musings

I’m still recovering from the first full week we’ve opened at the cafe, read about it over at the cafe blog. my back hurts, I need a good sleep although I’m wide awake at daylight these days. my son is here for a few weeks, he got himself on the bus from home, then transferred to the train and walked up to the house all on his own. the gypsy gal’s son is arriving thursday eve, hopefully they’ll keep themselves entertained as it looks like dad’s gonna be busy. cal’s thirteen in a couple of weeks:

tomorrow’s new year’s eve. most of those nye’s from the time I was fifteen through late thirties, I was playing a bar, club, pub, a gig somewhere. these days, I haven’t done much at all and this year I’ll be in bed well before midnight as I have a 5.30am start next day. yes, we’ll be open. and busy probably.

a few birthdays, pete wells would’ve been sixty. gary cowan tells me he feels like a 25 year old, and I think he means something other than how that reads. condolences to christy, who lost her mother then learned of the death of an ex a few days later. I also read of the passing of delaney bramlett, freddie hubbard and robert ward, three musicians whom I greatly admired. not to mention the original catwoman, eartha kitt. always seems to happen around this time of year, no?

and finally, a happy snap. the gypsy gal and I on christmas eve:

see y’all next year.

it’s christmas day, but it feels like another ordinary day to me. this, in spite of the gypsy gal’s bouncing happily around the place shouting “I love christmas”. she does. I do too, or at least I used to.

for me, christmas has always been about kids. when I was one, and when I had my own. take the kids out of the equation, and it just feels like another day to me.

I’ve been reading some of the previous blog entires. this will be the seventh christmas during which I’ve had this blog, so it’s a good memory jogger. most christmases for me are pleasant enough, but I can’t remember too many really great ones. except when I was a kid.

my dad loved christmas. he absolutely went all-out every year. our house was overflowing with food, trays of mixed nuts and nutcrackers on the side tables, celery sticks and dip on the dining table. decorations everywhere, fake snow framing the windows, o holy night revolving on the turntable, mistletoe hanging under the front door, which led to a well-planned lighting display that carried much more taste and subtlety than the national lampoon version. my dad became christmas incarnate.

after he died, our family sense of the christmas spirit seemed to die with him as well. I remember the christmas after he’d passed in 1977, driving to southern oregon where my mother and younger sister had moved. I’d been playing christmas music all week, the t.v. ran all the great shows, a charlie brown christmas, rudolph the red nosed reindeer (with burl ives’s voiceover), miracle on 34th street - all the stuff they never seem to show anymore. I clearly remember steering my dodge van down interstate 5, dodging slow traffic with the radio blasting a bbc production of dicken’s a christmas carol, with alastair sim as scrooge. I was in the spirit.

but as much as we all tried, it just didn’t feel like the christmases of old. dad was gone and so was my vibe. I went again the following year, by then the band was becoming successful and I started finding reasons to get out of going to visit, choosing instead to spend christmas alone, in front of the piano, guitars and tape recorders, trying to find the hit song that would catapult me out of the hovels I spent those years in.

I regained the spirit when my kids got to about three or four. watching the excitement in their eyes, their clumsy but anxious attempts to unwrap gifts that I’d accidentally used too much tape on all brought back the feelings. I saw what my dad used to see. I did everything I could to spoil my kids during those years, as I knew that those memories will stay with them for their lives.

now, they’re older, more cynical, more mercenary. the spirit of christmas for them has been replaced by a goods grab, and for me, another part of my life has vanished.

but I’ll always remember my kids opening their gifts, the smiles beaming across their faces. I’ll always remember crawling out of bed at age eight, sneaking into the living room where, silhouetted by the lights from the tree, stood a brand-new bicycle. I’ll always remember waiting anxiously while my dad put his santa hat on, looking at each other and us both grinning like mad. just happy to all be together.

I’ll always remember. and perhaps that’s the greatest gift of all.

I’m sorry, but I’m not feeling christmas at all this year. the strain of opening the new biz, the year’s near-successes and nearer failures dogging my heels, no kids til after new year’s and a nasty stomach bug makes me a very dull boy indeed.

I did wake up to this:

not exactly the white christmases of my youth, but as close as I’ll get in this part of the world - especially during our “summer”.

we’ll be open from boxing day - 26th, the day after christmas, for you notre americanos - so my christmas day will be spent in the kitchen, prepping food for the weekend’s trade. I hope yours will be filled with much laughter, happiness and peace.

