, 2015 · 8:09 pm

Just In Case You Haven’t Seen It…

My sisters and I as kids loved old movie musicals with dancing in them probably as much as any genre.  This video making the rounds on Facebook is something I have seen posted and re-posted and have personally watched at least five times already.  I have shared it twice on Facebook, and it continually gets re-shared, especially by friends my age or older.  Why does something like this go viral?  Well, Bruno Mars is a popular young Michael Jackson clone with an amazing musicality that appeals to all ages.  And the video is beautifully edited so that all the dancers from old movie musicals are actually in sync and appear to be dancing to the beat.  But the game-breaker for me is the fact that the dancers are all the old stars that used to fascinate me with their dance moves on PBS back in the 1970’s when old movie musicals got played on Friday, Saturday, and sometimes Sunday evenings.  I recognize Fred Astair, Gene Kelly, Buddy Ebsen, Donald O’Connor, Ginger Rogers, Judy Garland, Cyd Charisse, Mickey Rooney, Groucho Marx, the Ritz Brothers, and many more from the movies I loved like Anchors Away, Singing in the Rain, New York New York, and so many others I can’t even begin to name them all.  This mash-up brings back a whole lost world for me and gives me joy.  It connects the past with the energy of the present.  It gives me something to long for, to sigh for, and to fondly recall.  I want to see all those movies again.  But it wouldn’t be the same without my sisters there.

Blue Dawn

One has to wonder if all the time we spent on entertainment during our lifetime was a lost cause or not.  I have a rich tapestry of memories of other people’s lives, gained through movies, television, and books.  But has that enhanced my life?  Or has it taken away from my life’s work?  I know work puts food on the table and makes continued life possible.  But it also has to define the value of our lives.  I have never, though, lived a moment as a teacher when something I learned from movies or a book has actually interfered with delivering instruction.  And I can name innumerable times, looking back, when being able to recall entertainment experiences led to a unique teachable moment.  Those things can actually be the most important things we teach.  And what an entertainer in any medium manages to communicate to me validates their life’s work.

This flash mob concert makes me weep for joy every time I watch it.  It makes me realize what marvelous fulfillment there is in the act of committing a work of art.  How must poor demented and deaf Beethoven be soaring in spirit to have his work take so many people by surprise like this?  It gives me chills to think about that kind of immortality even though the composer is long since dead.  He is still giving astonishing gifts to little girls who put a coin in a hat.

You don’t even have to be Beethoven-levels of famous to create moments that will live forever in the memory of the universe.  I have watched this video of street performers across the world so many times I have it memorized and can sing along.  I have shared this video so many times that I expect others to tell me, “Just stop it already!”  But they never do.  We learn the value of art by being an audience… by being consumers of art.  And it gives me hope as well for my own artistic endeavors.  Making money is not the point.  Sharing my work with others… even long after my own personal time on earth is up… is the precious thing.  I am reminded of the culmination of the long and glorious career of Charlie Chaplin.  And the movie clip that gets circulated so often now after another tragedy like the one in Paris.  I dare you to listen to this speech and not be moved… to hear it out and not learn something important.

Thank you for letting me waste your time today.  I intended to commit no further evil in the world today, than to let you share a few of the things that everybody seems to be finding beautiful and worth the effort of sharing.

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October 24, 2015 · 3:40 pm

Music is Life

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Last night, in the middle of the downpour in Dallas, my wife dragged the Princess and I kicking and complaining to a special concert of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra.  It was one of those things… a Friday night after a long, hard week… tired bodies and aching arthritis… and she only gave us one day’s notice that she was going to do it.  But we couldn’t waste the tickets once they’d been purchased.  And the star of the show was Ashley Brown whom we’d seen in the Broadway version of Mary Poppins when it came to Dallas at the theater in Fair Park.

