1. Make sure you spell every word correctly, unless you are misspelling words for an effect. This completely gives away the fact that you are a novice. If you don’t own a Webster’s 3rd, there are plenty of online dictionaries, like http://www.m-w.com
2. Went to a writing workshop that was held in the back of Chatterton’s book store in Hollywood 30 years ago, and although I can’t remember the guy who ran the thing, he made one comment that has stuck in my mind like a dart. POETRY FOCUSES US ON THE RHYTHM OF THE LINES. If your poetry consists of complete sentences maybe it’s not a poem.
Look at the rhythm of this poem. Read it out loud slowly and pause a little at the commas and other punctuation.
Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’ hierarchies?
And even if one of them pressed me suddenly against his heart:
I would be consumed in that overwhelming existence.
For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.
(opening of First Duino Elegy by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Stephen Mitchell)
Right, these are complete sentences, but the structure is magical. Rhythm is one of the keys.
3. If you’ve written a piece and it somehow doesn’t please you, write it again. Express the same ideas but use different words. You will probably gather insights you didn’t have before.
4. If you’ve read my comments to people on editred, you will note that I often say—you have to colorize your poem, and by that I don’t mean to add blues or reds. I mean you have to make it live for the reader. Read the following and look at the way you begin to visualize the subject.
And then went down to the ship,
Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and
We set up mast and sail on that swart ship,
Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also
Heavy with weeping, and winds from sternward
Bore us out onward with bellying canvas,
Circe's this craft, the trim-coifed goddess.
(Beginning of Canto I by Ezra Pound)
I’ll admit Pound isn’t the easiest poet to read but the opening of his Cantos which span some 170 pages is masterful.
5. Don’t imitate another poet’s writing verbatim. Yes it’s OK to pay homage to another writer, but subtlety is important.
6. A lot of poetry is written because people have “diarrhea” of the mind. Suddenly they start writing, and it all falls out, just like…(you know what I mean). A page is full, you pat yourself on the back, and say “Well done!” Then a few days later you go back and look at what you wrote, and you realize…yes, it was a case of diarrhea of the mind.
Think ahead of time about what you want to express. Perhaps make an outline of what you want to say. Proceed quietly and carefully. Very few creations emerge fully formed and perfect. Even a musical poet like pianist Keith Jarrett who improvises entire concerts has moments when he stumbles and is uninspired. It doesn’t happen a lot, but you can hear it in his recordings.
I am not a professional writer and I’m not a sage who is preaching to the masses. After thirty years of writing a few lessons have been learned and hopefully, you can take away something from this, particularly if you’re just getting your feet wet as a scribe.
I remember during my fateful year at UCLA (1967-68), The Jimi Hendrix Experience came and gave a concert at the UCLA Student Union Ballroom. It was pretty cheap, only about $3.50 to get in. This was just before the album Axis: Bold as Love came out. The place was packed, perhaps room for about 900. Soft Machine was the opening band, and they were OK, but everyone was waiting for Hendrix.
He finally came out and they played two songs and stopped. The excuse was: they needed more power for the amps. When Hendrix finally began, he played for two hours straight. The drummer Mitch Mitchell was wearing a white satin shirt with giant blue lip-prints all over it. Noel Redding was tall and wearing sunglasses.
The crowd was smoking grass and the mood was rather subdued, but the music was unreal. The thing that was rather different and unexpected. Hendrix was getting all of his usual feedback effects, but the guitar wasn’t that loud. I expected to be bleeding from the mouth by the time it was over, but the whole evening didn’t even make your ears ring. Somebody even passed a joint to Hendrix on stage. They did all the hits “Foxey Lady,” “Hey Joe,” “Purple Haze,”—the works. He even pulled this weird move where somebody passed him a crutch out of the audience and he used that rather than his hand to press the strings to the frets.
By the end of the show, people were on stage dancing around the band. It was a trip. You could have gotten high in that room just from breathing, but at that time, I'd never gotten stoned. oh well...
I first heard Ravi Shankar play the sitar in about 1967. A friend at high school, Kevin Lindsay, had the old World Pacific album, Improvisations and he loaned it to me. That’s the one that had Bud Shank, the flutist on it as well as some of the film music for Pather Panchali (music written by Shankar).
I was immediately hypnotized by the sound. Within a few months I had purchased a Shankar album of my own titled Ragas and Talas. I think it was the first album released in America that featured Alla Rakha as the tabla (drum) player. I didn’t get it, but I reasoned that Indian music had been around for hundreds of years and so there must be something to it. It took a few months but I began to understand. I went with Kevin to a Shankar concert at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles. We sat miles away in the top balcony and it was still amazing.
In 1967 when I went to school at UCLA I met a young red-haired guy named Bruce Mac Kay. He had studied at Shankar’s newly-opened school for Indian music, and his teacher was Amiya das Gupta (He subsequently went to teach at Cal Arts, Valencia). I was lucky that Bruce trusted me enough to allow me to borrow his sitar to mess around with. I bought some “mizrabs” (the plectrum for a sitar) and some coconut oil for lubricating my fretting fingers. I was fortunate that I had a great ear, so I could tune it easily and get all the sympathetic resonating strings vibrating properly.
During the spring of ’68, Shankar gave back to back performances at UCLA’s Royce Hall. I attended on both nights and it was like too much whipped cream on a dessert. Wow! I saw Shankar do one thing that was unusual. When I had seen him play, it was like he was in a deep trance. At one point, some guy who must have been stoned yelled some thing unintelligible during a soft passage. Immediately, Shankar broke out of his trance, shook his finger at the guy and yelled something back. Then he continued as if nothing had happened.
I didn’t meet Shankar in person until about 1982, while working at KFAC. He was in LA for the Ojai Music Festival where he would perform. I made the arrangements and went to an apartment on Detroit Street, a few blocks from the station. I showed up at the address and was met by about five guys in North Indian garb. I guessed these were his bodyguards. After ten minutes they took me across the street to a second-floor apartment, and there he was sitting on the floor. I was in awe!
He was a wonderful warm individual and when I asked him the tough question, he answered it. (His brother-in-law was Ustad Ali Akbar Khan, the virtuoso on the sarod. His father was Allaudin Khan, who was Ravi Shankar’s teacher. I had heard that Allaudin was a strict disciplinarian, and that when Ali Akbar wouldn’t practice up to his standards, that he would tie him to a tree and beat him.) My question to Shankar was: if he was so strict, how did you escape the treatment he dished out to his own child? Shankar then explained the day that his own mother had turned him over to Allaudin to study. She told Allaudin that Shankar was a gentle soul; don’t treat him harshly.
Being in his presence is one experience I will never forget.
I visited some friends in Olympia Washington back in 1984, and I had picked up a book before I left to read during my trip. It was the Collected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke in a translation by Stephen Mitchell.
