For the past half-year, i've been playing regularly at the Hotel Utah, recently voted San Francisco's best open mic. It's a magical place, somehow combining high energy and reverence, qualities that are almost always mutually exclusive. On the 14th, i did my first feature there, a thirty-minute set (twenty longer than anything i'd done previously). Here's the Utah's link - just type "wrob" under "search performances", to hear what i've been creating (there are also a few stray performances from Bazaar Cafe, as humblingly talented and reverent a place as you'd want).
http://www.theutah.org/
Sunday, January 27, 2019
Wednesday, January 23, 2019
"The Human Zoo"
-by desmond morris
1969
The second paragraph of the introduction may make your 2019 self cringe. Anti-masturbation, anti-homosexual, anti-fetish, anti-fat...
Don't panic. Get past it.
Once you do, you'll dance with one of the sharper minds you'll ever encounter.
He's also anti-murder and anti-self-mutilation, and he calls these things (along with the aforementioned) behaviors that animals display only under conditions of captivity. And therein lies his thesis - that so much of modern humyn behavior has arisen only because post-tribal humynity has voluntarily put itself into conditions exactly like those which other animals experience in cages.
Decades ago, i somehow missed this book after i was gobsmacked by the brilliance of "The Naked Ape". I've read other morris books, never being aware that this was the sequel and companion piece. In some ways, this one's even more brilliant or important for anyone trying to understand how humyns have become so unbalanced, violent, and self-destructive. In a nutshell, says desmond, we've replaced all the comforts and securities of tribal life with conditions of under-stimulation or over-stimulation (or both) which leave us on the brink of insanity.
Desmond is a zoologist, and his strength lies in observing other animals to better understand ourselves. Even if he has blind spots (which he almost assuredly does...other animals DO display homosexuality in non-captivity, and our prehistoric life was probably more idyllic than he imagines), his big-picture analysis is possibly as spot-on than any thinker ever.
But to call homosexuality a...maladaption?? Lumping it with other fetishes (dom/sub, pedophilia, rubber pants)? I'm going to focus on this one, not because it's central to the book's point, but because it may be the most offputting pill for any reader to swallow. Can you accept that under natural conditions for any species, sexual maturity and sexual exploration go hand in hand? That it's unnatural to avoid sexual contact for YEARS after maturity has arrived? But that's exactly what we do to our children. For me, there was a half-decade gap between puberty and my first sex.
Would anyone deny that the quality of one's first sexual experiences has an influence on subsequent behaviors and preferences? What would happen if, instead of an affirmative first experience, a species generally experienced either something negative (molestation/rape) or a whole lot of NOTHING? Doesn't it make sense that they might develop a staggering variety sexual hangups or maladaptions? The latter arising because, absent any socially-approved expression of sexuality that is in line with sex's primary natural purpose (procreation), we might bond or identify with ANYTHING that touches our intimate, repressed urges? Smother something, and it will seek oxygen anywhere it can.
We're all aware of pandas in captivity who grow up isolated, and then years later when the zoo wants baby pandas, these pandas are put with members of the opposite sex, and...nothing happens!! Zip. Zilch. Barry white music doesn't help.
But isn't that exactly what we do to ourselves? And so we bond with whatever's at hand. Rubber pants...or members of our own sex, with whom society allows opportunity for at least some physical intimacy. With what we now know about homosexuality in nature, i'm sure even desmond would be less dismissive of it in it's entirety. But does his overall point have merit? Perhaps even a whole lot? Anyway, i took this detour into homosexuality because it might be the most off-putting part of the book to modern eyes. But if you can make peace with that, the merits of morris's thesis might make this one of the most important works you'll ever read, in terms of understanding how our species has gone so horribly awry.
1969
The second paragraph of the introduction may make your 2019 self cringe. Anti-masturbation, anti-homosexual, anti-fetish, anti-fat...
Don't panic. Get past it.
Once you do, you'll dance with one of the sharper minds you'll ever encounter.
He's also anti-murder and anti-self-mutilation, and he calls these things (along with the aforementioned) behaviors that animals display only under conditions of captivity. And therein lies his thesis - that so much of modern humyn behavior has arisen only because post-tribal humynity has voluntarily put itself into conditions exactly like those which other animals experience in cages.
