Mmmore Mmmuffins

Mmmade Mmmore Mmmuffins this Mmmorning.

I used the same recipe as last time, except these are cinnamon-apple, not blueberry. I've never made apple muffins before. But I've made apple cobbler, so I figured it would work well. It did. They're yummy.

piano lessons (for Havilah)

I never decided to become a musician. Apparently, and I don't really remember this, when I was very young I would sit at the piano and "play" (or more likely bang on it). I did it enough that my parents sort of didn't pay that much attention to it until somebody came to visit and noticed that I was playing "chords". When I was maybe 7 or 8 I started asking for piano lessons. If asked what I wanted for Christmas or my birthday, it was lessons, or a teacher. I do remember that. The parents were a bit doubtful that I'd stick with it, so they made me a deal that if I got through a beginning piano book and still wanted to take lessons, they'd find me a "real" teacher. 

My first teacher was my paternal grandmother. She and my grandfather were visiting, and she played piano, so she started teaching me. She got me most of the way through that beginner book before they left, and my mom coached me through the rest.

Then they found me a regular teacher. I don't remember her name, but I do remember that she was a minister's wife. Not sure what denomination, but it must've been something along fundamentalist protestant lines, because... I'd somehow gotten hold of one of those books of "63 Songs You Love to Play" or whatever. It had some old standards and folk songs and some more contemporary popular songs, including "Joy to the World". Not the Christmas carol, but the 3 Dog Night Song. I wanted to learn it, but my teacher wouldn't work on it with me, not because it was a pop song, but because of the lyric "But I helped him drink his wine, Yes, he always had some mighty fine wine." Of course wine was evil, so I couldn't learn that song. Well, I did learn it, just not with her help. 

After my family moved, during my 4th grade year, I found a new teacher. It was group lessons at the Faye Langdon school of music. I don’t remember that teacher’s name either. It wasn’t Mrs. Langdon. I took lessons there for a while, then quit for a while, then started lessons again. Just around the time that I was starting to play moderately difficult things, we moved again.

It was the middle of junior high for me, and we moved to Mississippi. I hated it at first. I never found a teacher there, never even looked for one. I didn’t stop playing; I just wasn't taking lessons. I always liked to play, but I didn't ever practice much. My parents never pressured me to practice or not practice. When I had wanted lessons, they paid for lessons. And when I’d wanted to quit, I don't recall their making a big deal about it. 

I started playing some times in church, and I started buying sheet music for some pop songs I liked. That’s when I discovered how playing the piano is attractive to girls. I would play during a break at church camp or in the school choir, wherever, and a gaggle of girls would gather and watch me and listen and comment on how great I played. I was not the type to take advantage of that. I never really talked to these girls, but I did enjoy the attention. When I was 13 or 14 this group of girls who were 13 or 14 wanting to hear me play felt pretty awesome. Of course as I got older, they stayed the same age. Not the individual girls, of course, but the group. By the time I was 17 or 18 it was considerably less awesome.

When I went to college, I started as a music major, but pretty quickly changed to undecided. It was actually called “General Studies”. It was a department where you could go in for career testing and stuff, and there were a few classes. But I didn’t do all that stuff. I just sort of ended up in psychology. But that first semester as a music major I’d started taking piano again, after about 5 years of no lessons. After that semester my teacher went on sabbatical, and the second teacher I had at college gave me a B because I didn’t want to keep working and polish and memorize a piece after I’d learned it. I’d always read well, and learned how to play things fairly quickly, but I was never really a great memorizer. And at that point I wasn’t’ a music major any more. I had no intention of performing whatever those pieces were. So why should I memorize them? That was my feeling.

I wasn’t going to continue piano after that. But I was taking composition by then, and my composition teacher told me I should keep taking piano, to keep my technique up. So he arranged for me to take with his friend who was head of the piano faculty, whose studio I never would’ve gotten into as a non-major, and that I would work on whatever I wanted as long as it was decent stuff. When I composed my first piano sonata, we worked a little on that in my lessons. When I started accompanying for the opera program, we would sometime work on that stuff in my lessons. When my teacher realized I liked accompanying and was good at, we worked a whole semester on a set of songs and piano reduction of a piece for orchestra and soprano (Hermit Songs and Knoxville, Summer of 1915 both by Samuel Barber).

So I kept up lessons until I finished school. I knew I was never going to be a concert pianist, and do big solo piano recitals. I was never interested in that. And I had absolutely no desire to teach piano or be a choir or band director. Other than maybe being a pop musician, I had no idea of anything else you could do for a living as a musician. I’m sure I knew that an accompanist was someone who played piano for some other soloist or group. But for the first few years of college I had no idea that someone could work as an accompanist (etc.) and make a living at it.