The people I stayed with lived in an area removed from the city. They told a funny story about the Northwest winters. They had a wood-burning stove to keep them warm. I noticed the thermometer on the metal chimney and they said it was there because if the fire became too intense, it could burn down the house. One evening it was snowing so they had to have the stove going, but it was putting out so much heat that they had fans on to blow the hot air everywhere in the house, they left the front and back doors open and were wearing shorts.
Anyway, back to Rilke…It was a cloudy morning and my friends had left for work. It was very quiet in this forest setting so I sat down on their couch and started to read. When I read the following passage, I became quite unhinged and began sobbing because I had never read any writing that had touched me so deeply.
Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels' hierarchies?
Every angel is terrifying.
Perhaps there remains for us some tree on a hillside,
Oh and night: there is night, when a wind full of infinite space gnaws at our faces.
Don't you know yet?
That’s only about a third of the poem and there are ten elegies in all. They really get to the nitty-gritty of existence. I became a big fan of Stephen Mitchell and began to read more of his translations. Everything was really brilliant.
I learned that he resided near Berkeley, and lived with a Chinese acupuncturist. So several weeks later after returning home, I called Berkeley 411 and asked for a Stephen Mitchell, a residence number. They gave me a number, I called, and I heard an Asian female voice on the answering machine. I left a message, and it was the right number. He called me back within a day. I could barely speak, but I did manage to get out that I felt his Rilke translations displayed great genius. I had always been a “some-time” student of the German language, so I asked him if he was fluent. To my surprise he said he wasn’t. I asked him how he developed his great translations and he told me he would just find all possible translations of a German word and build it slowly. It was quite an amazing story.
and even if one of them pressed me suddenly against his heart:
I would be consumed in that overwhelming existence.
For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror,
which we are still just able to endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.
And so I hold myself back and swallow the call-note of my dark sobbing.
Ah, whom can we ever turn to in our need?
Not angels, not humans, and already the knowing animals are aware
that we are not really at home in our interpreted world.
which every day we can take into our vision;
there remains for us yesterday's street and the loyalty of a habit so much at ease
when it stayed with us that it moved in and never left.
Whom would it not remain for--that longed-after, mildly disillusioning presence,
which the solitary heart so painfully meets.
Is it any less difficult for lovers?
But they keep on using each other to hide their own fate.
Fling the emptiness out of your arms into the spaces we breathe;
perhaps the birds will feel the expanded air with more passionate flying.
At the age of 21, I got my first singing job was as one of the four tenor soloists at the Glendale Seventh Day Adventist Church. The others were Noel Murdoch, Jerry Patton, and another guy named Bill. The conductor of the choir was an energetic guy named Robert Herr and we would get together an hour before the service and rehearse. It was an excellent choir—it had to be because we did a live radio broadcast every Saturday morning.
After another six months or so I was hired to be the interim tenor soloist at Glendale Presbyterian Church. The director was a guy named Don Fontana. He never really liked my voice as a soloist but in a section he couldn't go wrong because my sight-reading was beyond reproach. But it was a paycheck and it lasted for three years or so, until I was hired as the tenor soloist at Cal Heights Methodist Church in Long Beach. The operatic mezzo-soprano Marvellee Cariaga, wife of Dan Cariaga (music critic for the LA Times), was a soloist there and the first piece we did there was a challenging Easter cantata by a modern Southern California composer. It was rather challenging.
Then I got my favorite church job of all time, soloist at All Saints’ Church Pasadena. David Farr was the music director. His wife was the harpsichordist Kathleen McIntosh, and she used to carry her instrument around in a hearse. I was there for four years, 1974-1978. The previous tenor was Jonathan Mack, and when I found that out, I said to myself that if the conductor wanted Mack’s style of voice I was definitely the wrong way to go. I auditioned with the Deposuit Potentes from the Bach Magnificat, and I made a sufficiently good enough impression so that I was invited back for the REAL audition—singing in the Tenebrae Service during Holy Week. It was sort of a laid back place and before the service, we all tossed back a few glasses of sherry, then went in to work. After that, I got the job and they even played a few of my compositions there, an organ piece with the French title S"evader and a large scale anthem for choir, children’s chorus, organ and brass titled Christ as a light. They also did a few of my brass arrangements during services too.
Meanwhile, Robert Herr had established a semi-professional group he called the Robert Herr Chorale. We performed at several churches and actually gave a pretty good rendition of Bach’s B Minor Mass at the Pasadena Congregational Church. I always remember that performance because just before it I met actress Lindsay Wagner (in the "Bionic Woman" days). A few weeks later when we were rehearsing Bob walked in and announced that we were going to give a performance in the Mark Taper Forum of the Music Center. The other people seemed enthusiastic, but I went right up to Bob after the rehearsal and asked who had talked him into giving a concert in the Taper. He asked why? I told him that that room was designed for declamation and acting, not for singing. I told him it would be very difficult to hear in there and it would be like singing into a pillow. He persisted and we prepared to sing there. It was one of the great musical disasters of all time! More about it in a later installment…
Then there were all those other films he scored. Vangelis gave his first American concert at Royce Hall, UCLA, and naturally I had to be there. Of course by that time, I had purchased every recording of his I could find. I was a real fan and since I was working for KFAC at the time, I immediately called his management to set up an interview. I would speak with him two days before the concert in his bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel.
Needless to say I was jazzed. He occupied one of those two-story places they have there. His entourage consisted of a bunch of tech guys who knew his equipment needs backward and forward and could solve any electrical problem should once arise. I was taken downstairs which was really the bedroom area, and he had all of his keyboards set up, along with one of the newest machines of that time, a Prophet VS. Sequential Circuits had just given him one for a test run.
We chatted for about 45 minutes and regrettably, I have misplaced the interview, so I can’t put it up here. We talked about his music, past and present, and he was quite excited about a ballet he was working on. He was warm, friendly and very Greek, but his English was excellent.
The concert was wonderful, and the great thing was that I noticed that Jon Anderson of “Yes” was sitting behind me. Vangelis obviously knew he was there, and he motioned for him to come up on stage and they performed a few songs together. (If you didn’t know they ever made music together, check out the album, The Friends of Mr. Cairo.) The encore was brilliant, a set of variations on the song "Singing in the Rain."
Here is a little something I knit together electronically—the Bryan Ferry song "Will You Love Me Tomorrow?" along with the Love Theme from Blade Runner by Vangelis. It’s another one of those cases of—"it sounds like they were born to be together." Listen!
What is love? I still don’t know. After 57 years I still don’t know. I have a few ideas that I will share. It is perhaps an appreciation of another’s existence, and a willingness to allow that person to grow in whatever direction they desire. I know it is impossible to control someone else by force of will, and I was never into threats. One of the biggest problems with love is that there is always the tendency to be selfish and make demands of someone else.