Decades ago, i somehow missed this book after i was gobsmacked by the brilliance of "The Naked Ape". I've read other morris books, never being aware that this was the sequel and companion piece. In some ways, this one's even more brilliant or important for anyone trying to understand how humyns have become so unbalanced, violent, and self-destructive. In a nutshell, says desmond, we've replaced all the comforts and securities of tribal life with conditions of under-stimulation or over-stimulation (or both) which leave us on the brink of insanity.
Desmond is a zoologist, and his strength lies in observing other animals to better understand ourselves. Even if he has blind spots (which he almost assuredly does...other animals DO display homosexuality in non-captivity, and our prehistoric life was probably more idyllic than he imagines), his big-picture analysis is possibly as spot-on than any thinker ever.
But to call homosexuality a...maladaption?? Lumping it with other fetishes (dom/sub, pedophilia, rubber pants)? I'm going to focus on this one, not because it's central to the book's point, but because it may be the most offputting pill for any reader to swallow. Can you accept that under natural conditions for any species, sexual maturity and sexual exploration go hand in hand? That it's unnatural to avoid sexual contact for YEARS after maturity has arrived? But that's exactly what we do to our children. For me, there was a half-decade gap between puberty and my first sex.
Would anyone deny that the quality of one's first sexual experiences has an influence on subsequent behaviors and preferences? What would happen if, instead of an affirmative first experience, a species generally experienced either something negative (molestation/rape) or a whole lot of NOTHING? Doesn't it make sense that they might develop a staggering variety sexual hangups or maladaptions? The latter arising because, absent any socially-approved expression of sexuality that is in line with sex's primary natural purpose (procreation), we might bond or identify with ANYTHING that touches our intimate, repressed urges? Smother something, and it will seek oxygen anywhere it can.
We're all aware of pandas in captivity who grow up isolated, and then years later when the zoo wants baby pandas, these pandas are put with members of the opposite sex, and...nothing happens!! Zip. Zilch. Barry white music doesn't help.
But isn't that exactly what we do to ourselves? And so we bond with whatever's at hand. Rubber pants...or members of our own sex, with whom society allows opportunity for at least some physical intimacy. With what we now know about homosexuality in nature, i'm sure even desmond would be less dismissive of it in it's entirety. But does his overall point have merit? Perhaps even a whole lot? Anyway, i took this detour into homosexuality because it might be the most off-putting part of the book to modern eyes. But if you can make peace with that, the merits of morris's thesis might make this one of the most important works you'll ever read, in terms of understanding how our species has gone so horribly awry.
Friday, January 18, 2019
confluential concertions
In my growing life as a musician, i gave two concerts this week. Sort of.
I've not yet done a "proper" solo concert, but this week was big. I was the featured performer at the Hotel Utah's open mic, doing a thirty-minute set. The Utah was voted San Francisco's best open mic, and it's the most magical one i know. It somehow combines high energy and reverence (open mics can generally have one or the other, but not both).
The previous longest gig i'd ever done was ten minutes. I'd been waiting and hoping for this slot for nine months. Considering my minor struggles with stage fright and the fact that i'm still in my first year of serious self-accompanying songwriterly intent (i'm basically a fifteen year-old guitarist trying to squeeze a five-year growth curve into one), this was huge for me. I'm at the point where most of my stuff sounds nice when i'm practicing alone, but in public it still takes so little to rattle me. On the Utah's website, you get to choose whether you want your archived performances to be available to the public, and of the twenty-some i've done, almost half haven't been acceptable to me, due to my own gaffes.
Of course, the performer is only half of the equation that goes into a performance...but at the Utah the audience is almost always ready to be a part of brilliance.
My set went...well. In some ways, fantastically. My playing and singing were near-perfect. I don't think i bungled a single lyric, even in the new song (i had my sheet music, but as soon as i started playing, i realized i had positioned the stand ineffectively...yet still nailed every word). During one song i felt a bit concrete-fingered, but was still hitting the right chords. I only had one major fuck-up, on my final number. Maybe it was self-conscious relief that i had made it all that way so perfectly, but i suddenly COULD NOT REMEMBER how the song began. No clue! I knew the words and chords, but not the construction. I just started hitting something and hoped that it would fall into place. It did eventually, but wasn't nearly the show-stopper it's been elsewhere.
