Invincible, pt 1 of 2: the light of grey

When you are small, you are invincible. Cuts heal, scars disappear and tears turn to laughs very quickly. I think this is best illustrated by my friend's two year old son, Adam. While running around on the playground he bit the dust, hard. You can see it: his legs are only twelve inches long and that's including all the space taken up by feet and knees. So it's not really running, it's more like bouncing on chubby stubbs with flailing arms. Adam was running full speed, eyes taking in every ray, cheeks pulled back in a manic smile, drool flying everywhere. It was a little like a smiling, fleshy jackhammer without an operator. Stumble and THWAP! Pancake Adam.

After taking a moment to visually check-in with his mom, he decided not to cry and then used a combination of hands, feet and head to right himself and continue his touring-the-playground via seizure. I didn't see his face but I'm assuming he was smiling even wider now that he had kissed the pavement. If I was running proportionally as fast as Adam and then hit the ground, I would take a day off to go to the doctor and sip Advil cocktails until I couldn't see straight.

As I put children up on a pedestal, let's get something clear: I love getting older.

I love driving; I love drinking (not at the same time). If I want to see my sisters, I buy a ticket and go. Gray hair? Awesome. Gray is Gregory Peck, Steve McQueen, George Clooney and my dad. I'm fine with Gray. Hell, I can't wait for the gray on the right side of my head to convert the brown on the left. I have an iPhone, a drumset, a sweet watch, three earrings, a tattoo, and every episode of Battlestar Galactica on my macbook. If I want pizza for lunch like I do today, I'm going right the fuck outside to buy the best pizza in a four block radius. Suck it, Adam. And PS, have fun waiting twenty years to get laid.


Next Post: Invincible, pt 2: the dark of grey. You can safely assume at least three more posts before I get to "Her and Me and the End." That story keeps shedding it's skin and growing longer.

4/21/09 - Edit: changed title to indicate there are only two parts to this essay.

Wednesday

There is something about the rain.

I woke up at 7:40 a.m. My alarm goes off at 8:00 a.m. Waking fantasies of coffee (between dreaming fantasies of dragons) rolled my smile over the rest of my body rendering sleep obsolete. The people who warn you not to drink coffee right out of bed have never had it fresh-ground.

My neighborhood is very windy. The petulant child pulls paper out of the garbage cans and tosses it about. I decided to pick up all the trash I could on my way to the subway. After an hour or so, I made it to Ditmars Boulevard. On the train, I gave my seat to a frizzie-haired woman. She was not pregnant or old.

I’ve had my job for one year. Once seated in my office, I spent the next two hours doing absolutely everything. I got it all done. The director called me for my annual evaluation where I was told that despite my wardrobe and stainless steel garnishes, I was a “top notch employee and an example for the rest of the staff.” I was given a raise. When the ceremony was over, I walked outside to drop a letter in the post box. A scream! I turned to see a woman proclaim her stroller toward Second Avenue. I sprinted to the infant, scooping her out of the stroller with my left hand while grabbing the handle of the cart with my right. No bulls will run over young Lucy today. I went back to work, consoled my boss over the death of her aunt and was given the rest of the day off.

The M15 bus runs south on Second Avenue. Entering the bus, the only open seat was next to a Latino man. Three blocks later, he began to teach me Portuguese. Thirteen blocks later, I knew the same vocabulary as the average Portuguese teenager. Thirty blocks later, I decided to hop off and told Jorge (his name was Jorge), “Foi um prazer conhecerte, meu amigo.” In English: “It was a pleasure meeting you, my friend.”

There is a fantastic falafel place at Broadway and 17th. I walked there and bumped into Matthew Broderick. He mentioned something. I mentioned something else. He mentioned something about New York. I laughed and we sat down together in Union Square Park to eat. We talked about Election and Ferris Bueller. He asked me about being in a band. I asked him about executives at HBO. A husband and wife eating lunch nearby stood up suddenly. The man was huffing in and out and the woman was rubbing his back. Eyes bulging now, he grabbed at his throat and she screamed, “Somebody help!” Luckily, Matthew Broderick carries an Epi-Pen with him. He popped off the cap and stabbed the needle into the man’s thigh. Crisis averted. The four of us then went to the afternoon showing of Watchmen in IMAX.

