Shaky hands

My doctor ordered me off caffeine in September of 2002. This was a very tough transition marked by splitting headaches, low energy, and all the things you'd expect. Overall it has been a great help though. It's great that in the 21st century in the San Francisco Bay Area, a switch to decaf doesn't mean a taste sacrifice!

Nearly a year and a half later, my body responds very differently when I do consume caffeine. I have to be very circumspect about it on those rare occasions. I forgot about that this morning and added about a third of a cup of regular coffee to my decaf at the cafe I habitually go to on Sunday mornings, and now my hands won't stop shaking! It's really dramatic. On mornings when I don't get enough sleep, I'm tempted to add a little regular coffee to the decaf and along with the alertness, I often get anxiety and other side effects.

Celeste commented a little while ago, in a voice tinged with suspicion, that I was "so clean-living". I assured her it was only because the doctor read me the riot act, and that I used to be as wired as everybody else.

Last night the Lads and I met for rehearsal at Jim's place on the Stanford campus. Jim offered me a bottle of water, and when I opened it I found it was carbonated. I have never been able to drink carbonated beverages, because they always hurt my throat. I have tried them from time to time throughout my life and it's always been that way. Jim didn't know this of course because it's never come up.

When Grant arrived I offered him the bottle of water. He was surprised to hear of my beverage deficiency. I told him it was very sad and it isolated me from my peers. He said I could form a support group for non-carbos, but that I would probably get a bunch of Atkins diet folks.

Returning to SFSU

Will Grant and I played music at a silent art auction last night, which was a benefit for the SFSU Marin Headlands MFA program. The event took place in the Fine Arts Gallery in the new Fine Arts building. When I was attending SFSU (longer ago than I care to reveal), that building hadn't been built yet. It was actually my first time inside it. It is very dramatic how new the new buildings look, and how old the old buildings still look, on that campus. I found I still knew my way around the campus pretty well, despite the huge new buildings taking up what used to be open space.

Will and I dealt with technical limitations and the way the space changed when people came in and filled it up. I had written a flute part to go with his electronics and voice piece, Dreams, which has a text by Rose Lobel. He had sent me an mp3 of the electronic background, and knowing there was also a lead vocal part, I wrote myself something that was still in the background but which complented the electronics. This wasn't hard to do. Will's electronic music was really nice and had dramatic movement to it and it was easy to see where the flute would fit.

We'd both been led to believe there was an input on the soundboard for my mic, so I wrote multiphonics and whisper tones, which are really soft and need to be amplified. It turns out there was no input for my mic. I had to go directly into the back of one of the speakers, but that meant Will couldn't hear the electronics very well when improvising his vocal part. So the first time we did the piece, it didn't go so well. I said, I'll do something that is louder so you don't have to amplify me, and then you can hear better. So we made that adjustment and instead of multiphonics and whisper tones, I played with regular flute tone using notes from the multiphonics, and changed the whisper tone melody to regular flute tone also. It went a LOT better that way, and the piece came together in a way it hadn't the first time.

For never having collaborated before, I thought it was a really good start. I hope the MFA program made some money!

Celeste is back!

Celeste is back from Connecticut for winter break, and she'll be here until January 18. She and I had dinner over the weekend and it was so cool to catch up with her. We talked about Joan of Arc, and Liturgical Drama vs. Mystery Play, specs of medieval bells, Robert & Jaron's album (which she can apparently compel the Wesleyan library to buy, and I hope she does), Ellen Fullman and her fabulous new album, a piling up of Planet Organics boxes, and much else. We went to Starbuck's in San Bruno (thereby compromising her principles) so Paul could say hi to her too. Paul was there geeking away on his laptop and my laptop, too. We all talked about the Orange Alert and the closed bathrooms on BART, and how much warmer it is here than in Connecticut. Xena the brown dog, it was revealed, is spending winter break in West Virginia chasing squirrels.

In other news, it looks like Will Grant and I will collaborate in a live performance on January 16 at the SFSU Fine Arts Gallery.

My friend Sean

Sean is a poet, and I really admire his work. Here's his bio. Go check out his stuff!