Still in all, a great night. There were spikes of huge audience delight, and some humbling feedback from crowd members afterward. I didn't maintain that pin-drop vibe throughout the entire concert (during one song, it felt like a few people were talking about shopping lists), but there were fantastic moments of audience/performer connection. My patter was spot-on, my visual gags great. It renewed my eagerness to do killer, mistake-free longer sets. My voice was a little raw the next day, which is something i'll have to learn how to prevent. I can do a concert full voice in practice with no ill effect, but i guess the excitement made me push.
The other concert came a couple nights before.
I went to the local laundromat, to do my clothes. I brought my ukulele to practice while waiting, as i love the acoustics there. I ended up doing all my songs, which took far longer than my laundry required. I suspected i might do that, if the place remained clear of patrons who might be annoyed by a uke-playing singer. That can go either way. Most adore it, but one got uptight in the extreme.
For almost three hours, i was the only official patron in the place. My audience consisted of two people who were perhaps both homeless. I think they were there because it was warm and dry. The homeless presence is fairly mild on my street, but has become a bit more marked in the year i've lived here. The first person came in and sat down, opening some reading material. The second came an hour or so later, and she was obviously in deep distress, likely drug-related. A very, very bad trip perhaps? She paced around, occasionally letting out cries of pain, or banging on metal.
The first person spoke to her perhaps once, though not memorably. Mostly we both just let her do her thing. After half an hour, she walked back into the night.
The first person seemed friendly enough. Or self-contained, rather. Minding his own business. I hoped he might dig what i did...yet i was concerned that my more risque or blasphemous material might put him off. Or that he might be offended by some of my pieces in which it's not always obvious to audiences that i'm doing satire. He was african-american and not young, and i pegged him as possibly christian. Was i racial-profiling? Maybe a little. I was trying to sense his energy, but he wasn't giving much away.
Until finally i noticed his feet, ever-so-slightly moving to the music.
I became self-conscious about so many of my cover songs being by white artists. But not all - i had adapted a michael jackson and prince song over the past year, partly because i loved the songs or had a brilliant vision for them...but also partly because i wanted to be sure i had at least one black cover in my set (just as i'd made sure to have at least one female cover). My own interior affirmative action? That's a bit unfair...several of the non-white male songs i've covered have come from pure inspiration.
But in this world, one thinks of such things. At least i do.
As i played on, to this silent person who never looked my way, i couldn't help smiling at the thought that someday people might pay real money for tickets to my show, and here this fellow was getting the most free, intimate concert of his life. Could he possibly be digging it, even more than his possibly subconscious toe-tapping let on?
When i finished, i gathered my things. Would he say anything? I wished him a beautiful night. He looked up at me with bright eyes, and told me i was brilliant, and that i was going to very big places indeed.
I'll skip the Hallmark ending, and not tell you that i enjoyed that moment far more than the crowd-pleasing set a couple nights later. While there may be a touch of truth there, making a crowd of strangers laugh or squeal is a rush like no other. Perhaps that's partly about the affirmation and adulation we all crave in this ego-driven celebrity culture of alienation.
But i forgot to mention...the other person in the laundromat spoke to me too.
Her anguished reality coalesced into conscious thought and coherent words for a moment, when she looked my way and told me she loved my music. Then she went back to her crying.
Life in the big city.
Life in a broken world.
I've not yet done a "proper" solo concert, but this week was big. I was the featured performer at the Hotel Utah's open mic, doing a thirty-minute set. The Utah was voted San Francisco's best open mic, and it's the most magical one i know. It somehow combines high energy and reverence (open mics can generally have one or the other, but not both).
The previous longest gig i'd ever done was ten minutes. I'd been waiting and hoping for this slot for nine months. Considering my minor struggles with stage fright and the fact that i'm still in my first year of serious self-accompanying songwriterly intent (i'm basically a fifteen year-old guitarist trying to squeeze a five-year growth curve into one), this was huge for me. I'm at the point where most of my stuff sounds nice when i'm practicing alone, but in public it still takes so little to rattle me. On the Utah's website, you get to choose whether you want your archived performances to be available to the public, and of the twenty-some i've done, almost half haven't been acceptable to me, due to my own gaffes.
Of course, the performer is only half of the equation that goes into a performance...but at the Utah the audience is almost always ready to be a part of brilliance.
