“Plunder”?

RE the Men at Work story, I always thought it was “women blow and men thunder.” Seriously.

I never thought that made any sense, but then I never understood “repped up like a dution of the runner in the night” either.

And music critics admit no one really knows the words to “Louie, Louie.”

You’ll Still Need a Tray

Thanks, any and all who assisted with prayer this morning. Things went very well.

I have nothing to do for the rest of the day. What now? If there is one thing I hate, it’s idleness.

Shut up.

Can I bore you again with my supernatural weight loss? I made pizza over and over again for a month, and depending on how accurate my scale is, I either gained no weight or a pound and a half. Because I ate tons of pizza and God made it magically nonfattening? No. I mean, I ate plenty, but I’m pretty sure my permanent increase in self-control kept it down to a harmless amount. I don’t think angels are hovering around my maw, destroying calories miraculously as food gets caught in the gravity well. Although I rule nothing out.

I love pizza more than just about anything on earth, but once I got Sicilian figured out, I no longer had an overpowering urge to make it. That is completely bizarre. I never got tired of pizza in the past. I ate it every day for long periods. I had no problem with eating it twice a day.

As long as I had sauce, cheese, and flour, I had to make pizza until the supplies ran out or my arches collapsed. But I’m sitting here right now with no idea what I’m going to have for lunch, and I have delicious Costco cheese and two kinds of sauce handy, and the only thing I’m sure of is that I’m going to have something boring and healthy. This is like a crackhead turning down rocks in favor of Sanka.

I wonder if I’ll ever be able to help anyone else get what I got. Nobody cares. When I talk to people about it, they start telling me all their diet secrets. That’s a completely different subject. No relevance at all. I’m not on a diet. I have diet secrets, too, but they don’t work. This is a different thing. I just eat less. No one understands. God just dropped it on me. I don’t even know why. I hope he shoves a few more presents off the back of his sleigh. Or chariot or whatever.

I’m right down here! Look me up on Google Earth. I’ll paint a big X on the driveway. Or maybe a yud.

Imagine Moses talking to someone about parting the Red Sea. The other guy would say, “Yeah, you can build a caisson with lots of slave labor and spend about ten years pumping the water out,” and Moses would go, “Dude, I just waved a stick.”

After a few minutes, Moses would throw up his hands and say “whatever.” Or “oy.”

Sometimes I feel like I’m talking Chinese. “God fixed me so I don’t overeat!” “Yeah, I’m thinking of doing Slim-Fast.” “No, GOD FIXED ME SO I DON’T OVEREAT.” I feel like Lego Darth Vader trying to make people understand he’s not Jeff Vader or Mr. Stephens, the head of catering.

Obscure reference. See Youtube. Search under Eddie Izzard.

I have to watch that now.

Support Sought

I have to take on an unpleasant job this morning. Prayers for a decisive victory would be appreciated. God has shown himself powerful and faithful at my side, but it’s always best to have others praying for you.

I Need an Agent

I played a song on the cornet today!

As predicted by a reader, it was the bane of all beginning music students: “Hot Cross Buns.” I honestly think I’d rather listen to “My Sharona.”

I was atrocious, but I played the notes.

Onward and upward.

I’m surprised I didn’t realize what a great instrument the trumpet (cornet, whatever) could be. Most of the trumpet music I’ve heard has been jazz, and the artists don’t really knock themselves out shooting for feeling and finesse. It’s mostly speed, high notes, and musical legerdemain. I’ve been listening to clips of other types of horn music online, and it’s extremely impressive stuff.

Which is ironic, really, because the main thing jazz players try to do is impress.

Epoxy = Talent?

I am starting to suspect that the embouchure drives a lot of horn players insane.

Today I started trying to play my favorite song, D-E-F-G-F-E-D (look for it on Sony Records soon), and I made a strange and disappointing fuzzy sound. I decided to do what I always do when I have a problem. I Googled.

I found a site with some good stuff on it. A guy named John Lynch makes a product called the Asymmetric Mouthpiece, and his promotional site features some material applicable to all horn players. He says you shouldn’t situate your mouthpiece so half of it is on each lip. Instead, move it so 2/3 of it is on the bottom lip.

I gave this a shot, and it really seems to help. I’m not sure why everyone else says to do it the other way. Presumably, they’re not stupid.

His mouthpiece has a thicker bottom rim on it. He says this will extend your upper range by up to seven semitones. But he doesn’t make cornet mouthpieces, and he advises cornet players to simulate the effect with plumber’s putty.

The obvious problem here is that anyone who can stand the feeling of plumber’s putty against their lips can save the $73 cost of a mouthpiece.

