Anecdotal Heroes

I keep a list of heroes who motivate me from afar.
They are on the list because I only know a few (speculative and possibly incorrectly attributed) (awesome) things about them which fit together nicely to make it all work out in the end.

Anecdotal Heroes

Writers
Gertrude Stein: finished all but the last day (?) of medical school and goes to the dean and says fuck it, and drops out.  Writes ridiculous words in ridiculous order (to dig around at truer meaning and irony) and gets away with it.  Takes long walks at night writing and rewriting sentences.  Known all around for her taste in music, literature, and art.  Her home in paris serves as a synergistic gathering place for all the contemporary sharp thinkers and most expressive feelers.

John Steinbeck: never managed to finish Stanford but said fuck it I think six years of skipping class and writing short stories on the lawn is enough.  Leaves, writes all the time, immerses himself in highly fascinating and vital collections of people that function just fine, thank you.  Goes to New York City to hit it big in writing but just does construction and comes back to califoria with his tail between his legs.  Then more or less he writes In Dubious Battle, Tortilla Flat, Cannery Row, and the Grapes of Wrath and dies satisfied that he has written the greatest journalistic fiction of his time or any.

Musicians
Jenny Schienman: Fun Fact.  At one time, Jenny Schienman, world class jazz violinist, was also a piano performance major at Humboldt State, just like me.  Except unlike me she was very good at piano and was five years younger than me, and practiced a rigorous five hours daily NOT including the time she took for bathroom breaks.  Little Jenny from Petrolia, a little skip from here down the Lost Coast.  graduates from another music school and then hits the streets of New York as a busker, circus accompanist, practicing like crazy.  spent a summer in a cabin transcribing John Coltrane solo.  Apparently she's not afraid of anything.

Lil' Hardin Armstrong: accompanist who hears Jelly Roll Morton when she is twenty and decides she ought to play that old jazz piano herself.  She's a black female in the 1920s but leads a famous big band and keeps Louis in line.

Jack-of-all trades educators
Carl Sagan: Who in addition to having that very sincere and eclectic public television show that first taught you how absolutely insignificant you are was an actual astrophysicist.  His many projects included the search for extraterrestrial  life, advising NASA, and writing frequently as an advocate for science and mankind.  It's hard not to slip into inspired summaries when talking about Carl Sagan.

LH Bailey (Horticulturist): Divided his life into 25 year segments for organizational purposes: 25 years for education, 25 years for your career, and 25 years for active pursuit of your own interests, plus more if like LH Bailey you life until you are 96.  He died when he was packing his bags to go to Africa to study native flora. Founded two horticultural journals and published 65 books.  Several manuscripts existed simultaneously on his desk for when inspiration would strike.


Romans
Cincinnatus: The farmer who was called to war. Reluctantly but bravely puts down his hoe and leads the Roman Army to victory.  He is supposed to be the paragon of Roman sense of duty

Olof Ribb: My high school Latin Teacher, who was close to no one but had very enriching and fulfilling conversations with everyone.  He ping-ponged all over the country and europe picking up languages and having very deep conversations.  I knew him only a short time and when I was way too young to make good use of it, and yet through me and others his life 'echoes through eternity.' -Quis in vita facimus referat infinitio.

Today in third grade/music school

Today in third grade in Jazz Improvisation, we took turns sharing how we felt deep inside.  But none of us have the musical vocabulary for something so all-encompassing, so it was mumbling and trying to copy things someone else mumbled.  Sometimes I forget that I am not the only one sharing and I mumble a lot for a long time, and have to be reminded that I have two ears but only one soul.  (ten fingers!)
Then in accompanying was reading music time and I hate reading in front of the class because I read really slow and fumble things.  After school I ate my peanut butter sandwich and rode my bike until it was dark.  Then I did my homework which was writing music using vocabulary like whole tone and pentatonic scales and it was really hard and everything I wrote sounded like debussy.  Then lights out at 10:30 pm but I secretly stayed awake listening to symphonies.

1000 words about a picture of Louis Armstrong

This is a picture of Satchmo and his wife Lucille that time they went to the Sphinx in Egypt in 1961.

 If you didn’t know Satchmo had a wife, it’s probably because you had never thought about it.  It is accepted that behind any great man is a strong, hard-headed woman, and this is especially true for the slippery and successful jazz types.  A more contemporary example of this relationship is in the Blues Brothers (1980) in which Aretha Franklin sternly advises her husband, Matt ‘Guitar’ Murphy, that he had “better think about what he’s tryin’ to do” before going off with the boys to play blues, through verse and clever choreography involving an entire restaurant. 

Now by the time Louis got around to marrying Lucille, a strong, hard-headed woman, he had already married three other hard-headed ladies, if you can be’lee dat.   Lil Hardin Armstrong, the second, she was the hardest.  She made him put on suits and play his cornet in churches for classical training and on her own recordings besides, in her band under her name.  He did what he was told and she let him have a couple of bands of his own, Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five and Hot Seven, and she did not nag him about smoking marijuana.  Now after a while this woman, who saw Jelly Roll Morton shake and rattle a piano in 1918 (she was twenty) and said “well hell, I think I’m gonna do that too”, decided to get out of the piano shaking business and become a tailor.  She had decided to get out of the Louis Armstrong business sometime a couple decades earlier, but they still got on alright because in the forties Louis Armstrong was wearing whatever suit she sent him.  Now jumping ahead of this picture ten years was the main time Louis Armstrong deliberately disobeyed this hardheaded woman that wasn’t his wife no more, when he died in 1971.  She was so confounded and indignant that she fumed for a month and then she collapsed at the piano and died herself. 