I’m about to rearrange the two bookshelves out back. reading the spines of my meagre collection is telling. about a dozen bios of musicians and music industry figures: clapton, lennon, steve earle, hank williams, led zeppelin, chuck berry, yetnikoff, holzman. plus a handful of p.j. o’rourke titles and a few far side compilations. then there’s the mantlepiece in my office, with piles of cookbooks, cuisine anthologies and food dictionaries.

then I go to the gypsy gal’s bookshelf, which spans an entire wall. courtnay, king, allende, maugham, tolkien, for starters. plus a few dr phil and john edwards.

then you compare the cd racks, of which I have thousands of titles from miles davis to hawaiian slack-key instrumentals to mahler to lightning hopkins to caribbean calypsos to lucinda williams. she’s got keith urban, don henley and richard marx.

so the conclusion I draw is, she’s much smarter than I, but I have better musical taste.

one of my all time fave films is “it’s a wonderful life“. there’s an article about it in this week’s new york times, and I have to admit, I agree with much of it. it’s an enthralling film, but possibly for reasons other than what may have been intended. always good holiday viewing, however.

happy birthday to my little girl, casey-lee. fourteen now and going on thirty. or so she thinks. her and her brother won’t be down until after new year’s, hopefully we’ll be busy enough until then so I can take them shopping. money’s pretty damn tight at the moment, and we had a dismal weekend’s trade at the cafe.

still editing my annual best-of music list for the year, coming soon.

and that’s not a reference to myself. it seems like ages since I wore that mantle. these days, I’m a co-owner of a much-in-debt cafe, part-time graphic designer and former recording artist/producer/musician/songwriter. at least ‘former’ seems an apt title.

tim easton has an amusing piece in this month’s no dep online mag (and thanks to grant, peter and kyla for keeping that flag flying for those of us who love… no, need… real music).

tim’s an extremely talented singer-songwriter, a troubadour of the truest sense who tours constantly, finding the means to release well-received but not-so-well-sold albums regularly. the americana scene in particular seems full of artists like tim, those who’ve had a crack at a major label deal or big name management only to be swept by the wayside for some mcmusic flavour of the week. but tim, and those like him, persevere and somehow manage to survive. people like slaid cleaves, kacy crowley, kevin montgomery, carrie rodriguez, grayson capp, holly o’reilly, martin sexton, eliza gilkyson, walt wilkins. they sacrifice and suffer long drives, bad hotels and indifferent audiences so that a few of us can appreciate their music and be enriched by it.

I used to be one of them, one of those, part of that gang. whatever makes sense. somewhere along the way, I seemed to have lost that. I’m not sure just where, but somehow I found myself slipping out of reach. or perhaps it was that touring/recording scene that drifted away when I wasn’t watching.

living in this part of the world doesn’t help, admittedly. this is a country where sport reigns supreme and music artists exist only to pad out t.v. game shows. the faithful few who attend visiting overseas indie artists like catholics to mass are possibly a smaller percentage proportionally than their nth american or european counterparts. the world needs more folks like amanda.

so I begin each year by announcing that I’m finally going to release a new album, get on the plane and do some shows. and I end that year saying to myself, maybe next year.

it’s now mid-december, and as I look into that room in the middle of this building where boxes of guitars, amps, recording gear, song notebooks, tape reels all lay in a pile like a discarded deck of playing cards, I again tell myself - maybe next year.

maybe next year.

eight years of the bush administration’s presence in the middle east, justified “by helping iraquis build a democracy“. presumably, this includes the first amendment’s right of free speech, free expression and freedom of the press.

not so for iraqi journalist muntadhar al-zeidi, at least according to the bleating of right-wing conservatives in the media.

so what they seem to be saying is: during the last presidential election, when people at the g.o.p. rally yelled “kill him”, “terrorist” and the like in relation to obama, that was okay, freedom of expression and all. just don’t throw shoes at the current president. that’s undemocratic, it would seem.

do you suppose anything will change with the next government? will the hypocracy and hyperbole that we’ve all had to endure for the better part of the past twenty-odd years come to an end? and yes, I’m including the clinton years, no partisan bias here.

oh, there’s already an online game based on the incident. doesn’t take long, does it?

congrats to my buddy neville and mrs neville on the birth of their second daughter.

and happy b-day to nol, who’s allegedly somewhat limited. but aren’t we all?

I’ll credit adrian for finally forwarding something funny:

question: what’s the definition of optimism in the finance sector?
answer: ironing five shirts on a sunday night.

we had a pretty good opening weekend, details on the cafe blog.

the new cafe’s opening tomorrow. still a fair bit to do, but we’ll get there.

happy b-day to justin and to cali.