After I started accompanying there was a point when I realized that I couldn't not be a musician. I was a psych major, but I spent much more time in the music department, and I stopped thinking I was gonna be a therapist or whatever and kept doing music. In fact, I considered dropping out of school, taking a few years off, and eventually coming back to do a music degree. But everyone I talked to about it said that was a bad idea. They all suggested I should finish a degree in whatever I was closest to finishing. And then taking whatever time I wanted to figure out what to do with myself. So I finished the psychology degree, but with more actual music hours than psych hours. Undergrad psychology isn’t a really complicated or intensive degree, but music is. I wasn’t even close to having the right line-up of hours for a music degree. There were several ways you could minor in music, and I qualified for all of them except the one which was more history and theory (academic music) heavy.

I’d majored in psychology ‘cause it was something I was really interested in and thought I’d be good at. I had always liked my therapist in high school, and for a time I had actually thought I would be a therapist. I’ve always been pretty good at listening to people, cutting through the bullshit, and giving advice. But I’m a musician. I accompany, I coach, I do music direction, arranging, orchestration. And now when people find out that I have a psych degree, they often ask if I ever use it. I always say. Pretty much the same thing: Are you kidding, of course I use it; I work with singers and actors and dancers all the time, and they’re all crazy.

Objection!

I object to leaf blowers.

No, not that. This:

They’re not simply leaf blowers. They’re dust blowers. Okay, yes, at least the people using them are courteous enough to power down when I walk by, but that does nothing to dissipate the cloud of dust I have to walk through. I’m already allergic to plenty of things in the air without your help, thanks.

Also, they’re noisy and annoying at 9am when I’m trying to snooze.

Also, they have some kind of power source. I’m guessing they’re mostly gas powered. But even if they’re electric, they’re using up energy, and unnecessarily, I think.

I mean, why is it so important that your yard or driveway not have leaves in it? Seriously. It’s not as if the leaves cease to exist. They just go out into the road or, as in the case with the apartments next to mine, onto your neighbors’ property (i.e., my parking lot and “yard”).

I know, I know: dead leaves remind you of your own pending death.

Or is it that you were taught too severely as a child that clutter makes you a bad child. 

And if you really need to hide away those disturbing &/or shameful leaves—out of sight, out of mind?—there are other ways to go. What ever happened to a good ol’ fashioned broom or rake and a little elbow grease? That would be healthier for everyone, right? 

Why Family Guy Sucks

Okay, maybe “sucks” isn’t the right word...but then again, maybe it is. How ‘bout this: Family Guy is just not funny.

First, a little background. I don’t remember exactly when Family Guy started, but when it did, I didn’t watch it. I suspect I just didn’t want to invest the time and energy into yet another TV show. For a long time, I’ve felt that I watched too much crap on TV as it is.

For quite a few years now, various people have mentioned Family Guy  to me, and when I said I didn’t watch it (or until about 3 years ago had never seen it) they suggested that I would really like it. So when I finally watched a few episodes (unusual little side note: the first 3 or 4 times I watched it, it was the same episode) I just didn’t think it was funny. So when I mentioning this lack of funny to people who would recommend it, they suggested that I just hadn’t seen the “right” episodes. Well, I really don’t have much interest in sifting through an entire series of mediocre episodes just to find the “right” ones. One person even mentioned some incident or reference in an episode that recurred several seasons later and that it was just amazingly hilarious. But again, I’m not gonna wade through a lot of crap to find a few moments of hilarity. Especially not when I can find other shows that I actually consistently like.

I haven’t watched many episodes, but just today (technically, yesterday) I gave it another try. I even watched “Blue Harvest”, the Star Wars episode. I’m a Star Wars fan. I love it, but I also recognize how fertile an area it is for parody. So I held on to some hope (a new hope?) for that episode. There were some humorous moments. But they were relatively few and far between.

So... Here is why I think Family Guy just isn’t funny.

Now, I’m assuming it’s supposed to be a comedy. It feels like a comedy. And from what I have seen, Family Guy does what most sit coms do (which I hate): for much of its comedy it relies on characters doing something stupid or telling a lie and then doing more stupid things or telling more lies to keep other characters from finding out about the original stupid thing/lie.

The thing is, I just don’t think that being stupid &/or lying is funny. Or admirable. Certainly not something we should be putting out there over and over, being done by “the beautiful people” so that we media consumers/sheep admire it.