A horn player named Nick Drozdoff has a Youtube in which he shows a cornet mouthpiece with a glob of putty in it. He didn’t like it, so he ended up buying a Harrison Wedge cornet mouthpiece. My guess: he never heard of Devcon, JB Weld, or Marine-Tex. Any of those products should be much more satisfactory.

I may get another mouthpiece and glom some Devcon onto it. What the hell.

Parallel, or Knotted Together?

It’s a beautiful day, and I feel fantastic, and I just had to have some more coffee and goof off, so I’m writing again.

Last night, our church had a guest speaker. No point in saying who he is, but he runs a megachurch.

I was working as an “armorbearer,” which means I wander around with an earpiece, aggravating people. I tell them to quit propping the fire doors open. If an armed criminal comes in and tries to take the offering, I stand on a chair and scream in a high-pitched voice until he goes away. Stuff like that.

The sermon didn’t get off to a great start. He told two jokes we had heard the previous week from another evangelist. I don’t think anyone told him that, but the crowd laughed nervously.

His message, as I understand it, was this: we are supposed to “release” angels to help us. He said he did this all the time, and it was how he got a huge church with rich tithers.

I am extremely leery of this stuff. To me, it borders on sorcery. I have read the entire Bible, and I can’t recall a single instance of a godly person commanding an angel, unless yelling at demons counts. The impression I get from angelic encounters in the Bible is that the angels are polite and helpful, but that they really don’t want us getting close. They get upset when we kneel and bow. They don’t offer to serve us. They make it clear that they serve only God. One supernatural visitor told Joshua he was not on Joshua’s side. He said he led God’s angelic army. That’s pretty blunt. Joshua was a very righteous person, and the visitor (probably Jesus, because he received worship) wanted him to understand that there was a difference between being on God’s side and being on Joshua’s side. In any case, he made it very clear that Joshua’s army and God’s army were different organizations.

The angels killed the Egyptians when Moses crossed the Red Sea (according to some), but Moses didn’t tell them what to do. Presumably, angels destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, but they didn’t need Abraham and Lot to command them. The angel that heralded the conception of John the Baptist was downright cranky with Zechariah. He made him mute. The angels that appeared at the tomb of Jesus didn’t offer to do anything for the disciples. An angelic army helped David, but he did not get to talk to them.

Jesus told Peter that what he bound or loosed on earth would be bound or loosed in heaven. Many Christians think this means we can “bind” and “loose” events and angels. But the Jews interpret it differently. Messianics say it only means Peter, like rabbis before him and the Popes that followed him, was given authority to decide what was right or wrong. So if he made a mistake with regard to doctrine, people who obeyed him were excused, because God would back him up.

That’s a troubling thought, because it would suggest that all of us should belong to the Catholic or Orthodox churches, with all of their problems and errors.

Anyway, the guy I heard last night said this gave him the authority to loose angels. I am not ready to accept that. I have heard another prominent preacher say the same basic thing, and I don’t like it. It’s like the saints; it reminds me of voodoo. You command (or ask) spirits other than God to do stuff for you.

On the other hand, asking God to send angels to do things for us is very scriptural. Jesus made it clear that he could do that. He said he could call for legions of angels to protect him, so presumably, there is nothing wrong with asking God to send angels to make things work out for you. God promised us angelic help in the 91st psalm.

So the message I got last night was this: don’t forget to ask God to send his angels to fight for you. That, I think, is safe. But you will never catch me telling an angel to do anything. It scares me to death. I guess it’s like calling the police. It’s okay to ask the dispatcher to send a car, but you can’t call the cops directly and order them to come to your house.

I think there would be big problems if angels had to listen to us and do what we told them. It would be like giving Somalia the hydrogen bomb.

Last night I started wondering what I would do, if my church got into serious heresy. Then I remembered what happened twenty years ago. My church made mistakes, and I quit, and in the end, I was the loser. I think this angel stuff is unstable dynamite in a truck without shocks, but I will not quit again.

Every church has error. You have to latch onto the best church you can find, and relax. Maybe sometimes you have to turn up your nose at something it offers. I’m not sure. How much faith are we supposed to put in our earthly authorities? Division is bad, but becoming a slave to the erroneous doctrines of men can be worse. What is the greater sin: dividing the church, or practicing idolatry in a church that has lost its way? The Bible says rebellion is as bad as witchcraft, which is idolatry. But does that include rebellion against a badly confused church, or does it only mean rebellion against God himself?

Bringing evil doctrine into a church can be rebellion, which makes things even less clear.

The big win I see here is that I have matured enough not to let something like this blow me off the deck of the boat. That’s more important than resolving nonessential issues of doctrine.

Change Your Hopes

The Dow is bellyflopping again. Is this going to be the week when liberals say, “Hey, we put an undistinguished junior Senator in the White House, and he turned out not to be God”?

I wish I had had the guts to day-trade over the last year. I’d be retiring to the Caymans. But a little voice inside me kept saying, “Al Qaeda could bomb the NYSE tomorrow morning.” Then, I thought, I’d be retiring to an appliance box next to the landfill.

Of course, that wouldn’t affect day traders, because they sell out every afternoon.

So maybe I’m just stupid.

No, now that I think about it, a bomb during the trading day would wipe out a trader, even if he sold out every afternoon.

Funny story. I used to day-trade. One day I bought a huge amount of Cascade Communications. It went up. My policy was to sell out at the end of the day, but I thought Cascade looked really good, so I changed my mind. This is something you never do, if you’re a day-trader. Then I changed my mind again, and I sold, and the sale went through about a minute and a half after the closing bell. That happens. Cascade was at about 64 dollars per share. I forget the figure. I sold at the peak.

Next day I went into the SOES trading place, and everyone was staring at me. Someone asked if I had sold Cascade after the bell. I said yes. They pointed out the current value. It was about 42. Bad news during the night.

An experience like that will make you stop thinking adult diapers are funny. Some poor soul ate my giant loss while I sat at home, cheerfully waiting for the Domino’s guy.

I had a lot of lucky experiences when I traded. I sold Iomega at something like 54, right before it plummeted and died. Once an Internet error resulted in me ending up with twice as much of a stock as I was legally allowed to buy, and I made $4000 in one day, before I knew what was wrong. Schwab never caught that one. I went shopping for a digital piano that afternoon.

I had something like that happen to me at the SOES joint, and by law, they had to confiscate the profit. They must have loved me.

I went a whole year with only one loss. I dropped about $600 on Microsoft. No one believes that story. My law school registrar believes it. I gave my profits to her.

Overall, my SOES experience was a bust, so I quit. I should have stuck it out. It’s a very easy way to make money, if you have the disposition for it. You sit at the computer every morning, and you get up and turn it off when you’ve made at least a few hundred dollars. Sometimes you eat it, but my experience was that it was possible to make it average out in my favor. I screwed things up by making changes that added stress to trading, and stress leads to bad trades. I could have fixed that. In fact, I did. The year I only had one loss came after my SOES days, but by then I was in law school.

The main problem with day-trading, apart from the fact that 99% of the people who try it will lose all of their money, is that you don’t do anything productive or interesting. You just move stock around. Nobody quits his boring job as a jazz singer so he can live his day-trading dream.

“What did you do at work today, honey?” “I bought and sold stock with people whose faces I never saw.” “What did you do at work today, honey?” “I bought and sold stock with people whose faces I never saw.”
“What did you do at work today, honey?” “I bought and sold stock with people whose faces I never saw. Then I punched Needle-Nosed Ned Ryerson in the belly.”

And if your Internet connection craps out, you pretty much have to shoot yourself in the head. Or scramble to sell your stocks over the phone, which is lots of fun, pushing one button at a time.

You have to be a real psycho to sell short. You can sell a stock at 1 and then have to buy it back at 100. Ouch. The losses are unlimited. If you buy Ford at 4, all you can lose is 4. Sell it short, and you have to worry that the next day, they’ll invent a car that runs on something inexhaustible, like mainstream media distortions.

What are we all going to do, if the inevitable bear market is finally here? I think I have some magic beans in a drawer somewhere. Maybe I can train Marv to lay golden eggs. I don’t think that works very well. You probably have to feed the bird gold to get gold out of it, so you come out behind.

Grass is edible, right?

Maybe I’ll set a thousand dollars aside and buy three or four houses with it in June. Or I could just trade mangoes for them. Or just walk in and take them, because no one wants them.

I shouldn’t be flippant. People are suffering, and their numbers will increase.

Up the road from me, someone built a condo complex. It is not a nice place. It’s in a comparatively seedy part of South Miami; the buildings around it are full of small apartments packed with college students. The condos aren’t much to look at.

They have a sign up. It says prices start at $775,000. Every time I see that, I wonder when they’re going to catch the misprint. These little places are probably a thousand square feet each, and the area is nothing special. They’re not close to downtown Miami, so the commute is bad. What were they smoking when they made that sign? My guess: they’ll sell for under $100,000 each. Well, my real guess is that they won’t sell at all. The builder will grit his teeth and hold onto them because he refuses to take a loss. Then the bank will get them. Then they’ll sit empty, because the bank is afraid to flood the market. After that, I think monkeys and possums move in and Denzel Washington walks by with a Bible in his backpack.

Miami is full of new construction. I can’t understand it. No one wants this stuff. Why build? My dad thinks people are building because they took loans, and they have to do something with the money.

Oddly, people in construction say they have no work. Can that be possible? The new construction proceeds at a snail’s pace. Maybe that means they’re putting up lots of buildings, but they’re not hiring enough workers.

Pretty soon American bricklayers will be standing in the parking lots at Home Depots in Mexico.

Maybe people are building because they think they timed the bottom of the market. Talk about blood sport. It’s like jumping out of a burning building, only to see the firemen move the airbag.

I will be praying for America today. I’ll pray we turn this around through faith and obedience. Misfortune is only misfortune if you don’t profit from it. We could reap a harvest of joy and blessings from this mess. If the only help God gave us was in the form of prosperity, we wouldn’t benefit at all in the long run. Fleeting blessings are nice, but lasting ones are better.

If you’re taking a beating today, be encouraged. Nothing can hurt you if you’re in God’s will. Things that look like defeats will turn out to be victories. It may not be easy to feel blessed when things look bad, but that doesn’t mean the blessings aren’t there. God can throw you off a bridge onto the deck of a yacht. He can force you out of your job the day before a disgruntled employee shoots everyone in the place. He can drive you to trade your mansion for a shack with a chest full of diamonds buried in the front yard. He makes things work out.

Still, I think I’ll quit refreshing the page with the Dow Jones average on it.

Sorry

Should have posted these sooner.

From Heather:

Need prayers for my mom, Penny. We got a call from the gyno-oncologist today and there was a lesion on her pap last week. She has to have blood work today and then a PETScan next Tuesday. Please ask the Lord to cleanse this cancer from her body.
I need you to know that my grandmother was treated with a synthetic hormone called DES while she was pregnant with my mom. DES was taken off the market in 1971 because it causes cancer. Many of you know that my grandmother did die of breast cancer. Somewhere along the way in the daily business of life, we forgot about the DES diagnosis until Penny was diagnosed with cervical cancer. Penny NEVER had the venereal warts that have been advertised to cause the cervical cancer. Nor was she promiscuous-she has been celibate since her divorce, because of her deep and abiding faith in God.
Paedric and I need her in our lives and need God to cleanse this cancer from her body.

This next one is about some babies that disappeared in Haiti. I would assume you can find out all about it at Mercy and Sharing. Philanthropist Susie Krabacher has been going nuts over this. Evidently, most of the babies have turned up. Reader Cindy says:

Steve,

Most of our prayers have been answered. 30 of the 32 missing children from the abandoned baby unit have been locate. Keep praying for the two who are still missing.

http://www.denverpost.com/search/ci_14298637

Thanks
Cindy

I don’t know where my brain was when I wandered off without posting these, but there you go.

FAIL

Today I got an annoying letter from the Republican National Committee. They put it in an envelope that looked like the ones the government uses, and they put the word “audit” on the outside of it.

They do this to scare people, so they’ll notice their junk mail and take it seriously. It must seem like a pretty good joke to their marketing people. I didn’t think it was all that funny. Audits are not very pleasant, and in these times, a lot of people are getting real audit letters, and the IRS is proceeding to ruin their lives. Why not put “FORECLOSURE” on the envelope while you’re at it?

I sent them an email demanding they remove me from their mailing list and informing them that I was all done sending money. They can pull their jokes on someone else. I supported them, and they rewarded me with a juvenile postal prank.

This is the kind of marketing that cost us Congress and the White House. It is astounding that they would do something this crass, tactless, and counterproductive. Terry McAuliffe and James Carville must be their fundraising advisors. The Democrats should send letters like this out, pretending to be the RNC. It would win them a lot of new voters.

I Miss the Old Ones

I am working on the cornet. Man, it’s weird. Every day, I feel like I woke up with a different set of lips.

Day before yesterday, I could barely play a note. Yesterday it got way easier. Today I’m struggling again. It’s as if the embouchure is developing so fast, it changes significantly every night.

I had to take a break. This is one of those days when I have to remind myself I’m practicing for the future, not the present.

Don MacLean Got the Year Wrong

I watched the tenth DVD of the ten-disk series Jazz last night. What a relief. It’s over.

I noticed something as I made my way through the documentary. It starts out enjoyable and then turns into a big drag. Why? Bebop.

At the beginning of the series, they talked about African roots and Haitian music. That stuff may be a lot of hogwash, depending on whom you listen to, but it’s interesting. Then they moved on to New Orleans and the first real jazz. Then we learned about Louis Armstrong and Bix Beiderbecke and the other early greats.

After that, the series moved on to swing, which is wonderful music. Chick Webb. Benny Goodman. Artie Shaw.

Eventually, the program made a turn. I believe it happened when they brought up Coleman Hawkins and a seminal recording he made. “Body and Soul,” I think. He abandoned the melody and went off on his own path. If Ken Burns is to be believed, this is pretty much where bebop started. First thing you know, you’re watching Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, and the music just…plain…STINKS.

I was thinking about it last night. Rock and roll is not the reason jazz died. That’s a whiny excuse. Jazz died because it became unpleasant to listen to. The musicians no longer thought about the fundamental purpose music has always served, which is to please the ear while conveying enjoyable emotional content. They only thought about cleverness. Invert a chord. Mess with the timing. Shun harmony in favor of constant dissonance. Eventually, they ended up playing music that sounded GREY. It’s like a grey wall splattered with random blotches and splashes of grey paint. A paint blob may be light grey, or it might be charcoal grey, but in the end, it’s all still grey. Nobody wants to hear that stuff.

There’s a reason musicians have always used dissonance sparingly. It’s tedious, oppressive, and melancholy. It is the sound of despair. It’s fine to toss in a few flatted notes here and there, like seasoning, but when the whole tune is dissonant, it’s like a pot of stew with a pound of cumin in it. It’s too much. The music no longer conveys things like optimism, high spirits, nostalgia, or love. It conveys pessimism and alienation. If I want pessimism and alienation, I’ll watch Andy Dick and read The Catcher in the Rye. I don’t need to torture my ears with it.

Notes are like color. What happens when you take paint in the seven colors of the spectrum and stir them together? GREY, with a little brown.

Jazz musicians seem to think the heart of music is progress. It’s not. Emotion and beauty are at the heart. It’s okay to play the way musicians did sixty or seventy years ago. There is nothing wrong with playing the way Benny Goodman did, or the way Bix Beiderbecke did. The fact that they got there first doesn’t make your contribution invalid. Combinatorics is such that there is a virtually infinite number of ways to play any song. Even “Jingle Bells.” You will never run out of ways to express yourself. You don’t have to turn the music inside-out in order to be somebody. Chopin said he never played any of his pieces the same way twice.

Classical musicians still play Chopin and Scarlatti and Mozart. Thank God. What if they decided Chopin’s waltzes were no longer fit to be heard, because the ideas were a hundred and seventy years old? What stupidity that would be. Modern pianists still do beautiful, unique things with this music. Listen to Richter, and then listen to Rubinstein. Different, but equally valuable. On the other hand, modern classical music, which is infected by the progress bug, is an abomination. It’s like sitting in a room in a dreadful De Stijl building, with the walls plastered with Jackson Pollack paintings. The point isn’t to enjoy it. The point is to be seen claiming you enjoy it. And smoking French cigarettes, if at all possible.

And the things the jazz “scientists” did…are they really that impressive? Is emphasizing a different beat rocket science? Should you get a Nobel Prize for starting measures with dissonant notes and making them resolve? It’s not string theory, believe me. It may be creative, but it’s not the discovery of relativity. It’s impressive that people can do these things on the fly, but so what? If the end result is unlistenable for a reasonably sophisticated audience, you might as well be playing silently, in your head.

I could make pizza with jakfruit sauce and limburger cheese if I wanted. I could use flour made from dried yuca. It would be highly original. Would you want to eat it? Would you wake up in the morning and think, “Man, I have to have some of that jakfruit pizza today”? Jazz musicians think too much about ingredients and not enough about the dish.

The funny thing is, the thing that killed jazz was not, itself, creative. Coming up with new musical ideas was creative. Forcing people to adopt those ideas and making them choose musical pigeonholes was the opposite of creative. No musician should think he has to do what the people around him are doing. That is one hundred and eighty degrees away from the fundamental concepts of art and creativity.

I’ll bet musicians who insisted on respecting melody and chord changes were ostracized back in the bop days. My knowledge of human nature says it must have been so. Everybody wants to be original, just like everybody else, because if you’re not the right kind of nonconformist, you’re never going to fit in. That idea is as old as the world.

Jazz people love to say the Beatles killed jazz by competing with inferior music that was easier to listen to. The Beatles didn’t kill jazz. They showed up after it was dead. There was a giant hole in our popular music. It had to be filled. Besides, other musicians had been jumping into that hole for a decade or so. The Beatles did not invent rock and roll. It was the predominant popular music in America, years before they arrived. Jazz musicians who whine about the Beatles need to be made aware of names like “Buddy Holly” and “Elvis Presley.”

If jazz musicians were currently playing music as enjoyable as Benny Goodman’s, they’d do just fine. Look at Diana Krall and Harry Connick. Maybe they wouldn’t be able to call themselves scientists, and they wouldn’t hit the trashy heights of the true giants of rap and bad dance music, but they would make a good living. Instead, they want progress. They can have it. I’d trade a thousand Keith Jarretts for one Nat Cole. I’d trade them for almost anything, just to make their music go away.

I can listen to Miles Davis, and I like some of John Coltrane’s stuff, but that’s about as far as I can stand to go. I bought two albums featuring Charlie Parker, and they’re downright obnoxious. No wonder he was depressed. “It’s brilliant.” Great. Come get it. I’ll leave it by the front door. Call me a hick. That’s fine, but remember, critics used to go wild over the stuff I listen to. I guess they were wrong.

When you come right down to it, no matter how rarely you watch the Food Channel, and no matter how little your pans cost, and no matter how unfamiliar you are with the latest foodie jargon, you will be a good cook as long as you can make a nice biscuit. A good biscuit is better than bad pheasant under glass, and very few people can make one.

The same principle applies to music. Because the musicians didn’t get that, clever jazz had no chance of survival as a popular art form.

Your Choice

Here, look at Artie Shaw and Charlie Parker. Which would you rather listen to for two hours?

By the way, Parker’s song is about his heroin dealer.

More

Interesting quotation from Miles, the autobiography of Miles Davis:

Birth of the Cool became a collector’s item, I think, out of a reaction to Bird and Dizzy’s music. Bird and Diz played this hip, real fast thing, and if you weren’t a fast listener, you couldn’t catch the humor or the feeling in their music. Their musical sound wasn’t sweet, and it didn’t have harmonic lines that you could easily hum out on the street with your girlfriend trying to get over with a kiss. Bebop didn’t have the humanity of Duke Ellington. It didn’t even have that recognizable thing. Bird and Diz were great, fantastic, challenging–but they weren’t sweet. But Birth of the Cool was different because you could hear everything and hum it also.

Improvement!

Wow, this is freaky. I started using my trumpet sheet music for piano sight-reading. It’s fantastic. Now I can sort of almost play songs at sight. Granted, one hand is missing, but that’s not the point. The point is that I finally have something simple enough to use for sight-reading, without having to play the same ten things over and over. The left-hand stuff will still be a pain, but half a solution is way better than none, and progress with the right hand will help to some degree with the left hand.

Apart from that, the music is better. It beats dismal pieces by obscure classical composers, about depressed puppets.

For anyone trying to learn to sight-read on the piano, I recommend this highly.

Slobbery Instrument Starts Making Sense

The cornet is working out well.

Until today, I couldn’t make myself practice for more than 15 minutes. On the first day, I was seeing spots and feeling like I would faint, and the sounds were positively flatulent. And all I had was the mouthpiece. On the second or third day, I managed to play a G. Yesterday I managed to play “G F E” over and over. Today, I managed D, and I also started to get a sound that almost resembled a brass instrument. On top of that, I was able to practice continuously for several minutes without stopping, and I didn’t faint. And I went over half an hour total. My lip crapped out at that point, so I sat down.

I got myself a book of standards. Man, is it encouraging. One note at a time! I can’t WAIT to be able to play an entire scale so I can try this. It’s so much simpler than the piano, and presumably, sight-reading with the trumpet will help me do a better job of sight-reading on the keyboard.

People say the trumpet (cornet, whatever) is hard to play. Okay, it is. Every instrument is hard to play…WELL. But some instruments are easy to play badly, and it looks like the trumpet is one of them. If I can learn to play badly in a month, it will be fantastic. I don’t have to be Doc Severinsen to get a lot out of it.

It takes about six months to learn to play bluegrass guitar badly, because flatpicking is a set of very unnatural motions. It takes a long time to learn to play piano badly, because sight-reading is hard, and you have to play two parts at once. Trumpet seems more like the banjo. The basic mechanics aren’t that tough.

I don’t know how long it takes to get an embouchure working. At the rate I’m going, it would appear that I ought to be able to play a whole scale within a month. Once that happens, I may be able to torture the neighbors with a real song. I mean actual music. Not the horrors found in my “Play Trumpet Today” book. On March 1st, I may be playing a whole song badly! I sure hope so.

