Little Gigs

When I see the advertizements for individual gigs on Facebook from other musician friends it only reminds me that we are in a much different era. Professional musicians are papering the house instead of going from town to town entertaining the locals.Yea , yea , there are the shows , those venues of indifferent bigness but that is another illusion that really doesn't support many people for very long.Musicians were traveling across this country long before I ever went to work. Road life was a way of life and being a musician was also a means of support as well as an art.When did it change? I don't know ,it was a gradual thing like the climate of the world changing or the cowboys vanishing as the trains took the cattle across the country instead of trail driving men.Where did the cowboys go ? What did they do ? I might find out ,or maybe I won't.



This morning I woke up thinking of gigs ,past gigs .For some reason I was hung up remembering singing "Can't Turn You Loose" in front of a band(the Otis Redding song)and it wouldn't stop playing round my mind. That wasn't my usual fair ,really ,yet it was fun and exciting to see the crowd moving to the rhythm . Each gig has it's character , the individuals , the weather conditions, the load in and out, as well as the excitement of the audience's reactions as a whole and individually.I can float thorugh decades of gigs in my memory ,entire eras that are gone now . Somehow this morning ,I found myself remembering DC in 1964 playing the stringed bass at the "Brass Rail"with Charlie Hampton and Philly Joe Chavis.Buck Hill often sat in with us .Steve Novacel stopped in and I would switch to piano and Charlie picked up his alto or flute. The club was a nice little jazz scene five nights a week. On NY Avenue there were clubs in a row that sometimes I would peek in or have a beer between sets. There was another place called "New York ...Something" that had other musicians from out of town . It was before the rock thing took over everything . I would catch strange combos ,combinations that seemed unlikely like violin ,trombone , and piano .Such strange combos that I had to wonder how they did it . A Duo with Violin and drums seemed kind of brutal.



Ten years later ,I remember a violinist , Morgan Bear, who was a local booking agent here ,booking society music . He sold continuous music for the four or five hours they palyed and that would get down to strange combos ,too,as the musicians had to leave the stand occasionally. The trumpet players lips would fall off . Even the drums and bass had to stop sometime but the music went on . Out of Morgan's office there was another fellow ,Tommy Miropolis, a drummer who used to work for Liberace . He gave me some work . I played pop music then ,mingling in jazz ,but popular songs and what were becoming soul oldies.It is ironic that another agent there, Gene Donati , wasn't interested in pop and wasn't even booking any acts ,didn't give me a contact at all , but it wasn't too much longer that his jobs became so pop oriented that the pop format became known as a "Donati gig"to the musicians in DC. When I met them , they looked down their noses at popular music in favor of the standards ,two beat, and maintaining the society and political jobs of Washington DC.



One morning Miropolis called me and asked where I was playing. I didn't think too much about it at all and told him , "The Back Alley" a place I had been for a little while playing solo piano and singing. I played five or six nights a week there .There used to be other guys too.One of the guys was "Trey Hur", who played a knuckles O'Toole kind of bar room piano of real old songs. He once was a winner on the "Gong Show". My pop format kind of overtook the sing along thing somewhere along the way.I never papered the house or solicited friends to come to my scene as I met new friends and entertained the local people who lived in which ever part of town I found myself for a few months.Schmoozing on the phone with owners and maintaining contact ,over time ,I would go back again and again ,as I did in the "Back Alley". That afternoon , as I started at happy hour , I noticed Morgan Bear's man,Tommy walking through the place . He didn't stop to say hello but seemed in a hurry. I knew he was trying to cop the gig . I did speak with the owner later who quipped ,"Friend of yours? ..Yes, ,with friends like that ,pal.." Anyway , while I maintained contact with Tommy , I didn't mention my gigs to him anymore but Gigs come and go.