Watchmen is a long movie. To ease the stiffness of sitting for three hours, I padded to Chelsea to meet my friend Claire for dinner at her father’s restaurant. Halfway through the meal, she mentioned the chef’s name off-hand:
“…Mark Lupino.”
“Mark Lupino!” I said.
“Mark Lupino,” she said.
I knew Mark from restaurant work in Saratoga after college. Before I knew it, Claire, Claire’s father, Mark and I were all Elaphanting through red wine. We laughed, drank cappuccino, exchanged phone numbers and laughed some more. Mark hailed a cab for my ride home to bed.

7:40 a.m. Lovely rain.

Next Post: Me and Her and the End.

Laughed Myself Wide Open

I don't smoke. I have, however, smoked quite a few cigarettes and I've enjoyed most of them. Usually alone, sometimes with a band or at a bar, never more than one or two a day. I would buy a pack, smoke half of them over a week, give the other half away, wait four months, repeat. There may have been three times in my life where I bought more than one pack in a row and smoked more than two cigarettes in an evening. At those times, I was a "smoker." And it wasn't all fantastic. There were a few in there that, when coupled with the shouting, dancing and imbibing, lead to a lousy day-after. Those nights usually came at the end of the week, and lead to the four month hiatus.

People hate smoking and I don't blame them. Smoking will kill you as slow and steady as the tide. It is also likely that smoking has done considerable damage to a member of your family. But it feels so good and all your favorite people are doing it. Well shit. I don't smoke because it's a little disgusting and it hinders my ability to run, jump, and play the drums. I rarely ever criticize someone for smoking, although I usually encourage others should they decide to quit. Either way, it's from the perspective of someone who has been there and done that.

I loved smoking; I was addicted to Twitter.

There is something amazing about millions of people posting completely random and unique thoughts every second. The web is lit-up by trends. People flock electronically. Current Events? The definition of current events is rewritten: I mean right the fuck now. Not a report tonight on what happened hours before. And some of my favorite authors, actors and comedians are doing it - people who I've always been curious about...

And yet, with the beautiful diamonds comes the scratchy dirty straw. First, there is constant updating and overflow of mundane information. Second, most web trends are pop-culture related. Not a whole lot of Ghanaians thumbing away on their iPhones. And my favorite people? I still don't really know them. Following them around is a little self-centered on their part and stalkerish on mine. And just who were the ten random people following me?

Yesterday, I deleted my account. My last cigarette didn't feel that good. I left work and laughed myself wide open. Like an unmoored boat, I drifted around midtown smiling and tilting. Listened to music, watched some people, sent a text. The sun went down and I rolled towards the subway.

I don't twitter anymore because after the novelty of throwing random things on the internet wore off, I began to feel a little trapped: I was compelled to post every hour regardless of what I had to say. It wasn't fun anymore; it was simply something I did. Still, I have no intention of criticizing it's power as a connecting force. Maybe in twenty years, I'll join the 2029 twitter equivalent. Whatever I do, it will be from the perspective of someone who's been there and done that.

Next Post: "Wednesday"

Shhhhhh! Quiet Please.

Although he doesn't know it and would never admit it, my father hears the truth.  He doesn't hear what he wants to, he hears precisely what is there.  Cold, exact, brilliant, powerful; he would be great in a recording studio.

On Saturday, I recorded drum tracks for six songs at KMA studios on 49th street and Broadway in Manhattan.  The equipment was somewhere in the Nasa-quality range, and the studio itself would have James Bond's approval for the combination of elegance and functionality.  A friend knew the owner which meant that since they had no one scheduled for the afternoon, we were allowed an eight hour session, typically priced at a modest $1,500, for free.