After that, road trip to Birdland. I’ll need a beret.

If I can learn to play something really engrossing, like Summertime, it will be hard to pry the horn out of my hand. That’s a slow song, loaded with improvisational inspiration. The notes will be in my head, and if I think there is any hope I can actually play them, I’ll keep trying until I have to be separated from the horn by burly EMTs and sheriff’s deputies with bean bag guns.

I don’t know all of the instruments that are easy to play badly, but offhand, I can recommend the electric bass. I played one the first and only time I picked it up. Bass players hate to hear people say things like that, but it’s true. The bass is really easy. All you have to do is find three or four notes per measure that harmonize with whatever you’re listening to, and then you play them over and over. Nobody is going to give you a scholarship to Juilliard for doing that, but it will be real music. And the sad reality is, if you’re playing rock, you could actually sit in with a band after a day, because listeners have extremely low expectations of bass players. If you’re good enough to solo, people will notice you, but if you can only play your three or four notes, 98% of the crowd will have no idea you can’t actually play. Here’s something to make bass players even madder: for most rock songs, the bass player could turn off his amp, and most people in the audience wouldn’t know the difference.

Drums. You can play the drums right now, as long as you don’t get cocky.

I hear horror stories about the violin, although I haven’t tried it. They say the hardest part is being able to stand listening to yourself while you get the pitches wrong a billion times. People say you pretty much have to start learning the bagpipes as an embryo, because it takes so long to learn the fingering and wind control. Of course, the bagpipes are, in all respects, heinous. So I can’t say I care. Now the Uillean pipes…they would be worth the effort.

The cornet is a mystery. I thought the notes the horn could play were determined solely by the pitch the lips make, plus the length of the tube. But I noticed something odd today. When I do the fingering for a certain note, but I try to play a different note (because I’m inept), sometimes it seems like I accidentally make the horn play the correct note. How can that be possible? I would think the horn’s length and the wavelengths of the sounds would relate in a pretty rigid way.

I just found a website that explains how horns work. I can’t believe I used to be an aspiring physicist. Just looking at this stuff gives me vertigo.

I remember studying forced oscillations. You can make anything oscillate at the frequency of your choice, if you’re willing to supply the energy. I don’t know if horns work that way. You would think the volume would plummet.

Anyway, this is pretty cool. It won’t be long until I’m jamming to smokin’ beats like Three Blind Mice and Frere Jacques.

Great News

I just looked at Osama bin Laden’s latest video, and I saw something really encouraging. I made a still capture. See if you can figure out what I spotted.

I considered calling this entry “51.”

Inevitable

Not by Sight

Pizza, pizza, pizza.

I keep thinking about it.

I have my recipes fixed up, so I no longer have to make pizza every day. I used to make it every day because I wanted to eat it. These days, it’s just puzzle drive. But my gut doesn’t know the difference, so I wanted it to end. I haven’t put on weight, but it made me nervous anyway.

I have a burning urge to buy a defunct pizzeria, but I am trying to squelch it. Do I really want to work sixty hours a week, dealing with the public? Ack. That’s not an inviting prospect. I like the idea of squashing all competitors and becoming the pizza king of the Southeast, but I would have no time for myself. No tool time. No piano. No cornet. No music theory. No writing, period. Leave that stuff for the next life, because you can’t do it here AND run a pizzeria. God gave me some natural gifts, and I would have to abandon all of them, except the ability to make good food. It would be like cutting my legs off. I’d have to say goodbye to big parts of me.

I would much rather write. I got a couple of offers to write Christian books, but the people involved have not followed through. My pastor is just too busy to work on the book he and I were doing, and the other guy–the former addict turned rehab director–just wandered off. This is one of the frustrating things about Christianity. People start things they don’t finish. Even Paul did it. He started to travel to Asia Minor to spread the gospel, and the Holy Spirit put the kibosh on it, so he had to go somewhere else.

Another frustrating thing about writing for God is that you need a divine spark. You can’t just decide to write a book. God has to be in it. He has to give you the concept. Otherwise, it’s just you, doing what you think is right, without his guidance, approval, and favor. It’s not like being a Christian air conditioner repairman or a Christian car salesman. Those people just go from deal to deal without pausing. When someone comes in and asks to look at a used Taurus, you don’t have to get down on your knees and ask if it’s God’s will that you sell a car. The founder of Chick-fil-a is a Christian. I very much doubt that he requires his employees to pray before they agree to take people’s orders.

