Little Georgie's Blog-a-Thon

Daily Dose #72 "And So It Begins...."

2018-03-07T10:45:00.000-05:00

The blank screen stares at you. The blank page dares you. A glaring, white, mocking flung gauntlet.

“Just who do you think you are?” It asks. It aims directly at all the things that scare you the most. All that you fear. All your insecurities. All your perceived deficiencies, and all those that hide in the shadows of your unknown blind spots.

And so it begins. You either face all those fears, or you don’t. Not playing the game is always the third move on any chess board.

Its an internal confrontation, and one frankly, that I’ve been avoiding for quite some time. I reached a point in my life where I was just exhausted from waging a war with myself inside my own cranium. Call it battle fatigue, post traumatic stress syndrome, or whatever you want.

I retired. I got tired of failure. I got tired of loss. I needed some peace.

So I moved to Sodus Point in Wayne County, NY, USA to become “A gentleman apple farmer”. I was due for a major battery recharge, and this is where I found it.

The Gentleman "Apple Farmer"

I made a new life with someone I loved and someone that seemed to love me back. The genesis moment of a new me, really. I tended the “farm”. Cooked and cleaned, made sure my woman was taken care of. Toiled in the gardens, took care of the critters, fixed up the house… learned new skills that eluded me in my previous nomadic musician’s existence. I learned how to be simple. I learned how, above all else, to preserve my tenuous hold on my own sanity without the benefits of serotonin re-uptake inhibitors and lithium. I learned how to meditate. I learned that is was ok to just STOP. Take a break. In this case, it was a five year time-out.

One of the casualties, or collateral damage however you want to look at it, was that I stopped playing the piano for a few years. I wrote a song once about the piano being “the only thing that has never let me down”. That may be true. Perhaps I just got tired of letting IT down (and more importantly, letting my friends and people I truly loved down through the medium of playing the damned thing). It became pretty evident to me that no matter how hard I tried, I was never really gonna master that 88 keyed beast to the point where I was going to be able to play what I actually heard in my head.

Sorry, piano. It's been great fun, but like with any substantial future ex-lover, painfully it was time to say "Au Revoir". "Arrivederci". "Ciao". "Auf Wiedersehen". "Sayo-the fuck-onara". The future is now.

There was a lot of saying “goodbye” to a lot of things. Primarily, the definition of “self”. “Tear it Down, and Build it Up Again”. I was more than content stripping a deck, weeding gardens, walking dogs, and plunking on a ukulele every blue moon.

Exiled On Fitzhugh Street. A place to let go, relax, and empty my overflowing and chaotic monkey brain

I didn’t exactly stop being creative, however. I just directed my creative energy, and the disciplines I learned through a lifetime of creativity (and the music biz), and applied them to other things.

So I went on to other projects, and other objectives. I wrote a lot. Created a lot of content in the forms of Internet Dog Beauty Contests, Blogs, a video cooking show with my Dad that almost got off the ground, to continue to experiment with some theories and predictions I had about Social Networking Platforms (which proved to be pretty accurate). Worked a straight job that was deeply connected to the underbelly of the State and Federal government (Fun; even wildly compelling, but ultimately my exposure to sausage making in the political “Arena” was starting to be bad for my health...and Karma. Someday, I may write about those experiences, but in the meantime? I kinda like being above ground and breathing.) I got passionately involved in environmental activism concerning hydrofracking in NY State.

But ultimately, no more music, and most definitely, no more “Little Georgie”. That set of clothes was just getting too binding; Confining. and I was beginning to get used to being fat and more specifically, centered and happy for once in my life.

Every once in awhile, my old life would reach out with an offer that involved music and I would have to be as gracious as possible while internally promising to myself that I wouldn’t turn into Al Pacino in Godfather III (“Just when I thought I was out….They pull me back IN….).

Or at least they were trying. I’m pretty slippery these days. Must be all the olive oil.

Some very prestigious and plummy studio production offers floated up from New Orleans with the production company I used to work for (those ones were tough to say "no" to), along with little local gigs, and bands looking for a “keyboard player” (I don’t even know what the fuck that IS, even… I’m a piannaplunker, and a hack at that at best...those ones were rather easy to say "no" to).

I always graciously and gratefully thanked folks for thinking of me and advised them I was “retired”, just hoping that the phone would stop ringing. It eventually did.

I still kept a bit of toe dipped in the music pool, though. In retrospect, I think I was always “cheating” a bit by doing so. I was still journaling, writing poetry, stuffing shoe boxes full of ideas and possible songs that would never see the light of day… maybe. It was a tiny ember, not the raging wild fire that its always has the potential to become. Man still needs fire, or at least a way to start one.

Several offers did come in from a few regional studios over those years, to specifically try and convince me to do a “spec” deal for a new Hungarians record. That was really the only bait that I would bite at and rationalize myself into a position of “un-retiring”.

The best part of being a musician, for me anyway, is recording. The studio is sacred ground. That’s where the real challenges reside. Ultimately, the goal is to leave something behind that is of lasting value, but to get there? All of your creative cylinders have to be firing at full strength.

Can you do it? Do you have anything to actually say? Can you write it? Can you organize it? Can you hear it? Can you execute it without compromising your vision, and thus your standards and principles? Can you calculate the distance to the far off target? Determine trajectory and escape velocity and come within a few light years of actually hitting it?

Here’s my cardinal production rule: If you feel yourself rationalizing and telling yourself “it's good enough”... it isn’t. Recording is an exercise in pushing yourself, and your boundaries, to a place you’ve never been before, and that place doesn’t have a safety net or fall back position. When you take it on, you better find a way to swim, because the only other alternative is drowning.

It's the ultimate “making art” experience in music, but when done right, it’s not for the weak willed, half assed, or feint of heart. All in, Baby.

Scary shit.

So I took those meetings with those studios. All fine facilities, all run and staffed by fine, adept and capable people. And yet there was always a red flag that would pop up.

One thing that I’ve become very facile at in my advanced years is recognizing red flags. In the past, I was ego-centric enough to think that I could overcome any red flag that would present itself.

I’m not that guy any more. Now? When I see even the potential for a red flag being raised, I run to the nearest exit. Especially when it entails a collaborative dynamic on the actual art that is the sole intellectual product of my own imagination. You dig?

Nothing really truly resonated at those meetings. There was always something that just didn’t feel right. The methods. The pitch. The room. The deal. Little White Lies or Tiny Sins of Omission. Hidden Agendas that became apparent after the fact. Bad communication skills. A lack of true transparency. Lack of Focus. No chemistry.

Always something a little jenky; suspect motivations that indicated the tip of a shit sandwich: Surreptitiously revealing itself and was definitely going to be on the menu down the line. I was going to be required to eat it with a smile on my face to get the opportunity to make and realize my vision, and then take on all the attached challenges of having that vision be judged.

So...fuck that. I’ll stay retired, thank you very much. I wasn't ready for those types of human clusterfucks. I'm still not.

From a business perspective, I understand the motivation of making the offer. Studios exist to make money to keep running. I respect that. And yes, amazingly enough, there is still an “Hungarians Cache”, if you will. Locally, and in a more minor capacity, nationally and internationally. There is a fan base out there, still; a testament to a great band, a great team that assembled and supported us behind the scenes, the work produced, a great design and a great concept. It was built to stand the test of time, and so far? It has.

Spitting out a Hungarians recording would present a lot of social networking opportunities as well. In the course of my career I’ve travelled in some rarified air at times. It was certainly possible to score a bunch of heavy ringers in terms of players and participants, if there were any kind of budget involved. I have “connects”, and if you’re talking about photos and videos being released over the term of recording, mixing, mastering, and producing finished product, combined with an integrated and funded marketing initiative, all of it being produced in your facility? It isn’t a bad business idea for a studio to get behind it.

These meetings usually started with “I saw a Hungarians video on facebook, and I was amazed after all these years at how many views it got”. Leading with the metric data. Red flag #1. Again, from a business perspective, totally understandable… no harm, no foul. Just not where my head was at. Then things generally de-evolved and went downhill from there.

So invariably, it was back to the apple farm and self imposed exile. And it was all good.

Until I got drunk with The Mole at an Syracuse Area Musicians Award show in 2016. Then shit changed. More on that in the next installment of “Why George Decided To Open Pandora’s Box And Accept The Consequences Of Opening It”

Down The Rabbit Hole...or in this case, Down The Mole Hole.

"You may shoot for the stars and end up beaten and bloodied in a back alley behind Pluto, but at least I dare to dream; that’s better than being Earthbound mired in the muck of mediocrity"

I judge my forward progress and success by the crushingly epic nature of my failures.

The more epic the crash, the more I’m convinced I must be doing something right.

AS ALWAYS: PLEASE FEEL FREE TO COMMENT, SUBSCRIBE, AND SHARE THIS BLOG ADDRESS VIA COPY AND PASTE IN AN EMAIL, THROUGH THE TWITTER OR FACEBOOKIE "SHARE" BUTTONS,WORD OF MOUTH, FILTHY WHISPERED GOSSIP, FALSE NARRATIVE, TIN CAN AND STRING CONFIGURATIONS, PONY EXPRESS, OR CARRIER PIGEON. WITHOUT FEEDBACK OR ACTIVE "SHARING", WHAT YOU JUST READ.... DOESN'T EXIST!

COLONEL BEAUREGARD "IRON THIGHS" JEFFERSON, A.K.A. "THE MANAGEMENT"

Daily Dose #71 The Owl And The Pussycat: "A Lake Boy Tale"

2016-04-03T10:41:00.001-04:00

While cruising my facebook feed in utter boredom, I stumbled across this video posted by my childhood friend Meegan; (basically, the prototypical object of teen aged affection and totally untouchable girl-next-door; in actuality across the street and three doors down, if you want to get technical about it.)

I usually don’t bother with animal video posts; I made a personal oath that after the “Kitty at The Keyboard” viral phenomenon they as a general rule, were to be avoided. But my curiosity got the best of me. I bit the bait and clicked through.

Here’s the cliplette:

Now I don’t know if (at the time of this writing) that 622,000 views are an actual “Japanese Internet Sensation” or that according to the copy, “An unlikely friendship between a kitten and owl at a Japanese cafe takes the internet by storm”, but it’s a nice little visual metaphor that seemingly polar opposites can get along; as long as one of them has a shackle on its leg, anyway.

It reminded me of a poem of my early childhood read to me by my mother, Edward Lear’s “The Owl and The Pussy Cat”.

I responded to my friend’s post, thanking her for jogging a forgotten memory.

“Thank You for this. Linda (being that she was the girl-almost-next-door, my friend was familiar with my Mom’s first name) used to read “The Owl and The Pussycat” to me as a child. I’m going to call my Mommy right now and tell her I love her”; which of course elicited a cursory “like” from Meegan.

Now in all honesty, being inspired to call my mother out of the blue to tell her I love her is a pretty rare occurrence. It isn’t that I don’t, but my relationship with The Lovely Linda has been anything but smooth for the past forty five years or so.

We always seem to be locked in mortal combat and find ourselves in a state of perpetual loggerheads. It has frustrated both of us for decades, and we never seem to come up with a solution to actually fix the problem; we just sort of go through cycles of “detente”, followed by slow but constant irritation with each other complete with barbed dialog that could have been penned by Edward Albee as “George and Martha” exchanges from “Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf”.

The cycle then finally gets punctuated with a major flaming blow up that resemble the human equivalent of thermonuclear war, scorched earth, and periods of radio silence until one of us blinks…. usually me.

I guess we just would never accept each other for various reasons. She constantly would be trying to change, control, or psychoanalyze me against my will for the sheer entertainment value. (She’s a licensed therapist, among other things). I was constantly seeking her approval but on my own terms.

And I think we both were a little co-dependent on keeping the war on going.

Although every family gathering was eventually identified as a toxic battlefield environment, it wasn’t without its benefits. You girded and armored yourself to wage war if called upon in preparation before walking through the door.

She always initiated the opening gambit and attack, so I had to be in a constant state of readiness; to match wits, intellectual acumen, oratorical skills, game theory, the ability to read red flags, to stay twenty moves ahead on the three dimensional chess board of argument, to summon all of your critical thinking and cognitive resources, and then finally realizing in a nano second “moment of truth”, your own rat-brained ruthlessness.

The intellectual Achilles Heel and soft white belly of vulnerability of argument would reveal itself. You would have to quickly calculate the moment of opportunity before it happens, and when it finally does? Pounce without hesitation as you drive your diamond tipped stake of logic through the heart of the most worthy mental adversary you have ever known. Matricide or Infanticide. There was no middle ground.

We kept each other pretty sharp through the years, though. Our twisted idea of “Family Fun”.

As I have aged, I can say that all of those skills became pretty finely honed. My “wins” became more frequent, but they came at a great cost. We just exhausted each other.

I finally realized that the only solution to ending the war was not to play in the first place. I know it seems rather simplistic, but after a particular egregious back stabbing betrayal delivered by “Dear Old Mom” (She had recently discovered she could play "off the board" and behind my back), I asked myself this question:

“What if I didn’t seek my Mother’s approval? What if I could truly and completely, not give a tumbling fuck about her validation? How would this change the situation and eventual outcome?”

This epiphany didn’t actualize without some real soul searching, focused navel gazing and heavy psychological lifting, but it was in effect eventually actualized. I just stopped caring, and in doing so, stopped playing the game and walked out through the metaphoric breezeway of Linda’s “Arena Of Pain” for good. Ultimately, it was as easy as flicking a light switch to the “off” position. Why hadn’t I thought of this mental perspective mind-shift move forty years ago?

I didn’t announce this. I just did it. She didn’t know what had just happened of course, and this drove her absolutely batshit nuts; frankly, an intended and foreseen side benefit. The constant and reliable sparring partner and her personally self trained warrior / gladiator “Prince” had turned into passive, pacifist dud.

But I digress.

Upon considering the memory of my mother reading “The Owl And The Pussycat” as an itty bitty baby child to me, something strange and wonderful happened.

I started by just trying to remember. Every evening before bedtime she would read to me. She would sit in the green and gold flecked Paul McCobb lounge chair with the nubby fabric upholstery, and invite me with open arms as she asked, “What do you want to read”?

I would always consistently grab my big little book of Lear’s poem, as it was my favorite. She already had it at the ready of course, and would gently pick me up, and nestle me into her lap with my head resting against her breast.

We’d open the book, and she would hold my index finger as she recited; tracing the words from left to right on the printed page (Her hidden agenda of course was to get me reading by the age of two; an agenda point of many which was successfully achieved in her constant quest of engineering an “uber kid”).

She would always assume the characters in different voice; Tres Dramatique! And always considerately pausing after every second page so I could fully absorb the pictures of The Owl and beloved Pussycat as they ventured out to sea in their beautiful pea green boat.

When finished, there were always the obligatory “Again Mommy….Again!” repetitive encores, until I floated off on waves of sleep to the strains of an imaginary small guitar.

I hadn’t thought of these events for over fifty three years. A memory completely buried, and pretty much totally suppressed.

And then it happened.

The memory ceased to be a memory, and it became totally sensory.

Like a wall caving in, or a levee breach, those feelings that I felt as a child and those sensory memories suddenly became real. In the moment, those atrophied synaptic pathways to the actual experience as it happened in real time became suddenly supple and efficient. They powerfully overtook my conscious state and completely washed over me like a tsunami. I ceased remembering being a child and for a brief moment, became that child in the here and now.

I could smell her skin, her perfume, and the acrid aroma of stale cigarette smoke. I could sense the dim light of the floor light next to the chair. I felt my soft fuzzy flannel little blue onesie with the pink bunnies on it against my skin. I could see my little index finger tracing the words, her beautiful hand guiding it as she recited the poem. I could see the pictures exactly as I saw them, but if as seeing them with rapt joy and delight for the first time. I turned the pages as her sweet voice paused. I could feel her heart beat next to my temple, the rhythm or her breath as her chest gently started to lull my head into slumberland. I could feel her pride, her approval, when she pointed at a word or phrase and I started mastering the art of reciting them back to her; I could hear her and my own little voice inside my head as we recited the poem together in unison; knowing the words by heart, me always trying desperately to match her cadence, and she mine.

I felt the safety, and the absolute power of my Mother’s love.

I felt and sensed it all very suddenly. It took me by surprise, and it was… overwhelming. These weren’t memories, they were happening in that moment. I can’t say that I wept, but I certainly lost my bearings as it happened. I inadvertently astral projected into my two year old body in 1962 with a total loss of cognitive control.

I haven’t felt that safe and that unconditionally loved in a long time. As a matter of fact, probably never have I felt that way as I felt it right then, as a little boy in his mother’s lap.

My sensory flashback stripped me down to my very core with an absolute albeit brief, clarity. It was, for lack of a better term, a spiritual experience.

I immediately called my Mom, as I promised my former neighbor I would.

And just as I have recounted this tale to you, dear reader, I recounted it to her. The video, where it came from, how it inspired me to call her, and then this unexpected mental event that blew me away.

And then I said: “Mom… I know that things have always been rough between us, and I know I don’t say this to you as often as I should or could have…. but I truly love you. I hope you know that”.

That point had to meet its target, surgically aimed and delivered with confident, yet powerfully loving force. We aren’t getting any younger. She’s no spring chicken, and I’m long in the tooth. The time to deliver the message without equivocation or failure, was now.

There was a dead silence, and a pregnant pause way past its due date on the end of the line.

And then… she recited “The Owl and The Pussycat” over the phone, word for word and chapter and verse, just as she had done over fifty three years ago, without missing a beat .

I joined in halfway through the first stanza, because I knew those words by heart. So did she, and those words connected our hearts together, and they miraculously (and unknowingly until now) still do.

The Owl and the Pussycat went to sea

In a beautiful pea-green boat,

They took some honey, and plenty of money,

Wrapped up in a five-pound note.

The Owl looked up to the stars above,

And sang to a small guitar,

"O lovely Pussy! O Pussy, my love,

What a beautiful Pussy you are,

You are,

You are!

What a beautiful Pussy you are!"

Pussy said to the Owl, "You elegant fowl!

How charmingly sweet you sing!

O let us be married! too long we have tarried:

But what shall we do for a ring?"

They sailed away, for a year and a day,

To the land where the Bong-Tree grows

And there in a wood a Piggy-wig stood

With a ring at the end of his nose,

His nose,

With a ring at the end of his nose.

"Dear Pig, are you willing to sell for one shilling

Your ring?" Said the Piggy, "I will."

So they took it away, and were married next day

By the Turkey who lives on the hill.

They dined on mince, and slices of quince,

Which they ate with a runcible spoon;

And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,

They danced by the light of the moon,

The moon,

They danced by the light of the moon.

As we recited the poem together, my defenses compromised and my shields crushed, real tears silently streamed down my face in the light of the moon.

After this beautiful moment with my mother, she then paused and said, “Well...that was lovely, but tell me; What are you going to do with the rest of your friggin’ life with what little is left of it?”

If we had been in the same room, and she had a runcible spoon handy, she probably would have gouged my eyes out with it just to make her Oedipal point.

C’est La Vie, C’est La Guerre. I love you, Mommy.

THE END.

"You may shoot for the stars and end up beaten and bloodied in a back alley behind Pluto, but at least I dare to dream; that’s better than being Earthbound mired in the muck of mediocrity".

I judge my forward progress and success by the crushingly epic nature of my failures.

The more epic the crash, the more I’m convinced I must be doing something right.

AS ALWAYS: PLEASE FEEL FREE TO COMMENT, SUBSCRIBE, AND SHARE THIS BLOG ADDRESS VIA COPY AND PASTE IN AN EMAIL, THROUGH THE TWITTER OR FACEBOOKIE "SHARE" BUTTONS,WORD OF MOUTH, FILTHY WHISPERED GOSSIP, FALSE NARRATIVE, TIN CAN AND STRING CONFIGURATIONS, PONY EXPRESS, OR CARRIER PIGEON. WITHOUT FEEDBACK OR ACTIVE "SHARING", WHAT YOU JUST READ.... DOESN'T EXIST!

COLONEL BEAUREGARD "IRON THIGHS" JEFFERSON, A.K.A. "THE MANAGEMENT"

Daily Dose #73 Goodnight, Sweet Prince

2016-03-10T20:23:00.004-05:00

Huckleberry checking out the new kitchen floor at "The Sedge Wedge"

Last November, after a year of tumult where at one point I was living in spartan hotel room with three dogs in the Adirondacks, we finally settled into our new home in Syracuse.

Traveling, and being responsible for a menagerie of two aging Shih Tzus, a young 80 lb rescue retriever with a boundless source of dog energy, and a cat that sometimes resembles a criminal mastermind capable of great evil mischief, is not without its challenges.

So all of us here at the Sedge Wedge were pretty relieved to finally take possession of our new domicile and finally start our lives, all together. No more hotels, no more disruption. We may have been surrounded by a pile of boxes, but contained within were the familiar smells of our old home, and our old routines.

Huck and Doo dig Elvis

We barely made it all together across the finish line. Doodle (Huckleberry’s litter mate and little sister) took ill over the spring and summer. Being the runt of the litter and kind of snatched from the jaws of eminent death as a little tiny puppy, she had a few genetic / physical defects; primarily a little hole in her heart that got progressively larger through thirteen human years. Her heart sounds like a out of balance Maytag washing machine in the throes of an agitation cycle from hell. Her little ticker has a tendency to slosh fluid into her lungs, causing all sorts of problems, including passing out from oxygen deprivation.

So this became part of life last year. Emergency Vet visits, and a pretty complex daily chemical cocktail to keep her alive, pain free, and relatively healthy and happy. The pill pocket people (and the dog pharmaceutical distributor) love me, and probably have a portrait of Doodle hanging in the vestibule of their front offices, an engraved brass tag attached reading “Our Benefactor”.

We did in fact, finally turn the key, and the corner; or so we thought anyway.

But we didn’t. Huckleberry suddenly came up lame in his right front leg. This wasn’t exactly abnormal, as Shih Tzus are notoriously jenky in the joints, and there have been many dislocations of shoulders and legs; particularly when Huckie decides he’s super dog and calculates he can negotiate soft landings after launching himself off the bed and becoming airborne as he attempts to save the free world from...the epitome of all that is unholy, the cat!

After shopping for a new vet, transferring paperwork, and going through several visitations and second opinions, I got the bad news. This was no jenky joint. Basically he was suffering from degenerative bone disease, and was slowly becoming paralyzed, from front to back on his right side, and eventually, in total.

So the new house became a hospice care center, as I tried to allow him to squeeze as much life out of this world as he could, relatively comfortable and pain free.

Our days were spent with him by my side in the man cave, him listening to me practice the piano. Something that we used to do quite a bit in New Orleans, but not so much during my time up in CNY. He likes Beethoven Piano Sonatas, tolerates my butcher job of Chopin, and prefers the dirty boogie woogie. His tail wags telegraphed the tale of the scale.

Huckie truly loved munching on his "snowbies" (His cue word for snow)

My nights were spent ferrying him cradled in my arms, taking him outside every hour on the hour. He didn’t necessarily have to do his business (Although that did become problematic over time; How are you supposed to pee when you can’t lift your leg without falling over? This became a source of painful confuzzlement). Basically, he just wanted to eat as much snow as he possibly could, and I was happy to oblige. It kept me from having to subcutaneously hydrate him with an I.V drip bag and a needle; a task neither of us looked forward to.

So basically, I’ve been a 24 hour on call nurse, and haven’t had a night’s sleep in two months. My sleep deprivation is so severe that I’m in a constant hallucinatory state. Forgive me if this blog doesn’t contain my usual verbose flourishes.

I didn’t want to flick the switch on Huck out of personal convenience. I ushered him into this world, and he trusted me to take him out on his terms, not mine.

He fought right to the end. His spirit? Indomitable. Inspirational, really. Of all the gifts he gave me over thirteen years of love and loyalty, this last lesson he taught me may be the most valuable.

We had a pleasant last day. The weather broke, so he could smell the onset of Spring and the aroma of the dirt wafting up from it’s Winter slumber one last time. He got to sit in the sun some.

Huckie's Last Supper

He laid next to me all day, licking the thin veneer of shaving gel off my face and neck (Edge shaving gel: Puppy Crack). Sloppy work but what the hell. Doodle and Gingy joined us for a last supper of freshly cooked bacon, his favorite treat.

And as the hours ticked down my anxiety ratcheted up. As the knot in my stomach commensurately rose into my throat as we got closer to having to leave for the vet, it was all I could do from totally losing my shit. Driving while crying isn’t exactly a good idea. Huck always knew when I was in trouble and turmoil. I tried to shield him from the disturbance in my heart and mind the best I could for his last day in the material world.

I can rationalize to infinitude concerning my ultimate decision: ("He's in a better place", "You did the humane thing", "He'll be there on the other side waiting for you"....). All of those rationalizations ring hollow today.

He was my constant; my little rock that amazingly kept me tethered to the earth's surface for 13 years and three months, preventing me from floating off into the ether. All the shit that life throws at you (and life is capable of heaving enormous piles of shit), little Huckleberry was right next to me on the front line, a loyal soldier taking fire. He never wavered. He was my raison d’etre, because he was my responsibility, above anything else. He loved me without question and I him.

Swaddled in his favorite fuzzy green blanket, nestled comfortably in my arms, he didn’t know what hit him. He was gone five seconds after the shot was administered.

A big chunk of me left with him today. Life without my running partner of thirteen years is a great unknown. It’s too soon to make a total emotional damage assessment, but I’m afraid it’s going to be more critical than I could ever have originally projected. Time will tell.

I’m extremely grateful to be surrounded by the love of my remaining furry children, my family, and my partner Michele. They surround me and prop me up when I'm about to dive bomb into the abyss.

We never got to have that wing ding in Hawaii (More on that later; stay tuned kids). My hope is that he is surrounded by Hula girls, munching on spit roasted swine, with the strains of slack key guitars and ukuleles softly lilting through the gentle ocean breeze.

Goodnight, Sweet Prince.


Huck and Doo at a Lua at the imaginary "Million Dollar Bash" in Hawaii

My best friend, ever. Huckleberry Rossi (12/10/02-03/08/16)

"You may shoot for the stars and end up beaten and bloodied in a back alley behind Pluto, but at least I dare to dream; that’s better than being Earthbound mired in the muck of mediocrity".

I judge my forward progress and success by the crushingly epic nature of my failures.

The more epic the crash, the more I’m convinced I must be doing something right.

AS ALWAYS: PLEASE FEEL FREE TO COMMENT, SUBSCRIBE, AND SHARE THIS BLOG ADDRESS VIA COPY AND PASTE IN AN EMAIL, THROUGH THE TWITTER OR FACEBOOKIE "SHARE" BUTTONS,WORD OF MOUTH, FILTHY WHISPERED GOSSIP, FALSE NARRATIVE, TIN CAN AND STRING CONFIGURATIONS, PONY EXPRESS, OR CARRIER PIGEON. WITHOUT FEEDBACK OR ACTIVE "SHARING", WHAT YOU JUST READ.... DOESN'T EXIST!

COLONEL BEAUREGARD "IRON THIGHS" JEFFERSON, A.K.A. "THE MANAGEMENT"

Daily Dose #72: Rock and Roll College, St. Louis Style

2016-02-26T15:48:00.000-05:00

Old St. Lou

Wedding Band Perk: THE TROUGH

Back in 1987, I was playing for the first time in my life in a commercial cover / wedding / party band with Gary Frenay and Arty Lenin (The Neverly Brothers) and actually making a decent living playing music. So much so, I decided to ask my girlfriend at the time to get hitched, and so we did. We didn’t have a lot, but money was consistently rolling to the point that we could fund our own wedding, save up and maybe buy a house someday. Start an adult life, albeit a little late in the game.

The Neverly nights were filled with club work, and our weekends with double days of weddings, where usually the budget for plastic garbage bags exceeded the budget for the band. But no matter; we ate well (I really learned how to stack a plate in buffet lines for maximum power eating in one pass during this time), and we still made a few shekels and simoleons. Enough not only to pay the bills, but to accrue some savings and still have enough left over for new gear and personal entertainment.