I guess there is initially, the novelty of a new relationship, considering the possibilities of where it will lead. The look of someone new, their smell, the way they move, all of these things enter into the equation. I remember my first girl friend, back in 1970. She wasn’t a raving beauty, but she was cute and sexy. Almost all you had to do was look at her, and she would have a climax. Relationships were built on a different plane at that time. We would write letters to each other—long copious letters where we would try to express everything that was in our hearts and minds.
Of course another factor to think about is: When I’m alone with this person, it feels intimate and close, but what will happen when we interact socially with people? We can’t treat the love of our lives like Rapunzel and hide her away in a tower. What will I do if she doesn’t get along with anyone I know? Hopefully your significant other is not that dysfunctional, that he or she is unable to handle being with people. Then there is the other side of the coin—if I introduce my significant other to my friends, will they find someone they like better than me? You can’t be that insecure. If your relationship isn’t that solid, then maybe it was always on shaky ground no matter how much you like this individual. That might be the reason that I have always been obsessed with creativity, because it was and will always be a refuge when humans become too bizarre.
Sex? It’s always delicious and inspiring, but it can’t replace the solidity of being in proximity to a soul-mate, feeling that the person you are with cannot be replaced by anyone else. Sex cannot displace that wonderful sensation when the one you love goes off to be him or herself, to exist as an individual apart from you. In the fact that they come back to you like a faithful pet, that is tremendous.
I have a close friend whom I have known for more than 20 years. During the first three or four years, we were intimately involved. I have asked this person for the world at times. The fact that we still communicate is testament to the fact that there is a love between us, but it doesn’t have to be acted upon in any overt way. It just has to be felt occasionally. I am secure in knowing that this other person is always there if I need to talk, or feel a connection with someone else. I don’t know if this arrangement is enough for this other person, but it seems to be OK.
Bernard’s at the Biltmore- - One of the great French restaurants of the late 1970s in Los Angeles. By the second time you went into the place you were addressed by name. Coat and tie were mandatory. Lunch for two on average $70. Dinner with a bottle of wine $120. If you were a frequent customer you received complimentary French sauterne. It wasn’t Yquem but it was very good. Memorable things at Bernard’s: the live harpist; the sumac trees; filet of shark stuffed with a mousse of salmon and asparagus; the French 75s; escargot baked in a pastry; creamed mussel soup; their chocolate cake. I had a lot of memorable dinners and lunches there, and blew a lot of money.
My favorite thing to do was to wait until the manager of KFAC was out of town, and I would spirit away his German secretary to Bernard’s for a long lunch.
Marianne in Pasadena is long gone but it was a great place, especially for their private dining areas with the curtains that could be drawn. The artichokes stuffed with shrimp were nice, too. If you wanted some place less formal, there was always Monahan’s if you could get a seat in the Snug Room. Those were the days! I remember one Monday, Paul Mayo,
Wally High (we called him Captain High because he had a pilot's license), Bob Scott (Glendale College drama teacher), and I got together at Wally's place in Pasadena to have oysters on the half shell and some French chardonnay. After putting away a few dozen between the four of us, I hauled out a bottle of Monopolowa vodka (120 proof) and we had a few shots. Then we got into Captain High's big Chrysler (we called it "The Cocoon") and went off to Monahan's. We forgot it was Monday, so there were Howard and the boys on Channel 7, and we were in a booth next to the bar (standing-room only that night)--a memorable evening.March 15, 2008 7:30pm--Childish discoveries
I was always a precocious kid. Throughout elementary school I received straight As on my report cards. The only bad grades I received was for having a messy desk. Oh well… I remember being in the 8th grade at Rosemont Junior High School and the science teacher was Mr. Oliver. The assignment? Read a book about a scientific subject and write a report on it. Not being super familiar with a library at the time I went to the next best place, the news stand at the Montrose Pharmacy. There I found a book titled My Self and I by Constance Newland. It seemed like an interesting book about a woman who had gone through psychotherapy and her doctor had administered a drug known as LSD-25.
It was only 1962 at the time so no one knew about the drug, at least as much as people would know ten years later. The woman who was telling the story was trying to overcome frigidity, a difficult concept for a 12 year old to understand, but I soon realized it had nothing to do with her feeling cold. The descriptions of her hallucinations were quite unusual and bizarre, and very sexual. I knew better than to bring this up in my subsequent paper. It sufficed to discuss the history of the substance as discovered by Albert Hoffman who had worked at Sandoz in Switzerland. I wrote my paper and received a B+.
It was sort of a shock in late 1965 when I was with my cousin, Steven Ruiz, and he told me he had just taken some stuff called LSD. I told him all about the history of the substance and warned him to be careful. A number of times I visited Steve when he was tripping and it was quite an experience. The most noticeable characteristic were his dilated pupils and the fact he became infinitely more suggestible to any idea. This convinced me that I was light years ahead of most of the people who were my fellow students.
When I started listening to Ravi Shankar when he was first endorsed by George Harrison they all thought I was nuts. No one I knew could get their mind around Indian music. It took me about four months but the great light bulb over my head finally came on, and the glimmer of understanding crossed my face. I didn’t meet Shankar until about 1981, but it was one of the great experiences of my life. But that story is for another day.
I called it The Circular Path and it began with the sound of the ocean. It was hosted by the station’s program director Carl Princi and he started off by reading several definitions of the word music. He began with rather standard descriptions talking about pitches and rhythms, but then he moved to a more abstract definition that was more akin to the famous quote uttered by American composer John Cage--"Everything we do is music." I had read that statement for the first time in the book by the author of Understanding Media, Marshall Mac Luhan, titled The Medium Is The Massage.
Then the narration moved to a musical "chicken or the egg" question—which came first: melody or rhythm? I decided it had to be rhythm, since one of the first sounds that a human hears, pre-natally, is the pulse of the mother’s aorta. Of course I had a recording of that sound so the ocean became a pulse, and it sounded a bit like a timpani. Then that rhythm slowly faded into the constant drum pulse heard at the beginning of Steve Reich’s work, Drumming, and after a few minutes when the rhythmic figure had become more complex, it faded into the sound of African drumming.
Then we were off and running for twenty hours. The final program considered the future of music, with answers by various musicians and music critics. Perhaps the most unusual answer was the one given by composer Henry Brant, who stated that he thought humanity would reach a state of music pollution where performance would be outlawed because there would be “too much of a good thing.” The program finally ended with Peter Allen singing "Everything Old is New Again," the same live version that Ann Reinking dances to in the film All That Jazz.
Having said that, looking back on the early minimalism of the late 1970s I think it can be concluded that at that point the circle began again. After all, we had been through the Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, Romantic and Contemporary periods of music. In the latter period we had gone through serialism, doedecaphony (12-tone), aleatoric, and ended up with the complete spiritual improvisation by Stockhausen in some of his writings.
