Tom Interviews me...

[dwenius]

boutell interviewed me. Leave a comment if you want to be interviewed, I'll give you 5 questions, please offer to interview others when you post your responses.

1. When was the last time you performed for an audience? What did you do?

Well, arguably, I was performing the last time I visited a client site and pitched our service. This is my current full-time acting role, in the character of "Chief Technical Sales Droid." But I suspect you mean something less transparent/more meaningful.

The last time I performed for an audience was at a party in Sequim, WA, where camping in P.'s yard ("yard" = several acres of land on the Dungeness river ("several" = a variable and depends solely on the whim of the river)) and chatting around a fire pit leads inexorably to a series of long acoustic and electric jams. There are a few of us who have come often enough, once every year or two, that we know a bunch of the same songs and play them fairly decently. And those who don't play, dance. Come to think of it, my dear departed friend Marie was always one of the first people to wander into the middle of the jam and start dancing, which always made us play better because, you know, a crowd's a crowd.

IIRC, I brought and played my Peavey Falcon, a stratocaster clone with active pickups, through a Mutron III and a Moogerfooger phasor, into a Yamaha Digistomp amp modeling pedal, straight into the mixing board and out through P.'s PA speakers. I remember being rather impressed with the sound of the Yamaha, until a guy came over with a beat up, noisy as all hell old Fender, which sprang to life and completely took over the sonic spectrum when he played his SG through it. For the bluesy or Allman Brothers stuff we tried, I think the operative phrase is "I got blown off the stage/out of the room." When the songs turned towards the hippie side of the spectrum, I think I held my own quite well. We always play "Eyes of the World" and "Scarlet Begonias", and I've reached the point where I feel my solos on those songs are actually adding something new and possibly meaningful to the canon. What else, let's see, I know we played "Dixie Chicken", and "Days Between", a very haunting late-era Hunter/Garcia tune.

The last time I performed for an audience *for money* was about 15 years ago, in the auditorium of the Harrisonburg adult school, for the closing performances of the Shenandoah Shakespeare Express summer season, playing the Provost and a few very minor characters in Measure for Measure.

2. The little ones in your household have done adorable things you probably refrained from crowing about on the Internets, for fear of boring nonparents. Crow about them... now.

Brave man.

Rose is at that age where adorableness is her sole strategy. She smiles a lot. She laughs sometimes, a real belly-cackle, but there's no pattern to it. She'll laugh at a weird sound for an hour one day, ignore it or cry the rest of the week. She can roll over now, so she's always tangled in blankets when we go in to get her out of her crib. She's still got that "rending with terrible foreclaws" thing down cold, and her aim is improving; I swear she is going for my jugular. Like most babies her age, she chatters non-stop and waves her arms around, trying to figure out how all these parts work. She can sort of clutch objects, stare at them cross-eyed, and maneuver them into her mouth for a drool-bath. We're not totally convinced that she has said her first word yet, but she's clearly trying; she responds to some questions with the same sound, and it would be easy enough to claim that she was saying "yeah" or " 'un-gry". Oh, and she's teething lately, which means she does this not-so-cute thing where she doesn't want to be put down even for a minute. But other than that, or after a little infant Tylenol, she's all smiles and drool.

Nina, after over a year of very sporadic attempts, can now bike up the long, deceptively steep hill to our house without stopping. We have taken to sometimes biking over to Baskin Robbins for dessert, or biking over to her bio-dad's to say goodnight, which is how we discovered this. She also now has a hamster. She named it Cheesecake, and mild hilarity ensued, such as when we were serving actual cheesecake for dessert one evening and Calvin enthusiastically says "Yes, I like Cheesecake! He runs around and stuff!"

Actually, Nina and Calvin have been very close lately...literally. Nina has wanted someone to share her room for ages. Well, Rose outgrew her bassinet in our walk in closet, so she gets the crib, Calvin recently started sleeping in his "Big boy bed" instead of the crib, so something had to give anyway. Having the two littlest ones in the same room was not going to work at all, so with a little shuffling and cleaning, Calvin and Nina's beds are in her room, and their closet is all built out and subdivided (not all that usefully, IMHO). Calvin's dresser/changing table is out in a corner of the kitchen, which works out better than it may sound. Nina was a little surprised, I think, to learn that toddlers are not so good about going to sleep quickly and quietly when they are in the same room as their big sister and all her cool toys. But she has been great about the whole thing; when Calvin wakes up early, she gets up with him, gets him breakfast, and is otherwise helpful as all get out.

Bedtimes are interesting, though. I still sing bedtime songs to Calvin for between 10-20 minutes every night, and Nina goes to bed an hour or so later. Usually, Calvin is asleep. But sometimes not, and the sudden door opening, light, sister climbing into loft bed, wakes him up completely. This leads to the occasional "only in a house with children" type questions between canetoad and me, such as" "Did you just go 'Whoomph'?"

Musically, Calvin has been on a heavy "songs abut trains" kick lately. So I made him a playlist that turned into a bedtime-song list, which includes "City of New Orleans", "Mystery Train", "Stop that Train", "Big Railroad Blues", and his favorite new song, "Folsom Prison Blues". He wanders around singing it, pretty much spot on melodically if a little too regular with the rhythm, and well, for comic value you really can't beat a two year old singing about shooting a man in Reno.