One time when I was out of work Tommy gave me a contact ,a position at a strip club to make a few bucks. I went out in the afternoon and met cab drivers at the hotels across town and told them that I would give them two dollars for each man they brought to the club. Later , I would be outside the club ,sometimes acting as a doorman ,but paying off the cabbies as they came and went . The "Show Palace" was on 11th Street when it was a strip mall ( haha .. real strippers , that is ) .There was a comedian-MC introducing the girls ,doing schtick between acts ,saying things like ,"Oh Newark , yea ..and he would have a joke about Newark or what ever town . The comedian was Jay Leno and he was doing the same act he does now,really.He was a nice guy at the time and seemed genuinely interested in you when he spoke with you ,just as he seems to be at the distance of TV.The girls were very attractive and were dressed in very little between their exotic dances.They tantalized and came to the tables to speak with customers who often bought them drinks .They ordered champagne but the waiter would bring ginger ale and charge the customer for champagne.That was like working at a carnival and I didn't do it very long and didn't keep touch with the Morgan Bear office too much after that.

New Plastic

I am still in a fog about resolution ,pixels per inch, and the print size of my composites. I attempted to gain a higher resolution by redoing a few paintings ( of which this one was one of the eight experiments I tried )from the original default 72 pixels per I have used for ten years to 400 per and finally settled at 1000 per inch . What I ended up with was a photograph that comes out to be an inch by almost two inches. I wanted a photograph that I could blow up to 24 X30 or even more . I did print one on my computer and it came out about ten inches long and confused me even further . Ah well,it's always something . I am planning to get help tomorrow by having maybe fifteen paintings digitally photographed in as high a resolution as possible which will make it possible for me to start over in a way and hope for a light at the end of the tunnel ,that is printing in poster sizes .

The Deprivation of Pleasure

So "Chicken Little " had a yen to go to the other side of the road. Somebody asked,"Why do you want to go there?" It had been recognized that the sky wasn't falling , but after all,the chicken replied,"There is just something over there.., something that draws me.The responder quipped ,"Could it be the grass is always greener over the septic tank," and then stabbed Chicken Little in the neck,plucked the feathers ,cooked and ate it.



I pull my punches on Facebook even when the straight lines are set up like Bing Crosby setting up Bob Hope in a "Road " movie.Facebook and it's format has continued to change for the worse. Now the little box where comments can be written closes after a couple of lines . You can't see what you have written . It forces one into a corner like "Tweeting" ,using a limited number of words. Tweeting like a twit,like a child without a thought to completing a sentence or maintaining a complete thought,and never communicating in adult terms.We are censored at every turn and now we do it to ourselves even without "Big Brother" looming over our shoulder. Cable television is expensive and censored to politically protect the sponsors. There should be a disclaimer at the end of every broadcast ,"No sponsors were harmed in the production of this show".All the good words are removed as if we don't know them ,or as if children don't know them.We can laugh and point back at the fifties shows and the June Cleavers and the separate beds but today we have it worse as complete subjects are off the table , complete thoughts are taboo,adults thoughts are all seen as pornography instead of adult reasoning.



Yesterday I saw a link,shared from a woman in Italy who I have been in touch with.The photo was shocking as was the entire article on the genital mutilation of as many as 4,000 girls each year in Italy and many are not reported at all .In Italy, the law prohibits this practice but there are physicians in the community that, for a fee, practice female circumcision. In many European countries,the mutilations are performed in the centers of vaginal aesthetic surgery or in those where they are doing piercing and tattoos. It is mete and right that people realize what this practice means. This practice landed in Italy in the 1980s and only in 2006 the law was established that forbids it, but it is not enough, we need an awareness-raising campaign!There are more than 50,000 in Italy (and millions in the world) women do not have the right to a sexual life.



In the photos attached to the article we noted two practices: the almost total removal of the clitoris and part of the large and small lips .One of the shots was the excision of labia majora, labia minora, clitoris and stitching of surrounding external female genitalia leaving only the vagina in a partial way that serves to allow the flow of the menstrual cycle and urine.After a groom has sexual relations with his wife ,she will then will be sewn together again after pregnancy (the first photo in the article).



