Harleys, Cars, Girls & Guitars

Filling Up the Dumpster

The real estate agent told me to get rid of all the piles of stuff before he shows the house. So, my son-in-law towed the dumpster over, dropped it off in my driveway and I'm filling it up.

I've owned my house in Woodstock for 25 years. So, the junk is piled high. 

Stuff I absolutely had to buy has been gathering dust under my bed for a decade or more. Guitar stomp boxes, computer cables, etc.

I have a couple of bookcases full of programming and software manuals that are obsolete. At least I made money reading those books. 

Twelve years after Myrna's death, I'm finally throwing away the last of her affects and possessions. Her pics will be stowed away in boxes. Time to close the books on that chapter in my life. You can't mourn forever.

Well, you can, but what the hell good does it do?

I might put one of our couple pics up on the wall in my new in-law apartment.

I'll be cleaning out my closets and tossing all the clothing that doesn't fit me that I'll never wear again. Might drop that stuff off in the Goodwill box instead of dumping it.

I'm finally free from the pain of surgery and I can lift heavy objects again. Trying to slowly get back to my exercise regimen. 

I'm deep cleaning the house as I toss stuff out. Lonely old widower that I am, I've fallen into the usual male trap of settling for superficial cleaning. My girlfriend nags me constantly on her weekend visits to adopt her standard of cleanliness, but lifelong habits are difficult to change.

The attic is the tough hack. Spiders take over any space not regularly swept clean and I don't go up in the attic often. Out here in the Catskills, spiders constantly threatened to take back any human encroachment on their territory. I routinely sweep the walls and ceilings of their webs.

That stuff in the attic is the really old junk. Some of it even predates buying my house. I don't know why I dragged that crap up there. Should have simply tossed it.

I'll still be living at my house for another 3 to 6 months. The real estate agent thinks my house will sell quickly. But, it still takes a while to go through the process of showing it and dealing with the legal and financial issues of selling.

Two New (Old) Henry Miller Books

When I lived in San Francisco, in my early 20s, I read almost everything Henry Miller wrote. Of course, I read him for the sex. Who doesn't? I was living on the bum... working a part time job and the rent was all of $150 a month... unbelievable, huh? I spent many brilliant afternoons in North Beach reading in the Caffe Trieste and sipping cappuccinos. Last week, I bought two obscure Miller books on Amazon, both from his Book of Friends series.

The price for each of these books was about 4 bucks. Amazon sourced them second hand from a couple of libraries. They are in remarkably good shape and free from marginal notations. The shipping cost more than the books.

I am moving, in retirement, backward to a life similar that how I lived in college and in the years before I had children and a serious job... except that I'm no longer obsessed with chasing after pussy!

Reading a real book, after years of reading almost exclusive on an electronic tablet, is quite a different experience. Better of worse? I haven't decided. The backlighting of a tablet strains my eyes. The paper in old books is a dull yellow. 

For the past 25 years, I've been reading technical stuff and the short postings that are common on weblogs and online news sites. 500 words seems to be the optimum length in the electronic medium. I usually aim for that in my weblog posts.

Miller was deliberately verbose. Conversations between his characters run on for pages. He develops thoughts over the length of an entire book. Although both the Book of Friends tomes are short, each is a far more developed intellectual thread than I am now accustomed to reading.

The subject matter of Miller's books is precisely what the titles say... remembrances of his men friends and of riding his bicycle, both important subjects. I've always had one or two close male friends, usually guys with whom I play music or ride bike. (Sometimes both.) In fact, just last night I took a 10 mile bike ride with Big Joe, my longtime lead guitar player friend. We stopped for dinner in the diner afterward.

My life is now quiet and leisurely. I'm hardly ever in a hurry and I have no deadlines to meet. I even drive in a different way... old man driving. If somebody else is pushy and in a hurry, I let him have his way. If you've ever driven in New York City on a daily basis, you know that this is a radical change. Drivers fight like morons for every inch, battle constantly for position and toot the horn in your back at every light and stop sign.

Driving in that atmosphere makes you constantly anxious and pissed off. That's in the past for me.

I play classical and sacred music much more often than popular music now. Classical and sacred music are also more long form and contemplative than popular music. My car radio is always tuned to Sirius XM's classical station and I'm hearing pieces I haven't listened to in 40 years.