So let’s go back to the minimalism of Philip Glass. Steve Reich really seemed to anticipate Glass with his work Come Out—a work based on a tape loop of a young man saying the sentence fragment "come out to show them." By the end of the piece there are 8 simultaneous loops of the same voice and the sound has converted from English to a bizarre-sounding machine. The sound of the piece is like the sound of a phonograph needle stuck in the groove. That’s essentially the impression made on early listeners to Philip Glass’s music. However, astute people noticed how the music kept changing in subtle ways.
I remember the night I first saw the Philip Glass Ensemble perform at the Roxy on Sunset. It was an amazing evening and I attended the concert with William Malloch who for many years was the music director of KPFK in Los Angeles. The whole time I knew him for 20 years, he wore his hair in a long gray pony tail and sported a long gray beard. He knew a great deal about music. (I’ll explain some of his achievments in the blog later.) At that time the PG Ensemble featured Jon Gibson on sax as well as Dickie Landry. The singer was this attractive woman named Iris Hiskey, and it always seemed as though she never needed to take a breath. You can hear her perform some unbelievable stuff on the old Tomato release of Einstein on the Beach. If you’re interested in hearing some of the music of Philip Glass, go to Room 52 on the second floor of the Classroom. Take me there now.
Anyway, one day I was watching the news and they had a report about some new guided missile that the military was using. A film was shown of the missile slamming into a building and destroying it. Logically I asked myself, what would happen to me if I had been in the building at that time. I reasoned that I might be dead. But what did that mean? It meant "to not exist," but how would that feel "to not be here?" It became an obsession and for years I would try to understand what it was like to not be here, to be dead. It was a bit scary for a 4-year old to consider this.
It wasn’t something I discussed with anyone, after all, this was a private thing and I didn’t know how I would talk about the subject with another person. Then when I was about five I remember running across the street in front of my house (a small residential street) and almost being hit by a car that was speeding by. I didn’t buy the farm at that time, but it was close.
Of course then when I got to junior high I pondered being a funeral director. I knew a guy who was a cop but he was also a sometime embalmer. His name was Roger Peck, and he had a great sense of humor, but I never questioned him much about his work.
See what happens when you have too much time on your hands??March 12, 2008 10:25am--Minimalism and music
Many years ago, back in 1981, when I worked at KFAC, I worked on a mammoth project of 5 four-hour radio specials which I felt compelled to create because I had an idea that I needed to communicate and that was that music history moved in a giant circle, from simplicity to complexity and back again.March 12, 2008 7:55am--Thinking about the Grim Reaper
I just wrote that title and thought that maybe the Grim Reaper isn't so grim...maybe it's a woman who looks like Jessica Lange, who represents Death in the movie, All That Jazz? It happened when I was about four years old, and at that time (back in 1954), I was already hooked on television. I remember when I was in kindergarten how the teacher, a Miss Scheppers, called my mother and told her that I was disrupting the class. Why? Because I could already read. My mother told my teacher that she had nothing to do with it and it probably had something to do with my incessant viewing of television. This was prior to the time I used to stay up and watch the entire Jack Paar show, from 11:15 until 1:00am.
The one thing I quickly learned about him was that he had a direct sense of honesty. He was always a straight shooter and you knew that his answers were always blunt and perhaps unexpected.
I told him that I had heard that Richard Burton didn’t like him at first but that after Goulet went out and drank with him, he finally warmed up. He said that was sort of the way it went and related the following story. This was at one of the first rehearsals when the actors and director were just sitting around a table reading the lines of the script. Goulet was a newcomer to this milieu and when it came to the place where, as Lancelot, he had to profess his love for Guinevere (Julie Andrews), he was supposed to say simply "Ginny, I love you." When he arrived at the line, he pulled out all the stops and when it came out of his mouth, it was dripping with every bit of emotion he could muster. Burton responded rather disgustedly, “Oh my God!"
That certainly put a crimp in his shorts. It was several days later, and lunchtime. Goulet walked out of the theater and ran into Burton on the street. They repaired to a local bar and as Bob put it, "I kept up with him, drinking doubles. By the time we left, we were fast friends."
I did speak with Goulet one other time on the phone. We were doing a series of programs when Gower Champion died, covering the musicals he had directed (Hello Dolly, etc.). Goulet had worked with Champion in the musical The Happy Time. He came out with a surprising revelation and that was that Champion was always nervous during tryouts and opening nights. Goulet would find him sucking on wet towels because his gums were bleeding. Rather strange. Now wait till I tell you the story about Carol Channing…March 7, 2008 7:55am--Meeting Robert Goulet
You might have seen the altered photo of Robert Goulet among my photographs. If you haven’t and want to see it, click here. (The question: is the guy in the photo Robert Leno or Jay Goulet?) Anyway, I did meet him once back in the late 1970s when he was in Los Angeles to perform in "On a Clear Day You Can See Forever." We met in his dressing room at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and talked about that musical and the show in which he made his Broadway debut, Camelot.March 5, 2008 7:00pm--Bailing out early
You've heard me mention John Jensen the pianist elsewhere in this blog-a great pianist who lives currently in Minnesota. More about John further down the page. I knew another younger guy back in the early 70s who lived in the Glendale, California area. His name was Bill Morosi and he was in danger of becoming immortal. At the age of 16 he was already a formidable sight-reader at the keyboard. In fact, for his first public piano recital he played the Piano Sonata, Op. 1 by Alban Berg. That is a mind-blowing achievement for any pianist. Most who have played the instrument for 30 years may never even touch that piece. Its difficulty is astounding.
You've probably already read my mention of Charles Ives, who also wrote some knuckle-busting music. I was attending Glendale Junior College at the same time Bill was at Glendale High School and I invited him to perform at a concert of avant-garde music I was presenting at the college. He came by and performed the Three-Page Sonata by Ives, a very challenging work and he got the ovation he deserved when he was through.
In late 1971, there was a woman who was a student in the music department at the college, and she asked a bunch of us who were singers to come and give a recital at her temple. Although she was sort of a pain, we decided to do it, particularly because John Jensen was playing the piano for us, so he would make us all look good because his playing was so phenomenal. There were some other musicianly types on the show so while we were waiting for the big moment, John and I were sitting in the kitchen. I was going to sing a set of Ives songs, including things like Charlie Rutlage, Serenity, West London, The Side Show, and to close, The Son of a Gambolier. That is one of Ives most humorous numbers because the singer does two short verses that take about 90 seconds to perform, then there is a six-minute piano postlude. The thought of cooling my heels in the crook of the piano while Jensen completed his performance seemed a bit daunting, so as we were getting pleasantly smashed in the back room, I told him, "When I finish, just don't pay any attention to me, just finish the song." Never doubting my judgement, he said "Great!"