As a full time working, paid musician, if you really wanted to see a first run movie, you had to hit a matinee in the middle of the week at our friendly local neighborhood monument to corrupt, crass commercialism: The Carousel Mall.

Some flicks took precedent over others. Whenever a true rock and roll movie hit town, I was there. When “Hail, Hail Rock and Roll” was theatrically released, my bandmate Gary and I were intent on experiencing it on the large screen. It doesn’t get more rock and roll than Chuck Berry and Keith Richards, Peep-A-Roos. We were there at the first day, first screening, and were the first in line at Ye Olde Multiplex.

As a kid voraciously reading anything he could get his hands on to learn the secret codes of rock and roll, every once in awhile you could pick up a tidbit in an interview that might appear in such mags like Crawdaddy, Creem or Rollingstone (Back when music journalism was a serious art form).

Best Rag EVER

Those rags could lead you down the real and righteous path. Usually it came from a British rocker talking about American Blues, Soul, R N’ B, and Rock and Roll. Being born well after the golden age of rock and roll of the 1950’s ( In my case, I executed the reverse vaginal canal spelunk in 1960), one first learned about Elvis, Buddy Holly, Little Richard, Early Motown Artists, and The Everly Brothers through interviews with Beatle people, and you learned about Muddy Waters, Chess Records and Chuck Berry through interviews with Stones people, specifically Keith Richards. He was always generously intent on citing influences and main contributors to his listening diet of major influence. But in a little piece probably buried in the way back of some article back when I was 13 and just starting to play piano, I read a little paragraph quoting Ian Stewart (The Stones’ original piano player and then road manager), citing Pete Johnson, Albert Ammons, Meade Luxe Lewis, and Johnnie Johnson as the only piano players you ever had to listen to to master everything you needed to know about rock and roll. All the rest “were shit”, in the Sixth Stone’s book anyway.

My Trusty Pioneer Tape Deck

When I was 13, I thought I was going to end up PLAYING in The Rolling Stones (Curse you, Chuck Leavell: You took my gig!)) so of course, this is where I had to start; picking apart their styles note for note on a reel to reel tape recorder set by the family piano, with the tape playing back at half speed to decipher screaming velocity old school Kansas City boogie woogie and Johnnie Johnson’s swinging St. Louis style.

Johnnie, by 1987, was just a major part of my musical DNA by then. To get the opportunity to watch him finally play, and play within the context in which I spent countless hours studying his style? Priceless. I was ready to see the movie multiple times at the multiplex.

Chuck and Johnny: The Architects

I can’t say that I was overly impressed with the flick. It had its moments of authenticity, but ultimately Chuck Berry came off as kind of a prick, and the concert footage (especially with the “guest vocalists” and “ringers”) was rather an obvious, slowly lobbed, marketing cheese ball deluxe; the aesthetic equivalent of drizzling melted Velveeta on an already gilded lily, and shriveling its petals.

Just give me the rock and roll, straight with no chaser. Too much monkey business, for my tastes anyway.

But there were two elements in that film that changed my musical quest, and my life’s trajectory, forever.

One was seeing and hearing Johnnie Johnson, up close and personal, the piano mixed up front with true sonic integrity. His hands were the size of canned hams! No wonder he made it sound so effortless.

The other was the rhythm section of Steve Jordan on drums and Joey Spampinato on bass. It was ear opening and enlightening to hear a relatively modern duo of players that absolutely and completely “got it”. They did not forget “The Roll” in the crucial equation of “Rock and Roll”, as defined by one of its architects, Chuck Berry. The casting of these two players in the section was a stroke of musical directing genius on the part of Mr. Richards. They were THAT perfect.

Steve Jordan

So when the accompanying disc and VHS cassette were released, it was back to the half speed mastering deck, but this time to dissect what Jordan and Spampinato were doing, as well as Johnnie Johnson. The closest thing I could ever do to fantasize playing with these masters. I knew I’d be chasing the elements of that groove for the rest of my life.

Gary, of course, knew how moved and now motivated I was. Over time, he couldn’t help but notice just how much my playing had improved. As a wedding gift, he did a little research through some relatives in St. Louis and produced Johnnie Johnson’s home phone number. I could actually talk to him, if I screwed up enough courage to do so. You know me. I went big, called him and pitched him on me coming out to St. Louis for a week to study with him. Slightly bemused, and in retrospect, totally drunk he said, “Sounds like a winner to me!”. I told him I would make some plans and get back to him.

So plans were made. Plane tix bought, Cadillac rented, Wads of whatever available spending cash accumulated, accommodations at Gary’s brother-in-law accounted for; all the while continuing my conversations with Johnnie to keep him abreast of the dates, and all the while selling the idea of spending the collective marital cash to my blushing bride on going to the college of rock and roll knowledge, in lieu of an actual honeymoon.

Two days before the flight, I called Johnnie to tell him the exact time I would be arriving. He then said, “Who?”
Shit.

Not taking no for an answer, I just asked him where he would be at 10pm on the date of arrival. He gave me a name a club his combo was playing at, and I told him I would be there. This was going to be a total improvisation that could go south at any moment, as the trip was already well on its way of being a total bust.

I arrived in Old St. Louie under the cover of darkness. Grabbed the bag, scored the rental Caddy, and headed out to the “club”, which turned out to be a ramshackle wooden shed that sat in the shadow of an oil refinery belching flame into the night sky, located in East Jesus Bumfuck, Missouri.

Upon entering the shack, I spotted Johnnie. He was in the corner propped up against the wall, three sheets on the way to four to the wind. A pickup band was playing a slow blues, and the bar had about four totally inattentive greasy roughnecks downing shots and beers after their shift.
I waited for the band to take a break, and talked to the guitar player. He explained that Johnnie often checked out during a gig, but he would try to wake him up for me. Johnnie mumbled something I couldn’t understand, but then said, “Sit in with the band and finish out the night.”

So I did. He soon nodded out again, so I don’t know if I actually proved anything to him, but the band seemed pleasantly surprised. Too late to wake Gary’s relatives, I slept in the Caddy that night.

The next day, I picked Johnnie up which was basically a project tower building for old folks. We went to Denny’s for breakfast, and thus my adventure with Mr. Johnson officially took flight.

First stop, a drive through at a package liquor store, something in my tender years I did not know existed, let alone question the overall insane concept that it was actually legal to score a quart of Crown Royal, a personal baggie of ice, and a go cup like you were picking up a Big Mac and fries “to go” behind the wheel of a car.

This was always the second stop of the day. We drove around St. Louis all day in air conditioned Cadillac comfort as he introduced me to all his friends and relatives. At first, he would say “This is my friend Gawge...he came all the way from Seeeracyoose New Yo-wuk just to study piano with ME!”. He was so proud of that fact, it didn’t really matter that we never really did seem to get around to actually playing piano together. He was having a blast being chauffeured around in a brand new Caddy showing off his freaky little long haired white boy disciple to all of East St. Louis.

At night we would maybe go to one of his gigs, where he would promptly play a couple of tunes, cede the piano chair to me, and then find another corner to prop himself up upon and promptly pass out.

I spent the week sleeping it off in the parking lot of his building after somehow miraculously driving the Caddy back to his apartment to drop him off for the night. He finally took mercy on me and allowed me to crash on his couch for the remainder of my visit. I was starting to get a little ripe by then.

So a week turned to two, then to three, and finally edging towards four. Every day followed the same pattern, with a couple of exceptions; one was that during his introductions of his little long haired friend, my location of origin became further and further distant until it became, “This is my little friend Gawge...he came all the way from Istanboool just to study piano with ME!”

The other was that he introduced me to his inner sanctum of family, both past and future, in the form of his son that he hadn’t talked to in several years, and his future wife Frances and step daughter Chaz (Of which I still maintained a friendship with long after he died). He was that proud of my appearance in his life, and to this day, that still makes me feel good.

My future ex-wife Penny was very understanding at the time. I did get to play with some of St. Louis’ finest blues musicians, and I sure as hell was learning how to function completely soaked in scotch 24/7, but I still hadn’t succeeded in getting an officially taped interview, let alone significant time seated at the piano with him; which is why ultimately, my stay became an extended one. Every time I called home to break the news that I once again changed my return flight home she just said, “Do what you hafta do”. She knew I was on my vision quest.

But I finally had to set a hard date for return. Life couldn’t be put on hold forever.

I was finally scheduled to fly out on a Sunday night. On Saturday Night, we partied particularly hard. We both ended up curled up in two separate balls of red hot drunk mess, he in his bed, and me on the roach infested couch. At 7am, there was a violent, constant knocking on the door, a woman’s shrill voice screaming Johnnie’s name.

Disoriented and still smashed, I opened the door a crack. Before me was a variation of Moms Mabley: a little old lady in cat’s eye glasses, in all her gummy denture-less glory; decked out in a blue, stained tuck and roll house coat, fuzzy slippers, and support hose that, elasticity exhausted, had settled in rolls around her ankles.

Still screaming, but now in my face, she bellowed, “You tell Johnnie Johnson to get his lazy ass outta bed, and FUCK ME RIGHT NOW!”

Not quite having the faculties to deal with this um, delicate situation at that particular moment, I feebly tried to run interference by making some excuse for him.

“Don’t give me any of your shit, boy! Wake his ass up right now, and tell him he’s gotta fuck me... fuck me good, and RIGHT NOW!”

What could I do? I woke him up.

“Johnnie, there’s a lady out in the hall raisin’ a ruckus. You better go talk to her”.

He stumbled out of bed and into the hallway. She yelling, he trying to calm her down in his inimitable charming way outside the apartment door, and me on the other side awaiting further instruction.

He stuck his head inside the door.

“Uh, uh, uh, Gawge… I gotta go for a couple of hours. I’ll be back soon”.

The door gently closed, but he did a double back and stuck his head back into the apartment.

As a consolation as my last time, and last chance to perhaps corner him on the piano in the common room of the old folks home was slipping away before me, he conspiratorially whispered, “That’s the widder Whitehead…. she eighty five years old, but she got the pussy of a fiddy year old!”

Come to find out that the reason Johnnie could have had a comfortable life at Frances’ house but chose not to and maintain his own digs, was because his main gig was regularly servicing all the hens in the assisted living community henhouse. He was, if anything, in high demand. Guess hands like canned hams were only just one of his estimable attributes.

I fell back on the couch to sweat it out in the Sunday morning St. Louis heat, stewing in my Crown Royal fed juices, and Crown Royal fed delirium.

He came back a few hours later, refreshed.

“OK, Gawge. Grab your stuff, let’s do this”

We went down to the common room. In the height of hangover the light and stupefying heat was brutal. I set up my Marantz field recorder, and my copy of the liner notes of the Chess Records Chuck Berry box set. And then we both sat at the piano bench. He tuned a small transistor radio to a St. Louis Cardinals game at a low volume to keep tabs on the home team, and then cracked his knuckles.

I can’t begin to tell you what then transpired, but with the liner notes as our guide, Johnnie told all, and played all for about four hours. Every lick, every story, every influence, everything he could possibly recollect, all punctuated by musical examples. The road stories. The stories of being taken advantage of, by the Chess Brothers. By Chuck. The never ending flow of the architectural history of Rock and Roll by one of its more unsung, but acknowledged designers. And tons of four handed jamming duets. A wealth of knowledge and a well I could drink from for the rest of my life. And frankly, a mother lode of validation. When Johnnie Johnson says, “I like how you did that...show it to me”, um, it really doesn’t get much better than that.

And I got it ALL on tape. Still do, and those cassettes are still one of my most prized possessions.

So I packed up my gear, headed for the airport, returned the Caddy (of which now had a massive crease in the left side front quarter panel, the rear bumper hanging by a thread, and rolling on a donut; Thank Jesus for high limit credit cards and insurance) and headed home.

When I threw the suitcase on the bed, all I had left was my recorder, the liner notes, and the magic beans, the recordings. My cassettes of that four hour Sunday session with Johnnie and what seemed to be hundreds of purple cloth Crown Royal bags with gold pull strings in various sizes. I had pretty much lost everything else, including most of my clothes and toiletries.

My future ex-wife looked at my bloodshot eyes derisively.

“I hope it was all worth it….”, she snarled.

It was, but I really couldn’t explain why. I may not have initially learned much about Rock and Roll pianna plunkin’, but I sure learned how to drink, and drink big. And I ended up with an epic tale to tell.

I saw Johnnie once after that. I convinced a local Syracuse BBQ and Blues emporium to book him for a Sunday afternoon concert, and The Hungarians backed him up. I fleshed out all the “Johnnie B. Bad” songs and the Chuck Berry book with full horn charts, a gospel trio, a percussionist, and a B3 player (That would be me). Twas an epic afternoon, the house couldn’t have been packed any tighter, and he was thrilled at the absolute ridiculous hugeness of it all and all the heaps of Salt City love received. We remained phone buddies until he passed away back in 2005.

Although my course of musical study has wandered far and wide since those days, Johnnie is always in there; a part of my creative DNA functioning as an essential amino acid. He’s the foundation of how I interpret and express my soul at a molecular level.

If you rock, then you MUST roll. Them’s the rules, according to Mr. Johnson.

"You may shoot for the stars and end up beaten and bloodied in a back alley behind Pluto, but at least I dare to dream; that’s better than being Earthbound mired in the muck of mediocrity".

I judge my forward progress and success by the crushingly epic nature of my failures.

The more epic the crash, the more I’m convinced I must be doing something right.

AS ALWAYS: PLEASE FEEL FREE TO COMMENT, SUBSCRIBE, AND SHARE THIS BLOG ADDRESS VIA COPY AND PASTE IN AN EMAIL, THROUGH THE TWITTER OR FACEBOOKIE "SHARE" BUTTONS,WORD OF MOUTH, FILTHY WHISPERED GOSSIP, FALSE NARRATIVE, TIN CAN AND STRING CONFIGURATIONS, PONY EXPRESS, OR CARRIER PIGEON. WITHOUT FEEDBACK OR ACTIVE "SHARING", WHAT YOU JUST READ.... DOESN'T EXIST!

COLONEL BEAUREGARD "IRON THIGHS" JEFFERSON, A.K.A. "THE MANAGEMENT"

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2014-12-10T08:39:00.004-05:00

The President Makes A Whistle Stop In My Olde Home Towne....

2013-08-21T14:56:00.000-04:00

President Obama will be embarking on a bus tour of Central New York, making a stop in Syracuse on Thursday August 22nd, 2013.

He's going to give a to give a little talk concerning educational opportunities at Henniger High School. According to the White House, he will presumably discuss and promote the "importance of ensuring that every American has the opportunity to achieve a quality education by reducing cost and improving the value of higher education for middle-class students and their families."

This is quite an honor for the Salt City. The Presidential spot light carries much more weight to cities that have struggled to survive the economic climate that has prevailed in the post 9/11 era, along with being seriously caught in the swoon of the economic meltdown of 2008.

Its also been rumored that on Thursday Night the entire Presidential Entourage will be staying at the ultra exclusive and chi-chi Mirbeau Spa in my home town of Skaneateles, which sits on the northern tip of one of the freshest bodies of water in the US.

Skaneateles Lake is part of the water supply for residents of the city of Syracuse, with over 250,000 humans dependent on access to clean and plentiful water.

(A disclaimer: I've been involved in the anti-hydrofracking grass roots movement in New York State for almost five years now, and administer a facebook page called YOU CAN'T DRINK MONEY.)

Many people on the grass roots level have worked tirelessly to protect Skaneateles Lake, and thus the water supply for a densely populated area, as gas leases were signed willy nilly in the gold rush that is high volume, slick water, hydrofracking. So far, a moratorium on the practice has held for five years, and Skaneateles Lake got a special layer of dispensation that would make it slightly less profitable to frack about and around its shores.

President Obama has been recently quoted as calling the US "The New Saudi Arabia Of Natural Gas", and is about to sign off on opening federally controlled lands to widespread fracking, among other initiatives. He has adopted an open and official stance of "Damn The Torpedoes, Full Speed Ahead". His usual stance of at least perceived caution and pragmatism has been clearly discarded for a "Drill, Baby, Drill" policy that out Sarah Palins Sarah Palin.

He's making James Watt look like a bonafide tree hugger.

I'm a supporter of the President, and voted for him twice. I'd be a liar if I didn't mention that lately I've been pretty disappointed with some of his policy decisions and administrative actions, especially those revolving around energy and natural gas extraction in the US.

So the irony of the President on a promotional tour and taking a break to enjoy one of the most naturally beautiful places in New York State that many have busted their collective asses (at great personal and financial risk) to protect from the industrial dangers of high volume, slick water, horizontal hydrofracking hasn't escaped me.

Mirbeau Spa, Skaneateles NY

The more I think about the Presidential Bus Tour stopping in Syracuse and having an overnight in Skaneateles, the more galled and appalled I become considering his stance on hydrofracking.

He will be speaking at a high school ostensibly to talk about the "opportunity to have achieve a quality education".

Those of us involved in the anti hydrofracking movement are concerned with much more simple opportunities. The opportunity to access of clean water, to not have the risks of the oil and gas industry externalized onto an unknowing and uneducated public, by the unethical re-writing of laws and regulations that were bought and paid for by an industry that has proven over time to be wholly incapable of any type of transparency or self-regulation. This is so much more than a straight up environmental issue.

Aside from the absolute public relations tone deaf gaffe of tossing the majority of your New York populist support under the wheels of your tour bus by having a "spa night" like a Pasha (Axelrod and P-Fluffy: Are you listening?), I'd like to make a suggestion:

Stay in Skaneateles if you must, Mr. President, but stick to your principles and the industry rhetorical bullshit that you have embraced and don't turn on the water taps in your luxury bathroom.

Don't wash your hands, hydrate yourself, have bowel movements, brush your teeth or take a shower during your visit.

And if you must urinate, relieve yourself by the side of Route 20 in full sight of your secret service detail.

Or better yet, if you are insistent on propagating this absolute hypocrisy, just go piss up a rope.

I, as did many other of your constituents, voted for you because you were the smartest guy in the room.

That never gave you Carte Blanche to act like the biggest asshole in the room.

YOU CAN'T DRINK MONEY, MR. PRESIDENT.

Daily Dose #69: The Bee Boy / A Lake Boy Tale

2013-08-17T08:09:00.001-04:00

Back when I was a little shaver (around 4), we used to visit my Momma's best friend's camp on the western shores of Owasco Lake. Both friends had several kids around the same age, so it was always a lazy summer day hang. The rote routine: Swimming, playing in the woods, macaroni salad, hot dogs and lemonade for lunch, nappy time on the front porch, more swimming, and then packing up and getting home before Dad arrived from work.

I was the youngest in that combined gaggle of goslings, so I was always running around trying to play "catch up", and the older kids were always trying to ditch me. Such is the social dynamic of groups of children. The youngest is always the outcast, bringing up the rear.

One of the pastimes enjoyed was "Penny On The Rails". A real live train used to run on the west side of that lake back in the early 1960's, and right through that camp like clock work at high noon.

So all the kids would take pennies and put them on the tracks, go eat lunch, and after the train rumbled through, run and collect their squished copper coins.

The older kids would always get there first, so by the time I brought up the rear, all the flattened pennies would be scarfed up. It was always an exercise in futility for me, but I never stopped trying to be part of the action.

One time while chasing after them, I stepped right on a yellow jacket nest in my barefeet, wearing only my plaid swim trunks. As the angry little beasts swarmed all over me, up me, and in me, I really didn't know what to do. I knew to stay away from bees, but when you're covered from head to toe with them within seconds, including having a mouthful of them.... I kinda was at a loss, and in shock.

I called to my brother and sister, but they were way ahead of me on their penny retrieval mission... so I turned around and tried to get back to the camp, where my mother and her friend were laconically cleaning up from lunch, smoking cigarettes and sipping their afternoon decompression cocktail.

I must have been some sight. I was a half-pint, walking, talking festering, robot bee hive. As my mother tell the tale, she would recount "You couldn't see any SKIN!...just bees".

My mother has always been good in emergency crisis situations, and I never failed to provide them for her in my accident prone younger years. She ran down the hill, picked me up, ran down the dock, threw me in the water, jumped in, pulled off my bathing trunks, and held me under while squeegeeing bees off my little body with her bare hands.

Then she pulled me out of that baptism by bee and finger lake water, threw me in the car, and hustled my now ballooning and bloated body to the hospital, all without saying a word. She just dealt it down.

Up until yesterday, I have not been stung by a bee... a pretty good run of almost 50 years of a clean, sting free record.

But yesterday, while weeding the garden, I inadvertently stuck my hand in a nest of yellow jackets.

Hello my old striped friends! Within a nano second, I was about to revisit the torture I had once endured back in 1964. Fortunately this time, I was wearing a few more clothes.

I did a clumsy dance (I'm naming this dance "The Yellow Jacket", and I fully expect it to sweep the nation) to the hose and escaped with minimal damage, except to my soggy ego. In my brief forays into naturalism, the lifetime score is Bees=2, Little Georgie=0.

But the first word I uttered when I stuck my hand in that nest and saw the swarm fly at my face was "MOMMA"... then the unending stream of expletives followed, like a little kid trying to catch up.

Friday On My Mind Leads To Tuesday's Child. A Musing On The Presidential Press Conference on 08/09/2013

2013-08-14T02:45:00.000-04:00

There ain't nothin' more powerful than the odor of mendacity!

Burl Ives as Big Daddy Pollitt in Tenesee William's "Cat On A Hot Tin Roof"

I've been going to a little 24/7 "key access" gym to rehab an ankle that I inadvertently destroyed in a freak home improvement accident.

Alone in the building, with the sun streaming through the front plate glass window, I mounted the Lifestyle 9500 Elliptical instrument of torture for my dose of aerobic, cardiovascular ankle crunching.

On the television directly in front of me, members of the White House Press Corps were jockeying for position, in preparing for an upcoming Presidential press conference... on a lazy Friday afternoon... in the middle of summer, right before the Prez will disappear off the grid on his Martha's Vineyard Vacation... announced in such a low key fashion that I wasn't even aware that there was going to be an event of such importance to the American and ultimately World Audience even held.

Lucky me, I got to witness the whole enchilada in its entirety, whilst wincing in very real and physical pain, sweating like a whore in church. I even got closed captioning along with sound, and that's always good for a chuckle when watching live broadcasts.

In his opening statement, he promised to address the current Edward Snowden / NSA / Government Surveillance / Leaking vs Whistleblowing/ Internet Privacy Violation debacle, and that seemed like damned good political Kabuki Theater entertainment for the political junkie that I am on a Friday afternoon. I pedaled faster to get my heart rate up to optimum speed for what was to follow, because it promised to be a doozy.

The Obama Administration's now standard tactic of addressing critical issues or signing controversial legislation on the slowest of news cycle days are getting a little moldy for me. "Slipping it in the backdoor when no one notices" is not a hallmark of grabbing the reigns of leadership robustly. Its bad passive aggressive manners in bed, and even more obviously manipulative and duplicitous in the political arena.

As the President addressed the issue of Snowden/ Leaks/ The Patriot Act/ The NSA / FISC ect, I ticked off on my fingers every provable, debatable half truth, subterfuge and lie. I'm not exactly uninformed on Patriot Act abuse, as its study has been kind a "hobby" of mine for the past 5 years or so.

I was struck with how the President was allowing himself little to no wiggle room, and no outlet to any plausible deniability with the absolute finality and assuredness in some of his statements. I didn't know whether to cheer at the TV at the sheer genius of his bluffing strategy, or yell at the TV to advise him to duck. He wasn't potentially digging holes with a garden shovel, he was breaking out the back hoe and doubling down.

It was as if he, The Big P-Fluffer, and Axelrod were never around when Clinton uttered "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky", and never learned the political and public relations lessons in the aftermath of that fateful statement.

As I watched this press conference the critical question for me was "Does He know the extent of what he is saying, or is He being fed so much dis-information by his advisory teams that he's actually being set up for a massive fall?"

As I entertained that hypothetical second notion, I became very concerned for our President. Perhaps the bubble that he lives in has made him that vulnerable to that type of attack.

The surface is only being scratched here. If the actual abuses of these programs are eventually uncovered (and judging by the draconian clampdown by the administration, somewhat of a perceived long shot at this point; one can only hope that more whistleblowers will surface), then the President has either an unprecedented hubris, or is about to be forced into taking an unwitted fall of epic proportions. One thing is for sure though. To paraphrase "Breaking Bad"'s Walter White; he most definitely is not currently "Treading Lightly".

I won't bore you with the gory details of refuting or debating what was said in this conference, but today an article published by The Atlantic started making the social network rounds on facebook entitled: "THE SURVEILLANCE SPEECH: A NEW LOW IN BARRACK OBAMA'S PRESIDENCY. His tone was inappropriately dismissive, while the substance was misleading at best, and mendacious at worst" (Byline: Connor Friedersdorf, August 12, 2013 at 4:14 am)

I couldn't have agreed with that opening shot across the bow more. So I dove in and read the thing, and if you should decide to go any further with this blog, I suggest you read it and get up to speed. I don't know if the editorial slant of The Atlantic is part of the vast biased media conspiracy, but I do know that the article is worth the time to read and consider.

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/08/the-surveillance-speech-a-low-point-in-barack-obamas-presidency/278565/

I seem to confuse my facebook and social networking friends with my political views. I'm loathe to put an ideological label on myself, because I find the whole idea of an all or nothing bi-polar ideological system loathsome to begin with. Truth and Consensual Realities, are on a potentiometer.

There are many different degrees, and many different points of view and perspectives. All must be accommodated, and none should be marginalized. Like the X-Files, truth is in there somewhere, but it has to come from interpretation, and that can only happen when the data set you're working with is as complete as you can possibly make it. Collect the data, orbit and rotate around it, view all facets, and then make an interpretive call. That is as close to truth in the political arena that you will ever get.

If forced, I guess I'm a left leaning centrist. I believe in progressive thinking, and therefore could be labeled a liberal progressive. I also believe in basic common sense, and certain core ideas like respecting the Constitution; rather the province of a typical definition of a "Conservative".

So when I choose to be publicly critical of the stewardship of the Presidency (per example), somehow my liberal friends think I've gone over to the dark side, and my Conservative friends think I'm somehow validating their more extremist positions... both of which couldn't be further from my own truth. There's a lot of unconscious, non-voluntary knee jerking going on out there in cyber space.

Being critical of how the Presidency is represented to the American Public and thus the world does not automatically mean that you don't support " The Presidency" or even The President for that matter. It does mean that you want it to function differently, and in your own opinion, function better and at a higher level. You want your guy to do the job you know he's capable of doing.

People seem to be very comfortable in demonizing President Obama as a singular entity, but lets get real here for a brief NY minute. The Presidency is always a creation of committee; many different skill sets are required to acquire a US Presidency, from the creative conceptualization of an electable entity to those who put up the money to fund the initiative to go out and win it.

The Executive Branch is then beholden, and accountable, to all that contributed to secure the reigns of power for four, or in the current case, an eight year cycle... and the basic job of elected office is to make hay for yourself and your supporters while the sun shines. In cases where there are no term limits, the figureheads are constantly raising money first, leading and legislating LAST. Its all about power, and money, in that order.

But every once in awhile to make it look good, the manifestation of progress on a social initiative might materialize...but more times than not "legislation and appropriations" take the form some sort of legal chicanery that results in someone making a lot of money, either the elected official his or herself, or the consortia and corporations that put up the money to get them there in the first place.

The hoi polloi electorate that physically won the office, in the end in terms of hierarchy in the food chain of being accountable for, is far down the actual agenda ladder.

Cynical, I know. But that's our current system, in simplified terms.

This particular Presidency is a brain child of a few brilliant American public relation minds, the best and brightest on the technological front, and deep, deep pockets; not only a group that obviously includes President Obama himself, but also the individuals that really invented the concept of an "Obama Presidency." They are leading just as much as the figurehead himself, if not more so.

I know its hard, but try to not buy into the singular entity as a target, but the larger organization of what the figurehead represents... and here's a clue. It isn't the Democratic Party. Widen your scope and your ability to its widest angle, and you still will be hard pressed to identify (Its designed that way).