This changes the texture of my life very significantly, too. 

My babysitting duties will lighten up quite a bit in a couple of months. My daughter is a public school teacher and she'll have the summer off. Life will be very quiet. I'll have two and a half months to read, to contemplate and to garden. 

I'm a quiet old guy living a slow and peaceful life.

First Bicycle Ride of the Season!

Got my bike back from the shop, fully tuned up and ready to go yesterday. I celebrated by taking one of my routine routes through the Catskills, a 10 mile ride that begins at Cooper Lake. What a relief to be back outdoors! Reminded me of this book by Henry Miller, my favorite writer.

Not the sort of book you think of when you think of Miller, right? As the cover shows, this is the second volume of his Book of Friends. The titles of both books pretty accurately describe the contents. Both books are remarkably cheap at Amazon. I ordered them as I was writing this post.

Haven't read either of these books since I was on the bum as a kid in San Francisco. I sat in the coffee houses and read for hours. My favorite coffee house was the Caffe Trieste in North Beach.

I have a lot of books on tap right now. Including, an Audiobooks version of Suleiman the Magnificent! 

Anyway, the crickets are beginning to chirp and the geese were honking fiercely overhead as I biked through the mountains. Bicycling outdoors is so much more interesting than wanking away on the stationary bike at the gym. 

Don't know how many springs I have remaining. Must get the most out of each one.

My bicycle is four or five years old. The guys at the shop told me that I will either need major repairs or a new bike by the end of this season. The gears and chain are wearing out. A new bicycle costs about $700, a pretty hefty bite for a retiree on a fixed income.

A cold spell is setting in, so I won't be able to ride a lot for a week or so. But, I'll be back to my daily routine of riding 15 to 20 miles as soon as a warm weather arrives.

Mastering the Pipe Organ

For the past year or so, I've been responding to ads for church organists. Not much success so far, but that has been my own fault. I play a synth keyboard at my current church job. So, I haven't been dutifully practicing my organ chops, particularly my pedal board chops.

My church does own a Baldwin knock-off of a Hammond B3. So, I do have an organ with a pedal board for practice purposes. But, I've been practicing sporadically, only when a job opens up. A week or two of frantic practice on the pedal board is not embedding the skill in my feet. I'm still looking down to locate the proper pedal, and making a ton of mistakes.

Why do I want a different church job?

Well, I'm not sure that I do, which might account for my unpreparedness for the auditions. I would like to have access to a good grand piano and a custom pipe organ, and my church does not have either. Nor is either instrument within my budget.

Making a significant salary as a church organist might be a good thing. I say "might" because the result of increasing my income could be higher taxes on my Social Security payout and little net gain in spendable income.

Most of the well paying organist jobs are in Protestant churches. I'm not planning on abandoning my Catholic faith, and I'm not sure how to navigate that dilemma. Or whether I should even try. I figure I can do a Sunday service and a weeknight choir practice at a Protestant church, and still attend a Saturday night Vigil Mass. 

I have decided to get to work on my organ technique. That means getting back to Bach, in this case back to the Preludes and Fugues for Organ. I ordered this set of 8 from Amazon yesterday.

The plan is now to stay after Mass to practice organ for an hour, and to attend a weekday morning Mass and stay afterward for a practice session. Within a few months, I should be able to play the pedals reflexively, without looking down at my feet to check out their position.

So, next time a worthwhile position opens up, I'll be ready!

Who is My Target Audience?

As I begin work on the new CDs (albums?) that I've planned, I want to simultaneously create a marketing plan. (I don't know what to call a CD/album in these days of single song marketing via digital media.) Many years ago, I issued a couple of solo CDs that received rave reviews in the press in the Northeast. I played some gigs in the area and just sort of expected everything to fall in place.

But, things didn't fall into place. In retrospect, I understand that I had no marketing plan for my product. Why? I labored under the naive notion that the quality of what I produced should and would drive the entire process.

In the digital age, defining one's audience isn't enough. You also have to plan how to, as they say, "monetize" your product. It's so easy to download and pass around music and books for free that it has become difficult to convince people to part with money for art works.