The other thing that Family Guy relies on for humor is random references. But the problem is that when random stuff happens, it's just random stuff. It's like comedy for people with ADD. Or people who are high.

“Look here’s some random reference! If you’re much younger than us, the people writing this show, you probably won’t have a clue what we’re referring to. But that’s okay, ‘cause even if you did know the reference, it’s still not actually funny. We’re just hoping for that ‘Oh I recognize that’ reaction which people might misinterpret as funny or good.”

But I tell you, people, simply recognizing something doesn’t make it funny or good. (There could be a whole other blog in here about people wanting what they know, and how that can be dangerous. I was just thinking about that tendency today, and it’s political ramifications. But back to Family Guy’s randomness. ) There's no payoff, no later call-back of the random stuff. 

Now, (by way of contrast,) I do like South Park. Yes, it’s crude. Yes, it shows children being rude and disrespectful to everyone, et cetera.  But it’s not really a show for kids. The same is true of The Simpsons, and those shows shouldn’t be marketed in any way as kid-friendly programming. When real-life kids act that way, it’s appalling. And their parents should be punished for allowing them to get that way.

Anyway, I certainly recognize the similarities between South Park and Family Guy. They’re both animated series, for adults (South Park more so) which have a lot of popular culture and historical references. Both sometimes seem random, HOWEVER in South Park the random stuff almost always comes back in the story in some significant way.

I like unpredictability, spontaneity, random references. But in a dramatic or comedic work, which someone has put effort into, to shape it into something better-crafted than an improvisation, the unpredictability (et cetera) should eventually result in a sense of inevitability, or payoff. In other words, it shouldn’t just be some random shit thrown out there because it just came to mind. The creators should take responsibility for what they put out there, and make it worth our time to watch. Don’t just throw whatever nonsense comes babbling out of your brain at us. I know that people are stupid, but don’t pander to the stupidity. Make a little more effort.

That’s all I’m asking: don’t just throw random crap at us and tell us it’s funny. Put some effort into writing, people. 

Dear actors...

Dear actors (and singers and dancers),

I’d like to take a moment today to talk (write) about headshots (or, bodyshots for you dancer-types). You all need them. And you all get excited when you get a bunch of proofs for new headshots. And you all get excited when your friends post them on the facebook, so you can vote on which they should use. But sooo many of you seem perhaps to not get what headshots should be. If you have photographer friends who do headshots, please share this with them.

Your headshot needs to look like you...how you actually look when you go into an audition. I realize that having someone take beautiful, glamorous pictures of you that make you look amazing (or maybe those quirky “look how fun I am?” pictures), and which you put in front of your audition notebook and see before each audition and get to show everyone who might cast you...all that can be a great ego boost. I really do get it. It’s nice to think that you look amazing. But chances are, oh actor- and singer- and dancer-types, you are, in regular life, beautiful. And in your glamorous-looking headshots your beauty achieves a level of unreality.

But a director doesn’t need to see that. None of the people on the “other side of that table” need to see that. I’m a music director. I’ve been in lots of auditions, and not just over to the side playing the piano. I’ve am actively involved in making casting decisions, so I know what goes on, I know what’s said in those discussions. Waaayyy too many times I’ve heard someone say “what about this person”, and someone else says “who is that?”, and someone holds up a headshot, and someone else says “do they look like that”, and someone says “uh no, not really”, and someone else says “well, what did they look like?”.

Now, I tell you, folks, there is no need for that conversation. The reason you give us a headshot is so we who are trying to cast a show or fill a spot in a company or whatever you’re auditioning for can recall what you look like. We usually see lots of people in auditions, and we can’t always remember. So instead of a headshot that captures the most glamorous possible you, pick one that captures the typical audition-you. If we want to know that you can look glamorous and can’t imagine it in our heads, we can always call you back and ask you to glam up.

The glamorous headshot is great if you have a modeling portfolio. And if you have a buddy who takes pictures for you, it’s great that they can do that sort of thing. That’s what fashion photography is about, That’s what glamor photography is about. I say go ahead and get a couple of those kind of pics, to post on the facebook so your friends can say “wow you look so hot” and to look at daily to feel good and know that you are a beautiful person. But also get some real actor headshots. The more unusual the angle or position or lighting set up or make up required, the more likely the resulting photos aren’t gonna look like “normal” you.