The Ives songs went very well and when I completed the second verse of The Son of a Gambolier, I marched down the center aisle in rhythm to the music, walked out the front door, got into my car which was about 20 feet away, and burned rubber as I took off to go home. I never went back and when I saw the woman who had invited us the next week, she asked me, "What happened? They said you left and never came back." I told her, "Well, I was finished, so I didn't see any reason to hang around." I don't think she ever took me seriously again.
March 1, 2008 8:20pm--Meeting the virtuoso David Munrow
Christopher Hogwood was for many years the resident keyboard player for the Early Music Consort of London under the director David Munrow, an unparalleled genius when it came to early wind instruments. I remember when the EMC came to perform at Royce Hall, UCLA many years ago and the place was packed to the rafters. Munrow was onstage with countertenor James Bowman, viol player Oliver Brookes, lutenist James Tyler, and Hogwood who, when he wasn't playing keyboard, played little drums and other percussion instruments. All these men were true stars of early music in the mid 1970s.
When they came out on stage, Munrow had an array of forty or fifty wind instruments lying on the floor around his chair, and when a piece of music would end, he would just lean down and pick up another instrument and begin to play—a truly amazing artist.
About a week and a half later he was dead, his life taken by his own hand at the age of 34. I met Hogwood a few years later but he was quite reluctant to talk about the whole thing. The only thing he would say about the Early Music Consort was that it was sort of like a three-ring circus. I heard that Munrow hanged himself in his barn, evidently out of a sense of intense guilt caused by an extra-marital relationship. For those who are curious, there is an audio of an interview between myself and Hogwood, recorded about 2003 when his ensemble The Academy of Ancient Music came to perform all-Mozart concerts with fortepianist Robert Levin. Look for the room in the Classroom marked Christopher Hogwood speaks. It should be there soon.
Anyway, one day I had the great man in the studio. He was quite intelligent and he knew A LOT about classical music. There was one incredible picture in his book of a live concert where he performed. There were three drum kits at the front of the stage, each with a kick drum emblazoned with the drummer's name—Gene Krupa, Buddy Rich, and Mel Tormé. Mel was a great drummer and there are not too many recordings of him playing the skins, but, there are a few. One is I believe of him playing drums on Cotton Tail in a Japan concert.
He was very cool, and in the intervening years he would occasionally call me to find out where he could find certain recordings he had heard on the air. When I produced airline shows he invited me to interview him at his house. In his living room was the last set of drums owned by Krupa. It was an inspiring environment.
It seemed that his greatest accomplishment was in the area of scat singing and you can find a room where scat is discussed and a great recording of Tormé is played over in the Classroom. If you go there, just look for the room titled "The Fog Blasts Off."
The most interesting person I ever met was Nicholas Slonimsky (April 27, 1894 - December 25, 1995). He was an amazing and at the same time a rather tragic individual. As he put it, he was a failed wunderkind, meaning I guess that his parents expected him to be a child prodigy but he never made the cut. He was born in St. Petersburg and as I understand it, he taught the last Russian czar's nephew the piano.
I remember the look on his face when I asked him about being in the search party that found the body of Julian Scriabin (Alexander's son) in the Dneiper River near Kiev.
He became very sorrowful and talked about finding "that poor little boy." A few years after that event, he decided to get away from the Russian Revolution. He went south to Constantinople where he became a pianist in a silent movie orchestra. A few years later he found himself where all artists in Europe eventually found themselves—Paris.
It was in this city that he met the Russian conductor Serge Koussevitzky. In 1925 when that man came to the U.S. to take over the leadership of the Boston Symphony, Nicholas came with him as his secretary. Suddenly he was in heaven, for two of the most famous contemporary composers of the early 20th century in America lived in New England—Charles Ives and Carl Ruggles. He got to know both of them and he became quite a champion of Ives' music. In fact he was responsible for creating the first performance edition of Three Places in New England by Ives. He met everyone and anyone, even Edgard Varese. Slonimsky even conducted the premiere performance of that composer's Ionisation. On top of that he was THE classical music lexicographer in the world, editing Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Music and Musicians for many years. I didn't meet him until he was 85 years old and living in an apartment on Wilshire Blvd. near Westwood in 1979.
Clyde Allen, the music director at KFAC during the time I worked there, also knew Slonimsky and during part of 1985 and most of 1986, he was kind enough to shuttle Nicholas from his home to the station. Thus, the great man made frequent appearances on my Saturday afternoon show. It was like having a treasure trove of music history in the studio each week. Of course I didn't just sit there and bow at the master's feet. I would often bring out music that he had never heard, written by composers he had known. He seemed to know every major writer in his century from Ravel and Gershwin to Ligeti.
Slonimsky did possess a few "savant" talents. For example, you could give him a date 2 or 3 centuries into the past or future, and he could tell you within about 10 seconds, what day of the week that date would fall upon. He was a guest on the Johnny Carson "Tonight" show many times—always witty and very entertaining. If you recall the PBS series The Mind, which aired during the late 1970s, Nicholas and I appeared at the opening of the "Aging" segment. WNET came over one Saturday and set up a camera in the studio and filmed us.
He ultimately lived in a house on Midvale in West L.A. He was fairly lucid until the end. I recall the last time I saw him at his home. He was slowing down a bit. Remember the famous fold-out picture of Nastassia Kinski nude with a snake wrapped around her prone body? Some wag had altered it and put Slonimsky's head on it. He had that picture up on the wall of his bedroom like a pinup.
Back at the beginning I said he was a bit tragic. My remark was made only because having died at the age of 101, everyone he had known in his life had died. He basically had to go out and constantly make new acquaintances. He was a terrific person and I would suggest you locate his autobiography, a book called Perfect Pitch. If you want to see audio and video of him, please visit: Otherminds.org then do a search for Nicholas Slonimsky. He wrote a number of books which are all extremely informative and pretty funny too. Long live St. Nicholas!
Working in radio in L.A. was an unexpected surprise. In 1972 when I was attending Cal State Northridge as a music major, I happened by the campus radio station one day and saw that they needed someone to host the weekly airing of live concert tapes made at the school, known as Faculty Artists Preview. I walked into the station manager's office and said that I would like the job because I knew how to pronounce most of the foreign names so I wouldn't be an embarrassment to the school. I got the job and it lasted for several years.
Then an opening came up to take over the Saturday night spot which was vacated by some radio guys who had split for greener pastures. The manager, Loretta Kaye, was stuck because she only had three days to find a replacement. I told her, give me the slot and I'll do something entertaining. She said I would have to submit an audition tape. I said "There's no time for that, just trust me." "What's the name of the show," she asked. I suggested Circular File. She found that too negative.
Then I said, "How about Fred??" She said, "Fred? Sounds pretty silly." I replied, "No, How About Fred—with two question marks." For the next several years, How About Fred?? became a staple on KEDC and KCSN. There usually involved some spoken material, such as stories or poetry, and a lot of different types of music. I tried to keep it light-hearted.