The other two were hard headed like this more or less since that’s the way Satchmo liked it best.  The first one, she was so damn-harded that she tried to get Louis to settle down in Louisiana when he was 18 years old, a notion he gave a good cogitation for a long while sitting at the dinner table looking out the window at the river.  Meantime this lady Daisy was hollering about this and that and the baby was crying.  Well you sit at the window looking out on the river and after awhile so many riverboats go by, and the hollering just shakes and rattles your last nerve and that’s it! Up you go with your trumpet and catch the next riverboat.  This is just speculation of course but there’s no one saying it wasn’t good for his career and for the rest of us besides, thank heaven.

No one knows a lick about his third wife Alpha, not even the internet.  Rumors so fearsome that they’ve lasted until now say she was SUCH a formidable woman that nobody even has the guts to speak a lick about her.  I better shut my trap and move on.

So by the time Louis got around to marrying Lucille, a strong, hard-headed woman to be sure, he was kind of relieved that she was not hard-headed to beat the band.  I mean she was hard-headed the way she was supposed to be to keep Louis in line, but they had good fun too.  She was hard-headed until it was quitting time and then they watched tv together and ate pork sandwiches. 

623 words and I think I’ll finally get around to talking about the picture:  You wouldn’t know it, but here in front of the Sphinx Satchmo and Lucille just had quite the heated disagreement right before somebody took the picture.  Just to clarify, this picture is completely candid and the photographer was a very lucky fan.  The same thing happened to me in the community forest a week ago when I ran into Jenny Scheinman, world class Jazz Violinist, with her new little baby, but I thought it would be rude to take a picture.  How Lucille and Satchmo look so relentlessly and candidly photogenic has to do with meticulous self-care and I do mean administration of laxatives. Swiss Kriss – Leave it all behind ya!  (For more information check out “Lose Weight the Satchmo Way”. True.)

            They were hot and tired and a little grouchy, Satchmo, Lucille, and Sphinx, which is understandable because it is the desert and they had been running into people all day who wanted to take their picture, and they were jetlagged and their stomachs weren’t quite used to Egyptian food.  What they argued about isn’t important and even they don’t even remember.  Later Lucille would pull this picture out of a shoebox and holler at Satchmo “DAMN that day was hot.  What was we fightin’ about?” 

            What probably happened was this: Lucille, who was not a whiner, whined a little bit how hot it was.  Louis thought that was pretty funny and he whipped out his trumpet and he made kind of a whiny Lucille noise on it.  Well Lucille did not think that was funny and she made some more whiny and angry noises.  So Satchmo kept right on, of course.  Well Lucille decided that right then was a good time to start reminding Satchmo that weren’t they supposed to be getting on back to the hotel to freshen up for the dinner and how come he never got around to calling his mother when they landed?  Well?, she wanted to know.  Satchmo didn’t really have anything to say since she was right, so he just garbled an answer into his trumpet.  I didn’t get that, said Lucille.  He garbled and grumbled and she said What? You’re not speaking clearly! and Satchmo kept right on on his trumpet.  Loouu-eeee! She cried, I don’t understand a word comin’ out of your mouth! And they both thought that was pretty funny, and a lucky kid took their picture, and then they went back to the hotel. 

russians

Last night I finished Crime and Punishment.  My mom sent me an email with advice about how to navigate this horrible world as an introvert.  GOD MOM I was like TO BE CLEAR the reason I don't hang out with people is because they breathe too loud.
But today I said, OK reluctantly back to the real world, albeit with less passion and murder.  Yes, today is the day I walk down the street (G street, even! the scary one) in broad daylight and when I see someone I know I will not jump behind a bush!
I saw someone I know, I said Hey - you know in the epilogue of Crime and Punishment when he is washed with overwhelming happiness about finding himself capable of love of woman and Jesus?  Is that like supposed to be promoting redemption or is supposed to say religion is another ridiculous psychological state (which would be consistent with the rest of the book) ??  She was like I have not read crime and punishment, ok I said fuck the real world and I went to buy another classic (Babbit.
Who knew there was an entire genre of boring middle aged white men bored even by themselves.  Add Babbit to The Winter of Our Discontent and The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.  I recommend reading them if you are pursuing a degree in a boring field such as real estate though finding this genre won't ever occur to you, nevermind how it finds me.)
My piano teacher has read crime and punishment in Russian, so there was nothing lost in translation.  She schedules class on Sundays.  While taking notes I was so immersed that I forgot to discriminate between lecture and ranting, so under the section of American technique my notebook says WHEN I LIVED IN MOSCOW I HAD TO WAKE UP AT SIX AM AND STAND IN THE COLD IN LINE WITH COFFEE AND CIGARETTES TO PAY FOR A PRACTICE ROOM FOR TWO HOURS.  FOR THE OTHER FOUR HOURS I PRACTICED ON 88 KEYS I PAINTED ON A PIECE OF CARDBOARD.

tonight's live music menu

begins with a sampling of Humboldt county's finest buskers and every upper division HSU music department student and graduate playing simultaneous gigs at Eureka's Arts Alive

Main course: Light but substantial, classical pianist Winston Choi plays the old fugues like new and the New like the old
Don't worry about forming an opinion about contemporary piano works, just watch the page turner's eyebrows.

To cleanse your palette and remind you life is not so serious after all, it's Arcata's own best looking psychadelic jam rock at the jambalaya.
So what Humboldt county boys smoke weed and surf and jam all day, their feminist mothers raised them to truly respect the divine mystery that is woman.

And a late night shot of shitty I stayed out too late again sfo grindcore at the alibi to cap it all off
total cost mild hangover and $18 assuming someone else buys your drinks