Sean Mclain Brown enlisted in the Marine Corps and served in Desert Shield and Desert Storm as a jet engine mechanic on AV8B Harriers. Much of his writing is influenced by his experiences in the military and living abroad. He was formerly the Poetry Editor and Managing Editor for Fourteen Hills: The SFSU Review. He is two-time winner of the Mark Linenthal Poetry Award and a Finalist in the Ann Fields Poetry Prize. Currently, he is a member of Maxine Hong Kingston's Veterans Writing Workshop. Read Vietnam Veteran and Writing Workshop member John Mulligan's testament. "Art," says Maxine Hong Kingston, "is the transformation of feelings and experience into meaning. Writing is a tool for accessing events and memories and giving them meaning ...we have lived with war experiences in our hearts. Now we can put them through the process of art. Now is the time for the healing and the coming home." His poetry and fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in EM, First Intensity, Fourteen Hills, Indiana Review, LUNA, Mobius, Potpourri, Sentence, Small Town and Transfer magazines. His first book, Manufacturer's Specifications and Guidelines is forthcoming from Blue Barnhouse press. You can read his work and current projects at www.seanmclainbrown.org

All I Really Want to Do Is Play Nirvana Covers...

...and/or get myself a real, brand-new, supportive-of-the-ankles pair of skates and hit the rink for an hour or two per day. That would rock. I'm all inspired by the current Grand Prix Series and the new scoring system. :)

When you rent skates at the ice rink, you can't help but stagger around clinging to the rail because the boots prevent you from skating any other way than with your ankles turned in. I've never done anything harder than back crossovers and spinning a little bit but I really loved skating when I was doing it regularly. My first experience with non-rink-rental skates was when my cousin outgrew hers and they were handed down to me. I was still growing really fast, so I was only able to wear them for about a year or so, but it was like night and day compared to the rental skates!

Thanksgiving was very nice and peaceful and festive. The entire family behaved themselves. Sort of.

Today I worked on guitar chords for a new song called "The Great Highway". There are several new tunes in existence that have not yet been recorded which I'm planning to show to the Lads soon so they can work their guitaristic and bass magic on them. They are "How Now Is Soon", "Blood With Salt", "Ultralite", and "The Great Highway".
I have gone through at least three titles for my fourth album. At first, it was going to be called Pellucid. Then came Strange Men With Strange Flowers, which Sisters of Mercy fans will recognize as a paraphrase of a line of lyrics by them. Then came Earthquake Weather. Now, I'm leaning toward calling it Exit Stage Wrong. Anyone who is reading this may feel free to comment. :)

In other news, Robert and Jaron's album has been released. There has been a flurry of radio airplay and a release concert in New York. Here is where you can learn more about it:
http://www.advanced.org/jaron/columns.html

Venue 9, Laurie Anderson, and Gus Van Sant

The Lads and I played at Venue 9 last night as part of their Women's Work series. It's a small theater in the SoMa district with seating that rises up away from the stage, plus a backstage area where the audience can mingle with performers and buy food and drink at a concession stand. Not sure what to expect, we brought all our gear, including our PA, mains, and monitors. We started out sending a signal to their sound system from our board, but sadly it appears other high-volume performers had taken a toll on their main speakers. We sounded like we were trying to play through a car stereo. So we had to bring in our own main speakers, which are huge and heavy and which we'd hoped not to have to haul into the theater but it was the right thing to do. There was no point in sounding really bad on our first time playing there.

We played "Taste the Wall", "Tacit Blue", "John Mockingbird", "Romp Yello", and "The Song of Coinchend Cennfada". Jenny Makofsky did her monologue after we were done, and then Yiam Redd's troupe performed. However the downside to bringing in all that gear was that we had to strike all that gear, so even with the help of the Venue 9 staff, I missed Yiam's performance entirely. She had some musicians working with her, I know that. I saw them backstage and one of them was a flute player, but I didn't catch his name!I really enjoyed playing at Venue 9. I thought we sounded really good and the live sound is massively improved.

Our next gig will be over Presidents' Day weekend in San Jose, and it will be a much longer set in a bigger room.

In other news Grant lent me Laurie Anderson's live double album. The first disc was good but the second disc was REALLY good. I'm planning to buy it. My favorite number is "Poison" from the second disc. Sound-being Paul, who works at NASA Ames Research Center, tipped me off a few months ago that Laurie Anderson is now the NASA Artist-in-Residence, and that somebody he works with had a meeting with her. I can't wait to find out what work she is doing in partnership with them. She mentions it on her web site, but there are no details yet.

I recently saw Elephant, a film that Gus Van Sant wrote and directed. It is about a Columbine-style school shooting, re-conceived to occur in Portland, Oregon. I'm not going to run out and buy the DVD when it comes out, but I thought it was an interesting take on the school shooting concept. It is bizarre that, just as the Viet Nam war is now public domain and fair game for movie directors, Columbine has become movie subject matter too. Elephant focuses on the experiences of the victims leading up to the shooting. The student gunmen appear in a few very powerful scenes, but it is mostly about the victims. There are long, atmospheric shots with blurry unfocused areas around the characters, as though they are doing things that are very much part of their daily routine and they don't really see what's around them. It's worth seeing.