This barbaric practice makes women seriously impaired and reduced to a mere sexual object for the pleasure of men through this introduces pain into their relationship. Many women complain but there is nothing to stop this continued abuse, because even if it is true that these practices are unknown to our culture, all the issues that concern the violence on women are dismissed and relegated as not important.Perhaps this is the reason why there is still silence on this barbarity because female pleasure is not considered important even in the western world.Don't forget the Afghanistan women of 1998 who were being murdered and whipped in football fields by the Taliban sometimes for merely being seen without their burkas. There was no protection for those women ,no European or American governmental intervention or sanctions. It took a couple of American buildings coming down to help these women as a byproduct of revenge



The mutilation that results in the deprivation of pleasure is predominantly a product of some Muslim sects .I could not re - publish the photos anywhere I can think of without being associated with child abuse myself. In our country we are often ,ironically,not telling the truth and not recognizing problems though we know they are there. We are engaged in a prudish pontificating ,for instance laws that govern abortion and the right of women to control decisions about their lives and bodies, and censoring of our very ideals in the name of what has become known as political politeness. Even though we see politicians kissing babies and making statements that are seen as trying to gain votes without caring,we are adopting this same practice becoming politicians ourselves. We are accepting censorship on television ,being spoon fed pap ,and tweeting , not writing or communicating in complete adult thoughts.It is as if we should be considerate of the guy in the car behind us traveling at sixty miles an hour who is texting , reading , and driving at the same time. It isn't really caring for diverse cultures or being considerate of other people in the world .



I couldn't sleep this morning , thinking about a comment from a friend in Facebook, a fellow musician who was ,for a moment expressing that Facebook depression, the idea that the friends all seem to be so happy, so content , and having such a good life.All those smiling faces of husbands I don't know from women friends, wives, I don't know of men friends, and children's faces I just don't care about one way or the other. They are like eight by ten glossies of a band , an act ,or that joke about the promotional demo where "Hell" seemed a lot better than the real thing.Another one of my musician friends ,Cyndy ,was mentioned in his status report as having just come back from China . To the commenter , this seemed like a romantic trip. To me "the road" looks a lot better from a distance of time.There was a lot of mundane boredom that happened on the road.One plastic hotel room after another ,the noisy plane , the waiting for everything , the long car trips, the time spent between shows in towns that rolled up the sidewalks at twelve. I mean ,where do you think the sex and drugs came from before rock and roll? It was boredom and depression on the road. Hey , Charlie Parker was a pig and he passed his habits on to others that were affected by him like Chet , Miles, my friend Bennie Harris,and uncounted legions of would be musicians,who thought that getting high was a prerequisite to blowing.At least the self indulgence of drugs created a little independence from what has become the music of elevators,a beat behind every commercial,and playing what is expected... or did it ??? The hands in the air with the two fingers splayed at rock concerts does seem an awful lot like a "Seig Heil" in 1933 Germany to me.Nope , you can have it and you can have China ,too.



China was and continues to be a mistake.Nixon was wrong , America was wrong. (Now there is a novel idea.. Here is another one:the founding fathers were fallible and never imagined 380 million people being subjected to plutocracy.)We should never have gotten involved with China. When did the "Red" come off the name of "China"? Miranda spent time traveling through China as an advanced student of Qigoing .She found that people across the country were going to the toilet in holes .The beautiful ,new Chinese cities didn't really house the people.When I see that American movies are produced in China , I think they are saving money just as other corporates have that have left the mainland.The Hollywood Corporates are the same folks that are going to censor the American Internet in the spring in the guise of saying that the "SOPA" Bill is to keep China from stealing American products over the Internet. This is not the case. The truth is that they will be censoring America just as China is censoring the Chinese Internet. China ,for the Chinese,is not romantic at all,but for Americans ,it is an illusion just like the movie industry wants ,like the corporates that own this country are dictating.



Hey , but I can't write that ,it may be too adult and greener over the septic tank.I am also overdrawn on my number of words.I wish I could go back to sleep.Let's get back to "Little Red Riding Hood" and forget "Red China"and female mutilation in Arabia.After all, this isn't politically correct and , even though I wouldn't have let Mary Tyler Moore sleep in a separate bed,"Leave it to the Beaver".