What I saw in this press conference was a man that may have finally reached a "Peter Principle" point. He finally was over matched and over whelmed in actual performance and conceptual ability to perform the required task at hand. Either that, or a Narcissist that has finally strayed far off the reservation.

What was exhibited in my mind was the clear incapability to step outside his committee consensus and take the lead for those who supported this Presidency from the bottom; The ones that worked phone banks, and contributed their paltry five dollars in unprecedented numbers during the campaign of 2008. We're all waiting for the potential that was recognized to be finally realized.

What seems to be happening is the exact opposite; The Atlantic article clearly articulates in point by point fashion not only the minute points concerning surveillance, but in doing so, exposes the larger methodology of the official actions and strategies of the current Presidency.

A standard reaction tool now used is the one of "withering condescension" directed at the opposition forces.

It may have worked in the past, but this too is becoming less an less of an effective strategy. It works less and less on the informed. Whether a rabid frothing at the mouth tea bagger or a way left of center commie pinko liberal, the internal thought that is inspired by that now standard five year rhetorical maneuver and smug high school debate strategy is basically, "Fuck Off, Mr. President".

No American Citizen, no matter at what station of life they may or may not occupy, needs to willingly suffer an arrogant asshole, especially one that's digging himself in a hole in front of their very eyes. Take your constituents a little more seriously, and treat them with the respect you demand for yourself. You'll need the hands of those same constituents to pull you out of this current mess of your own making down the road.

There is a simple pathway out of the current NSA/ Security / Privacy / Snowden morass. There may be legal implications that dictate massaging it with a seemingly light non-committal touch, but in the end, there are going to have to be some heads on pikes. Significant ones, but not so much to touch the Presidency. In other words, by targeting Snowden, you are targeting the wrong head. Or set of heads, for that matter.

It may be a good obfuscation trick to focus the debate on the ""Is He A Traitor? / Is He A Hero?" question, but that will only work in the short term. Many of us are actually beyond that and focused on the content of the message that Snowden actually attempted to deliver. Dropping the turd in the cornflake bowl on a Friday before the slowest news cycle of the year isn't going to throw people of the scent. Its a woeful underestimation of the resolve of the American Citizenry.

There will be damage and loss, much like a drastic cancer surgery. Cancer can be survived after radical surgery, and so can a Presidency and its subsequent legacy after a large scale public purging and house cleaning.

Then all the actors will get to do there best Claude Rains in Casablanca impression "I'm SHOCKED... SHOCKED that this was going on in this Casino!". The Kabuki Theater will compel the public to stop paying attention to the next bit of behind the scenes thievery, and eventually we all can get back to "normal" and business as usual.

But if the decision is made to continue down the current pathway that seems to have been chosen by the creators and handlers of this Presidency, a word of caution. You have compromised the figurehead to the point that if the real truth of these matters are uncovered, then that figurehead will be burned beyond any reasonable political or public repair. Its a very dangerous political and public relations game that is being played right now.

I like a high stakes gamble as much as anybody, but don't overestimate your ability to keep a lid on this one, or plug all the leaks. Too many people know too much. Its the HUBRIS that will kill your golden goose.

So give up a little ground first. It will give you the element of surprise.You missed the window to get ahead on this issue, and now you're about to enter full on damage/ spin control. The water is swirling down the bowl, and unfortunately its YOUR HAND that jiggled the lever... a rookie mistake, really , and that's why I'm disappointed.

So follow the simple dictum and the standard playbook. Its standard for a reason; now is not the time to re-invent the wheel.. Shed some sacrificial heads that are verifiable abusers of the laws on the books ( I have a few suggestions if you're interested), and live to fight another day. You have an election cycle coming up in 2014, a political and data collecting machine to preserve post term, people to pay off, and a legacy to secure.... oh yeah, and a country that needs to run that actually requires guidance and leadership, instead of falsely sustaining the seat of power on a fuel mixture that CAN be clearly recognized as a formula comprised of mostly horseshit by all Americans if they invest the energy to take a heady whiff, regardless of their ideological leanings.

Have a nice vacation, and then get your collective heads out of the sand of your own creation.

And as a minor personal aside to P-Fluffer and Axelrod: Bo The DOG being delivered by Ofsprey to Martha's Vineyard? Who made THAT genius call?

You guys are killing us. Dip in the well of Archie Drell and the Bells and "Tighten Up".

Daily Dose #68: On Metaphor

2012-07-26T09:55:00.000-04:00

Sometimes its hard to take good advice and useful action plans to heart when you're in crisis mode.

Life lessons are hard to learn when you need them most, and they are the hardest to hear and absorb when you find yourself at that juncture.

The use of metaphor helps us to break through to a new found wisdom. It depersonalizes a situation just enough to provide a little crack of clarity through the chaos. A good metaphor can function as a small, narrow beam of illumination; it may be just enough to light your path out of the morass, espescially when the beam is clearly defined by the dust that you're kicking up all around you as you flail your way through life.

Here's today's metaphor: I don't know exactly what it taught me, but I recognized that something changed, and there was evidence of new growth. A little green shoot of new life that grew from what seemed to be a dying plant.

I had a friend who I spent alot of time with over the past four years. My faith and loyalty in this person was really ill founded in retrospect, and because of that choice, I suffered alot of damage. We all know that human dynamic and scenario, so I won't waste alot of time writing about it. It was my choice to persue the friendship, I ignored all the red flags, and eventually got spiritually fist fucked for trying to persue the relationship. Ain't nobody's fault but mine.

For the past year, I've been cleaning up a mess of epic proportions. The hole I dug myself in was deep, and its still an on going job. I went through the steps of Anger, Denial, and Blame. But at my age, I've recognized to get through them quickly and only focus on my own personal responsibility.

That's the only thing that will lead you to a change, because ultimately it is only the self that you have control over. No matter how hard you try, you can never effect change in others. So if you don't like the outcome, you have to change your own behavior.

That lets everybody off the hook, and will eventually lead to forgiveness. The last person to forgive in the chain is yourself, and the hardest path to discover is how to really forgive yourself without being a total sociopath with no moral compass when finally doing so.

There is a big difference between forgiving yourself honestly, and not giving a tumbling fuck about the consequences of your decisions.

Forgiveness is not deluding yourself in a blanket of denial, especially when trying to identify your own mis-steps. There has to be an awareness achieved before you get there; a step that is human nature to want to skip over.

THE METAPHOR

I collected art pottery at one point in my life, and had quite a collection of Roseville Pottery placed about my home.

This friend of which I speak spent a lot of time in my home, and quite frankly, was a bit of an emotional klutz, which manifested itself in physical reality. One by one, my precious collection of antique breakables got broken, and suffered damage.

Replacement of those items was always promised, and never delivered, and over three years, a lot of pottery got accidently broken.

That's a pretty clear metaphor for the relationship in and of itself. All I ended up with is a pile of broken, valueless pottery and a pile of broken, valueless promises.

I recently moved, losing my home of four years directly tied to my bad judgement and assesment of this person. Time to pack, and move on.

As I was packing, I not only was packing my precious Roseville pottery, I was packing shards and pieces of Roseville Pottery. The ridiculousness of this exercise did not escape me.

I had been holding on to those shards for over three years. Hoping that the promise of replacement would come, but knowing that it never would. Holding on to the broken pieces. Hoping that a person I loved would do the right thing and miraculously grow a conscience, but knowing that ultimately they were incapable of it.

When I landed in my new digs, I unpacked all those shards. I finally gave up the ghost, drove to the hardware store, and bought my ass some super glue.

Thoses pieces of pottery have no market value anymore. They are cracked, and they are damaged.

The upside however is that after three years, I finally made the attempt to glue them together and make them whole again. The may have cracks, and they may show damage, but they have life again.

Instead of being squirreled away in hopes of a better out come, they are back on the shelves and in use after a long period of stasis and "retirement". They are still beautiful, and I now can enjoy their beauty (albeit now flawed) once again.

So what's the lesson? I don't really know. But I do know this; Nobody will put Humpty Dumpty back together again for you, and its a waste of time projecting your value system on others....especially on those that don't have any.

You have to glue it back together on your own, and only when you're ready to accept the cracks and flaws that are now in evidence, and who really was responsible for creating those flaws in the first place. It isn't the person that broke them, it was the person that allowed a bull in a china shop in their "home". If you are tempted to point a finger of blame, try aiming it at yourself first. That saves a lot of precious time and aggravation.

A quick look in the mirror is all I needed, but it took me three years to finally accept it, re-glue, forgive and let go.

Considering my own emotional track record, that's a pretty speedy recovery. I'm getting better at this, but some work still needs to be done to quicken healing time in the advent of the next relational screw up.

DAILY DOSE #67: "When We Were Young And Dreaming"

2011-12-13T12:50:00.014-05:00

Dreaming and then making those dreams real are sometimes the exclusive province of the young.

Its not like I haven't stopped trying in my middle age, but I do tend to pick my spots more carefully these days. I can still throw a well aimed pebble in the pond, but I try and weigh carefully outcomes, probabilities, and the potential for possible collateral damage before cocking back my arm and chucking one. Truly believing in living by the Hippocratic Oath ("First Do No Harm")took me awhile to take to heart.

When I was young, I didn't give a tumbling fuck about any of that. With naivete comes a certain form a bravery that I just can't recreate in the here and now. I'm just not as blindly stupid as I once was. Admittedly, I miss that bubble of clueless stupidity at times, because when fully enveloped within that bubble, I did have a lot more fun than I do now.

So here's a little story of the bubble, and the feeling of security it gave me. It, like all things in life ended up being temporary. At the time it was authentically real. This story comes with a little attached piece of evidence that for me proves that distant dreams and friendships were in fact true, and motivated by love.

I have a tendency to forget that, mostly for justifiable reasons, but sometimes not.

Sometimes stupidity is not limited to the young.

GETTING FOUND AT THE LOST HORIZON

I had cut my performance teeth on the corner of Thompson Road and Erie Boulevard throughout my third decade on the planet, courtesy of my tenure in Ed Hamell's band "The Works", and the good graces of the owners and operators of the club; The family Italiano, particularly Greg and his father Tony.

In addition to those performance opportunities, whenever I found myself with nothing to do, a pot to piss in, or a window to throw it out of (of which was a state of constancy throughout that decade), my then roomate Scott Sterling filled the breach whenever he could.

The Lost Horizon was not only a popular rock venue for local bands that could draw a respectable number of fans to fill it. It was also a favorite stop of "Nationals", bands that may have had their first hit on MTV per example; basically a gas gig on a first tour; an off-night club stop on the way to a larger market.

Scott adminstrated and operated the house PA in the club, so if the opportunity arose, he always offered me a gear humping "load in/ load out" gig whenever one of those national acts on a club tour played the Lost. The gig didn't pay all that much, but the experience was incalcuable. Working those shows gave you access, the most treasured commodity in any business, and certainly the business of Rock and Roll.

You got to see how the big boys operated on their way up the ladder, basically. As time progressed I learned many useful skills along the way; how to wire a PA, how to focus a light show, how to operate a monitor desk; because I lived with Scott, I saw and learned how all those gigs were advanced. Scott enabled me to acquire real world knowledge of the business of Rock and Roll from the trenches.

Sometimes those National shows absolutely tanked, and sometimes the were like the battle of the bulge. It was a crapshoot depending on airplay and word of mouth. Watching Chuckie the promoter repetitively bashing his head against the bar in frustration was a common occurence at the end of particularly ill attended shows.

Whether those shows were a financial success or failure, observing the musicians close up and being able to have conversations with them through soundchecks and on their respective tour buses was the real "college of musical knowledge". They were life lessons on how to conduct yourself in the world you wanted to be part of.

Per example, Richard Marx was a complete flaming pissant, hissy-fit throwing asshole when forced to play in the provinces in front of a paltry 28 paying customers. Jon Bon Jovi, touring in support of his first hit "Runaway", may have looked like a rockstar when he walked off that bus, through the side-load in door only to get assaulted by the patented Lost Horizon stale beer and smoke stench, but he was anything but a rockstar in his actions and reactions. A true sweetheart and gentleman, grateful to have the opportunity to play in front of approximately the same paltry number of Syracuse fans and win their hearts, minds and loyalty... one fan at a time.

One of those guys went on to and can still fill arenas, if you get my drift.

Without my friendship with Scott, and his support, I would have never received those practical life lessons. They still serve me well to this day.

I THOUGHT I'D NEVER SEE AN ELEPHANT FLY....

Towards the back end of the 1980's I was trying to find new things to do. After seven years of faithful service in "The Works" I had a tiny radar blip of a brief tenure in "The Masters Of Reality"; signing on to briefly replace Mr. Owl to perform a string NYC showcases that led to their first record deal with Rick Rubin on Def American, only to then getting promptly shit-canned before a note was recorded in reward for the effort.

Rock and Roll can break your heart and your will at times. Lets just say my dream, and self-esteem, were both simultaneously approaching a swirling downward status.

In all honesty, the next part of this tale gets real sketchy for me.

The Black Crowes were flapping their baby wings through Syracuse, landing at the Lost Horizon on their first tour in support of their debut recording "Shake Your Money Maker". I'm a little foggy on the date: 1990 perhaps? '91?

Scott got an advance copy of the record. Local radio hadn't caught on yet, although MTV had.

Perhaps the point of inspired illumination and motivation for Scott was the combination of George Drakoulias (engineer of "The Blue Garden" recording for The Masters Of Reality) producing The Crowes debut and the fact that my childhood piano hero Chuck Leavell (then Allman Brothers, Sea Level, and soon to be Rolling Stones Musical Director.) was all over the record in a very integral way.

By the time Scott was advancing the Crowes gig at the Lost and realized they weren't touring with a piannaplunker he clearly and creatively connected some theoretical and conceptual dots and saw an opening; even if it might have been a figment of his own fertile imagination.

I don't know how he did it, really. But somehow, he bum-rushed management, he bum- rushed the band, and he bum-rushed me all at the same time and convinced everybody that The Black Crowes should give me an audition and a trial by fire in front of an audience of the Syracuse faithful.

He made it happen, and wouldn't take "no" for an answer from anybody. A prime example of youthful enthusiasm, pure balls, and a testament to our friendship all in one shot.

I don't really remember it actually happening... not in detail anyway. He just stuck me in a room and made me learn that record to the best of my ability, and he took care of the rest.

I do remember feeling like I was inappropriately invading someone else's space. The guy that just humped their gear was now going to play with them, and it felt like I was getting shoved down their throats to some degree.

Scott didn't care. He was going to make something happen, and not be deterred.

FAST FORWARD

In twenty one years after the fact, a lot of water rushes under the proverbial bridge.

I had forgotten all about this little episode until I started posting dog beauty contests, anti-hydrofracking initiatives, cooking videos, and blogs on various social networking sites.

A new facebook friend had recently reminded me that I had played with the Black Crowes at the Lost Horizon. I had totally repressed the memory. Just another epic failure, and a reminder of days that I didn't want to re-live.

Not only did he remind me of the lost memory that occurred behind the omni-present pole at the Lost Horizon, he offered proof: A bootleg recording, and hard evidence that this wasn't a distant dream or memory. It actually happened.

So with all due respect to the Robinson Brothers, their publishing company and their record label, I offer that proof now: Here's The Black Crowes at The Lost Horizon in all their crunchy glory, taking their first steps of their touring career, playing their first hits "Hard To Handle" and "Jealous Again" with yours truly plunkin' away in support. I'll let you all decide whether I held my own or not.

Hard To Handle by The Black Crowes

Jealous Again by The Black Crowes

Whether I did, or whether I didn't doesn't matter in the here and now. What does matter is that I was reminded of a time when friends were friends, and a sweet innocence long gone sour got tasted once again, if only for a moment. It serves as a gentle reminder:

Look for, and lead with gratitude, always.

Thank You, Scott, for your blind faith and belief in me when I needed it most, and for a still fond and newly found memory that was once lost in the distant horizon.

"You may shoot for the stars and end up in a back alley behind Pluto, beaten and bloodied, but at least I dare to dream, and that’s better than being Earthbound, mired in the muck of mediocrity.

I judge my forward progress and success by the crushingly epic nature of my failures.

The more epic the crash, the more I’m convinced I must be doing something right"

AS ALWAYS: PLEASE FEEL FREE TO COMMENT, SUBSCRIBE, AND SHARE THIS BLOG ADDRESS VIA COPY AND PASTE IN AN EMAIL, THROUGH THE TWITTER OR FACEBOOK "SHARE" BUTTONS,WORD OF MOUTH, FILTHY WHISPERED GOSSIP, FALSE NARRATIVE, TIN CAN AND STRING CONFIGURATIONS, PONY EXPRESS, OR CARRIER PIGEON. WITHOUT FEEDBACK OR ACTIVE "SHARING", WHAT YOU JUST READ.... DOESN'T EXIST!

COLONEL BEAUREGARD "IRON THIGHS" JEFFERSON, A.K.A. "THE MANAGEMENT"

Daily Dose #66 (08/09/11)

2011-08-09T08:22:00.009-04:00

I AM THE HUMAN MEAT

(A Lake Boy Tale)

HALLOWEEN 1975

My adolescent rebellion was in full flower by the age of fifteen. I had become the antithesis of all that surrounded me:Re-invented as an anarchist and junior Anti-Christ in training.

Who knows how one gets to this point? Nature? Nurture? Raging Hormones? All I know is that "not giving a tumbling fuck" about ANYTHING was always me first move in any situation, and had to be immediately clarified, right up front.

Danger, was indeed my business. And complete anti-social behavior was the conduit and delivery system.

Inspired by Dadaist Happenings, my little circle of ne'er do wells (and ne'er do well experimentalist wannabees) devised a little recurrent happening of our own.

Dubbing ourselves "The Tiger Sextette", we would crash a classroom, gym class, grocery store or any other locale that would have an incredulous surprised audience.

We would then proceed to dance lasciviously, thrusting our collective pelvii, and look absolutely ridiculous as we bumped and grinded for about 30 seconds, and then run out of the joint laughing like six insane screaming hyenas. A total exercise in Surrealism.

It being the mid nineteen seventies, being properly stoned was ritual preparation for these little theatrical commando raids. I suppose it was the "flash mob" happening of its day. We were just having fun.

On this Halloween, it was decided by The Sextette that we would crash Under The Stone, our own little rock club ratheskellar in our sleepy little town of Skaneateles NY. C.R.A.C., a kickin funk band was playing that night, so an appropriate soundtrack to the shenanigans wasn't going to be a problem.

The plan?

1. Get as high and or as drunk as possible
2. Crash the club and the dance floor
3. Run out, or get thrown out. Either outcome was acceptable.

We were all fifteen years old, after all. Well below the legal limit to be in a drinking emporium.

Since this nefarious plan of mischief was devised after school on Halloween Day, a costume had to be improvised, and my inspiration was a 5,000 foot roll of industrial grade shrink wrap in my basement at 12 Gayle Road.

I would transform myself into the human meat! Wile E. Coyote, Super Genius.

I pedalled my bicycle down to the P & C, and bought the most exotic and disgusting cuts of meat I could find: Tongue, Tripe, and Pigs Feet, with a healthy supply of more traditional cuts of beef.

I then enlisted the help of the girl next door for the next phase of my creative Halloween costumed expression. With an indelible purple marker, I had her section off every part of my naked body with dotted lines, and then label the "cuts": Rump Roast, Flank Steak, Top Round, Etc, my body functioning as a butchering diagram for cannibals.

She then took the the industrial grade roll of shrink wrap and wrapped my from neck to toe, in a single unbroken wrap job.

In the middle of this operation, still half naked, my Mother came home from school. She was working on completing her four year RN degree that marriage and kids had interrupted nineteen years previously.

She begged me to reconsider my costume, and even offered a complete nursing uniform to go to the party in full nursing drag. But I could not be swayed. That meat cost a lot of money.

I attached all the bloody meat to a pristine lab coat of my Mother's with safety pins, and completed this horrific ensemble by topping it off with a white hard hat.

As the rest of the fellows collected in the back woods behind Walser's house on Lakeview Circle, we knew it was going to be a night to remember.

The first step was to get properly primed, and we did so with gusto with about an ounce of weed and a bottle of Jack Daniel's that we drained in about a half hour, as we huffed and puffed away.

Careening around Pluto without brakes, we made our covert trek into town, showed up at the door, and weren't even carded. The ridiculous nature of my meat suit gave us automatic entry. "It's Showtime, Ladies and Gentleman"

We immediately crashed the dance floor, to what we were anticipating was going to be the collective shock and horrified awe of a packed club of adults, and be immediately tossed out on our collective keysters.

But Lo, this did not happen. We were applauded, and lauded with free drinks all night. We were teenaged rock stars dancing the night away with real live older women dressed in their once a year, costumed expression of their inner slut.

It was a throwdown to end all previous throwdowns. A real live Bacchanal, and a teenaged dream come true.

Unfortunately there was a critical flaw in the conception of my costume. The industrial grade Saran Wrap sealed my entire body. As the temperature rose, and the alcohol factor increased, I reached the peak of heat prostration and hypothermia.

I had built up quite a tolerance of binge substance abuse by the tender age of fifteen, but this was even beyond my Herculean abilities to handle.

The meat coat was jettisoned sometime in the proceedings, and the sweat slick building up inside the wrapping started to cause it to lose its grip on my skin.

That's the last true cognitive memory I have of the evening. The rest is anecdotal.

Somehow, at around 4am and way past curfew, I found myself at the front door of 12 Gayle Road. Was I driven and delivered? Did I walk up from town? Who knew, because I was in no shape to know.

Coatless, and more importantly without house keys, there was no alternative but to ring the door bell, wake up Mom, and face the music. I was completely butt naked.

I leaned on the door bell and then promptly passed out against the front door.

As my Mother tells the tale, when she opened the door I fell into the house face first, breaking my nose. As she gazed incredulously at my naked ass and the faded purple cuts of meat decorations that had been applied to it only just hours before, a single twisted rope of Saran Wrap was attached to my left ankle. It ran down our walkway, down the entire length of Gayle Road, down the access road to the lake, and finally ended disappearing down the shore line headed in the direction of downtown.

Id like to say that passing out in front of my Mother was a singular occurrence in those days, but it wasn't. There were a few times when she would awake to the sounds of me aspirating my own vomit.

I was on a mission to join the 27 club, and I was ahead of schedule, being the motivated little whippersnapper I was. I was always a "Go Big, or Go Home" personality type, even at fifteen.

2008

I relocated to the town of my birth in the summer, emigrating for good from New Orleans.

It was nice to be home. I needed to get reset, and you can only do that at home. It was the first time that I spent any length of time in Skaneateles since 1978, a repatriated exile, and returned prodigal son.

But a funny thing started to happen. As I was introduced to total strangers, invariably the same question would arise:

"George Rossi....Oh Yeah, You're The Human Meat Guy, aren't you?"

I would like to be remembered and recalled for some of my successes, triumphs, and good deeds done over the past 35 years, but in my hometown? I'm still "The Human Meat" guy.

I've come to accept this gracefully. We are the sum total of the choices we make, and unfortunately, the salacious bad ones have much more sticking power in a tiny town.

We write our own narratives to some degree, and sometimes we inspire the motivated to write it for us, whether its actually based in any type of reality based truth or not. In the end, you have to own what you have done, good, bad, or indifferent.

So when asked if indeed I am "The Human Meat Guy", I smile, extend my hand and say, "Yes I am. Its a pleasure to meet you"

AUTHOR'S NOTE

As of this writing, The Dose has received over 20,400 legitimate page views in 65 daily injections. All I have asked of the general readership is that if you enjoyed what you just read, hit that little share button on the top right column of this site, or copy the blog address down, paste it in an email, and give a friend a taste.

The Dose's original intent and design was for it to be passed along and shared; sort of hoping that we could form a bond and a shared sense of responsibility between the content creation and its users active participation.

Unfortunately, my personal assessment is that its starting to look like a failed experiment.

It isn't without its harvestable aspects in the face of failure, and I don't regret the amount of time I spent writing 66 posts at all. I have learned so much by disciplining myself to produce quality writing to the best of my ability for 65 conescutive days. I can look myself in the mirror and honestly say that I gave my all, every little last particle of me. I did not phone it in, or take whoever might be reading The Dose for granted in anyway. I stayed true to principle.

I'm truly grateful to those of you that have read, and perhaps even been inspired by the Blog-O-Thon's content and message. I'm also especially grateful to the folks that took it upon themselves to realize their implied responsibility by enjoying the content, and then taking the time to hip their friends and family to the Blog-O-Thon.

Circumstances beyond my control have led me to a place where I can no longer devote the time to producing a quality reading experience for you daily.

Those circumstances were the result of broken promises made to me, and the collateral damge is that I no longer can keep my promise to you... everything, IS connected.

That isn't an excuse though. We are what we eat, and we are the choices we make. I sincerely apologize for breaking my promise, and seeming unaccountable.

Those circumstances coupled, with a rather tepid response of reader participation have led to this unfortunate resolution.

That's cool. I'm a big boy, and I can handle it. "I judge my forward progress and successes by the crushingly epic nature of my failures..."

If you are on facebook, I also started a page called "Little Georgie's Blog-O-Thon". Just search it, it will pop up. That will be the final publicly published Master Index for all of the past Dose Output, and any that might happen in the future.

The "Last Dispensary" as it were.

I love you all.

Easy,

Geo

"You may shoot for the stars and end up in a back alley behind Pluto, beaten and bloodied, but at least I dare to dream, and that’s better than being Earthbound, mired in the muck of mediocrity.

I judge my forward progress and success by the crushingly epic nature of my failures.

The more epic the crash, the more I’m convinced I must be doing something right"

AS ALWAYS: PLEASE FEEL FREE TO COMMENT, SUBSCRIBE, AND SHARE THIS BLOG ADDRESS VIA COPY AND PASTE IN AN EMAIL, THROUGH THE TWITTER OR FACEBOOK "SHARE" BUTTONS,WORD OF MOUTH, FILTHY WHISPERED GOSSIP, FALSE NARRATIVE, TIN CAN AND STRING CONFIGURATIONS, PONY EXPRESS, OR CARRIER PIGEON. WITHOUT FEEDBACK OR ACTIVE "SHARING", WHAT YOU JUST READ.... DOESN'T EXIST!

COLONEL BEAUREGARD "IRON THIGHS" JEFFERSON, A.K.A. "THE MANAGEMENT"

DAILY DOSE #65 (08/03/11)

2011-08-03T14:23:00.012-04:00

EXPLORING CREATIVE PROCESSES PART 10:

(Adding The Stock)

I know I'm beating this "Gumbo Metaphor" to death, but this particular dish signifies clearly the process. Food preparation, assembly, and the techniques involved truly mirror how "Little Georgie And The Shuffling Hungarians" was pulled from theory into a tangible reality.

To recap:

At this point in time, all of the foundational concepts that I could complete by myself were identified and clearly defined. The Roux had been rendered, and "The Holy Trinity" had been identified, chosen, chopped in the right amounts; blended into the roux. The basic armature had been pulled from theory to a loose manifestation of reality.

But ultimately, live performances and possible future recordings, like films, are collaborative vehicles. I could be the engine, but I still needed a car to get to the final destination point.

Second only to a perfectly rendered roux, a perfect Gumbo hinges upon the stock used to prepare it for its final finishing stages: the spices and additional ingredients, the timing of their entrance into the gumbo pot, and its cooking down process to blend the flavors of all of the pot's eventual contents.

You can use water, and you can used pre-packaged stock as well, but your Gumbo will suffer accordingly if you do.

Only homemade stock will do.

As mentioned previously, at the time of ultimate creation I had very few resources available to me at the time. I was unknowingly bi-polar crazy, suicidal, and dead broke. All I had was my brain and a modicum of musical talent.

That said, I did have access to a stock; beautifully made and created outside of all of this.

If that stock and the access to it did not exist, then all of this creative armature building would have been a totally pointless exercise. The existence of the stock was the insurance policy needed to commence the mental work necessary to finding the roux and the "Holy Trinity" in the first place.