The foundation of my audience is people who love "roots" music... that is music derived from the traditional music forms... gospel, blues, country, folk and jazz. I think that this audience goes across all age groups. I'm not political. I'm an outlaw. That's attractive to a certain audience.

For the past 5 years or so, I've tried to convince other musicians to collaborate in my vision of how virtual marketing would work, and I've had zero success. Guys my age want the music biz to function as it did in the 60s and 70s. It's almost a moral issue with them. A band should form in a public performance space, bars and clubs, build an audience, get a record deal and go on the road. That model is just about dead. For one thing, the traditional recording company is mostly obsolete.

Nowadays, the marketing process works backwards. Build a strong online presence, attract an audience and that leads to a foundation for public performing. At least, so I think. My vision is to slowly build a virtual online performing space that can reach a global audience. Where and how to do that... well, I don't know yet.

People who are interested in this process form another core audience that I want to address. In other words, a large part of the work that I plan to do is blazing a trail in this new world of virtual online performance.

I'll be combining the old and the new approaches. I'll be venturing out into public performing spaces. In fact, I already am. I enjoy live performing. (Not so much, however, in venues that do not allow for creative expression, which is most of them.) Musicians receive instant criticism and feedback from a live audience about what does and does not work. At the same time, I'll be building an online presence in the virtual world through video, animation, etc.

I'll start rolling out the specifics soon. 

Comrades! My Personal Five Year Plan!

If I learned anything from decades in publishing, advertising and multimedia, it was that a snazzy graphic logo announcing that you're going to do something or that you might produce a product is the most important part of any plan! So, since I announced my personal Five Year Plan this morning, here's a draft of my Five Year Plan graphic logo, which shows how hard at work I will be:

See? The hard work never stops here at Chez Howlin' Steve!

I only have 10 to 15 years of good health left. So, it's time to leave behind my artistic legacy. I'll be producing at least 5 new CDs of original songs and standards. I'll probably release the CDs on iTunes and in a physical CD format. And, I'll be writing a book, which I foresee marketing online in e-book format. Of course, I'll be illustrating each of these works. Below, a brief description of each of the 5 CDs I've planned.

Tiny But Mighty 

A collection of songs entirely about my late wife and artistic partner, Myrna. These will probably be all original tunes. It is long past time to tell her (and our) story.

Watseka in My Rear View Mirror

Songs about my teeny-tiny hometown in east central Illinois, including songs about my family and friends and the long gone characters from my past.

Dirty Blues

The dirty blues is a distinct sub-genre of the blues. Bessie Smith was probably the best known dirty blues artist. Some covers, some originals.

My Favorite Hymns

Just as the title says, my renditions of my favorite hymns. How can this co-exist with the "Dirty Blues?" Never been a problem for me.

Standards

I love the Great American Songbook standards, among them tunes like "September Song."

Other CDs that I'm planning include songs about the odd and interesting characters I've known in my decades in Woodstock, and perhaps a CD of country standards.

Get out your credit cards!

Last Time I Saw Her

I knew, when Myrna died 11 years ago today, that I would spend the rest of my life alone. Oddly, this sent me into a panic of dating and attempting to find a replica. No such woman exists. Her final words to me were: "Don't blame yourself for anything. I love you."

But, I still do blame myself. For years, I agonized over whether I had caused her death from cancer. Crazy... I know. In reality, I know that the horrifying abuse she suffered as a kid growing up in the gutters of Manila came back to destroy her. And that doesn't even take into account the lack of sanitation in that sewer that undoubtedly was the cause of her infection with h-pylori, the precursor to her stomach cancer.

I should have recognized the symptoms... the persistent abdominal pain. But, I didn't.

I've worked for Martin Scorcese, the pre-eminent filmmaker of our era. Also worked for David Boise, the pre-eminent corporate litigator of our era. He argued the pro gay marriage case before the Supreme Court. I worked with and performed as an opening act for The Band, one of the most influential rock bands of the 60s. So, I've known some incredibly brilliant and talented people.

Believe me when I tell you that Myrna left them all in the dust. A fierce and profound intellect built on bitter knowledge of the ugliest side of humans. A child prostitute, she was tortured and left for dead repeatedly before she was 10 years old. I learned the most astonishing things from her. One of them was that there are so many men who would rather beat the shit out of a beautiful, sexy woman than fuck her. What accounts for that?