When you have seventeen microphones recording a small drumset, there are no unnoticed mistakes.  No smoothing things over.  No lying.  If you play the entire song ahead of the beat but then drop behind it for two measures, you'll hear it clear as crystal.  For the non-music inclined we're talking about milliseconds of temporal shift.  Sounds intimidating but this is a musician's dream: to spend the entire day hearing your mistakes and learning from them and correcting them.  To realize that your bordem during a song will drastically shift your energy and when you don't make conscious decisions about which notes to play, it's as obvious as an orator who's mixed up their index cards!  I was blown away at how clear and objective it all was.

But my playing was not the only 'naked' thing in the room.  The kid at the helm was a nice guy and a hard worker, but as I said already, milliseconds stick out.  Maybe it was the way he set up one of the microphones.  Or his voice over the intercom.  Maybe it was his answer to the question, "Where are you from? Where'd you go to College?"  For whatever reason, in the room without any distractions, I knew exactly who he was, how old he was, how competant he was at his job.  What if your brain operated like a recording studio?  Would you be able to read people without bias and give them honest answers in return?

And how about all those buttons!  10,000 settings and thirty microphones can't disguise a poorly written song.  I was amazed at how much time we spent moving a small microphone around the bass drum.  Was the same amount of time spent working out the chorus?  Some of the most amazing songs in history were recorded with four microphones and almost no effects.  The effects should be used to sell the song.  Make sure your product matches your salesmanship.

Being in the studio felt right.  I've already said it was quiet.  It forced me to look at my playing and the songs we worked on through an untainted lense.  It made me think of my father and how he knows when someone is bullshitting (and let's them know).  Most importantly, it made me listen.

Pop & Circumstances

Remind me to post some funny stories along the way.  Like the time I fell asleep on my drums while playing a musical.  Or the time I left my snare stand next to a strip club and had to "buy" it back the next day.  On a side note: it should also be known that my alma mater sent me a magnet-backed bottle opener enclosed in their semi-annual donation solicitation.  They want to get me drunk, then ask for money.  I'm getting off track...

Any good musician will have a hard time explaining pop music.  But like true love or a bad rash, they'll know when they've got it.  Pop music is contemporary music enjoyed by the masses.  Let's refer to it as now-music for short.  If you write the pop music you hear on the radio (or the iTunes store homepage), you'll get a perfect example of now-music.  But by the time you've written your now-music, it's become then-music and someone is making money while you're living at your parents.  So you must attempt to accurately predict and then write future-music.  That way, by the time you're through writing, it's become now-music.  This involves some guess work.  My roommate, a market analyst, will tell me all about what's happened so far.  He can then guess, with a certain degree of uncertainty, what's to come next.  But the bottom line is that no one knows.  Same with pop music.  How then do you write future-music?  The good news is that "Humanity doesn't do backward."  (Words of encouragement tossed at me by a friend last Saturday.)  As long as you be yourself, you'll be combining elements of everything you've ever heard thereby producing something totally new.  You will write future-music which will then become now-music.  But I almost forgot: if your music sucks, no one will want to listen to it.  And then you've failed at writing pop music.

Should we go for fame?  Perhaps post-mortem glory?  If you pen something "ahead of your time," it will eventually be recognized as great work, astounding work, genius work.  Nothing sounds quite as unfulfilling as laying in a box in the dirt, while everyone dances around above celebrating the music they didn't used to like.  It's not my fault they didn't like it.  I was just too future and not enough now.

I must be a good musician: explaining this was hard.

Dust Settles

No Cambria?  Alright.  Not a problem.

I blame Neil Gaiman and New York Magazine.  Neil, who writes amazing books, comics, movies, etc., obsessively writes interesting entries into his blog. Meanwhile, NYMagazine recently published an article about Twitter.  I decided at midnight to use both.  For silly thoughts, I direct you to my twitter page.  For thought-out thoughts like this sentence, you are welcome here any time you like.  I'll feel published and loved and no one will ever read either.  Everybody wins.