I knew that if I could get the Gumbo to the point of having the stock added and heat applied, the rest of the process would just fall into place. It was going to start to look and smell like a mighty good gumbo, one that would generate a magnetic force of gravity that would pull all the other future crucial and ultimately very special and unique ingredients into its orbit; eventually convincing those ingredients to dive into the "Hungarian Gumbo Pot" of their own volition.

THE STOCK; MARK TIFFAULT AND PAUL LaRONDE A.K.A. THE RHYTHM DICKS

My association with The Rhythm Dicks started benignly enough. A local comedian by the name of Tom Kenney (Later to go on to fame and fortune as the voice talent behind "Sponge Bob Squarepants")wanted to reprise a one off gig in his old hometown of Syracuse, New York.

I had worked with Tom before. Gary Frenay had organized the original first one off gig of what was to be called "Tom Kenny and The Fabulous Pushballs" (For those unaware of The Upstate New York Volunteer Firemen Arena, Pushball is a form of tug of war played between departments using high pressure hoses and a large canvass ball attached to an elevated rope, utilizing public embarrassment and humiliation for fundraising purposes).

A couple of years later, Tom called me and asked if we could do it again, but this time, he put the responsibility of putting the band together squarely on my own shoulders, and gave me full autonomy over personnel decisions.

I had always been a sideman, parasitically joining bands that were well into their development phases. A gun for hire. Oddly, this would be the first time I had that responsibility and autonomy.

It would be the perfect time to be handed that type of autonomy. I found myself between “causes”: The Bogeymen’s record deal had just imploded, or was about to anyway simultaneously with my personal life. I needed to get my mind of off the shit side of my life and do something productive. It was a unique opportunity to build a “Dream Team”, even if it was to service the needs of a crack comedian to ultimately showcase his abilities. That level of creative and administrative control had never been felt by my hands. It was time to seize control, because all elements of my life as I knew it were wildly spinning out of control.

So if given the responsibility of constructing some thing of value, you start at the foundation. Mark and Paul got the first call, and they signed on for this singular gig.

When Tom sent me the source material of the show, it was way more on the Jump Blues side of things. They were still obscure novelty numbers from an era long gone, and Tom was (still is) an absolute scholarly musical archaeologist and archivist when it comes to these matters.

My concept of novelty blues began and ended with Bull Moose Jackson (“Big Ten Inch”), Roy Brown (“Keep On Churnin”), or a huge chunk of the Louis Jordan and his Tympani Five catalog. Tom dug up things that I had NEVER heard, and for me, that was a tough feat to accomplish. “Uh-Oh, Get Out of the Car?” “Cut It Out?” “Mickey Mouse Boarding House?”. “Drunk, by Joe “The Honeydripper’” Liggin’s little brother Jimmy , who used to be his bus driver?” This was a subterranean strata of the blues and rock and roll history that even I had never been exposed to, and I thought I was pretty well schooled at the time.

I still have those tapes. They are an absolute historical primer on how humor and the blues are related. If you were ever curious as to how intrinsically verbal and poetic humor is woven into the blues, rock and roll, and popular music in general, I suggest you talk to Spongebob Squarepants.

So now, at age 31, I was finally being handed the reigns, and how successful a race run was going to fall upon my jockeying abilities; and they at that point were untested.

The “New” Pushballs were formed around the rhythm section of Mark Tiffault, Paul “Big Daddy” LaRonde, and me. We busted our collective asses to be totally prepared for the future voice of Spongebob’s show. With the addition of Tim Harrington on guitar, and a killer sax section of Frank Grosso and Paulie Cerra, I again might have found myself once again the low man on the musical end of the totem pole, but I will take the credit for putting together and administrating a killer band of the very best that Syracuse had to offer.

Tom blew into town, and we played the show at the Zodiac Club. He was on fire, as per usual, and the band killed completely, adopting Tom’s “take no prisoners” mind set when it comes to performance.

Playing a Pushballs show is like being in the middle of a hurricane, and time compresses. It just blows by. At the end of them you always ask yourself these questions; “What in Hell’s name just happened? Was I even here for this? ”

Playing a show with Tom Kenney is an out of body experience.

Transition

In the aftermath of that show, Paul, Mark and I had a pow wow. We had worked so hard to build that set of material, it would be a shame to just let that workload go to waste. I floated the idea of just going out and playing as The Pushballs. I was the rehearsal vocalist anyway. I knew the tunes.

But I was totally untested as a vocalist and frontman. It was a huge risk for Mark and Paul to take professionally. They were on the forefront of the roots and blues scene, I was an interloper from the Rock and Roll world and a green horn as well.

But they took that leap of faith with me. I rounded up the rest of the Pushballs, and booked a series of 4 consecutive Wednesday shows at Club Zodiac, to try and snare some of the revellers heading to Armory Square after Party In The Plaza.

I’d like to say we were a smashing success, but we weren’t. Specifically, I wasn’t. No let me rephrase: I sucked. I couldn’t sing and play at the same time. I couldn’t sing. I was, (and still am to some degree)totally charismatically challenged. I didn’t even know how to count in a song half the time. It was a humbling experience.

After the four shows, it was “back to the woodshed”. Time to figure out the "Gumbo".

FROM THEORY TO REALITY (Taking Stock)

Let's skip back in time a bit.

When Mark and Paul started humping their gear up the stairs to my newly acquired second floor bachelor flat on Winton Street for the first time, I was as low as a human could possibly go. Completely bottomed out.

The Pushballs project fell into my lap, and truly, it was all I had to look forward to. Everything else in life was burned to the ground, and I knew it.

These two musicians were the absolute cream of the crop. The "A" list rhythm section, both with extensive professional resumes. In the midst of abject personal catastrophe, the Universe had decided to cut me a break, and delivered a huge gift, although at that moment wasn't recognized.

They set up in my front room. We really didn't know each other personally from Adam.

My piano faced the bay window overlooking Winton street. I asked if they just wanted to jam on something to warm up, because the source material tapes hadn't been distributed yet. I suggested Professor Longhair's classic "Tipitina" in F, started playing the rubato intro, and they just fell right in.

There was no eye contact between me and the amazingly sympathetic rhythm section playing behind me. They were a Godsend. They knew the tune, they knew the vagaries of style; They put their own unique spin on it, a spin developed over thousands of road miles and countless gigs in their former band The Kingsnakes, and their present project Built For Comfort. They were John Lee Hooker's back up band for chrissakes.

So in the midst of a complete meltdown, this is what was bestowed upon me. Absolute musical perfection. I dont know how long we jammed on "Tipitina" but by the end of it, I was convinced that somebody up there, did in fact like me. It was a sign.

I was going to have the opportunity to play with the best rhythm section I would ever get a chance to play with, even if it was just for one gig with the future Spongebob Squarepants.

I can't really get into their heads as to how they felt about making noise with me, but it went well enough for them to commit to doing the one-off Pushballs gig. The rehearsal source tapes were distributed, the first ten songs on the tape to be learned, and the second rehearsal scheduled.

The Pushballs project was all I had, and I threw myself into it. I trancribed all the lyrics to about forty tunes, charted them out, worked with the horn players to create charts. The "assembly line" system that I would employ in the future was developed right then. I could not waste Mark and Paul's time. Half-assing, phoning it in, and ultimately if that happened, failing, was not an option.

Rehearsals were focused, directed, and run with military precision. They came in totally prepared with a combined surgical eye aimed at the innards of all the material, and I was ready for them. I honestly didn't have anything else to do other than to dedicate myself to pulling it off on a 24/7 basis. My life, literally revolved around the once a week arrival of Mark and Paul to my Winton Street digs.

It was the only bright spot in my rather bleak existence.

By the time we assembled the whole band together for complete rehearsals, the three of us knew that we may be on to something, but that something hadn't really been defined at that point. We did know that the show with Tom Kenney would be pretty epic, but that was about it.

Maybe they recognized my dogged work ethic. Maybe they saw that I could be the potential complimentary engine to their already completely stylized car. I can't tell you what made them decide to sign on to the subsequent four shows at The Zodiac with a totally untested, destined to suck front person. Maybe it was just the extra dough to be made on an off night while they pursued their main project, Built For Comfort.

Whatever the reason, they were there. And after bombing mightily, they were still there, ready to make a transition into something else, and they left me to my own devices to create and define what that something else was going to be.

Mark and Paul were "The Stock". Perfectly cooked down and rendered, and lustily flavorful. Had they not given me access to their superlative talents, I wouldn't have had the opportunity to go into the tunnel of memory and find the critical components of the Gumbo. I wouldn't have had the opportunity to build that conceptual armature.

To say that there wouldn't be a band without them would truly be an understatement.

Those rehearsals were my life line. They extended it to me, and I grabbed it with all my might.

They saved my life. Period. I wouldn't be writing this blog today without them. I would have been long gone from this earthly existence.

The tenure of the Hungarians through their history was not without its bumps in the road. Some of those bumps could have been avoided, and some of them couldn't.

But when put in terms of giving thanks and finding true gratitude, I look back at that spring and summer, and I realize what really is important in this world.

I was close to dead, and they gave me the means and support over time to ressurect and re-invent myself, and they knew exactly what they were doing.

Its a debt, that can never be repaid. Ever.

AUTHOR'S NOTE

As of this writing, The Dose has received over 19,500 legitimate page views in 63 daily injections. All I have asked of the general readership is that if you enjoyed what you just read, hit that little share button on the top right column of this site, or copy the blog address down, paste it in an email, and give a friend a taste.

The Dose's original intent and design was for it to be passed along and shared; sort of hoping that we could form a bond and a shared sense of responsibility between the content creation and its users active participation.

Unfortunately, my personal assessment is that its starting to look like a failed experiment.

It isn't without its harvestable aspects in the face of failure, and I don't regret the amount of time I spent writing 63 consecutive posts at all. I have learned so much by disciplining myself to produce quality writing to the best of my ability for 63 conescutive days. I can look myself in the mirror and honestly say that I gave my all, every little last particle of me. I did not phone it in, or take whoever might be reading The Dose for granted in anyway. I stayed true to principle.

I'm truly grateful to those of you that have read, and perhaps even been inspired by the Blog-O-Thon's content and message. I'm also especially grateful to the folks that took it upon themselves to realize their implied responsibility by enjoying the content, and then taking the time to hip their friends and family to the Blog-O-Thon.

Circumstances beyond my control have led me to a place where I can no longer devote the time to producing a quality reading experience for you daily.

Those circumstances were the result of broken promises made to me, and the collateral damge is that I no longer can keep my promise to you... everything, IS connected.

That isn't an excuse though. We are what we eat, and we are the choices we make. I sincerely apologize for breaking my promise, and seeming unaccountable.

Those circumstances coupled, with a rather tepid response of reader participation have led to this unfortunate resolution.

That's cool. I'm a big boy, and I can handle it. "I judge my forward progress and successes by the crushingly epic nature of my failures..."

If you are on facebook, I also started a page called "Little Georgie's Blog-O-Thon". Just search it, it will pop up. That will be the final publicly published Master Index for all of the past Dose Output, and any that might happen in the future.

The "Last Dispensary" as it were.

I love you all.

Easy,

Geo

"You may shoot for the stars and end up in a back alley behind Pluto, beaten and bloodied, but at least I dare to dream, and that’s better than being Earthbound, mired in the muck of mediocrity.

I judge my forward progress and success by the crushingly epic nature of my failures.

The more epic the crash, the more I’m convinced I must be doing something right"

Suggested Reading:

Gary Frenay: A Testimony:

http://littlegeorgiesblog-a-thon.blogspot.com/2011/05/gary-frenay-testimony.html

033.) "On Rhetorical Devices, Influences, and Making Art "Popular": The use of rhetoric as a velvet rope and associative strategy 1981-2011

http://littlegeorgiesblog-a-thon.blogspot.com/2011/06/daily-dose-33-062911.html

055.) "Exploring Creative Processes: Part 1": An Introduction

http://littlegeorgiesblog-a-thon.blogspot.com/2011/07/daily-dose-55-072211.html

056.) "Exploring Creative Processes: Part 2": What's In Your Gumbo?

http://littlegeorgiesblog-a-thon.blogspot.com/2011/07/daily-dose-56-072311.html

057.) "Exploring Creative Processes Part 3": The Hard Wiring Of The Really Little Georgie 1960-1964

http://littlegeorgiesblog-a-thon.blogspot.com/2011/07/daily-dose-57-072411.html

058.) "Party Time": A "Lake Boy" Tale

http://littlegeorgiesblog-a-thon.blogspot.com/2011/07/daily-dose-58-072511.html

059.) "Exploring Creative Processes Part 4": The Test Of Time

http://littlegeorgiesblog-a-thon.blogspot.com/2011/07/daily-dose-59-072611.html

060.) "Exploring Creative Processes Part 5": The Test Of Time

http://littlegeorgiesblog-a-thon.blogspot.com/2011/07/daily-dose-60-072711.html

061.) "Exploring Creative Processes Part 6": Finding the Second of Three "Trinity" Components: The Green Pepper

http://littlegeorgiesblog-a-thon.blogspot.com/2011/07/daily-dose-61-072811.html

062.) Exploring Creative Concepts Part 7: They Eat Green Bell Peppers in the Emerald City

http://littlegeorgiesblog-a-thon.blogspot.com/2011/07/daily-dose-61-072811.html

063.) Exploring Creative Concepts Part 8: Finding The Celery: The final and third component of "The Holy Trinity"

http://littlegeorgiesblog-a-thon.blogspot.com/2011/08/daily-dose-63-080111.html

064.)Exploring Creative Processes Part 9: The Celery Was As Green As An Invader From Mars (Integrating Core Marketing Concepts To Fuel Creative Content)

http://littlegeorgiesblog-a-thon.blogspot.com/2011/08/daily-dose-64-080211.html

DAILY DOSE #64 (08/02/11)

2011-08-01T11:14:00.029-04:00

EXPLORING CREATIVE PROCESSES Part 9: The Celery Was As Green As An Invader From Mars

(Integrating Core Marketing Concepts To Fuel Creative Content)

Citizen Kane is considered by many to be "The Greatest Film Ever Made".

The Hollywood film community and Studio System effectively killed it immediately after its release in 1941. It was too good and Welles made too much trouble for all of them. But once it got resuscitated in the mid 1950's by first French New Wave film makers and critics, and then its television rights got sold and Americans could finally see it, in a relative short time it was topping every critic's "best of" list and still does to this day.

Historical Context is pretty important when looking at "Kane". In 1941, it was just clearly ahead of its time on so many different platforms it still boggles the mind. So much so that Welles never got a chance to make a film with total creative control again in his lifetime.

Much like an early episode of "Survivor" , Orson Welles' sheer genius and the value of his work framed himself as either an impudent child ass or a very real threat to the 1941 film making community. He had to be voted off the island a soon as possible, and was.

I'm not going to go into a lengthy diatribe concerning the artistic value of "Citizen Kane". Much has been written about it, and has been written much better than I ever could.

But in my quest to find a solid armature to build my own work upon, the study of "Kane" and its creators was a forgone conclusion.

With VCR remote in hand, for hours, days, and weeks I deconstructed the film, scene by scene and frame by frame. I bought a copy of the shooting script and took scrupulous notes. Every camera angle, special effect, unorthodox lighting trick, and scene transition was notated. I broke down Bernard Herrman's score bar by bar. I poured over Pauline Kael's and Peter Bogdonovich's critical essays, and fact-checked every anecdote contained within. I logged alot of public library time and still have multiple stacks of composition books written in 1991 filled with "Kane" arcana.

I was in search of a story, but I was also in search of story telling techniques, both in a literary and visual sense.

I learned much and can definitely say that "Kane" as a film was a major influence on me and on the final blueprint that I was trying to create before actually initiating the actual construction of the musical project before me.

But much more influence on me than the film was Welles the man himself.

Welles was given a "Carte Blanche" at RKO, a feat unheard of at the time. Although known as a child wunderkind dramatist and radio star, really he scored that contract on the back of the "War Of The Worlds" broadcast. They were basically expecting him to come to Hollywood and make a B grade amateur film version of it.

Welles was all about controversy and shaking up the status quo. He produced and directed Shakespeare's Macbeth with an all African American cast in a Haitian "Voodoo" context. He mounted a production of "Julius Caesar" with everyone dressed as modern day Italian Fascists in ultra modernist staging and lighting techniques.

And of course, he did a radio broadcast about a Martian Invasion, and set it in the context of an emergency bulletin, igniting a widespread national panic. Don't think he didn't know what he was doing, because even though he had issued a mea culpa apology after the fact, they were well aware of what was happening during the broadcast and Welles refused to pull the plug.

The controversy was a preconceived element and major component, woven directly into the radio play as performed and presented by The Mercury Theater. It was Orson's ticket to Hollywood, and he knew it.

This veritable child arrived in Hollywood with an unheard of two picture deal, total control over all aspects including casting and final cut, having never directed a film before in his life. A kid in a veritable candy store.

Welles basically was lost in the weeds of the Hollywood Hills when he got there. He originally came up with a treatment for Joseph Conrad's "Heart Of Darkness",which RKO refused to greenlight. Then came "Smiler With A Knife", again unable to sell George Schaeffer, the head honcho at RKO on his choice of Lucille Ball for the lead role.

The entire Mercury Theater troupe was out in La-La Land with nothing to do except play tennis all day and get drunk all night on RKO's payroll. Welles was banging starlets like Delores Del Rio and cocktail waitresses two at a time. Things were getting dicey for Orson, and the public relations pressure was mounting; much of it at the poisoned journalistic pen and sword tips of Louella Parsons, the "Perez Hilton" Hollywood gossip monger of her day.

Parsons was the handmaiden and Satanic minion of William Randolph Hearst, one of the most powerful men in America, controlling a newspaper and broadcast empire of epic proportions. She, along with Hedda Hopper (her competition) were key players in the eventual fate of "Kane" and its creator.

With the walls closing in on him, Welles started collaborating with Herman Mankiewicz, and that's when the worm finally turned.

Mankiewicz was part of the New York journalist and writers migration to the west coast when the embryonic film industry started to develop. In his day he was very successful and is credited for creating the snappy dialog patter style in comedies of the 1930's and the subsequent humor employed.

Nunnally Johnson, no slouch to screenwriting and directing himself, once said that the "two most brilliant men he has ever known were George S. Kaufman and Herman Mankiewicz, and that Mankiewicz was the more brilliant of the two. ... he spearheaded the movement of that whole Broadway style of wisecracking, fast-talking, cynical-sentimental entertainment onto the national scene."

But by this time he had de-evolved into a notorious drunk and professional liability. Just another extremely talented, lovable Hollywood loser.

They had a basic working dramatic construct of an idea: Develop a story about a famous American, told from several intersecting point of views in flashback. Aimee Semple McPherson and John Dillinger as potential central characters were kicked around as possibilities, among others.

Only when Mankiewicz handed him an old manuscript and notes of a sprawling novel based on the life of William Randolph Hearst did Welles finally approach the position of getting back on his creative rails. But even then, he wasn't quite there yet.

"Mank" purposefully had shelved the Hearst project out of fear of reprisal from the publishing magnate. Hearst could have people killed in the literal sense, and get away with it. Killing careers to Hearst was the equivalent of shooing away flies.

Mankiewicz was part of the crew that Hearst would ship up to San Simeon, and was a close friend of Marion Davies, Hearst's longtime mistress and Hearst's personal "pet project". Davies' film career was bankrolled by Hearst, and a bit of a Hollywood joke. Mank knew many intimate details of Hearst's life, due to his association with Davies.

You don't become a "Giant of American Publishing" without having a massive ego. Hearst was a Narcissist beyond compare. Welles, knowing a thing or two about over inflated egos and narcissism himself, recognized enough bitchy details in Mank's notes to assume that there just might be enough slings and arrows available to take a shot at enraging that ego as an attempt was made to deflate it.

Welles was compelled by the thought of throwing a well aimed punch at the face of real power and in so doing lighting a fire under the ass of most powerful man in American Media. He was a man that wielded a considerable amount of power over The American Film Industry and Hollywood as well.

Within this context, the controversy would be delivered woven into the actual vehicle of the art.

It was "The Sell" that sold Orson, primed his creative pump, got those juices flowing, directed and focused. Making great art to Welles was a forgone conclusion. He had done it his whole young life.

But making a huge stink and having the art the vehicle to achieve that? Not so easily done. Welles knew that "marketing" was just as important as "making" and he had discovered at a very early age that the secret always was in the alchemy of combining the two in the creative process, instead of the linear process of "making" and then trying to figure out how to sell it.

One of the dirty little factoids in Mankiewicz's notes was the euphemistic pet name that Hearst had lovingly bestowed upon a certain organ in his misstress Marion Davies' vaginal nether world. The pet name?

Rosebud. Rosebud was a code word for "The Courtesan's Clitoris"

This school boy joke became the unifying thread in the narrative of "Kane". As the word was gaspingly uttered in a death rattle, and the first line of dialog spoken, the movie became a "who dunnit" mystery aimed at answering a singular question "What exactly was "Rosebud'?"

The shadowed and almost faceless "News On The March" journalist Jerry Thompson attempts to track down the hidden "clitoral question" through the interviews and subsequent memories of characters Susan Alexander, Jed Leland. Mr. Bernstein, and through Walter Thatcher's memoirs: As Kane's life story was unfolds in flashback from these sources, "Rosebud" was the topic, the conversation starter, and the mystery of the picture.

"Rosebud" drove the action. And although in the end Rosebud signifies the last time this tragically flawed man was authentically happy, the picture ends with "Rosebud" being discarded and going up in flames.

The whole narrative story was based on a prank. One designed to function as a red hot poker, continuously rammed into the eye of one of the most powerful men in America and thus the entire power structure of the film industry, for the entire running time of "Citizen Kane".

That, my friends, is an integrated core marketing concept that informs and shapes the final product.

It is aimed at a single bullseye to achieve the desired result: a firestorm for a work of art yet to be even created, and really a large part of the formula for the fuel to ignite Orson's creative rocket ship launch.

The rest of the incendiary devices in "Kane" were aimed directly at the Marion Davies character. The "Opera" career. The puzzles on the floor. The dim bulb, knuckle-headed, low brow portrayal. The isolation in Xanadu. The alcoholism. That was just cruel variation on a theme.

The "Greatest Movie Of All Time" was going to be about a clitoris. A very specific one. That was the foundational ground work before a a script was developed or a single frame was conceptualized or shot.

Not alot of people were in on the joke, except a few Hollywood insiders. The movie certainly works for people who don't know the joke.

But for those few who did? Kane became an exercise in absolute brutality, and its agenda was very clear. The few that did know ran the show. The heat that was going to come down on all their heads would be beyond compare.

Then the little pissant upstart interloper NY intellectual had the audacity to make the best film ever seen to add insult to injury, having never made a film before in his life, exposing the mediocrity of Hollywood product of the day.

Under pressure from Hearst, the studio heads made a collective offer to RKO to buy all prints and negatives of Citizen Kane for $800,000... to burn it. The greatest movie of all time came very close to being destroyed before ever getting a chance to be seen by a general viewing public.

THAT'S how good it really was then, and that is why it's still great now.

Welles' own narcissism sealed his own doom; with the marketing device, and ultimately with his own genius.

He became one of the great tragedies of the latter half of the 20th century.

Art can imitate life. In this case, Art imitated life and life imitated art in an infinity loop of unforseen, but ultimate self-destruction.

THE CELERY

The purpose of this series was to expose and explore "process". From a single point of view, show how I came up with what I did and why.

But before work really initiated, the core concepts had to be in place, and a rough blueprint had to be developed.

"The Celery" was where art and commerce met. The Wellesian device, the red hot poker and the secret punch in the face, integrated into the art.

There are other ways to create controversy. You can dress up outrageously. You can bite the heads of of bats, or wear meat dresses at awards shows, or have fake lesbian spit swaps with Madonna.

Welles's device was a little different, and much more integrated. It really was designed at a single target, and the very few insiders that knew the joke. His main target was still mass appeal and a mass audience. He knew he was making popular art.

He just knew how to get eyeballs on it, and he knew how to direct focus and expectations before the eyeballs actually saw it.

So in the end, this device worked for me. I would function as "Kane" as well as "The Bunny" and ultimatley the character of "Little Georgie".

It would be the fictionalized version of real life events. The tragic hero would be undone by his fatal flaw. And although there were many protaganists in the tale I was about to write, the singular one was the ultimate betrayer. The vessel of disengenuous love.

This narrative going to be my version of a classic Greek tragedy of loss, dressed and presented as a comedy. The tragic elements were only going to be revealed to those that had the ability to notice. The surface presentation and eventual narrative was just sugar coating and chocolate dip on a rotten peanut of a story of abandonment,mysticism and the dark arts, lust, sex, betrayal, lies, substance abuse, a public beheading and then delivering a head on a plate, with a surprise twist at the end with a cautionary warning to the members of the collective cosciousness that trucked in the utter banality of evil as they mundanely scorched the earth.

That coating would be able to stand alone and function quite effectively as an entertainment in and of itself, and as a shield.

In the end, a casual observer wouldn't know anything about this, and certainly wouldn't recognize anything resembling a "Rosebud". But for those few in the music community that knew the real story, or were at least privvy to all the gossip surrounding the ugly details of the last year of my marriage and the excruciating year between separation and ultimately divorce played out very publicly by my future ex-wife, it was going to be pretty obvious that "Little Georgie's Narrative" was going to follow real life very closely.

Art would imitate life.

I wasn't very good at hiding my "Rosebud" at first. A Gumbo has to cook down and the flavors have to blend. At the point of creation, ideas and concepts, and the feelings that inspire them are very raw indeed.

But in the end, as a concept, the final hidden output was going to be a twisted love letter to my ex-wife, delivered with hidden a red hot poker directly to her metaphoric eye.

Enough people knew the tale to get tongues wagging.

If I could sustain that local innuendo trading, narrative spinning and tongue wagging for three years, that would buy me enough time to slow cook the Gumbo, and get it into a finished state.

There would be an eventual business plan crafted for long term goals, but this was the point where the creative armature and the future business plan truly intersected.

Next Step For The Creative Gumbo Assembly

At this point in time, all of the foundational concepts that I could complete by myself were indentified and clearly defined. The Roux had been rendered, and "The Holy Trinity" had been identified,chosen, chopped in the right amounts, and blended into the roux. The basic armature had been pulled from theory to a loose manifestation of reality.

But ultimately, recordings, like films, are collaborative vehicles. I could be the engine, but I still needed a car to get to the final destination point.

Second only to a perfectly rendered roux, a perfect Gumbo hinges upon the stock used to prepare it for its final finishing stages: the spices and additional ingredients, the timing of their entrance into the gumbo pot, and its cooking down process to blend the flavors of all of the pot's eventual contents.

You can use water, and you can used pre-packaged stock as well, but your Gumbo will suffer accordingly if you do.

Only homemade stock will do.

As mentioned previously, at the time of ultimate creation I had very few resources available to me at the time. I was unknowingly bi-polar crazy, suicidal, and dead broke. All I had was my brain and a modicum of musical talent.

That said, I did have access to a stock; beautifully made and created outside of all of this.

If that stock and the access to it did not exist, then all of this creative armature building would have been a totally pointless exercise. The existence of the stock was the insurance policy needed to commence the mental work necessary to finding the roux and the "Holy Trinity" in the first place.

I knew that if I could get the Gumbo to the point of having the stock added and heat applied, the rest of the process would just fall into place. It was going to start to look and smell like a mighty good gumbo, one that would generate a magnetic force of gravity that would pull all the other future crucial and ultimately very special and unique ingredients into its orbit; eventually convincing those ingredients to dive into the "Hungarian Gumbo Pot" of their own volition.

That stock manifested itself in the form of three very specific people.

The next intallment of this series will take a look at those three people, for without them, "Little Georgie" or "The Shuffling Hungarians" would have been just another good idea left on the drawing board. The only reason it became realized was because of their specific contributions, ones that I will be forever grateful for.

(Stay Tuned For Installment 10)

AUTHOR'S NOTE

As always, if you are following The Dose regularly, its going to be increasingly more helpful if you have a roadmap and scorecard. An updated master index is sent out weekly that includes descriptions and direct hyperlinks to each archived blog: Its a lot easier than searching for archived material for cross referencing purposes than the blogger platform. Just shoot me your email address at:

piannaplunker88@gmail.com

You can opt out at anytime.

As of this writing, The Dose has received over 19,500 legitimate page views in 63 daily injections. All I have asked of the general readership is that if you enjoyed what you just read, hit that little share button on the top right column of this site, or copy the blog address down, paste it in an email, and give a friend a taste.

The Dose's original intent and design was for it to be passed along and shared; sort of hoping that we could form a bond and a shared sense of responsibility between the content creation and its users active participation.

Unfortunately, my personal assessment is that its starting to look like a failed experiment.

It isn't without its harvestable aspects in the face of failure, and I don't regret the amount of time I spent writing 63 consecutive posts at all. I have learned so much by disciplining myself to produce quality writing to the best of my ability for 63 conescutive days. I can look myself in the mirror and honestly say that I gave my all, every little last particle of me. I did not phone it in, or take whoever might be reading The Dose for granted in anyway. I stayed true to principle.

I'm truly grateful to those of you that have read, and perhaps even been inspired by the Blog-O-Thon's content and message. I'm also especially grateful to the folks that took it upon themselves to realize their implied responsibility by enjoying the content, and then taking the time to hip their friends and family to the Blog-O-Thon.

Circumstances beyond my control have led me to a place where I can no longer devote the time to producing a quality experience for you daily.

Those circumstances were the result of broken promises made to me, and the collateral damge is that I no longer can keep my promise to you... everything, IS connected.

That isn't an excuse though. We are what we eat, and we are the choices we make. I sincerely apologize for breaking my promise, and seeming unaccountable. In the end, all you are left with is your Integrity, and mine got compromised by not recognizing the lack of it in others that I openly trusted.

Those circumstances coupled, with a rather tepid response of reader participation have led to this unfortunate resolution.

That's cool. I'm a big boy, and I can handle it. "I judge my forward progress and successes by the crushingly epic nature of my failures..."

If you are on facebook, I also started a page called "Little Georgie's Blog-O-Thon". Just search it, it will pop up. That will be the final publicly published Master Index for all of the past Dose Output, and any that might happen in the future.

The "Last Dispensary" as it were.

I love you all.

Easy,

Geo

"You may shoot for the stars and end up in a back alley behind Pluto, beaten and bloodied, but at least I dare to dream, and that’s better than being Earthbound, mired in the muck of mediocrity.

I judge my forward progress and success by the crushingly epic nature of my failures.

The more epic the crash, the more I’m convinced I must be doing something right"

DAILY DOSE #63 (08/01/11)

2011-08-01T04:44:00.011-04:00

EXPLORING CREATIVE PROCESSES: PART 8

(Finding the Celery: The Final Component Of "THE HOLY TRINITY")

Going back in time to find the purity of concept was initially like trying to find buried treasure without a map.

But through repeated dives, by this point a methodology started to emerge, that at least at the surface, was paying pretty large dividends. The more I dedicated myself to the goal of building a solid armature of conceptual elements, the better I got at knowing where to look to find them.

The shortest distance between two points is a straight line. As I circled around the central point of building that armature, the harvested concepts and ideas kept tightening the circle. At the onset, getting to the true heart of the point of discovery required a time machine worthy of H.G. Wells, but by this point, quantum traveling from any point of the circumference to the center was like walking to the corner store.

Patterns in this chaotic process started to emerge. Subconscious drivers and actual methods materialized.

The Shuffling Hungarians were to be, in the end, a band. A presentation of music, to state the obvious. But by opening myself up to the absolute randomness of the process and to find the real and true answers to the questions I posed to myself, one of those patterns was that I was finding those answers in very unorthodox mediums, that had very little to do with the process of making music.

Maybe I instinctively knew that in trying to create an entity that was unique to its arena, that I needed to pull ideas and be influenced by works of art that had nothing to do with music.

Perhaps that had something to do with how I learned about rock and roll. If you dig The Stones, that sets you on a path of discovery of who they were listening to to arrive at the end product. The same with the Beatles. In fact both groups early recordings were peppered liberally with material to point the way. They were exposing their own journeys of discovery.

To get inside the minds of Lennon and McCartney, you had to absorb the complete ouvres of Motown, Brill Building Pop, Carl Perkins, Buddy Holly, The Everly Brothers, Little Richard, Elvis, The Isley Brothers, Fats Domino, British Dancehall Music and Broadway Show Tunes. The covers gave you a map to understand the artists. If in fact you are what you eat, its a good idea to study the diet of others.

Being very familiar with that process, in very gut-brained fashion I went in the opposite direction. By searching for that one pure moment of discovery, and casting the net wider without any preconceived controls, I started creating a list of "future influence" that wasn't actually operating in the realm of music, or music making. I aimed for the first and last time that I ever felt safe and truly loved.

Then I found the influence and sources of inspiration.

One of my main objectives was again "The Test Of Time". What stood the test of time? What works elevated themselves through time to iconic status?

Beethoven wrote thousands of pieces of music to arrive at the opening four notes of his Fifth Symphony. Out of the whole cannon of Piano Sonatas, why are "The Pathetique" or "The Moonlight" the ones that automatically trigger the collective consciousness?

Van Gough's out put was pretty prodigious, and yet when you think of his work, why do "Sunflowers" or "Starry Night" pop up first? Why does "The David" define the sculptural output of Michelangelo first?

The Sistine Chapel's Ceiling has many images, but God touching his finger tip to Adam's is the first one that pops up.

I was in search of the "Iconic", and I didn't realize it in real time in the multiple journeys of trying to make those discoveries. Really the goal was pretty purely motivated. I just wanted to make the best work that I could with the resources available to me at the time.

I was alone, isolated, bi-polar crazy, clinically depressed and dead broke. The only resource available for conceptual purposes was my own very broken brain, heart, will and spirit. If I could pull off a personal ressurection, than the ressurection would be "televised". My life's story and very public humiliation had been writ large on bathroom walls and shit house stalls, and if I made a public statement, I expected no different of an outcome.

I knew that if I "aimed big", that failure was pretty much a foregone conclusion. But I also knew that in aiming big, I was going to end up with something of much more lasting import than if I stood two feet away from the target and aimed for the middle.

Professional and personal failure was all around me. This did not discourage me, in fact it fueled me. If failure was a foregone conclusion, than I was going to fail in epic proportions. It was the "Daffy Duck" finale. You can only do it once. Accepting that responsibility was a key factor in dedicating myself to the process.

I posted this clip in Dose #60. Watch again, because this was me. I was in search of the creative equivalent of a ".. generous portion of gasoline and nitro-glycereeeen....".

While sewing a Devil's Suit to wear in perpetuity, all I needed was the proverbial "Lit Match" to set it all off. That, dear readers and world wide peep-a-roos, was the "Celery", and I already knew where to find it.

(Stay Tuned For Part 9)

Suggested Reading:

Gary Frenay: A Testimony:

http://littlegeorgiesblog-a-thon.blogspot.com/2011/05/gary-frenay-testimony.html

033.) "On Rhetorical Devices, Influences, and Making Art "Popular": The use of rhetoric as a velvet rope and associative strategy 1981-2011

http://littlegeorgiesblog-a-thon.blogspot.com/2011/06/daily-dose-33-062911.html

055.) "Exploring Creative Processes: Part 1": An Introduction

http://littlegeorgiesblog-a-thon.blogspot.com/2011/07/daily-dose-55-072211.html

056.) "Exploring Creative Processes: Part 2": What's In Your Gumbo?

http://littlegeorgiesblog-a-thon.blogspot.com/2011/07/daily-dose-56-072311.html

057.) "Exploring Creative Processes Part 3": The Hard Wiring Of The Really Little Georgie 1960-1964

http://littlegeorgiesblog-a-thon.blogspot.com/2011/07/daily-dose-57-072411.html

058.) "Party Time": A "Lake Boy" Tale

http://littlegeorgiesblog-a-thon.blogspot.com/2011/07/daily-dose-58-072511.html

059.) "Exploring Creative Processes Part 4": The Test Of Time

http://littlegeorgiesblog-a-thon.blogspot.com/2011/07/daily-dose-59-072611.html

060.) "Exploring Creative Processes Part 5": The Test Of Time

http://littlegeorgiesblog-a-thon.blogspot.com/2011/07/daily-dose-60-072711.html

061.) "Exploring Creative Processes Part 6": Finding the Second of Three "Trinity" Components: The Green Pepper

http://littlegeorgiesblog-a-thon.blogspot.com/2011/07/daily-dose-61-072811.html

062.) Exploring Creative Concepts Part 7: They Eat Green Bell Peppers in the Emerald City

http://littlegeorgiesblog-a-thon.blogspot.com/2011/07/daily-dose-61-072811.html

As always, if you are following The Dose regularly, its going to be increasingly more helpful if you have a roadmap and scorecard. An updated master index is sent out weekly that includes descriptions and direct hyperlinks to each archived blog: Its a lot easier than searching for archived material for cross referencing purposes than the blogger platform. Just shoot me your email address at:

piannaplunker88@gmail.com

You can opt out at anytime.

As of this writing, The Dose has received over 19,250 page views in 61 daily injections. All I have asked of the general readership is that if you enjoyed what you just read, hit that little share button on the top right column of this site, or copy the blog address down, paste it in an email, and give a friend a taste.

The Dose's original intent and design was for it to be passed along and shared; sort of hoping that we could form a bond and a shared sense of responsibility between the content and its users.

I'd like to continue to keep delivering this stuff, but we're rapidly reaching the point of diminishing returns.

Unfortunately, my personal assessment is that its starting to look like a failed experiment.

It isn't without its harvestable aspects in the face of failure, and I don't regret the amount of time I spent writing 62 consecutive posts at all. I have learned so much by disciplining myself to produce quality writing to the best of my ability for 62 conescutive days. I can look myself in the mirror and honestly say that I gave my all, every little last particle of me. I did not phone it in, or take whoever might be reading The Dose for granted in anyway. I stayed true to principle.

I'm truly grateful to those of you that have read, and perhaps even been inspired by the Blog-O-Thon's content and message. I'm also especially grateful to the folks that took it upon themselves to realize their implied responsibility by enjoying the content, and then taking the time to hip their friends and family to the Blog-O-Thon.

Circumstances beyond my control have led me to a place where I can no longer devote the time to producing a quality experience for you daily.

Those circumstances were the result of broken promises made to me, and the collateral damge is that I no longer can keep my promise to you... everything, IS connected.

That isn't an excuse though. We are what we eat, and we are the choices we make. I sincerely apologize for breaking my promise, and seeming unaccountable. In the end, all you are left with is your Integrity, and mine got compromised by not recognizing the lack of it in others that I openly trusted.

Those circumstances coupled with a rather tepid response of reader participation have led to this unfortunate resolution.

That's cool. I'm a big boy, and I can handle it. "I judge my forward progress and successes by the crushingly epic nature of my failures..."

If you are on facebook, I also started a page called "Little Georgie's Blog-O-Thon". Just search it, it will pop up. That will be the final publicly published Master Index for all of the past Dose Output, and any that might happen in the future.

The "Last Dispensary" as it were.

I love you all.

Easy,

Geo

"You may shoot for the stars and end up in a back alley behind Pluto, beaten and bloodied, but at least I dare to dream, and that’s better than being Earthbound, mired in the muck of mediocrity.

I judge my forward progress and success by the crushingly epic nature of my failures.

The more epic the crash, the more I’m convinced I must be doing something right"

AS ALWAYS: PLEASE FEEL FREE TO COMMENT, SUBSCRIBE, AND SHARE THIS BLOG ADDRESS VIA COPY AND PASTE IN AN EMAIL, THROUGH THE TWITTER OR FACEBOOK "SHARE" BUTTONS,WORD OF MOUTH, FILTHY WHISPERED GOSSIP, FALSE NARRATIVE, TIN CAN AND STRING CONFIGURATIONS, PONY EXPRESS, OR CARRIER PIGEON. WITHOUT FEEDBACK OR ACTIVE "SHARING", WHAT YOU JUST READ.... DOESN'T EXIST!

COLONEL BEAUREGARD "IRON THIGHS" JEFFERSON, A.K.A. "THE MANAGEMENT"

Daily Dose #62 (07/ 29-31/11)

2011-07-30T14:38:00.031-04:00

Exploring Creative Concepts Part 7

(They Eat Green Bell Peppers in the Emerald City)

1964 / 6:45 am

I remember waking up early on cold winter mornings in the dark, lured into an emerging state of semi-consciousness by the aroma of Cream Of Wheat wafting from the kitchen.

I would stumble out of bed and into the kitchen, beclothed in my baby blue "onsie" with the pink bunnies scattered about the flannel material and the white nubby plastic soles glued upon its feet.

As we three Rossi sprouts took our places around the small square wooden table in the kitchen, Moms would serve up the steaming glop whilst singing "The Cream Of Wheat" radio jingle of her youth, grab the glass bottle and pour milk in three bowls, and let me handle the sugar ratio with a four year old's heavy spoon-wielding hand.

The TV was tuned to The Today Show. Moms said it was for "Current Events", but I think she secretly had a crush on Hugh Downs. Eating for those first ten minutes of the lead-off news segment was a solemn affair. All of us were required to shut up and give Hugh our undivided attention while we blew on spoonfuls of breakfast goo to cool it off some.

At 7:10, Mom would assume her position at the fourth side of the square, and as if by magic, produce "the book". The TV was turned off, its black and white picture closing in on itself, reducing to a lingering white dot in the center of the screen.

Our first hour of an awake state was mapped out with military precision. Reality first, and then fantasy second, accompanied by her rendition of The Cream Of Wheat Song.

It didn't matter what the book was, but in retrospect, it was always of high quality. Charlotte's Web, Winnie The Pooh, Stuart Little, Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, The Wind and The Willows, and The Cricket In Times Square; Every morning a chapter would be read aloud; The dialog acted out in character by my beautiful Moms, and when an illustration would appear in the text, the book was passed around the table.

Day by day, the stories would unfold serially as we ate our cereal. You never wanted the chapter to end. That meant that Alfie and Becky would have their teeth washed and their faces brushed and hustled off to school; and I would be the only kid in the house until they came back.

But I couldn't wait for the next part of the story. I figured the quicker I learned to read, I wouldn't have to depend on Mom to read them to us. Eventually all those books and more were devoured and memorized chapter and verse, read repetitively with my nose buried constantly within them.

But long after I was able to digest novels myself, still; Those breakfast table readings and performances were enthralling ritual.

Moms never read to us to put us to sleep at bedtime. She read to us to fire our imaginations and wake us up.

DANNY KAYE SITTING ON A TOADSTOOL 01/64

Having had to replace our TV set due to my block throwing incident during the news coverage of JFK's assassination and State funeral, the first color TV on Gayle Road made its appearance in the Rossi living room.

We gathered around the set on a cold Sunday's winter night earlier than usually, to watch the televised special broadcast of "The Wizard Of Oz". I'm sure that the yearly broadcast had been established as a yearly event before then. But this is the first of my memory.

It was in color, and it was a revelatory experience.

The family brood, and like every other American Atomic Age, Cold War Era family, tuned in every year as "The Wizard Of Oz" cemented its place in the American cultural consciousness.

No one can deny the overall greatness of this film, or the L.Frank Baum books that had been entertaining about four decades of American children before the theatrical release of the film in 1939.

But the confluence of the film with the medium of broadcast television in the era bears special notice.: With only three major networks and no ability of home video recording or playback technologies in the day burnished the importance of the film and its yearly special broadcasts. You could only see it once a year, and it was a truly special family event, shared by America.

It unified all of us. Just like the airing of Warner Brothers Cartoons did to every kid with access to a TV, every Saturday morning.

So when searching for examples of "Pop Culture" creative output, its impact on our culture, and running it through the criteria of "The Test Of Time", there is no larger or more impactful example than this film.

I knew if I was going to find "The Pepper" of my holy trinity, I would have to deconstruct this film on all platforms, but my first focus was the original progenitor of the film: The actual story, written by L.Frank Baum, and how it was re-interpreted by the multitude of writers that crafted the screenplay and musical numbers for the film.

Allegorical stories seem to have more staying, and thus more sticking power in human experience and consciousness, from Homer's "Odyssey", to The Bible, all the way to "The Wizard Of Oz". In search of a narrative for a central character, I knew that just like everything else about to be cooked up, those narrative elements had to function on many different levels to bear repeat exposure, and have the same type of impact.

The narrative had to be a gift that kept on giving, no matter how many times it was visited by an audience.

Allegory, and its use, was a key component in crafting a future narrative for "The Bunny".

As I deconstructed every element of "The Wizard of Oz", and went on a vision quest to learn each and every little fact and detail I could about the construction and creation of the books and the film, many other new skills and concepts were revealed; and many other pre-existing skills and theoretical concepts that already were within me were validated.

Unknown to me, I was actually co-opting as I was crafting the architecture of this classic American musical film. In search of an actual story, the ideas started to gel as a strong allegorical narrative rooted in fantasy, with its action driven forward by songs.

This was "The Pepper", in it's embryonic state: and it was as green as anything else found in The Emerald City. But I had the foundation dug, and laid, even if the rough architectural blueprint wasn't exactly manifested in a hard reality yet. All I needed now was the building material to draw those blueprints and build my own creative version of an "Oz" upon it.

WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW"... Mark Twain, American author and humorist"

1991

I was at the creative "Waterloo". I had my foundational parameters clearly defined, but now I was at the point where you really do have to create something out of nothing.

I used Twain's quote to guide the process and lead the way. If I was going to assume the character of "The Bunny", then The Bunny in the context of an allegorical, picaresque adventure story, was me.

My story was the one story that I knew most intimately.

So roughly, I just decided to take that story, mythologize it and amplify the life themes of existence that were running through my head at the time. As I sat down with a pencil and a yellow legal pad, I jotted down a short list of potential dark adult themes that I wanted to weave into the future "Allegory". I was in a very psychologically dark place at the time, and by writing about what I knew, these themes would reflect me current state of mind:

1. Abandonment
2. Loss
3. Personal Betrayal
4. Lust and Sex as Leverage and Other Substance Abuses: Addiction
5. Heart Break: Love and Love Lost
6. Madness
7. The Nature of Failure
8. Mob Rule.
9. Maintenance of Integrity
10. Death/Murder of the bunny at all platforms
11. Mysticism
12. The Quest for Meaning/Spirituality
13. The Flaws of Humanity, both innwardly and outwardly
14. Resurrection

This was my life in 1991. The commitment to a creative endeavor was tied to the need to get out of the psychic hole that I was in. These were the stages and changes I was experiencing as I continued to absorb cataclysmic professional and personal failures, the personal ones tied to the events of the disintegration and very public implosion of my marriage, specifically tied to the behavior and autonomous life style choices of my soon to be future ex-wife.

I hadn't really figured out how to turn this into an allegorical tale yet, but this was a process of circling around certain conundrums, and slowly tightening the noose around its neck, as mentioned previously.

The challenge was to write a narrative that somehow would be entertaining, and appear to be not only light hearted, but in fact at times extremely comedic as well. Alot of that element would center on the actual character development of "The Bunny" himself.

But at the onset, there had to be a transition of material from the comic R 'N B book of obscure covers that had been hand picked by the future voice of Spongebob Square Pants, fellow Syracusan Tom Kenny. So any future material chosen to cover had to meet two basic criteria:

1. It had to be New Orleans based as a rule. The band had to go through the process of learning how to be a New Orleans style band first before one note of original music could be written. I had to go through this learning curve as well both musically and in the context of being the "Ringleader/Front Person". We had to immerse ourselves in the New Orleans "book" and explore the styles and arrangement techniques and then re-interpret them with an East Coast, New York sensibility. It had to evoke, but uniquely personalized as a representation of who we actually were. New Orleans would function as "OZ".

2. The lyric content had to match these thematic threads. Some of The Fabulous Pushballs material already met that bench mark ("Drunk", "Down Home Girl")... so much so that those two tunes were covers that were included in the final manifestation of all of this, The Shuffling Hungarians eponymously named first recording, released in the fall of 1994.

As a side note, an actual timeline started to emerge of just how long it was going to take to get there. Before we debuted at the Dinosaur, I started to get a feeling for the projections, time wise, and it did look to me like it was going to take about three years from conception of the original ideas to finished product of both band and recording.

BUILDING LITTLE GEORGIE ("You got to do "Good" in the world...")

As I was in the development phase of indentifying basic narrative themes and that the narrative would take on the fictionalized and mythologized version of autobiographical events, I still didn't have the actual "story". That would come in time, but now I needed to actually develop the central character, and had enough structural elements in place to take that challenge on.

By doing this, I knew that the character traits of the character would start to actually redefine and clarify narrative points.

At the time, I was very much intrigued by the inner conflict of popular artists that had fought the battle of becoming secular Pop Stars by using sacred forms, and coming from a personal place of deep spirituality.

There's a recording of an argument between Sam Phillips and Jerry Lee Lewis prior to cutting "Great Balls Of Fire". At the time, I had only read a transcript of it, but thanks to the intrawebs, here's the actual recording as Sam tries to twist Jerry Lee's arm into to recording "Great Balls Of Fire", as both of them cite scripture chapter and verse; Jerry Lee desperately trying to not record "Great Balls Of Fire" and Phillips intent on selling the true power of Rock and Roll.

http://www.myspace.com/sunyears/music/songs/jerry-lee-lewis-sam-phillips-argue-53422860

Listen to the pain and incredulity in Jerry Lee's voice as he asks the question "Nooooo, Nooooo!-How can The Devil save souls? What are ya talkin about? Man...I got the Devil in me! If I didn't I'd be a Christian!"

I especially love one of the sidemen on the session who can be heard in the background saying "Awww, lets cut it man...."

Well as history proves, Phillips prevailed. Rock and Roll history was made.

But Jerry Lee's state of mind before he cut the song? A lost soul, in complete and utter turmoil.

Just like mine at the time I was trying to come up with the "Bunny".

There are other examples of this inner turmoil, when the sacred and the profane collided in rock and roll history and genious was born of that inner clash and turmoil. Elvis. Sam Cooke. Ray Charles. Al Green. Aretha Franklin. Really anybody that came up through the church with a holy roller Pentecostal sensibility. All of them had to eventually accept the very real thought in their minds that they were actually going to burn in hell predicated on a career and artisitic choice.

The art got made in the context of real conflict. The epic and eternal battle between good and evil.

This aspect would define the new character, but also define the as yet written narrative, In any good allegorical story, this is the critical element, be it God vs. The Devil, The Good Witch of the North vs, The Wicked Witch of The West, or The Dark Side vs. The Force or Yin vs Yang.

Magnetic, chemical and electrical force at the atomic level, be they positive or negative, is how energy is transferred through the universe, and it effects us all right here on our lowly little Earth bound existence.

The action of the narrative would ultimately driven by this time honored tradition in story telling and life: What happens when the sacred and the profane collide, and what is the outcome?

OTHER ELEMENTS

In all honesty, much of my direction of character development was directly inspired by Greil Marcus' classic tome of Rock and Roll essays, MYSTERY TRAIN. My paperback copy by 1991 was a much dog eared, coffee stained, yellowed by drool, constant resource and repetitive reference book.

The prologue of MYSTERY TRAIN recounts an episode on THE DICK CAVETT SHOW, the guests present at this taping being Little Richard, Erich Segal (who wrote "Love Story" a very popular book at the time), theater critic John Simon, and Rita Moreno.

Basically, Marcus details an argument between Simon and Segal, with Little Richard quietly watching as the two intellectuals crash their broadswoeds over the cultural significance of Segal's enormously popular but ultimatley crappy book, "Love Story".

Until Richard Penniman sees his opening. This from the prologue of MYSTERY TRAIN:

"The battle resumes. Segal has now slumped even lower in his chair, if that is possible, and seems to be arguing with the ceiling. “You’re only a crutuc,” he says as if to Simon. “What have you ever written? What do you know about art? Never in the history of art…”

“WHY, NEVER IN THE HISTORY!”

The time has come. Little Richard makes his move. Leaping from his seat, he takes the floor, arms waving, hair coming undone, eyes wild, mouth working. He advances on Segal, Cavett and Simon, who cringe as one man. The camera cuts to a close-up of Segal, who looks miserable, then to Simon, who is attempting to compose the sort of bemused expression he would have if, say, someone were to defecate on the floor. Little Richard is audible off-camera, and then his face quickly fills the screen.

“WHY, YES, IN THE WHOLE HISTORY OFAAAART! THAT’S RIGHT! SHUT UP! SHUT UP! WHAT DO YOU KNOW, MR. CRITIC? WHY, WHEN THE CREEDENCE CLEARWATER PUT OUT WITH THEIR ‘TRAVELIN’ BAND’ EVERYBODY SAY WHEEE-OOO BUT I KNOW IT ONLY CAUSE THEY DOING ‘LONG TALL SALLY’ JUST LIKE THE BEATLES ANDTHESTONESANDTOMJONESANDELVIS – I AM ALL OF IT, LITTLE RICHARD HIMSELF, VERY TRULY THE GREATEST, THE HANDSOMEST, AND NOW TO YOU (to Segal, who now appears to be on the floor) AND TO YOU (to Simon, who looks to Cavett as if to say, really old man, this has been fun, but this, ah, fellow is becoming a bit much, perhaps a commercial is in order). I HAVE WRITTEN A BOOK, MYSELF, I AM A WRITER, I HAVE WRITTEN A BOOK AND IT’S CALLED –

“‘HE GOT WHAT HE WANTED BUT HE LOST WHAT HE HAD’! THAT’S IT! SHUT UP! SHUT UP! SHUT UP! HE GOT WHAT HE WANTED BUT HE LOST WHAT HE HAD! THE STORY OF MY LIFE. CAN YOU DIG IT? THAT’S MY BOY LITTLE RICHARD, SURE IS. OO MAH SOUL!”

Little Richard flies back to his chair and slams down into it. “WHEEEEE-OO! OOO MAH SOUL! OO mah soul…”

Little Richard sits with the arbiters of taste, oblivious to their bitter stares, savoring his moment. He is Little Richard. Who are they? Who will remember Erich Segal, John Simon, Dick Cavett? Who will care? Ah, but Little Richard, Little Richard himself! There is a man who matters. He knows how to rock.

A phrase that Little Richard snatched off Erich Segal stays in my mind: “Never in the history – in the whole history of art…” And that was it. Little Richard was the only artist on the set that night, the only one who disrupted an era, the only one with a claim to immortality. The one who broke rules, created a form; the one who gave shape to a vitality that wailed silently in each of us until he found a voice for it."

The "Bunny" became "Little Georgie" officially. An homage and a blueprint.

His future story? "HE GOT WHAT HE WANTED BUT HE LOST WHAT HE HAD"

Ultimately, "Little Georgie" was going to fill all the deficiencies that I felt that I represented at a time when my self-esteem was at an all time low. He would be the "Anti-George Rossi".

"Little Georgie" would be everything I was not.

He would be a cross between Jerry Lee, Little Richard, Stack-O-Lee, and John Henry The Steel Drivin' Man.

He would be larger than life, and a complete amplified cartoon: bragadocious beyond belief, physically beautiful, charismatic, talented, and adored. He would be able to out-play, out-fuck, out-drink, out-drug, out-pimp, and out-fight any mere mortal alive.

In my personal isolation and very real abject misery, I would define him as a version of Bacchus, The Devil, and God incarnate. The Alpha and Omega, as defined by Foghorn Leghorn, Wile E. Coyote, Pepe Le Pew and Bugs Bunny via Chuck Jones and Mike Maltese.

At the intersection of Highways 61 and 49, he could close a deal like Ron Popeil on the Atlantic City Boardwalk.

But like every epic hero, he would be imbued with a tragic flaw, and an Achilles Heel. For this one flaw, I looked toward myself, and installed the singular point of actual reality firmly and deeply into a utter fantasy of character invention.

He would want to be loved truly and authentically; He would risk all to seek it and that would be his undoing.

The narrative would be a variation on the concept of "Love Conquers All", sideways and backwards.

(Stay Tuned For Part 8: The Third Element Of The Holy Trinity)

Suggested Reading:

Gary Frenay: A Testimony:

http://littlegeorgiesblog-a-thon.blogspot.com/2011/05/gary-frenay-testimony.html

033.) "On Rhetorical Devices, Influences, and Making Art "Popular": The use of rhetoric as a velvet rope and associative strategy 1981-2011

http://littlegeorgiesblog-a-thon.blogspot.com/2011/06/daily-dose-33-062911.html

055.) "Exploring Creative Processes: Part 1": An Introduction

http://littlegeorgiesblog-a-thon.blogspot.com/2011/07/daily-dose-55-072211.html

056.) "Exploring Creative Processes: Part 2": What's In Your Gumbo?

http://littlegeorgiesblog-a-thon.blogspot.com/2011/07/daily-dose-56-072311.html

057.) "Exploring Creative Processes Part 3": The Hard Wiring Of The Really Little Georgie 1960-1964

http://littlegeorgiesblog-a-thon.blogspot.com/2011/07/daily-dose-57-072411.html

058.) "Party Time": A "Lake Boy" Tale

http://littlegeorgiesblog-a-thon.blogspot.com/2011/07/daily-dose-58-072511.html

059.) "Exploring Creative Processes Part 4": The Test Of Time

http://littlegeorgiesblog-a-thon.blogspot.com/2011/07/daily-dose-59-072611.html

060.) "Exploring Creative Processes Part 5": The Test Of Time

http://littlegeorgiesblog-a-thon.blogspot.com/2011/07/daily-dose-60-072711.html

061.) "Exploring Creative Processes Part 6": Finding the Second of Three "Trinity" Components: The Green Pepper

http://littlegeorgiesblog-a-thon.blogspot.com/2011/07/daily-dose-61-072811.html

As always, if you are following The Dose regularly, its going to be increasingly more helpful if you have a roadmap and scorecard. An updated master index is sent out weekly that includes descriptions and direct hyperlinks to each archived blog: Its a lot easier than searching for archived material for cross referencing purposes than the blogger platform. Just shoot me your email address at:

piannaplunker88@gmail.com

You can opt out at anytime.

As of this writing, The Dose has received over 19,250 page views in 61 daily injections. All I have asked of the general readership is that if you enjoyed what you just read, hit that little share button on the top right column of this site, or copy the blog address down, paste it in an email, and give a friend a taste.

The Dose's original intent and design was for it to be passed along and shared; sort of hoping that we could form a bond and a shared sense of responsibility between the content and its users.

I'd like to continue to keep delivering this stuff, but we're rapidly reaching the point of diminishing returns.

Unfortunately, my personal assessment is that its starting to look like a failed experiment.

It isn't without its harvestable aspects in the face of failure, and I don't regret the amount of time I spent writing 62 consecutive posts at all. I have learned so much by disciplining myself to produce quality writing to the best of my ability for 62 conescutive days. I can look myself in the mirror and honestly say that I gave my all, every little last particle of me. I did not phone it in, or take whoever might be reading The Dose for granted in anyway. I stayed true to principle.

I'm truly grateful to those of you that have read, and perhaps even been inspired by the Blog-O-Thon's content and message. I'm also especially grateful to the folks that took it upon themselves to realize their implied responsibility by enjoying the content, and then taking the time to hip their friends and family to the Blog-O-Thon.

Circumstances beyond my control have led me to a place where I can no longer devote the time to producing a quality experience for you daily.

Those circumstances were the result of broken promises made to me, and the collateral damge is that I no longer can keep my promise to you... everything, IS connected.

That isn't an excuse though. We are what we eat, and we are the choices we make. I sincerely apologize for breaking my promise, and seeming unaccountable. In the end, all you are left with is your Integrity, and mine got compromised by not recognizing the lack of it in others that I openly trusted.

Those circumstances coupled with a rather tepid response of reader participation have led to this unfortunate resolution.

That's cool. I'm a big boy, and I can handle it. "I judge my forward progress and successes by the crushingly epic nature of my failures..."

If you are on facebook, I started a page called "Little Georgie's Blog-O-Thon". Just search it, it will pop up. That will be the final publicly published Master Index for all of the past Dose Output, and any that might happen in the future.

The "Last Dispensary" as it were.

I love you all.

Easy,

Geo

"You may shoot for the stars and end up in a back alley behind Pluto, beaten and bloodied, but at least I dare to dream, and that’s better than being Earthbound, mired in the muck of mediocrity.

I judge my forward progress and success by the crushingly epic nature of my failures.

The more epic the crash, the more I’m convinced I must be doing something right"

Daily Dose #61 (07/28/11)

2011-07-28T12:15:00.010-04:00

Exploring Creative Processes: Part 6

(Finding the Second of Three "Trinity" Components: The Green Pepper)

Deep sea diving through my past, I found certain "Pearls" that matched my objectives of finding a state of conceptual purity. On my first two excursions, I found a few core concepts that would comprise the roux of my projected, but still yet unknown and undefined creative "Gumbo Project".

Just as a refresher, here's a snippet that outlines rough parameters for "The Roux"; The true base of "The Gumbo", defined in a previous blog (The Hard Wiring Of The Really Little Georgie, Daily Dose #57: http://littlegeorgiesblog-a-thon.blogspot.com/2011/07/daily-dose-57-072411.html)

"Those identifiable core elements took this form, when finally digging inside myself to find them.

1. There had to be a "narrative" element. All material, covered or eventually written, had to follow that narrative.

2. Although undefined at that point, the narrative would explore the darker side of the human experience. A creator creates of what he knows.

3. The narrative would be allegorical in nature. And in the end, uplift.

4. The project had to be just as powerfully presented graphically. Everything piece of material that came out of the camp had to deliver the right visual content to be just as evocative as the music, the presentation, the performances, and the narrative.

5. As mis-direction, the narrative had to be hidden, through the use of unabashed humor. It couldn't look like any of us were taking ourselves too seriously.

Entertainment values were what we were going to show first.

6. The band was going to showcase a decided New Orleans Piano flavor; (Insert "Caribbean Calypso" in here: a strong component of Mardi Gras Indian chants and music, and the music of Professor Longhair, blues with a decided Afro Caribbean slant, and the artist that I stole the name of the band from, as an homage, of course!)

7. It had to rock, but more importantly, it had to roll. There were going to be moments of collective and communal orgasmic release, just like that scream in "I Saw Her Standing There"; a pure exhibition of the power and resultant joy of Rock And Roll as I knew it."

After another dive in the darkened depths of early memory, I found my "onion", the first of a projected three additional core components, revolving around the filter of "The Test Of Time". What that was, and could again I find the purity in that concept; and then reinterpret that concept as a core design component.

From Daily Dose #60 ("Finding The Onion": http://littlegeorgiesblog-a-thon.blogspot.com/2011/07/daily-dose-60-072711.html)

"The first awareness of "The Test Of Time" was drilled into me from 1963-1970 on all platforms, but the source of the springwater? The love and care of my brother through the conduit of the entire Warner Brothers Cartoon Cannon.

I had the onion now, and like an onion, this first component of my "Holy Trinity" was a multi-layered thing......

The onion, and thus the Gumbo, would explore the darkness of the human condition, yet appear to be "light", functioning on many conscious and subconscious levels simultaneously. The Onion would not condescend or cheapen its intended audience in anyway. The onion would be stand repetitive viewings and listenings through multi- layered complexities. The onion at first glance would be funny. The onion was going to have a cast of characters that would be absolutely personality driven.

Everything I knew about the Warner Cartoon Output would be re-interpreted, twisted and personalized, but I knew that those core concepts would be recognized and followed.

And at the heart of it all, and the soul of it all, would stand "The Bunny", as I remembered him from 1962 with my six year old brother sitting next to me with a sketch pad, teaching a two year old how to draw a perfect Bugs with nothing but love and a totally open heart.

I was going to be "The Bunny". As I rushed to to escape the past to gasp the air of the here and now, and broke that water line, the concept of "Little Georgie" was born unto this world."

I was circling around a conundrum, tightening the noose around its proverbial neck.

The last two components of "The Holy Trinity" ("The Green Pepper and The Celery") were now going to be actual creative work that were going to by guided by the parameters outlined, and always run through a set of filters, at this point "The Test Of Time".

These next components were going to be narrative based. I now had the function of a central character in that future narrative, but now I had to actually develop it in form.

Do do that, I had to take one more dive, this time to find that narrative. Find it, and the character of "The Bunny" would flesh itself out, as would the problem of character development in general.

I was very close to breaking through at this point, and probably would have gotten there without this third trip in the Time Tunnel, but since it had born the core design elements, and found them in a state of child-like purity and awareness, I had to make sure I had the narrative's priorities screwed on straight.

DAILY DOSE #62 will be about storytelling, and what types of stories I was attracted to, and what types of stories conformed to these newly defined parameters. Ultimately leading me to answer a critical question: Could I write one of my own?

Could I write one that could run cleanly through the now established filter of "The Test Of Time?"

(STAY TUNED FOR PART 7)

As always, if you are following The Dose regularly, its going to be increasingly more helpful if you have a roadmap and scorecard. An updated master index is sent out weekly that includes descriptions and direct hyperlinks to each archived blog: Its a lot easier than searching for archived material for cross referencing purposes than the blogger platform. Just shoot me your email address at:

piannaplunker88@gmail.com

You can opt out at anytime.

Remember Peep-A-Roos, your feedback and the active sharing of The Dose is what keeps it alive and viable, and is just as important if not more than the actual generation of the content.

As of this writing, The Dose has received over 18,950 page views in 60 daily injections. All I ask is that if you enjoyed what you just read, hit that little share button on the top right column of this site, or copy the blog address down, paste it in an email, and give a friend a taste.

It's designed to be passed along and shared. Otherwise, it just dies on the vine.

Love,

Geo

"You may shoot for the stars and end up in a back alley behind Pluto, beaten and bloodied, but at least I dare to dream, and that’s better than being Earthbound, mired in the muck of mediocrity.

I judge my forward progress and success by the crushingly epic nature of my failures.

The more epic the crash, the more I’m convinced I must be doing something right"

Daily Dose #60 (07/27/11)

2011-07-26T19:41:00.032-04:00

EXPLORING CREATIVE PROCESSES: PART 5

Finding The Onion

In the same mental quantum leap taken to find the authentic elements my "Roux", I used the same techniques to find the first of three elements of my "Holy Trinity", my metaphoric "Onion".

Just like an onion, I stripped away memory layer by layer, falling backward in time to get to some kind of purity, that I knew resided at the core, but was lost to me.

I really did stare into the mirror while I did this. I had to look myself directly in the eye, with no more self-generated bullshit attached to the process. My life depended on it.

I was isolated and alone, and felt abandoned and betrayed by anyone outside of my family who I had ever dared to love. I wasn't at the point where I could accept my own personal responsibility for my current lot. Those were the final questions that needed to be acknowledged and answered obviously; that's where any harvestable wisdom and lessons for the future resided and this was only the start of THAT journey. I wasn't ready for that yet. This was only the second of many attempts at "Soul Scraping".

Framed in the context of finding the root elements of a future creative endeavor, that gave me cover to some degree; yet still, the only council I could keep or trust was my own.

As the imaginary digit counter of the years rolled backward, I left a trail of breadcrumbs by the milestone markers to get back to the present.

Every failure, every betrayal, every fucked up thing done, either to me or what I had done to others, got cataloged and then peeled away. Every mask, every facade, every rationalization that led to false justifications got stripped and tossed aside.

This time though, I was on a specific mission. I was in search of "The Test Of Time", but not the versions that were learned in 7 years of car rides with debating the concept with Eddie Hamell.

I was in search of the first awareness of the concept; it's initial discovery. When was that light bulb lit? Where was that one true and pure moment in life that "The Test of Time" not only existed, but that somehow I had simultaneously placed a value on it without attaching an agenda to it? When was the time, and where was that place of security and innocence?

Where's my real "Onion"?

November 22, 1963

Although I have very definitive memories of my first three years on the planet, its difficult to attach specific times and dates. That's why November 22nd, 1963, and its media aftermath is useful as a memory docking station, and point of real verifiable time reference. The rest of early childhood is based alot in part on ritual. Feeding times, bed times, and repetitive, consistent events.

I remember the pain and anguish of all the adults around me, and being aware of the fact that something was terribly wrong. I had never seen real grief before that day. It was scary.

But there was also a frustration attached to those days as well. All regularly sceduled television programming got pre-empted, and more specifically aimed at the rote rituals of a three year old child, all children's programming on the only available three broadcast networks dematerialized mysteriously.

The disappearance of "The Bugs Bunny Show" the following Saturday morning was a crisis of epic proportions, much more so in my life at the time than a Presidential assassination. I became unglued. I remember this morning well, because all hell broke loose at the realization that my ritual was being denied.

I threw a block at the TV in an uncharacteristic three year old blind rage, and got thoroughly thrashed for the outburst. These were the days when it was OK to spank your kids, and although I received MANY of them through my early years by being what in my mind was being benignly mischievous, this one was my first, and my three year old ass was a deserving recipient.

You never forget your first time.

For over a year of hard-wiring cognitive development, my Saturday morning ritual was based around "The Bunny". That was the highlight of the week, and the whole of my toddler existence was scheduled around that singular weekly event, with Sunday's airing of "Walt Disney's Wonderful World Of Color" (of which we watched on a black and white set) coming in a distant second. Cartoons were always kind of a crapshoot on that show, and not always guaranteed.

But most importantly, "The Bunny" always was experienced at the side of my older brother Alfie.

My brother was four years my elder, the first born to our little mid-century nuclear family that was housed and based at 12 Gayle Road, Skaneateles, NY.

Alfie was (and still is) a genius. There's no delicate way of saying that. His I.Q. tested off the charts, and he was a child prodigy in many areas. It was normal to me, but in retrospect he must have been pretty scary to some, especially kids his own age. He was that smart, but more so he was freakishly talented in his chosen field of interest by age seven: The graphic arts of all genres, and by relation, the study of Animation.

From the day I spurted out of my mother's birth canal, I became Alfie's charge and he became my protector; He was "Primo" and I, "Secondo". Frick and Frack. Mutt and Jeff. Abbot and Costello. There wasn't a time I can remember where we were separated for very long until he started to go to Kindergarten. Every available moment we had, it seemed like we spent them together.

Alfie knew that if we were going to hang, that he had to get me up to speed and make up that four year gap as quickly as possible. He taught me to read, and he taught me to draw. He sat me down in front of every cartoon available on TV, and deconstructed comic books, from my day one until he finally hit puberty and realized that hanging out with his kid brother as best friend might result in a form of social suicide.

I took that intellectual and skill challenge on. There was no safer, and no more fun place to be for me, than to be pasted at his side.

"The Bunny" was the centerpiece of all knowledge and filial love in 1963, and it grew from there.

As we watched every Saturday, Alf would explain the gags that were dependent on reading, or humor aimed at adults. I knew what cirrhosis of the liver was at the age of three, because of the references to "Sir Osis of Liver and Sir Loin of Pork" from a roundtable scene from "Knighty Knight Bugs"

He taught me what suicide was in 1964. Bugs, Pepe LePew, and Daffy always seemed to commit it, or try to. I wanted to know, and Alfie had the answers.

The punch line of "Good thing I missed!" was much funnier if you comprehended the darkness of the set-up.

He taught me about surrealism through "Duck Amok". Right after viewing it, we'd hit the art books that had paintings of Magritte and Dali. Opera? Right after "The Rabbit of Seville", "What's Opera Doc?" we'd hit the family record collection and listen to Rossini's classic while devouring the liner notes and reading the libretto in Italian, or attempt to plow through Wagner's "Ring" cycle to sing "Kill The Wabbit" along with "The Ride Of The Valkyries"

Why was Bugs commonly dressed as a girl all the time? Here comes the lesson on cross-dressing and Transvestism. Nothing was held back as being "age-inappropriate."

He defined the use of irony in "One Froggy Evening" and "Show Biz Bugs". If you didn't get the reason why the space aged construction guy re-discovers Michigan J Frog in the year 2056 A.D. in a cornerstone placed in 1955 and has the the same delusions of grandeur and moral flaws concerning the frog that the last guy did, you didn't know that he was about to be driven to insanity. You didn't get the joke, the irony, or the absolute existential darkness of the humor being explored and then deployed.

I'd run around the house on Saturday afternoon's singing, "Oh, We are The Boy's Of The Chorus- We Hope You Like Our Show- We Know You're Rooting For Us- But Now It's Time To Gooooo".

It wasn't just a catchy tune. Alfie knew what it really meant, and he made sure that I knew about the concepts of vanity and futility attached to it.

In other words, Alfie had a true understanding of all these things, and made sure he drilled them into me from the jump.

Through the years, Saturday mornings were spent recording The Bugs Bunny Show and its various incarnations and it's network jumps, first with a tape recorder and then with one of the first home VTR's received by both of us as a collective Christmas gift, a fifty pound beast that used 7 inch reel to reel Black and white magnetic tape.

We'd deconstruct the plots, recreate the story boards, type out the scripts and the dialogue and practice imitating Mel Blanc's voice characterizations.

By the time I was seven we were breaking them down frame by frame and tracing each drawing off the television tube.

We'd do it with the rest of the Saturday morning fare.

The Hanna-Barberra stuff, Rocky and Bullwinkle, and any new half hour Saturday animated Kiddie show.

But the animation was crap, even if the writing and voice characterizations were worth careful study study.

By the time I was reading at the age of four, I knew by scanning the title cards and scored the "four horsemen of the apocalypse"; Mike Maltese, Mel Blanc, Carl Stalling and "Directed by Chuck Jones" a winner was about to appear. Alfie made sure my tastes were that refined as far as the output of Termite Terrace was concerned.

Milt Franklyn was an acceptable substitute, but only for special ones like "What's Opera, Doc?"

There was a qualitative difference between McKimson, Freeling and Jones. I was a Chuck acolyte. His stuff just looked better, the animation was more radical while also using incredible subtley at the same time, and the character development was a lot darker. Above is an illustration of the greatest smirk of evil intent ever animated.

By the time I was eight, we were using a Bell and Howell 8mm Film Camera with a momentary control on the shutter, enabling us to shoot frame by frame. Alfie built a light table, peg board and Rube Goldberg vertical camera stand and crane.

We started making our own cartoons.

My mother was always very supportive of all of this. She didn't want Alfie and me to grow up mired in the muck of mediocrity either. She wanted little versions of Leonardo and Michelangelo, and I guess in some form, she ended up with them.

My Mother made sure that every available resource was right at our fingertips at all times; from the complete Encyclopedia Britannica, to Art Books, to college level Animation Text books, to Art Supplies, to the actual advanced technical gear to advance to the point of producing real two-dimensional Animation on film.

All those years, in the act of acquiring all that knowledge, really boiled down to the core in two objectives: I loved my brother and mother with all my soul, and all I ever wanted to do was to please them. Life, from zero to the age of ten, was about seeking that closeness and safety through their collected validation of effort, work, ethic, development of talent, mental and intellectual acuity, and most importantly, creative output.

I can't exactly pinpoint the moment that I realized that The Warner Cartoon Output represented "The Test of Time" to me for the first time. Somewhere between 1965-1968, as I was learning the craft, I put it together. When I started to learn the production dates and did the math certainly helped. Some of these classics were produced as far back as 1948, and to an eight year old, a 20 year gap might as well have been an eon.

But it was more than that. It was their absolute density. How they functioned as not only kiddie entertainment, but functioned on many other levels as well, all at once. Their sheer artistry. That just like a Van Gough painting, you could watch them over and over again, and always be spiritually rewarded on some level in a new and different way. With every single repeat viewing, these seven minute shorts continued to deliver over the span of decades.

They never dumbed it down, or condescended to their intended audience, ever. They weren't worried about some kind of Freudian or Jungian developmental concern for impressionable young minds. They were smart, and the more you dug into them, the smarter you became.

So like Glinda the Good Witch explaining to Dorothy that she always had the power to go back to Kansas, telling her; "Now those magic slippers will take you home in two seconds. ...close your eyes. Tap your heels together three times...and think to yourself...there's no place like home" as a took my freefall back in time to find my "Onion", I realized that I had had it all along, but it was such a fundemental part of me that I couldn't recognize it until I had a soul scrape through my own version of a past "Oz".

My yellow brick road traced a twisting, spiraling path through the folds in my brain, always.

The first awareness of "The Test Of Time" was drilled into me from 1963-1970 on all platforms, but the source of the springwater? The love and care of my brother through the conduit of the entire Warner Brothers Cartoon Cannon.

I had the onion now, and like an onion, this first component of my "Holy Trinity" was a multi-layered thing.

As I re-emerged through the waters of the past to breath the oxygen of my present, my psychological lungs almost burst before I broke the water line. Like swimming out of the amniotic fluid and spurting out the birth canal, I had harvested some pretty major components and was about to have a creative birth of my own.

The onion, and thus the Gumbo, would explore the darkness of the human condition, yet appear to be "light", functioning on many conscious and subconcious levels simultaneously. The Onion would not condescend or cheapen its intended audience in anyway. The onion would be stand repetitive viewings and listenings through multi- layered complexities. The onion at first glance would be funny. The onion was going to have a cast of characters that would be absolutely personality driven.

Everything I knew about the Warner Cartoon Output would be re-interpreted, twisted and personalized, but I knew that those core concepts would be recognized and followed.

And at the heart of it all, and the soul of it all, would stand "The Bunny", as I remembered him from 1962 with my six year old brother sitting next to me with a sketch pad, teaching a two year old how to draw a perfect Bugs with nothing but love and a totally open heart.

I was going to be "The Bunny". As I rushed to to escape the past to gasp the air of the here and now, and broke that water line, the concept of "Little Georgie" was born unto this world.

THE BEGINNING OF THE END

(Stay Tuned For Part #6: Finding Another Trinity Component)

As always, if you are following The Dose regularly, its going to be increasingly more helpful if you have a roadmap and scorecard. An updated master index is sent out weekly that includes descriptions and direct hyperlinks to each archived blog: Its a lot easier than searching for archived material for cross referencing purposes than the blogger platform. Just shoot me your email address at:

piannaplunker88@gmail.com

You can opt out at anytime.

Remember Peep-A-Roos, your feedback and the active sharing of The Dose is what keeps it alive and viable, and is just as important if not more than the actual generation of the content.

As of this writing, The Dose has received over 18,500 page views in 58 daily injections. All I ask is that if you enjoyed what you just read, hit that little share button on the top right column of this site, or copy the blog address down, paste it in an email, and give a friend a taste.

It's designed to be passed along and shared. Otherwise, it just dies on the vine.

Love,

Geo
"You may shoot for the stars and end up in a back alley behind Pluto, beaten and bloodied, but at least I dare to dream, and that’s better than being Earthbound, mired in the muck of mediocrity.

I judge my forward progress and success by the crushingly epic nature of my failures.

The more epic the crash, the more I’m convinced I must be doing something right"

Daily Dose #59 (07/26/11)

2011-07-26T06:47:00.024-04:00

EXPLORING CREATIVE PROCESSES: PART 4

(THE TEST OF TIME: Section A)

Part Three of this series left off with getting to the root of all knowledge, and the act of personal discovery to find core elements of pure authenticity as I made the commitment to "make a gumbo".

Gumbo starts with the "roux", for all of you non-culinary types out there. A base of white flour, slowly and carefully browned and thickened in animal fat or vegetable oil; Making a proper roux, in the proper amount, is tricky business.

You've got to get it almost to the edge of utter destruction without actually destroying it. It has to be constantly stirred and watched for up to an hour to get it to that perfect dark reddish-brown, melted chocolate color and the right consistency of thickness, right before it burns. The darker the roux, the richer and more complex flavors can be achieved. It's a gastronomic high wire act.

Burn the roux, and you have to toss not only it out, but more than the
hour of life you spent trying to render it.

The next steps needed to be taken in making my creative metaphoric "Gumbo" was to conceptually identify what is called in Creole Cuisine "The Holy Trinity": Chopped Celery, Chopped Green Bell Peppers, and Chopped Onions.

There's no variation here. These three vegetables go into a Gumbo. They don't call it the "Holy Trinity" for nothing.

But each ingredient must be carefully chosen. They have to be fresh, and chopped to the desired consistency and in the right amounts; at the ready as soon as the roux is ready to go.

They represent "core" or "ground zero" structural concepts.

As I faced the possibility of transitioning from an instrumentalist to having the opportunity to take the full responsibility of embarking on creative and business initiative that would result in tangible output, you know that output will be judged to some degree.

"Throwing it out there into the Universe" has many emotional and character components attached to the act. One of them is courage.

You can not give a tumbling fuck about what people think about your "output", but if you are working in the arena of "Popular Art", its probably a good idea not to ignore the word "popular" either, especially where the "business" side is concerned.

That isn't to say that you have to be guided by popular trends as you make your own "Gumbo". If you get caught in that trap, you're already behind the eightball.

You just burned your roux if you position yourself as a dedicated follower of fashion.

You can shoot for "Elvis" or aim for "Fabian". There is a quantifiable and qualitative difference, and that choice is not without consequence. The measuring stick is just how much bravery you bring to the table as much as how much creative juice you may think you have to offer.

The goal is to stay true to core elemental concepts, and hopefully go way beyond the trend and set it. Raise the bar and obliterate the bell curve as you find the right escape velocity to create a large distance between what you produce from constraints of "the muck of mediocrity".

As I sat in my apartment on Winton Street in 1991 with my entire existence crashing and burning down around my ears, I knew one thing. If I was really serious about taking this on, and all it represented: Creating a "Gumbo" and assuming the full responsibility of making it, I knew in my gut brain that it was "go big or go home" time.

What ever I was going to end up with, it was going to have to stand up against "The Test Of Time".

It was my first and very possibly, my last shot at it; my feeling at the time was that I had better make it count.

You got nuthin' to lose if you got nuthin' left to lose.

This core concept, was going to be part of my "Holy Trinity". It was the first one recognized, and directly relates to the training I received in my tenure in a band called The Works, from the mind of my tutor and mentor of seven years, Ed Hamell.

THE 7 YEAR CAR RIDE: 1981-1988

When I first joined forces with Ed, his first move was to throw a pile of LP's at me to digest immediately. I had already digested most of them. I wouldn't have been in position to be asked to join the band if I hadn't to some degree, but certainly there were mutually recognized holes in my game and knowledge base.

All of those recordings were not only cherry picked by Ed because of what they represented stylistically. These records weren't based on obtuse esoterica to hide a sphere of influence, but on popularity and their place in the world wide musical, and primarily (but not exclusively), rock and roll zeitgeist.

There was only one true benchmark. All of them would stand the test of time, or had already done so. Either that, or would eventually prove to be of timely cultural significance.

I'm not going to go into a long list here. That's up for you to compile and find for yourself if you want to explore that concept. You are in fact, what you eat.

This I can say though: through thousands of hours of car rides, and thousands of hours spent listening, excavating information, reading books, and rooting out anecdotal stories, hundreds of records were deconstructed down to core elements.

The were dissected not only by their overall structure; Art work and graphic design, genre, concept (if any) or conceptual narrative elements, pacing, song structure and structural elements, hooks, instrumentation, arrangements, spheres of influence, production techniques and lyrics syllable by syllable.

Entire careers got disassembled and reassembled to figure out how the watches actually ticked. Who was the producer? Who was the engineer? Where was it recorded? What was the technology available at the time of recording? Who was the manager, and how was that career stewarded? Who signed them? What Label? Who broke them on the radio, and how? How was the team assembled, and how could we find out the backstory on every last one of them?

What was the cultural climate at the time of impact? What was sheer dumb luck, and what was brilliant design?