At the time of her death, she was a manager in a corporate law firm in NYC, pulling down a big salary, and she was my partner in the music biz. Here's the eulogy I gave for her at her Manhattan law firm.

To understand Myrna's brilliance, you have to grasp this. After our weekly gig in a restaurant in Woodstock, we sat down most nights for a cocktail at the Bear Cafe with Mike Lang, the owner of the Woodstock Festivals. He was considering staging a Woodstock Festival in Beijing with Myrna as a lead performer.

The loss on a personal scale for me has been staggering. Myrna was a once a day girl in bed... where in the hell do you find that again? (You don't.) She knew more than how to make love fun. She knew how to make love dramatic and a constant spiritual revelation. She was also profoundly romantic. My withdrawal into sexual deprivation after her death was damned near debilitating. She worked relentlessly at supporting, defending and encouraging her man. Here's a link that describes my standard morning routine with her.

Expecting another woman to fill Myrna's stiletto heels was foolish, but I tried. The women I dated those first few years after her death in my hysterical attempt to replace her must have thought me an awful boor. Took me five years to surrender to reality and accept that that part of my life was over.

The loss on a professional and financial scale has been equally staggering. I'm OK financially... secure for life at a low middle class level, so I have no complaint. But that romantic and cozy future of travel all over the world that Myrna and I foresaw will never happen. I do not apologize for the fact that I became second banana in our musical act because everybody, male and female, wanted to feast their eyes on her astounding beauty. Without her, I am just another guy who used to have something going. Even Mike Lang has sort of forgotten who I am and he seems a little perplexed when I greet him in public in Woodstock.

I can't blame him. Like everybody else, he was entranced with Myrna.

The loneliness that I am left with in her absence never goes away. Myrna wanted to be with me every moment when she was not at work. When we were together she was almost always in direct physical contact. My mother bitterly complained that Myrna had cast a spell on me, and she was probably right. I forget about the pain and loneliness when I am occupied and busy.

Myrna was an epic character. Bawdy and hilarious. She wouldn't hesitate to blurt out in the most PC setting of Manhattan and Woodstock that "black men are good for fucking and not much else." (Not saying I endorse that idea! I quickly surrendered on controlling her outbursts.) She was completely unafraid. Nobody dared rebuke her because they were all afraid of her (with good reason) and they all hoped she would give them a dollop of love.

Woodstock's lesbians were equally under Myrna's spell. They made the fatal mistake of trying to seduce her with that standard mid-90s routine of telling her that her hetero white husband was a despicable oppressor. I dragged Myrna out of more than one cafe in Woodstock to prevent her from beating the living hell out of those dumb bitches. (The hilarious reality was that she would probably have invited them into a menage a trois with hubby if they had only been romantic and nice. Not one of those idiot lezzies thought of that.)

Her experience of suffering through torture created within her a powerful spirituality. She refused to blame anybody for her suffering. In fact, she credited that suffering with forging her strength, intellect and power. Myrna happily helped anybody who asked for it, but she would brook no whining and no excuses, not even from me.

"I've had the worst done to me," she often said. "There isn't anything else left that people can do to hurt and humiliate me." And, "If I can make it, what the fuck excuse does some spoiled brat white American bitch have?"

I am humbled that she chose to walk beside me for 16 years, and I remain devastated that she is gone. After years of cursing God for taking her, I learned to thank Him for giving her to me. That was really my only choice. Well, my other choice was to destroy myself.

I learned from my experience to believe in prayer. Decades before I met Myrna, I was living in absolute despair in San Francisco, trying to find something to guide my life. I read every book Henry Miller wrote, and I prayed endlessly (without recognizing that what I was doing was praying) that I would one day meet a woman like the wild characters he wrote about.

God answered my prayers. Big time.

"Promise me that you will tell our story," Myrna said to me on her deathbed.

I am trying, but I am unworthy.

Tiny But Mighty, indeed.

Always Merry and Bright!

These are the words of my great artistic and literary hero, Henry Miller. The wisdom of these words is vast. People justifiably think of Miller for his writings about sex, but I always found his writings about freedom and controlling your own life to be far more important.