I quit Northridge in September 1973 and went to work in a photo processing lab, however, I continued doing the radio show. By chance I called KFAC and spoke with the guy who was the FM Programmer at the time, Dennis Parnell, and inquired as to openings. He told me that the man who pulls and files records in the library was quitting in two days and I could have the job because he knew I was quite knowledgeable in music.
I showed up for an interview with the program director Carl Princi. He could tell I was serious. I got the job and remained there for 13 years. More about this great job as time passes.
Back when Charles Ives was starting out in music, he was a kid growing up in Danbury, Connecticut. Being a musician at that time (late 1800s) was thought of as a rather effeminate profession. Therefore, according to men, it was not a desirable occupation. When other young people asked Charlie what he played, he would reply "Shortstop!" He felt trepidation about admitting to anyone that he was a musician.
Regrettably, we seem to have swung back to that state of affairs. As I was falling asleep a few nights ago, my t.v. happened to be switched to one of those reality shows and the participants were a bunch of young girls (no, these were definitely not women) about the ages of 16-19. You could tell that they all had overly large egos but no talent whatsoever.
They obviously don't get it that they might appear more sexy, more mysterious, more intriguing as people if they did possess a talent they could exploit. Of course, if that were the case just imagine how intimidating that would be to all the members of the opposite sex they met. Look at young musicians today like All are attractive and severely talented young musicians. The average guy with his head shaved and a few visible tattoos would be of no interest to these women (and they are definitely women). Do I even have to mention how sexy a cellist is, particularly in the way she holds the instrument.
So if these are desirable traits, why aren't there more young and talented musicians? Because they are afraid of being looked down upon by their friends. When I was in high school, I knew a bunch of people who had no interest in music but that did nothing to deter my education. I simply ignored them and felt sorry for them because they had not discovered the big truth. Music unites people no matter who they are. If you were a proficient violinist and found yourself in an orchestra in the middle of the Czech Republic, the music you were playing would unite you with every one else. Even if you couldn't speak the language, you could still get along.
You've probably never heard of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra. The idea of the ensemble was conceived in 1999 by two artists and intellectuals: an Israeli, Daniel Barenboim, and a Palestinian, the late Edward Said. They decided to create a workshop for young musicians from Israel and various countries of the Middle East with the aim of combining musical study and development with the sharing of knowledge and comprehension between people from cultures that traditionally have been rivals. In this workshop, young musicians build upon their musical knowledge while living side-by-side with people from countries that may be engaged in conflict with their own. Through the cross-cultural contacts made by the artists, the project could have an important role in overcoming political and cultural differences between the countries represented in the workshop. In this model, an orchestra serves as a good example of democracy and civilized living.
This is an amazing group of people and you should hear them play. It's quite inspiring.
Anyway, if you're not involved in music, think about it. It's a satisfying way to spend a life, and you are participating in something of a historic nature, while the rest of your buddies are cooling their heels on the sidelines.
When I worked for AEI Inflight producing audio programs for airlines,, I used to create a show called Dateline Delta. For one program I had to interview the conductor and former musical director for the Red Skelton Show, David Rose.
If you don't remember him, he wrote such memorable melodies as "Holiday for Strings" and "The Stripper." Other than the facts so far revealed, I knew little about him. I arrived at his home a little after lunch time and was met at the door by his wife. She led me into a kitchen appointed with professional gas ranges and refrigerators. Finally, Rose showed up and led me to the living room, where he made me a drink of scotch and soda.
He began to explain to me his job at the NBC radio affiliate in Chicago, and how he had to improvise at the piano if a program ran short. I didn't realize that he had once been married to Judy Garland. He was probably glad I knew nothing of that.
We spoke for over an hour, and I knew what my last question would be. I had heard that he owned one of the world's largest collections of steam engines. He said that he did, would I like to see them? Absolutely was my response. He ushered me into a room in back of the house that measured about 40 x 60 feet. There were hundreds of steam engines in there, from tiny ones that would fit in your hand to gigantic ones that occupied a corner of the room. He even had a small steam locomotive and cars that was operational and ran around the perimeter of his property. It was utterly amazing. He said that the most expensive thing about it was the non-polluting coal he had to purchase from Ireland.
We know that Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt, and Vincent van Gogh, but have you ever examined the work of the Pre-Raphaelites? They were a group of painters in England who worked around the turn of the 20th century. They were fairly modern naturalist painters who were trying to maintain the ideals of the old painter Raphael. I've posted a few up here just to get you curious. Perhaps the most astounding one, because of its surreal quality is The Lady of Shalott by William Holman Hunt. Isn't that painting breathtaking, and her hair? Outrageous. But look at this one known as Beata Beatrix by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Those are the figures of Beatrice and Dante in the backgrouned. The model was Elizabeth Siddal. She was Rossetti's wife and she had been dead for about a year when he painted this. Here's one more to look at The Blind Girl by John Everett Millais. Another dynamite creation! Anyway, you can find books of them and they are great to look at and think about.
Honorable mentions: In a Glass Cage; King of New York; Paris,Texas; Being John Malkovich; The Name of the Rose; The Usual Suspects; Fargo; The Deer Hunter; Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead
I didn't really encounter serious music until I was in junior high school, but I recall winning a contest when people were supposed to write an alma mater song for the school. Since I had no experience with composing, my solution was to merely write words appropriate for the school and set it to a pre-existing melody. My choice was "Far Above Cayuga's Waters," which was an alma mater for some college. My setting won the contest, but I wasn't gloating yet about musical knowledge.
When high school began I became one of the staples in the a cappella choir. The director was a sprightly woman in her late 30s, although at the time no one had any idea how old she was. She was very energetic with a strong motivation to teach. She introduced me to the recording by E. Power Biggs titled Bach Organ Favorites. His recording of the Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor was my first musical obsession. When I heard the way the passacaglia theme stubbornly persisted beneath all the variations, I would listen and just sing the theme along with the recording. Suddenly, I perceived an order to it all. Then I became obsessed with trying to hear the logic in any piece of music. Most music was not as profound as Bach's but it was still satisfying.
Then she turned me on to pianist Glenn Gould and his recording of the first book of the Well-Tempered Clavier.
Understanding that music was another amazing journey, and when I started college I began to learn some of the pieces in spite of the fact that I had never had a lesson at the keyboard. I picked the D major fugue from Book II and it took me about five months to learn it.
Fingering, what was that? I didn't think about that for another five years. I just played the notes and tried to make it sound right. It was a great voyage of self-discovery and you should all at least try it. You don't have to play an instrument, but merely begin to understand how music fits into history and joins with the other arts as the backbone of a culture and a civilization.