My set went...well. In some ways, fantastically. My playing and singing were near-perfect. I don't think i bungled a single lyric, even in the new song (i had my sheet music, but as soon as i started playing, i realized i had positioned the stand ineffectively...yet still nailed every word). During one song i felt a bit concrete-fingered, but was still hitting the right chords. I only had one major fuck-up, on my final number. Maybe it was self-conscious relief that i had made it all that way so perfectly, but i suddenly COULD NOT REMEMBER how the song began. No clue! I knew the words and chords, but not the construction. I just started hitting something and hoped that it would fall into place. It did eventually, but wasn't nearly the show-stopper it's been elsewhere.
Still in all, a great night. There were spikes of huge audience delight, and some humbling feedback from crowd members afterward. I didn't maintain that pin-drop vibe throughout the entire concert (during one song, it felt like a few people were talking about shopping lists), but there were fantastic moments of audience/performer connection. My patter was spot-on, my visual gags great. It renewed my eagerness to do killer, mistake-free longer sets. My voice was a little raw the next day, which is something i'll have to learn how to prevent. I can do a concert full voice in practice with no ill effect, but i guess the excitement made me push.
The other concert came a couple nights before.
I went to the local laundromat, to do my clothes. I brought my ukulele to practice while waiting, as i love the acoustics there. I ended up doing all my songs, which took far longer than my laundry required. I suspected i might do that, if the place remained clear of patrons who might be annoyed by a uke-playing singer. That can go either way. Most adore it, but one got uptight in the extreme.
For almost three hours, i was the only official patron in the place. My audience consisted of two people who were perhaps both homeless. I think they were there because it was warm and dry. The homeless presence is fairly mild on my street, but has become a bit more marked in the year i've lived here. The first person came in and sat down, opening some reading material. The second came an hour or so later, and she was obviously in deep distress, likely drug-related. A very, very bad trip perhaps? She paced around, occasionally letting out cries of pain, or banging on metal.
The first person spoke to her perhaps once, though not memorably. Mostly we both just let her do her thing. After half an hour, she walked back into the night.
The first person seemed friendly enough. Or self-contained, rather. Minding his own business. I hoped he might dig what i did...yet i was concerned that my more risque or blasphemous material might put him off. Or that he might be offended by some of my pieces in which it's not always obvious to audiences that i'm doing satire. He was african-american and not young, and i pegged him as possibly christian. Was i racial-profiling? Maybe a little. I was trying to sense his energy, but he wasn't giving much away.
Until finally i noticed his feet, ever-so-slightly moving to the music.
I became self-conscious about so many of my cover songs being by white artists. But not all - i had adapted a michael jackson and prince song over the past year, partly because i loved the songs or had a brilliant vision for them...but also partly because i wanted to be sure i had at least one black cover in my set (just as i'd made sure to have at least one female cover). My own interior affirmative action? That's a bit unfair...several of the non-white male songs i've covered have come from pure inspiration.
But in this world, one thinks of such things. At least i do.
As i played on, to this silent person who never looked my way, i couldn't help smiling at the thought that someday people might pay real money for tickets to my show, and here this fellow was getting the most free, intimate concert of his life. Could he possibly be digging it, even more than his possibly subconscious toe-tapping let on?
When i finished, i gathered my things. Would he say anything? I wished him a beautiful night. He looked up at me with bright eyes, and told me i was brilliant, and that i was going to very big places indeed.
I'll skip the Hallmark ending, and not tell you that i enjoyed that moment far more than the crowd-pleasing set a couple nights later. While there may be a touch of truth there, making a crowd of strangers laugh or squeal is a rush like no other. Perhaps that's partly about the affirmation and adulation we all crave in this ego-driven celebrity culture of alienation.
But i forgot to mention...the other person in the laundromat spoke to me too.
Her anguished reality coalesced into conscious thought and coherent words for a moment, when she looked my way and told me she loved my music. Then she went back to her crying.
Life in the big city.
Life in a broken world.
Thursday, January 10, 2019
"Free Jazz pt. 1"
S.T.H.O.L.T.B.I.D
(songs to hear one last time before i die)
-by ornette coleman
I listened to six albums by this famous jazz experimentalist. Then i listened to them again. Then a third time. And still, nothing sounded "right". I couldn't make whatever he was getting at, sound good.
No scales? No chords?
EXCEPT...
For this track. It clicked into place, and became one of those rare songs that's just pure listening joy.
Go figure.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0i4miN_r4g
(songs to hear one last time before i die)
-by ornette coleman
I listened to six albums by this famous jazz experimentalist. Then i listened to them again. Then a third time. And still, nothing sounded "right". I couldn't make whatever he was getting at, sound good.
