taking a triangular trip
Current mood: adventurous
Category: Goals, Plans, Hopes

Starting

April 17

Greyhound to Myrtle Beach,

South Carolina, to visit with friends, play music, make videos, walk the sands of Myrtle Beach one MORE time...then up top NYC, and NJ to visit family and friends there, and play some MORE music...

5:41 PM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

songs popping up
Current mood: artistic
Category: Blogging

IN

THE

GROOVE

I am happy to say, that I've greased the wheel long enough this spring, that songs I know are bubbling up out of my memory now, presenting themselves to my conscious recollection in a flash, ans I play them from memory, and they are all there, a little polish work necessary, and a dropped word from the lyric here and there, but otherwise intact...WHEW! Thanks, memory, for doing what you do, without the need to intend that it be done...

Other songs, like Dylan's Tangled UP In BLUE, continue to happen in a fresh, tell the story kind of way, which gives me excitement each time it happens, it's like play the role of the narrator in a movie of the song...

6:45 AM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Mister Tamborine MAN
Current mood: creative

Healing

power in a song

I can remember still when I heard it first, in college at Seton Hall U back in the mid-sixties...before the controversial Forest Hills Tennis Stadium concert...ANYHOW, I was out busking early this evening, looking to bust out of a case of 2-3 day blahs, and I gravitated to this jangly old acoustic chestnut...LIFTED me right out of the mopery I'd been feeling, it did...by the time I got to the 3rd verse I was full bore...

"...and if you should laughin' spinnin' swinging madly across the sun,
It's not AIMED at anyone, it's just escaping on the run..." (entire song for those not familiar with it)

Such is the perennial beauty of music to sooth, to FREE one's soul! My favorite time to be singing it is right around the crack of dawn in the 3 summer months...ask any singer/player you know well enough to get a frank answer, and you'll soon hear that there are entire shows that one can do where nothing special happens, and you are simply glad to get thru without any mistakes...I'd venture to say most performers love certain songs that for them have rejuvenating power...even though there is no guarantee that one particular song will ALWAYS work in this regard...even one's own...
 
What say you?

8:30 PM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Busking 4 Freedom again...
Current mood: amused

Busking 4 FREEDOM

again...first warm day this year...

Today, in Bloomington, Indiana the temperature reached the high seventies during the afternoon, so I packed some song sheets to work on, my trusty star shaped box and headed for Kirkwood Avenue...playing and singing at both the corner of Grant and Kirkwood, across from our county library, and the Sample Gate entrance to the Indiana University campus...I was happy to discover several of my favorite covers were still intact in my memory, and 3 of my own songs also could be rendered without any "crib" sheet...It's good to here that jingly-jangly sound of Dunlop pick on bronze and steel strings backed by the mahogany wood of my old Gibson 6-string...

Neil's Blog

Here's a chap in Perth, Australia describing what it's like for him...I noticed he's talking about a critical skill for busker(s) shows...how one handles the presence of "regulars" who can be a challenge, especially if one is "pitching" - playing for "meat and potatoes" - I've had my own challenges to meet, reading Neil goes to show how similar folks are all over the world...

4:58 PM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

deleting friends at myspace
Current mood: disappointed

BE CAREFUL: when you are deleting a friend here, I accidently selected an entire page and "lost" 17 friends...in time I'll manage to retrieve some I guess, but others might have "entered the aether" far as this place is concerend...alsa alack...

4:36 PM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Where I am
Category: Goals, Plans, Hopes

Well...I've only been back in Bloomington, for 40 days, now give or take a few...still nothing permanent happening in the way of a job or dwelling, details to be added as things get more newsy...I HAVE gotten a great welcome from many peopel I didn't expect to see so soon...I have been trying to relocate again to the west coast for 20 years now and not managing to get a "leg-up, toe-hold..." This doesn't mean I've given up! It's been economic each time, job fell apart, or money ran out reasons in my previous several attempts...I learned more about Eugene this second time there...Be sure to check out the weekend Farmers Market/crafts fair...and the Senator Wayne Morse Plaza nearby...some great quotes celebrating FREEDOM OF SPEECH...carved in stone...it is highly appropriate that I mention this...there's a paid for with donations FREE SPEECH open mike every other week there (I guess this is during the non-rainy months...) I recited this particular song of mine Family Of PEACE

10:10 AM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Coming Down THE Wind...a song
Current mood: contemplative
Category: reflective Dreams and the Supernatural