By the way, that company proves what God can do for you, if you’re receptive. I can’t understand why anyone would eat at Chick-fil-a, but they do. The food is ridiculous. A bland fried cutlet on a damp hamburger bun. Come on. How could that work? But it did, even though they refuse to serve on Sunday.

I remember seeing my first Chick-fil-a, years ago, in a mall. I thought, “Man, those people are idiots. That will never work.”

People said the same thing about the ark. “Water from the sky? Are you crazy? That will never happen. And what do you know about naval architecture, pops? Nothing, that’s what. I’m going to go home and sacrifice goats to Baal and make fun of you.”

I’ve been reading about The Book of Eli. It’s a big hit. Guess what that means? More Christian movies in a year or so. Almost all will be bad. Almost all will be packed with wrongness. Maybe two or three genuinely anointed films will squeeze out while the window is open. Is that God’s plan? Hard to say. It’s obvious, and God specializes in subtlety and unpredictability.

I read about Gary Whitta, the screenwriter. Judging by what I read, he’s not a Christian. Or maybe he is, but he’s not hardcore. He says he doesn’t think The Book of Eli is a Christian movie. He’s a video game expert. Can you believe that? But he wrote a movie that is extremely consistent with principles of charismatic Christianity, which non-Christians and even non-charismatics know almost nothing about. A mainstream Baptist or Catholic could never have the same understanding of this movie that a charismatic can have. Even if they understood, they wouldn’t agree with it. In fact, this morning I read a review by a well-known Christian blogger, and she clearly had no idea what the movie was about. It might as well have been two hours of quantum mechanics explained in Navajo.

The non-charismatic take appears to be this: God tells a guy to preserve the Bible, and God takes care of him while he does it, but there is a lot of mean violence, and there are dirty words, and the stuff that happens is not very plausible, so why are people going to this movie? That’s way off. If you’re worried about the movie’s premises making sense, you missed the whole point. For that matter, when you watch any movie, it’s generally a bad idea to let things like that bother you. Imagine trying to enjoy Bugs Bunny with an attitude like that. “Rabbits can’t talk! I want my money back!” Forget the Wizard of Oz. Forget Star Wars.

It’s kind of dangerous to start thinking God is sending you messages no one else can see. On the other hand, he does it all the time. The psalms are full of things no one could fully understand until after the crucifixion and the events in the Upper Room. Jesus spoke parables to ordinary people, and they didn’t understand, but the disciples got the true meanings. You don’t want to become a nut who thinks his toaster is commanding him to do stuff for God, but encrypted messages have been a big part of worshiping Jehovah since the dawn of history. He gave Nebuchadnezzar dreams he couldn’t understand. He wrote an incomprehensible message on the wall in Babylon. This is just how God is. It’s part of his modus operandi.

If you think God doesn’t speak in riddles, explain Ezekiel and the Revelation to me. Good luck with that.

Yesterday I heard a message from Perry Stone. He reminded listeners that Jesus predicted that many would be offended before his return. I understand “offense” to mean anger or strong disagreement aimed at God or the church. The Book of Eli may well provoke a lot of offense. Many charismatics are thrilled, and we’re saying, “We get it.” Some non-charismatics seem upset by the violence, and they think the movie is shallow. Unbelievers are just mad all the time, whenever Christianity makes it into a movie theater; they don’t need a particular reason. People like me will say, “This is what real Christianity is like. This is what walking by faith is.” Some non-charismatics will say, “Christianity is not about hitting people with swords and talking dirty!”, because they can’t comprehend the movie, and they won’t understand what we’re saying.

We’re seeing all sorts of offense already. Satan turns good into evil, in people’s minds. The church is under heavy persecution for opposing homosexuality. Millions are offended by our defense of God’s will. Suddenly, people who believe the Bible are bigots. We’re also under attack for teaching our kids that God created us. Suddenly, real Christians are ignorant. Faith equals rejection of logic. We’re anti-knowledge! We want to break into pharmacies and destroy the antibiotics. We want to smash all the computers. Evil! Evil! Christians are a plague!

One of the most plausible premises of The Book of Eli was that after the nuclear holocaust, people burned Bibles, claiming religion had caused the war. I find that completely believable. To an unbeliever, Christianity is just as silly and evil as wahhabist Islam. That’s a classic type of offense. The ancient Romans exemplified it.

This movie will probably be a powerful vehicle for offense. It will be a sword that divides. Oh, well. God took care of the fictional Eli, and he will take care of real Christians, too. People will attack us, but if you think about it, the longest any Christian can suffer here is about a hundred years, while God’s postmortem judgment lasts forever. We’re on the sweet side of this conflict, even if that isn’t obvious at the moment.