No scales? No chords?
EXCEPT...
For this track. It clicked into place, and became one of those rare songs that's just pure listening joy.
Go figure.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0i4miN_r4g
Sunday, January 6, 2019
dear sis
Dear sis,
I normally avoid religious conversation with believers, because of the futility factor, but i'm glad we got into it. It clarified some of the challenges we all face, in trying to save this world. It would be nice if you could help me further, by advising me on how to reach believers on one particular point.
For i do believe that, whatever else, the average believer is a person of good intent.
We're at a strange time in the history of our species. Our chickens are coming home to roost, in terms of our unbounded manipulation/exploitation of our environment. The short-sighted disregard we've shown for any kind of balance (to say nothing of our absence of compassion for humyn or indeed any kind of life) has us on the brink of self-annihilation. Given our behavior, that's not necessarily tragic, but it's also likely we'll take all other life with us (or at least all animals and plants).
The greatest danger of religious thinking seems to be this - it encourages people to think that whatever happens is AS IT MUST BE. For if we were magically created with the wave of a divine hand, we are exactly as we're supposed to be.
I look at humynity from a scientific standpoint, investigating how we lived before agriculture, and see a species which has strayed from its basic sharing nature, while you see us as simply expressing our evil nature.
Religion is the ultimate expression of fatalism - THIS is how god made us.
But fatalism at this historical juncture is more than annoying or atrocious. It's, well...
Fatal.
Realistically, the only way we might be able to save all life is for everyone to jump up and down saying "We do NOT accept this! This is not WHO WE ARE!" Only a unified effort by all the peoples of this planet has any likelihood of reversing our self-immolation.
Yet for many believers, even millennia before global warming concretized our fate, apocalyptic self-destruction has been our seeming birthright...even to the point of celebrating the rapturous "day of judgment". It's understandable...despite (or perhaps because of?) religion's narcissistic arrogance (God loves US! We're special!!), there is also self-loathing embedded in most dogma (We're so BAD! Ooh, aren't we just??). But endtime prophecies are singularly self-fulfilling.
So if humynity is to be saved, it will be in spite of religion. But that challenge may be beyond non-believers' scope.
How do we all fight that? How do we make believers believe it doesn't have to be like this?
i love you muchly much,
wrob
I normally avoid religious conversation with believers, because of the futility factor, but i'm glad we got into it. It clarified some of the challenges we all face, in trying to save this world. It would be nice if you could help me further, by advising me on how to reach believers on one particular point.
For i do believe that, whatever else, the average believer is a person of good intent.
We're at a strange time in the history of our species. Our chickens are coming home to roost, in terms of our unbounded manipulation/exploitation of our environment. The short-sighted disregard we've shown for any kind of balance (to say nothing of our absence of compassion for humyn or indeed any kind of life) has us on the brink of self-annihilation. Given our behavior, that's not necessarily tragic, but it's also likely we'll take all other life with us (or at least all animals and plants).
The greatest danger of religious thinking seems to be this - it encourages people to think that whatever happens is AS IT MUST BE. For if we were magically created with the wave of a divine hand, we are exactly as we're supposed to be.
I look at humynity from a scientific standpoint, investigating how we lived before agriculture, and see a species which has strayed from its basic sharing nature, while you see us as simply expressing our evil nature.
Religion is the ultimate expression of fatalism - THIS is how god made us.
But fatalism at this historical juncture is more than annoying or atrocious. It's, well...
Fatal.
Realistically, the only way we might be able to save all life is for everyone to jump up and down saying "We do NOT accept this! This is not WHO WE ARE!" Only a unified effort by all the peoples of this planet has any likelihood of reversing our self-immolation.
Yet for many believers, even millennia before global warming concretized our fate, apocalyptic self-destruction has been our seeming birthright...even to the point of celebrating the rapturous "day of judgment". It's understandable...despite (or perhaps because of?) religion's narcissistic arrogance (God loves US! We're special!!), there is also self-loathing embedded in most dogma (We're so BAD! Ooh, aren't we just??). But endtime prophecies are singularly self-fulfilling.
So if humynity is to be saved, it will be in spite of religion. But that challenge may be beyond non-believers' scope.
How do we all fight that? How do we make believers believe it doesn't have to be like this?
i love you muchly much,
wrob
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