I was walking to my library to post a notice/create a page about an experience I had two months before at the Woody Guthrie Festival in Okemah, OK...(And many might beg to differ with this, but New York - in some spiritual but otherwise indescribable way - wouldn't be what it is had Woodrow Wilson Guthrie, America's own BARD, not graced it with his presence...in Howard Beach...) An Oklahoma group was singing a song about how the FBI refused to dna trace a murdered Canadian Indian woman's found in an alley in North Dakota...after all, she was JUST an indian...the rage in the singer's voice was mighty and palpable...standing in with the group was Bill Miller...a Native American himself...playing along on a very bautiful hand drum...I felt something HEAVY IN THE WIND and began to shudder and feel troubled for a deeply unfathomable reason...Miller then gave the land, the trees, the skies above us a blessing in his native tongue and translated it for us all...it was a profound moment...

I struggled with putting this story on my web-site page about that song and that feeling for two months...after the events September 11, I was devastated...for I had experienced someone saying there is a judgment coming...and it was someone whose nation had been all but wiped off this planet by the people who came here from Europe...it took me TWO more years to get to the place where I was able to compose this story...

My feeling found their way into this blues:

Blues is burning, burning in my soul,

Blues is burning, burning in my soul,

Blues is burning, burning hot as coal...

Change is coming, coming down the wind,

Change is coming, coming sown the wind.

Don't cry it's the end, sing it's time to begin!

Chaff is flying, bushel has been tossed,

Chaff is flying, BUSH...EL has been tossed,

Time to recover, all we have lost...

Change is coming, coming down the wind,

Change is coming, coming sown the wind.

Don't cry it's the end, sing it's time to begin!

9:32 PM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

shaving whiskers in stages
Current mood: chipper
Category: Life

OFF they COME!

I have begun to shear my facial hair!

This has been planned for over a month...I shaved each side of my face along the jaw line...I will be uploading pics of each stage of this bit of "performance" art...my beard is in a braid at this point...in a few days, I will create TWO braids and shave the middle of my chin...once I get to the weekend, the last few stages won't be mentioned aforehand, but will be photographed for posterity's sake...it took a year and a half of NOT shaving (Simple isn't it? I wasn't "growing a beard" - I was simply NOT doing anything about what happens naturally when it comes to facial hair...LOL!!!), I was/am in no hurry to get rid of it all quickly in one swell foop!

2:55 AM - 2 Comments - 2 Kudos - Add Comment

busking4freedom
Current mood: accomplished
Category: Music

We Carried You

In our arms, on Independence day...

Bob Dylan, Tears of Rage

It's July 2, the anniversary of the day the signers of the Declaration of Independence actually agreed to sign their names to it...deciding the actual day to DECLARE themselves independent from the CROWN of England would be the 4th...that was 230 years ago now...

My groove is coming back, I'm having fun making music and singing again, after a lapse that lasted many moons...I have the mental clarity it takes to go through the several song chart books I prepared for my own songs, so that I could refresh my memory...this is the portion of the performance on stage, or by the Sample Gates - part of which is pictured to the left - that makes the fluidity of playing possible...last night people were quite generous in their support of my efforts...

6:47 PM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Moving to Ithaca, NY in August
Current mood: bouncy

That's right!

Time to get a move on...

On June 6, 2006, I got the message - loud and clear - that it was time to pare my belongings again, and move lightly to Ithaca, NY...I've been selling books I've collected, getting rid of excess baggage items, and will be flea-market much of the rest...storing/shipping must have cartoon project materials...the pleasure of giving many things to friends is mine...

Last night, as I walked past Monroe County's Public Library, I saw the block long building with traveller's eyes...that intensity that one experiences in new places, like the first view one gets of the Rocky Mountain Front Range sticking up west of Denver, Colorado - after over 1000 miles of plains...these pictures stick in your memory...I was happy to see this aspect of the familiar that fades from consciousness when one settles into a place...and we impart our various mundane moods to the very terrain we walk/stumble/trudge through from day to day...

For me, getting that wanderer's view is a sign I am ready to make my move, even though I have 4 weeks of my job left before I bus east towards upstate New York...I will blog my adventure in detaching myself from this place that has served so well as "ALPHA base" for decades now...

Now, out to sing some CAB Calloway tonight...When he trades you dimes for nickels, and calls watermelons pickles, you know you're talking to that...can you guess the next word?

8:10 PM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment