I finally finished up a song in the key of Gladys. I did a video this time because my recording gear is in a shambles right now. It’s called “It Ain’t Worth the Bill” and it’s about reaping what we sow. It’s about the failure of political system to actually do what’s good for people. And it’s about the sorry exaggeration of the benefits of the replacement of traditional homemaking & agricultural activities with industrial products and services. Pretty neat, huh?

Sorry for the new-haircut-bed-head combo – it’s a new look I’ve been experimenting with lately.

Hope you enjoy the song. So far this project has sparked a lot of new songwriting, but not the mastery of pitch recognition that I had hoped. Losing Gladys is a bit of a setback, but I have 12 other tuning forks to get to know while I wait for her to turn up.

I got a little sidetracked starting my business and quitting my job, so my efforts to acquire perfect pitch this year were slightly delayed. But no need to dwell on the past. This is the present, and I have a sketch for you. It’s called “Smaller Steps” and it’s in the key of C (Clarence). My friend and all-around awesome person Mikey Naucas gave me an assist with some lyrical tweaks, but no other musicians were harmed during the making of this piece.

If you are familiar at all with my songwriting with Last to Show First to Go, you may be aware that I don’t write happy songs. It’s getting to be kind of a problem, honestly. If there is one thing that I know how to do, it is lament. So in the interests of personal growth, I made a strong effort to give “Smaller Steps” a silver lining or redemptive or happy tone in some way.

I hope you enjoy the song! And if you want to come on over and add something to it, just shoot me a note on the FB, or Twitter. I’m hoping that some of these songs will be good enough, or at least a good enough start, to put them together sometime next year onto an EP, or heaven forbid, a full-length.

smaller steps

P.S. As for being able to recognize a C note, or sing it without any cues… I can sing a C note about 80% of the time on my first try, but I can only recognize one about half the time. I’m hoping that will improve as I start in on other notes. Just now deciding what the next note will be…

As is the case with many of my often neglected side-projects and ill-conceived schemes, my latest project is inspired by my readings, conversations with friends and family, and the mish-mash of podcasts and video clips I regularly consume. This project resulted from a convergence of ideas around a similar theme which has been amplified by my ongoing musical activities.

I listened to a fascinating episode of Radiolab recently (Season 2 Episode 2 “Musical Language”) in which they explored the relationship between music and language and the brain. They interviewed a musical psychologist and linguist named Diana Deutsch who has done some interesting research. She has found a strong connection between the likelihood that a musician has perfect pitch and whether or not they speak a tonal language. In a bit of a cultural ass-whooping, 74% the tone language-speaking students she tested had absolute pitch compared to only 15% of the non-tone language-speaking students. There is also an awesome bit about a recorded phrase from one of Deutsch’s CD’s that sounds like music and not like spoken word. The melody of Deutsch simply saying “sometimes they behave so strangely” will be stuck in your head for weeks! If you listen to this Radiolab episode for anything, just that section makes it worth it.

I also recently read Daniel J. Levitin’s “This Is Your Brain on Music.” Levitin spends a good deal of time in his book on the importance of pitch, and how the ability to detect differences in pitch is based on physiology.

The basilar membrane of the human inner ear contains hair cells that are frequency selective, firing only in response to a certain band of frequencies. These are stretched out across the membrane from low frequencies to high; low-frequency sounds excite hair cells on one end of the basilar membrane, medium-frequency sounds excite the hair cells in the middle, and high-frequency sounds excite the at the other end. We can think of the membrane as containing map of different pitches very much like a piano keyboard superimposed on it.

In other words, pitches are physically mapped in the brain, it is not a “virtual” thing that could be different in each person’s head, which also effectively means that sounds may “sound” the same for everyone. Different parts of the brain respond to different pitches, and it is demonstrated across all members of the species. You could look at someone’s brain activity and be able to tell the pitch of the sound they are hearing just based on where their brain is active.

Now I definitely don’t  have perfect pitch. But as a musician, I am curious to see if I could get it just by training my ear over time. Levitin describes a test that he and his colleague Perry Cook created to see if the average non-musician could learn to recognize and/or reproduce a note. They gave their subjects each a tuning fork and asked them to carry them around for a week, banging them on their knees and listening to the sound as often as they could. They also gave the tuning forks a name instead of telling the subjects which note they were (half the subjects’ forks were named “Ethel”, and the other half “Fred”), I assume in an effort to also personalize them. After the week was over, they took the forks away for a week and then had the subjects come in to be tested. Levitin explains, “Half of the subjects were asked to sing back ‘their pitch’ and half were asked to pick it out from three notes that I played on a keyboard. The subjects were overwhelmingly able to reproduce or recognize ‘their’ note.”

These kinds of things always get me excited, and as a result, I am now the proud owner of a set of John Walker tuning forks (thanks, Mom and Dad). I intend to train my ears this year, and see how well I can learn to recognize and reproduce different notes. I’ve already had the forks for a couple weeks, and within a week I began having some success recreating a note from memory. However, my plan does not stop at simply trying to acquire perfect pitch. It also includes a couple of other fun things that I hope you will enjoy, and, as you will see, fully deserves to be called a “project” and not just a “plan”.

Lately, I’ve been inspired by many other musicians’ song-per-whatever projects, especially Andy Berkhout’s song-per-week project. Now I am not so ambitious as to commit to write a song a week, but I will commit to writing a song in the key of the note of each tuning fork in my set (13 total C to C) in 2011. This is of course a little more than one song per month. I will do recordings of each song as well, hopefully including the talents and contributions of other St. Louis musicians.

So, allow me to introduce you to our first fork:  Mr. Clarence C. Fork.

Clarence, the original C-note

Clarence is a C-note who carries a frequency of 261.6 Hz, enjoys smashing his tines on various surfaces, and fancies a daily ride in my shirt pocket. Next time you see me, please ask to meet Clarence as well.

So here is a summary of the project:

• I will train my ear on each tuning fork for at least a couple of weeks, but maybe up to a month. Tests will occur quite often and I’ll keep everyone updated on my progress.
• Each fork will receive a regular human-type name so we can all get to know them.
• I will write a song in the key (major or minor) of each note.
• Each song will be recorded and shared.
• I will try to employ the talents of other St. Louis musicians for the recording of these musical “sketches”.

I hope to have the first sketch out by the end of the month, the songwriting has already begun (Clarence is such an easy key to write in!) I’ll send out TweeTumbleStatuses with my updates.

The seven words that sum up Michael Pollan’s book In Defense of Food, “Eat food – not too much – mostly plants”, reveals three basic guidelines for every eater:

1. Eat food.
2. Don’t eat too much food.
3. Eat mostly plants.

Pollan first asks you to eat food.  And by “food”, he means things that your great-grandmother would recognize as food.  Next he suggest that you don’t eat too much of it.  That’s pretty self-explanatory.  Finally, he suggests that you eat mostly plants.

I like the simplicity of these guidelines.  After suffering through countless books and television shows and commercials and newspaper advertisements telling us what food is or isn’t good for us, Pollan’s seven words ease in like a warm breeze.  I didn’t know it was so simple – hang on while I get my coat – I’m going to the market right now.  Thanks, Mike.

We have been pushed into an unfortunate situation where we can’t rely on knowledge passed down through our families to help guide us in our eating habits, food choices, and meal preparation.  Industrial foods usually don’t resemble vegetables, grains or animals – and the ones that do often can’t be trusted anyway because they have been modified or changed in subtle but potentially harmful ways.  Great-grandma can’t tell you if you should eat that breakfast bar, or why those apples are so perfectly red and clean and shiny.  So instead we have to rely on strangers to explain, assure and instruct us.  We rely on people who are not deeply interested and invested in our health, families and communities but rather in their wallets and their employers’ financial health.  We rely on people who lie.

In the face of such challenges, I think it is important that we get beyond Michael Pollan’s seven words, and into a few deeper guidelines.  I think we can all handle a little more complexity – it is after all our health and our bodies we are talking about here.  Pollan obviously gets into more detail in his books and other writings and appearances, but I’d like to stop the Pollan monopoly, the Pollanopoly if you will, and let another more mature and equally respected voice have his say on what we need to do about our food.  For those of you who don’t know who Wendell Berry is, he is a writer from Kentucky who published his first novel in 1960.  He is also a farmer.  I’ve read several of his essay collections and books, almost always learning something or find a new challenge to my stubborn beliefs along the way.  The following suggestions are taken from his essay “The Pleasures of Eating” which I first read as part of the essay collection The Art of The Commonplace:

1. Participate in food production to the extent that you can.
2. Prepare your own food.
3. Learn the origins of the food you buy, and buy the food that is produced closest to your home.
4. Whenever possible, deal directly with a local farmer, gardener, or orchardist.
5. Learn, in self-defense, as much as you can of the economy and technology of industrial food production.
6. Learn what is involved in the best farming and gardening.
7. Learn as much as you can, by direct observation and experience if possible, of the life histories of the food species.

There you have it.  Add these 7 to the 3 from Pollan and you have a total of 10 suggestions to remember.  Think of them like the ten commandments of eating.  Taken in small steps, they can change your life.

Berry also has a few priceless observations in his essay, including this one concerning the specialization of consumption (my notes in italics):

The specialization of production induces specialization of consumption.  Patrons of the entertainment industry, for example, entertain themselves less and less and have become more and more passively dependent on commercial suppliers.  This is certainly true also of patrons of the food industry, who have tended more and more to be mere consumers — passive, uncritical, and dependent.  Indeed, this sort of consumption may be said to be one of the chief goals of industrial production.  The food industrialists have by now persuaded millions of consumers to prefer food that is already prepared.  They will grow, deliver and cook your food for you and (just like your mother) beg you to eat it.  That they do not yet offer to insert it, prechewed, into your mouth is only because they have found no profitable way to do so.  The ideal industrial food consumer would be strapped to a table with a tube running from the food factory directly into his or her stomach. (BJ – And I would add “with a tube running from your wallet back to their bank”)

Perhaps I exaggerate, but not by much.

And at one point he answers his critics and the defenders of the industrial food production and consumption system who say that it is on balance a benefit to us and improvement to our lifestyles:

It is possible, then, to be liberated from the husbandry and wifery of the old household food economy.  But one can be thus liberated only by entering a trap (unless one sees ignorance and helplessness as the signs of privilege, as many people apparently do).  The trap is the ideal of industrialism: a walled city surrounded by valves that let merchandise in but no consciousness out.  How does one escape this trap?  Only voluntarily, the same way that one went in: by restoring one’s consciousness of what is involved in eating; by reclaiming responsibility for one’s own part in the food economy.

The concept of responsibility is the most important here.  We must eat responsibly, and that has nothing to do with counting calories.  I am thankful that here in the St. Louis area we continue to see more farmers’ markets and local, small-scale agriculture, as well as organizations focused on encouraging and supporting these efforts.  I can’t wait until spring when the markets come back to life.

You have to be  serious when you put 3 bumper stickers on your car.  Seen on Forest Park Parkway on the way home from work.

Kind of hard to read in this photo:

Sticker #1 – “does anyone else think it’s strange…”

Sticker #2 – “that many who oppose government healthcare…”

Sticker #3 – “would be dead without medicare?”

this is bound to cause an accident

The question is… do you get it?  Some people truly don’t.

P.S. Isn’t the sky in these photos surreal?  It was a beautiful day for sure.  So the camera couldn’t quite capture the text on the bumper stickers, but at least it got the clouds.

Fortune cookie fail.  If you had any superstition left in you, this will help you exorcise it.

Does anyone know how many different fortunes the typical cookie fortune printer is working with?   There must be hundreds of thousands.  Is it rare to get the same fortune as your lunch date?  I guess the gods just don’t care.

Does anyone believe in “cookie fortunes”?

There was a squirrel hanging out in a garbage can in the parking garage at my office the other day.  I tried to take some pictures of him, but for some reason he seemed a bit threatened when I pointed the camera at him.  You should have seen me running around this garbage can trying to snap a picture of this elusive squirrel.

I never did get a good picture as you can see.  But no worries, after a quick run through the google it seems I’m way way way way… way late to the squirrel-in-a-trash-can party:

The mysterious white squirrel of exeter... on a trash can

I wish all trash cans had this warning.

Trash can... or squirrel TOILET?

Some fancy-ass squirrel-in-a-trash-can photo that your need to buy in order to show on your website

Squirrel in a trash can or just another squirrel toilet?

He's got that automatic dog-like ready to "shake" for a treat look about him... but it's still just a squirrel in a trash can.

Don't do it, Frank!

This squirrel is in a trash can with a yellow lid. Get it?

Even more interesting than a good quality photo of a trash-can squirrel would be pictures of me fumbling around trying to get pictures of a trash-can squirrel.  I’m afraid that just admitting to this behavior is a mistake.

That is all.

Just finished reading  Oliver Sacks’ “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat”. Based on the first few chapters, I thought I would really get into the book.  But towards the end Sacks’ style was beginning to bother me a little and I sensed that the later stories were being scraped from underneath the barrel.  However, I did enjoy the book and there were a few passages that drew my attention.  This one in particular:

The power of music, narrative and drama is of the greatest practical and theoretical importance. One may see this even in the case of idiots, with IQs below 20 and the extremest motor incompetence and bewilderment.  Their uncouth movements may disappear in a moment with music and dancing – suddenly, with music, they know how to move.  We see how the retarded, unable to perform fairly simple tasks involving perhaps four or five movements or procedures in sequence, can do these perfectly if they work to music – the sequence of movements they cannot hold as schemes being perfectly holdable as music, i.e. embedded in music.  The same may be seen, very dramatically, in patients with severe frontal lobe damage and apraxia – an inability to do things, to retain the simplest motor sequences and programmes, even to walk, despite perfectly preserved intelligence in all other ways.  This procedural defect, or motor idiocy, as one might call it, which completely defeats any ordinary system of rehabilitative instruction, vanishes at once if music is the intructor.  All this, no doubt, is the rationale, or one of the rationales, of work songs.

For as little as I watch television, and as little as I follow mainstream entertainment, I find it interesting that after reading those words Britney Spears is the first thing to come to mind.  Perhaps it is because I stopped paying attention to top-40 music right around the time Britney and her virgin-esque dancing was entering our collective consciousness.

Anyway, speaking of dancing, here is some obscure JCVD:

van damme he can dance

The most interesting thing I have ever seen while on an airplane, other than a woman with arms hairier than mine:

airplane + rainbow = planebow

Airplane shadow + rainbow = planebow.

I used to think that a rainbow required a complex set of atmospheric conditions.  Now the planebow, that’s truly complicated.

Was there a pot of gold at the end of the flight?, you ask…

No, just Orlando.  The sprawling Disney vomit of central Florida.