I don’t normally associate the DSO with Broadway musical music.  I tend to think Tchaikovsky and Beethoven.  But it couldn’t have been a fairer treat as a compensation for yielding to wifey’s whims.  Ms. Brown was vocal-tastic and utterly spell-binding as she sang “The Bird Woman” from Mary Poppins, and a toe-tingling medley of Disney songs that reached a tear-inducing crescendo with “When You Wish Upon a Star.”  Several songs by themselves would have made the evening totally worthwhile, but she topped the evening off with a rendition of “Defying Gravity” from  Wicked.  And it all helped me realize that I need music practically as much as I need air to breathe.  Music is life.

Part of what made the week so difficult was driving kids to and from school and events with rainy weather soaking the furious flying idiots on the roadways of Dallas as they barrel along in their Warp-10 wasp rockets and SUVs.  I constantly flip on the radio to the local Classical Music Radio Station, 101.1 FM.  The healing effects of classical music make me able to cope with maniac drivers and suicidal killer Texas grandmothers driving.  It calms me down and makes me sharper for dodging all those drivers who are driving the “Texas Friendly” way, which means, “Kill them before they kill you!”

“When You Wish Upon a Star” was the song I sang every night to all three of my babies as I rocked them to sleep.  The essential message of that song was the milk I tried to nourish my children on.  “When you wish upon a star/ Makes no difference who you are/ When you wish upon a star/ As dreamers do./ No request is too extreme/ If your heart is in your dreams/ When you wish upon a star/ Your dreams come true.”  It’s a goopy, sentimental thing, I know.  But I have to believe in the fundamental goodness of being a human being on planet Earth.  We are where we belong and good things find you when keep faith with the wish and the star.

So I am grateful that my family forced me to go to the symphony last night.  It is the “spoonful of sugar” that I need to make my way in a world that is increasingly hard to deal with and ever more painful.  I depend on music to keep me alive in so many ways, physical, emotional, and spiritual.  It makes me wish that I could write music.  But hopefully my writing becomes music in some obscure way.  The truth is beautiful and I love the sweet musical sound of it.

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October 4, 2015 · 2:24 pm

Danny Kaye

Archive photo from the Los Angeles Times

Archive photo from the Los Angeles Times

My childhood was shaped by television events like the annual showing of The Wizard of Oz and classic movies on Friday nights when I was allowed to stay up past my bedtime to watch the whole thing.  I have told you before how much I loved the comedy of Red Skelton.  Another comedian who shaped who I am through his wondrously manic movie performances was Danny Kaye.

One of those Friday movie classics that really struck home was the wonderful, kid-friendly movie Hans Christian Andersen.

1952 movie poster from Wikipedia

1952 movie poster from Wikipedia

The movie was about a storyteller from a previous century and embroidered his biographical story with his famous children’s stories in the form of songs.  And Danny Kaye could trip through multi-syllabic, fast-paced musical numbers like no other rubber-faced clown I have ever seen.   I wanted to be such a story-teller from a very early age.  I even wanted to write the kind of stories that could be made into songs.  Let me show you a few of the bits that amazed me and killed me with laughter.

This song from the Inspector General was doubly engaging because the corrupt businessmen were trying to poison the character Danny played with the wine he was supposed to drink during the drinking song.

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The movies Danny Kaye was in were mostly about the musical comedy.  But sometimes they were just about the music.  He appeared in musicals like White Christmas with Bing Crosby and stage musicals like Lady in the Dark which won him awards on Broadway.  He made movies about music like The Five Pennies and A Song is Born.  He always said he couldn’t read music, but he demonstrated perfect pitch and scored a number one hit with The Woody Woodpecker Song recorded for the animated cartoons of Walter Lantz.  How cool is that?

And you already know that The Wizard of Oz is my favorite movie of all time.  In 1964 Danny became the host for CBS’s annual showing of the film.  He was able to do funny songs that made you snort your hot cocoa through your nose from laughing, and he could also do beautiful ballads like these.