This music and trains thing has crossed over from the stereo to the DVD player also. He is not so much into the Telletubbies anymore; now it's "I Love Toy Trains" or one of my concert videos. He is mad for the two Stevie Ray Vaughn Live at Montreaux DVDs we own. He likes the song "Pride and Joy" a bunch, but if he's not singing "Folsom Prison Blues", he sings "Voodoo Chile (slight return)", his second favorite or maybe even sometimes favorite song. It got to the point where I had to insist that we watch the Jimi plays Berkeley concert, so he would realize that SRV didn't write that song. He calls it "Wah wah wah song!" which cracks me up. And yes, wandering around, causing mayhem, singing it at the top of his lungs. When I plug in down in the studio, he comes down, says "Play wah wah wah!!", but when I start, he says "No no no! I wanna rock it!" and he comes over and moves the wah pedal around with his hands while I play the riff. Or stomps on it and rocks with his foot in the usual manner, sometimes. It is cute beyond words, unless the cute is overpowered by the fact that he has the wah pattern/rhythm for the song down cold.

Naturally, we watch the Grateful Dead movie and a recently released Jerry Garcia Band Shoreline DVD too. He basically recognizes Jerry's voice (i.e. lack thereof) and his playing, and he has seen enough pictures that he can name Jerry and Phil Lesh when they appear on a CD cover. I didn't realize the extent of this until I was reading "Searching for the Sound" (Phil's book, which may be my favorite of the post-Jerry "insider" memoirs); inside it there is a picture from the '72 Europe tour, when the band performed with bozo the clown makeup, and Calvin walks up, looks at it, and says "Look! It's Phil, wearing a funny mask!".

I have so far completely failed to impress upon my children the crucial relevance of dub, ambient, goa, jazz or any other genre of music that lacks words. But in the car the other day, apparently, Calvin was mesmerized by "Axel F", the theme song to Beverly Hills Cop, with that signature Prophet 5 riff. So there's hope yet.

Speaking of words, Calvin has started to lose some of the earliest toddler-pidgin puns, things like calling a granola bar a "ganola darm", saying pieway for highway, calling his favorite park "Tah-LOT-land!" instead of Tot-land, and others. Thankfully, he still has a fierce arsenal of dangerously cute sayings. His diction is very good for his age (says our speech-pathologist-in-training friend), but he still says things like "Can I play in the sprinkler wif you?" He cannot whistle, so when he wants to pet the cat, he says "Fee-foo! Jaaaake! Fee-foo!" And lately, he does this thing where he realizes that he has gotten what he wanted, and we have an exchange like this:

Calvin: "Are we swimming? At the pool?"
Me: "That's right, we're swimming at the pool."
Calvin: "Oh! [pause] Thanks!"

Ok, I think that's enough for now. There will be more, oh yes, more.

3. Is tariffed Internet really going to happen? Should I pull my neck out of this sand? Is there anything I can do about it?

Well, the recent congressional and other efforts against the tariffed internet have not been promising, but the public backlash is gaining momentum, and a new net neutrality bill was just introduced in the House and has been promised in the Senate. This is a standalone bill at the moment, as opposed to the attempt last week to attach net neutrality to the larger omnibus telecom bill. Net-neutrality-positive articles have also recently appeared in Forbes and Business Week.

My fear is that the telcos, present company included, are dumb enough to keep pursuing this (hey, when you've got nothing else to innovate, think up new ways to charge for free stuff, right? It worked for Sirius/XM Radio...), and they have a large and powerful lobbying wing. I've seen at least one memo that regards net neutrality as "a regulatory solution to a problem that does not exist", which tell you right there how clueless the people fighting this on the telco side are. What you can do, as always, is make your feelings known to your congresspersons, early and often.

4. You get to make me buy one song on iTunes. What am I to purchase?

Assuming you didn't immediately go out and purchase it when I mentioned it last time, go download "I Will Follow You Into the Dark" by Death Cab for Cutie. Now, for all I know, this has been played to death on the radio, it's the "Every Breath you Take" of our time, utterly pummeled into uselessness. But somehow I suspect not.

And the primary reasons I recommend it are these: it is a supremely powerful, well crafted song, for solo acoustic guitar and voice, that you, yes you, could probably learn to play and sing in an afternoon. Here is an accurate (to my ears) chord map with lyrics; figuring out the strum or finger picking pattern is left as a very valuable and not-too-difficult exercise. Note: you will see some chord maps or tablature for this song on the Intarwebs that suggests using a capo on the 5th fret; these are to be shunned.

5. You're hungry at two in the morning. What do you eat?
More than likely, fresh fruit, possibly in a bowl with 0% Greek yogurt. Maybe a red or yellow pepper with hummus for dipping.

Since my dad's heart attack and my subsequent commitment to a better diet, my snacking choices are severely limited. No trans-fats obviously, which takes out most processed snack food. I am tending to avoid wheat or other simple starches just right now, as I'm about 10 lbs. overweight and my body is telling me so (feet, knees), so no crispbreads or crackers or other munchables on the grains-plus-salt end of the spectrum, either. I used to munch soy nuts for a little salt, but since breaking a filling on a popcorn kernel, I'm staying away from them as well. Luckily, I'm of the opinion that there is no such thing as too much fruit.

Comments

[boutell.livejournal.com]

Thanks for being on the show!

... Your kids rock, literally. I'll take this as a reminder to make darn sure Eleanor's piano lessons start in the fall.

I own "I Will Follow You Into The Dark" already, but I hadn't thought of trying to play it. My barre chords are still impressively bad, but quasi-recognizable now, so this is just right. Much appreciated.

[dwenius.livejournal.com]

You can absolutely get through this song with partial chords, although you will lose the walking bass line. LEt me know how it works out :)