This was pre-internet days, peep-a-roos. There were no "Search Engines". There was no Wikipedia, and no YouTube to go to. If you really wanted to know this stuff, you had to really commit to finding it out, by any means at your disposal.

These were also the days when Rock and Roll journalism actually meant something. Ed required that you know just as much about Lester Bangs as you did about The Beatles.

Everybody from Al Jolson to N.W.A. got put under that microscope. Top 100 "All Time" lists were debated vociferously. One of my favorite exercises was the "Career and Output" face off. Madonna or Bowie? Go! Little Richard or Chuck Berry? Go! Springsteen or Dylan? Go! Andrew Loog Oldham or Brian Epstein? Go! The Clash or The Pistols...and Where Do The Replacements fit in? Go! Brian Wilson or George Martin? Go! Roy Thomas Baker or Mutt Lange? Go! Prince or Michael Jackson? Go! "Exile on Main Street" or "Sticky Fingers"? Go! Sam Phillips or Leonard Chess? Go! Lou Reed or Iggy Pop? Go! Dick Clark or Don Kirschner? Go! Berry Gordy or Thom Bell? Go! Lenny Bruce or Richard Pryor? Go! Robert Johnson or Muddy Waters? Go! Johnny Cash or Hank Williams? Go! Jerry Lee or Elvis? Go!

This went on for seven years, and it was like going to a Master's Program of Rock and Roll, Songwriting, Career Management, Street Fighting, The American History of Humor, Criminology, Sociology, World History, Industrial and Technological History, Military Planning and Theory, Advanced Poetry and Literature, Media History, Advanced Marketing and Economics all rolled into one, every time that extensively touring car door opened and I set my foot in it.

Crossing intellectual swords with Ed was like stepping willingly into a running Waring Blender set permanently on "Puree".

These debates could get very heated, but in the end, it hardened and cured your knowledge base like carbonized steel.

We were unified as one, however. Brothers in arms, shoulder to shoulder in the same foxhole, discovering the conceptual strategies in all areas, deployed in the past and present. Hopefully in that process, we would find a unique mixture; one of our own for a common purpose aimed at a collective future.

We wanted to make history.

Or rather he did, and I willingly enlisted myself under his leadership and guidance.

No matter how arcane a factoid was or how it came to light, all of that knowledge had to answer to that one parameter and be housed under a singular umbrella of a concept.

The Test of Time.

In the end, as I look at The Works retrospectively, the band basically went through four phases in the time I was a member; A Springsteenian start, a Clash like turn to the left, a more current for the times 80's English Glam sensibility due to personnel changes and the influence of MTV and emphasis on visual information, and sort of petering out with a more punkish direction and ultimate vision of Ed's that the band, at that time, had difficulty in tacking to and following.

That last turn, due to the economic and sheer physical grind that The Works represented and the fact that we all were growing up and developing diverging strategies on how to acheive the common end goals, was probably one of the main factors for Ed to decide to close the final curtain down on that particular project.

We thought we were pretty slick, but all of those transitions seem a bit sophomoric and forced today. We were young, and we were learning the trade, trying to run through identifiable shapes, "periods" and image changes, and keeping the music and presentation fresh over a grueling seven year period; following the chameleon template defined by Picasso and The Beatles, refined by David Bowie and Neil Young, and copied rather ham-fistedly but quite successfully by Madonna.

That's an over-simplification, but you get the general idea. Cut us some slack. We were kids. We may have been miles ahead of the curve for the provinces, but for the world stage, we were a little behind that eightball.

We built a loyal and supportive tribe. We made some great music. We had a blast has we lived a very low rent bohemian, yet truly Bacchanalian lifestyle, and made great friends. We were downright inspiring to many folks. We walked the walk as we talked the talk, and paid the price dearly for doing so.

And personally, I walked out with the education of a lifetime. I'm proud of every note I ever played in that band and what those notes represented, under the guidance and tutelage of Ed.

Ed was on the right track, however, and has spent the years since refining that original knowledge base and the implementation of it for his following and very successful solo project, "Hamell on Trial". Unencumbered by the constraints of having to deal with other humans in a band and everything else that goes with that, he was able to make calibrations and changes much more nimbly, as he continued to hone and pressurize his coal into his own personal vision of what a diamond should be.

Just as my treasured friend and teacher had done, when my turn at bat came up, all that I had learned was going to be deployed somehow.

In search of my own personal statement and spin on the "Holy Trinity" of a future creative "Gumbo", one thing was certain.

"The Test Of Time" was going to be my onion. I didn't know exactly how that would exactly manifest itself, but it was going to be there. All I had to do was discover it.

(Stay Tuned For Part 5: Finding The Authentic Onion)

Author's Note:

All Dosages will eventually connect, for those that are following the entire cycle.

For those that aren't, here's one quick recommended read concerning Ed Hamell and just one of many of the lessons I learned from him:

033.) "On Rhetorical Devices, Influences, and Making Art "Popular": The use of rhetoric as a velvet rope and associative strategy 1981-2011

http://littlegeorgiesblog-a-thon.blogspot.com/2011/06/daily-dose-33-062911.html

Also if you'd like to learn more about "Hamell On Trial", here's his web address:

http://www.hamelltv.com/

I also highly recommend his interesting take on his "Works" days, which can be found here:

http://www.hamelltv.com/category/the-works/

As always, if you are following The Dose regularly, its going to be increasingly more helpful if you have a roadmap and scorecard. An updated master index is sent out weekly that includes descriptions and direct hyperlinks to each archived blog: Its a lot easier than searching for archived material for cross referencing purposes than the blogger platform. Just shoot me your email address at:

piannaplunker88@gmail.com

You can opt out at anytime.

Remember Peep-A-Roos, your feedback and the active sharing of The Dose is what keeps it alive and viable, and is just as important if not more than the actual generation of the content.

As of this writing, The Dose has received over 18,500 page views in 58 daily injections. All I ask is that if you enjoyed what you just read, hit that little share button on the top right column of this site, or copy the blog address down, paste it in an email, and give a friend a taste.

It's designed to be passed along and shared. Otherwise, it just dies on the vine.

Love,

G

"You may shoot for the stars and end up in a back alley behind Pluto, beaten and bloodied, but at least I dare to dream, and that’s better than being Earthbound, mired in the muck of mediocrity.

I judge my forward progress and success by the crushingly epic nature of my failures.

The more epic the crash, the more I’m convinced I must be doing something right"

Daily Dose #58 (07/25/11)

2011-07-25T09:18:00.013-04:00

PARTY TIME

(A Lake Boy Tale)

Gayle Road is a steeply graded street located on the east side of Skaneateles Lake; on the outer Eastern border but still within the village limits.

Lined on either side with relatively modest ranch style homes, the street descends sharply in altitude, curves suddenly to the south at a ninety degree angle, turns into a dirt trail, and winds up basically at the shore; a small sixty foot slice of beach side real estate that is shared by all of Gayle Road’s residents.

In the days of my youth, most of the homeowners were of the same age, with children that were all mostly the same age too. It was a little tract of about fifteen homes and fifteen nuclear families; our own little private Utopia within the utopian confines of the village of Skaneateles.

There were cocktail parties hosted in a different home every weekend. It was always an exciting event when it was my mother’s turn to throw a party. The house bustled with major activity during the day; a blur of super-charged anal-retentive cleaning, errand running, hair dresser appointments, liquor deliveries and strange ritualistic preparations of tiny bite sized food.

Around five pm, my brother Alfie, my sister Becky, and myself were scrupulously scrubbed, dressed for bed, and then fed some gawd-awful “quick” repast, usually Mrs. Paul’s fish sticks and tater tots accompanied by the pre-requisite glop of ketchup on the side (parties were usually thrown on Fridays, hence “Catholic food” that passed for fish).
Then that wonderful hour before guests were scheduled to arrive, where Pops did the final tweaking chores of preparing the bar (A six foot sheet metal folding table with kidney-shaped "parameciums" printed on it; covered in an exquisite table cloth.)Dansk ice bucket filled: Check. Exotic fruits cut, lemons peeled: Check. Maraschino cherries and green olives with pimentos jammed inside: Check. Cocktail napkins: Check. Tooth Picks: Check.

It was very quiet, but the anticipatory tension in the house was palpably increasing by the minute, the smell of warming cocktail weenies wrapped in pastry permeating our family quarters. Then my mother’s magic metamorphosis would unfold.

I used to marvel at my mother’s ability to transform herself from a drill sergeant barking out marching orders with militaristic precision in preparation for the upcoming Bacchanalian onslaught to an absolute knockout “Betty”.

I would lay on the linoleum floor of our garishly pink tiled bathroom, watching her carefully in a state of awe: wrapped in a towel, freshly bathed, her coiffed hair wrapped in a protective plastic mushroom cloud of a shower cap, sitting on her green upholstered vanity pouf, applying her war paint with a vast array of strange tools (The curved eyelash curler was always an implement that I found particularly compelling); the application ritual of the smearing of frosted pink lipstick (which seemed to me to resemble a disembodied, rotating doggie penis within a large caliber bullet casing) and then the “kissing” of a Kleenex tissue to set it, smacking her lips; and finally dousing herself in a copious amount of Estee Lauder’s “Youth Dew”, a perfume that was so overwhelmingly noxious that I would almost pass out from the intoxicating fumes. My first foray into the world of “huffing”, I suppose.

In the enchanted pre-party “calm before the storm”, as my Pops would zip up her up in some latest designer cocktail dress and they’d give each other the once over to make sure they were sharp, straight and good to go. They would fixedly look each other in the eye in silent pause, and a deep breath of relaxation would be collectively shared.

And then they would tenderly kiss as the first of a stack of L.P.'s would mysteriously slide down the spindle and plop down on the turntable, my mother's right knee bending, her high heel ascending heavenward in the embrace; the music would start and the doorbell would automatically ring as if on cue.

Here we go.

This was the age where the men wore tailored suits and the women dressed to the nines with teased-to-the-stratosphere beehive hair helmets and rhinestone studded cat’s eye goggles. Martinis, Scotch and Sodas, Manhattans, and Whiskey Sours for the ladies were the libations of choice coupled with the sounds of Frank Sinatra, “Kind Of Blue”, Show Tunes, and calypso music functioning as the soundtrack as it burbled through “hi-fi” stereo speakers.

I didn’t know what was going on, but I did know that I wanted to be in the middle of those wing dings, not on the periphery. I especially hated the collective sibling “trot out” right before bedtime, where all the Gayle Road women cooed collective “oohhhs” and “ahhhs” and then we would be hustled off to bed. I would try to fall asleep to the muffled sounds of Harry Belafonte singing the Banana Boat Song coupled with the amazing booze fueled detonations of cackling laughter that would periodically explode out of the living room.

I remember sneaking around and hiding under the table cloth that draped the bar in my footie pajamas trying to discern just what was going on in that blue haze. Instinctively at age three I knew that staying up late smoking cigarettes, listening to weird music, and drunkenly trying to play grab ass with your neighbor’s wife whilst doing the rhumba to the sounds of Acker Bilk was way more fun then the existence I was currently living, which mainly consisted of a steady diet of toys, “Romper Room”, “Captain Kangaroo”, and “The Silly Book”; my musical fare consisting of songs like “Itsy Bitsy Spider” or worse, and not being old enough to play with most of the other kids on the street.

It was like watching Martians. All I wanted to do was go to Mars in a suit, hair helmet, and a pair of cats-eyed rhinestone studded goggles of my own.

But there I was, up way past my bed-time; crew-cutted and goggle-less, in a set of blue “one-sie” pajamas with pink bunnies printed on them feeling like the plastic treaded soles of my jammies were permanently glued to the slate stone floor of our dining room. Hopelessly Earth-bound.

Not for long.

THE END

Author's Note:

This is a revised and edited version of an older posting. My apologies for having to resort to such chicanery!

Life intrudes sometimes. This was the best I could do in the time alotted... plus #57 was a work out of epic proportions, so in reality, I'm not feeling too guilty. This is a companion piece to #57.

For those that want to follow the story cycle, I again urge you to consider signing up for the Master Index List, updated and sent weekly. Its easier to negotiate than the archived material on the Blogger platform, and to really experience the Dose as its designed, this is a very useful tool.

Just send me your email address: piannaplunker88@gmail.com

You can opt out at anytime.

Love,

Geo

"You may shoot for the stars and end up in a back alley behind Pluto, beaten and bloodied, but at least I dare to dream, and that’s better than being Earthbound, mired in the muck of mediocrity.

I judge my forward progress and success by the crushingly epic nature of my failures.

The more epic the crash, the more I’m convinced I must be doing something right"

AS ALWAYS: PLEASE FEEL FREE TO COMMENT, SUBSCRIBE, AND SHARE THIS BLOG ADDRESS VIA COPY AND PASTE IN AN EMAIL, THROUGH THE TWITTER OR FACEBOOK "SHARE" BUTTONS,WORD OF MOUTH, FILTHY WHISPERED GOSSIP, FALSE NARRATIVE, TIN CAN AND STRING CONFIGURATIONS, PONY EXPRESS, OR CARRIER PIGEON. WITHOUT FEEDBACK OR ACTIVE "SHARING", WHAT YOU JUST READ.... DOESN'T EXIST!

THANK YOU KINDLY,

COLONEL BEAUREGARD "IRON THIGHS" JEFFERSON, A.K.A. "THE MANAGEMENT"

Daily Dose #57 (07/24/11)

2011-07-24T07:41:00.030-04:00

EXPLORING CREATIVE PROCESSES: PART 3

THE HARD-WIRING OF THE REALLY LITTLE GEORGIE

I happen to be blessed (or cursed) with a memory bank that reaches far back into my early development phase. I have very specific memories that were burned into my naked gray matter via my tiny little virginal synapses at a very early age.

I remember when JFK got assassinated, per example. I was utterly frustrated after three days of having my afternoon cartoons pre-empted by a nation in mourning. I was three at the time. I had never seen my parents cry until that fateful day. It was scary to witness your Mom openly weeping for days. That's my touchstone to unearth things further back.

Those earlier memories are usually associated with records, and the effect they had on the adults around me.

Anybody remember this one?

This, released in the fall 1962, got a lot of spins in the Rossi household. That would put a very firm and specific memory in place at the age of 2.

I didn't have a clue as to what was actually contained within it's grooves, other than it made everybody sit in the living room with rapt attention, and resulted in everybody booming out loud in laughter. It was always a beautiful thing to hear that joyous sound pealing out of the living room "with great vigah" during my parent's patented weekend, Gayle Road cocktail parties, when I was supposed to be in bed; in actuality I was hiding under the draping table cloth that was set up on a card table, that functioned as the party's bar in my little footed onesie pajamas.

How about this one?

Released in 1960, the year of my birth, and the "soundtrack" of The Kennedy Presidency.

I remember my mother holding me in her arms as a toddler, and having her spin and dance across the living room as "Camelot" played out of the hi-fi set, or gently sway me to the dulcet tones of Robert Goulet singing "If Ever I would Leave You". Probably one of the earliest memories I'm capable at age fifty one to still capture with any type of verifiable clarity. I still wonder what the King is doing tonight.

As soon as I became ambulatory, my mom taught me how to work the record player on my own. The 1961 equivalent version of sticking your kid in front of the TV to watch The Disney Channel. Listening to the music, and singing along while holding the jacket in my hands, staring at it, soaking up the graphics and trying to decipher the words was a daily session in my pre-toddler years.

The first words I learned to read were "Lerner and Lowe".

I could quietly entertain myself for hours, and Mom took full advantage. She had a house to run, and two other trouble makers to keep her eye on.

And then, there's this amazing recording:

Released in 1956, this was my defacto "In-Utero" soundtrack.

My mother tells a story that when she first held me in the hospital on the day I was born, she sang these songs to me, and I sang the melodies right back at her. I can't remember this, but she swears it's a true story.

I can tell you this: I sat staring at this Al Hirschfeld illustration, listening to this record for hundreds of hours up until "Meet The Beatles" invaded the Rossi living room on 12 Gayle Road in 1964.

It just wasn't the music. This graphic was equally as compelling, and the ironic idea that people thought they could be puppet masters when really God was pulling the strings.

The concepts of God and flawed human manipulative behavior, clearly understood at the age of two.

Hirschfeld's illustrations held a remarkable sway over me. On Sunday mornings, instead of making a mad grab for the funny papers, I instead made a mad grab for The New York Times Arts and Entertainment Section, to unearth the "Nina's" embedded in every one of his cover illustrations.

Powerful graphic stuff. It was back then, and for me, still is.

Now check this one out:

Again, released in 1962, this one was a major contributor to my own hard-wiring process.

At age three, I not only was compelled by the music, but by the narrative that was driven and moved along by those tunes.

This is a strong allegorical story of a clown who marries into the family circus business to improve his life, gets disillusioned, goes on a pussy parade only to find that the one true thing of value in his life, the love of his wife, was the thing he valued the least.

I totally "got it" at the age of three, and even though I haven't heard this recording in almost 45 years, I can still sing "Meilinki, Meilchick", "Mumbo Jumbo", and of course the bittersweet "What Kind Of Fool Am I?" today, by heart, and with a bad cockney accent to boot.

And now, this:

The music of the Caribbean. "Day-O!". I wore several copies of this one into vinyl shavings right up to the day that Mom and I went to Nicholl's record department in Auburn, NY to pick up a copy of "Meet The Beatles", probably about a month before my fourth birthday.

I used to drop the needle on Side 1, Track 2: as the killer straight up bass and drums rock and roll of "I Saw Her Standing There" would blast out of the wall mounted hi-fi speakers, I'd climb up the book case right up to the ceiling; to the topper most of the popper most top shelf, and when that blood curdling scream erupted out before the solo, I'd let go and free fall backwards onto the couch; about a ten foot drop.

Once mom got hip to that, that kind of killed my unchaperoned use of the family hi-fi for awhile.

These records, and the critical thinking skills attached to them through repetitive listening, emotional experiences and experiential visual imprinting became ground zero, and the absolute core of my creative sun when I finally found myself in position to craft a statement of my own.

These are the base elements that I drew upon when I got to be the chef, making that personal creative gumbo.

BACK TO THE GUMBO

The Fabulous Pushballs (the original incarnation of The Shuffling Hungarians) started as a backing band for a comedian, and after a failed attempt at playing that material with a charismatically challenged front person (that would be me), the whole thing had to be re-tooled and conceptualized.

Before the band ever played a note as "Little Georgie and the Shuffling Hungarians" at their unveiling at the Dinosaur Bar-B-Que that fall, all those major conceptual components had to be identified and then solidly installed.

This wasn't exactly cognitive at the time. I wasn't going "A pinch of Vaughn Meader, and a dash of Anthony Newley, a dollop of "Get Me To The Church On Time", two cups of Harry Belefonte, mix thoroughly, fold into a meatloaf pan and bake at 325 degrees, let cool, and slather it with "I Saw Her Standing There" sauce before serving.

Those identifiable core elements took this form, when finally digging inside myself to find them.

1. There had to be a "narrative" element. All material, covered or eventually written, had to follow that narrative.

2. Although undefined at that point, the narrative would explore the darker side of the human experience. A creator creates of what he knows.

3. The narrative would be allegorical in nature. And in the end, uplift.

4. The project had to be just as powerfully presented graphically. Everything piece of material that came out of the camp had to deliver the right visual content to be just as evocative as the music, the presentation, the performances, and the narrative.

5. As mis-direction, the narrative had to be hidden, through the use of unabashed humor. It couldn't look like any of us were taking ourselves too seriously.

Entertainment values were what we were going to show first.

6. The band was going to showcase a decided New Orleans Piano flavor; (Insert "Caribbean Calypso" in here: a strong component of Mardi Gras Indian chants and music, and the music of Professor Longhair, blues with a decided Afro Caribbean slant, and the artist that I stole the name of the band from, as an homage, of course!)

7. It had to rock, but more importantly, it had to roll. There were going to be moments of collective and communal orgasmic release, just like that scream in "I Saw Her Standing There"; a pure exhibition of the power and resultant joy of Rock And Roll as I knew it.

It had to free asses so minds and spirits could collectively as one, follow and fly.

LIFE CONTEXT IS EVERYTHING

At the point of the realization that Tom Kenney-less "Fabulous Pushballs" was on its way to being a failed endeavor, it was just one of a consecutive string of many critical personal and professional failures that seemed to be falling on my head like a thick sheet of New Orleans tropical rain.

My shot at the brass ring with "The Bogeymen" had unceremoniously, and still to this day mysteriously, crashed and burned.

My future ex-wife had just been outed as a long term philanderer. That's as delicately as I can put it. The multiple bi-sexual affairs had be going on for over a year, known to our collective network of friends, but unknown (or denied in delusion) by me. She was my wife. I had to trust her by default, even though I knew that I shouldn't have.

It was a long, grinding year.

I was betrayed by all of whom I loved and trusted. I had been sold down the river by my closest friends, including my future ex-wife. I felt totally abandoned, and my innocence and joi de vivre forcibly robbed against my will. I felt like Dustin Hoffman strapped in the Dental Chair in "Marathon Man", with the world as Laurence Olivier asking me "Is It Safe?", a running dental drill in its hands.

The answer was always "No...it most definitely is NOT SAFE"

I had moved out of my formally happy little soul-sucking marital house and into a dingy apartment on Winton Street. A piano, a couch, and a set of bookshelves were all I took with me.

She could have the rest. I had no interest in staking claim to the 30 pieces of silver. Even if I was the only one who knew, I knew I was worth more than that.

My best friend in the world couldn't hang with that type of misery and pain. He usually stayed with me when he had a gig in town. I called him out on some of his patented bullshit and took a well-aimed verbal swipe at him, heavily medicated on Vicodin after a botched oral surgery in which all four of my wisdom teeth had been shattered, rather than extracted.

He walked out the door the next morning and I haven't spoken to him in the 20 or so years that have elapsed since. More abandonment.

In all of that undiagnosed, crazy-as-a-shit-house-rat, bi-polar free falling, I had to process all of this, all at once, to the best of my ability, by myself.

Either that, or check out and meet my maker. It was a close call.

I stripped all my personal history away, layer by layer, to expose my core, and get back to a time and place where I felt authentically and in it's purest state a sense of safety, as I was feeling quite the opposite at the time.

It took me all the way back to swirling across the living room floor in 1962, gathered up in my mother's arms, as we danced to the tune of "On The Street Where You Lived" as she whispered the lyrics in my ear.

It took me all the way back to sitting with my big brother Alfie as he patiently taught me how to read, using the liner notes of "Stop The World, I Want To Get Off", listening to Anthony Newley poignantly warble "What Kind Of Fool Am I?" and knowing exactly what he was saying.

It took me all the way back to the joy of free falling backwards off from ceiling height to the awaiting nubby fabric cushions of the brown Paul McCobb couch looming below as Paul McCartney screamed, punctuating and providing the requisite soundtrack.

It took me all the way back to hiding under the card table, loving the sound of adult laughter, even if I didn't understand the jokes.

It took me all the way back to pondering the existence of God at the age of two while I memorized the lyrics of "I've Grown Accustomed To Her Face", mesmerizing myself with an Al Hirschfeld illustration.

It took me all back all the way to dancing without fear of judgement to the sacred call and response groove of the "Banana Boat Song" on top of the coffee table, wearing a straw floppy hat.

It took me all the way back to pointing at words on record jackets, reading them aloud, and having my mother radiantly beaming at me with pride.

This was the last time I ever felt "Safe" and in that safety, pure unadulterated joy and love without fear of reprisal or betrayal. I needed to feel it again, and when I discovered where and when it was, THAT was going to be the core structural building blocks of any upcoming "Gumbo".

I had to start with the uncut, pure essence of all of everything, and the jump point of all acquired knowledge collected after the fact.

That was the stuff that was going to get thrown in the pot first. That was the roux.

WHAT'S IN YOUR GUMBO?

When I ask it this of you, I don't ask it glibly. On the surface, it may seem like an easily answered question, but I assure you from at least my own personal experience, it is not.

Stand in front of the mirror, and ask yourself that question. Then peel away all that you think you are, all the facades, all the illusions, all the damage wrought and the damage incurred, all your defense mechanisms, all of your bullshit and lies, and all the misdirected blame you've deployed to keep yourself from looking in the mirror, and doing the real work that God and the laws of Karma put you on Earth to do. Soul growth doesn't happen on auto-pilot.

Get it down to your very soul, and then scrape that fucker clean. Tear it ALL down.

Are you ready for that kind of work, and that kind of investment? Are you ready for the high probability of a fall, when you aim big and get on the highwire without a net?

If you are, you'll know what needs to go in the Gumbo when you commit to playing catch with The Universe and all of the energy flow that IS creation.

Whatever creatively flows from you and through you, it will flow on the bedrock of your authentic heart and soul, instead of quicksand.

And it may just stand the ultimate test. The Test Of Time.

(Stay Tuned For Part 4)

Author's Note:

I've been trying to subtley intimate that all projected 365 Daily Doses are going to function as a cycle, and every singular Dose will function as a "connective point" that will illustrate unseen, connective tissue: Hopefully illustrating a larger story than the sum of its parts.

This is why I've been urging you Peep-A-Roos to get yourselves on The Master Index mailing list. You'll be able to read the Dose descriptions, and discover the related archived material on your own, if you were so inclined.

So "Once More, With Feeling": Write me at piannaplunker88@gmail.com and join the inner sanctum for real by receiving The Weekly Updated Master Index.

The Dose series is kind of like a mixed up jigsaw puzzle that you can put together anyway you want to.

That said, I'll give you a little nudge: Here's a suggested reading list of archived material that I consider potential "related points":

001.) "Gary Frenay: A Testimony": How brief contact can radically change your personal trajectory, and how you can radically effect others 1987

http://littlegeorgiesblog-a-thon.blogspot.com/2011/05/gary-frenay-testimony.html

003.) "Pondering Upon A T-Shirt": Why Art Created With Commitment Will Stand The Test Of Time 1993-2011

http://littlegeorgiesblog-a-thon.blogspot.com/2011/04/pondering-upon-t-shirt.html

005.) "Party Time": A "Lake Boy" Tale of the recognition of Love, and a longing for a future of adventure 1964

http://littlegeorgiesblog-a-thon.blogspot.com/2008/09/lake-boy-1-party-time.html

043.) "Creativity, Validation and Inspiration Part 5": A seven part series on creativity issues, and self rationalizing mind games

http://littlegeorgiesblog-a-thon.blogspot.com/2011/07/daily-dose-43-071011.html

033.) "On Rhetrorical Devices, Influences, and Making Art "Popular": The use of rhetoric as a velvet rope and associative strategy 1981-2011

http://littlegeorgiesblog-a-thon.blogspot.com/2011/06/daily-dose-33-062911.html

029.) "The Best Gift I Can Give": Make Sauce, not War, and the consequences of choice. 2010-2011

http://littlegeorgiesblog-a-thon.blogspot.com/2011/06/daily-dose-29-062511.html

025.) "A Song Is Born": Gutbucket Blues, Rare Video, UK interpretation, and The History of the Bloody Mary Cocktail, 1993-1994-2011

http://littlegeorgiesblog-a-thon.blogspot.com/2011/06/bizzarro-dose.html

003.) "Influences": Early Musical Influences/ Dylan Video. 1962-2011

http://littlegeorgiesblog-a-thon.blogspot.com/2011/05/influences.html

"You may shoot for the stars and end up in a back alley behind Pluto, beaten and bloodied, but at least I dare to dream, and that’s better than being Earthbound, mired in the muck of mediocrity.

I judge my forward progress and success by the crushingly epic nature of my failures.

The more epic the crash, the more I’m convinced I must be doing something right"

AS ALWAYS: PLEASE FEEL FREE TO COMMENT, SUBSCRIBE, AND SHARE THIS BLOG ADDRESS VIA COPY AND PASTE IN AN EMAIL, THROUGH THE TWITTER OR FACEBOOK "SHARE" BUTTONS,WORD OF MOUTH, FILTHY WHISPERED GOSSIP, FALSE NARRATIVE, TIN CAN AND STRING CONFIGURATIONS, PONY EXPRESS, OR CARRIER PIGEON. WITHOUT FEEDBACK OR ACTIVE "SHARING", WHAT YOU JUST READ.... DOESN'T EXIST!