I will always take the opportunity to watch a Danny Kaye movie one more time, whether it comes on YouTube or a Netflix oldie or a $5 DVD from the bin at the front of the Walmart Superstore.  And I will always think of him in his role as Hans Christian Anderson.

Oh, and he was a very funny comedian too when he wasn’t singing, as in The Court Jester and The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.

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August 19, 2015 · 3:29 pm

Mickey Mouse Club Music

Today’s essay was inspired by Annette Funicello’s Facebook page.  I was marveling at how a teen idol and Disney child star could have such a large following and leave such large footprints on social media when she is not only all grown out of her child-stardom, but is actually quite dead.   I, however, who am technically still alive, work very very hard at this author-self-promotion-thingy, and I hardly make any headway at all in the ocean of the internet.  So, I did what I always do when faced with the imponderables of this writing life.  I drew a picture.  I drew Annette naked.  Well, that’s not entirely accurate either.  I put clothes on her because, well, young-adult-genre authors don’t always have to think like a teenager.

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You see, I am not mad at Annette.  And my hormones no longer control the other things that once made me deeply regret the fact that Disney never let Annette appear in movies in a bikini, even the movies that were not Disney movies.  When you’re twelve, there are different priorities than when you are 58.  Hormones don’t do all of my thinking any more… at least, that’s what I tell my wife.

And part of what I still love most about Annette is the music.  The Mickey Mouse Club was always about talented kids.  They could sing and dance and play the drums, and they were as easily professional quality as many of the adults… and cuter to boot.  Talented children have been a significant portion of my life.  As an English teacher in middle school, I taught kids that were Annette’s MMC age.  I taught them how to write and how to read, and occasionally I had to find other talents to promote and help those kids become winners in the great game of life.  And, it may be cruel to say it bluntly, but some kids are downright ugly.  Not merely ugly in terms of what they looked like, but how they acted and how they thought and how they felt about things.  Racism runs deeply through children who’ve been taught thoroughly by parents before the teacher even meets them.  Sometimes you have to dig around really deeply in the black pits of their personalities to find something bright and shiny enough to put the spotlight on.   But it is always worth it.  ALL CHILDREN HAVE TREASURE BURIED INSIDE THEM.  And it deeply hurts that too many adults in every community can’t be bothered to dig for it.

Annette in DLandnI grafted a background on my picture of Annette to stress the fact that she is not naked in my picture.  She was a very public figure and a good portion of her personal treasure was that screen personality that showed through and sparkled in every role.  My favorite Annette piece is the movie Babes in Toyland which I saw for the first time at Grandma Beyer’s house in Mason City on her color TV.  The songs from that movie still play in my dreams.

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September 15, 2014 · 1:35 am

More Paffooney Progress!

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As you can see, I made a tiny bit of progress over yesterday… but in many different ways.  I got my son to finish his week’s worth of online school despite his not being completely well.  I got the fake shutters off the windows on the wall where the city is expecting me to put up new siding so the house doesn’t shame the neighborhood.  (I wonder if they threaten the other shabby yards and houses in the neighborhood with fines, or am I just special?)   I got the dog to choke down 30 per cent of her heart-worm pill.  And I added the keyboard and a tiny bit of Chopin to the Paffooney.

Why is the piano player naked, you ask?  (Well, really you don’t ask, that was really me.  But I have to connect the idea somehow, don’t I?  Don’t answer that.)  The piano player, like all writers, story-tellers, performers, artists, and other motley fools must put something of herself or himself into the piece.  It has to be the true self, the inner self, the often private self.  Having been the victim of sexual abuse as a child, the fear of being naked and vulnerable like that is nearly overwhelming.  And yet, in a very metaphorical way, it is what I am compelled to do.  (What?  You can stop screaming.  I’m not going to take my clothes off, if that’s what you’re afraid of.  I know how horrifying that thought is.)  I am only baring what I feel about the creative process.  I am writing that part near the end of The Bicycle-Wheel Genius (the fool novel project I am now working on) where the bad guy must be defeated, the good must be made clear and maybe win out, and somebody dies or does something else irretrievably sad.  I did it in Catch a Falling Star.  I did it again with a major character in Snow Babies.  And now, one of the characters that I have created and loved will die at the climax of this novel.  A resolution and a death at the end of the tale, just like some cheap Robert Altman movie.  How can you possibly have a comedy where nobody dies at the end?  Wait, am I doing something wrong here?  Who knows?

So that is the meat of this Paffooney process.  I give you the drawing, even though it is not complete.  I give you the ideas, even though they are half-formed and goofy as heck.  A naked piano player… and, I don’t know if you can see it yet, a tiger swallowtail butterfly.  The butterfly will be naked too.

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January 12, 2014 · 9:46 pm

Metaphor and Meaning

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In this week’s Paffooney remix, I have pictured the little boy crooner Francois Martin on the main street of Norwall.  Why have I done such a foolish thing?  Why have I drawn a boy singing silently a song that only I can hear in my silly old head?  In fact, why do I label them Cantos instead of Chapters?  Of course, the answer to these rhetorical questions is metaphorical.  I look at my writing as being poetry, or, more accurately, as music rather than mere prose.  It is a metaphor central to my being, writing is putting the inner music of my mind down on paper.

Here is a secret to powerful writing.  Connect ideas with metaphors.  A metaphor is a direct comparison of two unlike things to create an analogy, an echo of an idea that gives resonance to a notion.  Sorry, I’m an English teacher.  It’s in my genes.  But metaphors can serve as the essential connections, as glue to put paragraphs and scenes together.

Let me show you a metaphor.  Here is a short poem, the natural environment where many metaphors live;

                                                The Cookie

Once I had a cookie… But every time I took a bite, It became smaller and smaller…

                With each bite I had less and less cookie left.

But when it was gone, the sweet taste of it…

                Lingered on… as memory.

 

The central metaphor of this poem is comparing the cookie to my life.  I am getting older.  I have six incurable diseases, some of them life threatening.  I have been thinking about mortality a lot lately.  So what is the point of the poem?  That even when the last bite is taken, and there is no more cookie… when I am dead, there is the memory of me.  Not my memory.  The memory of me in the minds of my family, my children, my students, and other people who have come to know me.  That memory makes whatever goodness that is in me worth living for.

Okay, a metaphor explained is kinda like a bug that’s been dissected for a science fair.  Its innards are revealed and labeled.  The beauty is gone.  It’s kinda icky.

What works better, is a metaphor that the readers can readily grasp on their own.  The beauty has to be discovered, not dissected and explained.  Let me try again;

 

                                                The Boy and the Boat

                The boy looked to the horizon where wild and wooly white-caps roiled upon the sea.

                “Lord help me,” he said, “the sea is so large, and my boat is so small…”

 

I can hear what you are thinking.  “That’s too simple and ordinary.  If it’s a metaphor, then it’s a really stupid one.”  Well, I heard someone thinking that, even if it was not you.

Let me add a bit of information to help you connect things as I do.  When I was ten years old, a fifteen-year-old neighbor boy sexually assaulted me.  I told no one.  I was so devasted by the event that I repressed the memory until I reached the age of twenty two.  In high school, my suicidal thoughts and darkest depressions were caused by this event even though I couldn’t even recall.  To this day I have not explained to mother and father what happened.  I can only bring myself to tell you now because my abuser died of heart failure last summer.  It was a life event of overwhelming darkness, pain, and soul scorching.  Now look at “The Boy and the Boat” again.  Has the meaning changed for you the way it does for me?

Now, I know that the last paragraph was a totally unfair use of harsh reality to make a point about metaphor and meaning.  So let me give you one last poem… a sillier one.  You can make of it whatever you will;

 

                                                The Grin

The wrinkly, bewhiskered old man

Had a smile like a plate of moldy spaghetti

In the afternoon sun.

 

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