010310

It's been bitter cold in New York this week, in the 20s, feeling closer to 0 degrees. Makes me want to curl up and read.

*Asia*

While I was living in Taiwan, I had to leave the country every few months, for visa purposes; I lied and told the government I was living in Taipei studying Chinese (there were schools who would sign off on this fiction) so in effect I was there on a "student visa;" but I wasn't even close to Taipei. I could have gone anywhere on my visa trips, and just for a day, but I quickly found Hong Kong, an overnight ferry or short plane ride away, to be a delightful place for a white person to spend some time. One of the most important reasons for this is the underground Indian restaurants which abound in Chung King mansion in Kowloon. The mansion is a complex of four or five high rises; it's a very dirty place, scummy I would say. Not the sort of place you'd want to find yourself alone after dark. And only the poorest and bravest of Chinese folks ventured here.

Mostly it was Indians and Filipinos that called the place home. But the Indian food, OMG! The deal was you had to wander around on the seedy ground floor and wait until you met someone handing out flyers for some particular restaurant on some anonymous floor. These invariably were fly-by-night establishments; there was never one that lasted longer than my stay in Taiwan, until my next visa trip. One arrived on the designated floor and searched for the specified apartment number. All of it was residential, and the restaurants were tucked away amid family dwellings. One knocked on a given door and waited a moment. The person who answered was usually a waiter, and he was sure not to show the inside of the apartment until he was certain you were someone looking for a meal.

Inside, these restaurants were, believe it or not, extremely luxurious. The staff was always well-dressed, proper, and polite, and meals came out from the kitchen with surprising speed. It was rock-bottom cheap and amazingly good. One could stuff oneself on gourmet Indian for a couple of dollars. I ate in such places twice a day everyday; it was simply too good to be true, and I am not one to look a gift horse in the mouth. These restaurants were probably the best-kept secrets in Hong Kong. Certainly no Chinese person would be caught dead in such a place. In my experience, Chinese folks in general look down on India and Indians; I had a student once who insisted it couldn't possibly be a civilized, cultured place since people wiped their asses with their hands. I'm sure some of you agree.

I must inform you that Indians, nevertheless, are extremely clean people as a whole (of course, it's the Brahmins, the highest caste, more than, say, the Untouchables). There are very specific rules about how one touches another. The left hand is the one used for, ahem, that which we might find objectionable, and one does not ever touch another person, or a plate, or a book, with that hand. Regardless, India and Hong Kong are former English colonies. Loathed though they were, those with Indian passports used to be able to travel freely to Hong Kong, often to start the aforementioned restaurants. Thankfully, imperialism is no more; the Hong Kong Chinese don't have to "put up with lowly Indians" anymore. But I'd imagine cheap Indian food has been part of the fallout.

*Quotations*

Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.

--MLK Jr.

Being a nerd, which is to say going too far and caring too much about a subject, is the best way to make friends I know.

--Sarah Vowell

It creates a feeling of wonder that so much beauty should be apparently created for such little purpose.

--Charles Darwin

In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation.

--Guy Debord

If you want to make enemies, try to change something.

--Woodrow Wilson

As a writer, I need an enormous amount of time alone. Writing is 90 percent procrastination: reading magazines, eating cereal out of the box, watching infomercials. It's a matter of doing everything you can to avoid writing, until it is about four in the morning and you reach the point where you have to write. Having anybody watching that or attempting to share it with me would be grisly.

--Paul Rudnick

I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people's dream died there. It was a beautiful dream. And I, to whom so great a vision was given in my youth--you see me now a pitiful old man who has done nothing, for the nation's hoop is broken and scattered. There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead.

--Black Elk

TV and the Internet are good because they keep stupid people from spending too much time out in public.

--Douglas Coupland

Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.

--Helen Keller

There is no distance on this earth as far away as yesterday.