Miller lived through the most murderous era of butchery in human history, the 20th century. He devised a strategy to stay the hell away from the politicos and the war mongers of the left and the right, and to enjoy life... wine, women and song. He ignored the great conflagrations and ate well and drank wine.

I've tried to follow his example... and I've got to congratulate myself on doing this successfully. I do not concern myself with the great political issues, except for the purposes of entertainment. I do not involve myself in any political activism. My focus is entirely on enjoying my family, my friends and my art.

My life has been a comic Pilgrim's Progress, just like Miller's. But, I found my way through the maze of backstabbers, fanatics, criminals, suffocating bureaucrats, crazies, etc. It wasn't easy and I took some big hits. Like Miller, I've always been an outlaw. I've assumed that both the law and the criminals are thugs, and that the way to a good life is to outwit and avoid both... making both irrelevant to my life.

Be happy today. Eat well. Enjoy a good bottle of wine. Sit down and enjoy the company of a beautiful woman. Play with your children. This is my goal in life. I do my art, and expect nothing in return except the satisfaction of doing.

Laugh! Make yourself entertaining! Play the clown! There is no more important work to be done than this.

And, remember... "Against stupidity, we are helpless!" Don't bang your head against the wall trying to cure the world of stupidity. That is a hopeless task. Let somebody else do it.

I lived for love. Did I get my ass kicked? Plenty. It was a fantastic adventure. The women were divine.

Latin Mass at St. Anthony's

I attended a Latin, or Tridentine, Mass at St. Anthony's of Padua in Jersey City yesterday. The Mass was a beautiful work of art. A full choir, along with the priest, chanted the entire liturgy. Only the Gospel was given in English. This was my first Latin Mass in, probably, 45 years.

Mark Stahlman, a Facebook friend, invited me to attend. Mark is a Marshall McCluhan scholar.

St. Anthony's is all of four blocks from the house where Myrna and I lived as she was dying of cancer.

What did the Church gain by destroying its own tradition of the Latin Mass? Nothing, or so it appears to me. Every time the Church concedes to its critics that it must "reform" in order to be contemporary and relevant, the result is that more people leave the Church.

Mark's academic focus is on how media affects the Church. He divides the modern era into Radio, Television and Digital eras. The dominant media of each era shapes the assumptions of the listener/viewer/user about how the world works. The Church has consistently, according to Mark, failed to appreciate the impact of these different media eras on its faithful.

Vatican II, according to Mark, was the response of the Church to the Television era. The dominant message of that era was "Do your own thing."  One of the primary reforms of Vatican II was dumping the Latin Mass in favor of Mass being given in the native tongue of the congregation.

The Latin Mass is a stunning work of art and dramatic theater when it is properly presented. Learning another language, even one no longer in use, is a great intellectual exercise. The Latin Mass sort of united the Church under the banner of "Roman." At the time of Vatican II, I was generally in favor of the "reforms," but the long term affect of those reforms seems to be entirely negative.

I'll be going back to St. Anthony's. I really enjoyed Latin Mass.

Oregon Catholic Press

Every week, I prepare for Mass by learning three or four new hymns from Today’s Missal published by Oregon Catholic Press. Isn’t it remarkable that OCP is located in Portland, Myrna’s hometown? I’m still a beginner, so I need all the help I can find to get together my presentation for Mass.

The best feature of OCP’s site is the MP3 clip for just about every hymn in the Missal. I can preview the songs before I try to play them.

OCP also publishes Today’s Liturgy, a quarterly. The quarterly features a two page spread for each Sunday in the liturgical calendar. On the left hand page, you’ll find suggestions for appropriate hymns for a particular Sunday Mass. On the right hand page, you’re given a fill in the blanks sheet for planning out your musical presentation.

The mother of all OCP publications is the huge Keyboard Accompaniment Book. I had to divide this monster into two huge 3 ring binders. This book features notation and chord charts for each of the songs in the two Missals published by OCP. The arrangements are usually pretty decent, although sometimes overly complicated. I learn the arrangements, chuck whatever I think is unnecessary and construct my own version of the songs.

I’ve got a lot to learn. I recently found a series of choir director tutorials on YouTube created by a Mormon woman.  There’s always something new to learn.