I had never heard anything like it before in my life but my head was completely turned around after that experience. I was never the same. I had to hear every piece of music that Ives wrote, gobbling up everything I could, from Three Places in New England to the four symphonies and the Holidays Symphony. Of course those astounding songs! And fortunately, I knew John Jensen (pianist referred to below) so he could play all the accompaniments. Few people who were students knew about Ives in the early 1970s but his music was like the psychedelic drugs which had become popular. Paul Mayo used to have me come in and give a lecture on modern music for his music appreciation classes since I became an authority on the subject.
It was dynamite to look at the expressions on students' faces when they heard the Fourth of July for the first time. I played Ives' music for all my girlfriends and they probably thought I was nuts. For most his music was incomprehensible. Then in 1979, I met a person who was very important in the life of Charles Ives--Nicholas Slonimsky. More about that great man, coming up!
About five months later I was down in the lobby using the Xerox machine and there was a small lady in jeans sitting on a nearby couch. She told me her name was Jill. We had a bizarre experience together one evening at the beach in Santa Monica. As we were standing on the sand looking at the Pacific, it suddenly seemed as though our thoughts were occupying the same space. It was an amazing sensation, and I can only say that I had never before experienced that sort of unity of spirit. The only thing I knew was I didn't want the feeling to stop. It was something more intimate, more private than sex. I never looked at her the same way after that. We were never physically involved and there didn't seem to be a need to do so. I had been inside of her and she had been inside of me.
After the school year, she hung around West LA for another year or so, then she moved with her boyfriend to Haight Ashbury.
We kept in touch, basically letters an occasional phone call. Then she moved to Vermont with this guy. I was in Glendale College by this time, and she finally told me she was pregnant. She had a daughter who was delivered by her husband one night in the middle of a snowstorm. Since I had begun to write music I wrote a large-scale work in tribute to this event, and the title of the work was her name--Soyala Breen. Soyala is a Hopi Indian festival that celebrates the rebirth of nature with the coming of spring. It was in three movements: Conception, Gestation, and Birth. The Glendale College Music Department really supported me in this. It was scored for mixed choir, brass quintet, flute quartet, solo oboe, solo tenor, and organ. Playing the organ was Phil Harry, whom I had met at Occidental College when he was putting together his senior recital. Tom Oberheim, inventor of the famous keyboards, brought over a few ring modulators to alter the choral sound for Phil's concert. Phil, by the way, gave the American premiere of Volumina, the massive organ work written by György Ligeti. Remember Ligeti? He was the man who wrote the various modern orchestral and choral pieces that Stanley Kubrick used in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Anyway, Jill and her significant other came out for the premiere one Sunday afternoon, and it was an amazing event. She has continued to live in New England and became a professional midwife. She has delivered hundreds of kids. She always told me she was the Earth Mother, and I guess it is true. Soyala graduated from the College of Santa Fe. Time flies...
I've watched all five years of it a number of
times and never get tired of any of it. The very last episode is crazy in its
own way. I'm not going to give anything away, just see it.; It will give you new
insights on both life and death. When I attended Glendale College in the early
70s (after being kicked out of UCLA for lack of academic scholarship), I
decided to major in the subject I had always enjoyed--music. One of my teachers
was a youngish man named Paul Mayo. He was in his mid late 30s and he
practically became the father I never had. I knew him and his family for more
than 40 years. He encouraged me to write music when I had professed a vague
interest. My first effort was a cantata like piece that utilized the directions
for using Drano drain cleaner as the basis of a text for chorus. The opening of
the work was a piano solo called "The Agony of the Clogged Drain." It
was admirably played by the virtuosic talent of John Jensen, a truly brilliant
keyboard artist who is the music director of a church in Minnesota (oof-da
oof-da). He looked a bit like Brahms when he played. There were choruses and
arias for the voices. I recall when we first performed it, we actually had a
sink and a toilet sitting on the stage as props, and during the final chorus.
whose words were CALL PHYSICIAN AT ONCE, as the voices faded away, we played a
recording of a sink draining. The audience and the performers probably thought
I was crazy but...Fred Bock, the head of Gentry Publishing, was interested in
printing it, but the makers of Drano did not like the idea of their
instructions being treated so trivially. They would not give us permission.
Bock did end up publishing a piece of mine the following year--Reflections from
the Porch Swing, a rather Ivesian take on 23 old American songs, lasting about
3 minutes. It was in the early 80s and Filmex was part of
living in L.A. The Los Angeles International Film Exposition! During the years
it was ensconced at the Century Plaza Theatres, I practically lived there. It
was a great place to see unusual movies like Peter Weir's The Last Wave
for the first time in L.A. The guy who introduced many of the films was Dennis
Bade (who currently works for the Los Angeles Philharmonic). The voice who
spoke many of the foreign titles to the movies over the added Filmex logo was
Anneliese Goldman, who we affectionately referred to as "Vox Filmex."
One of the founders of Filmex, Gary Essert
decided to put on a gala tribute to Elizabeth Taylor at the Los Angeles Music
Center in the Ahmanson Theatre, and I was hired to be the offscreen voice who
had to use his wonderful stentorian voice to say things like "Please
welcome to the stage Mr. Gregory Peck." It was quite an evening and I got
to meet all the stars in attendance: Gregory Peck, Roddy McDowell, Julie Bloom,
Maureen Stapleton (Who was acting with Liz at the time in a production of The
Little Foxes), special guest of the evening Bette Davis, and of course,
Liz. This was at the time Taylor was married to Senator Warner so there were
all sorts of Secret Service jokers running around. I unexpectedly ran into Davis during a private
moment. I walked into this one room that was THE BAR--just a room filled with
every kind of liquor imaginable. Davis was sitting there by herself, not
drinking, looking rather sad and forlorn. I didn't speak because I just didn't
feel like it was right for me to even address her. The great moment was when I was sitting at my
roost behind the microphone and Liz came by and gave me a look with those
purple eyes. I wanted to melt right there. I thought of the famous moment when
she had been married to Burton and a former husband, Eddie Fisher, walked up to
Richard and said something like: How is it getting what I used to get? The
great Richard came back with something like "After I got past the place
you had used, it was all right." The crazy moment for the evening was when
they showed an excerpt from a foreign film Liz had done called IDENTIKIT, which
featured a scene where she was into some sado-masochism on screen. How
shocking! January 27, 2008--11:09 am--Duke
Ellington When I was about 23, ca. 1973, I was singing
in a semi-professional choral group known as The Robert Herr Chorale in Two weeks later we were told to arrive at a
temple on Olympic Boulevard in January 26, 2008--2:11pm-- Henryk
Szeryng and Spalding Grey I remember the time I met violinist Henryk Szeryng
at the Hilton in Spalding Grey came to mind. We met in Comments are appreciated. Send me an e-mail. Include the word BLOG in
the subject!