--Robert Nathan

*Music*

When I was a teenager, Michael Hedges was one of my foremost idols. I'd been to see him perform countless times. For this reason, I had some good bootleg recordings (hey, it was different in the old days). Hearing him perform live was key to learning how to play his tunes; back in the day, before he had roadies to tune his guitars back stage, he tuned his guitar differently between each song, and if you had a recording, you could figure out what each tuning was. (My friend Adam still has a great tape we made one night at The Bottom Line; I used that recording to figure out a lot of Hedges' stuff.) I remember the first time I ever heard the music: it was on a road trip to Florida with my brother in the early 80s. The thing that struck me most back then was that even though it was new to me, and complex, and unpredictable, it felt as if it were music I'd always known.

I became a devotee of Mr Hedges, following him closely until his untimely death in 1997 in a car wreck. Once, when I was living in Seattle in the mid 90s, he came through and played in Everett, just north of town; the day before the show, he did a workshop open to all. By this time, I was fairly adept at playing his music, but I went mainly to meet him in person. One of the most important things I learned, though, was this: I had always assumed that, because he was trained in classical composition, and because his music was so intensely orchestrated, he arranged each piece, then figured out how to play it on guitar. No, he explained, he picked a tuning he liked for whatever reason and did the composing on the guitar. I was stunned.

(Years later when I was studying jazz bass at PSU, I met a guy who was even better than I was at playing Hedges' music (I tell myself that was because, by then, Hedges had published all of his tunings). One day, I happened upon this fellow playing Hot Type; when he was through I told him I thought Hot Type was Hedges' hardest tune to play. He said no, definitely the hardest tune was Aerial Boundaries. And why? Because to play that tune, one had to do something Hedges had perfected: one had to control precisely how long each of six strings/notes rang out, damping each string, with either the right or left hand, as necessary. I knew the guy was right--that's the reason I'd never been able to play Aerial Boundaries before!)

And that distinct, sublime, aspect of Hedges' playing was not a topic of discussion at the workshop. His main point was this: once you figured out the right tuning for a given piece, the actual fingerings, of importance to guitarists, were remarkably easy; in fact this ease of fingering was part of his design--he picked particular tunings according to how well they lent themselves to easy fingerings. (I think he said this habit dated back to the days he played for tips in clubs; he had to be sure he could play no matter his state of mind.) And anyway, Hedges had already published a book, with the help of John Stropes, which detailed his radical approach.

He and Stropes developed a whole new style of transcription, one that accounted for techniques such as slapping, hammering with right hand simultaneously with the left (each making up its own line), picking the strings with the left hand, Hedges own sometimes explosive and idiosyncratic attacks, and, of utmost importance, his various ways of precisely controlling each note's, on each string's, duration, etc. Note duration is a part of composition and jazz improv; a rhythm guitarist playing sing-alongs, for example, need not worry about note duration as he or she strums away at chords. It's only when you get into fingerpicking individual notes that this comes up at all; and even for many players it still never does.

Needless to say, the various methods of controlling note duration could never be learned in a two-hour workshop. We were all more than happy just to be with the man and, in particular, to learn details of how he got his larger-than-life sound. (I had the technical details I already knew confirmed.) At the end, a group of folks crowded around him. I really wanted to speak with him and tell him how much his music had always meant to me. But the crowd was thick; I waited a few minutes and decided I'd end up being there all night so I went to leave. Out from the middle of his group of adoring fans, he called out to me. He said, "You wanted to tell me something?" It was quite as if God had descended from on high to speak directly to me.

I walked back over to him; the rest of the group stood in stunned silence. I reiterated what I said above, about his music having always been familiar to me, in the best of ways. He told me that was the best compliment he could receive and thanked me for being a fan. I am often thankful that I was able to meet the man whose music meant the world to me. While I was still able, I composed two pieces which were very much in Hedges' style; though I have no recordings, I'm happy to say I performed the pieces at a hootenanny and blew the audience of a couple of hundred people away. And the last time I saw Michael Hedges, he was calling to me at a workshop, asking me to put my money where my mouth was.

Peace love and ATOM jazz