This week I discovered that spell-check systems across the board accept the following word: supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. !!! That fact make me gleeful and gives me hope for the future.
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Check out this video. It makes me nostalgic for the 90s.
*Perfume*
I'm going to a meet up this week of local NYC natural-perfume enthusiasts; I think I might be the only perfumer there. I'm bringing 9-10 good samples: Phoebe (formerly Oz), Daphne (formerly Keeper), Anthea (formerly Soliflore), Aphrodite, Apollo (formerly Down Under), Demeter (formerly Blondie), Ares (formerly Adam's Amber), Helios (formerly Poppa), and Euros. I think this group should be good for me to connect with; I'll let you know how it goes.
This week I made a new perfume with my new assistant; it's the first time she's helped me make a perfume and I'm pretty sure she had a lot of fun so maybe I can convince her to be my perfume assistant for the long haul. This is called Artemis (I've decided to use the names of Greek gods, as you can tell from the above list) and, as Anthea is an olfactory ode to jasmine, this is meant to be a tribute to lavender. Lavender can tend to remind people of soap and cleaning products so a perfume emphasizing it has to be carefully constructed. I think we made something complex enough that one won't necessarily be able to pick out the lavender; with luck it will mesh into something greater than just the sum of its parts--the grand goal in all perfumery. I'll know in a few weeks how it's turning out.
*Poem*
I wrote this more than 10 years ago, but it was part of a larger poem. Now I see this snippet works well on its own.
Our Language
Pop put up a shack for himself down by the beach
in his teens, says the salt air and ocean bathing
left white deposits on his skin after a while and
he had to head uphill to the adult house for
water without salt from time to time. When he
went off to college, he wore black turtlenecks,
did headstands on the lawn to center himself,
and went out with Jewish girls, he was such a
beatnik. And he had been a foreigner too for
the longest time. Until he left that beach, he says,
left behind the shack and the family, stopped
speaking with that stupid accent. People used to
call him names. Pop says he’s got to sell
the old place now, says it’s the day and age,
and it’s not having the money, and it’s not
caring enough anymore anyway. He has learned
to wield his languages with accuracy now,
has learned to keep certain of them from his
children, and can never go back. We both try
to make ourselves clear, in ways we couldn’t
when younger, make ourselves clear but not
give ourselves away. And we have come to agree
that it’s the words themselves which are broken,
the dialects, the very attempts at speech, not us.
Not us.
*Teachers*
Toward the end of my time studying with Kelley Johnson in Seattle I started jazz workshops with Ev Stern. Those workshops were the best thing that ever happened to me musically. Ev would call for applicants; you'd go in and talk to him and play for him; then he'd place you in a band (beginner, intermediate, advanced; I made intermediate). Then you'd begin meeting as a band once a week, and the first two sessions, you'd pick five or six tunes to practice together and play, in a public concert at Ev's house, at the end of the three-month workshop. It is very hard in jazz to get hands-on playing experience outside of a school. This was a golden opportunity for me and I loved it. Once a week or so, each player met with Ev individually to work on specifics, ask questions, and get feedback. Ev played bass in most of the bands, as bass players tend to be few and far between. At one of our sessions, I was complaining about my lack of fluency in jazz guitar; Ev stopped me and said, "Now, wait a minute. You're at least as good as I am." Made my year to say the least. I did two 'quarters' and had more chances to make music in a band setting (directed) than I ever had anywhere else. I even got to play and sing What's New? with our band, which is no mean feat.
After I moved to Bellingham to finish college I quickly spotted a great jazz guitarist, Christopher Woitach, who eventually became my teacher, and is my good friend to this day. Because I became even more serious during my upper-division studies, again, I had no time to practice (that's what I tell myself but the truth is that if I were really meant to be a musician, I would have found or made time all along). Christopher was a great teacher, and is one of the very best jazz musicians I've ever known personally. I actually hired Christopher to play in a trio at a monthly extravaganza I started and hosted, The Bellingham Slam. Once I got to perform You Don't Know What Love Is with the band (I was on acoustic guitar and vocals). Due to technical difficulties, my monitor wasn't working; trying to perform in a crowded, noisy venue with no monitor is like trying to walk carefully over broken seashells in the pitch black. Needless to say, the performance was far from my best, but I had a load of fun.