THANK YOU KINDLY,

COLONEL BEAUREGARD "IRON THIGHS" JEFFERSON, A.K.A. "THE MANAGEMENT"

Daily Dose #56 (07/23/11)

2011-07-23T08:03:00.021-04:00

EXPLORING CREATIVE PROCESSES: PART 2

WHAT'S IN YOUR GUMBO?

(You are what you cook and you are what you eat)

Preparing a real gumbo (or Italian Sunday Gravy for that matter. See Blog #29, "The Best Gift I Can Give") serves as a great metaphor.

If you've ever tasted a real gumbo made by a real native New Orleanian there isn't anything quite like that experience.

You can recognize what it looks like. What it smells like. How it feels in your mouth, and what it tastes like. It is a very rich and complex combination of blended flavors,textures, techniques and components.

You can also recognize that no two gumbos are alike. The dish can go through endless variations, depending on the actual tools and techniques employed, the ingredients used, how the roux is prepared and the family history of the person who cooks it. That narrative is in the pot just as much as any physical component.

But the most important things to notice are what the gumbo does to people as it is served and consumed: To the chef and the guests alike.

The chef provides a mind and body experience while providing sustenance. The guests not only experience the dish as a full body experience that stimulates all senses, but has also stimulated agroup of people simultaneously at their gut brain AND cognitive level.

It's food, made from the heart, and given freely. Food for the senses, food for the stomach, but also food for the heart and soul, A collective orgasmic yummy noise emotes communally as the experience is savored from the dining table.

The Gumbo elicits intellectual, emotional, and a full body response when prepared with authenticity of the history, the heart, and the true soul of the chef.

A non-verbal reciprocal feedback loop of elevation to a different place for all the participants is achievable. I've seen this happen time and time again at my father's table; He can make a linguine and white clam sauce that has reduced grown men to tears.

If you are wondering why I have included video family cooking tutorials to the Blog-O-Thon, wonder no more. Everything over the next three hundred and ten days is going to all connect at some point, if everybody focuses and pays close attention.

Creative arts and efforts should elicit similar response, no matter what the delivery system. Some conduits are skewed more toward the head than the heart. A painting can't make you dance, normally. Let me rephrase: A painting can make you dance if you are open enough to let it that have that type of effect on you, but music is a more direct delivery system, per example.

When trying to visualize the "end product", you have to visualize what that end product is going to actually do when humans interact with it. Those are the elements of design as much as how it sounds or what it looks like, and they can be very broad and far reaching, and they can be both cliche and totally obscure as well. They can be inclusive, or repugnently repulsive. Are there narrative elements? What's the ride going to feel like? Are you even providing a ride to take? Do you have a full pallette of techniques to build that ride?

What will be the emotional response? The physical one? The spiritual ones?

Are you even thinking along the lines?

What is in your gumbo? Find those answers first, and then pathways will illuminate themselves. The recipe and the techniques used reveal themselves if you can answer those questions.

When I got bitten by the bug of music, the first step was to absorb as much piano related material as possible, specifically anything that the piano had to do with twentieth century popular music; from ragtime, to trad jazz, the history of jazz piano and its primary exponents, raw blues, boogie woogie, r & b jump blues, the history of African American Pop forms, and modern rock and roll and its lineage.

An inordinate amount of time got spent on "the fundementals". Not only the mechanical ones like scales, theory, harmony, time, groove and the like, but the whole history of what transpired before you. Solid ground on which to build a house of your own design and architectural plans.

You spent every dime you had on records, and every availble minute listening, and then trying to decipher and deconstruct. I read every rock and roll book or magazine, every musician's memoir, and every liner note I could get my hands on.

Early on you realize that you are the sum total of the amount of input flowing into you.

At some point though, you realize that the choices you make as far as input was concerned, were going to start to define how you would be perceived. I went with what felt natural, and gravitated toward the rock and roll side of things. I started to narrow my listening diet, and narrow beam my focus. when I truly started digging deeply into the music of New Orleans, I became organically enflamed. Strange for a skinny assed white boy from Skaneateles NY, but that true authentic love put me in charge of a studio recording for a seminal Mardi Gras Indian Tribe Funk Band, The Wild Magnolias, on a major label (Code Blue/Blue Note Records). I was just as Joe Campbell would say, following my bliss.

Making those types of esoteric choices was really the first time that I was aware of trying to find a unique voice on the instrument.

All instrumentalists go through that process. Slowly over time, we try to sharpen definition. This just doesn't apply to instrumentalists. Singers, Songwriters, Artists, Poets, Painters, Novelists, Filmmakers, Business Folks, Academics and Professionals alike all realize that they intrinsiclly have to find a niche.

Any thing you do that requires skill and acumen, once we acquire a bit we realize that we have to specialize to some degree.

I only mention this process because that process is just but one facet of the microcosm.

When you finally get to a point of having the reigns in your own hands, and are solely responsible for a final "end product", hopefully you take those skills and expand, search for creative and unorthodox usage, and extrapolate them as you apply them to your ultimate gumbo.

What goes in, manifests itself in the end result. You are what you eat, and you own the choices that you make.

(Next Up, Part 3: "THE HARD-WIRING OF THE REALLY LITTLE GEORGIE")

Author's Note:

If you would like a master index list of all The Daily Doses sent directly to you every Saturday morning, shoot me an email at:

piannaplunker88@gmail.com

The index is a lot easier to navigate; has brief descriptions of the content of each dose, and hyper-text links, possibly opens up a direct line of communication with me (which is cool for me), and its easy to forward via email if you want to get them addicted.

As always, you can opt out at anytime.

Also, see that friggin' share button in the upper right of The Blog-O-Thon? Press it, and be an active participant, rather than a passive energy black hole of a Suck -O-Vac.

Love,

Geo

"You may shoot for the stars and end up in a back alley behind Pluto, beaten and bloodied, but at least I dare to dream, and that’s better than being Earthbound, mired in the muck of mediocrity.

I judge my forward progress and success by the crushingly epic nature of my failures.

The more epic the crash, the more I’m convinced I must be doing something right"

AS ALWAYS: PLEASE FEEL FREE TO COMMENT, SUBSCRIBE, AND SHARE THIS BLOG ADDRESS VIA COPY AND PASTE IN AN EMAIL, THROUGH THE TWITTER OR FACEBOOK "SHARE" BUTTONS,WORD OF MOUTH, FILTHY WHISPERED GOSSIP, FALSE NARRATIVE, TIN CAN AND STRING CONFIGURATIONS, PONY EXPRESS, OR CARRIER PIGEON. WITHOUT FEEDBACK OR ACTIVE "SHARING", WHAT YOU JUST READ.... DOESN'T EXIST!

THANK YOU KINDLY,

COLONEL BEAUREGARD "IRON THIGHS" JEFFERSON, A.K.A. "THE MANAGEMENT"

Daily Dose #55 (07/22/11)

2011-07-22T06:29:00.015-04:00

Exploring Creative Processes: Part 1

(An introduction)

As we begin a creative journey on our way to some kind of tangible output, part of that process is educating ourselves on what has transpired before, no matter what particular form or genre you may be working with. We use them as references and jumping off points for creative variations on our way to putting personal stamps on them. Come up with enough, from a wide panoply of avenues and choices, and in the right combination, we might luck out and find not only a voice of individuality, but the spiritual components that not only will move people, but may even stand the test of time.

By knowing what has transpired before you to the best of your ability, you may even develop the skill of foresight: The ability to see clearly what hasn't transpired, and clarity enough to identify the pathways of how to get there.

I am known as a musician, and musical projects were the conduit to identify those pathways for myself personally, and yet the processes that I have learned can be applied to pretty much anything you set your mind to do.

Everyday I present myself with a blank blogging form, and every day I ask myself the same question: "What do you have for the Peep-A-Roos today, George?".

My mind starts as blank as the form, but usually by 8pm I've ended up with something that meets my standards enough to publish.

That's output, and no amount of knowledge, theory, conceptualization, and systems analysis can replace tangible output.

That is always the goal for me. All roads lead to that central point: The output, but more importantly, the function of the output. Is the output doing what it was designed to do?

I like to problem solve, backwards. Identify the goal, and then identify the paths that lead to it. That will eventually lead to a first step and leave you with a rough action plan to get you over, and to the end of the proverbial rainbow.

There are exceptions to every road map, however; "The Best laid plans of Mice and Men" and all that jive. Be prepared to improvise, and stay as fluid as possible.

Part of any good plan is enough of a contingency cushion to let inspiration guide you, instead of trying to force the issue. As you travel, a balance must be achieved between disciplined work ethic, and letting yourself float in the power grid; and allowing the power grid to flow through you, untethered.

It really doesn't matter if you are creating a painting, a new CD, conceptualizing a new business and writing a business plan, or writing a fresh story per day. The processes are remarkably similar.

So please bear in mind as I dive in to a forensic analysis of processes, tricks, and techniques that relate to my own personal experience and personal output, I'm only putting that up for detailed examination to serve as a larger metaphoric device for anyone that may be reading this stuff.

This next series of projected blogs isn't designed to function as a "set in stone" rule book. Just an example of one person's creative process that might reveal some usable concepts as you embark on your own personal creative journey as you decide to commit to playing your own game of catch with the Universe.

It's time to share some of the trade secrets. I'm not "competing" anymore, so being proprietary about what I know is kind of silly at this point.

Maybe some of this will be useful to you, maybe not. I'm just setting it all free.

I referred to my own creative education taking place in a car commuting up and down the "Thruway Circuit" with Ed Hamell in a past Daily Dose (#33,"On Rhetorical Devices, Influences, and Making Art "Popular") for thousands of nighttime hours over seven years. He was the Sensei and I the grasshopper.

You don't have to be a grasshopper for this next series of blogs that will come down The Dose Pipeline.

Let's just call it an extended car ride.

(Stay tuned for part 2)

"You may shoot for the stars and end up in a back alley behind Pluto, beaten and bloodied, but at least I dare to dream, and that’s better than being Earthbound, mired in the muck of mediocrity.

I judge my forward progress and success by the crushingly epic nature of my failures.

The more epic the crash, the more I’m convinced I must be doing something right"

AS ALWAYS: PLEASE FEEL FREE TO COMMENT, SUBSCRIBE, AND SHARE THIS BLOG ADDRESS VIA COPY AND PASTE IN AN EMAIL, THROUGH THE TWITTER OR FACEBOOK "SHARE" BUTTONS,WORD OF MOUTH, FILTHY WHISPERED GOSSIP, FALSE NARRATIVE, TIN CAN AND STRING CONFIGURATIONS, PONY EXPRESS, OR CARRIER PIGEON. WITHOUT FEEDBACK OR ACTIVE "SHARING", WHAT YOU JUST READ.... DOESN'T EXIST!

THANK YOU KINDLY,

COLONEL BEAUREGARD "IRON THIGHS" JEFFERSON, A.K.A. "THE MANAGEMENT"

Daily Dose #54 (07/21/11)

2011-07-21T09:11:00.018-04:00

LAKE BOY TALES

(Home as a "Reset" Button)

I had lunch with a very old friend of mine at the Cedar House Lanes in Skaneateles yesterday. I really love the Cedar House. It’s one of the last bastions of the town I remember growing up in. The rest of it, with the exception of the lake, has changed and mutated much over the past 50 years.

You can still go to a place called Riddler’s. but there’s no Ed Riddler to inject a personality to the experience. You can go to the Skaneateles Bakery, but you can't saddle up to the lunch counter to get a cup of cop coffee and chain smoke cigarettes, pretending to be a Bohemian in Paris as you ditched school for the day.

You can get a glazed donut, but it won’t even come close to the glazed donuts that used to be produced there. When it changed ownership, they got rid of the ancient machinery and secret alchemy that produced the best glazed donut in the entire free world. Those donuts (and the half moon cookies) were art, not just food. Every time I would land home after an extended ramble around the world, I could always count on the Bakery to snap my brain to grid with sensory memory back to Square One, Ground Zero.

Those donuts were like a giant reset button, re-booting me to my original "settings". It’s just evolution, and that reminds me of my own mortality I guess. I’ve certainly sailed into middle age collecting curmudgeonly barnacles along with my ever graying hair.

Originally, My friend Holly and I were headed to Cam’s (now The Willow Glen) up on the tangled intersectioning corners of Jordan St., Seneca Turnpike and Jewett Road, but we were greeted with a hand lettered sign written on a paper placemat that said, ‘Closed Tuesday in March.’ I don’t know if it was every Tuesday, but according to the sign this particular Tuesday we were to be denied.

So off to the Cedar House and The Hilltop diner.

I don’t have any axe to grind against all the other potential lunch spots in town; they all serve their purposes, and they put out fine food, in a great atmosphere. I sometimes pop into the Sherwood for a drink, but frankly I’ve been defaulting to the Cedar House for all my night time libations in public lately. There’s a little too much jockeying for position in the Sherwood for my tastes, and Dusty’s mother-in-law always makes me feel like a long lost son as she tends to her duties behind the bowling alley bar. I used to wash dishes in the Sherwood as a kid, so I do have a deep rooted connection to the place. The Blue Water’s been around for awhile (Their Portabello Mushroom Sammich is particularly yummy), but again, it still has new car smell to me, and I feel like an alien when I walk in there sometimes.

Morris’s Grill is now gone, to be replaced at some un-determined time with a ‘Bistro’ when the foreclosure on the Seitz Building finally gets untangled. And when I visit Skaneateles, I crave that "reset". As I age, the options for experiencing that are becoming limited.

To walk into the Cedar House, and to be enveloped in its yellow orange shellacked walls with an old and trusted friend, is like crawling back into the womb. After getting your ass kicked by life, sometimes you need that. Instinctually, when I do, I gravitate towards that reset experience.

Tear it down and build it up again.

Here’s how I start the process: a hamburger at the Cedar House, shooting the breeze with my buddy, Holly.

It’s not just the place, but the people in it. Here are all the ex-pats of the old town, that somehow survived the gentrification process that started in full force around 1980 or so. They tore down the trailer park and put up a spa. Some of us moved, some of us dug in our heels, and some of us just got plain left behind.

But those people, the descendants of Yankee pioneers with ancient bloodlines, as I remember them, are all here; like members of an exclusive club of wizened war veterans.

It’s just progress.

The "Old Skaneateles" of my memory wasn’t all that great. I mean we did have confirmed pedophiles running around at St. Mary’s Church and at the local movie house. It was down right creepy at times.

Sometimes, change is good.

I’m just grateful that the Cedar House is still there for me when I need it, even if a gas station now sits where Fabin’s used to be. I don’t know about the rest of you, but right now I feel like doing some keggling, and I thank God that I still can in a memory that I call "Home."

Sometimes, I need a little help in reminding myself who I am, and where I came from.

Fabin's demolition photo by Jorge Battle

"a parking lot in paradise"

FINIS

Author's Note:

Just a few little updates for the regular peep-a-roos that get their Dose, daily.

1. Page Views: "The Dose" just eclipsed the 17,000 page view benchmark in 53 consecutive days of publication (17,071 as of 5:30pm, EST 07/20/11).

2. Feedback and Metrics Count: The confirmed Peep-a-roo network has 40 feedburner subscribers, 14 google followers, and 10 networkedblogs subscribers. That means 64 peeps are actively sharing The Blog-O-Thon, and generating page views at a ratio of almost 4-5/1 per "share", to achieve an average viewership of around 250-300 page views per day.

Peeps... THANK YOU! This is how its supposed to work, and you have made yourself an integral part of this publication.

I know there may be more regular readers out there that are firing into the blog through facebook newsfeed posts. I'm very grateful for the time you spend reading them, but if you would please consider using the sign up options in the left collumn, I could get a much more accurate read on just how united The Peep-a-Roo front really is.

3.Comment Protocols: Commenting directly on the Blog-O-Thon site is supposed to help promote it, but for the life of me I don't know how... that said, I moderate all comments before they show up, in case you were wondering. If people want to say negative shit, I generally post it anyway.

But I'm instituting a new rule. No more "Anonymous" comments will be posted. If you have an opinion, attach your name to it. Other wise, your opinion really has no value. This blog is about standing up and being counted, not sniveling behind a cloak of anonymity.

4. The Master Index:A Peep-A-Roo (Denise, you know who you are) pointed out to me recently that the Blogger Platform makes it difficult to access archived blogs, along with the fact that its hard to find a previously published piece if all you have to go on is a consecutive string of numbered blogs.

I created a Master Index of all The Daily Dose injections, with a brief description of each one to make them a little easier to locate. This index will be updated weekly, and sent out every Saturday morning.

If you would like to receive The Master Index, please send me a traditional email address to: piannaplunker88@gmail.com You can always opt out at anytime.

Aside from receiving the index, this also gives us a chance to correspond one on one, probably the most rewarding part of the Dose experiment for me. Don't be shy!

Don't forget: "The Dose Is In The Discipline" and "Sharing" really does translate to a state of "Caring", no matter what you do, what you make, or who you are. If you participate in the Universal Recycling system while playing a game of catch with creation, great things will happen. They always do.

Love,

Geo

Daily Dose #53 (07/20/11)

2011-07-20T06:34:00.031-04:00

THE LAKE BOY

(An Introduction)

A few million years ago, mighty glaciers migrated due south, gouging deep lake basins and creating what now look to be topographic claw marks on the face of Central New York. Or maybe it's backside, depending on your point of view.

The Iroquois also named them "The Finger Lakes". The original Native inhabitants envisioned this collection of gouges as the hand print of the Great Spirit on creation.

Whether interpreted as loving hand print or angry claw marks also depends on your point of view and disposition. There are thin lines between love, hate, and the viloent throes of passion. The Great Spirit probably was capable of a whole range of emotions.

One of those water filled geological scars is called "Skaneateles"; A slight Anglicized bastardization of the original Native American Iroquois word "Skeh-ne-a-iles" meaning "Long Lake".

The locals pronounce it "Skanny-AT-less". You can still suss out an interloper if they pronounced it "Skan-needles", or any other variation. They weren't true "lake people". If someone took the trouble to pronounce the extra syllable but got the rest of it right, they might be worthy of a little local slack being cut.

As spoils for soldiers participating in the Revolutionary War, nearly two million acres of land in Central New York were set aside as compensation. A clerk that worked in the Surveyor General's Office drew up the apportionment map; He had a predilection toward Roman history, Greek classical literature, and philosopher authors of the Enlightenment which is why to this day towns bear names like Marcellus, Pompey, Camillus, Ulysses, Syracuse, Cinncinataus, Milton and Locke.

Skaneateles (as a section of the town of Marcellus) was intitially settled by a hardy pioneer family around 1794; historically by Abraham Cuddeback with his wife and eight children in tow after a 43 day journey, depending on which historian you're talking to. It was rough terrain to clear for farming but the soil was rich, and because of the swift flowing outlet and its position on the Old Seneca Turnpike Road, it was perfectly suited for hydro powered industries such as saw and gristmills, and light industry.

The sons of the Revolution (or the folks that they sold their granted land to for a pittance) carved out a little Yankee town, and eventually a self contained economy and culture in one of the prettiest spots on God's Green Earth.

Many of the family names of those early settlers were still the surnames of kids I went to school with, proving that once you became a lake person, you stayed a lake person for life, and for generations.

There was one aberrant blip on the radar screen of the town's history that bears a little notice. J.A. Collins, a travelling speaker selling the concept of the Abolition of Slavery, became so enamoured of my little town that he was inspired to buy 300 acres just north of the village and start a Utopian commune that espoused the abolition of Religion, Civil Government, and the institution of marriage.

Collins formed his Utopian commune in a town called "Sodom", later to be renamed "Mottville". I kid you not.

Collins only lasted three years in the land of Puritan fundamentalism, but I mention the "Community" because a strand in the DNA of the collective gene pool of that social experiment is still in evidence today.

Just walk into The Sherwwod Inn on any given Saturday night, currently. You'll see what I'm referring to. The old guard conservative denizens of Skaneateles may be the descendants of Calvinists and Puritans, but they still know how to get their commie pinko free love freak on.

I was born in 1960, and by that time Skaneateles was a typical small Yankee town. You never had to leave, because everything you needed was there.

We had a movie theater, a bakery, a hardware store, a five and dime, lunch counters, pharmacies, toy stores, retail clothiers in which you could procure work and summer wear, and grocery stores; they were all locally owned and operated. We had doctor's that made house calls.

We had all kinds of houses of worship, except mosques and synagogues.

According to the US census, 99.16% of the total village population is white.

I guess that other .84% signifies some kind of progress. When I was growing up, being from one of the two EYE-Talian families in town tagged me as an exotic.

There was always old money in Skaneateles, but most of it was consigned to a rich persons ghetto, on West Lake Road from the village to the Country Club. The rest of Skaneateles had every layer of the socio-economic strata well represented, from the dirt poor to the upper middle class tax bracket.

We still had a trailer park in Skaneateles when I was growing up. After I left for good in 1978, at some point they tore it down and built a spa.

Skaneateles is a lot tonier now. Those balanced economic layers started to get pushed out during the boom-boom eighties. Now its basically a tourist economy and commuter community.

It has solidified its reputation for being the playground of the wealthy. There are alot more rich folk (Some of them EYE-talians!) and folks that are carrying three mortgages and are leveraged to the teeth to pretend that they are to take advantage of the excellent public school system.

Something got lost along the way though. There's no more movie theater. There still are two pharmacies, but they aren't on the main drag and are national chain stores.

There's no more Western Auto, or Talbot's Five and Dime. The retail shops service the hoi-polloi and tourist trade. The last vestige and holdout is Roland's clothing store and The Cedar House bowling lanes. Even Morris' Grill is gone, the victim of a botched condominium development project.

The impetus and inspiration of "The Lake Boy" daily dosages was to somehow record the era from 1960-1978, when a small Yankee town was still a small Yankee town, and trace my life's personal narrative arc within it, before it disappears from my memory.

The ingredients for the narrative gumbo in mind? Part Norman Rockwell, part Jean Sheppard, part Mark Twain, part Garrison Keillor, part Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery", part "Peyton Place", part John Irving, with liberal spices from Steven King's catalog of twisted horror.

The "Lake Boy" stories don't appear in chronological order, as this is how my brain actually works these days. The memories are randomly chaotic, like puzzle pieces that magically appear in the space between my ears.

The tales are but faintly flickering stars that I am pinning to a fantasized celestial sphere that surrounds me; I imagine that I am standing in the center of that sphere, estimating the proper location and distance of each memory as I attach it to the firmament.

Eventually, the picture that will materialize out of that chaos will take shape and form. One would hope that anyway, but you never know. As a regular reader of the Dose, you're taking that journey right along with me.

I will leave you with this memory:

I was a pretty angry young man by the time I hit sixteen, and left Skaneateles for awhile. I didn't leave with much of an appreciation for it, because I was a typical confused adolescent with his head firmly self-inserted in his own ass.

When I was about 18, I momentarily returned in the summer of '78. I hitched hiked from Bucks County, PA and got stranded on a country road in the bowels of Pennsylvania overnight. What was usually a 24 hour hitch turned into three miserable days.

When I got closer, getting dropped off in Auburn NY in the late afternoon of a glorious early summer day, I walked the seven miles due East to the place of my childhood; the staging area and backdrop of teen-aged, over-the-top angst.

But as I approached Clift park, I saw it, and felt it.

The sun was setting, the lake clear, clean and smooth as glass. It was ablaze with the reflection of the orange, pink and purple solar fireworks display.

I stood in that park with a duffel bag slung over my shoulder in an unexpected awe. What I had always taken for granted, became quite clear.

I was standing in a place where what the Iroqois called "The Great Spirit" had put its fingerprint on the whole of creation, and for one brief shining moment, that spirit completely filled me. I was home, in one of the most beautiful places on earth. A place of great spiritual power, energy and significance.

I let that energy flow freely through me, and reached a clarity, a state of peace and grace, and an understanding that I had never known. I was one, and connected with that place.

I turned toward home to walk along it's shores around its curve to the south on Route 41. Back down the steep downward incline, cut by a glacier, to 12 Gayle Road; to the lake and the little tribe that had been a constant in my life carrying this little thought:

No matter how hard I tried to fight it, ignore it, or deny its existence in my soul, I am, and always will be, a "Lake Boy".

FINIS

Kihm Winship's blog, "Skaneateles: The Character and Characters of a Lakeside Village", is a precious resource and inspiration; Kihm has been a great source of first encouragement for me to keep on grinding out The Daily Dose.

Check his blog out. It's really well researched and well written:

http://kihm6.wordpress.com/

Author's Note:

Just a few little updates for the regular peep-a-roos that get their Dose, daily.

1. Page Views: "The Dose" just eclipsed the 17,000 page view benchmark in 52 consecutive days of publication (17,071 as of 5:30pm, EST 07/20/11).

2. Feedback and Metrics Count: The confirmed Peep-a-roo network has 40 feedburner subscribers, 12 google followers, and 10 networkedblogs subscribers. That means 62 peeps are actively sharing The Blog-O-Thon, and generating page views at a ratio of almost 5/1 per "share", to achieve an average viewership of around 300 page views per day.

Peeps... THANK YOU! This is how its supposed to work, and you have made yourself an integral part of this publication.

I know there may be more regular readers out there that are firing into the blog through facebook newsfeed posts. I'm very grateful for the time you spend reading them, but if you would please consider using the sign up options in the left collumn, I could get a much more accurate read on just how united The Peep-a-Roo front really is.

After casually insulting the casually passive, non-sharing readers last week by basically calling them out for being lousy in bed, this would be very helpful data if you could sign on to the email or network options.

3.Comment Protocols: Commenting directly on the Blog-O-Thon site is supposed to help promote it, but for the life of me I don't know how... that said, I moderate all comments before they show up, in case you were wondering. If people want to say negative shit, I generally post it anyway.

But I'm instituting a new rule. No more "Anonymous" comments will be posted. If you have an opinion, attach your name to it. Other wise, your opinion really has no value. This blog is about standing up and being counted, not sniveling behind a cloak of anonymity.

4. The Master Index:A Peep-A-Roo (Denise, you know who you are) pointed out to me recently that the Blogger Platform makes it difficult to access archived blogs, along with the fact that its hard to find a previously published piece if all you have to go on is a consecutive string of numbered blogs.

I created a Master Index of all The Daily Dose injections, with a brief description of each one to make them a little easier to locate. This index will be updated weekly, and sent out every Saturday morning.

If you would like to receive The Master Index, please send me a traditional email address to: piannaplunker88@gmail.com You can always opt out at anytime.

Aside from receiving the index, this also gives us a chance to correspond one on one, probably the most rewarding part of the Dose experiment for me. Don't be shy!

I bite, but only when asked politely in the privacy of my own home.

I guess that's it for today. Don't forget: "The Dose Is In The Discipline" and "Sharing" really does translate to a state of "Caring", no matter what you do, what you make, or who you are. If you participate in the Universal Recycling system while playing a game of catch with creation, great things will happen. They always do.

Love,

Geo

Daily Dose #52 (07/19/11)

2011-07-19T06:34:00.007-04:00

JUST STOP

Today has been a day of miscommunication. I try to achieve clarity, but sometimes it feels like I'm speaking English and it's getting interpreted as Chinese.

Is that my personal "crazy"? Or is everybody else crazier than I am, and because I'm more honestly transparent about my personal crazy, it gets used against me?

Who knows? Sometimes, you just have to stop.

I actually have to work today, and be productive in other ways. My best friend is in trouble, and friends come before blogs. So I will leave you with this:

Read the red flags, and when you recognize them, don't try to fix the situation.

Response time is critical.

Just stop as quickly as you can. You don't have to come up with a reciprocal action all the time.

Life is long. You may think that there are only two moves on the chessboard, but don't forget the unseen third option.

You can chose not to play. You can take a breath and recalibrate.

Everything we do effects everything else.

Sponteneity has its place in life, but so does being mindfully aware.