Please, don’t give us the glamor shots. Don’t give us the 2 hairstyles ago pic. Don’t give us the 50 pounds ago pic. Don’t give us a pic more than a few years old. If you tend to alternate between two looks, then get headshots for both looks. For example: guys if you sometimes wear a beard, get bearded and clean-shaven headshots. If you absolutely need us to see you looking glamorous, then fine, get those headshots, but then also come to auditions looking that way. (Of course, chances are we’ll think that it’s kinda odd and maybe you’re crazy or something, and we won’t cast you.) And if you think that we need to see variety (the audition-you plus some other version)...don’t. We probably have at least a normal ability to imagine you in a different costume or hairstyle or makeup. Trust us a little.

Okay. That’s it. Maybe I’ve overdone it. Maybe I just needed to say “PEOPLE! Stop using those damn headshots that look like another person!” But I just like to go on, don’t I?

Forgive me

I’ve recently seen a couple of movies that have confessional scenes. I’ve never been in a confessional. I’m not Catholic. And being the critic I am of church and state and institutionalized control, I never cared for the idea of confession as a requirement in life. But I suddenly realize that maybe there’s something to it—something positive, something useful.

Maybe the act of revealing your shortcomings (I’m not comfortable with the word “sins”—it’s part of a whole mindset or belief system that I don’t want to participate in and to which I strongly object) to someone else can be healing. That’s sort of what (psycho) therapy is about, right?—you talking about your life and someone else, supposedly neutral about the whole thing, helping you see what’s good and what’s not.

I think confession is supposed to be anonymous. Again, I’m not Catholic, so I’m not completely sure. But if you always go to the same church it’s gonna be one of a few priests in there, right? Or maybe always the same guy. So not really anonymous. Some people may find comfort in that—confessing to the same person over and over. He can notice trends and warn against ongoing problems. But true anonymity would sometimes be a plus—you know, with the really shameful stuff.

Maybe we should all take turns confessing to each other. And forgiving each other. It just seems like that would have to be good on the whole.

experimenting

I just heard the phrase "experimenting with drugs" in a movie from 2001. I mention the year because it's not like something from the 60's or 70's. The phrase is probably still in use. The movie is Series 7: The Contenders. It's an interesting sort of commentary on TV violence and reality shows. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0251031/
Anyway, I'm thinking about that phrase "experimenting with drugs". But do people really experiment with drugs? Don't people just basically try drugs or take drugs (or continue to take drugs)? I'm not used to hearing about kids "experimenting" with cigarettes or alcohol or sex...well, maybe with homosexuality.
So if it's something that's legal or "the norm" for adults but undesirable for kids, then it's something kids get into, involved with, whatever. But if it's drugs or maybe homosexuality, then the kids are "experimenting"? Why the difference? Is it the hope on the part of parents or other adults that once the experiment is done, the behavior will stop, whereas drinking, smoking and straight sex are fine in the long run?

saving the world...or not

I just had a thought about saving the world and not saving the world.

Right-wing Christian fundamentalist types, who believe in the “literal word of the bible” (or it’s standard traditional interpretation) and all that jazz, have no incentive to reduce/reuse/recycle or reduce carbon emissions or conserve non-renewable resources or develop alternative energy sources or anything else that might allow life to continue on this planet. Nor have they any incentive to strive for peace among nations or any of the things that I would imagine a “reasonable” person to want in regard to sustaining life on this planet.

They’re too busy looking forward to the rapture, because they know it’s gonna happen in our time. So why should they bother? In fact, maybe they should do anything they can to hurry it along so they can all party in paradise with the Jesus…and the 72 virgins.

Wait, am I mixing my religions?

trailer

This morning I saw an appalling movie trailer. The movie is Machete. The trailer consisted mostly of a guy chopping off a bunch of people’s heads in various clips from the movie. It’s a real movie. I looked it up. There are other trailers that are “approved for appropriate audiences” (the green band previews) that are still pretty violent. But the one I saw this morning showed heads coming off and blades going into bodies, an explosion or two and a bare ass. (I hope it was a red band trailer… “mature audiences only”.)  It kept coming up as a 15-second ad before other videos.

I’m not generally squeamish about movie violence, but this was just violence…no context. I didn’t know if this was a good guy violently avenging wrong, saving the lives of innocents, whatever OR some crazy psycho bad guy just killing people for kicks. Now, having looked at one of the other trailers, I have some idea of the context. And this first trailer I saw was probably a compilation of the most violent 15 seconds from throughout the movie. So it’s not just a feature-length film full of creative beheadings.

It was truly disturbing, especially because it kept coming up every time I tried to watch some other video. I’m not a fan of censorship, but if you’re gonna do it (and we do) that sort of glorification of violence has got to be more damaging than a graphic realistic-looking sex scene, which I’ve rarely seen in a commercial movie and never in a trailer. Who would put together a trailer like that? Who is the target audience? Seriously, what…the…fuck!?