As fate would have it, after I moved to Portland six or seven years later, I discovered Christopher was living there too (he and Kelley both played in a band at the reception, nearby Portland, for my ill-fated wedding). At some point I decided to enroll in the excellent jazz program at PSU, on bass for the first time. Though I discovered within a week that I couldn't physically go to school (getting to all the classes with bags of books and my instrument was far more than I could do), I had a total blast and did really well (especially for someone who had only started playing bass a couple of years before) during my short time there. At one meeting of the guitar orchestra, directed by an excellent pro jazz guitarist, Dan Gildea, I played an obscure Santana piece with two other new students (on my fretless bass); it was the first time I'd ever played bass in front of others and at the end Dan walked up to me, looked me in the eyes, and said, "Great job." That felt particularly cool. I felt more comfortable in those classes, all of them, surrounded by other musicians, than I've ever felt anywhere (I took a career/aptitude test at Johnson O'Connor after high school and they told me, without question, I would find the most satisfaction if I went into music; luckily for me, though I can't make music anymore due to hand tremors and coordination problems, I find music, and poetry, and painting in perfume).
And through that program I met the best teacher I've ever had, Dan Schulte. It turns out that Schulte and Woitach are good friends (they're both friends of mine as well), and they both ended up doing concerts at my house, Jazz at the Loft and Jazz at the Bungalow. Schulte was exactly the kind of teacher I like: he did not mince words, did not do much explaining (he'd much rather play you an example of what you should be aiming for), and had a Socratic approach. When you arrived at his house, you got set up and he sat there looking at you, waiting for you either to ask a question or to begin playing something. You might fiddle around for a little while and after a few minutes he'd say, "Here, give me that." He played good stuff over what you'd just been trying to do, handed you the bass back, and sat down again staring at you, waiting again for a question or more playing. He was full of timeless "simplicisms" like, "You should really work on eighth notes. Quarter notes too; folks really like bass players who can play quarter notes for hours without fucking up." Schulte and Woitach (and Kelley) are some of the very best jazz players on the west coast, possibly in the whole nation.
*Musician*
Great moments in my life as a musician:
1. The monthly performances at my first teacher Steve Bentzel's house. Whenever I've made music in front of others I've always been completely at home and totally content.
2. The fact that I was accepted for a master's class with Tuck Andress gave me much confidence that I'd lacked. It was one of the more profound weeks I spent as a musician. Its impact on my playing was enormous.
3. Studying with Kelley Johnson was magical. It came at a time when I was still sort of in love with my new terrain, Seattle. Kelley helped me to feel as though I were part of it all.
4. The quarterly concerts that Ev Stern held at his house were extraordinary highlights for me. Performing in a band of other good musicians felt great.
5. While I was in Bellingham, I started working on some originals, Michael-Hedges style. I got to the point where they were working well, but to get the HUGE sound Hedges was known for, I needed a better amp. I traveled to American Music in Seattle, told them what I wanted, and was sent into the secluded acoustic room to test a potential amp out (a Peavey Ecoustic that's one of the best pieces of musical kit I've ever owned). Well, they must have been able to hear me in the main room because when I came out to say that I did want to buy the amp, at least six guitar-jock employees came over to say things like, "Man, that was sick!" and "Where did you learn to play guitar like that?" and "Do you give lessons?" I couldn't possibly count the number of times I've fiddled around in music stores, and that's the only time anything of the kind happened.
6. Not long after the guitar-store experience, I had the chance to perform my new originals before a large audience at a hootenanny put on by my friend Glenn Hergenhahn, to promote his play (Off the Map?) which I was in. I must say my performance of my original pieces was exceptional, totally in my prime, and fired up. Folks were flabbergasted, again asking where I learned to play like that (people don't generally appreciate it when you say you mostly taught yourself), saying, "My god, you were just slapping the _shit_ out of that guitar," and talking about when and how we would get me on record. That was the apex of my musical career.
7. After I moved to a loft apartment (after my ex-wife deserted me) I found myself knowing many of the best jazz players in town, Don Corey (and his band Flatland), Christopher Woitach, Dan Schulte, and others, so I started a monthly house-concert series, Jazz at the Loft, that happened on last Thursdays, which was gallery-walk night and _hoppin'_ on the street where I lived (Alberta Street). Those were majestic times. I recorded every show (available on adamgottschalk.net and citizenproductions.com) and toward the end, players were scrambling to secure a spot. Everyone knew about the shows. When I was out and about, every once in a while someone would say, "Oh, _you_ run those shows?" That felt great, but nothing could compare to having world-class musicians in my living room. I listen to the recordings now (Flatland's full electric band, or Schulte's stellar sextet) and I'm blown away. That music happened in my living room! I hope to start something like that again some day here in New York.
8. I have never felt so among my people as when I studied jazz at PSU. I walked into piano class, or ear training, or guitar orchestra, all filled with musicians of every type, jazz, classical, solo, and had an overwhelming sense that I understood everyone and they understood me. The reason this sense sticks out for me now is that I realize that's the _only time_ I felt that way in all my years in the PNW. Some people (like me) have to chase their tales for 20 years before they finally wake up and smell the coffee.
*Quotations*
If by a Liberal they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people-—their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, their civil liberties, someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and the suspicion that grips us, if that is what they mean by a Liberal then I am proud to be a liberal.
--Senator Edward M Kennedy
When you're traveling, you are what you are, right there and then. People don't have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road.
--William Least Heat Moon; I used to live for traveling but now I want to stay put and recover all my yesterdays.
[It contains] a great deal of corn, more corn than in the states of Kansas and Iowa combined.
--Julius Epstein, on the screenplay he and his brother, Philip, wrote for the movie classic, Casablanca
That's the deal. After that, you're on your own, you're just another idiot out there who is going to get plucked to death like anyone else.
--Martin Amis, on how having a famous writer for a father helped him get his first book published
Spend some time living before you start writing. What I find to be very bad advice is the snappy little sentence, 'Write what you know.' It is the most tiresome and stupid advice that could possibly be given. If we write simply about what we know we never grow. We don't develop any facility for languages, or an interest in others, or a desire to travel and explore and face experience head-on. We just coil tighter and tighter into our boring little selves. What one should write about is what interests one.
--Annie Proulx, on her advice to young writers (AMEN!)
At a certain point in our lives, we lose control of what's happening to us, and our lives become controlled by fate.
--Paul Coelho
Sometimes our fate resembles a fruit tree in winter. Looking at its sad appearance, who would think that those stiff branches, those jagged twigs would turn green again and blossom and bear fruit next spring? But we hope they will, we know they will.
--Goethe
Fate is for those too weak to determine their own destiny.
--Kamran Hamid
Each man is the architect of his own fate.
--Appius Claudius
Life is like a game of cards. The hand you are dealt is determinism; the way you play it is free will.
--Jawaharlal Nehru
*Taiwan*
When I lived in Taiwan, after I left Taipei, I moved to the small town of Hualien on the east coast, where I stayed for a year. Life turned out extremely well for me in Hualien. I quickly assembled a large roster of students for private tutoring; I pounded the pavement for a couple of weeks and stopped in at every place that looked like it might have folks interested in English lessons. After folks got over their initial amazement that I could actually speak Mandarin, I found they were generally very receptive. I have no problem saying I was one of the best English tutors on the island; this is for two reasons: years of Latin training in grammar school (I was able to explain fundamentals of the way English works as no one else could), and I actually made a concerted effort to become a good teacher. If I wasn't hanging out to an MTV or a beer garden or a noodle stand, I was reading books to become a better teacher.
The result was that once students started with me, they never left and they recommended me to all their friends. After those first two weeks I never had to look for students again. I even met a guy on the street one day who gave me a nice apartment and a new Vespa in exchange for teaching his two sons English. What a sweet deal! At 18, I felt like a king. My favorite students were big groups. I had a big class of the people who worked at the local water utility; big classes are fun in part because the students have fun with each other; also it's easy to play language-learning games (one of _the_ best language-learning techniques). Another group I had was four middle-aged housewives with wealthy husbands. They were just boatloads of fun, and I got to do plenty of flirting. They also blew me away because they were quite advanced at English, and English was only one of four or five languages they spoke: Mandarin, Taiwanese (a distinct dialect from Mandarin), Japanese (the Japanese occupied Taiwan for 50 years in the 20th century so speaking Japanese was common), also Hokkien (another distinct Chinese dialect), Cantonese (ditto), Korean, etc.
MTVs were big when I lived in Taiwan. There was at least one on every block. It was a hotel of sorts; housed on the main floor was a receptionist and a controller, and all around were files with listings and photos of all the movies you could watch (_Movie_ TV). Once you selected one or more, you went to the controller and apprised him or her of your selections. Then you were assigned a private room, to which you retired and the controller piped in all your movies for you. Anything was allowed in those private room, drinking, smoking, getting high, love making (I think that was sort of the point), feasting, etc. I valued them because in these places I could meet people my age who _weren't drunk_ (the way they would be at a beer garden or club) and have substantive conversations. Most of my best friends in Taiwan I met at MTVs. The funniest thing about this phenomenon was that many of the movies, if not most, were the worst kind of bootlegs: someone went into a movie theater and filmed the movie with a video camera. You could get away with that sort of thing if you were a gang member; the tapes were then sold to MTVs across the island. Every bit of the phenomenon broke numerous international laws; as far as I know, MTVs no longer exist in Taiwan.
*Politics*
First off everyone reading must do me a favor: buy/acquire and read Marilyn Waring's book If Women Counted. Her critique of capitalism is at least as important as Marx's, and, a Facebook friend pointed out, much more realistic, sensible, and practical. She took a long hard look at the international systems of national income accounting and concluded the following: the fact that women's lion's share of work around the globe (in reproduction, in agriculture, in micro business, etc.) is not counted at all in national income accounting is terribly detrimental for us all. Our accounts can never be balanced until it is.
"The Women’s Crusade
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF and SHERYL WuDUNN
"In the 19th century, the paramount moral challenge was slavery. In the 20th century, it was totalitarianism. In this century, it is the brutality inflicted on so many women and girls around the globe: sex trafficking, acid attacks, bride burnings and mass rape.
"Yet if the injustices that women in poor countries suffer are of paramount importance, in an economic and geopolitical sense the opportunity they represent is even greater. "Women hold up half the sky," in the words of a Chinese saying, yet that’s mostly an aspiration: in a large slice of the world, girls are uneducated and women marginalized, and it’s not an accident that those same countries are disproportionately mired in poverty and riven by fundamentalism and chaos. There’s a growing recognition among everyone from the World Bank to the U.S. military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff to aid organizations like CARE that focusing on women and girls is the most effective way to fight global poverty and extremism. That’s why foreign aid is increasingly directed to women. The world is awakening to a powerful truth: Women and girls aren’t the problem; they’re the solution.
"One place to observe this alchemy of gender is in the muddy back alleys of Pakistan. In a slum outside the grand old city of Lahore, a woman named Saima Muhammad used to dissolve into tears every evening. A round-faced woman with thick black hair tucked into a head scarf, Saima had barely a rupee, and her deadbeat husband was unemployed and not particularly employable. He was frustrated and angry, and he coped by beating Saima each afternoon. Their house was falling apart, and Saima had to send her young daughter to live with an aunt, because there wasn’t enough food to go around. "My sister-in-law made fun of me, saying, 'You can’t even feed your children,'" recalled Saima when Nick met her two years ago on a trip to Pakistan. "My husband beat me up. My brother-in-law beat me up. I had an awful life." Saima’s husband accumulated a debt of more than $3,000, and it seemed that these loans would hang over the family for generations. Then when Saima’s second child was born and turned out to be a girl as well, her mother-in-law, a harsh, blunt woman named Sharifa Bibi, raised the stakes.
""She’s not going to have a son," Sharifa told Saima’s husband, in front of her. "So you should marry again. Take a second wife." Saima was shattered and ran off sobbing. Another wife would leave even less money to feed and educate the children. And Saima herself would be marginalized in the household, cast off like an old sock. For days Saima walked around in a daze, her eyes red; the slightest incident would send her collapsing into hysterical tears. It was at that point that Saima signed up with the Kashf Foundation, a Pakistani microfinance organization that lends tiny amounts of money to poor women to start businesses. Kashf is typical of microfinance institutions, in that it lends almost exclusively to women, in groups of 25. The women guarantee one another’s debts and meet every two weeks to make payments and discuss a social issue, like family planning or schooling for girls. A Pakistani woman is often forbidden to leave the house without her husband’s permission, but husbands tolerate these meetings because the women return with cash and investment ideas.