March 1, 2008 3:00pm--Meeting singer Mel Tormé
I met singer Mel Tormé in 1981 when I hosted the KFAC Artsline which aired Monday thru Friday from 11 am until noon on KFAC AM. We had phone-ins with guests, and that year I worked seven days a week. I was on the air every day. It was intense. I had four days off the entire year and on those days I was sitting at home, thinking…Why am I not at the office?February 25, 2008 8:30am Meeting a failed wunderkind
February 23, 2008 - - 1:00pm Working in Radio
February 20, 2008- - Attitudes among the young toward music
violinist Hilary Hahn (I've met Hilary and she's a charming person and highly intelligent!)
or trumpeter Alison Balsom
or pianist Gabriela Montero.February 18, 2008 5:30pm—The man who did not sit on a tack
David Rose sat on a tack; David rose. That was a joke my mother used to say.February 18, 2008--12:45 pm--The Pre-Raphaelites
February 18, 2008—Favorite movies
No. 1 films (There couldn't be just one)—Apocalypse Now, Blade Runner, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
2. Wings of Desire
3. The Man Who Fell to Earth
4. Days of Heaven
5. House of Games
6. Berlin Alexanderplatz (Yes! All fifteen hours!)
7. 1900 (Yes! The 5-hour version shown on the Z channel years ago)
8. The Hotel New Hampshire
9. In the Realm of the Senses
10. Sophie's ChoiceFebruary 17, 2008 6:40am--How an obsession with music began
I began to listen to classical music when I was about 12 years old. I remember the wonder and mystery I felt the first time I heard Bolero by Maurice Ravel. I recall hearing Capriccio Italien by Tchaikovsky for the first time and marveling at the orchestration. February 9, 2008--12:30pm--A New Beginning
This morning I was struck by a new idea. If you want to see it follow this link to the classroom. Or alternatively, just hit the classroom button on the website's first page.February 7, 2008--1:00pm--The composer who changed my life
When I was a student at Glendale College in the fall of 1968, I was in a total quandary about what to do. I had just been booted out of UCLA and felt like a total failure. I knew I wanted to major in music, but felt like I was a rank amateur. I began to work in the library and handled the upstairs reserve desk where they kept phonograph records. While going through the collection looking for things I had never seen, I happened upon a piano recording by the German pianist Aloys Kontarsky. He was playing a piece called the Concord Sonata by Charles Ives. I had no idea who Ives was, but I put on the record. After about fifteen seconds, I was completely hypnotized. To hear those fifteen seconds, click
here.February 6, 2008--10:15am--An incredible person
I've met a few special people and one of them was during my fateful year attending UCLA (1967-1968). I was a resident at the first off-campus dorm at the school. It was called Weyburn Hall and if you look you can find a website for it. 1000 crazy people lived there, and it was a spacey place. The first day I was there I met a rather thin fragile looking young man who owned a sitar. It was the first I had ever seen up close. My acquaintance with East Indian music happened when I was 16. I didn't meet Ravi Shankar till about 1982. But more about that later. This fragile fellow had actually studied for six months with Shankar. He was a trip. I went out to dinner that first evening with him and another fellow who looked like a stereotypical hippie and he had a thick chestnut beard. I recall him telling me that his name was John and that he came from Venus. That will give you some idea of the place.February 4, 2008--8:30am--About one of my photographs
Jenice was a lovely girl I met at Glendale College in 1971. It was totally a chance meeting. I was sitting in one of the piano practice rooms there playing a piece by Erik Satie titled Venomous Obstacles. It's a rather funny sarcastic piece. As I was playing I saw a face looking in the window. When I finished I opened the door and this young lady said, "What was that?" I told her and we were in the midst of a conversation. She was Catholic and a former student at Providence High School in Burbank. I found out she was the accompanist for the voice class taught by my friend Paul Mayo. I went to one of the classes where she played and watched her. Soon I had invited her to a piano recital by Charles Fierro, an instructor at Cal State Northridge. Soon we were deeply embroiled in an intimate relationship. She was just the sort of curious girl from the early 70s who wanted to experience everything, and we did, for about two years.February 1, 2008--6:30pm--The reason why a child shouldn't be skipped a grade
When you're going through something as a child you may have no idea what the consequences may be down the road. Here's a warning--if you're ever a parent and the elementary school calls you up and says "We want to put your son or daughter into the next grade, because they're so advanced," tell them no thanks. I went through first grade in two weeks--why? I was in a class that was half first graders and half second graders, When I was given crayons and art paper to draw upon while the second graders were getting instruction in cursive writing, what was I doing? Trying to write of course. And a few weeks later, my teacher, a kindly older lady named Mrs. Stone, imformed me that I should sit on the other side of the classroom. I had no idea had been promoted., but I finally figured it out by the time I was in third grade and all the kids were at least a year older than I was. People thought I was smart, and I used to bring home all As. Everything was fine until I got to junior high and high school. Then I was suddenly out of sync with everyone. By the time I was a junior in high school, I was the age of the sophomores and got along with them much better. All of a sudden I didn't care for the people in my grade, and I didn't make many friends when I was a senior and we had to take a class called government. I had the toughest teacher in the school and he liked me right off the bat, so much so that he asked me to write the weekly current events test for my class. That was something that did not endear me to the rest of the people in class, because I got an automatic A grade, and I could make the test as tough as I wanted. Oh well,so if they try to skip you or your offspring a grade, don't do it, because seven or eight years down the road, you WILL know the difference.
January 31, 2008--12:30pm--Six Feet Under
The best series I've ever seen on television! When I was 13 years old, I
had an interest in becoming a funeral director, because I felt that I could
give solace to the bereaved. I learned quite a bit about the funeral biz. Just
sold my 1896 edition of The Art and Science of Embalming on EBay a few years
ago, and it fetched $150 or so. I finally gave up the idea because I realized I
would need to own my own place of business, and I didn't know that I wanted to
go that far. The funny thing was my friends all thought I was very morbid, but
one of them, a tall slender gent with a sepulchral voice who went out and
joined the US Air Force, ultimately became the head funeral director at Mt.
Sinai Memorial Park in L.A.
Anyway, the TV series was great, especially
in the way the family members were "haunted" by the ghost of the
father (who died in the first episode), and the other recently deceased folks
who come back to visit David, Nate, and Rico. The women were stunning, from
Francis Conroy to Rachel Griffiths to Lauren Ambrose. Joanna Cassidy as
Brenda's mother is a hoot. When I saw her I immediately recalled her as one of
the replicants in Blade Runner (Zhora). As M. Emmet Walsh says, "You've
heard of Beauty and the Beast--she's both." Kathy Bates was also good.January 29, 2008--1:30 pm--First efforts at composing
January 28, 2008--5:30 p.m.--The Elizabeth Taylor Tribute