"Saima took out a $65 loan and used the money to buy beads and cloth, which she transformed into beautiful embroidery that she then sold to merchants in the markets of Lahore. She used the profit to buy more beads and cloth, and soon she had an embroidery business and was earning a solid income — the only one in her household to do so. Saima took her elder daughter back from the aunt and began paying off her husband’s debt. When merchants requested more embroidery than Saima could produce, she paid neighbors to assist her. Eventually 30 families were working for her, and she put her husband to work as well--"under my direction," she explained with a twinkle in her eye. Saima became the tycoon of the neighborhood, and she was able to pay off her husband’s entire debt, keep her daughters in school, renovate the house, connect running water and buy a television.
""Now everyone comes to me to borrow money, the same ones who used to criticize me," Saima said, beaming in satisfaction. "And the children of those who used to criticize me now come to my house to watch TV." Today, Saima is a bit plump and displays a gold nose ring as well as several other rings and bracelets on each wrist. She exudes self-confidence as she offers a grand tour of her home and work area, ostentatiously showing off the television and the new plumbing. She doesn’t even pretend to be subordinate to her husband. He spends his days mostly loafing around, occasionally helping with the work but always having to accept orders from his wife. He has become more impressed with females in general: Saima had a third child, also a girl, but now that’s not a problem. "Girls are just as good as boys," he explained.
"Saima’s new prosperity has transformed the family’s educational prospects. She is planning to send all three of her daughters through high school and maybe to college as well. She brings in tutors to improve their schoolwork, and her oldest child, Javaria, is ranked first in her class. We asked Javaria what she wanted to be when she grew up, thinking she might aspire to be a doctor or lawyer. Javaria cocked her head. "I’d like to do embroidery," she said. As for her husband, Saima said, “We have a good relationship now.” She explained, “We don’t fight, and he treats me well.” And what about finding another wife who might bear him a son? Saima chuckled at the question: “Now nobody says anything about that.” Sharifa Bibi, the mother-in-law, looked shocked when we asked whether she wanted her son to take a second wife to bear a son. "No, no," she said. "Saima is bringing so much to this house. She puts a roof over our heads and food on the table.
"Sharifa even allows that Saima is now largely exempt from beatings by her husband. "A woman should know her limits, and if not, then it’s her husband’s right to beat her," Sharifa said. "But if a woman earns more than her husband, it’s difficult for him to discipline her...."
[Snip, several more stories of empowered third-world women.]
"There are many metaphors for the role of foreign assistance. For our part, we like to think of aid as a kind of lubricant, a few drops of oil in the crankcase of the developing world, so that gears move freely again on their own. That is what the assistance to [various recipients of aid] amounted to: a bit of help where and when it counts most, which often means focusing on women [like the highlighted recipients of aid]. And now [they are] gliding along freely on [their] own--truly able to hold up half the sky."
*Music*
This week I found myself saying to a Facebook friend, "The best music always has a question mark after it." That's certainly very true in my own life: What category would you put this in? Is this jazz or blues or rock? How many people are making this music? Does it have to be so loud? (:-)
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I love this song, Michigan by Josh Rouse, because it reminds me very much of the many letter-poems I've written in my day. Also I can relate to the need to write home after a time away; I can also relate to the fact that this is probably a letter he never sent. The whole story, about not being able to stay in his hometown, about bar-tending, about not having found love, seems like a chapter from the story of my own life:
"Mom and Dad,
I'm living in Michigan with Uncle Ray.
He and aunt Terry said I should write,
said I should write or I should phone you.
I just don't have that much to say.
You see, I've been bar-tending
about three nights a week.
It's a stand-up joint
and they're good to me.
And I stay bored most all the time,
except for the cards that Ray and I play.
He's the only friend I got in this place,
still it's better than Wichita.
Terry, she's fine.
She wants you to know she's wrote a song.
She's picking up where she left off;
she's bringing it back
'cause it's been years since she tried.
God, has it really been that long?
Mom, I'm sorry: I was wrong.
Dad, I'm sorry but I just couldn't stay
in that town where everyone knows
everything about me.
Michigan's all right,
still I haven't found a love.
Just wanna be happy,
love your son.
Just try to be happy,
love your son."
Peace love and ATOM jazz
